“Let us declare that the state of war does exist and shall exist so long as the Indian toiling masses and the natural resources are being exploited by a handful of parasites. They may be purely British Capitalist or mixed British and Indian or even purely Indian. They may be carrying on their insidious exploitation through mixed or even on purely Indian bureaucratic apparatus.” – Com. Bhagat Singh, in Last Petition to the Punjab Governor
“Yes, a state of war does exist today… India has not got independence from economic exploitation. The exploiting classes are the same. Indian labourers and people, especially the Adivasis have not gotten independence from exploitation and loot.” – Himanshu Kumar, a noted Gandhian activist. He ran ‘Vanvasi Chetna Ashram’ in Dantewada in Chhattisgarh for 18 years.
In the Bastar region in the heartland of India in Chhattisgarh, massacre of Adivasis is currently unfolding. In the name of making a “Maoist-free India”, the current Brahminical Hindutva regime has claimed to kill 111 Maoists in the last five months. Various human rights organizations and media houses have reported that at least more than 50 of them were ordinary Adivasi villagers and a large number of them were women. Two of the recent stark atrocities of the Indian state on its own people are as follows.
On January 1, police forces indiscriminately fired upon the hut of an innocent six-month-old girl named Mangli Sodi. Her mother was feeding her when the bullets struck, resulting in Mangli’s tragic death and severe injuries to her parents. In another appalling incident on April 2, the police took away a twelve-year-old girl called Kamli, who had been deaf and dumb since birth, and shot her multiple times, later falsely claiming that she was killed in an exchange of fire with the Maoists. Doubts were also raised by activists like Bela Bhatia that she had also been sexually assaulted. The mother could hardly recognize Kamli’s lifeless body, marred by bullet wounds. Many of the deaths of the actual Maoists are also tainted with human rights violations, where unarmed or injured combatants were dragged out of their shelters or the place of combat and shot in cold blood in clear violations of the Geneva Convention.
To carry out this bloodshed, the Indian state has deployed not only thousands of local police operatives but also more than ten thousand troops from border security and paramilitary forces as well as special counterinsurgency units. Military and police camps have been strategically established at intervals of three to five kilometers to saturate Bastar. In Chhattisgarh, there are nearly three hundred such camps, with Bastar alone hosting about a hundred. Each camp accommodates between five hundred and two thousand personnel, armed with heavy weaponry, and supported by drones of various sizes. Additionally, every camp is equipped with two mine-proof vehicles, all-terrain vehicles, and war tanks. The state is resorting to the use of drones to drop bombs in these Adivasi areas.
Now, the question is why is the Indian state resorting to such a genocidal aggression on its own people at the cost of undermining its perception as the “World’s Biggest Democracy”?
The answer is Chhattisgarh’s abundant reserves of minerals with big corporate players like Adani, Vedanta, Tata etc. poised like vultures, ready to exploit the minerals once the Adivasis are displaced or killed. The state of Chhattisgarh accounts for a large proportion of India’s mineral reserves, including 38% of its tin ore, 20% of its bauxite, 18% of its iron ore, 17% of its coal, and 4% of its diamonds. Mineral extraction in the state contributes almost 13% of India’s total mineral produce. The Bastar region alone possesses several minerals that are essential for various industries, including coal, iron ore, bauxite, dolomite, limestone, diamonds, and manganese. It also contains rare-metal and rare-earth (RMRE) pegmatites such as niobium, cerium, yttrium, lithium, and tantalum. The combined value of these mineral resources is staggering.
The Indian state’s strategy revolves around privatizing mining operations, paving the way for increased corporate involvement in the sector. Secondly, extensive infrastructure has been constructed to facilitate corporate operations, including the extraction and transportation of minerals. This infrastructure development includes roads, railways, airports, and other logistical support systems. Thirdly, the entire region has been militarized through the establishment of numerous police camps, aimed at providing security to corporate interests and suppressing dissent.
Adivasis who have a history of struggle and resistance, with their way of life intricately tied to land, water and forests, perceive this ruthless encroachment through privatization, corporatization, and militarization as a direct threat to their livelihood, existence and cultural heritage. Hence, they are resisting through any means available around them, be it armed or peaceful. They call this resistance the fight for Jal Jangal Jameen.
From 2003 to 2018, the Chhattisgarh government signed 272 Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) related to mining, entailing an investment of approximately $16.5 billion. However, 158 MoUs were terminated in 2021 as they did not materialize due to the resistance by the adivasis. Between 2019 and 2021, the fascist RSS-BJP government came up with a new set of 104 MoUs totaling $6 billion. To execute these MoUs and extract resources for the corporate masters, the Indian state has been attempting to displace the Adivasis from their land where the mineral wealth exists.
In fact, the tactics of forcefully displacing the Adivasis goes against the constitutional provisions stipulated in the Fifth Schedule under Article 244 of Indian Constitution. The Fifth Schedule mandates that any developmental initiatives within Adivasi areas must proceed only with their free, prior, and informed consent. The Fifth Schedule safeguards the Adivasis by granting special provisions for their governance, protecting their land and resources, and prohibiting the transfer of tribal land without consent. It also facilitates the establishment of autonomous district councils and regional councils within Scheduled Areas tasked with fostering self-governance and promoting socio-economic development among Adivasi communities. Similarly, the Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 abbreviated as PESA Act is a law enacted for ensuring self-governance through traditional Gram Sabhas for people living in the Scheduled Areas. However, despite the presence of these constitutional guarantees, Adivasis have remained consistent targets of state repression for mining activities, indicating a wide gap between constitutional principles and their practical enforcement.
One of the recent nonviolent movements involving thousands of Adivasis under the banner of Mulwasi Bachao Manch in Bastar was against illegal (under PESA Act) CRPF camp in Silger, starting in May 2021, overlapping with the historic farmers’ movement in Delhi. This movement had sparked similar nonviolent protests in other districts of Chhattisgarh like Bijapur, Sukma, and Dantewada, where people are tired of security camps, fake encounters, arrests etc. However, on May 17, 2021, CRPF officers shot and killed three people, including a 14-year-old, and a pregnant woman died from injuries in a stampede. Around 40 others were hurt. This incident again raises questions on constitutional means of dissent in Bastar. As Arundhati Roy said regarding possibility of nonviolent means of struggles in Bastar, “Gandhian satyagraha is a political theatre which needs an audience and in jungle there is no audience.” These kinds of acts of the state reaffirm and remind us again and again that this is a war, and the state has declared a war against its own people.
The state repression on adivasis in Chhattishgarh is centuries old. However, the current phase can be traced to the 1990’s introduction of neoliberal policies. Any regime in power, irrespective of the colour, have used the strategy of using vigilante groups like Jan Jagaran Abhiyan and Salwa Judum and the paramilitary forces like CRPF, BSF, ITBP, Greyhounds for targeted killings, sexual violence against women, looting and arson of homes to displace and terrorize them. However, since 2014, the fascist Modi regime has intensified the suppression to unprecedented levels.
Till 2017, Modi administration continued and intensified the Operation Green Hunt that was started in 2009. Then this “Hunt” was rebranded with an acronym SAMADHAN. None of these strategies succeeded in face of the strong resistance given by the Adivasis to implementing the MoUs. In response to this failure, a new war strategy was devised. Home Minister Amit Shah proclaimed this strategy during a meeting held in Surajkand, Haryana, in October 2022. In this meeting, Shah stated that his government would not spare any “anti-national” forces, whether they were pen holders (referring to public intellectuals and civil rights activists) or gun holders (the Maoists). He reiterated the same goal of ending Maoism in the country by 2024 during a meeting held on December 11, 2022, in New Delhi. As part of the Surajkand strategy, the Modi administration is systematically eliminating all forms of opposition, including opposition political parties that could impede its goal of transforming India into a Hindurashtra. To achieve this, the government has implicated hundreds of public intellectuals, writers, artists, and rights activists in sedition cases and incarcerated them. While stifling the voice of civil society, the Modi administration has escalated its campaign at the same time against Adivasis by intensifying militarization of Adivasi areas, imposing restrictions on adivasis’ movement and launching rockets from camps, causing panic and displacement. Since January of this year, Modi government has escalated its military operations under the name Operation Kagar, declaring it to be a decisive step to “liberate” Bastar. All the atrocities and human right abuses that we are seeing this year are under this strategy.
The situation will become grimmer with the increasing crisis of imperialism, particularly US imperialism, which pushes them to increase the exploitation of natural resources to compensate for their earnings. The domestic big corporates whose interests are intertwined with imperialism in forms of investments and loans have to increase the exploitation in their fronts to serve the international capital. For this they bolster fascist forces like Modi with an expectation that the political structure will help them facilitate it, this expectation is what the current regime is trying to meet.
Since 1991, with the advent of Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization (LPG), approximately 15 million farmers have abandoned agriculture, largely due to the economic system’s failure to provide adequate returns from farming, including pastoralism, fisheries, and forestry. Moreover, an alarming 60 million individuals have been forcibly displaced by various developmental projects such as dams, mining operations, expressways, ports, and industrial ventures, with many facing inadequate or no rehabilitation measures. Alongside Bastar, the situation gets repeated in Hasdeo in Chhattisgarh, Niyamgiri in Orissa, Latehar in Jharkhand, Deucha-Pachami in West Bengal, Nagarhole in Karnataka or in Ladakh.
The looming climate crisis caused by this ‘development model’ worsens the situation, with studies revealing that the United States, China, and India collectively contribute to 40% of global pollution. Under the Modi government, relentless pursuit of heavy mining, industrial expansion, dam construction, and indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources for exorbitant profits is wreaking havoc on the environment. 6,68,400 hectares of forests were destroyed in our country in 2015-2020 under Modi’s rule. The recent amendment to the Forest Conservation Act further facilitates environmental degradation and tribal displacement to cater to corporate interests. Despite objections from scientists and a Supreme Court ban on deforestation and construction in scheduled areas, bureaucratic implementation of this amended act is on. India ranks at the bottom in a list of 180 countries in the 2022 Environmental Performance Index. This quantifies the urgent need for action from concerned student-youth to raise voice against this alarming loot of Jal Jangal Jameen.
