India's Tribals/Adivasis and Naxalite/Maoist Violence - 2

Arundhati Roy on India's tribals/adivasis and the Naxalite/Maoist violence*:

This legacy of rebellion has left behind a furious people who have been isolated and marginalised by the Indian government. The Indian Constitution, the moral underpinning of Indian democracy, was adopted by Parliament in 1950. It was a tragic day for tribal people. The Constitution ratified colonial policy and made the State custodian of tribal homelands. Overnight, it turned the entire tribal population into squatters on their own land. It denied them their traditional rights to forest produce, it criminalised a whole way of life. In exchange for the right to vote, it snatched away their right to livelihood and dignity.

Over the past five years or so, the governments of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal have signed hundreds of MoUs with corporate houses, worth several billion dollars, all of them secret, for steel plants, sponge-iron factories, power plants, aluminium refineries, dams and mines. In order for the MoUs to translate into real money, tribal people must be moved. Therefore, this war.

This CSR masks the outrageous economics that underpins the mining sector in India. For example, according to the recent Lokayukta report for Karnataka, for every tonne of iron ore mined by a private company, the government gets a royalty of Rs 27 and the mining company makes Rs 5,000. In the bauxite and aluminium sector, the figures are even worse. We're talking about daylight robbery to the tune of billions of dollars.

There are no teachers in any of the schools, Chandu says. They've all run away. Or have you chased them away? No, we only chase police. But why should teachers come here, to the jungle, when they get their salaries sitting at home?

The perennial problem, the real bane of people's lives, was the biggest landlord of all, the Forest Department. Every morning, forest officials, even the most junior of them, would appear in villages like a bad dream, preventing people from ploughing their fields, collecting firewood, plucking leaves, picking fruit, grazing their cattle, from living. They brought elephants to overrun fields and scattered babool seeds to destroy the soil as they passed by. People would be beaten, arrested, humiliated, their crops destroyed. Of course, from the forest department's point of view, these were illegal people engaged in unconstitutional activity, and the department was only implementing the Rule of Law.

When the Party is a suitor (as it is now in Dandakaranya), wooing the people, attentive to their every need, then it genuinely is a People's Party, its army genuinely a People's Army. But after the Revolution how easily this love affair can turn into a bitter marriage. How easily the People's Army can turn upon the people. Today in Dandakaranya, the Party wants to keep the bauxite in the mountain. Tomorrow, will it change its mind?

Most of the people, including those in the PLGA (People's Liberation Guerrilla Army), have a haemoglobin count that's between five and six, when the standard for Indian women is 11. There's TB caused by more than two years of chronic anaemia. Young children are suffering from Protein Energy Malnutrition Grade II, in medical terminology called Kwashiorkor. "It's an epidemic here, like in Biafra," the doctor says, "I have worked in villages before, but I've never seen anything like this." Apart from this, there's malaria, osteoporosis, tapeworm, severe ear and tooth infections and primary amenorrhea — which is when malnutrition during puberty causes a woman's menstrual cycle to disappear, or never appear in the first place. "There are no clinics in this forest apart from one or two in Gadchiroli. No doctors. No medicines."

Niti talks about the range of agricultural problems they have to deal with. Only 2 per cent of the land is irrigated. In Abujhmad, ploughing was unheard of until 10 years ago. In Gadchiroli on the other hand, hybrid seeds and chemical pesticides are edging their way in. "We need urgent help in the agriculture department," Vinod says. "We need people who know about seeds, organic pesticides, permaculture. With a little help we could do a lot."

*"Walking With The Comrades" (Outlook, 29 March 2010)