Long Live Revolution!

உணர்வு...

2007-09-04T09:50:00.000-07:00

ஒளிபுகாத

அடர்காட்டின் நடுவில்

அரிவாள்களை கூராக்கி

பாதை செய்கிறோம்.

ஏளனச் சிரிப்புகளும்,

வன்மம் பொங்கும்

ஊளைச் சத்தங்களும்,

முற்றும் அறிந்த

மேதாவித்தனங்களும்,

திரும்பும் திசைகளிளெல்லாம்

எதிரொலிக்கின்றன.

புதைசேறு அழுத்துகிறது.

புரட்ட முடியாத பாறைகளில்

யுகங்கள் கழிகின்றன.

அரவம் நெளிகிறது.

சற்றே கண்ணயர்ந்தாலும்

அட்டைகள் உயிர் குடிக்கின்றன.

சதுப்பு நிலத்தில்

தெறித்து மின்னும்

எங்கள் வியர்வைத் துளிகளின்

வெளிச்சத்தில்தான்

பாதை தொடர்கிறது.

பின்னொரு நாளில்

பனிக்கட்டிகள்

சேகரிக்க வரும் பொழுது

நீ இதனை நம்ப மறுப்பாய்...

நாங்கள்

நம்ப மறுத்ததைப் போல.

ஆனால்

நாங்கள்

இப்படித்தான் வாழ்கிறோம்,

வாழ்ந்தோம்.

எது தூண்டிற்று

என நீ கேட்பாய்.

~~வேறு என்ன செய்வதென்று~~

~~எங்களுக்குத் தெரியவில்லை.~~

உணர்வு என்பேன்.

அதன் பொருளை

அகராதிகளில் கண்டறிய முடியாது.

பனிக்கட்டி மறந்து

பதிலின் விளக்கம் கேட்பாய்.

உரையாடல் தொடருகையில்

மாலை கவிந்து

நட்சத்திரங்கள் முளைக்கத் துவங்கும்.

A peal of spring thunder

2007-09-01T07:58:00.000-07:00

A good news...Comrade Thippu has started a blog titled Spring Thunder, a historically significant word inspired from the prophetic commentary of Chinese communist party on Naxalbari. This blog as noted in it's 'About' section,

is an unofficial initiative by the blog authors to archive the publications of People’s Art and Literary Association (PALA), New Democratic Labour Front (NDLF), Peasants Liberation Front (PLF) and Revolutionary Students Youth Front (RSYF) of Tamilnadu and Translations from Revolutionary Tamil magazines namely ‘Puthiya Jananayagam’ (New Democracy) and ‘Puthiya Kalacharam’ (New Culture).

That's really a good news to hear about. At present, it has the papers presented by PALA in AILRC and a series of posts on the counter revolutionary nature of WSF. hope we can expect more posts.A single spark has got ignited indeed as the caption of the blog says. I request the readers to check out the blog to know more.

Trapped!

2007-08-24T21:37:00.000-07:00

Recently one more barbaric atrocity got added to the list of countless atrocities heaped out on the tribals of India. On Aug 21, 11 tribal women of vakapalli village of Vishaka agency area(in Vishakapattinam) were gang raped by greyhound policemen. Till date the police has not officially admitted the crime. The Kondia tribe men , the husbands, fathers, and uncles of the the rape victims boycott their own women saying that they are 'impure' and need to be purified. On one side, Uniformed beasts pounce on them and on the other side male-chauvinistic, patriarchal cultural values boycott them. The story of 11 tribal women narrates the agony of 'non-shining' india.They are trapped in an inhuman system and they live through it. 60 years of independence has given an unforgettable gift to the 11 women.

sare jagan se acha hindu sita hamara hamara!

...

From 'The Hindu'

Rape victims face social boycott
G. Narasimha Rao

PADERU: Even as a strong wave of protest is sweeping against the gang-rape of 11 Girijan women in the Visakha agency area, and the police top brass fully denying the charge, more insult is heaped on the victims in the shape of a social boycott.

Since they have returned to their village Vakapalli in G. Madugula mandal, about 50 km from here on Tuesday night, the rape victims are not allowed into their home. "You are policemen's women," their husbands told them. The women watch their children from a distance. The victims are given shelter by village headman Korra Dumarayya.

The women faced "Keedu" (lost the honour as they were raped by other men) and redemption for them is only after those who brought them "Keedu" are punished. Then they will be purified according to Kondu rituals.

"This is our custom and decided by our elders," said Dumarayya on Thursday at the village. However, he seems not too happy with the trauma the women are facing.

Among the women, Janaki has a small boy, Eswara Rao, who is still fed by his mother's milk. Now, Janaki's husband Masteswara Rao is giving gruel to his son.

Vantala Rendo has two daughters. When the younger one Bharati, just about two years, was brought outside her house by a neighbour she started crying after noticing her mother.

The rest of the women have school-going children. The children loiter around the headman's house and their mothers watch them with pain in their eyes as they could not feed them after coming back from school, a daily chore a mother will not miss. Husbands of victims were in their fields on Thursday afternoon.

Pangi Sridevi, wife of Suryam who was picked up by the police for interrogation and brought to the village on Monday morning and was witness to the gang-rape, lost her one-and-half-month-old baby one week before the incident. But she was also subjected to the gang-rape in her house, which is at one end of the first row of houses.

The victims said 21 policemen entered the village around 6 a.m. while some others were positioned around the village.

The men folk leave the village around 3 a.m. everyday and the policemen gang-raped them, said the victims. Some broken bangles were still lying on the trampled plants in the fields adjacent to the village, where some women were raped.

On Thursday morning, Sub-Collector of Paderu, Lokesh Kumar, visited the village and assured them that many benefits like silver oak trees, bulls, sheep, loans, Anganwadi Centre, etc., would be provided to them. But he did not talk about the gang-rape incident, the villagers said. "No official visited us before," they said.

Later, Member of SC and ST Commission Gummadi Sandhya Rani visited the village. State leaders of several peoples' organisations and local leaders of political parties visited the village to console the victims and offered support.

Among them was Chandranna of Jana Shakti Party, who participated in the peace talks between the Government and naxalites a few years ago.

The village is located in a picturesque valley and provides a beautiful sight from the G. Madugula-Boithali road. But the 11 women in the village are facing a great insult of social boycott.

...

From 'NDTV'

Gang rape: People demand Judicial Enquiry

Activists are crying hoarse that the government is turning a blind eye to the reported gang rape of 11 tribal women in Visakhapatnam and are demanding a probe by a sitting judge.

Meanwhile, the alleged victims are facing a double tragedy.

They are reportedly not being accepted back home because tribal custom requires the guilty to be brought to book and the women to be cleansed after that as per tribal rituals.

An effigy of Andhra Pradesh police chief M A Basith was burnt before the Visakhapatnam Collectorate.

The police chief had dismissed the reported gang rape of 11 tribal women allegedly by special party police personnel early on Monday as a ploy by Maoists to discourage the police from carrying out combing operations in the agency areas.

''We demand a probe by sitting judge. The hearings should be held in the village and not somewhere else,'' said a tribal woman.

''When they are labeling me, Pasiya Padma, a Maoist for protesting atrocities, they can so easily label anyone of these tribal women and men as naxals and arrest them,'' said an activist.

Activists say there was a deliberate delay in getting the alleged victims medically examined. Samples have also been sent to the Forensic Sciences Laboratory in Hyderabad.

''Not a single responsible official has gone there. They are making all these comments sitting elsewhere. Can any woman come out and seek justice in such circumstances,'' said D Prabhavati, AIDWA.

The police have refused to comment on camera but a rape case is booked by a government servant and also of prevention of atrocities against SC/ST.

A Note

2007-08-23T07:40:00.000-07:00

So refreshing to type here again...! sorry pals, due to some personal reasons i couldn't blog for the last one month. Though my blog is not updated every day, the frequency of posts were atleast three to four in a month. Comrade Abhay enquired about the inactivity in a comment and i believe some more readers, especially my silent readers would have wanted to ask the same. Though i am not sure of whether i can increase the frequency of posts in the near future too due to limited browsing time, i'll try my best to maintain it. In the meantime many events had bypassed. some of them which really need to be brought in to focus and many must-read articles passed away. lemme try to catch them. I have read very less fiction in english. recently I read Roy's 'God of small things' and Taslima's 'Lajja'. i'll write about them in the forthcoming posts and also watched some movies, 'Babasaheb Ambedkar' by Jabbar patel and 'Life in Metro'. i'll try to change the font size of the posts as some said it's tiny.

sope i am back! bear with me. :)

Then count me too!

2007-07-04T01:34:00.000-07:00

Anand Patwardhan, noted film-maker who made the unforgettable films like, 'Raam ke naam','Father, Son and Holy War','In memory of friends' etc., has written on the criminal silence of Chattisgarh state in Binayak Sen's arrest. Like Praful Bidwai, Subash Gatade and others, he traces his 'links' with Binayak Sen, Shanker guha niyogi and their organisation, Chattisgarh Mukthi Morcha(CMM). A must-read article.Thanks to Abhay.

...

from Sanhati.com

Dr Binayak Sen, General Secretary of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, was arrested in May this year by the Chattisgarh police, apparently because he had ‘links’ with a jailed ‘Naxalite’. World over, from Amnesty International to Amartya Sen, there have been strong protests against the arrest. Support has also poured in from across the country. The world’s medical fraternity has also taken up the cause, for Sen is that rarest of rare doctors - one who walks and works among the poorest and the most deprived. Yet, our cries so far have fallen on deaf ears.

I first met Sen in 1986 when Shankar Guha Niyogi, leader of the Chhatisgarh Mukti Morcha (CMM), had invited me to screen ‘Bombay Our City’ to the mine-workers of Chhatisgarh. Niyogi was no ordinary union leader. Originally a worker in the Bhilai Steel plant, his thinking went far beyond the wage-struggle politics of most unions of the day.

I witnessed democracy at work every evening when workers sat down in a large circle to discuss the ideological and practical issues of the day and saw how innovative their thinking was. The predominantly adivasi workforce needed to have their own symbols of struggle, so the CMM revived the memory of a forgotten hero, Shaheed Veer Narayan Singh, a 19th century adivasi who had been hanged by the British in 1857 for feeding his people from the granaries.

Inspired by Niyogi, Sen came to work among the mine workers of Chhatisgarh. They were instrumental in conceiving and setting up a 15-bed Shaheed Hospital, a modest but impressive institution built and maintained with the voluntary labour of the mine workers. By mid-1980s, the hospital had grown to a 50-bed one with its own self-sufficient operating theatre. The love, care and pride that went into the daily work at the hospital made it a unique institution, one of its kind.

The Legendary -Shankar Guha Niyogi

The revolution that Niyogi and his comrades envisaged was acquainted both by the failures of the Left as well as by the knowledge of environmental degradation wrought by the development paradigm.

When disillusionment with the traditional Left set in by the mid-1980s, there was a search for an alternate vision. Niyogi and the CMM in Chhatisgarh seemed a harbinger of a new Left movement, using not armed struggle but grassroots organisation and mass mobilisation as their primary weapon.

The screening of Bombay Our City, a film that described the daily struggle for survival of Bombay’s slum-dwellers, was an instant hit with the workers. Over a thousand attended the open air screening and discussions lasted long into the night. So lively was the exchange that the union wanted its own print. I promised to return but to my regret, never kept my promise.

But Niyogi and the CMM had other powerful enemies. Growing confidence among workers had allowed the union to tackle social evils like alcoholism. The union imposed a small fine on those who drank but incredibly, secretly returned the fined amount to the wives of the alcoholic worker. Shrinking consumption levels hit the liquor mafia hard. Other powerful enemies included labour contractors who had lost their exploitative livelihood, to the most intractable force of all, an industrialist/politician nexus that could not tolerate a strong workers’ movement.

On the night of September 27, 1991, Shankar Guha Niyogi was shot dead as he lay asleep in his hut. Those who organised the murder were never punished although everyone in the area knows who they are. The additional district and sessions court found six persons guilty and awarded the death sentence to the man who fired the gun and life sentences to the other five, including two prominent industrialists close to the BJP, charged with planning and funding the murder. With the BJP in power, the Madhya Pradesh high court freed the accused, citing lack of evidence. The orphaned CMM struggled on, led by Janak Lal Thakur among others. Sen, and his wife Ilina, stayed on, working with the CMM. He later began work with the civil liberties movement and took up the position of General Secretary of the Chhatisgarh unit of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL).

The assassination of Niyogi and the logic of ‘liberalisation’ led to a rapid worsening of repression against adivasis and workers in the region. Into this vacuum, armed resistance in the form of the Naxalite movement began to grow. In response, the State launched one of its most infamous anti-Naxal operations we know as the ‘Salwa Judum’ — arming and training civilians to form para-military vigilante outfits to combat Naxalism. As General Secretary of PUCL, Sen documented and published reports on the reign of terror unleashed in Chhatisgarh by the State-para-military forces nexus.

The State took its revenge and put a warrant out for his arrest. It was alleged that Sen met a Maoist leader lodged in Central Prison, Raipur, and facilitated an exchange of letters from jail, despite the fact that the PUCL had sought and obtained official permission from prison authorities for this meeting. Since May 14, Sen has been held for over 2 months now as a Naxalite.

If Sen is deemed a Naxalite because he documented State atrocities, then count me in as one too.

அ.மார்க்ஸ் -> அ.காந்தி

2007-06-28T23:05:00.000-07:00

'தீராநதி' ஜீன்-2007 இதழில், 'பேசாப் பொருளை பேசத் துணிந்தேன்' எனும் தொடரில், பேராசிரியர் அ.மார்க்ஸ் பகத்சிங் குறித்து ஒரு கட்டுரை எழுதியுள்ளார். மிகத் தாமதமாகவே அதனை படிக்க நேர்ந்தது. அ.மார்க்ஸின் பின்நவீனத்துவக் கருத்துக்கள் குறித்து எனக்கு பெரிதாக ஒன்றும் தெரியாது. அதே வேளை, இந்துத்துவம் குறித்து அவர் எழுதிய சில நூல்களையும், கட்டுரைகளையும் நான் வாசித்திருக்கிறேன். இந்துத்துவ எதிர்ப்பில் சித்தாந்தத் தளத்தில் அவர் எழுதியுள்ள நூல்கள், அவருடைய பங்களிப்பு குறிப்பிடத்தக்கது. ஆனால், அவரது இக்கட்டுரை, பகத்சிங்கை குறித்த அவரது பார்வை, மிகவும் வருத்தம் தருவதாக இருந்தது. நான் அறிந்த வரலாற்றுத் தகவல்களுக்கு முற்றிலும் மாறுபட்ட, சில தவறான தகவல்களை அவர் எழுதியுள்ளார். எனவே, கீழ்க்காணும் எனது எதிர்வினையை 'தீராநதி' இதழுக்கு அனுப்பியுள்ளேன். அதே வேளையில், பகத்சிங்கின் நூற்றாண்டில், பகத்சிங்கை குறித்து இருட்டடிப்பு செய்யப்படுவதற்கும், திரிக்கப்படுவதற்கும், பூசைப் படமாக, அரசியலற்ற வீரனாக வெற்றுச் சின்னமாக்கப்படுவதற்கும் இடையில், இப்படியேனும் ஒரு கட்டுரை வந்ததே என எனக்கு மகிழ்ச்சியே.

அ.மார்க்சின் கட்டுரையை வாசிக்க :
http://www.kumudam.com/magazine/Theranadi/2007-06-01/pg4.php

எனது எதிர்வினை:
----------------------------

பேசாப் பொருளை பேசத் துணிந்தேன் :
ஆனால், நிதானத்தோடும், நேர்மையோடும் பேசுங்கள் !

தீராநதி ஜீன்-2007 இதழில், 'பேசாப் பொருளை பேசத் துணிந்தேன்' எனும் தொடரில், பேராசிரியர் அ.மார்க்ஸ் பகத்சிங் குறித்து எழுதியுள்ள கட்டுரைக்கு எதிர்வினையாக சில கருத்துக்களை முன்வைப்பது அவசியமெனக் கருதுகிறேன்.

பகத்சிங்கின் 'பிராண்ட்' தேசபக்தி என ஓரிடத்தில் குறிப்பிடுகிறார் அ.மார்க்ஸ். அதனை புரிந்து கொள்ள, பகத்சிங்கின் நேதாஜி, நேரு மதிப்பீடு கட்டுரையின் அம்சங்களை சுட்டுகிறார். ஆனால், அவர் சுட்டுகிற கட்டுரையில், 'பிராண்ட்' தேசபக்தி எப்படி வெளிப்படுகிறது என அ.மார்க்ஸ் தான் விளக்க வேண்டும். முற்போக்கான கருத்துக்களை ஆதரிக்க முற்படுவது 'பிராண்ட்' தேசபக்தியோ?

சாண்டர்ஸ் கொலையில் அறவியல் கேள்விகளை எழுப்பியும், இதே பொருளைப் பேசத் துணிந்த காந்தியவாதிகளான பட்டாபி சீத்தாராமையா, டி.பி. தாஸ் கூட 'துணியாத' அளவிற்கு வக்காலத்து வாங்கியும் நகர்கிறது கட்டுரை.

முதலாவது, அ.மார்க்ஸ் எழுப்பும் அறவியல் கேள்விகள் குறித்தது. பகத்சிங்கின் மேற்கோளை சுட்டிக் காட்டி, அறங்களில் 'அற்பமானது', 'உன்னதமானது' என வேறுபாடு உண்டா எனக் கேட்கிறார். மேலும், தனது அறக் கருத்தாக "வன்முறையும், தனிநபர் கொலையும் மனிதரின் அடிப்படையான அற உந்துதலுக்கு(moral impulse) எதிரானவை " என்கிறார். அதனடிப்படையில், சுரண்டல் சமுதாயம் உருவாக்கும் 'பேரறத்தை'க்| காட்டிலும், மனிதர்களுக்கிடையில் நிலவும் 'சிற்றறம்' முக்கியமானதில்லையா என வினவுகிறார்.

மனிதன், மனிதர்கள், அடிப்படை அறம், சிற்றறம், பேரறம்... வர்க்க சமூகம் நிலவுகிற வரை வர்க்கச் சார்பற்ற அறம் என ஒன்று உண்டா? அதனால் தான், பகத்சிங் ஆளும் வர்க்கம் போதிக்க விரும்பும் அறங்களை அற்பமானதென்றும், அர்த்தமற்றதென்றும் ஒதுக்கித் தள்ளுகிறார். ஜெனரல் டயர், கோபால கிருஷ்ண நாயுடு முதல் நரேந்திர மோடி, கேர்லாஞ்சி மிருகங்கள் வரையிலான 'மனிதர்கள்' மனிதர்களுக்கிடையிலான 'சிற்றற'த்தை மதிக்காத பொழுது, ஒடுக்கப்படும் 'மனிதர்கள்' அறபோதனைகள் பற்றி கட்டுரை வரைந்து கொண்டிருக்க வேண்டுமா? இந்த ஆளும் வர்க்க சேவை அறபோதனை, காந்தியத்தின் நகல் பிரதிதான். இப்படிப்பட்ட கருத்தை மொழிவதற்கு மார்க்ஸ் பெயரை ஏன் பின்னே சேர்த்துக் கொள்ள வேண்டும்? அ.காந்தி என மாற்றிக் கொள்ளலாம்.

இரண்டாவதாக, சாண்டர்ஸ் கொலையில் யாரைக் கொல்ல தீர்மானித்தார்கள் என்பதில் முரண்பட்ட கருத்துக்கள் எழும்ப முக்கிய காரணம், அக் கொலை குறித்து தீர்மானிக்கப்பட்ட கூட்டத்தில் இரகசியம் கருதி, கூட்டக் குறிப்புகள் எடுக்கப்படாதது தான். யஷ்பாலின் நூலைத் தாண்டி, பதுக் நாத் மற்றும் சோகன் சிங் ஜோஷ் ஆகியோர் சொல்வதன் அடிப்படையில், பகத்சிங் நேரடியாக சோகன் சிங் ஜோஷிடம் சம்பவம் நடந்த அன்று இரவு சொன்னதைப் போல, 'அவர்கள் வேறொரு சாத்தானைத் தேடிச் சென்றார்கள், ஆனால் மற்றொரு சாத்தான் வெளிப்பட்டது' (பகத்சிங்கும், இதர முந்தைய புரட்சியாளர்களும், சோகன் சிங் ஜோஷ்)

சில பத்திகள் கழித்து, சாண்டர்ஸ் போன்ற அப்பாவிகள் கொல்லப்படுவது குறித்து ஒரு திறந்த வாதத்தை தவிர்க்கக் கூடாது என அ.மார்க்ஸ் அறிவுறுத்துகிறார். 'அப்பாவி' என்ற சொல்லே தெளிவற்றது. 'பயங்கரவாதி' , 'தீவிரவாதி' , சிபிஎம் நந்திகிராமில் பயன்படுத்திய 'வெளியாள்' போன்ற சொற்களைப் போல வரையற்று பயன்படுத்தப்படும் சொல்லாகி விட்டது. புஷ்ஷும், பிளேரும் கூட இதே சொல்லைத்தான் பயன்படுத்துகிறார்கள். எனவே, அதனை மேற்கூறிய அ.காந்தியின் அற போதனையின் அடிப்படையில் பரிசீலிக்க முடியாது. லாலாஜி மீது ஸ்காட்டின் ஆணையின்படி, சாண்டர்ஸ் தடியடிப் பிரயோகம் நிகழ்த்தினான் என்பதுதான் இதுவரை வரலாற்றாசிரியர்கள் சொல்லியிருக்கும் செய்தி. அப்படியில்லை, அவன் பயிற்சியாளன்தான் என்றால், முற்றிலும் முரண்பட்ட இத்தகவலுக்கு அ.மார்க்ஸ் ஆதாரம் வழங்க வேண்டும்.

அப்படியே சாண்டர்ஸிற்கும், லாலாஜியின் மீதான தடியடிப் பிரயோகத்திற்கும் எவ்விதத் தொடர்புமேயில்லையென நீங்கள் ஆதாரமே வழங்கினாலும், அங்கே இன்னொரு கேள்வி முளைக்கிறது. ஒரு நாட்டை ஆக்கிரமிக்கும் அன்னியப் படையின் கைக் கூலி போலிசுக்காரன், அல்லது போலிசுப் பயிற்சியாளன், ஒரு சம்பவத்தோடு தொடர்பில்லை என்பதானாலேயே எப்படி அப்பாவியாவான்? ஒரு வேளை ஆயிரக்கணக்கான அப்பாவிகள்தான் இன்று இராக்கிலும் ஆக்கிரமித்துக் கொண்டிருக்கிறார்களோ? அபு கிரைபிற்காக அதிலே சம்பந்தப்பட்ட அதிகாரிகளை மட்டும் லிஸ்ட் எடுத்துத் தான், இராக் மக்கள் தாக்க வேண்டுமோ? இல்லையென்றால் அது அற மீறலோ?

மேலும், பகத்சிங்கை விடுதலை செய்யும் விசயத்தில், காந்தி நடந்து கொண்டதை பட்டியலிடும் அ.மார்க்ஸ், தாமே காந்தியின் கூற்றுக்கு ஆதரவாக மார்ச் 23 கடிதத்தை மட்டுமே குறிப்பிட முடியும் எனக் கூறுகிறார். (இதற்கும் அ. மார்க்ஸ் ஆதாரம் வழங்க வேண்டும்). பிறகு அவரே அது தும்பை விட்டு வாலை பிடிப்பது என்கிறார். இது காந்தியின் உண்மை, அகிம்சை நிலைபாடுகளின்படியிலான மனப் போராட்டத்தைக் காட்டுகிறதாம். ஏனென்றால், காந்திக்கு 'அகிம்சை' ஒரு மதமாக, ஒருங்கே அதன் சரியான, மோசமான அம்சங்களோடு ஒருந்ததாம்.

சரி, ஒரு வாதத்திற்காக அப்படியே வைத்துக் கொள்வோம். இதே காந்தி-இர்வின் உடன்படிக்கை பேச்சுவார்த்தைகளின் பொழுதுதான், எல்லைப்புற மாகாணத்தில், சில கார்வாலி படை வீரர்கள் நிராயுதபாணியான மக்கள் மீது சட மறுத்தார்கள் என்பதற்காக, இராணுவக் கோர்ட்டில் விசாரிக்கப்பட்டு கடுங் காவல் தண்டனைக்கு ஆளாக்கப்பட்டார்கள். பேச்சுவார்த்தையில், சத்தியாக்கிரகத்தை(கவனிக்க, அவர்கள் சுட மட்டுமே மறுத்தார்கள், கலகத்தில் ஈடுபடவில்லை.) கடைபிடித்த இவ்வீரர்களை விடுதலை செய்ய காந்தி கோர வேண்டுமென மக்கள் வேண்டுகோள் விடுத்ததை, பட்டாபி சீத்தாரமையா, தனது இந்திய தேசிய காங்கிரசின் சரித்திரத்தில் குறிப்பிட்டுள்ளார் (ஆதாரம்: பகத்சிங்கும், அவரது காலங்களும், மன்மத் நாத் குப்தா).

வன்முறையை பிரயோகித்த, தனக்கு சமதையாக வளர்ந்த பகத்சிங்கின் மீதான காழ்ப்புணர்ச்சி கூட 'மகாத்மா' காந்திக்கு மனப்போராட்டத்தின் காரணமாக இருந்து விட்டுப் போகட்டும். (மேலும், காந்தி காப்பாற்றுவாரென்று எதிர்பார்த்து பகத்சிங் குண்டு வீச முடிவெடுக்கவில்லை) ஆனால், சத்தியாக்கிரகத்தை பிரயோகித்த கார்வாலி வீரர்களைக் கூட காந்தி காப்பாற்றாமல் போனதற்கு, அவரது 'மதத்தின்' எந்தக் கோட்பாடு காரணமாக இருந்திருக்க வேண்டும், "வாடிக்கையாளரே நமது எசமானர் " என்ற உயர்ந்த கோட்பாட்டைத் தவிர? இல்லையென்றால், காந்தி-இர்வின் உடன்படிக்கையின் முக்கிய ஷரத்தாக, கீழ்ப்படிய மறுத்த போலிசு, இராணுவ வீரர்கள் ஆகியோர், அரசியல் கைதிகள் விடுதலைக்கான ஒப்பந்த வரம்புகளுக்குள் வர மாட்டார்கள் என ஏன் எழுதப்பட வேண்டும்? என்ன செய்ய, காந்தியை என்னதான் காப்பாற்ற முயன்றாலும், அவர் ஆளும் வர்க்கத்தின் ஆன்மாவாக (அந்தராத்மா) செயல்பட்ட வரலாறு சந்தி சிரிக்கிறதே.

இறுதியாக, சிறையில் பாய் ரன்பீர் சிங்கின் முயற்சியால், பகத்சிங் மீண்டும் சீக்கிய அடையாளங்களுக்கு திரும்பியதாகவும், அவற்றை நீக்கிக் கொண்டதற்காக 'வெட்கப்பட்டதாகவும்', 'அறிந்ததாக’ குறிப்பிடுகிறார் அ.மார்க்ஸ். அவர் எப்படி, எங்கிருந்து அவ்வாறு 'அறிந்து' கொண்டார் என அறிந்து கொள்ள ஆர்வப்படுகிறோம். ஏனென்றால் இந்த ரன்பீர் சிங் யாரென்று தெரியவில்லை. ஆனால், சிறையில் பாய் ரந்தீர் சிங் என்பவர் பகத்சிங்கின் நாத்திகக் கொள்கைகளால் ஆத்திரமுற்று, பகத்சிங்கை கர்வம் பிடித்தவன் எனச் சொல்ல, அதற்கு எதிர்வினையாக பகத்சிங் தனது இறுதி நாட்களில் எழுதிய கட்டுரைகளில் ஒன்று தான், புகழ்பெற்ற 'நான் நாத்திகன் - ஏன்?'. எனவே இத்தகவலை, ஆதாரம் வழங்கப்படாத வரை, எதிரிகள் கூட செய்யத் துணியாத அவதூறு என்று மட்டுமே சொல்ல முடியும். தயவு செய்து காலிஸ்தானி குண்டர்களின் ஆதாரங்கள் வேண்டாம், ஆனந்த் பட்வர்தன் அவற்றை ஏற்கெனவே அம்பலப்படுத்தியிருக்கிறார்.

இவற்றையெல்லாம் தாண்டி, ஆற்றொழுக்கான நடையில், பகத்சிங்கின் எழுத்துக்கள் குறித்து கட்டுரையின் முன்பகுதியில் சிலாகித்து எழுதியிருப்பதற்கும், பகத்சிங் குறித்து படிக்க வேண்டுகோள் விடுத்தற்காகவும், அ.மார்க்சுக்கு எனது உள்ளார்ந்த பாராட்டுக்களும், நன்றிகளும். ஆம், பகத்சிங்கின் ஒவ்வொரு கட்டுரையையும் நாம் அவசியம் படிக்க வேண்டும். ஏனெனில் அவரை திருஉருவாக மட்டுமே நிறுத்தி, சவமாக்க முயலும் போலி கம்யூனிஸ்டுகளின் முகத்திரையை கிழிக்க அது மட்டுமே உதவும்.

மேலும் படிக்க:

புதிய கலாச்சாரத்தில் வெளிவந்த பகத்சிங் குறித்த கட்டுரை
பகத்சிங்கின் எழுத்துக்கள் - புரட்சிகர இலக்கியம்
பகத்சிங் மேற்கோள்கள்

S.O.S

2007-06-27T01:33:00.000-07:00

Recently while reading a booklet by CPI (Maoist), named 'Salwa Judum - The inside story', I encountered the below letter of Mahaswetha Devi, a well-known Bengali novelist. She had written this letter when the land acquisitions in Singur rocked the country. It conveys the agitated mind of a writer on the ongoing onslaught who doesn't wants to rest even in her fragile health. I think this letter lives beyond its date. Singur has become a signpost to denote the capitalist land grabbing in this globalised era in India. Hence Now with SEZ's propping up all over India, Singur in this letter means the entire country and enemies mean everyone of ruling class, not only Buddhadeb. This letter remains like a hoisted danger signal and a clarion call to fight for past, present and future.

...

from Dainik Statesman, 27/11/2006

Message of Warning

Singur is in danger!
East Medinipur is in danger!

Today just before leaving for Shantiniketan, I am giving the readers a grave message of warning – an S.O.S.

After 29/11/06 the fascist State Government is sending 10, 20 or maybe 50 thousand police to grab the land in Singhur. There will be one policeman for each struggling man or woman – that is the news. All the thanas of district Hooghly are being emptied and police are being brought from there. Along with them will be CPM “cadre vahini”. They will take Singhur. They will take the coastal and surrounding agricultural lands of the East Medinipur.

Buddhadev and Bush have become one. I am not able to have faith in the other constituent parties of the Front. I am addressing all the people of West Bengal including the writers, artists, intellectuals, students and women. Intellectuals, do not let the allurement of governmental awards make you keep a distance. All the organizations must join in. Rivers of blood will flow. The State Government will deploy police. Wherever one is, all must go to Singur. Otherwise at least protest in one’s own place.

This is a war. I will say to the women of Singur. Keep chilly powder and salt with you. Throw it into the eyes of the assailants including the police. If it was possible I would have gone too, but I am not able.

Post Script – On Saturday evening there was a Citizens Convention in support of Singur at Chakdah. Today there is a rally in Barasat. It is being reported that 40 organisations have signed the memorandum. This is a war. All have to react collectively. Singur is watching you.

Yours,
Mahasweta Devi.

The Bluff of Super Star - THE BOSS!

2007-06-19T06:18:00.000-07:00

(a poster in Trichy, replacing Gandhi's face in the currency)

" Mass adulation can make you a money-making brand, but it means nothing for the soul, for society or for history. Because true greatness can’t be bought or sold, like the memory of Che Guevara or the writings of Munshi Premchand or the films of Guru Dutt, Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak."

Amit Sengupta in 'What the Superstar is selling today?'

No media-informed person of India could have escaped the recent orchestrated frenzy of 'Sivaji'. 'Sivaji - THE BOSS', (The expansion goes such - The Bachelor of Social Service!!) a Rajinikanth-starrer Tamil movie got released last week and it occupied the entire news spectrum as if a marvel has happened. News channels like CNN-IBN, NDTV, Times Now, Headlines News etc., went on with 'Sivaji specials' all through the week. These channels gave a similar coverage of such an extent 'Rang De Basanti', Jessica lal case and Anti-reservation riots in recent times while Kherlanji, Kalinga nagar etc., were kept as one amongst the ten.

It's obvious that the emerging upwardly mobile, globalised citizens of India, who have dissected themselves from the rest of the country, relate with all their mind and soul with the above mentioned issues that are highlighted by the English Media. Now with 'Sivaji' released it seems their party time arrived. So the party fever started. They were in search of such a Desi flavour to pep up their party and the deal got done.

A movie on a mammoth budget of 90 Crores (in a country were people live with Rs.12 a day) hit the screen and the tickets were sold in black for Rs.1000 per ticket. News anchors went in full cry on such a huge response and showed the word-mongering idiots who showed the tickets they have bought for Rs.1000/- (a monthly salary of many in India) as if they have done some achievement. No single papparazi who followed Rajini from Chennai to Tirupathi and to wherever he went to ask the storyline of the Movie (it is said to be with a message against black money - don't imagine much, as it may lay around somewhere between shreya's navel show and rajini's histrionics) questioned the open Black ticket sale-out, who are otherwise 'genuinely' against the corruptions of politicians. It's a known fact that 25% share of the ticket sales goes to Rajinikanth. leave it, it's party time, folks. No rules.

Rajinikanth is called as the Super Star of Tamil Cinema and he was compared with Amitabh Bachan, (the poor farmer who is not able to buy a land in UP) another Super Star of Hindi cinema in a Headlines News Sivaji Special show. This hair-splitting comparison and analysis went for an hour. Both these Super Stars and the other Super Stars of Indian Cinema or this bluff of Super Star is the primary reason for the dilapidation of Indian Cinema. This Humble Super Star Rajinikanth has got a salary of 16 Crore for this movie which is one of the primary reasons for the steep ticket rise. To maintain the Super Star pattern, all the movies are done with same rubbish melodrama formulas, propagated extensively by the media showing their sincerity to the bribes offered and corrupt the Film appreciation of masses and today it's a sad fact that meaningful and sensible cinema has lost its way.

Rajini has screened the movie to Chandrababu Naidu, Jayalalitha, Karunanidhi etc., crossing all political differences. They all have appreciated the movie. (What else we can expect from those staunch fighters against black money). The so-called 'educated' urban middle class finds a desi, peppy pass time and they really celebrate it. The victims are the poor, lower middle class youth in their teens who also join this ugly frenzy putting their hard-earned money or who mortgage household items to put up a poster for this narcissist shit.

I remember John Abraham, (No, this John has got nothing to do with Bipasha basu) an yesteryear director from Kerala, a fire-brand came out of Ghatak's school of thought, who made a Tamil Movie named 'Agraharathil Kazhudhai', once saying that wherever he goes, be it in bus stop or saloon or in home, rubbish cinema songs follow him everywhere and torture him like anything defying his resistance. This entire frenzy on a third-grade cinema creates such nausea to me.

Thanks to Asuran for the inspiration.

There is no erasure!

2007-06-05T02:55:00.000-07:00

“What happened in Gujarat was a mini Rwanda: your neighbour raped you; people killed between 9 and 6 and went home singing. It was like a football match where the Hindus won. There remains festivity around it, the state denies victimhood, and there is no erasure.”- Ahmedabad-based sociologist Shiv Vishvanathan

Last February, I came up with three posts on Gujarat pogrom and its aftermath. In today's 'The Hindu', a news item has got published on the displaced Muslim people of Gujarat. A Supreme Court-appointed committee has found that 4,545 families comprising around 30,000 persons affected by the post-Godhra riots are still living in difficult and pathetic conditions in 81 relief colonies across Gujarat with acute problems in getting food and livelihood security.

The supreme court committee report has suggested that a contempt notice be issued to the Chief Secretary and other officials for misrepresenting facts and furnishing incomplete and inaccurate information to the commissioners.After scrutinising the report, a vacation Bench consisting of Justices Arijit Pasayat and D.K. Jain on Monday posted the case for further hearing after the summer vacation.

what a response? when zaheera sheikh lied and retracted her statements, it was perjury. but when a state that calls itself as representatives of people misrepresent facts, it's not perjury and the supreme court judges want to finish their vacation and then to look in to the issue.notices, contempt's, directives , committees,...all institutionalised bullshit. As prashant jha says, "The 2002 riots were a tragic tale of visible violence, under the glare of the national media, which provoked outrage. But Gujarat 2006 is the story of invisible violence – systematic and subtle, at the state and social levels." Aveek Sen, below in his article on Telegraph gets us to those forgotten people who bear that invisible violence every day and night in the ghettos of Gujarat. As his title suggests, the Muslims of Gujarat today are considered just like garbages and had been thrown out of the civil life limits. Read the article and decide how long they should wait until all gods return from their vacation.
...

Juhapura, Ahmedabad’s largest ghetto

From Communalism Watch

THE GARBAGE PEOPLE

The Gujarat government continues to deny the existence of the internally displaced survivors of the 2002 genocide, writes Aveek Sen

There are two words that come up frequently if you talk at any length to the survivors of the 2002 genocide in Gujarat — tufaan or a storm, and mazaak or a joke. The first is a memory-word. It provides an image, or story, for the immediate purpose of remembering and talking about a series of events that both compels and eludes the grasp of words. The second is a colder, grimmer word. It stands for the dawning of a post facto sense of things — the five-year-long unfolding of a design, more persistent and rooted than just a storm that comes from somewhere else, devastates, and then runs itself out.

“Un logo ne mazaak kee Musalmano ke saath,” Mukhtar Muhammad told me with a bright-eyed grin that seemed to relish, for a moment, the devilishness of this mazaak. We were eating brain curry and chapatis for lunch, while his two little sons played Tiny Toon with the sound politely turned off. This was in Mukhtar’s sparsely-furnished, month-old house in the more middle-class part of Juhapura, one of Ahmedabad’s less noticeably backward, though quite as segregated, Muslim neighbourhoods. After the 2002 riots, Mukhtar moved to Ahmedabad, from the small town of Kaalol in the Panchmahal district, where he was a successful hardware manufacturer. During, and for months after, the violence, he ran a relief camp in his area where he got the government to provide rations, from March to May 2002. He had also arranged for free medical treatment for the 3,500 people who took refuge in his camp with help from his friend, a local Hindu doctor, whose courage, in the face of threats from other Hindus, did not last very long.

After the doctor backed out and the state government abruptly stopped rations, Mukhtar ran the camp on his own resources until December, 2002. Then, as things started ‘coming back to normal’, he found himself getting increasingly involved in the legal work of claiming compensation and rehabilitation support for those Muslims — mostly poor, illiterate rural folk — who were left homeless, bereft, and severely injured or traumatized by the carnage. And it was only when he started figuring out the diabolically complicated bureaucracy and loopholes of the entire compensation and rehabilitation process, and those entitled to Rs 50,000 for loss of property were being sent away with cheques for Rs 300, that the nature and scale of the joke being played on the survivors began to dawn on him.

Mukhtar’s relative affluence, good sense and robustness helped him negotiate with the separatist kattarwadis in his own community who did not want the displaced to return to their own homes. He and his wife, Anisa, then started getting serious threat calls, and that is when he decided to move to Ahmedabad, from where he continues his work with the survivors, with some valued training and support from an NGO called Centre for Social Justice. Yet, he cannily resists the label of ‘community leader’ and eludes most Islamist stereotypes, keeping a mischievously-smiling, unillusioned distance from fundamentalists, politicians and celebrity social activists alike.

With his sons and daughter in a mixed-community, English-medium school, his spacious, new house, and his relocated business evidently looking up, Mukhtar, together with Anisa, is a survivor whose painstakingly reconstituted world could not have provided a greater contrast to what I had seen of human survival the day before, in the rapidly industrializing wildernesses outside Ahmedabad’s city-limits. It was Jumma-baar that day, and around mid-day, Khairunnesa and Usha, two social workers from a local NGO, took me with them to visit the Bombay Hotel area miles outside the city. There was a cluster of colonies there, where “riot victims”, as they are now collectively referred to, have been “resettled” after they found it impossible to return to their original homes — because these homes did not exist any more and they got no help from the state to rebuild them, or because they were still too afraid to return and live among their Hindu neighbours.

As you approach Bombay Hotel, first the stench hits you — of rotting waste and burning plastic. And then you see the huge mountain range of garbage, silhouetted, all the refuse of the city dumped high, with wisps of smoke rising from here and there. And nestling in the foothills, surrounded by sulphurous pools and swamps, are the little colonies of single-storied, flat-roofed pukka houses. The first one we went to — far off the highway, connected to it by a winding, bumpy, kutcha lane — was called Citizen Nagar. The jokes are at their blackest here, I realized. Another colony, a little way away, was called Ekta Nagar.

Citizen Nagar, built by the Islamic Relief Society and the Kerala State Muslim League Relief Committee on land privately acquired, houses about 400 people in 60-odd families. They have been displaced from such places as Naroda Patia and Gulberg Society, which had seen some of the worst massacres in 2002. Nothing I had read of the various reports and newspaper articles about these colonies had prepared me for the bleakness and degradation I saw here. There is no drinking water, no sewerage, no health centre, no school within miles, no street lighting. Every facility, from electricity to water, has to be paid for. Because of the vast dumping ground nearby, the ground water, accessed by bore wells, is dangerously polluted. So is the air, by fumes from the burning garbage that waft in continually.

When it rains, the whole place is flooded by water mixed with chemical waste from the neighbouring factories. Most people suffer from skin and gastric diseases, and some children from a peculiar type of crippling, polio-like illness. Because the hospitals are so far away, women in labour deliver or die on their way to them. After dark, the whole area is unlit and unsafe. Children have to walk miles to go to school, and attendance levels are abysmal.

These are people who have not only experienced extreme brutality and loss, but have also lost all their official papers: ration cards, birth certificates, BPL cards. Many of them have been given voter ID cards, but their ration cards have been re-issued with their BPL status changed to APL. This is only one of the many sleights of hand denuding them of their most basic human entitlements from the State. The men find it impossible to find jobs, and when they do, are paid pittances.

Many of these men have been unable to save their wives, sisters, daughters, and mothers from being raped, tortured or killed or, in many cases, all three. The mix of trauma, outrage, fear and the sense of profound ineffectuality and emasculation, made worse by the lack of employment, breeds a feeling of irredeemable victimhood — easily handed down to the children or taken out on the women — that hangs like a miasma over the place. The men look hopeless and passive, lying around in the afternoon heat on khatias with blank eyes. The women, in contrast, seem bustling with energy, articulate and better organized together. They recount their experiences vividly and are very clear about what is happening, or not happening, to them. Yet, after a while, you begin to sense a different kind of incapacitation in them too, born out of persistent fear and a long history of disempowerment, that makes them unwilling, for instance, to go out and look for work outside the home.

This sense of victimhood and the scramble for getting most out of a system determined to make nothing easy result in another peculiar phenomenon: the battle for evidence. It is fought against an inhuman machinery that is geared to strategic denial and forgetting. Apart from personal papers and testimonies, photographs are crucial here. Every survivor carries around a personal portfolio of photographs — of damaged property, dead family members and, most unforgettably, of terrible physical wounds. These last are often well-lit studio photographs with fancy backdrops. You will be made to sit and look closely at these photographs and listen to the accompanying tales.

Most of the time, several individuals will be doing this together with a bizarre combination of desperate urgency and profound mistrust. Even as they trust you with their stories and images, with half a mind they wonder if you have come to conduct another survey of the sort that was done before the tufaan, when innocuous-looking surveyors came to their homes to see where and how they lived. Every survivor tells, over and over again, of the signs of systematic planning, with constant help from the police, in the months before the violence erupted.

From siesta-time at Citizen Nagar to the late evening azaan at Naroda Patia, we saw about ten of the 69 colonies that exist all over Gujarat today. Citizen Nagar is more or less representative of them all. The latest survey of 2007 shows 4,473 internally displaced families — 23,081 men, women and children — living in them. None of the land they are built on has been provided by the government, and most of the inhabitants do not yet have proper ownership papers. The state government denies that these people exist at all, and claim that they have chosen to remain in the colonies because it happens to be a better option for them economically.

Mukhtar believes that victimhood, together with the rehm-o-karam mentality that comes with it, has spread like a disease among them, exploited, in different ways, by the State and by organizations that believe building mosques in these colonies is more important than building schools or health centres. “So why shouldn’t 2002 happen again?” he asks.

Farmers are Life convicts!

2007-06-01T01:47:00.000-07:00

P.Sainath travels in Karnataka and brings out 'not so hot-news' of women who bear the brunt of life after their husbands suicided few years ago due to the agrarian crisis imposed by the centre-state and the super government WTO. In this article he compares the life of these women with convicts in jail and asks what the crime these women have done. As he narrates we understand, today in india, farming is the worst crime than all crimes and the so-called backbones of the country, farmers, are life convicts.

...

from The Hindu

Farmer's diet worse than a convict's
P. Sainath
Several women in Karnataka's Mandya district like Jayalakshmamma, whose husband committed suicide four years ago, still stand up to the unending pressure with incredible resilience.

Jayalakshmamma with her husband's portrait.

In Karnataka, her BPL card entitles her to less rice a day than a convict in prison gets in a single meal. WHEN JAYALAKSHMAMMA finishes her 12 hours of labour — on those days she can find work — she's entitled to less than a fourth of the rice given to a convict in prison. In fact, the rice she gets on average for a whole day is far less than what the incarcerated offender gets in a single meal.

Jayalakshmamma is not a convict in prison. She's a marginal farmer whose husband H.M. Krishna, 45, killed himself in Huluganahalli village of Mandya district four years ago. This district was among the worst affected by the farm suicides of 2003 in Karnataka. In this State, her BPL (below the poverty line) card entitles her to only four kg of rice (and a kg of wheat) a month. True, those four kg are subsidised by the State. But she cannot afford to buy a lot more than that at prevailing market price. She is also one of over a lakh of women across India who have lost their husbands in suicides arising from the farm crisis these past 14 years.

"Four kilograms a month means about 135 grams a day," says T. Yashavantha, who is from a farming family of the same district. He is also State vice-president of the Students Federation of India. "Even an undertrial or convict gets more." What's more, they get cooked rice. She gets four kg of grain. Jail diets in the State vary according to whether the prisoner is on a "rice diet," a "ragi diet" or a "chapati diet."

Jail officials in Bangalore told The Hindu "those on rice diets and doing rigorous imprisonment get 710 grams of cooked rice per meal. Those on non-rice diets get 290 grams of rice. Undertrials and those doing simple imprisonment [who are on rice diets] get 505 grams of rice per meal." The convict doing rigorous imprisonment does eight hours of labour. Jayalakshmamma does 12 or more. "But her entitlement is 45 grams per meal if she has three a day," points out Mr. Yashavantha. She doesn't have the time, though, to make comparisons. Her daughter now works at breadline wages in a Bangalore garment company. "At most she can send us Rs.500 in a year," she told us at her village. This leaves her son and herself at home. Their joint entitlement on the BPL card would yield 270 grams per day. That is: they would together still get less rice than even a prisoner on "ragi diet" gets — 290 grams or more.

They own around 0.4 acres and had leased two acres before Krishna's suicide. "On the former we grew vegetables. On the latter, we had sericulture. Vegetable prices have been terrible. Once, we got Rs.1 a kilo for tomatoes. And water costs came to Rs.9,000 (or Rs.70 per hour) over six months." Now they have only the 0.4 acres. "We also sold all our livestock after his death." They have been paying off his loans and most of the compensation they received appears to have gone this way.

"My boy Nandipa grazes the goats of others but there's no daily income from it." Instead, they will share the offspring of the animals — if any — with the owner. "I myself make Rs.35 a day working this off-season." "I wanted Nandipa to study. But he was in despair. Three years ago, then aged 12, he ran off to Bangalore and worked in a hotel. There he was beaten by the owner. He ran away, took the wrong train and landed up in Mumbai. After a while, he was brought back." "All widows have problems. But those bereaved by the farm crisis suffer worse," says Sunanda Jayaram, president of the women's wing of the Karnataka Rajya Ryuthu Sangha (Puttanaiah group) "Even after losing her husband she has to maintain his father and mother, her own children and the farm — with no economic security for herself. And she is saddled with his debts. Her husband took his own life. She will pay the price all her life."

In Bidarahosahalli village, Chikktayamma's state exemplifies this. Her husband, Hanumegowda, 38, killed himself in 2003. "The debts are all we're left with," she says, without self-pity. "What we earn won't pay off even the interest on loans to the money lenders." She's struggled to educate her three children — who might be forced to drop out though all want to study further. "The girls should study, too. But later, we'll have to raise lots of money for their marriages as well." One girl, Sruthi, has done her SSLC exams and another, Bharathi, is in the second year of her pre-university course. Her son Hanumesh is in the 8th standard. Her husband's mother and a couple of other relatives also live in this house. Chikktayamma is the sole breadwinner for at least five people. "We have only 1.5 acres [on part of which she grows mangoes]. So I also work as a labourer when I can for Rs. 30 a day. I had a BPL card but they [the authorities] took it from me saying `we'll give you a new card.'" It never came back, says Mr. Yashavantha. "Instead, they gave her an APL [above the poverty line] one."

Huge debt

In Huligerepura, Chenamma and her family grapple with a debt of over Rs.2 lakh left by her husband Kadegowda, 60, who took his life four years ago. "Sugarcane just sank and it crushed him," says his son Sidhiraj. "We have only three acres," says Chenamma. "It's hard to generate a living from that now." But she and her sons still try. And the family plans to shift to paddy this year. In Thoreshettahalli, Mr. Yashavantha's father, Thammanna, a farmer for decades, says the farm crisis is biting deep. "Most cane growers are not recovering the cost of production. Input costs go upwards, incomes downwards. Also, some 40 borewells were drilled in this village last month but only one succeeded. People are giving up. You will find farmland lying unused even during season."

What about self-help groups? Jayalakshmamma has paid an initial amount "but the group has not yet launched. And I cannot afford the Rs.25 a week. Nor the 24 per cent interest each year." Chikktayamma cannot think of making such payments regularly. "The SHG concept is a good one," says KRRS leader K.S. Puttannaiah. "But in some cases, they've also become moneylenders. Meanwhile, after the initial compensations, the State has no plan for widows and orphans of farm suicides. When have they even thought about it?"

"Remember, these and all other farm women are breadwinners and have always been so," says Ms. Jayaram. "Yet, they have no land rights and no land security. Even in agricultural labour, they are paid far less than men. Those widowed by the suicides are in constant tension. There are debts hanging on their heads which they did not incur. There are daughters whose marriages are pending. The pressure is unending." It is. But all the three women and many more like them in Mandya stand up to it with incredible resilience and still try to run their farms and feed their families with dignity and respect.

If you’re not with us, you are with them!

2007-05-31T02:12:00.000-07:00

"About Naxals and Maoists — well… India is about to become a police state in which everybody who disagrees with what’s going on risks being called a terrorist. Islamic terrorists have to be Islamic — so that’s not good enough to cover most of us. They need a bigger catchment area. So leaving the definition loose, undefined, is effective strategy, because the time is not far off when we’ll all be called Maoists or Naxalites, terrorists or terrorist sympathisers, and shut down by people who don’t really know or care who Maoists or Naxalites are. " Arundhati Roy in her recent interview to TEHELKA

Noted rights activist Dr.Binayak Sen got detained on May 14 under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 2004, and the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, 2005. Sen, general secretary of the Chhattisgarh People’s Union for Civil Liberties, and PUCL’s national vice-president, was arrested for his alleged links with Maoist groups.

Dr. Binayak Sen is a very well known person and highly respected both in Chhattisgarh and elsewhere. As a medical doctor, Dr Sen has been actively involved in reaching health care to the poorest people as well as monitoring the health and nutrition status of the people of Chhattisgarh.

As General Secreatary of the Chhattisgarh PUCL, he has helped to organize numerous fact finding campaigns into human rights violations in the state including custody deaths, fake encounters, hunger deaths, dysentery epidemics, malnutrition, and other similar violations. In recent times has worked intensively to bring large scale oppression and malgovernance within the so called Salwa Judum in Dantewara to national and international attention. Dr. Sen has regularly spoken to the local and national media on these issues.

After arresting Sen, Police searched the his house and found some pamphlets related to resistance against US imperialism and a letter written by a CPI (Maoist) leader named Madan in which he described the worst condition of prisoners in raipur central jail and has requested to take some action against this by PUCL Chhatishgarh. In this particular letter the maoist leader addresed Dr. binayak as " priya comrade binayak"(Dear Comrade Binayak). the police is acclaiming that this addressing show the connection of Dr. sen with maoist. Morever the critical charge is that Sen met Maoist leader Narayan Sanyal more than 30 times in recent months in the Raipur jail.

As praful bidwai puts it, " The charge is preposterous. Sen met Sanyal with the authorities’ knowledge and consent and always in a jailer’s presence. It’s his legitimate function to meet detainees and defend their fundamental rights. Whether he met Sanyal 35 times or 100 times is irrelevant. "

As the noted human rights activists say, "Arresting of civil and democratic rights activists is neither new nor original. The experience of various Civil Rights organizations including the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee over the last two decades is enough proof of how the state has attacked those who have questioned the state and exposed the truth behind fake encounters, disappearances and rapes that form an integral part of the operations of state forces. In the present context, it is well known that the Chhattisgarh Government has been indulging in the most brazen brutality in the adivasi areas of the State to suppress the Maoist movement. Dr. Sen's untiring work in documenting the atrocities and violations committed by the state forces in the guise of the Salwa Judum has earned him the ire of the police. PUCL, Chhattisgarh and other democratic activists have been raising their voice and campaigning against these illegal and inhuman practices, and for this service to democracy, the familiar allegation of being a 'Maoist' is made against them."

This brutal onslaught by the state on the Chattisgarh people by creating the mercenary force Salwa judum in the pretext of anti-naxal operations has a bigger agenda than combating Naxals. In the words of Roy," There is a civil war in Chhattisgarh sponsored, created by the Chhattisgarh government, which is publicly pursing the Bush doctrine: if you’re not with us, you are with the terrorists. The lynchpin of this war, apart from the formal security forces, is the Salva Judum — a government-backed militia of ordinary people forced to take up arms, forced to become spos (special police officers). The Indian State has tried this in Kashmir, in Manipur, in Nagaland. Tens of thousands have been killed, hundreds of thousands tortured, thousands have disappeared. Any banana republic would be proud of this record. Now the government wants to import these failed strategies into the heartland. Thousands of adivasis have been forcibly moved off their mineral-rich lands into police camps. Hundreds of villages have been forcibly evacuated. Those lands, rich in iron-ore, are being eyed by corporations like the Tatas and Essar. mous have been signed, but no one knows what they say. Land acquisition has begun. This kind of thing happened in countries like Colombia — one of the most devastated countries in the world. While everybody’s eyes are fixed on the spiralling violence between government-backed militias and guerrilla squads, multinational corporations quietly make off with the mineral wealth. That’s the little piece of theatre being scripted for us in Chhattisgarh."

Hence now the brutal state of Chattisgarh wants to say that even human rights activists have got nothing to do and there can be no voices expressing even a slight bit of dissent. it fears if the Government is exposed by the sincere human-rights activists like Sen, then its bigger agenda will be at stake. So now you need to be like Gandhi's monkeys to safe-guard this super-power. if you are with 'us', you need to speak only what the state speaks. you need to hear only what the state wants us to hear. you need to see only what the state wants us to see. if not then you are with 'them'.

So, my dear readers or the terrorists who read a terrorist's blog as per the current definition, i request you to forward this news to all you know. This is the present and future of this country. There is no place to hide and no shortcuts and no way left to call yourself neutral. If the state wants us to rest with this kind of repression to build its colony for its imperial masters, it's mistaken. by arresting Binayak Sen, State cannot terrorise the people and the ravage by Globalisation will never allow people to rest. Revolutionary movements spearhead this struggle all over the country and the recent developments in Singur, Nandigram, Ranchi and Chattisgarh show that people are not going to wait for any assured elixir to trickle down. let's see what they can do when instead of one Binayak Sen, crores of Binayak Sens rise up.

சில பழைய கவிதைகள் - III

2007-05-29T09:42:00.000-07:00

The below content will not display correctly if Unicode Encoding is not enabled in your browser. The content is written in tamil. To make it readable, pls install unicode tamil font latha.

மோனம் கிழித்து....!

ஒரு அதிகாலைப் பொழுதின் கருக்கலில்
விநாடிப் பொழுதின் இடைவெளியில்
இருளார்ந்த கானகத்தின் நடுவே
சாகேத்ராஜனின் மரணம் சம்பவித்தது.
புரட்சியின் கனவுகளில் இயங்கிய
அவரது இரத்த நாளங்களைத்
தெறிக்கப் பாய்ந்தது தோட்டா.
அன்றிலிருந்து
துவங்குகிறது மோனப் பாசாங்கு.
திரும்பும் திசையெங்கும்
முணுமுணுப்பு கூட சாத்தியமாகவில்லை.
கொடூர அமைதி...
கொலை முடித்த அமைதி...

சட்லெட்ஜ் நதிக்கரையில்
பகத்சிங்கின் உடல்
எவருக்கும் தெரியாமல்
எரித்துச் சாம்பலாக்கப்பட்டது போலவே...
பிரேம் என்ற சாகேத்ராஜனும்
சாம்பலாக்கப்பட்டார்.
செய்த குற்றம் என்ன?
சுட்டுத் தள்ளுமளவிற்கு என்ன நேர்ந்தது?
கேட்க முடியாது.
கேட்கக் கூடாது.
'நக்சலைட்'....!
அவ்வளவுதான்,
நியாயம் பிறந்து விட்டது.
பொதுக் கருத்தின் வரம்புகளில் நின்று
கேள்வியெழுப்ப முடியாத நியாயம்...

மணிப்பூரில் மனோரமா தேவியை
சீருடையணிந்த வெறி நாய்கள்
புணர்ந்து கொலை செய்யவும்,
கஜூரேலை இரண்டாண்டுகளுக்கும் மேலாய்
தொடர்ந்து வதைக்கவும்,
ஊத்தங்கரையில் சிறைப்பட்ட நாள் முதலாய்
வெஞ்சிறையில் வாடவும்,
சுவரொட்டி ஒட்டுவதற்கும்,
கூட்டம் கூட்டுவதற்கும் கூட சிறையில் தள்ளப்படவும்,
வழி சமைக்கும் நியாயம்...

எழுதப்பட்ட தீர்ப்புகளோடு
தொடர்கிறது வழக்கு.
நக்சலியம்
சமூகப் பிரச்சினையா,
சட்ட ஒழுங்குப் பிரச்சினையா?
அறிவுஜீவிகளின்
வடிகட்டிய சொற்களில்
தொடர்கிறது விவாதம்.
மற்றொரு புறத்தில்
துப்பாக்கிகளின் பேரிரைச்சலில்
தொடர்கிறது வதம்.

பகத்சிங்கின் காலம் தொட்டு
பகரப்படும் சட்டம் இதுதான்,
அரசு மாறலாம்,
ஆட்சி மாறலாம்.
ஆள்வோர் மாறலாம்,
ஆள்வோரின் நிறம் மாறலாம்.
அடிப்படையை மாற்ற முயன்றால்...
துப்பாக்கிகளுக்கு பசியெடுக்கும்.
ஊடகங்கள் உறங்கிப் புரளும்.
கொடூர அமைதி நிலைநாட்டப்படும்.

சாகேத் ராஜன் எழுதிய
வரலாற்று நூல்கள்
கர்நாடகப் பல்கலைக் கழகங்களில்
பாடமாக்கப்பட்டிருப்பதை
எண்ணிப் பதறுகிறது அரசு.
நாளை அது நீக்கப்படலாம்.
ஆனால்,
காற்றினில் எழுதிச் சென்ற
அவரது வாழ்க்கை கவிதையை
எங்கும் ஒளித்து வைக்க முடியாது.
கவனமாய் வடிவமைக்கப்பட்ட
இந்தக் கருத்துச் சிறையை
ஊடுருவி
அக் கவிதை
விரிசல்களை எழுப்பிக் கொண்டே இருக்கும்.

கோட்டையில் கொடி மாறும் வரை
பகத்சிங்கும் பயங்கரவாதியாகத்தான் அறியப்பட்டார்.
கொடியோடு
கோட்டையையும் கைமாற்றும் வரை
சாகேத்ராஜனும் தீவிரவாதியாகத்தான் அறியப்படுவார்.
இரத்தப் பலிகளால்
இறுதி நாளை
வெகுநாட்களுக்கு தவிர்த்து விட முடியாது.
நிறுவப்பட்ட கொடூர அமைதி
உடைந்து நொறுங்கும்.
எழும்பும் உரத்த குரல்களோடு
பகத்சிங்கினதும், சாகேத்ராஜனதுமான உயிர்கள்
புதிய உருவம் பெறும்.

...

பிப்ரவரி 6-ஆம் தேதி 2005 அன்று மாவோயிஸ்ட் கட்சித் தோழரான பிரேம் என்ற சாகேத்ராஜன் போலீஸால் சுட்டுக் கொல்லப்பட்டார். மாவோயிஸ்ட் கட்சியின் நடைமுறைகளில், இந்தியப் புரட்சிக்கான அவர்களது அரசியல், இராணுவப் பாதைகளில் கருத்து வேறுபாடுகள், விமர்சனங்கள் இருப்பினும், சாகேத்ராஜனுடைய, சாகேத்ராஜனைப் போன்ற எண்ணற்ற அக்கட்சித் தோழர்களின் தியாகம் அளவிறந்த மதிப்பிற்குரியது. இக்கவிதை மார்ச் - 23, 2005 அன்று எழுதப்பட்டது. சாகேத்ராஜன் குறித்த எனது பழைய வலைப்பதிவையும், அவரது அமைப்பின் ஆதரவாளர்கள் அவர் குறித்து உருவாக்கியிருக்கும் வலைத் தளத்தையும் படித்துப் பாருங்கள்.

Oust Reliance!

2007-05-24T21:51:00.000-07:00

The meaning of May Day is rubbished in India primarily by the pseudo-communist parties CPI and CPI (M) and by the ruling class parties like Congress, BJP etc., Historically May Day came in to existence to commemorate the Haymarket Martyrs of 1886 who fought for the Eight-Hour work day. The remaining eight-hours other than work and sleep for which the workers fought is not for entertainment as interpreted today. It is for organising the working class to build their future. Hence May Day cannot be celebrated as yet another holiday to rest at home or to distribute sweets as a ceremony to apoliticise and castrate the working class.

With this understanding, People’s and Literary Association (PALA) and its associate organisations namely New Democratic Labour Front (NDLF), Peasants Liberation Front (PLF) and Revolutionary Students Youth Front (RSYF) in Tamilnadu set specific political agenda for every May Day to organise the working class to make conscious of its duty. Hence, for the past two decades, May Day in Tamilnadu is marked with arousing protests, agitations and conferences by PALA. This year,as announced earlier,as part of the one month campaign against Reliance and MNC’s entering in Retail sector, PALA organised the protests encircling Reliance Fresh Shops. The one month campaign had 1,50,000 pamphlets, thousands of posters and wall writings and 25,000 booklets covering all over Tamilnadu but the primary focus was on Chennai as at present Reliance has started shops only in Chennai. The intensive campaign involved the doorstep propaganda in and around areas of Reliance shops.

The arousing march was flagged off by Comrade.Mukundan, President of NDLF and it started from the Koyambedu Market which is at the verge of extinction due to the Reliance entry in Chennai. The fervent slogans raised by the comrades of these organisations exposed the political parties, bureaucracy and Reliance while upholding the Naxalbari Revolutionaries as the only alternative to face the Recolonisation onslaught. The Revolutionary songs of PALA arts troupe roared in the air. Children and women carried the placards defying the scorching heat. The march reached the Reliance Fresh shop at Virugambakkam Market Road one in sense and two thousand in numbers.

The shop was closed expecting the protest and the police were all ready with barricades. Comrade Marudhaiyan, Secretary of PALA and Comrade Kaliappan, Joint-Secretary of PALA gave speeches explaining the movement. As the one-month campaign in various forms already reached the people of that area, they came in large numbers to watch the agitation bearing the three-hour traffic jam. The comrades got arrested 50 yards before the shop. When they all were carried in Police vans, Koyambedu trader’s union designators came to wish the comrades. Comrade.Marudhiyan thanked them and said, “The distance between us and the shop is just 50 yards. But the distance between the understandings of the people on the menace of MNC’s in retail sector and the reality is far more. Our motto at present of this struggle is to reduce that gap. If reliance to be put down, then Koyambedu should rise up!”

The false and confused ideas ruling the minds of people that deter them to foray were not formed by Ambani. These ideas were thrust in by the ruling class, media and political parties with the implementation of Recolonisation from the last decade. When the traders alone raise the slogan to oust the MNC’s, Reliance masquerades in ‘quality and cheaper prices’ and lures the people. But when the fight begins as a fight against Recolonisation then the slogan will become a people’s slogan and the definite moment will arrive.

The recent, spontaneous, laudable struggle of Ranchi vendors shows the desperation of the small vendor class. The land of Birsa Munda atlast showed the way to the country. These struggles should be organised and shouldn’t be allowed to be corrupted with decomposed political parties. People’s movements should be channelised as movements against Recolonisation as a whole and not to fade away as scattered and spontaneous.photographs of the protest on May 01,2007 at Chennai:

* Watch the Video of the protest above. Thanks to Karumpalakai.

* To read the tamil press clips of the protest read here.

* To read the tamil summary of the thought-provoking speech by Comrade Marudhaiyan, General Secretary, PALA in Public meeting on 27-04-07, read here.

*To hear the speech, click here

Come and See

2007-05-24T00:27:00.000-07:00

Some weeks before I watched the Movie ‘Come and See’, a Soviet/ Belarussian film directed by Elem Klimov in a NFDC screening. As Rita Kempley, of the Washington Post puts it, I felt, Klimov with an angry eloquence, taps into that hallucinatory nether world of blood and mud and escalating madness. The movie talks about the Nazi war crimes in Belarussia where the Nazis torched 628 villages. I have seen some war movies before but watching this movie was totally a different experience. Usually I felt the war movies generated a sense of thrill or a show of blasts and guns. But this movie generates a deep agony which is beyond words. I remember a scene in which the lead teen character, Florya meets the village head in a forest. Village head lying in his death bed with skin peeled out due to bomb shelling talks to him painfully. I found many left the hall unbearable to watch that scene.

The mystic music...Glasha and Florya taking bath in dew drops by shaking the trees ....the shock caused by the bombs...the expression of Florya when he watches the whole village burning....that last amazing montage....inexplicable!

I am not sure whether you can get whole feeling by reading the story of the film in this link. But ofcourse you can get a gist as this wikipedia piece is really written in a simple and nice way.

சில பழைய கவிதைகள் - II

2007-05-11T08:14:00.000-07:00

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பத்து நாள் தீவிரவாதி!

இடிபாடுகளுக்குள்
நசுங்கிக் கிடக்கிறது
உன் முகம்.
பத்து நாட்களுக்கு முன்னால்
கருப்பையிலிருந்து வெளிப்போந்து,
நீ கண்விழித்த நாள் முதலாய்
அரவணைத்த அன்னையின்
உருக்குலைந்த கரங்களுக்குள்
நீ மீளா உறக்கத்தில் ஆழ்ந்திருக்க்கிறாய்.

பெயரிடப்படாத நீ அறிந்திருக்க நியாயமில்லை,
தீவிரவாதத்தினால்
'தீவிரமாக பாதிக்கப்பட்ட'
இசுரேல் சொல்லும் நியாயம் இதுதான்.
" நீ ஒரு ஹிஸ்புல்லா தீவிரவாதி!
நீ ஒரு அல்கொய்தா தீவிரவாதி!
லெபனானில் பிறந்த,
பிறக்கப் போகின்ற ஒவ்வொரு குழந்தையும்
ஹிஸ்புல்லா தீவிரவாதிதான்!
உருத்தெரியாமல்
சிதைக்கப்பட வேண்டியவர்கள்தான்!"

திசையெங்கும்
ஒலிக்கிறது மரண ஓலம்.
தொலைக்காட்சியில்
ரசிக்கிறது மேலை உலகம்.
வானத்திலிருந்து
ஹிட்லர் சிரிக்கிறான்.
வரலாறு மீண்டும்
ரத்தத்தில் நனைகிறது.

...

ஹிஸ்புல்லா தீவிரவாதிகளுக்கு பதிலடி தரும் போர்வையில், லெபனானின் கடந்த ஆண்டில் ஒரு கோர யுத்தத்தை இசுரேல் அரசு நிகழ்த்திய பொழுது, ஆகஸ்ட் 7, 2006 அன்று கொல்லப்பட்ட ஒரு கைக்குழந்தையின் கதை இது. இத்தாக்குதலில் அக்குடும்பத்தின் 11 உறுப்பினர்களும் கொல்லப்பட்டனர். இக்கவிதை மறுநாள் எழுதப்பட்டது.

சில பழைய கவிதைகள் - I

2007-05-11T07:46:00.000-07:00

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நாலாவது தூண்

தினத் தந்தி தலைப்புச் செய்தி:
பிறந்தார் பேரன்;
தாத்தா ஆனார் ரஜினிகாந்த்!

தலைப்புச் செய்தியே இப்படி என்றால்,
உள்ளே என்ன இருக்கும்?

சிறப்புச் செய்தி:
அதிசயம்,
ஆனால் உண்மை!

பிறந்தார் பேரன்;
தாத்தா ஆனார் ரஜினிகாந்த்!
ரஜினிகாந்த் தாத்தா ஆனதால்,
லதா ரஜினிகாந்த் பாட்டி ஆனார்!
ரஜினிகாந்த் தாத்தா ஆனதால்,
தனுஷ் அப்பா ஆனார்!
ரஜினிகாந்த் தாத்தா ஆனதால்,
ஐஸ்வர்யா தனுஷ் அம்மா ஆனார்!
ரஜினிகாந்த் தாத்தா ஆனதால்,
ஐஸ்வர்யாவின் தங்கை சித்தி ஆனார்!
ரஜினிகாந்த் தாத்தா ஆனதால்,
தனுஷின் அண்ணன் பெரியப்பா ஆனார்!

உங்களால் நம்ப முடிகிறதா,
ரஜினிகாந்த் தாத்தா ஆனதால்,
கஸ்தூரி ராஜா கூட தாத்தா ஆனார்!
ரஜினிகாந்த் தாத்தா ஆனதால்,
கஸ்தூரி ராஜா பொண்டாட்டி கூட பாட்டி ஆனார்!
ரஜினிகாந்த் தாத்தா ஆனதால்,
கஸ்தூரி ராஜாவின் ஒன்று விட்ட சித்தப்பா....

பிற முக்கியமில்லாத செய்திகள்:
டெங்கு காய்ச்சல் பரவுகிறது! அரசு மெத்தனம்!
கடன் தொல்லையால் விஷம் குடித்த விவசாயி சாவு!
--இன்னும் சில இது போன்ற சில வழக்கமான,
ஆச்சரியப்பட வேண்டாத செய்திகள்--------

வாங்கிப் படியுங்கள் தினத் தந்தி!
வாழ்க இந்தியா!
வளர்க நாலாவது தூண்!

The 'Trishul' expose!

2007-05-08T00:21:00.000-07:00

CNN-IBN has recently exposed the criminal acts of 'seers' picking three notable figures from north to south, thus by showing the 'unity in diversity'. read the excerpts and imagine 'mera bharat kitna mahaan hain'!

FROM CNN-IBN

In this age of “instant karma, quick nirvana”, it’s perhaps natural that some individuals or organisations become the repositories of a country’s collective faith. Spiritual gurus, babas, Godmen – they are known by many names and have become forces to reckon with when it comes to faith, specially in India where the lines between superstition and religion have blurred significantly. But the faith has been maligned and many who claim to be Godmen, promising to rid lives of evil in the name of God have been proven close to evil themselves.A CNN-IBN-Cobra Post investigation exposes the ugly side of some the most popular Godmen - Pilot Baba, a former Indian Air Force officer, Vedanti Maharaj, former BJP MP and Guruvayur Surya Namboodiri, who claims to be an astrologer – shattering the myth that surrounds Godmen of modern times.

Money launderer leads Ram temple trust

IN THE NAME OF TRUST: Vedanti Maharaj uses Ram temple Trust for money laundering racket.

New Delhi Thousands of Ram temple believers have put in their trust in this God man. They feel he will realise their vision of a Ram temple.

Cobrapost and CNN-IBN Special Investigation reveals that he is just a common criminal running a very clever money laundering racket.

Meet Vedanti Maharaj - chairman of the Ramjanmabhoomi Trust in Ayodhya. A man who says he has no worldly pursuits but this Godman is lying.

Vedanti Maharaj: What percentage will I get?

CNN-IBN: Whatever you want.

Vedanti Maharaj: No, you need to tell me what I will get. Suppose you convert Rs 5 crore how much would I get?

Vedanti Maharaj has mastered the art of persuasion not just at his Ayodhya rallies, but also behind closed doors.

Vedanti Maharaj: How much will I get?

CNN-IBN:Rs 1.5 crore.

Vedanti Maharaj: Ask for Rs 3 crore instead, and give me Rs 2 crore.

CNN-IBN:No, we need to keep a margin.

Vedanti Maharaj: Alright, you will need to give a discount.

The Baba cheats the government of crore in taxes with impunity.

Maharaj says, "I do not need permission to use my Trust's funds. Let me consult my CA. Come to Ayodhya and I will get everything done there.”

Operating like a master criminal, Vedanti Mahraj launders black money for a commission, by issuing fake bills and receipts through his lesser-known Matri Sewa Trust.

CNN-IBN: Do you head the Ramjanmabhoomi Trust?

Vedanti Maharaj: Yes but if we put your money in the Ramjanambhoomi Trust it can't be recovered.

Vedanti Maharaj s aide: Not a single penny. You will need detailed accounts for that.

Vedanti Maharaj: Because its an international Trust.

CNN-IBN: Ramjanmabhoomi Trust?

Vedanti Maharaj: No the IB and CBI keep a watch on this Trust.

CNN-IBN: But your Trust is free of problems?

Vedanti Maharaj: No I made the Matri Sewa Trust for this purpose.

Using the promise of a Ram Mandir to keep the masses hooked, money laundering and tax evasion is what this man is actually all about.

Watch the Video: http://www.ibnlive.com/videos/39845/money-launderer-leads-ram-temple-trust.html

God-man turning black money to white

New Delhi: Thousands put their trust in them. But few can imagine some of our country's revered God-men are common criminals running very clever money laundering racket.

Former wing commander Kapil Advait, who fought for India in the 1965 and 1971 wars, later became a spiritual baba revered by thousands as Pilot Baba. But a CNN IBN-Cobrapost investigation unmasked this Godman. Pilot Baba says, "I will give you a cheque of whatever amount you need as long as you can convert it to white money.”CNN-IBN investigation team posed as corporate agents and approached Pilot Baba's henchman Jyoti in Delhi. The investigation team told him that it could convert Rs 10 crore of black money to white. Jyoti demanded Rs 30 lakh commission to fix a deal with the baba and a meeting with pilot baba was fixed.

CNN-IBN: Tell us what is the kind of deal that you would like?

Pilot Baba: It depends on the percentage of returns. I have been offered 20, 30 and 50 percent in the past.

CNN-IBN: There is hardly any margin in 20 per cent.

Pilot Baba: That's for you to decide.

CNN-IBN: Will ten per cent do?

Pilot Baba: No.

CNN-IBN: Not on ten?

Pilot Baba: Why take so much risk just for 10 per cent.

Pilot Baba blatantly admitted to laundering money for foreign firms.

Pilot Baba says, "Companies from Japan and America want us to convert hundreds of crore into white money."

Not just multinational corporations but also politicians of repute - a former prime minister, two former chief ministers and a ruling chief minister - this Godman claims they are all his followers.

"We have access to politicians who give Rs 500 crore bring down governments and buy off MPs," Pilot Baba adds.

CNN-IBN: Tell us who all are special?

Pilot Baba: All of them.

CNN-IBN: As you told us N D Tiwari also puts money.

Pilot Baba: All of them whether it is Mulayam or Mayawati, everybody needs us.

Pilot Baba: I know Narayna Dut Tiwari since long for the last forty years. Since Tiwari was on the streets. N D Tiwari, Murli Manohar joshi, Atal Bihari Vajpayee - I know them all since long.

The Pilot Baba also boasted about his connections with criminals.

Pilot Baba: I am from Bihar from a royal family not just anybody. I have contacts. I can fix anyone who tries to mess with me.

Even as fraudulent God-men like pilot baba indulge in corrupt and criminal activities all in the name of God. Thousands flock to them for spiritual guidance. And yet, these false men of God betray their trust.

Watch the Video: http://www.ibnlive.com/videos/39841/05_2007/pilot_baba/godman-turning-black-money-to-white.html

Southern godmen exposed turns dirty money holy

New Delhi: The third Godman exposed in the Cobrapost and CNN-IBN investigation was Guruvayur Surya Nambudiri, who is famous for making prophecies.

But as it happened the man who claims that he can predict what the tomorrow holds, could not get over his love for money. And to make more money, he is even willing to convert black money into white.

When he said the Shankracharya would go to jail, he did. Guruvayur Surya Nambudiri Swami is known for his prophecies, and for his huge following in South India.

But the Swami is also an expert in money laundering. Cobrapost and CNN-IBN investigators posing as corporate agents wanting to convert their black money approached Swamiji through his henchman.

Swami's aide: Guruji wants to know what his share is. For instance, if you give Rs 1 lakh in black to the Trust, how much would be returned, and what percentage do you expect?

CNN-IBN: Swamiji may decide according to prevalent rates.

The Swami was told Rs 10 crore of black money had to be converted into white money. Tough negotiations followed.

Swami's aide: Guruji says that his ashram has a clean reputation for the last 25 years. If someone were to find out about our work, we would have to pay tax.

CNN-IBN: What do you want?

Swamiji: 25 per cent.

Swami's aide: At least 25 per cent.

CNN-IBN: Let us also make some profit out of this.

Swami's aide: You asked for 10 per cent, Swamiji put it at 25.

CNN-IBN: Let's close the deal at 15 per cent.

Swami's aide: 20 is final.

CNN-IBN: We are also agreed at 20 per cent.

Swami's aide: Is 20 fine?

Swami: Done.

CNN-IBN: We are supposed to pay the amount in black on behalf of the company.

Swami's aide: But you'll have to make the payment in Chennai.

Payments in Chennai and in hard cash so that the Swami can stash away his own black income and evade taxes.

Swami's aide: Ensure payment in Rs 1000 rupee notes.

CNN-IBN: That won't be a problem.

Swami's aide: When do you want to convert the money?

CNN-IBN: Within 15 days.

Swami's aide: If you want a cheque, then you will have to wait for at least a month.

The transaction would take a month, we were told. As the Swami-and his aide duo would need time to arrange fake bills and receipts.

Swami's aide: Swamiji says that if you give Rs 10 crore then after a month.

CNN-IBN: You will return Rs 8 crore by cheque.

Swami's aide: We will return it by cheque so that we may get time to circulate the funds to avoid taxes. We will return Rs 8 crore to you. Inform us of the next deal.

Not just the Income Tax department but even thousands of his followers should ask their Swami - what he does in the name of God.

Watch the Video:
http://www.ibnlive.com/videos/39851/southern-seer-turns-dirty-money-holy.html

The Malignant Resentments

2007-04-20T22:55:00.000-07:00

"What is your major malfunction, numbnuts? Didn't your Mommy and Daddy show you enough attention, when you were a child?" Lawrence immediately shoots his tormentor, killing him instantly. Lawrence then sits down, puts the rifle in his mouth, and commits suicide. --from the movie, full metal jacket

The Cho episode is end and the American media is on the move to other news. But, even today morning a man has entered NASA killing a hostage and himself. As David Walsh argued in his previous article, the American society is reluctant to understand the social roots of these incidents. Cho's description and the arguments of Walsh in the below article, reminded me of the movie full metal jacket where you find the evolution of a so-called 'psycho' in a US marine base. Walsh again insists the need to question the foundations of Capitalist society in particular American society in the below article.
-------------------
excerpts from
The Malignant Resentments That Erupted Into Mass Murder In Virginia
David Walsh
21 April, 2007
World Socialist Web

The Virginia Tech tragedy, which led to the brutal deaths of 33 people, is an event that needs to be considered soberly and at length. But even before funerals have taken place and the dead properly memorialized, government and university officials are urging students, faculty and the population at large to “move on.”

The appeals to “move on” from officials combine callousness and stupidity. This has become a terrible cliché, repeated again and again, and directed against critical thought and feeling. No, people should not “move on.” ‘Enough, back to business!’ Here is the backwardness and indifference of the entire social superstructure, which cannot and will not look the reality it has created in the face. It is part of the ongoing refusal to analyze or understand. The attempt to transform every mass gathering at the Virginia Tech campus into a “pep rally” has something perverse and unseemly about it.

“Normalcy never comes back,” nor should it. Everyone in America and around the world knows this is not the last such atrocity. This could happen in any part of the country, it is a matter of the nation’s social pathology.

No one can argue in this case that there were not warning signs. It seems that Cho, the product of an arranged marriage between a man 10 years older than his apparently reluctant bride, did not have a happy upbringing. As a child, Cho was nearly mute; some in the family thought he might have mental problems. His parents ran a used-book store in South Korea, which was not profitable, and lived in a cramped basement apartment. They emigrated to the US in 1992 with very little.

The boy had difficulties in his new American school. He “was picked on, pushed around and laughed at over his shyness” (Associated Press) as a schoolboy in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Centreville, Virginia. In high school, Cho earned A’s in mathematics. When he started college, according to the Guardian, “his mother took his dormitory mates to one side to explain about her son’s unusual character and implored them to help.” He spoke to others, his roommates, classmates and professors at Virginia Tech as little as possible. He sometimes referred to himself as “Question Mark” and spoke in whispers. One of his dormitory suite mates told CNN that “he was just like a shadow.”

Difficulties came alarmingly to the surface in 2005. He annoyed two female students with his messages and attention. His sullen and angry conduct in class provoked the ire of one of his professors, who insisted that he be removed from her course. When Cho indicated in December 2005 that he might kill himself, a temporary detention order was obtained from a judge and he was taken to a mental health facility. A doctor evaluated him and reported that he was mentally ill but no imminent danger to himself or others. There is no record of any follow-up or subsequent treatment. Various professors seem to have done all they could personally for Cho.

Lucinda Roy, the head of the English department at Virginia Tech, in particular, took it upon herself to tutor him one-on-one after his removal from the problem class, as well as to warn authorities. She found him deeply troubled, “I was concerned that he was suicidal, that he was depressed. There was a negativity. It was like talking to a hole. There was such an absence when he entered a room. Everything just emptied out and it turned very dark.” Numerous people individually attempted to help, but, in the end, the university system treated his difficulties in a pro forma manner, as it does in so many instances. The university could have done more, without question, but there is no institutional or police solution to generalized social alienation.

A recent study of the Anxiety Disorders Association of America (ADAA) notes that “Nearly all survey respondents at both national universities and liberal arts colleges reported an increase in student usage of mental health services throughout the past three years.” They go on: “Schools see a growing number of students coming to college with a history of mental illness, increased anxiety after 9/11 and increased awareness of mental health issues.”

The ADAA observes that “While a variety of services are offered, many aren’t staffed appropriately to meet growing demand.” It points out that “Every year, 19 percent of young adults in the general [US] population think about suicide, and nearly 9 percent make an actual suicide attempt.”

A spring 2006 survey, cited in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, of nearly 95,000 students on 117 campuses found that almost half of them felt “so depressed it was difficult to function as least once during the previous academic year; 16 percent felt that way on at last five occasions.” Nearly two thirds felt hopeless at least once. Nine percent had considered suicide. “More than 93 percent had felt overwhelmed at least once by all they had to do.”

Students face immense economic pressures.A low grade, a failed class, a missed academic opportunity, and futures are ruined. The number of students working part-time has increased, along with the competition for jobs. Young people leave college or university with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, a burden that will take years to pay off.

And there is the general climate in the country. The US has been in a continual state of war since 2001, with government officials promising decades or a half-century more of bloody conflict. The Bush administration’s terror threat level has stood at “Elevated” (Yellow) for most of the time since then. Repeated warnings about the risk of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons being set off in the country, endless threats against foreign governments and individuals, the most bloodcurdling language used by government officials (“We either were going to kill him or capture him, and our policy is we try and capture and not kill and if we’re not able to capture and we can kill, we do it”—former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld)....

No wonder there is stress and anxiety. What is the impact of all this on the most fragile and unstable personalities?

No one in the media dares to make any link between the violence America is visiting on the world every day and the violence it visits on itself. No one in official circles will suggest that the country ought to take a penetrating look at itself in the mirror.

Cho’s videos are very disturbing. He poses with handguns, pointing them at the camera or his own head, holds a knife to his throat or wields a hammer in a menacing manner.

In other segments, he rails against the world at large: “You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people.”

And: “You have never felt a single ounce of pain your whole life. And you want to inject as much misery in our lives because you can, just because you can. You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn’t enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything.”

Finally, horribly: “This is it. This is where it all ends. What a life it was. Some life.”

This is an extremely disturbed person, but it is clear, if one listens to his words, that conditions in society were playing on his mind. He felt many resentments. This doesn’t justify any of his insane acts, but the resentments have a real basis. He was mentally unbalanced, but that doesn’t mean there was no connection between social life and what he did. And now television analysts begin heaping abuse on his head, as a substitute for taking the problems seriously. “He was a coward,” and so on. This is almost a provocation, an incitement of others. The resentments are real.

Huge social divisions exist on a college campus. Snobbery and elitism exist. With Cho, the resentments were psychotically internalized and developed in a pathological manner. The society denies that social classes exists, it papers over social inequality. The contradictions emerge in a malignant fashion, they explode in this anti-social form.

This is the ongoing price American society pays for the absence of a progressive and revolutionary social movement that offers a way out of the present impasse, for the lack of class consciousness and social solidarity. The emergence of such a movement would have a wonderfully regenerative and healthy effect on the national psyche, and pose a mortal threat to the social and financial status quo. That is why the ruling elite fears the emergence of such a movement a thousand times more than it does a deranged individual with a gun.

Note: Emphasis mine

Social Roots Of Another American Tragedy

2007-04-19T01:43:00.000-07:00

excerpts from
The Virginia Tech Massacre:
Social Roots Of Another American Tragedy
David Walsh
19 April, 2007
World Socialist Web

A day after the mass killing at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, along with grief and dismay, some reflections on life in the US are clearly in order. The event was horrifying, but no one who has followed the evolution of American society over the past quarter-century will be entirely shocked. Such psychopathic episodes, including dozens of multiple killings or attempted killings in workplaces and schools, have occurred with disturbing regularity, particularly since the mid-1980s. A timeline assembled by the Associated Press and the School Violence Resource Center lists some 30 school and college shootings alone since 1991.

Speaking of the Blacksburg killings, Bush commented: “Those whose lives were taken did nothing to deserve their fate. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now they’re gone—and they leave behind grieving families, and grieving classmates, and a grieving nation.” If he and his cronies were not entirely immune to the consequences of their own policies, it might strike them that they could be speaking about the masses of the dead in Iraq, who have also done “nothing to deserve their fate.”

The events at Virginia Tech follow almost eight years to the day the mass killing at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in which 15 people died. At the time, the media and politicians performed a ritual breast-beating, with Bill Clinton in the lead. Much was made of the need for new gun controls, increased security in the schools and the need to counsel troubled students. Then, as now, official American public opinion refused to recognize the killings as a social disorder.

What has occurred in the intervening years? Can anyone argue that American society has developed since 1999 in such a manner as to make tragedies similar to Columbine less likely?

Everyday life in America has continued to have a violent, remorseless backdrop. In April 1999 US and NATO forces were launching cruise missile after cruise missile against the former Yugoslavia and inflicting lethal sanctions and periodic bombing raids on Iraq. Somalia and Afghanistan had also already come in for punishment from the Clinton administration. American militarism, however, has truly flourished in the present decade. The USMiddle East for most of the eight years since Columbine. Following a hijacked election and making use of the terrorist attacks on September 11, the Bush-Cheney regime launched a war based on lies. The lesson taught by the ruling elite is clear: in achieving one’s aims, any sort of ruthlessness is legitimate.

At the same time, the social gap in America has widened in the past decade. By 2005 the top one-tenth of 1 percent of the US population earned nearly as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Those 300,000 wealthy individuals each received 440 times as much income as the average person in the poorest half of the population, nearly doubling the divide from 1980. The rich lord it over everyone else, piling up fortunes that come directly at the expense of wide layers of working people. Society is divided starkly into “winners” and “losers.” For the latter, the future is bleak.

The decay of social solidarity, the domination of the political process by cash, the erosion of democratic rights, the transformation of the media into more or less a propaganda arm of the government and the Pentagon—all of these processes, under way in 1999, have now attained a far more finished state.

More generally, the past twenty-five years have witnessed a sharp lurch to the right by the American political and media establishment, driven by its relative economic decline, and an accompanying coarsening and degeneration of the social atmosphere. Brutality in language and action is now the preferred policy of the powers that be.

The proliferation of violence, the continuous appeals to fear, the incitement of paranoia—all of this has consequences, it creates a certain type of climate. American society has for so long tried to cover up or ignore its most pressing problems. What are the official responses? Punishment first, then the invocation of the deity. The suppression of contradictions, however, doesn’t make them disappear.

The culture as a whole has suffered. Without giving any ground to the right-wing morality police, the prevalence of video games, popular music and films that celebrate rape and killing can hardly be taken as a sign of social well-being. Every effort has been made to atomize people, to render them callous and inured to the suffering of others. Human life has been devalued and often held in contempt.

Clearly, there have been consequences. The ability to kill one’s fellow students methodically in cold blood reveals a terrible level of social anomie. A doctor at Montgomery Regional Hospital, where the injured were treated, commented: “The injuries were amazing. This man was brutal. There wasn’t a shooting victim that didn’t have less than three bullet wounds in him.”

The gunman in Blacksburg, a 23-year-old Korean-American, Cho Seung-Hui, is one of those forlorn individuals who inevitably figure in such tragedies. He was a “loner,” says one college official. His roommates describe him as “weird,” a young man who ate by himself, refused to engage in conversation, appeared to have no friends or girl-friends and who sat at his computer for hours or simply sat “staring at his desk, just staring at nothing.”

Cho’s English professor indicated that there “were signs he was troubled,” based on his work in a creative writing course and directed him to counseling. One of his fellow students in a playwriting class described his work as “really morbid and grotesque.” She remembered one of his plays: “It was about a son who hated his stepfather. In the play the boy threw a chainsaw around, and hammers at him. But the play ended with the boy violently suffocating the father with a Rice Krispy treat.” It’s unpleasant to have to acknowledge, but would such a scenario be unthinkable in the contemporary American film industry?

Cho, who came to the US as a child and attended high school in Fairfax County, Virginia, in suburban Washington, DC, left behind a note, in which he reportedly ranted against “rich kids,” “debauchery” and “deceitful charlatans.” He also wrote, “You caused me to do this.” According to school authorities, the young man posted a warning on a school online forum, “im going to kill people at vtech today.”

This was a troubled person, but nothing was done. He fell through the cracks, like so many. There are plenty of well-meaning individuals in America, more than willing to lend a hand, but as a society it is uncaring. Many obstacles—institutional, financial—block the way of truly helping people, and all of this takes place in unyieldingly competitive conditions.

What has been learned since Columbine about the source of this social alienation? A perusal of the editorials in the nation’s major newspapers would inevitably draw one to the conclusion ... essentially nothing.

Virtually no portion of the media coverage is devoted to the social causes of the events. The political and media establishment responds to the Virginia Tech massacre as it does to every significant indication of social malaise, with a combination of denial and self-delusion. In deluding themselves that the epidemic of shootings can be treated by increased vigilance or the transformation of campuses into fortresses, the politicians and editorialists demonstrate how far from reality they are.

Such events bring home how necessary it is for another way to be found, for more sensitive answers, real answers to problems. This, in turn, raises the need for a different social orientation, which calls into question the present foundations of American society. And such searching critiques should not be reserved only for moments of national calamity.

Note: Higlights are not in the original.

Bajrang Dal's Social Service!

2007-04-12T21:46:00.000-07:00

News Item from Times of India
Dated April 12, 2007
Image Courtesy: CNN-IBN
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MUMBAI/BHOPAL: In an unusual development, Bombay High Court and MP High Court came to the rescue of a Muslim-Hindu couple, Mohammed Umer and Priyanka Wadhwani, who were facing death threats allegedly from Bajrang Dal after their marriage.

On April 2 Priyanka and Umer left Bhopal for Mumbai. The next day Umer underwent shuddhikaran (purification ceremony) and converted to Hinduism after changing his name to Umesh. The same day they got married in a traditional Hindu ceremony.

Despite both being adults the Bhopal police had lodged a case of kidnapping against Umer. "His brother was picked up by the Koh-Fiza police in Bhopal and detained illegally," the couple's petition filed in the Bombay High Court alleged.

Justice Ranjana Desai and Justice Dilip Bhosale of Bombay High Court held that the couple who had fled from Bhopal to take shelter in Mumbai were married and ordered the Mumbai police to provide them protection.

The judges have also restrained the Bhopal police from arresting Umer against whom a case of kidnapping has been registered at the behest of the girl's parents.

"We are relieved," said Priyanka, emerging out of the court. "I left of my own free will and was not kidnapped. My husband's family is being harassed by the police in MP and we hope the court's order will put a stop to it."

The family dispute over the inter-religious marriage took a political colour when Bajrang Dal activists organised protests outside Umer's home in Bhopal. The couple also said they were threatened with physical harm if they returned to Bhopal.

The Bombay HC judges interviewed Priyanka in their chamber where she reiterated that she was an adult and had left her parents' house of her own will. Besides ordering protection to the couple, the judges have also asked Bhopal SP to file a reply to the couple's petition by April 18.

Madhya Pradesh High Court in Jabalpur, too, directed the state government to provide security to the newly-wed. The ruling was given on a writ filed by Mohammed Samin, one of the brothers of Umer.

In its order to the principal secretary, home, and the Bhopal collector and SP, the court has asked them to ensure the couple's safety. State advocate general R N Singh submitted before the court that the state government would provide full protection to the couple.

Chief Justice A K Patnaik and Justice K K Lahoit also directed Kohe-Fiza PS in-charge to file a reply on Samin's allegation that one of his brothers was detained at the PS on April 13.

In Bhopal, Bajrang Dal activists took to the streets, clashing with a large contingent of police, including RAF and SAF personnel, deployed in old city for protection of the minority community.

The saffrong outfit has called for Bhopal bandh on Thursday. Bajrang Dal has also announced formation of a Hindu Kanya Raksha Samiti for the protection of Hindu girls following two recent cases of inter-communal elopement.

Incidentally, Umer's family is not ready to accept him as a Hindu. His father, Shafiq Pathan, said, "Since he has converted, let him live with his wife wherever he wants to. Let him not come here and disrupt our lives." Two of Pathan's sons are married to Hindu girls who converted to Islam.

"His first son, Akeel, had eloped with the daughter of an ex-Dgp. The officer left town and didn't return. His second son Shakeel eloped with a judge's daughter. If two Hindu girls can convert to Islam and live in his house, why can't he accept Umar as a Hindu?" asked a Bajrang Dal man.
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Response from me, whom they will call as a 'muslim-appeasing', 'anti-national', 'terrorist', 'pseudo-secularist' etc., etc., ,

‘Purification’ ceremony for umer!

So now who has converted whom? advani can rest at peace, Ram Rajya has come in to existence.

Bhopal bandh!

now you can understand how patriotic and socially responsible Bajrang Dal Men are? they immediately react for such 'necessary', 'public' issues that haunt our country and they 'restrain' themselves politely from 'unnecessary', 'private issues' like privatisation, globalisation onslaught, farmer suicides, FDI in retail sector etc.,

Kanya Raksha Samithi!

Initially they formed Ko Raksha Samithi(cow safegaurding committee). now they have formed Kanya Raksha Samithi like Babu Bajrangi of Gujarat whose life has been 'dedicated' to save hindu girls being 'lured' from Muslim boys. So what they mean atlast? girls are more or less equal to cows, an house-hold animal which cannot protect itself by its own sense and needs to be safegaurded.

I request hindu girls and boys who feel humiliated by these Bajrang Dal acts to make a vow that they will never marry within their caste and will only marry in other castes or other religions particularly from muslim religion.

My wish is to die!

2007-04-11T22:07:00.000-07:00

“My wish is to die,” 27-year-old Adnan Farhan Abdullatif of Yemen said through his lawyer. “We are living in a dying situation.”

This is the voice emerging out of Gaunatanamo Bay,a hell on earth built by US to 'deal' with the Jihadi terrorist 'suspects'. The horror stories of Gauntanamo inmates are beyond human imagination and US is on its pursuit brazenly surpassing condemnation of all countries. Now at the end of the long tunnel, rays of hope have started emreging as the inmates have started a hunger strike.

We are with you Guantanamo detainees!
People of all countries,
protest against the torture of Guantanamo detainees! Down with US Imperialism! Victory to the hunger strike!

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from countercurrents
Hunger Strike Expanding Despite Repression At Guantánamo Prison Camp
By Tom Carter
12 April, 2007
World Socialist Web

Despite the threat of retaliation by prison guards, several more Guantánamo prisoners recently joined an ongoing hunger strike, according to an April 8 article in the New York Times. US authorities acknowledge that 13 prisoners are now on hunger strike, though lawyers who have recently visited the prison put the number as high as 40.

In October 2005, after as many as 150 prisoners, or more than a third of the prison’s population, had joined a long-running hunger strike, the prison authorities ordered a ruthless force-feeding crackdown. Hunger strikers were strapped to restraint chairs, and feeding tubes were forcefully inserted through the prisoners’ nostrils without anesthetic, often while the prisoner struggled to remove the tube. Prison guards lacking the requisite medical training used tubes “with the bile and the blood still on the tube from the previous detainee,” according to one lawyer who spoke with the victims of this procedure.

The number of strikers dropped precipitously in the face of this vindictive policy.

That a hunger strike could now expand under conditions where prisoners can expect this treatment can only reflect the desperation of the Guantánamo inmates, who have been placed outside the protection of both international and US federal law. Many of the inmates, some of whom were captured as teenagers, are in their fifth year of incarceration, and in the five-year history of the camp, only 10 prisoners have ever been charged with a crime.

“My wish is to die,” 27-year-old Adnan Farhan Abdullatif of Yemen said through his lawyer. “We are living in a dying situation.”

The newly expanded Guantánamo Bay prison houses almost 400 individuals, most swept up in the initial stages of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2002 and carried away by US soldiers. The prison’s name has become synonymous with torture, humiliation, religious persecution, sexual abuse, and the abrogation of the most basic democratic rights associated with the so-called “war on terror.”

The brutal force-feeding practices at Guantánamo have been widely documented and roundly denounced by numerous human rights watch groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International (AI), the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights First, the UN Human Rights Commission, and Physicians for Human Rights.

A recent AI report cited one prisoner who described how “three times, the tube had been inserted the wrong way so that it went into his lungs; he said he frequently vomited after being force-fed and was not given clean clothes.”

“Guards have allegedly subjected hunger-striking detainees in one block to further punitive treatment,” the report continued, “such as pepper spraying them or turning the air-conditioning up high.”

Sami al-Hajj, a 38-year-old former cameraman for the Al-Jazeera news agency, described the terror and pain that accompanied the prolonged presence of the feeding tube in his throat in a diary entry he gave to his lawyer: “I said I would begin to scream unless they took it out.... They finally did.”

Navy Cmdr. Robert Durand, a Guantánamo spokesman, acknowledged in statements to the press that all of the current hunger strikers are being force-fed though feeding tubes inserted through the nose. Some have been relocated to a special “feeding block” outfitted with restraint chairs designed for the more determined hunger strikers.

Guantánamo officials have defended the practice of force-feeding as “safe and humane.”

According to lawyers for the inmates, the renewed hunger strike is largely a response to the opening in December 2006 of a $38 million concrete-walled facility dubbed “Camp 6,” which features tiny, sealed, windowless cells for each inmate. Many inmates who were formerly housed in primitive cages next to other inmates now find themselves arbitrarily placed in solitary confinement in Camp 6, deprived of all contact with other inmates and the outside world.

According to the recent AI report, prisoners at Camp 6, which houses 160 inmates, are kept locked in their sealed cells for 22 hours a day and are only allowed two hours of exercise in mesh cages each day. Bright fluorescent lights are kept on at all times, temperatures are kept low, contact between prisoners is forbidden, virtually no personal items are allowed, and female guards watch prisoners while they shower and use the toilet.

Under these conditions, it is no surprise that the mental health of the prisoners deteriorates rapidly and prisoners are willing to take more reckless and desperate actions to call attention to their situation.

“They’re just sitting on a powder keg down there,” lawyer Sabin Willett told the Times. “You’re going to have an insane asylum.”

Reliance Fresh: Deadly fresh

2007-04-10T02:37:00.000-07:00

Reliance, a corporate rogue which is built with deceit, forgery and all sorts of fraudulent acts at each and every step from its inception, has opened its chain of stores named ‘Reliance Fresh’ in Chennai. It has opened 14 stores covering major locations with expanding its tentacles every nook and corner of the city.

The wholesale grocery market at Koyambedu, a location at North Chennai which is delivering the groceries to Chennai and its surroundings has felt the instant tremors. Sales have fallen by 40% percent than before and the Number of small traders coming to Koyambedu for procurement has got reduced. Labourers dependent on the market have lost their income and jobs. As a whole, the lives of one lakh families dependent on Koyambedu Market are at stake.

Following Reliance, Tata and Birla also foray in to the Retail market with their chain of stores all over India. Moreover, American Wal-Mart, Metro from GermanyIndia. and Carrefour of France had announced their plans to open their retail outlets in the major cities of India.

India stands fourth in the Retail sales in the International level. The Indian reatil sector is estimated to be worth of 12 Lakh Crore per annum and the Chennai Market alone is of 20 Crore. It has been roughly estimated as more than 4 Crore people are engaged in Retail Sector. The MNC’s, TNC’s and the Vultures of Shining India are trying to swallow this entire market and to wipe out the ‘hurdles’ that come across their way.

Finance Minister P.Chidambram, the living example of all colonial traitors says that by allowing MNC’s and the comprador capitalists like Tata, Reliance etc., the farmers will be assured of fair rates and with the ‘elimination’ of Intermediaries consumers can also enjoy low costs. According to that ‘Intelligent’ definition, from the wholesale dealer who buys vegetables from farmers to the road-side grocery vendor, all are ‘Intermediaries’ and they are the ones who are getting ‘eliminated’ now. The crux of the issue is not only the loss of business of small retail traders with the MNC entry but it’s far above that. Markets, whoesale sales and retail form an axis of the economy while productive sectors like Agriculture, textile, industries form the other axis. By exerting their might on the former axis, MNC’s try to control the latter axis of economy.

If production, sales and retail will fall in to the hands of 10-20 MNC’s, then all prices will be under their dictate and nobody can defy them. Like the cement traders of today, they will dictate the prices of all essential commodities and will plunder the people. The arguments of Chidambaram is rubbish as Ambani is not coming to Chennai with 3000 Crores to ensure fair rates for the farmers or for ensuring cheap prices to consumers. Middle class fools too buy this argument by astonishing at the A/C showrooms and the attractive schemes of Reliance.

In the name of hygiene and consumer consciousness, a vicious propaganda is on set by the State that people shouldn’t buy products which are not sealed and not to buy goods without bill. What is the state of hygiene in MNC Products? isn’t the glossy covered Cadbury’s chocolate was found with worms and got banned in Maharashtra? The Killer Coke bottles were found with cockroaches, lizards, nails and even condoms. Was the Coke and Pepsi were banned even after it was proved that they had pesticide residuals that could cause cancer? What about the tightly sealed ‘Lays’ chips that hang around in all petty shops? Isn’t the chemical mixtures added in ‘Lays’ to avoid decomposition were clinically proved to cause cardiac arrest?

Is bill is the sole criteria for consumer safety? Ofcourse Reliance billed its consumers who used its mobile services to make calls to US and UK. But it forged those calls as local calls and deceived the Indian Government for about 3000 Crores. This fully deserved financial crime of Reliance was forgiven by its friend Dayanidhi Maran, the communications minister with a meager fine. A ‘Consumer’ from Chennai has filed a case on the fraudulent act of Reliance Mobiles. Last year it has announced a contest named ‘Film Dhamaka’ and this ‘Consumer’ sent 6000 SMS messages at the cost Rs.6/- per message to the Number 8888. After paying 36,000/- as bill, now he is fighting at the Court that Reliance has not actually conducted the contest and had not given any prize to anyone till date. Do we need any other example to show how cheap tricks can reliance play?

Retail trading in India is the last resort of people who are driven out of all other trades. State and Capitalist vultures want to ‘eliminate’ them even from that verge. Supreme Court showed its complicity by locking the shops of Delhi small traders. In Metros, Platform shops were bulldozed. As a final decisive blow, VAT was implemented to facilitate the entry of MNC’s all over India.

All the parliamentary firebrands are conspicuously maintaining their silence or had washed their hands with formal statements. Even the so-called Left parties are satisfied with their ritual statements. India is not a sovereign country. It has been sold to World Bank, WTO, US and MNC’s. Nationalism, Regionalism, and all those sorts of political trends of India are just jugglery of words and they are not even capable of throwing even a tomato away from the Reliance Shops.

Ambani is not the only one and Koyambedu is not a separate issue. MNC’s are entering in Retail sector only on the pretext of Privatisation and Liberalisation, and the traders of Koyambedu cannot defeat them individually. All compradors of India are backing Ambani. State Machinery, Police, Courts, Political parties and MNC’s are behind them. To defeat such a big enemy, all people affected due to Globalisation need to stand one and by fighting alone they will not be able to move even an inch.

Hunger strikes of traders will not give any results. Strikes and Ghereos are to be organised in the door steps of Reliance Shops. People should boycott Reliance shops and should realise that the so-called freshness assured is just a farce and each and every paisa spent at Reliance shops is nothing but a nail on the coffins of Lakhs and Lakhs of fellow people who served us all these days with all their hard work. We shouldn’t be like Nero’s guests who stood muted to the burning of slaves for the party lights.

Reliance is the first Serpent that had poured its venom in the retail sector. More and more massive serpents are on the pipeline. The only option left out is to slay the snake instead of shivering with fear and get bitten.

Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil me hain, Dekhna hain zor kitna bazuven khatil mein hain.

(The passion of Patriotism linger in our hearts, Let’s see, how powerful the weapons of enemies are! )*

This post is an abridged version of the booklet released by People’s Art and Literary Association (PALA), New Democratic Labour Front (NDLF), Revolutionary Students Youth Front (RSYF) and Peasants Liberation Front (PLF) in Tamil. These organisations have planned for a protest encircling Reliance Fresh Shops in Chennai on coming May 1, 2007.

* One of the favorite songs of Bhagat singh and his comrades.

Corporate Party of India (Murderers) – CPI (M)

2007-04-06T02:30:00.000-07:00

“ Let us not get into the issue of whether the “growth rate” has actually accelerated or not; doing so would entail precisely an acceptance of the problematic of “vulgar economy”. But to say that a “high growth rate”, no matter how it is achieved or what it entails by way of changing social relations, will overcome poverty, is to concentrate only on “thingness” and be oblivious to social relations, to accept the analogy of the “cake”, (“a bigger cake is good for all”) which is a thing, a materiality, apparently devoid of any connection with the realm of social relations. This is “vulgar economy” par excellence. It obliterates social relations to a point where poverty, an expression of social relations, is made dependent on the size of a material object, a “thing”, called the GDP (the “cake”).

Marx was particularly emphatic about the fact that poverty was the expression of social relations: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is .therefore at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital”. The “vulgarity” of contemporary “vulgar economy” consists in its claim that the size or the growth of a “thing”, seen completely in isolation from the social relations of which it is an expression, will overcome per se the social relations underlying poverty.”

- From ‘ The Assault of Vulgar Economy ’, Prabhat Patnaik, people’s democracy (CPI (M) magazine),17-09-06

When Buddhadeb clique ferociously argues for their ‘Development’ theory, Prabhat patnaik exposed the real meaning of ‘development’ in CPI (M) magazine itself some days before Singur and Nandigram. CPI (M) leadership probably believes that its cadres will never take these contradictions seriously. Now ‘Development’ theorists have shown their full face with Nandigram. Karat family is out with shameless arguments and like 70’s, CPI (M) is back with it's CIA propaganda.

In Nandigram they ask a ‘high moral’ question that how can they sit back and watch, when law and order is at stake? This year marks the 100^th Birth anniversary of Bhagat singh. let me quote from him.

" The sanctity of law can be maintained only so long as it is the expression of the will of the people."

When the people are deceived by its own elected government they have no other choice but to break the law and order as it’s no more the expression of the will of the people. With out being able to hide its real face, revisionist CPI (M) has now started to blabber mindlessly all the way.

Amit sengupta in the below article traces the trajectory of unmasking CPI (M) rightly from Naxalbari to Nandigram, slapping the CPI (M) in a clear voice. I feel, equating Naxalbari with Nandigram is not altogether right. While Nandigram is a ghastly massacre, Naxalbari is not an incident but a political path defying the revisionism of CPI and CPI (M), which changed the meaning of revolution once for all in India. As Amit sounds somewhat praising on CPI (M-L) (Liberation) in his short reference to it, I find it necessary to add my disclaimer. I think CPI (M-L) (Liberation) can never become an alternative to CPI (M) with their involvement with NGOs and opportunist Parliamentary line. It’s time for the CPI (M) cadres and intellectuals to come out of dogma and think from Nandigram to Naxalbari as the latter pronounced CPI (M) as butcherers and revisionists in 1970 itself. And for the Naxalbari revolutionaries, it's time we resolve our ideological-political differences to become a unified party and to practice mass line in a correct sense to face the engulfing dark era that grows day by day.

Thanks to Hard News.

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The train stops at Nandigram
Amit Sengupta,Delhi

After 30 years of being big bully, big brother in Orwellian West Bengal, with ‘Buddha’ being equated with Narendra Modi as ‘the role model of development’, Nandigram might mark the epitaph of the CPI(M) in ‘India Shining’

Those days, in the early 1970s, the slogan used to be in a fiery rhythm, almost a melody:

Aamar Naam, Tomar Naam, Shobaar Naam: Vietnam… Vietnam…
Aamar Bari, Tomar Bari, Shobaar Bari: Naxalbari… Naxalbari…

Literally, it means,

my name, your name, everyone’s name: Vietnam, Vietnam;
my home, your home, everyone’s home: Naxalbari, Naxalbari.

So it is not unpredictable or jarring, when the slogan, in 10 per cent growth rate, ‘Manmohanics India of March’, 2007, turns out to be as rhythmic and beautiful, almost Gandhian in its rooted simplicity:

Aamar Gram, Tomar Gram, Shobar Gram: Nandigram, Nandigram.
My village, your village, everyone’s village: Nandigram, Nandigram.

Like a flash of memory, and an inverted image of camera obscura, the slogan resurrects vicious cycle of epic tragedies: thousands of farmers in village after village committing suicides, every day, non-stop, in Vidharbha, Sangrur, Ananthapur; and thousands of farmers, dalits, tribals, being forcibly displaced to benefit big business and big projects, in Kashipur, Kalinganagar, Bastar, Punjab, Dadri, the Narmada valley, Tehri Garhwal.

Those days, in the early 1970s, the eclectic post-freedom idealism had failed. The dream of a young democracy after protracted sacrifices by revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru, Batukeshwar Dutt, Khudiram Bose, Jatin Sen, Chandrashekhar Azad, Ashfaqullah Khan, Ramprasad Bismil, among thousands of others, had been subverted and sucked into a black hole of greed, injustice and inequality by the new feudal and economic elite. Those days the story was that the train never stopped at Naxalbari. And why should the train stop in that obscure village silence in West Bengal, near Siliguri and Darjeeling?

No one would then know that this silence would one day become a spring thunder, heard across the world, become etched as a landmark of history, a rupture within and outside the ‘official Left’. Four decades after this sudden, stunning, spontaneous uprising rocked West Bengal and other flash-points in ‘unfree India’, followed by cold-blooded State repression whereby an entire generation was wiped out by the Congress and CPI(M) establishments, will Nandigram become another Naxalbari?

“Yes,” says Dipankar Bhattacharya, General Secretary, CPI-ML (Liberation). “Nandigram will mark a turning point in history. It will reassert the struggle of village India, the poorest farmers, versus the corporate sharks who are backed by the State. In West Bengal, the CPI(M) has become an agent of the capitalists. Look at the irony, between ‘Siddharth’ Shankar Ray, who led the elimination brigades after Naxalbari along with the CPI(M), and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the current icon of capitalism, the similarity is not only of politics, but also of name: both mean ‘Buddha’ but both are a shame on Buddha. If the CPI(M) continues this repressive and brazenly pro-business, anti-farmer politics, it will create space for the Right-wing in Bengal. And we will not allow that to happen.”

So it is significant that March 23 marked the 100th birth anniversary of Bhagat Singh. This year also marks the 150th anniversary of the great anti-British rebellion of 1857, which Marx called the first war of Indian Independence. And since history takes you by surprise, you become blind when it stares you at point-blank range. Because here, in the heart of Delhi, in memory of the martyrs of 1857 and Bhagat Singh, and in protest against the Nandigram massacre and SEZs, almost 2,50,000 people, the poorest of the poor from all parts of rural India, waving tens of thousands of red flags, shouted in one voice:

SEZs murdabad,
Nandigram lal salaam,
Inquilab zindabad.

They came in disciplined, non-violent, totally committed and organised groups led by the CPI-ML (Liberation): from Giridih in Jharkhand and Arwal in Jehanabad, to Singur in Bengal, Sonebhadra in UP, Karbi Anglong in Assam, Mansa in Punjab and interiors of South India. They came in waves of red, the people of India, the invisible majority; there were no traffic jams, no violence, not a moment of metropolitan disruption. This was perhaps the biggest rally in years in the capital and the topical backdrop was the Nandigram massacre.

Next day, not a word was reported in any of the big papers in Delhi. Not one word. As if, this India, this massive protest, does not exist. But this India exists, in affirmation and hope, in sacrifice and struggle, in dissent and resistance. Because revolutions don’t happen in Lakme fashion shows or in the big bucks of schizophrenic cricket, when the entire media lost it. People learn from history, from mistakes of the past. Revolutions move relentlessly in invisible spirals, of quiet, volcanic, unseen social unrest, in the daily struggles of survival and despair, when the radical turning point is waiting in the next bylane of an unknown village. Like Naxalbari, Nandigram and Kalinganagar. And when it happens, even the ‘official Left’, riding the bourgeois bandwagon, goes berserk, as the CPI(M) cadre and police did in the massacre of Nandigram. To protect the interests of a notorious MNC Salem, which aligned with dictator Suharto, when 2 million communists, dissenters and human rights activists were killed in Indonesia.No wonder Buddha says that capital has no ideology or colour.

Almost the entire country is witness to this revulsion, this brazen sell out of the Left to the Right. “If you want to behave like a capitalist party, declare it openly and go ahead. But don’t kill people,” said Prabhu Mahapatra, professor of history at Delhi University, in the protest in Delhi one day after the massacre. “The genocide is not over. The genocide is going on. Now. And why have the Left allies lost their speech?” asked an anguished Sumit Chakravarty, editor, Mainstream, joining the protestors. “The CPI(M) cadre and the police have become agents of the corporates. They have unleashed a reign of terror. They want to teach a lesson to all those who are protesting against forcible land acquisition,” said Medha Patkar, who has repeatedly fought her way through police barricades into the prohibited zones of Nandigram and Singur. Even as I write this, she is in jail, as the ‘Sangharsh 2007’ campaign of hundreds of people’s movements, take on the UPA government, backed by the Left Front. While seeking a ban on privatisation of water outside Montek Singh’s Planning Commission, she and other activists were smashed by the police, and packed off to jail.

Across the spectrum eminent intellectuals have protested against the CPI(M) policies in Bengal: historians Romilla Thapar, Tanika Sarkar, Sumit Sarkar, novelist Arundhati Roy, journalist Praful Bidwai – and they are not right-wingers, so even the CPI(M)’s propaganda machinery can’t brand them and get away. What is also significant is the eerie silence of the ‘CPI(M)’ intellectuals, including economists Jayati Ghosh, Prabhat Patnaik, Utsa Patnaik, CP Chandrashekhar and CPI(M)’s cultural front, Sahmat, even while an unrepentant Sitaram Yechuri and Brinda Karat blamed the people of Nandigram for the massacre. It took two weeks for these intellectuals to issue a muted statement. Not surprising, because the CPI(M) also supported the Tiananmen Square massacre, and branded the fasting pro-democracy students as ‘CIA agents and juvenile delinquents’. And doesn’t Nandigram remind of the Gujarat genocide: murderous, rapist VHP/Bajrang Dal mobs unleashed, backed by the police and the BJP regime?

A poster said it all in Delhi: Capitalist Party of India (Murderers) – CPI(M). After 30 years of being big bully, big brother in Orwellian West Bengal, with ‘Buddha’ being equated with Narendra Modi as ‘the role model of development’ by Right-wing journos, this poster might mark the epitaph of the CPI(M) in this neo-liberal epoch of ‘India Shining’. Because these days the train stops at Naxalbari. As it will, in Nandigram.

Because,

your village,
my village,
everyone’s village is Nandigram, Nandigram...

Exploding Some Myths

2007-04-05T01:20:00.000-07:00

Anand Teltumbde, a known activist-writer has written an indepth account on Khairlanji. His thought-provoking arguments explode the myths and to understand the need to analyse the caste equation in a materialistic approach. He unmasks the treachery of State and Dalit political parties with flair and urges the need for class unity with ground analysis. A must-read article and I recommend the readers to read it though the article may seem lengthy. Thanks to Economic and Political Weekly.

Image courtesy:Tehelka
NOTE: I have highlighted some points in the article which are not in the original.

Khairlanji and Its Aftermath:
Exploding Some Myths

Anand Teltumbde

The importance of Khairlanji lies in providing a clear illustration of the genesis, development and culmination of a caste atrocity. Khairlanji brings to the fore the irrelevance of dalit politics and politicians and rejection of them by ordinary dalits. But above all, Khairlanji helps dispel a number of myths – the myth that economic development does away with casteism, the myth of Maharashtra being a progressive state, the myth that there exists a significant progressive section of non-dalits that is against the caste system, the myth that dalits placed in the bureaucracy can orient the administration to do justice to dalits, and finally the mythology of ‘bahujanwad’ developed by the late Kanshiram and followed by other dalit leaders.

It is time to comprehend the significance of Khairlanji, the forces behind it, the reactions it evoked, and the lessons it holds forth. Khairlanji has exposed the omissions and commissions, indeed, the very complicity of the state in crimes against dalits, as also the bankruptcy and irrelevance of mainstream dalit politics and politicians. It has dispelled a number of myths – that economic development weakens the hold of the caste system; that Maharashtra is a progressive state; that there is a significant section of nondalits that is anti-caste; that a significant proportion of dalits in the bureaucracy can orient the state to fulfil its constitutional responsibility towards the dalits; and, that ‘bahujanwad’, which tries to unite the dalits and shudra castes on the basis of their caste identity, is a viable strategy of advance of the dalit cause.

More Grotesque, More Extreme

The cases of recent atrocities reflect a qualitative change in the mode of perpetration as well as their intensity. Unlike in the past, when individuals mostly committed caste atrocities, in recent years they tend to be committed by collectives in a grotesque celebratory mode.

Take the case of Jajjhar in Haryana where five dalits were lynched to death on October 15, 2002 by a crowd of caste Hindus in broad daylight and within the police premises, with police officials standing by as mute spectators to the ghastly act. There is a sense of defiance and self-assurance on the part of the perpetrators associated with recent crimes. The Jajjhar incident was publicly justified as a well-deserved punishment to the victims.1 So was the case in Bhutegaon in the Marathwada region of Maharashtra in May 2003,2 in which a youth was burnt alive by a crowd of caste Hindus or of Sonnakhota in Beed district, around the same time, where again a crowd of caste Hindus chased a poor dalit and stoned him to death.3 There is a discernible increase in the intensity of atrocities in recent years, which may be explained to some extent by their being committed by a collective.

The cruelty displayed in certain recent caste atrocities defies human imagination.

The details of the torture inflicted on the Bhotmanges in Khairlanji cannot be believed to be an act of human beings – a mother and daughter being paraded naked to the village centre, the genitals of the boys being crushed with stones, the two women being gang raped to death and the corpses being callously thrown into the canal.

The dispute over the passage through Bhotmange land provided a backdrop to the incident, no doubt, but this does not explain the atrocity, particularly the ferocity of it. The land dispute goes back 17 years in time, when Bhaiyalal Bhotmange had moved with his family to Khairlanji to cultivate five acres of land that he bought near the village of his in-laws.4 The land, which was used as a common passage by the villagers as long as it was uncultivated, became unavailable to villagers thereafter.The matter had gone to revenue court, but eventually Bhaiyalal Bhotmange emerged unscathed with the support of Siddharth Gajbhiye, a well-to-do cousin of Surekha, Bhaiyalal’s wife, who was also a police patil5 of his village. The injury to the caste pride of the caste Hindus simmered and grew with the increasing assertiveness of Bhotmanges, which was perceived to be partly due to their upward economic mobility and cultural progress, the latter in terms of the educational achievements of the Bhotmange children, and partly to the support of Gajbhiye. The villagers grudged Gajbhiye’s visits to Khairlanji, alleging an illicit relation between him and Surekha Bhotmange, and thrashed him on September 3. In the case filed by him, where Surekha and her daughter stood witness, 12 local persons were arrested. On obtaining bail, on September 29 last year they carried out the attack on the Bhotmanges with the support of entire caste Hindu population.

While the origin of dispute thus appears to be land, the caste prejudice of the caste Hindu villagers played a major role, right from the articulation of dispute through the development and eventual precipitation into a heinous crime.

Complicity of the State Machinery

Structurally speaking, in examining a caste atrocity one has to take cognisance of the existing social relational disequilibria between caste Hindus and dalits, as also the protective mechanism in favour of the dalits, which is mandated in the Constitution, should this disequilibria precipitate into injustice. The disequilibria in social relations is intrinsic to caste society, and can only be contained so long as dalits submit to the humiliating demands of the caste Hindus or the latter are so enlightened as to treat dalits as equals, which however is only an hypothetical possibility. The social relational dynamics, in normal course, is basically mediated by the perceived strength of each group by both camps. The state can play an instrumental role in enhancing the perception of dalit strength by its protective measures. But the record of atrocities on dalits reflects the utter failure of the state in the discharge of its constitutional responsibility.6

The state has only faithfully served the ruling classes, whose vested interests are in preserving the existing caste divide, even accentuating it.

Partly following from this, and partly due to its dominant upper caste orientation, the state has never made a sincere effort to arrest impending caste atrocities. On the contrary, mostly it has been complicit with the perpetrators of such crimes.

The state’s complicity has manifested even in its post-atrocity dealings in refusing to register the case, or, if registered, in not conducting proper investigation, and thereby weakening the case in the court of law. If the state had performed its role even reasonably well, it may be argued, the menace of caste atrocities would have abated substantially by now. Unfortunately, the incidence of caste atrocities has been growing with passage of time. The very process of dalits registering a crime with the police is fraught with hurdles, starting with a fear of reprisal from the powerful upper castes or of incurring social prejudice, as in the case of crimes involving women at the victim’s end, and thereafter the reluctance of the police to register the case.

The case gets counted in the statistics of crimes against SCs only after it gets past these hurdles.

More often than not, the local police clearly take sides with the perpetrators of the crime against the dalit victims and do everything possible to suppress the crime at the first instance. Political pressure and money exert a significant role. Even if the crime is registered, it is the police who investigate the crime and collect evidence for prosecution. The shoddy investigation by the police in such cases is legion, as evidenced by the extremely paltry rate of conviction. There is a tacit assurance to the upper castes that the official protectors of the law would not come in their way in their dealings with dalits. This assurance has played a key role in sustaining the growth of atrocities year after year. The temerity of the Khairlanji criminals also indicates a similar assurance.

From the facts of the case, it is clear that the incident was sought to be suppressed by the police even as they reluctantly took it on record. Although it would send shivers down the spine at the thought that such a ghastly incident could have been buried in the files of an obscure police station, this is precisely what was initially planned. On hindsight, it might appear foolish on the part of the schemers to have imagined that they would be able to cover up the incident, but the very fact that they tried suggests that this was not entirely out of the realm of possibility. The public uproar over the incident broke out a full month after the incident, during which it was as good as buried. If even Bhaiyalal Bhotmange’s first information report (FIR) led to the arrests of some people (not the real culprits, he kept on shouting until end-November) in Khairlanji, as it actually happened, who would have followed the case, what would have happened in absence of any evidence or any witnesses? Khairlanji, with all its bestiality and gore would have been covered up and forgotten. Nobody would have known about it.

Even now that it has got so much publicity, one cannot be sure that the real criminals would ever be punished.

If the Ramabai Nagar case in the heart of Mumbai could frustrate dalits, who could be sure of conviction in remote Khairlanji?7

Treacherous Role

The insidious role the police played in the making of Khairlanji and then suppressing it is quite representative of caste crimes anywhere. Khairlanji is a village of 800 people in which just three households are of neo-Buddhists (dalits) and seven households are of gonds (tribals), who in Vidarbha more or less identify with the caste Hindus, the balance population belonging to the kunabi, kalar, teli, lodhi, dhivar, vadhai and other jatis, which fall under the other backward classes (OBC) category, but serve as upper caste vis-a-vis dalits in a village setting. In such circumstances, dalits will never come out in open conflict with caste Hindus unless there is a grave enough reason. The land dispute that triggered a saga of the Bhotmanges getting ostracised was not unknown to the local police. While resisting the passage of caste Hindus across his fields, Bhaiyalal Bhotmange was once beaten, for which he had complained to the police.8 In 2002, Surekha had complained against a neighbouring farmer, Shivshankar Atilkar for trespassing on her farmland and abusing her in “casteist” tones. In 2004, though the re-measurement of the farmland confirmed the case of the Bhotmanges in a revenue court, in order to buy peace, Bhotmange, with the mediation of Siddharth Gajbhiye, conceded a small passage through the farm. But this conciliatory measure on his part did not stop harassment. Priyanka, Surekha’s daughter, was teased and verbally harassed by passing lewd remarks while she cycled to school. Once she had reported such harassment to Siddharth Gajbhiye, who reprimanded the caste Hindus but advised the Bhotmanges not to formally complain to the police. One complaint on record with the police is of Surekha being attacked with a sickle by some caste Hindu women. Indeed, there appears to be a series of incidents that were reported to the police but there was absolutely no action taken.

The Bhotmanges had the support of Siddharth Gajbhiye, and so the Khairlanji villagers decided to teach him a lesson. On September 3 last year, under the alibi of a dispute over wages to be paid to farm labourers, some of them caught and beat him unconscious. The following day his brother Rajendra went to the Andhalgaon police station to report the incident but was arrogantly turned away. Siddharth was admitted to a Kamptee hospital, where the police registered his complaint and transferred the case to the Andhalgaon police station on jurisdictional grounds. As the Andhalgaon police came to take the statements of Surekha and Priyanka, the witnesses named in the complaint, the sarpanch and upsarpanch of Khairlanji had threatened to kill them, and that too, in the very presence of the police. On September 21, Rajendra was similarly threatened at Kandri village. The next day he was involved in a skirmish, for which he had made a complaint to the police, but there was no action. The police arrested 12 people for beating Siddharth Gajbhiye but they were released on bail on September 29. It is said that as a witness Surekha took advantage of the opportunity and included some of her old enemies in the list of 12 accused. After the return of these accused, the caste Hindus called a meeting and decided to teach a lesson to Siddharth Gajbhiye and the Bhotmange family. When Surekha learnt of this,9 she informed Siddharth Gajbhiye and her nephew Rashtrapal Narnaware in Warti village over her cell phone.

Each of the above complaints qualified to be registered under SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act (PoA Act), but none was so registered.

Even the case of beating of Siddharth Gajbhiye in Khairlanji that culminated in the gory carnage was deemed not fit enough to be registered under the PoA Act. Had the police taken due cognisance of these preceding disputes, one could argue, that Khairlanji could have been averted. It is the complicity of police that has led to caste Hindus mustering courage to punish Bhotmanges for upholding their dignity and self-respect.

When the mob actually attacked, Surekha had called Rajendra Gajbhiye on her cell to seek police help. Rajendra immediately called the police but they did not pay any heed. Mysteriously, the sim card of Surekha’s cellphone went missing. Rajendra then rushed to Khairlanji and after witnessing the attack again called the police on his cellphone. Bhaiyalal, who saw the attack ran to Siddharth to save himself. Siddharth immediately called the police and requested for help. The torture of Bhotmanges lasted for more than two hours thereafter. The police, located just eight km away, could have easily reached there in less than 20 minutes, but they chose not to. Bhaiyalal and Gajbhiye personally reached the Andhalgaon police station to report the incident but the police did not register it and instead sent a constable to Khairlanji when everything was over. The constable just met the sarpanch and returned reporting that everything was normal. It was only the next day, when Bhaiyalal went with Gajbhiye and his uncle to the police station that an FIR was registered.When in the morning of September 30 the body of Priyanka was recovered from the canal and her cousin Rashtrapal identified her, the police recorded it in their inquest as “unidentified and unclaimed” and sent it for post-mortem. The post-mortem was carried out shoddily and the body disposed off. The next day, the other three bodies were recovered, but they were also similarly disposed off. The evidence as such was effectively destroyed.

The information provided by the police to the press was obviously prompted by the schemers – that the Bhotmanges were killed over the issue of an illicit relationship.The strategy appeared to have worked to the extent that none among the large congregation of dalits gathered to commemorate the 50th year of conversion of Babasaheb Ambedkar on October 2 at Diksha Bhoomi at Nagpur noted the news. It was not even noted by the next congregation on October 14 that followed the English calendar in observing the anniversary. The incident could have easily passed off as a crime for which some arrests were made and police investigation was on. They would have managed bail for the arrested people and thereafter for the others. This might seem implausible, but is actually what happens in most atrocity cases. Even after the publicity that the case gets, there is no guarantee of conviction of criminals. For instance, no one knows what happened in the case of Gohana10 or Jajjhar?

Apart from the entire police machinery, the doctors who helped suppress this incident by their acts of commission and omission, the public prosecutor who inexplicably advised against the PoA Act being applied, in short, the entire state apparatus has actively contributed to the making of Khairlanji.

The Aftermath

What followed Khairlanji was equally grave. As the information on the gruesome murders began leaking out of the factfinding reports and spreading around, it created revulsion among certain sections of the dalit community. The first reaction was to come out in protest on to the streets; a women’s organisation, the Rashtriya Sambuddha Mahila Sanghtana in Bhandara, took out a massive rally on November 1. This rally provided inspiration to others to organise protests in various towns and cities. Soon, the entire Vidarbha region reverberated with protests. It is notable that almost everywhere dalit women had taken a lead. The people, particularly youngsters supported these efforts and poured out on to the streets in large numbers. These were genuine protesters who did not have the usual support system that the established political parties have. Most people were educated individuals, employed or otherwise, who were impelled to express their moral outrage against the criminals of Khairlanji and police complicity in the crime. However, the police everywhere cracked down on them with a heavy hand, as though they were bigger criminals than the perpetrators of Khairlanji. At most places the protesters were brutally beaten. At least one person was killed and several injured when police opened fire in Amravati. As an all-India fact-finding committee that visited Nagpur, Kamptee, Amravati, Akola and Yavatmal, where significant police action had taken place, reported that the use of force by the police was unwarranted and reflected an anti-dalit bias.

At the rally in Nagpur, one of the first in a series of protest actions, people expressed their anger by blocking traffic and shouting anti-government slogans, nothing abnormal, given the context of Khairlanji. However, the home minister of Maharashtra issued a statement on camera that the government suspected Naxalites were behind these protests. Later he publicly retracted the statement, as it led to an uproar among dalits. However, the Nagpur police fully capitalised on it to unleash severe repression on the dalit masses. The brutal lathi charges on protesting dalits, the arrests that followed these protests, the showering of filthy casteist abuses, the humiliations heaped on people in police custody as though they were hardened criminals, and police vehemence in opposing their bail applications, were reflective of a deep anti-dalit bias and intolerance of dalit assertion of their democratic rights.

In Amravati, the protest rally on November 14 by the Khairlanji Nished Kruti Samiti evoked a massive response; more than 25,000 people in attendance, which was in sharp contrast to just a couple of thousand persons at a rally organised by the senior Republican Party of India (RPI) leader, R S Gavai. After reaching the collector’s office and handing over a memorandum, the rally formally concluded. But as the people dispersed and were returning home, the police suddenly began a lathi charge on the pretext of stone throwing from somewhere, which according to organisers was rather in response to police action. Police did not spare even women and children, one of whom lay in hospital paralysed for life. Irked by the police highhandedness, people set fire to a water tanker and a few motorbikes parked nearby. The police burst teargas shells and opened fire on the retreating people. One youth, Dinesh Wankhede was hit in the head and killed and three others were wounded with bullet injuries on various parts of their bodies. The fact that all the wounded persons fell down in the by-lanes clearly showed (this was even captured on camera) that police had indeed fired upon the people while they were in retreat. The police commissioner justified the firing to the all-India fact-finding committee members, saying that there was an imminent danger of a communal conflagration, with the Shiv Sena being prepared for that.

The police action however did not end there. The police began rounding up people and slapping all kinds of cases on them –cases such as sedition, attempt to murder, rioting, etc, for which it is not easy to get bail. They arrested a mathematics teacher of the local Navodaya Vidyalaya for having a booklet and a poster on Khairlanji.Incidentally, the booklet was a duly published fact-finding report by the Samata Sainik Dal, Nagpur and the poster was freely available on the Internet and was displayed in many cities in the form of hoardings. The harsh treatment meted out to persons like the arrested teacher was intended to break the morale of intellectuals backing the protests. As Dilip Edatkar, the editor of Matadar, a local daily, said: the police created such an atmosphere of terror that nobody dared to speak out in support of those who have been arrested or being harassed.

At Yavatmal, a small rally called by Pramodini Ramteke, a noted activist in the dalit women’s movement, provoked severe police repression. The alleged stone throwing could well have been executed by some miscreants at the behest of vested interests, according to Ramteke. One Subhash Rai, a businessman with a questionable reputation got his goons to pelt stones and chappals at Ambedkar’s statue near Patipura, a famous dalit colony. The police simply stood by. In the night, prompted by some political bigwigs, a posse of over 100 policemen raided the houses of dalits in Teli Fail, picked up youth, beat them in the presence of their parents and hounded them into police vans. Later in the night they raided Patipura. Everywhere the police broke open the doors of the houses and forcibly picked up the youth from their beds and hounded them into vans. Most of the people who were arrested swore that they did not know of the morcha and wondered why they were beaten and abused in filthy casteist language. Pramodini Ramteke herself was arrested and subjected to physical and sexual torture in police custody.

She literally wept while describing her plight in the police custody. Like the teacher in Amravati, she too was suspended from her job.

There was an unprecedented attempt to counter the dalit protests by encouraging others to come into the streets in opposition. Right from the Bhandara rally, this pattern was evident. Supporters of the Bajrang Dal, the Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came into the streets raising the issue of Ankita Lanjewar, who was raped and killed by a dalit in Lakhandur. The police wanted to justify its repression by giving it a communal colour. The firing at Amravati was actually justified under this alibi by none other than the police commissioner. At Sholapur, supporters of the combine clashed with dalits, with the police taking a completely partisan stand, unleashing repression on the dalits. The police entered dalit colonies and battered people, including women and girl children. They smashed the framed pictures of Ambedkar and Buddha, and abused the people in the most filthy casteist language. In contrast, no action was taken against the Bajrang Dal/Shiv Sena attackers.

Taking advantage of the dalit protests, the police prevented scores of dalits from paying homage to their messiah on the special occasion of the 50th death anniversary at Chaitya Bhoomi last year. A million odd people congregate at Chaitya Bhoomi every year to observe the anniversary on December 6 in a solemn manner. The fact that over 50 years there has not been any incident that has blemished this solemnity, and this, without much police presence (the entire arrangement is overseen by the Samata Sainik Dal), should have been good enough to dispel any misgiving. But the state intentionally created a fear psychosis, duly whipped up by the media, that lakhs of people decided not to grace the occasion. The entire Chaitya Bhoomi and Shivaji maidan had the overbearing presence of police, which effectively took away the solemnity of the occasion. The administration and the police in effect disrupted one of the most glorious occasions of dalit solidarity. Henceforth, the Diksha Bhoomis and Chaitya Bhoomis will no longer be the same; they will be closely monitored and controlled by the might of the state.

Before the fire over Khairlanji could be doused, the news of desecration of a statue in Kanpur came in, giving rise to a new wave of violent protests in Maharashtra. In Nashik, one person was killed; so too in Nanded. In Usmanabad, during a ‘rasta roko’ two persons were killed in police firing. At Ulhasnagar, the Deccan Queen and a local train were set on fire. The arrests that followed thereafter had the same pattern of harassment, beating and humiliation in police custody, and so on. The fact-finding team that investigated the Ulhasnagarincidents reported that,

according to local people, it was not the people protesting there who set the rear bogies of the train on fire, but persons patronised by a particular politician who caused all the damage.

Question of Conscience

The spate of spontaneous protests over the desecration of the statue of Ambedkar stunned many people because these took place in distant Maharashtra and not in the state where the desecration happened. While this could be easily explained by the immediate context of Khairlanji or the difference in degree of devotion among dalits vis-à-vis Ambedkar in Maharashtra and elsewhere, these protests exposed the nature of dalit consciousness, which could be an eye-opener for dalit movement. While in the case of Khairlanji, where four hapless persons were brutally killed in what could be called a pure caste atrocity, it took over a month for the protests to erupt, in contrast, the news of the desecration of Ambedkar’s statue evoked an instantaneous response.

News of the desecration of a statue evokes an immediate public outrage but not that of the brutal killing of human beings.

The gruesome killings in Jhajjhar or burning down of 70 dalit houses in Gohana, both in Haryana, surprisingly did not evoke any reaction in Maharashtra. Why, even in the wake of Khairlanji, there were a spate of atrocities in Maharashtra itself, which significantly included the brutal cutting into pieces of a dalit farm labourer in Jahangir Moha village of Beed district of Marathwada in November or the killing of a youth belonging to the matang caste in Umarga Narangwadi in October. But both these atrocities did not create even a ripple among dalits. Outrage over Ambedkar statues however is legion; recall, for instance, the Ramabai Nagar incident that took toll of 10 lives in police firing and self-killing in protest of a revolutionary dalit poet, Vilas Ghogre.

It seems that dalits are more concerned with symbolic identity issues than with what happens to the living members of their community.

On the positive side, the Ambedkar statue symbolises the loftiest legacy of dalit struggle, which should inspire generations of dalits to take this struggle further, but on the negative side, Ambedkar could become just a god head, like that of erstwhile vithoba or mhasoba, that could enslave their spirits. Considering the state of dalit masses, the latter is more likely to happen. None other than the ruling classes understood this and decided to promote it;

the more the creed of the Ambedkar statue takes root, the more would Ambedkar’s ideals be rooted out.

Khairlanji serves as one more reminder for dalits to rethink these matters. Looked at from a strategic angle, the resource scarce people as they are, dalits should have an acute sense of priorities.

The sensitivity towards dignity, symbolised by the Ambedekar statue, is only justified if it is associated with a similar concern for the plight of living people.

While the inversion may be explained to a large extent by the historical alienation of the dalit movement from soc ial movements inspired by the philosophy of historical materialism, it is time for dalits to realise that this reactionary disorientation has already done a great damage to their collective well-being.

Irrelevance of Dalit Politicians

The identity orientation of dalits serves well a politics that does not have anything to offer dalits other than empty slogans and hollow symbols. Intrinsically incapable of comprehending and confronting the real life problems of dalits, the politicians embracing the politics of identity abide by the practices of the ruling class political parties to maintain the vacuous character of dalit politics. The Poona Pact of 1932 had deprived them of the possibility of independent representation on the basis of a communitarian identity.

And, the possibility of an alternative politics, involving alliances with the working class as a whole and the communist parties, and embracing the politics of class was not as easy as identity politics and did not attract dalit politicians aiming at a quick buck.

The result was that dalit politics and politicians got subsumed as adjuncts of the ruling class parties for which symbols and identities mattered more than the material interests of the people.

Khairlanji conclusively exposes the bankruptcy of dalit politics and politicians in its comprehensiveness.

The absence of these politicians in Khairlanji was as conspicuous as in all the earlier incidents of atrocities on dalits. It is significant that dalit politics, whose raison d’etre it is to safeguard dalit interests fundamentally from caste discrimination, is not concerned with atrocities on dalits, which indeed are the concentrated expression of casteism.

The reason behind this is that the dalit politicians cannot afford to embarrass their ruling class political patrons.

In the case of Khairlanji, it is said that one senior dalit politician had deliberately ensured that the news of Khairlanji was suppressed in the city edition so that the celebrations of 50th anniversary of the ‘Dhammachakra Pravartan Din’, which has been reduced over the years to an event for self promotion passes on without any disturbance. Some politicians pursuing the ephemeral caste-based bahujanism could not figure out what stand to take when they found that kunbis and kalars were pitted against the dalits. Reared on anti-brahmin symbolism, they are intellectually so bereft as not to see that atrocities on dalits are mostly committed by the backward castes who have assumed the baton of brahminism during the post-independence period.

The protesters over Khairlanji therefore zealously kept away the entire set of mainstream politicians from their midst. Abhorrence of these politicians was so intense that the participants in protest rallies even did not let the organisers speak into the mike at many places lest they should seem like the mainstream dalit politicians. The anger of dalit protesters was as much against the perpetrators of crime as was against the complicity of the state and the dalit politicians, whom they held primarily responsible for such an occurrence.Khairlanji, and for that matter all caste atrocities, are a reflection of the impairment of the political strength of dalits for which dalit politicians have to take blame. When after the mass upsurge these politicians awkwardly tried to rush in to take the credit, they were utterly ignored. The pitiable show of R S Gavai in his own citadel at a rally on November 14, despite all the support from the administration, revealed it all. The violent protests that followed against the desecration of Ambedkar’s statue were also largely sans leaders and against them. The residual utility of dalit politics could have shown up in extending help and support to people who were arrested by the police, but unfortunately this was no where visible. People utterly without any support system were prepared to suffer but not look at these politicians for help. Indeed, Khairlanji has taken this divide between the dalit politicians and the dalit masses to a new high.

Myths and Mythologies

Khairlanji exploded many myths and mythologies that continue to shroud the reality of the caste question and thereby obfuscate its objective solution. Some of the obvious myths that get exploded are the myth that economic development does away with caste, the myth of Maharashtra as a progressive state, the myth that there exists a significant progressive section of non-dalits that is against the caste system, the myth that dalits placed in the bureaucracy can orient the administration to do justice to dalits, and finally the mythology of bahujanwad developed by the late Kanshiram and followed by others. Many intellectuals hold the notion that economic development will eradicate castes. Some people correlate economic development with educational and cultural development and therefore imagine that the irrationality of castes would be eradicated through it. Khairlanji certainly refutes all these notions. In economic terms, the village of Khairlanji is far better than the average village in Maharashtra. Even the economic position of the Bhotmanges, who owned five acres of irrigated land, can be similarly taken as better than that of the average dalit household. Even educationally, the village may not be inferior to an average village in the state.

In such a situation it is not the absolute development but the manner in which the unequal and uneven nature of the development process buttresses casteism that needs to be examined.

There is an associated myth about Maharashtra that it is a progressive state. This myth is built upon and related to its economic development, particularly around the Mumbai-Pune region, which significantly elevates the economic position of the state relative to the other states. Another factor that contributes to this myth is the origin of the non-brahmin and dalit movements in the state by Jotiba Phule and Babasaheb Ambedkar respectively. The empirical reality however is quite contrary. Maharashtra is as casteist as any other state. Maharashtra has an inglorious track record of heinous atrocities perpetrated on dalits. According to the crime statistics for 2005, Maharashtra ranks at number 10 among 35 states for the crimes committed against SCs and STs,11 which clearly indicates that it does not have much reason to be complacent. What this myth does is to make Maharashtra complacent. It dampens the need to put in special efforts by the state as well as the civil society to fight caste consciousness and disorients one not to see the reality. As one of the most barbaric caste atrocities that best expose the factors that go into their making, Khairlanji conclusively explodes this myth. Although subdued, there were certain casteist disapprovals even during the heat of protests that Khairlanji generated. Some Hindutva outfits had openly opposed these protests at many places. Some media people poured out their venom to dismiss the mass protests as “fuss” created over a nonevent. 12 Thus Maharashtra does not have a moral right to claim the legacy of Phule and Ambedkar.

It is a popular myth that there exists a significant progressive section of non-dalits that is against castes. There indeed is a large section of people who hold progressive ideas on many other social issues, such as communalism, gender discrimination, general exploitation of labour and the peasantry, and so on. However, when it comes to caste, they conveniently leave it for dalits to deal with. When Khairlanji protests broke out, they should have come forward to express their support to dalits. After all, it was apolitical and organised by people who in some way shared their progressivism. Why then were they not there? Why do the people who take up the cause of the communal oppression of Muslims so enthusiastically not moved on the issue of caste oppression? Why the people who are genuinely concerned to save Afzal Guru do not show any sensitivity to the pervasive injustice being done to dalits? Why is the opposition to caste bracketed with casteism?

It appears, progressivism does not necessarily mean anti-casteism in India.

Even the communist parties, who claim to have changed their stand on caste issues, do not think that they ought to go beyond tokenism. Why did they not mobilise their cadres to protest against Khairlanji? Progressivism in this country does seem to include the dispelling of caste consciousness.

That is why the media people, feigning progressivism, do not forget to prefix “dalit” to writers, doctors, engineers and managers belonging to the dalit community even when the appellation is irrelevant.

In such a situation, one tends to salute stray exceptions of Varsha Kale and others of her ilk who sided with dalit activists to demonstrate in Mantralaya.13

Importantly, Khairlanji also blasts the myth that if dalit individuals are placed in the bureaucratic structure, the latter becomes more congenial to dalits. This

myth informs a large part of the argument for reservations. As discussed, Khairlanji best exemplifies the complicity of the state machinery in the perpetration of caste atrocities, and interestingly, even when this machinery is largely manned by the people of the dalit community. The superintendent of police, Bhandara, the deputy superintendent of police, the PSI of Andhalgaon police station, a constable under him, the doctor who performed the post-mortems, the district civil surgeon who permitted the doctor to go ahead with the post-mortems without a lady doctor, the public prosecutor who advised against the application of the PoA Act to the earlier cases which were essentially caste-based, the nodal officer at the apex level who is entrusted with the responsibility of reviewing the state of crimes against SCs and STs in accordance with the PoA Act, were all dalits and belonging to the same sub-castes as that of the Bhotmanges.14 Nobody will fault this combination and accuse the upper caste people of exercising caste prejudice in relation to dalits but the fact is that the entire network failed at every possible step. It is easy to blame these individuals but not the system of which they are essentially a part.

It is naïve to believe that a dalit individual rising up the bureaucratic or governmental structure could influence it to be pro-dalit.

On the contrary, the rise of such an individual is basically a reward for the proven service rendered by him/her to the system and the latter expects much more of the same from EPW him/her in the future. It is a singular naivety of dalits that has reduced them to political inactivity. They have forgotten that it is their own political participation, their struggle that can influence the behaviour of the existing structures, indeed, change these very structures for the better, not the individuals howsoever highly placed they may be.

Above all, Khairlanji explodes a mythology,that of bahujanwad, developed and practised by the late Kanshiram with a reasonable level of success. Dalit politicians such as Prakash Ambedkar, Udit Raj, and many others, but without acknowledging his debt, are following bahujanwad. Bahujanwad is basically an expedient strategy of the lower castes to succeed in electoral politics, not very dissimilar to creating a maratha like middle caste identity as successfully done by Sharad Pawar or Mulayam Singh. It assumes that all the lower shudra castes and dalits can come together and create a formidable constituency to bid for power. Indeed, purely from the standpoint of their material status, all these castes are placed similarly and there is no doubt that they should come together. But when bahujanwad aspires to unite them on the basis of caste identities, it misses one point, namely, the fundamental break that divides them into caste and non-castes, varna and savarnas, unlike the maratha or any other caste identities, which fall on one side of the continuum.

This divide can only be crossed if one transcends it with an entirely different approach, the class approach that emphasises their similarities.

Khairlanji, and for that matter every caste atrocity, confused the bahujanwad because these atrocities are invariably committed by the so-called OBCs.

Email: tanand@vsnl.com

Notes

1 On the Dussera day, October 15, 2002, five persons hailing from the dalit community were lynched to death in open daylight by the VHP/ Bajrang Dal activists at Jhajjhar district of Haryana in active connivance with the police. See Anand Teltumbde’s ‘Onslaught of Fascist Hindutva on Dalits: Impact and Resistance’, available at http://www.ambedkar.org/vivek/ailc_speech.pdf.Last accessed on December 23, 2006.

2 On May 14, 2003, in Bhutegaon, district Jalana of Marathwada region, a youth, Dilip Shendge was burnt alive by the caste Hindu mob of the village. See ‘Violence against Dalits in Marathwada:The Caste Cauldron of Maharashtra, a Fact-Finding Report’, CPDR, 2003, available at http://www.pucl.org/Topics/Dalit-tribal/ 2003/caste-cauldron.pdf. Last accessed on December 23, 2006.

3 In Sonna Khota village, district Beed of Marathwada region, a dalit family was attacked by a caste Hindu mob. The mob chased Bhaurao Dongre when he ran to save himself from the attack and stoned him to death. See ‘Violence against Dalits in Marathwada: The Caste Cauldron of Maharashtra, a Fact-Finding Report’, CPDR, 2003, available at http://www.pucl.org/Topics/Dalit-tribal/2003/castecauldron.pdf. Last accessed on December 23,2006.

4 Rashtriya Sambuddha Mahila Sanghatana, a memorandum circulated for organising the protest rally in Bhandara, Vidrohi. Some factfinding reports say that Bhaiyalal Bhotmange got it from his maternal uncle. ‘Organised Killings of Dalits in Khairlanji Village: A Report under SC-ST (PoA) Act, 1989’, Babasaheb Ambedkar Research and Training Institute, Department of Social Justice, government of Maharashtra and Centre for Equity and Social Justice, Yashada. Available at http://www.mailarchive.com/zestcaste@yahoogroups.com/msg05124.html

5 Police patil is just an honorary post in the village.

6 The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), in its report on ‘Prevention of Atrocities against Scheduled Castes’, authored by retired civil servant K P Saxena had indicted successive governments for their lukewarm response to atrocities against dalits.

7 On July 11, 1997, one police sub-inspector, M Y Kadam fired upon the protesters against the desecration of Babasaheb Ambedkar’s statue in Ramabai Ambedkar Nagar, a predominantly dalit-populated urban colony in Mumbai, without much reason or provocation. Ten persons died and 24 persons were injured in the firing. Despite a struggle by the activists for the last 10 years, the conviction of the criminal PSI is not in sight.

8 Manuski Advocacy Centre, ‘Caste Atrocity in Khairlanji – A Fact-Finding Report’, Pune, 2006. Available at http://atrocitynews. wordpress.com/files/2006/10/khairlanji.pdf. Last Accessed: December 24, 2006.

9 It appears, many people knew of the decision. At least one woman deposed to one fact-finding team that she did.

10 Gohana is in Haryana, where 70 houses of dalits were burnt down by a mob of 1,500-2,000 jats in August 2005. No convictions are in sight.

11 National Crime Research Bureau, Annual Report 2005, Table 7.1, p 299, available at http://ncrb.nic.in/crime2005/cii-2005/CHAP1.pdf. Last accessed on December 23, 2006.

12 Many newspapers took a tangential view of the matter. An example is of a write-up by Sarita Kaushik, published in Hindustan Times on November 27, 2006.

13 On November 8, 2006 a group of 20 odd ladies managed to pass the security cordon and entered Mantralaya. They regrouped there to demonstrate and stunned the entire establishment. Some non-dalit women participated in this glorious initiative. Even in subsequent rallies, a few people of non-dalit castes did participate but their number was insignificant. Varsha Kale, who ran the struggle of bar girls in Mumbai was one of non-dalit women in support of the dalit women like Urmila Pawar and others.

14 ‘Hame Padhe Likhe Logone Dhoka Diya’, Mahanayak, Mumbai, October 11, 2006.

Some f***ing superpower this

2007-03-26T01:44:00.000-07:00

A stunning, must-read Interview of Arundhati Roy. Though i have got differences in her opinions on Mao, Stalin and the other socialist states of the last century, i find this interview thoroughly portrays the truely agonised mind bursting out in anger on what is happening today in India. Thanks to TEHELKA.
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'It’s outright war and both sides are choosing their weapons'

Chhattisgarh. Jharkhand. Bihar. Andhra Pradesh. Signposts of fractures gone too far with too little remedy. Arundhati Roy in conversation with Shoma Chaudhury on the violence rending our heartland

There is an atmosphere of growing violence across the country. How do you read the signs? In what context should it be read?

You don’t have to be a genius to read the signs. We have a growing middle class, reared on a diet of radical consumerism and aggressive greed. Unlike industrialising Western countries, which had colonies from which to plunder resources and generate slave labour to feed this process, we have to colonise ourselves, our own nether parts. We’ve begun to eat our own limbs. The greed that is being generated (and marketed as a value interchangeable with nationalism) can only be sated by grabbing land, water and resources from the vulnerable. What we’re witnessing is the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in independent India — the secession of the middle and upper classes from the rest of the country. It’s a vertical secession, not a lateral one. They’re fighting for the right to merge with the world’s elite somewhere up there in the stratosphere. They’ve managed to commandeer the resources, the coal, the minerals, the bauxite, the water and electricity. Now they want the land to make more cars, more bombs, more mines — supertoys for the new supercitizens of the new superpower. So it’s outright war, and people on both sides are choosing their weapons. The government and the corporations reach for structural adjustment, the World Bank, the ADB, FDI, friendly court orders, friendly policy makers, help from the ‘friendly’ corporate media and a police force that will ram all this down people’s throats. Those who want to resist this process have, until now, reached for dharnas, hunger strikes, satyagraha, the courts and what they thought was friendly media. But now more and more are reaching for guns. Will the violence grow? If the ‘growth rate’ and the Sensex are going to be the only barometers the government uses to measure progress and the well-being of people, then of course it will. How do I read the signs? It isn’t hard to read sky-writing. What it says up there, in big letters, is this: the shit has hit the fan, folks.

You once remarked that though you may not resort to violence yourself, you think it has become immoral to condemn it, given the circumstances in the country. Can you elaborate on this view?

I’d be a liability as a guerrilla! I doubt I used the word ‘immoral’ — morality is an elusive business, as changeable as the weather. What I feel is this: non-violent movements have knocked at the door of every democratic institution in this country for decades, and have been spurned and humiliated. Look at the Bhopal gas victims, the Narmada Bachao Andolan. The nba had a lot going for it — high-profile leadership, media coverage, more resources than any other mass movement. What went wrong? People are bound to want to rethink strategy. When Sonia Gandhi begins to promote satyagraha at the World Economic Forum in Davos, it’s time for us to sit up and think. For example, is mass civil disobedience possible within the structure of a democratic nation state? Is it possible in the age of disinformation and corporate-controlled mass media? Are hunger strikes umbilically linked to celebrity politics? Would anybody care if the people of Nangla Machhi or Bhatti mines went on a hunger strike? Irom Sharmila has been on a hunger strike for six years. That should be a lesson to many of us. I’ve always felt that it’s ironic that hunger strikes are used as a political weapon in a land where most people go hungry anyway. We are in a different time and place now. Up against a different, more complex adversary. We’ve entered the era of NGOs — or should I say the era of paltu shers — in which mass action can be a treacherous business. We have demonstrations which are funded, we have sponsored dharnas and social forums which make militant postures but never follow up on what they preach. We have all kinds of ‘virtual’ resistance. Meetings against SEZs sponsored by the biggest promoters of SEZs. Awards and grants for environmental activism and community action given by corporations responsible for devastating whole ecosystems. Vedanta, a company mining bauxite in the forests of Orissa, wants to start a university. The Tatas have two charitable trusts that directly and indirectly fund activists and mass movements across the country. Could that be why Singur has drawn so much less flak than Nandigram? Of course the Tatas and Birlas funded Gandhi too — maybe he was our first NGO. But now we have NGOs who make a lot of noise, write a lot of reports, but whom the sarkar is more than comfortable with. How do we make sense of all this? The place is crawling with professional diffusers of real political action. ‘Virtual’ resistance has become something of a liability.

There was a time when mass movements looked to the courts for justice. The courts have rained down a series of judgements that are so unjust, so insulting to the poor in the language they use, they take your breath away. A recent Supreme Court judgement, allowing the Vasant Kunj Mall to resume construction though it didn’t have the requisite clearances, said in so many words that the questions of corporations indulging in malpractice does not arise! In the ERA of corporate globalisation, corporate land-grab, in the ERA of Enron and Monsanto, Halliburton and Bechtel, that’s a loaded thing to say. It exposes the ideological heart of the most powerful institution in this country. The judiciary, along with the corporate press, is now seen as the lynchpin of the neo-liberal project.

In a climate like this, when people feel that they are being worn down, exhausted by these interminable ‘democratic’ processes, only to be eventually humiliated, what are they supposed to do? Of course it isn’t as though the only options are binary — violence versus non-violence. There are political parties that believe in armed struggle but only as one part of their overall political strategy. Political workers in these struggles have been dealt with brutally, killed, beaten, imprisoned under false charges. People are fully aware that to take to arms is to call down upon yourself the myriad forms of the violence of the Indian State. The minute armed struggle becomes a strategy, your whole world shrinks and the colours fade to black and white. But when people decide to take that step because every other option has ended in despair, should we condemn them? Does anyone believe that if the people of Nandigram had held a dharna and sung songs, the West Bengal government would have backed down? We are living in times when to be ineffective is to support the status quo (which no doubt suits some of us). And being effective comes at a terrible price. I find it hard to condemn people who are prepared to pay that price.

You have been travelling a lot on the ground — can you give us a sense of the trouble spots you have been to? Can you outline a few of the combat lines in these places?

Huge question — what can I say? The military occupation of Kashmir, neo-fascism in Gujarat, civil war in Chhattisgarh, mncs raping Orissa, the submergence of hundreds of villages in the Narmada Valley, people living on the edge of absolute starvation, the devastation of forest land, the Bhopal victims living to see the West Bengal government re-wooing Union Carbide — now calling itself Dow Chemicals — in Nandigram. I haven’t been recently to Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, but we know about the almost hundred thousand farmers who have killed themselves. We know about the fake encounters and the terrible repression in Andhra Pradesh. Each of these places has its own particular history, economy, ecology. None is amenable to easy analysis. And yet there is connecting tissue, there are huge international cultural and economic pressures being brought to bear on them. How can I not mention the Hindutva project, spreading its poison sub-cutaneously, waiting to erupt once again? I’d say the biggest indictment of all is that we are still a country, a culture, a society which continues to nurture and practice the notion of untouchability. While our economists number-crunch and boast about the growth rate, a million people — human scavengers — earn their living carrying several kilos of other people’s shit on their heads every day. And if they didn’t carry shit on their heads they would starve to death. Some f***ing superpower this.

How does one view the recent State and police violence in Bengal?

No different from police and State violence anywhere else — including the issue of hypocrisy and doublespeak so perfected by all political parties including the mainstream Left. Are Communist bullets different from capitalist ones? Odd things are happening. It snowed in Saudi Arabia. Owls are out in broad daylight. The Chinese government tabled a bill sanctioning the right to private property. I don’t know if all of this has to do with climate change. The Chinese Communists are turning out to be the biggest capitalists of the 21st century. Why should we expect our own parliamentary Left to be any different? Nandigram and Singur are clear signals. It makes you wonder — is the last stop of every revolution advanced capitalism? Think about it — the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Vietnam War, the anti-apartheid struggle, the supposedly Gandhian freedom struggle in India… what’s the last station they all pull in at? Is this the end of imagination?

The Maoist attack in Bijapur — the death of 55 policemen. Are the rebels only the flip side of the State?

How can the rebels be the flip side of the State? Would anybody say that those who fought against apartheid — however brutal their methods — were the flip side of the State? What about those who fought the French in Algeria? Or those who fought the Nazis? Or those who fought colonial regimes? Or those who are fighting the US occupation of Iraq? Are they the flip side of the State? This facile new report-driven ‘human rights’ discourse, this meaningless condemnation game that we are all forced to play, makes politicians of us all and leaches the real politics out of everything. However pristine we would like to be, however hard we polish our halos, the tragedy is that we have run out of pristine choices. There is a civil war in Chhattisgarh sponsored, created by the Chhattisgarh government, which is publicly pursing the Bush doctrine: if you’re not with us, you are with the terrorists. The lynchpin of this war, apart from the formal security forces, is the Salva Judum — a government-backed militia of ordinary people forced to take up arms, forced to become spos (special police officers). The Indian State has tried this in Kashmir, in Manipur, in Nagaland. Tens of thousands have been killed, hundreds of thousands tortured, thousands have disappeared. Any banana republic would be proud of this record. Now the government wants to import these failed strategies into the heartland. Thousands of adivasis have been forcibly moved off their mineral-rich lands into police camps. Hundreds of villages have been forcibly evacuated. Those lands, rich in iron-ore, are being eyed by corporations like the Tatas and Essar. mous have been signed, but no one knows what they say. Land acquisition has begun. This kind of thing happened in countries like Colombia — one of the most devastated countries in the world. While everybody’s eyes are fixed on the spiralling violence between government-backed militias and guerrilla squads, multinational corporations quietly make off with the mineral wealth. That’s the little piece of theatre being scripted for us in Chhattisgarh.

Of course it’s horrible that 55 policemen were killed. But they’re as much the victims of government policy as anybody else. For the government and the corporations they’re just cannon fodder — there’s plenty more where they came from. Crocodile tears will be shed, prim TV anchors will hector us for a while and then more supplies of fodder will be arranged. For the Maoist guerrillas, the police and spos they killed were the armed personnel of the Indian State, the main, hands-on perpetrators of repression, torture, custodial killings, false encounters. They’re not innocent civilians — if such a thing exists — by any stretch of imagination.

I have no doubt that the Maoists can be agents of terror and coercion too. I have no doubt they have committed unspeakable atrocities. I have no doubt they cannot lay claim to undisputed support from local people — but who can? Still, no guerrilla army can survive without local support. That’s a logistical impossibility. And the support for Maoists is growing, not diminshing. That says something. People have no choice but to align themselves on the side of whoever they think is less worse.

But to equate a resistance movement fighting against enormous injustice with the government which enforces that injustice is absurd. The government has slammed the door in the face of every attempt at non-violent resistance. When people take to arms, there is going to be all kinds of violence — revolutionary, lumpen and outright criminal. The government is responsible for the monstrous situations it creates.

‘Naxals’, ‘Maoists’, ‘outsiders’: these are terms being very loosely used these days.

‘Outsiders’ is a generic accusation used in the early stages of repression by governments who have begun to believe their own publicity and can’t imagine that their own people have risen up against them. That’s the stage the CPM is at now in Bengal, though some would say repression in Bengal is not new, it has only moved into higher gear. In any case, what’s an outsider? Who decides the borders? Are they village boundaries? Tehsil? Block? District? State? Is narrow regional and ethnic politics the new Communist mantra? About Naxals and Maoists — well… India is about to become a police state in which everybody who disagrees with what’s going on risks being called a terrorist. Islamic terrorists have to be Islamic — so that’s not good enough to cover most of us. They need a bigger catchment area. So leaving the definition loose, undefined, is effective strategy, because the time is not far off when we’ll all be called Maoists or Naxalites, terrorists or terrorist sympathisers, and shut down by people who don’t really know or care who Maoists or Naxalites are. In villages, of course, that has begun — thousands of people are being held in jails across the country, loosely charged with being terrorists trying to overthrow the state. Who are the real Naxalites and Maoists? I’m not an authority on the subject, but here’s a very rudimentary potted history.

The Communist Party of India, the CPI, was formed in 1925. The CPI (M), or what we now call the CPM — the Communist Party Marxist — split from the CPI in 1964 and formed a separate party. Both, of course, were parliamentary political parties. In 1967, the CPM, along with a splinter group of the Congress, came to power in West Bengal. At the time there was massive unrest among the peasantry starving in the countryside. Local CPM leaders — Kanu Sanyal and Charu Mazumdar — led a peasant uprising in the district of Naxalbari which is where the term Naxalites comes from. In 1969, the government fell and the Congress came back to power under Siddhartha Shankar Ray. The Naxalite uprising was mercilessly crushed — Mahasweta Devi has written powerfully about this time. In 1969, the CPI (ML) — Marxist Leninist — split from the CPM. A few years later, around 1971, the CPI (ML) devolved into several parties: the CPM-ML (Liberation), largely centred in Bihar; the CPM-ML (New Democracy), functioning for the most part out of Andhra Pradesh and Bihar; the CPM-ML (Class Struggle) mainly in Bengal. These parties have been generically baptised ‘Naxalites’. They see themselves as Marxist Leninist, not strictly speaking Maoist. They believe in elections, mass action and — when absolutely pushed to the wall or attacked — armed struggle. The MCC — the Maoist Communist Centre, at the time mostly operating in Bihar — was formed in 1968. The PW, People’s War, operational for the most part in Andhra Pradesh, was formed in 1980. Recently, in 2004, the MCC and the pw merged to form the CPI (Maoist) They believe in outright armed struggle and the overthrowing of the State. They don’t participate in elections. This is the party that is fighting the guerrilla war in Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.

The Indian State and media largely view the Maoists as an “internal security” threat. Is this the way to look at them?

I’m sure the Maoists would be flattered to be viewed in this way.

The Maoists want to bring down the State. Given the autocratic ideology they take their inspiration from, what alternative would they set up? Wouldn’t their regime be an exploitative, autocratic, violent one as well? Isn’t their action already exploitative of ordinary people? Do they really have the support of ordinary people?

I think it’s important for us to acknowledge that both Mao and Stalin are dubious heroes with murderous pasts. Tens of millions of people were killed under their regimes. Apart from what happened in China and the Soviet Union, Pol Pot, with the support of the Chinese Communist Party (while the West looked discreetly away), wiped out two million people in Cambodia and brought millions of people to the brink of extinction from disease and starvation. Can we pretend that China’s cultural revolution didn’t happen? Or that millions of people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were not victims of labour camps, torture chambers, the network of spies and informers, the secret police. The history of these regimes is just as dark as the history of Western imperialism, except for the fact that they had a shorter life-span. We cannot condemn the occupation of Iraq, Palestine and Kashmir while we remain silent about Tibet and Chechnya. I would imagine that for the Maoists, the Naxalites, as well as the mainstream Left, being honest about the past is important to strengthen people’s faith in the future. One hopes the past will not be repeated, but denying that it ever happened doesn’t help inspire confidence… Nevertheless, the Maoists in Nepal have waged a brave and successful struggle against the monarchy. Right now, in India, the Maoists and the various Marxist-Leninist groups are leading the fight against immense injustice here. They are fighting not just the State, but feudal landlords and their armed militias. They are the only people who are making a dent. And I admire that. It may well be that when they come to power, they will, as you say, be brutal, unjust and autocratic, or even worse than the present government. Maybe, but I’m not prepared to assume that in advance. If they are, we’ll have to fight them too. And most likely someone like myself will be the first person they’ll string up from the nearest tree — but right now, it is important to acknowledge that they are bearing the brunt of being at the forefront of resistance. Many of us are in a position where we are beginning to align ourselves on the side of those who we know have no place for us in their religious or ideological imagination. It’s true that everybody changes radically when they come to power — look at Mandela’s anc. Corrupt, capitalist, bowing to the imf, driving the poor out of their homes — honouring Suharto, the killer of hundreds of thousands of Indonesian Communists, with South Africa’s highest civilian award. Who would have thought it could happen? But does this mean South Africans should have backed away from the struggle against apartheid? Or that they should regret it now? Does it mean Algeria should have remained a French colony, that Kashmiris, Iraqis and Palestinians should accept military occupation? That people whose dignity is being assaulted should give up the fight because they can’t find saints to lead them into battle?

Is there a communication breakdown in our society?

Yes.

Mar 31 , 2007