12 March 2012. A World to Win News Service. India has been on a fast track to playing a more major role in the global economy. Indian and international corporations are itching to tear up the land inhabited by tribal peoples to get their hands on the riches that lie under them, minerals like bauxite, coal and iron ore. The Indian government cannot tolerate the fact that large swaths of the country are not under their control, and are determined to crush any resistance that stands in their way, especially the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and the masses hungry for radical change who make up the army they lead. In late 2009, with an array of military forces and the utmost cruelty, the Indian government unleashed a war on the people called Operation Green Hunt. Following is a press release dated 2 March, 2012 from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), signed by its spokesman, Abhay.
In the last week of February 2012, the police have arrested activists of our Party, including some senior cadres from Kolkata and Mumbai. On the specific intelligence inputs provided by the murderous Andra Pradesh Special Intelligence Bureau (APSIB), joint forces of police and Special Task Force (STF) of Andra Pradesh, Maharashtra and West Bengal have raided the shelters of our comrades in Kolkata and Mumbai suburbs and arrested at least nine comrades, including two women comrades. Comrades Sadanala Ramakrishna, Deepak Kumar Pargania, Sukumar Mandal, Bapi Mudi and Sambhu Charan were arrested from Kolkata, while Comrades Dinesh Wankhede, Aasimkumar Bhattacharya, Suman Gawde and Paru Patel were picked up from Thane in Maharashtra.
Comrades Sadanala Ramakrishna alias Santosh (62) and Aasimkumar Bhattacharya (65) were the seniors among the arrested. Senior comrade Sadanala Ramakrishna has been working for the revolution for at least four decades. He has been ailing with serious health problems for so many years. A mechanical engineer graduated from the prestigious Regional Engineering College (REC) of Warangal where other martyred leaders like Surapaneni Janardhan and Azad emerged as great revolutionaries of their times, Comrade Ramakrishna sacrificed his bright life for the cause of the liberation of the downtrodden.
Both the two women comrades arrested – Vijaya and Suman – have been undergoing medical treatment for some time, staying in the shelters outside the struggle zones. Particularly, comrade Vijaya has been suffering from serious heart problems.
The police forces, known for worst kind of cruelty, have been torturing these comrades mentally and physically while in custody. They have foisted several false cases against these comrades so that they could be languished behind bars forever.
On one hand the ruling classes are asserting that these arrests are a big success for them, and on the other hand, they are trying to portray our comrades as dangerous criminals, claiming that they have recovered huge amounts of cash and other material that is used for making arms.
These arrests are nothing but a part of Operation Green Hunt (OGH), i.e. the "War on People" which has been underway since 2009. The comprador ruling classes, in connivance with their imperialist masters, particularly with the US imperialists, have unleashed this brutal war of suppression in the poorest parts of India so that their neo-liberal policies of plunder of resources could go unhindered. They are particularly targeting the revolutionary leadership and eliminating them. As the Pentagon itself claimed recently, the US Special Forces are not only actively involved, but also assisting their Indian counterparts on the ground in the counter-insurgency operations aimed at eliminating the revolutionary leadership. This fact also shows us that the US has been patronizing in the ongoing Operation Green Hunt, making the values such as the freedom, independence, and sovereignty of our country a joke. The exploiting rulers of our country are daydreaming that this movement can be suppressed if its leadership is wiped out.
The revolutionary movement cannot be crushed with arrests and murders. The bars of the dungeons cannot restrict the revolutionary ideas from spreading among the vast masses.
The CC of CPI (Maoist) strongly condemns these arrests and the inhuman torture being inflicted on them. We demand immediate and unconditional release of these comrades, as well as all of the political prisoners languishing in various jails in all corners of our land. We also demand the lifting of all the false cases foisted against these comrades.
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India: CP(Maoist) on death of leading comrade Koteswarlu (Kishenji)
30 January 2012. A World to Win News Service. Following are excerpts from a press release signed by Abhay, spokesperson of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), dated 13 January. For the full statement see bannedthought.org.
On 24 November 2011 the Indian revolution lost its great leader and the oppressed masses of India lost their most reliable servant. November 24 would remain a dark day in the history of the Indian revolution. On 1 July 1 2010 the Indian ruling classes had murdered our Politburo member and spokesperson Comrade Azad. Within one and a half years, another Politburo member, Comrade Koteswarlu (who is popular among the people and party ranks as Kotanna, Prahlad, Ramji, Kishenji and Bimal), was caught alive in a covert operation, tortured inhumanly and was killed in a fake encounter.
In India, which claims to be the largest democracy in the world, the feudal and comprador-bureaucrat bourgeois ruling classes, with the support of the imperialists, particularly the US imperialists, are trying to suppress the democratic, national liberation and revolutionary movements with an iron heel. Particularly, since 2009 they are carrying on an unjust war on the people in the name of "Operation Green Hunt". They are shamelessly violating even the constitution and the laws formulated by themselves and are killing people, activists and leaders of the movement. They are unsuccessfully trying to justify all their unlawful murders in the name of a lie named "encounter" tracing the footsteps of the British colonial rulers. Now it is an established fact that an "encounter" anywhere in India means a conspiratorial murder by the state.
Comrade Koteswarlu was born on 26 November 1954 in Peddapalli, a town of Karimnagar district which has a legacy of the glorious Telangana armed struggle. He led the Indian revolutionary movement for nearly four decades. Comrade Koteswarlu was brought up by democratic-thinking parents and imbibed patriotic feelings and love for the oppressed people since childhood. He was a top-ranking representative of the generation after the glorious Naxalbari rebellion. Though the Naxalbari rebellion which established Maoist Protracted People's War as the path for the Indian revolution was suppressed within a few years, it had a great impact all over the country. Peasant rebellions arose in many areas following its model. It awoke the students in colleges and universities. The slogan "Naxalbari Ek Hi Rasta" (The Only Way is Naxalbari) reverberated all over the country. It was this backdrop that turned Comrade Koteswarlu into a Maoist revolutionary.
At the end of the 1970s, Comrade Koteswarlu played a crucial role in the Jagityal peasant movement and in the first decade of the 21st century he became the architect of the illustrious Lalgarh people's upsurge. He was an inspiring leader who never left the people and the cadres and who stood firmly during many an ebb and flow in the Indian revolutionary movement with courage and initiative. He was an organizer with initiative, a warrior/commander and a guide who imparted love and care. His very presence proved to be a hard nut to crack for the enemy right from the beginning. He successfully fought back several attacks and attempts to murder him. He was a tireless warrior who fought incessantly and uncompromisingly and never let go of any opportunity to attack the enemy politically and militarily.
That is why the ruling clique of this country led by Sonia-Manmohan-Chidambaram-Pranab-Jairam colluded with the Chief Minister of West Bengal Mamata Banerjee and killed him in the cruelest manner. The brutal signs of torture on his dead body indicate the fascist nature of the enemy, its cowardliness and its defeat. On the other hand he bore all the inhuman tortures in the hands of the enemy and emerged victorious even in the face of death. The crimson of the international red flag of the proletarians turned deeper with the blood spilled by him in Jungle Mahal.
On 24 November 2011 the Indian revolution lost its great leader and the oppressed masses of India lost their most reliable servant. November 24 would remain a dark day in the history of the Indian revolution. On 1 July 1 2010 the Indian ruling classes had murdered our Politburo member and spokesperson Comrade Azad. Within one and a half years, another Politburo member, Comrade Koteswarlu (who is popular among the people and party ranks as Kotanna, Prahlad, Ramji, Kishenji and Bimal), was caught alive in a covert operation, tortured inhumanly and was killed in a fake encounter.
In India, which claims to be the largest democracy in the world, the feudal and comprador-bureaucrat bourgeois ruling classes, with the support of the imperialists, particularly the US imperialists, are trying to suppress the democratic, national liberation and revolutionary movements with an iron heel. Particularly, since 2009 they are carrying on an unjust war on the people in the name of "Operation Green Hunt". They are shamelessly violating even the constitution and the laws formulated by themselves and are killing people, activists and leaders of the movement. They are unsuccessfully trying to justify all their unlawful murders in the name of a lie named "encounter" tracing the footsteps of the British colonial rulers. Now it is an established fact that an "encounter" anywhere in India means a conspiratorial murder by the state.
Comrade Koteswarlu was born on 26 November 1954 in Peddapalli, a town of Karimnagar district which has a legacy of the glorious Telangana armed struggle. He led the Indian revolutionary movement for nearly four decades. Comrade Koteswarlu was brought up by democratic-thinking parents and imbibed patriotic feelings and love for the oppressed people since childhood. He was a top-ranking representative of the generation after the glorious Naxalbari rebellion. Though the Naxalbari rebellion which established Maoist Protracted People's War as the path for the Indian revolution was suppressed within a few years, it had a great impact all over the country. Peasant rebellions arose in many areas following its model. It awoke the students in colleges and universities. The slogan "Naxalbari Ek Hi Rasta" (The Only Way is Naxalbari) reverberated all over the country. It was this backdrop that turned Comrade Koteswarlu into a Maoist revolutionary.
At the end of the 1970s, Comrade Koteswarlu played a crucial role in the Jagityal peasant movement and in the first decade of the 21st century he became the architect of the illustrious Lalgarh people's upsurge. He was an inspiring leader who never left the people and the cadres and who stood firmly during many an ebb and flow in the Indian revolutionary movement with courage and initiative. He was an organizer with initiative, a warrior/commander and a guide who imparted love and care. His very presence proved to be a hard nut to crack for the enemy right from the beginning. He successfully fought back several attacks and attempts to murder him. He was a tireless warrior who fought incessantly and uncompromisingly and never let go of any opportunity to attack the enemy politically and militarily.
That is why the ruling clique of this country led by Sonia-Manmohan-Chidambaram-Pranab-Jairam colluded with the Chief Minister of West Bengal Mamata Banerjee and killed him in the cruelest manner. The brutal signs of torture on his dead body indicate the fascist nature of the enemy, its cowardliness and its defeat. On the other hand he bore all the inhuman tortures in the hands of the enemy and emerged victorious even in the face of death. The crimson of the international red flag of the proletarians turned deeper with the blood spilled by him in Jungle Mahal.
Farmer suicides in India: a policy-induced disaster
23 January, 2012. A World to Win News Service. Sanhati, an Indian online magazine, has written and published a major report on the farmer suicides that have reached epic proportions in that country. The full article, about twice as long as this version, with charts, graphs and maps, can be found at sanhati.com (15 January issue). The article exposes the choke-hold of the multinational corporations and the impact of neoliberal trade policies on small farmers in India.
Some background: With the fall of the Soviet Union 1990s, the US was able to accelerate the breaking down of barriers to globalised investment, exploitation and trade. One of the biggest changes came in India, once financially as well as politically dominated by the USSR (where socialism had been overthrown in the 1950s and replaced with a form of capitalism in the guise of state ownership).
Indian agricultural production became even more deeply integrated into the workings of the global imperialist market. The U.S., the World Bank, and the IMF pressured India to privatize many of its state-owned enterprises, cut subsidies to small farmers, and integrate its economy, including agriculture, more closely into the Western imperialist-dominated global capitalist order.
A predominantly agrarian society, 70 percent of Indian's population (800 million people) live in rural areas. Food formerly produced for domestic consumption gave way to cash crops for the global market. Today India is now the second largest producer of cotton in the world. Mass farmer suicides were unknown in India before the 1990s.
More than 253,000 farmers have been reported to have committed suicide between 1995 and 2010; the actual number is likely to be higher because of deficiencies in reporting. Four states account for about two-thirds of these suicides: Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh), Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Another four account for a fifth of all the suicides: West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh.
The evidence regarding the ratio of suicide mortality rate for farmers and non-farmers across Indian states clearly establishes that the spate of farmer suicides can neither be considered a temporary phenomenon, nor can it be considered part of the "ordinary" suicide deaths in the country.
Here are two cases studies cotton in Vidarbha (Maharashtra), and coffee in Wayanad (Kerala) that provide details about the factors at work. The conclusion that emerges is the following: farmer suicides are a straightforward case of a policy-induced disaster. Policy changes under a neoliberal dispensation (starting early to mid-1980s) lead to the phenomenon of farmer suicides via the route of acute agrarian distress.
What is leading such a large number of farmers to commit suicides? The simple answer is: agrarian distress caused by large, mounting and unsustainable levels of indebtedness. Their incomes are systematically falling below their expenditures.
Income from agricultural production had been dwindling because revenues have stagnated (or falling) due to a complex set of factors while costs of agricultural production have gone up.
First: yield (i.e., crop output per unit of land) growth of most crops have stagnated. This is the direct result of the increasing pressure on cultivable land: the total area under cultivation has declined while the number of operational holdings have increased. Between 1960-61 and 2003, the total number of operational holdings increased from 50.77 million to 101.27 million. During the same period, the total operated area declined from 133.46 million hectares to 107.65 million hectares. Thus average operated area declined from 2.63 hectares to 1.06 hectares. (NSSO, Some Aspects of Operational Land Holdings in India, various issues)
On top of this is the fragmentation of each holding into multiple plots. Thus, the declining size of operational holdings, along with continued fragmentation, has meant smaller production units in terms of land area. This constrains the ability to use improved technologies of production, and has been one of the main reasons behind the stagnation of yield growth.
Second: due to the neoliberal policy orientation and the neglect of the rural sector, agricultural research and extension services have virtually disappeared from the country; thus new and better crop varieties have not reached the farmer. Along with this, irrigation (surface water) infrastructure has been neglected, and soil improvement and management efforts have been drastically curtailed. Compounding this has been the excessive use of fertilizers in several areas of the country that saw the so-called Green Revolution. All this has led to degradation in the quality of the soil, and contributed to the stagnation of crop yield growth.
Third: gradually doing away with import restrictions has meant a flood of low price agricultural imports (the low prices from US and European countries being supported by massive subsidies in those countries). By a perverse turn of policy, the minimum support price (MSP) for many crops have been kept below market prices. Both these factors have put downward pressure on crop prices, especially for smaller farmers who lack storage and transportation facilities (and have to sell to the local trader right after harvest).
Enter export restrictions and multinational corporations
One of the main reasons behind the rising costs of cultivation over the past two decades is the gradual change in crop patterns that have been directly and indirectly induced by policy changes. The lifting of export restrictions and the entry of multinational corporations have encouraged farmers to shift from traditional crops (like rice, wheat, pulses, etc.) to cash crops like cotton, potato, tomato, etc.
Cotton is the quintessential crop that lies entwined with the wave of farmer suicides. Production of cotton requires large capital outlays, large in comparison to typical earnings of farmer households. Seeds need to be bought from the market every year (because of restrictions put in place by the multinational corporations [MNCs] selling the seeds); large quantities of fertilizers and pesticides are also needed (whose prices are increasing because of reduction of subsidies). Cotton cultivation (like most other cash crops) is very water intensive. Since, during this same period, provision of irrigation was being systematically reduced, farmers had to make investments in bore well (tube well) technology to secure the supply of ground water. This involved substantial outlays, a sum often far beyond the reach of the average farmer. Taken together, these factors implied increasing costs of cotton cultivation.
Frequently, these costs (especially the large outlays required for tube wells or even the buying of seeds, fertilizer and pesticides that was part of the cotton cultivation package) could only be met with credit. The credit was provided by the same agency (often a branch of some MNC like Monsanto) that sold the seeds, the fertilizer and the pesticide, along with the knowledge that was required to carry out the cultivation. With such interlinked markets, there was a serious conflict of interest in the sense that the agency would almost always "advise" farmers to use much more than the optimal quantity of inputs.
The same neoliberal policy framework that reduced subsidies on fertilizer and diesel (and petrol), let the irrigation infrastructure gradually go to the dogs, opened up the import and export of agricultural crops, increased the cost of electricity, also reduced the rural component of development expenditures. Also the share of expenditures devoted to the agricultural sector fell from 13.1 percent to 7.4 percent during the same period.
Taken these factors together, you can see how vulnerable to shocks the poor farmer households became. If there was a medical emergency in the household or if there was an important life event (birth, marriage, death) or if there was a crop failure due to weather shocks or growth of pests, the household had to per force incur debt. This debt is in addition to the debt that the farmer would already have incurred if he/she had decided to move into the cultivation of cash crops like cotton. But where could the farmers turn to for credit at such times?
Dwindling institutional credit
After nationalization of the banking system in 1969, there was an impressive expansion of credit to the agricultural sector. The share of agricultural credit in total bank lending nearly doubled from around 10 percent in the mid-1970s to about 18 percent in the late 1980s. Financial liberalization, an important part of the neoliberal policy regime, reversed this trend. The share of agricultural credit in total bank lending declined from the peak of 18 percent in the late 1980s to about 11 percent in 2005. The decline has continued since then.
Financial sector reforms also struck down the policy of branch expansion to rural areas in the mid-1990s. The result has been that rural branches of commercial banks has declined from 51.2 percent in March 1996 to 45.7 percent in March 2005. Data also shows that the share of agricultural credit cornered by farm sizes of more than 5 acres has increased.
With institutional sources of credit drying up as a direct result of policy changes, farmer households, especially small and marginal farmer households, were pushed into the lap of the new breed of moneylenders, including the so-called micro-finance institutions (MFIs). Interest rates charged by these sources were very high if not outright usurious. Thus, debt-service payments became an important, and increasingly large, component of monthly household expenditures. With mounting debt came the pressure of monthly payments. And, if for some reason cash flow problems emerged (for instance, due to a crop failure), it increased the stress on the household enormously. In extreme cases, it led to loss of face, despair and suicide.
The adoption of the neoliberal model of capitalism by the ruling elite in India since the early 1990s has led to distinct aggregate-level institutional and policy changes related to public investment, input subsidies, organized credit and external trade; these policy changes have negatively impacted on the incomes of small and marginal farmers while their essential expenditures have continued increasing. Stagnant incomes and rising expenditures have led to pressures of mounting debt, creating acute distress that often lead to the extreme step of suicide.
Incidences of what we might call "cotton suicide" have been a pan-Indian phenomenon. From Punjab in the north to Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh in the south, cotton deaths cover broad swathes of land cutting across the heart of rural India. The state that was most severely affected by cotton suicides is Maharashtra. In particular, the eastern part of the state, the Vidarbha region, has the dubious distinction of being the farmer suicide capital of India.
Cotton crisis in Vidarbha
Vidarbha grows many crops such as jowar, tur, and soya bean, other than cotton. But it is the cotton farmers on whom the spate of suicides has been taking the heaviest toll. From different reports and studies, as we have indicated in the first part of this article, it appears that the reasons behind the agrarian crisis are systemic in nature. The crisis is a result of policy decisions which have blown away the protective covers for farmers in particular small and poor cotton farmers against highly subsidised imports and unscrupulous traders.
Maharashtra had a programme for procurement of cotton since 1972-73. The purpose of the Monopoly Cotton Procurement Scheme (MCPS) was to ensure a stable price to farmers. However, with liberalisation and opening of trade, operation of the MCPS was curtailed. It is true that the Maharashtra government was incurring high losses due to these operations. Serious problems had emerged in the form of middlemen between the farmers and MCPS who appropriated parts of the subsidy that should have gone to farmers. But the losses of the MCPS seem to be a function of other policies as well, which depressed the open market price and inflated the subsidy bill, rather than the inefficiency of farmers. The minimum support price was below the cost of production!
The sharp drop in procurement prices announced by the Maharashtra Government fell from Rs. 2500 a quintal (1 quintal = 100 kilos) in 2003-04 to Rs. (1 rupee = .019 USD) in 2004-05. Hence it is clear that this error at the level of policy, which slashed procurement prices even as cost of cultivation (and hence open market price) went up, spurred the crisis. A Planning Commission report tellingly notes that "the immediate trigger of present distress was the sudden shock faced by the farmers due to the withdrawal of monopoly procurement which had been in vogue for over the past two decades."
Trade policies
It is widely believed in policy circles that with the dismantling of trade barriers, competition takes place on a level playing field where no one has an undue advantage. The most efficient producer wins, ultimately benefiting consumers. Based on this laudable premise and trade theories based on invalid assumptions, India started to do away with trade restrictions. Quantitative restrictions on imports were removed, and import tariffs were drastically reduced.
But instead of giving equal opportunity to all farmers of the world, this policy move dealt a heavy blow to the cotton farmers in Maharashtra. The huge subsidies provided to US and European farmers enables them to sell their agricultural products at a price below the cost of production, thus undercutting farmers in India (and other parts of the third world). The average subsidy per hectare in the OECD countries is about four times the subsidy that an Indian farmer gets. According to a recent study, during the period 1998-2003, the export price of US cotton was less than half the cost of production. No wonder the level playing field is a little too steeply inclined!
Added to the element of subsidy were other important factors which spoiled the pitch for Indian, and in particular Vidarbha cotton farmers. First, compared to average global yields (i.e., output per unit of land), cotton yield in India is not impressive. China's yield is nearly thrice that of India's. Second, within India, Maharashtra is a rather low-yield state, although it has the highest area under cotton cultivation. Cost per unit is also relatively high in Maharashtra, which means profit per unit is substantially lower. Thus, when subsidised cotton from US and Europe flowed into the domestic economy and depressed cotton prices, this had a particularly devastating effect on the cotton farmers of Maharashtra. Vidarbha was most severely hit because its biggest cash crop is cotton.
Harvest failure
2004-05 was a particularly bad year for Amravati division in Maharashtra due to deficient monsoon rains in a number of districts. This meant that a part of the cotton crop withered in the fields. But the record harvest of cotton at the national level pushed down the overall price. Squeezed by the low price and low output, many farmers went into debt. They could have recovered, had the next year been any good. However, when procurement price plummeted the next year and procurement volumes were drastically cut, farmers were pushed to the wall. For many farmers, suicide turned out to be the last rational decision in the face of constant harassment by local money lenders and cooperative bank agents.
While a deficient monsoon is certainly bad for farmers, the overall impact of rainfall deficiency in Vidarbha was so disastrous because it was magnified several fold by a host of other factors. These magnification factors were (a) the widespread adoption of Bt cotton (a [genetically-engineered] variety made by the giant US chemical company Monsanto), (b) the contraction of organized credit, and (c) the lack of irrigation facilities.
Bt Cotton seeds are arguably superior in that they have a far higher yield (12 quintals per hectare) compared to the desi [Indian] variety (7 quintals per hectare). But the cost of the seed is three times higher for Bt than desi. There are additional concerns that the multinational corporations are making supernormal profits from this.
In Maharashtra, most cotton farms are entirely dependent on rainfall, with only 2 percent to 3 percent being irrigated. Hence, when the monsoon failed, Bt cotton crop became particularly vulnerable. It is to be noted that besides irrigation, Bt cotton requires a regular supply of other inputs, such as pesticides, and fertilisers. In short, although Bt cotton gives a higher ratio of revenue and cost, the cost per hectare is much higher than the desi [Indian] variety. The substantially higher cost of production required large amounts (i.e., large as a ratio of average farm incomes) of borrowing, thereby increasing vulnerability and leading to suicides when the crop failed.
Organised credit
These farmers who commit suicide had substantially higher debt obligations to moneylenders. The rate of interest on such unorganized loans is significantly higher, ranging between 25 percent to 50 percent for a period of four to six months.
Not enough organised credit is reaching the farmers of this region. Many cooperative banks have become dysfunctional because the number of defaulters have grown in the face of crisis. Contraction of organized credit interacted with commercialization of seeds to give birth to a new breed of moneylenders: input traders (i.e., traders who sold seeds, pesticides, fertilisers, and other inputs for agricultural production). Since interlinking of credit, input and output markets is a well known territory of exploitation in developing countries, the whole mechanism kicked in. Furthermore, due to dearth of extension services provided by the government, it is the traders on whom farmers depended for counselling, leading to a serious conflict of interest, and resulting in the purchase of unreliable seeds and inputs.
Vidarbha receives little state expenditure in irrigation. The dearth of irrigation facilities has compounded the crisis in cotton as uninformed farmers adopted expensive Bt cotton seeds which do not do well in erratic rainfed conditions.
Behind the series of dry statistics presented here are the loss of lives and livelihood of farmers, caused by a pervasive crisis in agriculture. The destruction of agricultural livelihood has a chain reaction on other facets of the local economy. Local business, trade and commerce, the schooling of children, the local manufacturing sector, etc. get severely hit. The interesting, and infuriating, part of it all is that much of this tribulation was neither inevitable nor accidental. These are the direct results of policies as we have argued throughout this article. The total number of suicides in Maharashtra has declined from their level of mid-2000s of more than to 4,000 per year. But even the current number of suicides is quite high. In 2010, 3,141 farmers committed suicide in Maharashtra. That is more than eight persons per day. Hardly a cause for celebration!
Case study 2: Crisis in coffee in Wayanad
In 2004-05, around 150 farmers in the prosperous north-eastern Kerala district of Wayanad committed suicide. Numerically, this is not significantly large compared to the Vidarbha suicides. But analysing the case is useful because it throws up interesting common patterns across regions and crops. Here, we will briefly present some characteristic features underpinning the mass human tragedy in Wayanad.
In Wayanad district of Kerala, coffee farming accounts for 70,000 hectares of land, and employs 60,000 small growers. In 2006, the price of coffee crashed to Rs. 24 a kilo from a level of more than Rs. 130 a kilo a few years earlier. The price of raw cherry [beans] declined from Rs. 70-Rs. 80 to Rs. 15-Rs. 16 a kilo. As P. Sainath reports, coffee growers of Wayanad lost nearly Rs. 800 crores within a brief span of four years. This does not however mean that the price of processed coffee has also crashed. Martin Khor of the Third World Network notes that in "992 producer countries earned $10 billion from a global market worth around $30 billion. In 2002, they made less than $6 billion in a market that had doubled in size."
What stands between, on the one hand, the prosperity of the global coffee market and, on the other, the misery of its growers is a thick layer of cartels and monopoly trading houses. The third world countries which produce coffee are given a raw deal by multinational companies. Market power at both ends allow the MNCs to sell the final product at a high price while pushing the price at which they buy from the third world growers to phenomenally low levels. Moreover, there is the added element of playing one third world country against another when they face labour resistance in one country. Sainath reports,
"Wayanad briefly saw a great rise in prices in the late 1990s when frost hit the Brazilian crop. 'And also because,' says a senior Government official who has tracked exports for two decades, 'of sheer rigging. Four major companies dominate the world market. When faced with a workers' strike in Brazil, they hike prices for Kerala coffee. So there's a boom. When the crushed Brazilians return to the fields, the companies pull the plug on us. Now they have two major, cheap sources.'"
Why can local producers not process their high-quality produce and sell it in the market? After all, the high priced branded coffees that dominate the market are much inferior in quality compared to the local product. Apparently then, the bulk coffee buyers close ranks to exercise monopoly power. In short, growers face boycott from the buyers (firms in the coffee processing industry) if they try to directly sell in the market.
As in other cases of agrarian crises, Wayanad's local economy got disarrayed in the wake of the price crash. Shops and cinema theatres have closed, trade and commerce has plummeted. The crisis has had a major effect on local labour markets and migration. On the demand side of the labour market, as production suffered there were fewer jobs available for farm labourers. On the supply side of the labour market, many owner-farmers joined the rank of wage labourers to make ends meet. This raised the supply of labourer and lowered the chances of finding a job even further. In short, not only were fewer days of work generated by the local economy, even wage rates fell as supply of labour outstripped its demand.
Farm labourers and small owner-farmers migrated across the state border to Karnataka. P. Sainath reports that the number of trips by government buses has gone up considerably, from 3 to 4 about five years ago to 32 a day in 2005. Do they earn a better livelihood now? In Karnataka farms the wage was about 30 percent lower than what they once earned in Wayanad. If we include the price of the bus ticket, the overall income has declined substantially.
Deep in debt, farmers try to cut losses by curtailing production, which thrusts them deeper into penury. Taking one's own life in such times appeared to many as the best choice available to escape harassment from banks and moneylenders.
Some background: With the fall of the Soviet Union 1990s, the US was able to accelerate the breaking down of barriers to globalised investment, exploitation and trade. One of the biggest changes came in India, once financially as well as politically dominated by the USSR (where socialism had been overthrown in the 1950s and replaced with a form of capitalism in the guise of state ownership).
Indian agricultural production became even more deeply integrated into the workings of the global imperialist market. The U.S., the World Bank, and the IMF pressured India to privatize many of its state-owned enterprises, cut subsidies to small farmers, and integrate its economy, including agriculture, more closely into the Western imperialist-dominated global capitalist order.
A predominantly agrarian society, 70 percent of Indian's population (800 million people) live in rural areas. Food formerly produced for domestic consumption gave way to cash crops for the global market. Today India is now the second largest producer of cotton in the world. Mass farmer suicides were unknown in India before the 1990s.
More than 253,000 farmers have been reported to have committed suicide between 1995 and 2010; the actual number is likely to be higher because of deficiencies in reporting. Four states account for about two-thirds of these suicides: Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh), Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Another four account for a fifth of all the suicides: West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh.
The evidence regarding the ratio of suicide mortality rate for farmers and non-farmers across Indian states clearly establishes that the spate of farmer suicides can neither be considered a temporary phenomenon, nor can it be considered part of the "ordinary" suicide deaths in the country.
Here are two cases studies cotton in Vidarbha (Maharashtra), and coffee in Wayanad (Kerala) that provide details about the factors at work. The conclusion that emerges is the following: farmer suicides are a straightforward case of a policy-induced disaster. Policy changes under a neoliberal dispensation (starting early to mid-1980s) lead to the phenomenon of farmer suicides via the route of acute agrarian distress.
What is leading such a large number of farmers to commit suicides? The simple answer is: agrarian distress caused by large, mounting and unsustainable levels of indebtedness. Their incomes are systematically falling below their expenditures.
Income from agricultural production had been dwindling because revenues have stagnated (or falling) due to a complex set of factors while costs of agricultural production have gone up.
First: yield (i.e., crop output per unit of land) growth of most crops have stagnated. This is the direct result of the increasing pressure on cultivable land: the total area under cultivation has declined while the number of operational holdings have increased. Between 1960-61 and 2003, the total number of operational holdings increased from 50.77 million to 101.27 million. During the same period, the total operated area declined from 133.46 million hectares to 107.65 million hectares. Thus average operated area declined from 2.63 hectares to 1.06 hectares. (NSSO, Some Aspects of Operational Land Holdings in India, various issues)
On top of this is the fragmentation of each holding into multiple plots. Thus, the declining size of operational holdings, along with continued fragmentation, has meant smaller production units in terms of land area. This constrains the ability to use improved technologies of production, and has been one of the main reasons behind the stagnation of yield growth.
Second: due to the neoliberal policy orientation and the neglect of the rural sector, agricultural research and extension services have virtually disappeared from the country; thus new and better crop varieties have not reached the farmer. Along with this, irrigation (surface water) infrastructure has been neglected, and soil improvement and management efforts have been drastically curtailed. Compounding this has been the excessive use of fertilizers in several areas of the country that saw the so-called Green Revolution. All this has led to degradation in the quality of the soil, and contributed to the stagnation of crop yield growth.
Third: gradually doing away with import restrictions has meant a flood of low price agricultural imports (the low prices from US and European countries being supported by massive subsidies in those countries). By a perverse turn of policy, the minimum support price (MSP) for many crops have been kept below market prices. Both these factors have put downward pressure on crop prices, especially for smaller farmers who lack storage and transportation facilities (and have to sell to the local trader right after harvest).
Enter export restrictions and multinational corporations
One of the main reasons behind the rising costs of cultivation over the past two decades is the gradual change in crop patterns that have been directly and indirectly induced by policy changes. The lifting of export restrictions and the entry of multinational corporations have encouraged farmers to shift from traditional crops (like rice, wheat, pulses, etc.) to cash crops like cotton, potato, tomato, etc.
Cotton is the quintessential crop that lies entwined with the wave of farmer suicides. Production of cotton requires large capital outlays, large in comparison to typical earnings of farmer households. Seeds need to be bought from the market every year (because of restrictions put in place by the multinational corporations [MNCs] selling the seeds); large quantities of fertilizers and pesticides are also needed (whose prices are increasing because of reduction of subsidies). Cotton cultivation (like most other cash crops) is very water intensive. Since, during this same period, provision of irrigation was being systematically reduced, farmers had to make investments in bore well (tube well) technology to secure the supply of ground water. This involved substantial outlays, a sum often far beyond the reach of the average farmer. Taken together, these factors implied increasing costs of cotton cultivation.
Frequently, these costs (especially the large outlays required for tube wells or even the buying of seeds, fertilizer and pesticides that was part of the cotton cultivation package) could only be met with credit. The credit was provided by the same agency (often a branch of some MNC like Monsanto) that sold the seeds, the fertilizer and the pesticide, along with the knowledge that was required to carry out the cultivation. With such interlinked markets, there was a serious conflict of interest in the sense that the agency would almost always "advise" farmers to use much more than the optimal quantity of inputs.
The same neoliberal policy framework that reduced subsidies on fertilizer and diesel (and petrol), let the irrigation infrastructure gradually go to the dogs, opened up the import and export of agricultural crops, increased the cost of electricity, also reduced the rural component of development expenditures. Also the share of expenditures devoted to the agricultural sector fell from 13.1 percent to 7.4 percent during the same period.
Taken these factors together, you can see how vulnerable to shocks the poor farmer households became. If there was a medical emergency in the household or if there was an important life event (birth, marriage, death) or if there was a crop failure due to weather shocks or growth of pests, the household had to per force incur debt. This debt is in addition to the debt that the farmer would already have incurred if he/she had decided to move into the cultivation of cash crops like cotton. But where could the farmers turn to for credit at such times?
Dwindling institutional credit
After nationalization of the banking system in 1969, there was an impressive expansion of credit to the agricultural sector. The share of agricultural credit in total bank lending nearly doubled from around 10 percent in the mid-1970s to about 18 percent in the late 1980s. Financial liberalization, an important part of the neoliberal policy regime, reversed this trend. The share of agricultural credit in total bank lending declined from the peak of 18 percent in the late 1980s to about 11 percent in 2005. The decline has continued since then.
Financial sector reforms also struck down the policy of branch expansion to rural areas in the mid-1990s. The result has been that rural branches of commercial banks has declined from 51.2 percent in March 1996 to 45.7 percent in March 2005. Data also shows that the share of agricultural credit cornered by farm sizes of more than 5 acres has increased.
With institutional sources of credit drying up as a direct result of policy changes, farmer households, especially small and marginal farmer households, were pushed into the lap of the new breed of moneylenders, including the so-called micro-finance institutions (MFIs). Interest rates charged by these sources were very high if not outright usurious. Thus, debt-service payments became an important, and increasingly large, component of monthly household expenditures. With mounting debt came the pressure of monthly payments. And, if for some reason cash flow problems emerged (for instance, due to a crop failure), it increased the stress on the household enormously. In extreme cases, it led to loss of face, despair and suicide.
The adoption of the neoliberal model of capitalism by the ruling elite in India since the early 1990s has led to distinct aggregate-level institutional and policy changes related to public investment, input subsidies, organized credit and external trade; these policy changes have negatively impacted on the incomes of small and marginal farmers while their essential expenditures have continued increasing. Stagnant incomes and rising expenditures have led to pressures of mounting debt, creating acute distress that often lead to the extreme step of suicide.
Incidences of what we might call "cotton suicide" have been a pan-Indian phenomenon. From Punjab in the north to Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh in the south, cotton deaths cover broad swathes of land cutting across the heart of rural India. The state that was most severely affected by cotton suicides is Maharashtra. In particular, the eastern part of the state, the Vidarbha region, has the dubious distinction of being the farmer suicide capital of India.
Cotton crisis in Vidarbha
Vidarbha grows many crops such as jowar, tur, and soya bean, other than cotton. But it is the cotton farmers on whom the spate of suicides has been taking the heaviest toll. From different reports and studies, as we have indicated in the first part of this article, it appears that the reasons behind the agrarian crisis are systemic in nature. The crisis is a result of policy decisions which have blown away the protective covers for farmers in particular small and poor cotton farmers against highly subsidised imports and unscrupulous traders.
Maharashtra had a programme for procurement of cotton since 1972-73. The purpose of the Monopoly Cotton Procurement Scheme (MCPS) was to ensure a stable price to farmers. However, with liberalisation and opening of trade, operation of the MCPS was curtailed. It is true that the Maharashtra government was incurring high losses due to these operations. Serious problems had emerged in the form of middlemen between the farmers and MCPS who appropriated parts of the subsidy that should have gone to farmers. But the losses of the MCPS seem to be a function of other policies as well, which depressed the open market price and inflated the subsidy bill, rather than the inefficiency of farmers. The minimum support price was below the cost of production!
The sharp drop in procurement prices announced by the Maharashtra Government fell from Rs. 2500 a quintal (1 quintal = 100 kilos) in 2003-04 to Rs. (1 rupee = .019 USD) in 2004-05. Hence it is clear that this error at the level of policy, which slashed procurement prices even as cost of cultivation (and hence open market price) went up, spurred the crisis. A Planning Commission report tellingly notes that "the immediate trigger of present distress was the sudden shock faced by the farmers due to the withdrawal of monopoly procurement which had been in vogue for over the past two decades."
Trade policies
It is widely believed in policy circles that with the dismantling of trade barriers, competition takes place on a level playing field where no one has an undue advantage. The most efficient producer wins, ultimately benefiting consumers. Based on this laudable premise and trade theories based on invalid assumptions, India started to do away with trade restrictions. Quantitative restrictions on imports were removed, and import tariffs were drastically reduced.
But instead of giving equal opportunity to all farmers of the world, this policy move dealt a heavy blow to the cotton farmers in Maharashtra. The huge subsidies provided to US and European farmers enables them to sell their agricultural products at a price below the cost of production, thus undercutting farmers in India (and other parts of the third world). The average subsidy per hectare in the OECD countries is about four times the subsidy that an Indian farmer gets. According to a recent study, during the period 1998-2003, the export price of US cotton was less than half the cost of production. No wonder the level playing field is a little too steeply inclined!
Added to the element of subsidy were other important factors which spoiled the pitch for Indian, and in particular Vidarbha cotton farmers. First, compared to average global yields (i.e., output per unit of land), cotton yield in India is not impressive. China's yield is nearly thrice that of India's. Second, within India, Maharashtra is a rather low-yield state, although it has the highest area under cotton cultivation. Cost per unit is also relatively high in Maharashtra, which means profit per unit is substantially lower. Thus, when subsidised cotton from US and Europe flowed into the domestic economy and depressed cotton prices, this had a particularly devastating effect on the cotton farmers of Maharashtra. Vidarbha was most severely hit because its biggest cash crop is cotton.
Harvest failure
2004-05 was a particularly bad year for Amravati division in Maharashtra due to deficient monsoon rains in a number of districts. This meant that a part of the cotton crop withered in the fields. But the record harvest of cotton at the national level pushed down the overall price. Squeezed by the low price and low output, many farmers went into debt. They could have recovered, had the next year been any good. However, when procurement price plummeted the next year and procurement volumes were drastically cut, farmers were pushed to the wall. For many farmers, suicide turned out to be the last rational decision in the face of constant harassment by local money lenders and cooperative bank agents.
While a deficient monsoon is certainly bad for farmers, the overall impact of rainfall deficiency in Vidarbha was so disastrous because it was magnified several fold by a host of other factors. These magnification factors were (a) the widespread adoption of Bt cotton (a [genetically-engineered] variety made by the giant US chemical company Monsanto), (b) the contraction of organized credit, and (c) the lack of irrigation facilities.
Bt Cotton seeds are arguably superior in that they have a far higher yield (12 quintals per hectare) compared to the desi [Indian] variety (7 quintals per hectare). But the cost of the seed is three times higher for Bt than desi. There are additional concerns that the multinational corporations are making supernormal profits from this.
In Maharashtra, most cotton farms are entirely dependent on rainfall, with only 2 percent to 3 percent being irrigated. Hence, when the monsoon failed, Bt cotton crop became particularly vulnerable. It is to be noted that besides irrigation, Bt cotton requires a regular supply of other inputs, such as pesticides, and fertilisers. In short, although Bt cotton gives a higher ratio of revenue and cost, the cost per hectare is much higher than the desi [Indian] variety. The substantially higher cost of production required large amounts (i.e., large as a ratio of average farm incomes) of borrowing, thereby increasing vulnerability and leading to suicides when the crop failed.
Organised credit
These farmers who commit suicide had substantially higher debt obligations to moneylenders. The rate of interest on such unorganized loans is significantly higher, ranging between 25 percent to 50 percent for a period of four to six months.
Not enough organised credit is reaching the farmers of this region. Many cooperative banks have become dysfunctional because the number of defaulters have grown in the face of crisis. Contraction of organized credit interacted with commercialization of seeds to give birth to a new breed of moneylenders: input traders (i.e., traders who sold seeds, pesticides, fertilisers, and other inputs for agricultural production). Since interlinking of credit, input and output markets is a well known territory of exploitation in developing countries, the whole mechanism kicked in. Furthermore, due to dearth of extension services provided by the government, it is the traders on whom farmers depended for counselling, leading to a serious conflict of interest, and resulting in the purchase of unreliable seeds and inputs.
Vidarbha receives little state expenditure in irrigation. The dearth of irrigation facilities has compounded the crisis in cotton as uninformed farmers adopted expensive Bt cotton seeds which do not do well in erratic rainfed conditions.
Behind the series of dry statistics presented here are the loss of lives and livelihood of farmers, caused by a pervasive crisis in agriculture. The destruction of agricultural livelihood has a chain reaction on other facets of the local economy. Local business, trade and commerce, the schooling of children, the local manufacturing sector, etc. get severely hit. The interesting, and infuriating, part of it all is that much of this tribulation was neither inevitable nor accidental. These are the direct results of policies as we have argued throughout this article. The total number of suicides in Maharashtra has declined from their level of mid-2000s of more than to 4,000 per year. But even the current number of suicides is quite high. In 2010, 3,141 farmers committed suicide in Maharashtra. That is more than eight persons per day. Hardly a cause for celebration!
Case study 2: Crisis in coffee in Wayanad
In 2004-05, around 150 farmers in the prosperous north-eastern Kerala district of Wayanad committed suicide. Numerically, this is not significantly large compared to the Vidarbha suicides. But analysing the case is useful because it throws up interesting common patterns across regions and crops. Here, we will briefly present some characteristic features underpinning the mass human tragedy in Wayanad.
In Wayanad district of Kerala, coffee farming accounts for 70,000 hectares of land, and employs 60,000 small growers. In 2006, the price of coffee crashed to Rs. 24 a kilo from a level of more than Rs. 130 a kilo a few years earlier. The price of raw cherry [beans] declined from Rs. 70-Rs. 80 to Rs. 15-Rs. 16 a kilo. As P. Sainath reports, coffee growers of Wayanad lost nearly Rs. 800 crores within a brief span of four years. This does not however mean that the price of processed coffee has also crashed. Martin Khor of the Third World Network notes that in "992 producer countries earned $10 billion from a global market worth around $30 billion. In 2002, they made less than $6 billion in a market that had doubled in size."
What stands between, on the one hand, the prosperity of the global coffee market and, on the other, the misery of its growers is a thick layer of cartels and monopoly trading houses. The third world countries which produce coffee are given a raw deal by multinational companies. Market power at both ends allow the MNCs to sell the final product at a high price while pushing the price at which they buy from the third world growers to phenomenally low levels. Moreover, there is the added element of playing one third world country against another when they face labour resistance in one country. Sainath reports,
"Wayanad briefly saw a great rise in prices in the late 1990s when frost hit the Brazilian crop. 'And also because,' says a senior Government official who has tracked exports for two decades, 'of sheer rigging. Four major companies dominate the world market. When faced with a workers' strike in Brazil, they hike prices for Kerala coffee. So there's a boom. When the crushed Brazilians return to the fields, the companies pull the plug on us. Now they have two major, cheap sources.'"
Why can local producers not process their high-quality produce and sell it in the market? After all, the high priced branded coffees that dominate the market are much inferior in quality compared to the local product. Apparently then, the bulk coffee buyers close ranks to exercise monopoly power. In short, growers face boycott from the buyers (firms in the coffee processing industry) if they try to directly sell in the market.
As in other cases of agrarian crises, Wayanad's local economy got disarrayed in the wake of the price crash. Shops and cinema theatres have closed, trade and commerce has plummeted. The crisis has had a major effect on local labour markets and migration. On the demand side of the labour market, as production suffered there were fewer jobs available for farm labourers. On the supply side of the labour market, many owner-farmers joined the rank of wage labourers to make ends meet. This raised the supply of labourer and lowered the chances of finding a job even further. In short, not only were fewer days of work generated by the local economy, even wage rates fell as supply of labour outstripped its demand.
Farm labourers and small owner-farmers migrated across the state border to Karnataka. P. Sainath reports that the number of trips by government buses has gone up considerably, from 3 to 4 about five years ago to 32 a day in 2005. Do they earn a better livelihood now? In Karnataka farms the wage was about 30 percent lower than what they once earned in Wayanad. If we include the price of the bus ticket, the overall income has declined substantially.
Deep in debt, farmers try to cut losses by curtailing production, which thrusts them deeper into penury. Taking one's own life in such times appeared to many as the best choice available to escape harassment from banks and moneylenders.
Donnerstag, 21. April 2011
Book review: Churchill's secret war in India
by Susannah York
11 April 2011. A World to Win News Service. Madhusree Mukerjee's book, Churchill`s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II
(Basic Books, New York, 2010), is a deeply moving read. Her subject is the 1943 famine that ravaged India for over a year, snuffing out the lives of 3 million people. Mukerjee argues that the figure should be adjusted upwards to over 5 million. When thinking about the millions of dead resulting from World War II, many atrocities come to mind: the 6 million Jews killed in the concentration camps, half a million Roma, 20 million Soviet citizens, 8 million Chinese, to name only some examples. Not so well-known, especially to people from the imperialist citadels, are those who suffered and died from what Mukerjee calls the "man-made" famine in India, a human catastrophe that could have been easily prevented if Churchill had not refused to assign available ships from Australia to carry their surplus grain to the Bengal region. This famine gets rarely mentioned in British history.
A former writer/editor for Scientific American and a trained scientist in her own right, Mukerjee's preoccupation with the question of hunger and famine led her to delve deeply and thoroughly into the archives of the British War Cabinet and the Ministries of War and Transport, the correspondence between the various major British players, and their memoirs during World War II. Much of this material was first made available in the mid-2000s. Among them are Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Secretary of State to India Leopold Amery (who thought that the British Empire should be contiguous and stretch from Cape Town through Cairo, Baghdad and Calcutta to Sydney) and the successive viceroys to India, Lords Linlithgow and Wavell. In an interview, Mukerjee acknowledges that given where her investigation was leading, she knew that if she were not especially careful, she would be torn apart by those who hated her conclusions.
Mukerjee's prologue provides background to how the British government subjugated India in 1757 and continued robbing it through steep taxation, theft of resources, unequal trade and the exploitation of its people for 200 years under colonial domination until its independence in 1947. Peasants were forced to pay the British East India Company rent for the land they farmed and to turn over a large percentage of the crop yield. The once prosperous exporters in the Bengal region of North-East India (including what is now Bangladesh) became impoverished as British-bound ships loaded with gold, silver, silks and other valuable commodities sailed off to London.
Mukerjee spells out many interpenetrating features that contributed to the famine, contextualising it in the raging world war and the independence movement against Britain then gathering force. Among those factors was the fall of Burma to the Japanese; the hoarding of rice by brokers from Bengal, other Indian provinces and also Ceylon, creating exorbitant prices; Churchill's intense racism and hatred of Indians and above all, in this reviewer's opinion, his ruthless determination to preserve the British empire. With the onset of World War II, maintaining the empire's interests was Churchill's uppermost goal, and he took decisions around the war effort accordingly. India was already contributing to the war effort on many fronts, from soldiers fighting in the Middle East to sending grain and other exports.
The British army had thousands of troops stationed in India, both British and Indian. The very large Indian army was poorly trained by the British for fear the guns would be turned on them. Feeding the soldiers as well as those involved in industries considered essential to the war effort was considered a priority. This included workers in industries in other colonies like the rubber workers in Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka). Feeding other civilians didn't fit into the calculus of the war effort.
The British empire was taking a beating in the South Asian theatre of war. In 1942 the Japanese captured Singapore, then Burma, one of the largest rice exporters to British colonies and the UK itself. Burma provided 15-20 percent of India's rice consumption. The conquest of Burma also meant that Japan was at India's doorstep, with the threat of imminent invasion.
The British response, euphemistically-called the "Denial Policy", was meant to deprive the Japanese of any useful material they might seize in an invasion. All along coastal Bengal, vehicles of any kind (trucks, cars, thousands of bicycles and boats, bullock carts etc.) were requisitioned by the military authorities and rice stocks were destroyed or removed. In addition, 35,000 families lost their homes and livelihoods to military barracks and air strips.
As Mukerjee describes it, "Boats were the primary form of transport of riverine Bengal. Most villagers were so poor that they either walked or boarded a ferry. Boats took traders to the market, fishers to the sea, potters to their clay pits, and farmers to their plots, which were often marooned between vast swathes of river. c" Even the viceroy's secretary Leonard Pinnell understood that demolishing boats meant destroying livelihoods. He said "for anyone who knows the Bengal cultivator it was a completely heart-breaking job."
With the fall of Burma, not only did India have to get by without the usual tonnage of rice imports, she also supplied rice to those parts of the British Empire that previously received rice exports from Burma. With the scarcity came the hoarding by Indian businessmen who stood to make huge profits when the rice price skyrocketed.
As evidence of impending disaster grew, on several occasions Viceroy Wavell and Secretary to India Amery appealed to Churchill, the War Cabinet and Shipping Ministries, warning them of the impending food crisis. To Amery, Churchill replied, "If food was so scarce, why hadn't Gandhi died yet" (Gandhi, a leader of the Quit India movement imprisoned along with others seeking independence, was on a hunger strike at the time ). To others, Churchill claimed that there were no boats. Previously German U2 submarines were sinking British supply boats. But by 1942 that problem had ceased once the US began building ships for British use and sending airplanes to protect British convoys against German subs. Rather than not enough ships, there was a surplus of ships that did not have enough cargo to fill them, documents Mukerjee. She argues that this was the critical moment when Churchill could have allocated the shipment of wheat from Australia to India. (Canada and the US also volunteered to provide aid.) It would have made hoarding unprofitable and food accessible to the rural population of Bengal province.
To complicate matters, in October 1942, a major cyclone hit Bengal, flooding the land with salt water, destroying every house and tree on the flatlands adjacent to the sea, sweeping away farm animals and leaving a layer of sand that flattened the rice crop. The moisture caused pest infestation, destroying the meagre amounts of grain that the peasants had acquired. Some local survivors date the famine as starting from this storm.
Cyclone relief was withheld by the British authorities because the population was "infested" with Quit India movement supporters. Instead they went to ferret them out and set fire to those homes still standing and burned any rice that survived the storm.
The famine struck ferociously in rural Bengal. Mukerjee vividly describes its effect, drawing on interviews with survivors. Many suicides, mercy killings and cases of child abandonment took place among families who could no longer bear to see the wild-eyed, starving faces of their children. Mass prostitution by village mothers, wives or daughters with anyone who had grain often saved whole families. Brothels for soldiers were serviced by the starving young girls from the countryside. Many were lured by promises of a real job and then forced into servitude, in much the same way as today women are forced into prostitution around the world.
The streets of Calcutta were flooded with skeletal figures waiting in soup kitchen lines for a thin gruel, which often failed to keep them alive. One agitated mother appealed to relief workers, "Please, take us first" for her baby's sake, but by the time she finally made it to the front of the queue that was full of others equally desperate, her baby had died. The situation became so serious that people at evening parties attended by the upper classes began discussing remedies. Bodies, dead and nearly-alive, were carted out of the city to keep them out of sight as much as possible. Even the dogs preyed and feasted on those near death. Amidst this tragedy, hotels in Calcutta continued to serve five-course meals to those who could afford them.
Much heroism also occurred in confronting the lack of food, with neighbours or older siblings somehow keeping younger ones alive. Children made up half the refugees flocking to Calcutta. They often appeared alone, with no one knowing what village they came from or what happened to their parents. Babies were left abandoned on hospital doorsteps in hopes they would be saved. One survivor, Gourhori Majhi, recounts how he lived by the grace of one relief worker. He told Mukerjee, "the food served at the relief kitchen was like water. The family had sold its utensils and would accept the soup in cupped leaves, but others would snatch even these out of their hands. The child (Gourhori) was fortunate, though, in that his swollen belly caught the eye of a gentleman with the relief operations, who called him aside. 'He gave me a few grains of rice and watched me eat them.' Day after day for months the man had fed him, in secret and a little at a time, so that the body slowly recovered." Officers reprimanded sympathetic rank and file soldiers (Indian and British) stationed there who gave their rations to the starving.
While the Japanese bombarded the city of Calcutta, they never invaded. The Japanese army was bogged down in China, which proved to be "a tough piece of meat" (as Mao Tsetung said) for the occupiers. Unlike Churchill, who feared unleashing the subjugated Indian soldiers, Mao did not fear mobilising the Chinese masses who saw it in their interests to fight the invading Japanese army, eventually routing it, just as the Soviets masses had broken the back of Hitler's army.
In the backdrop of the complexities of the war situation, the struggle for independence from Britain escalated. The Indian National Congress led by Nehru and Gandhi were part of the backbone of the Quit India movement. The Congress was willing to trade Indian independence in exchange for supporting the British war against Japan. While Gandhi wanted to keep the movement against the British non-violent, his position would have meant dragging the Indian people even deeper into the war – one in which British aims were to keep Burma, Malaysia, Singapore and other colonies.
Nevertheless, the independence leaders were arrested and thousands imprisoned for what was considered to be impeding the war effort. "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire," Churchill famously declared.
In 1940, the British War Cabinet had stated that "if conflict with Congress should arise, it should appear as an outcome of war necessity rather than as a political quarrel unrelated to the war." Mukerjee says that the rise of the independence struggle led Churchill to hate Indians more than ever. But actually, Churchill understood what was objectively at stake. A strong independence movement was a threat to the British empire and India was one of many rebelling colonies wrestling for independence from the colonizers.
The intensity developing in the independence struggle was met by the police killing insurgents and burning down homes and possessions, including the remaining grain that the peasants still had, and gang-raping women. In some rural areas, the insurgents organised the peasants to prevent grain from being sent to businessmen hoarders in Calcutta and were met with a hail of police bullets. As part of the divide and conquer approach of the British and Churchill, the police encouraged Muslims from different villages to join them in looting better-off Hindu homes.
To prove her point, Mukerjee cites many statistics from a broad range of sources about food shipments through the war years, the number of boats available for shipping, and the changed situation in 1943 when the famine became virulent. While acknowledging many contributory factors, she exposes Churchill's monstrous lie that no ships were available when there was a glut of ships available, sailing around with half-empty hulls.
Churchill pit the Muslim League against the National Congress, fanning religious fury and other rivalries, encouraging them to insist on the creation of a separate state for Muslims (today's Pakistan and Bangladesh). With the Congress leaders in prison, the Muslim leader Mohammad Ali Jinnah (who had promised support for the British war effort in exchange for British recognition of his Muslim League as the only organisation representing Indian Muslims) commanded the political stage in India. Appealing to Muslim nationalism, the idea of creating a Muslim state inflamed passions and encouraged bloodletting between Muslim and Hindus. Again, ever watchful for the interests of empire, Churchill thought that the creation of Pakistan would make that state beholden to the UK, thus enabling Britain to keep a foothold in the South Asian region.
While even today polls in the UK hail Winston Churchill as a great statesman, perhaps the greatest ever, many people remain unaware of his war crimes. Yet Churchill never hid his desire to keep the British Empire intact. Many of his statements openly state his strongest motivations. In the Spanish Civil War, at first Churchill sided with the fascist General Franco against the Republicans, but he overcame those gut feelings in the interest of the British empire. Hugh Thomas' book The Spanish Civil War (Harper & Row, 1961) quotes Churchill: "Franco has all the right on his side because he loves his country. Also Franco is defending Europe from the communist danger – if you wish to put it in those terms. But I, I am English, and I prefer the triumph of the wrong cause. I prefer that the other side wins, because Franco could be an upset or a threat to British interests."
Churchill had a "bull-dog" grasp of what was best for the interests of British monopoly capital, both at home and in the colonies and neo-colonies where superexploitation built up the wealth of the empire. The economic and social relations embodied in capitalism requires brutal forms of exploitation and oppression of the people and colonies it subjugates in its effort to ever expand. For profit and empire, there is no horror or crime that a statesman for a capitalist-imperialist empire will not commit.
The armies of all the imperialist powers criss-crossed the globe in a war over how it would be divided up between them. The significance of this book's title, Churchillfs Secret War, in this reviewer's opinion, is that Britain was both using India to wage war against Japan and at the same time waging a no less deadly conflict against the Indian people, who were the booty both sides in World War II sought.
Despicable and criminal as it was, Churchill's racism no doubt spared him of any anguish over the deaths of millions of subjects to Her Majesty, the Queen of England. From the viewpoint of the interests of British imperialism, a famine in India just didn't matter.
The days when European powers enjoyed direct and open government over colonies may be over, but imperialism as an economic and political system in which a handful of countries dominate and bleed the world is still in force. While today is not marked by a war between the imperialists, their invasions, occupations and other armed actions in the name of "humanitarian" ideals and "democracy" are driven by the same kind of interests, even if in different circumstances than those that Churchill so viciously embodied.
11 April 2011. A World to Win News Service. Madhusree Mukerjee's book, Churchill`s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II
(Basic Books, New York, 2010), is a deeply moving read. Her subject is the 1943 famine that ravaged India for over a year, snuffing out the lives of 3 million people. Mukerjee argues that the figure should be adjusted upwards to over 5 million. When thinking about the millions of dead resulting from World War II, many atrocities come to mind: the 6 million Jews killed in the concentration camps, half a million Roma, 20 million Soviet citizens, 8 million Chinese, to name only some examples. Not so well-known, especially to people from the imperialist citadels, are those who suffered and died from what Mukerjee calls the "man-made" famine in India, a human catastrophe that could have been easily prevented if Churchill had not refused to assign available ships from Australia to carry their surplus grain to the Bengal region. This famine gets rarely mentioned in British history.
A former writer/editor for Scientific American and a trained scientist in her own right, Mukerjee's preoccupation with the question of hunger and famine led her to delve deeply and thoroughly into the archives of the British War Cabinet and the Ministries of War and Transport, the correspondence between the various major British players, and their memoirs during World War II. Much of this material was first made available in the mid-2000s. Among them are Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Secretary of State to India Leopold Amery (who thought that the British Empire should be contiguous and stretch from Cape Town through Cairo, Baghdad and Calcutta to Sydney) and the successive viceroys to India, Lords Linlithgow and Wavell. In an interview, Mukerjee acknowledges that given where her investigation was leading, she knew that if she were not especially careful, she would be torn apart by those who hated her conclusions.
Mukerjee's prologue provides background to how the British government subjugated India in 1757 and continued robbing it through steep taxation, theft of resources, unequal trade and the exploitation of its people for 200 years under colonial domination until its independence in 1947. Peasants were forced to pay the British East India Company rent for the land they farmed and to turn over a large percentage of the crop yield. The once prosperous exporters in the Bengal region of North-East India (including what is now Bangladesh) became impoverished as British-bound ships loaded with gold, silver, silks and other valuable commodities sailed off to London.
Mukerjee spells out many interpenetrating features that contributed to the famine, contextualising it in the raging world war and the independence movement against Britain then gathering force. Among those factors was the fall of Burma to the Japanese; the hoarding of rice by brokers from Bengal, other Indian provinces and also Ceylon, creating exorbitant prices; Churchill's intense racism and hatred of Indians and above all, in this reviewer's opinion, his ruthless determination to preserve the British empire. With the onset of World War II, maintaining the empire's interests was Churchill's uppermost goal, and he took decisions around the war effort accordingly. India was already contributing to the war effort on many fronts, from soldiers fighting in the Middle East to sending grain and other exports.
The British army had thousands of troops stationed in India, both British and Indian. The very large Indian army was poorly trained by the British for fear the guns would be turned on them. Feeding the soldiers as well as those involved in industries considered essential to the war effort was considered a priority. This included workers in industries in other colonies like the rubber workers in Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka). Feeding other civilians didn't fit into the calculus of the war effort.
The British empire was taking a beating in the South Asian theatre of war. In 1942 the Japanese captured Singapore, then Burma, one of the largest rice exporters to British colonies and the UK itself. Burma provided 15-20 percent of India's rice consumption. The conquest of Burma also meant that Japan was at India's doorstep, with the threat of imminent invasion.
The British response, euphemistically-called the "Denial Policy", was meant to deprive the Japanese of any useful material they might seize in an invasion. All along coastal Bengal, vehicles of any kind (trucks, cars, thousands of bicycles and boats, bullock carts etc.) were requisitioned by the military authorities and rice stocks were destroyed or removed. In addition, 35,000 families lost their homes and livelihoods to military barracks and air strips.
As Mukerjee describes it, "Boats were the primary form of transport of riverine Bengal. Most villagers were so poor that they either walked or boarded a ferry. Boats took traders to the market, fishers to the sea, potters to their clay pits, and farmers to their plots, which were often marooned between vast swathes of river. c" Even the viceroy's secretary Leonard Pinnell understood that demolishing boats meant destroying livelihoods. He said "for anyone who knows the Bengal cultivator it was a completely heart-breaking job."
With the fall of Burma, not only did India have to get by without the usual tonnage of rice imports, she also supplied rice to those parts of the British Empire that previously received rice exports from Burma. With the scarcity came the hoarding by Indian businessmen who stood to make huge profits when the rice price skyrocketed.
As evidence of impending disaster grew, on several occasions Viceroy Wavell and Secretary to India Amery appealed to Churchill, the War Cabinet and Shipping Ministries, warning them of the impending food crisis. To Amery, Churchill replied, "If food was so scarce, why hadn't Gandhi died yet" (Gandhi, a leader of the Quit India movement imprisoned along with others seeking independence, was on a hunger strike at the time ). To others, Churchill claimed that there were no boats. Previously German U2 submarines were sinking British supply boats. But by 1942 that problem had ceased once the US began building ships for British use and sending airplanes to protect British convoys against German subs. Rather than not enough ships, there was a surplus of ships that did not have enough cargo to fill them, documents Mukerjee. She argues that this was the critical moment when Churchill could have allocated the shipment of wheat from Australia to India. (Canada and the US also volunteered to provide aid.) It would have made hoarding unprofitable and food accessible to the rural population of Bengal province.
To complicate matters, in October 1942, a major cyclone hit Bengal, flooding the land with salt water, destroying every house and tree on the flatlands adjacent to the sea, sweeping away farm animals and leaving a layer of sand that flattened the rice crop. The moisture caused pest infestation, destroying the meagre amounts of grain that the peasants had acquired. Some local survivors date the famine as starting from this storm.
Cyclone relief was withheld by the British authorities because the population was "infested" with Quit India movement supporters. Instead they went to ferret them out and set fire to those homes still standing and burned any rice that survived the storm.
The famine struck ferociously in rural Bengal. Mukerjee vividly describes its effect, drawing on interviews with survivors. Many suicides, mercy killings and cases of child abandonment took place among families who could no longer bear to see the wild-eyed, starving faces of their children. Mass prostitution by village mothers, wives or daughters with anyone who had grain often saved whole families. Brothels for soldiers were serviced by the starving young girls from the countryside. Many were lured by promises of a real job and then forced into servitude, in much the same way as today women are forced into prostitution around the world.
The streets of Calcutta were flooded with skeletal figures waiting in soup kitchen lines for a thin gruel, which often failed to keep them alive. One agitated mother appealed to relief workers, "Please, take us first" for her baby's sake, but by the time she finally made it to the front of the queue that was full of others equally desperate, her baby had died. The situation became so serious that people at evening parties attended by the upper classes began discussing remedies. Bodies, dead and nearly-alive, were carted out of the city to keep them out of sight as much as possible. Even the dogs preyed and feasted on those near death. Amidst this tragedy, hotels in Calcutta continued to serve five-course meals to those who could afford them.
Much heroism also occurred in confronting the lack of food, with neighbours or older siblings somehow keeping younger ones alive. Children made up half the refugees flocking to Calcutta. They often appeared alone, with no one knowing what village they came from or what happened to their parents. Babies were left abandoned on hospital doorsteps in hopes they would be saved. One survivor, Gourhori Majhi, recounts how he lived by the grace of one relief worker. He told Mukerjee, "the food served at the relief kitchen was like water. The family had sold its utensils and would accept the soup in cupped leaves, but others would snatch even these out of their hands. The child (Gourhori) was fortunate, though, in that his swollen belly caught the eye of a gentleman with the relief operations, who called him aside. 'He gave me a few grains of rice and watched me eat them.' Day after day for months the man had fed him, in secret and a little at a time, so that the body slowly recovered." Officers reprimanded sympathetic rank and file soldiers (Indian and British) stationed there who gave their rations to the starving.
While the Japanese bombarded the city of Calcutta, they never invaded. The Japanese army was bogged down in China, which proved to be "a tough piece of meat" (as Mao Tsetung said) for the occupiers. Unlike Churchill, who feared unleashing the subjugated Indian soldiers, Mao did not fear mobilising the Chinese masses who saw it in their interests to fight the invading Japanese army, eventually routing it, just as the Soviets masses had broken the back of Hitler's army.
In the backdrop of the complexities of the war situation, the struggle for independence from Britain escalated. The Indian National Congress led by Nehru and Gandhi were part of the backbone of the Quit India movement. The Congress was willing to trade Indian independence in exchange for supporting the British war against Japan. While Gandhi wanted to keep the movement against the British non-violent, his position would have meant dragging the Indian people even deeper into the war – one in which British aims were to keep Burma, Malaysia, Singapore and other colonies.
Nevertheless, the independence leaders were arrested and thousands imprisoned for what was considered to be impeding the war effort. "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire," Churchill famously declared.
In 1940, the British War Cabinet had stated that "if conflict with Congress should arise, it should appear as an outcome of war necessity rather than as a political quarrel unrelated to the war." Mukerjee says that the rise of the independence struggle led Churchill to hate Indians more than ever. But actually, Churchill understood what was objectively at stake. A strong independence movement was a threat to the British empire and India was one of many rebelling colonies wrestling for independence from the colonizers.
The intensity developing in the independence struggle was met by the police killing insurgents and burning down homes and possessions, including the remaining grain that the peasants still had, and gang-raping women. In some rural areas, the insurgents organised the peasants to prevent grain from being sent to businessmen hoarders in Calcutta and were met with a hail of police bullets. As part of the divide and conquer approach of the British and Churchill, the police encouraged Muslims from different villages to join them in looting better-off Hindu homes.
To prove her point, Mukerjee cites many statistics from a broad range of sources about food shipments through the war years, the number of boats available for shipping, and the changed situation in 1943 when the famine became virulent. While acknowledging many contributory factors, she exposes Churchill's monstrous lie that no ships were available when there was a glut of ships available, sailing around with half-empty hulls.
Churchill pit the Muslim League against the National Congress, fanning religious fury and other rivalries, encouraging them to insist on the creation of a separate state for Muslims (today's Pakistan and Bangladesh). With the Congress leaders in prison, the Muslim leader Mohammad Ali Jinnah (who had promised support for the British war effort in exchange for British recognition of his Muslim League as the only organisation representing Indian Muslims) commanded the political stage in India. Appealing to Muslim nationalism, the idea of creating a Muslim state inflamed passions and encouraged bloodletting between Muslim and Hindus. Again, ever watchful for the interests of empire, Churchill thought that the creation of Pakistan would make that state beholden to the UK, thus enabling Britain to keep a foothold in the South Asian region.
While even today polls in the UK hail Winston Churchill as a great statesman, perhaps the greatest ever, many people remain unaware of his war crimes. Yet Churchill never hid his desire to keep the British Empire intact. Many of his statements openly state his strongest motivations. In the Spanish Civil War, at first Churchill sided with the fascist General Franco against the Republicans, but he overcame those gut feelings in the interest of the British empire. Hugh Thomas' book The Spanish Civil War (Harper & Row, 1961) quotes Churchill: "Franco has all the right on his side because he loves his country. Also Franco is defending Europe from the communist danger – if you wish to put it in those terms. But I, I am English, and I prefer the triumph of the wrong cause. I prefer that the other side wins, because Franco could be an upset or a threat to British interests."
Churchill had a "bull-dog" grasp of what was best for the interests of British monopoly capital, both at home and in the colonies and neo-colonies where superexploitation built up the wealth of the empire. The economic and social relations embodied in capitalism requires brutal forms of exploitation and oppression of the people and colonies it subjugates in its effort to ever expand. For profit and empire, there is no horror or crime that a statesman for a capitalist-imperialist empire will not commit.
The armies of all the imperialist powers criss-crossed the globe in a war over how it would be divided up between them. The significance of this book's title, Churchillfs Secret War, in this reviewer's opinion, is that Britain was both using India to wage war against Japan and at the same time waging a no less deadly conflict against the Indian people, who were the booty both sides in World War II sought.
Despicable and criminal as it was, Churchill's racism no doubt spared him of any anguish over the deaths of millions of subjects to Her Majesty, the Queen of England. From the viewpoint of the interests of British imperialism, a famine in India just didn't matter.
The days when European powers enjoyed direct and open government over colonies may be over, but imperialism as an economic and political system in which a handful of countries dominate and bleed the world is still in force. While today is not marked by a war between the imperialists, their invasions, occupations and other armed actions in the name of "humanitarian" ideals and "democracy" are driven by the same kind of interests, even if in different circumstances than those that Churchill so viciously embodied.
Donnerstag, 6. Januar 2011
India: Dr Benayak Sen sentenced to life in prison
3 January 2011. A World to Win News Service. With the 24 December sentence of life imprisonment for Dr Benayak Sen, another travesty of justice has taken place in the Indian courts. Despite the clearly fraudulent evidence in the case and protests in India and from international figures, the Indian government is calculating how far they can go with a clampdown on those from different strata who oppose Operation Green Hunt and other state crimes committed against the masses of India.
Operation Green Hunt is an unprecedented military offensive against the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and the masses hungry for radical change who make up the army they lead. This war is being waged in the jungles and forests that are home to the tribal peoples known as Adivasis in central and eastern India (the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkand, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and West Bengal). That large swaths of these areas are under the control of the Maoists is intolerable to the Indian government. And it is desperate to ensure that India's continued economic growth and heightened role in the global economy remain unhindered by any vision and struggle for an alternative to the present system of poverty and humiliation for the masses.
The legitimacy of Operation Green Hunt has been sharply called into question by many well-known intellectuals, activists and academics. Whether or not the Indian government can silence them will have serious repercussions on both the government's ability to carry out this military offensive and the struggle to make revolution in India.
A graduate of one of India’s leading medical schools, Sen has been working in the state of Chhattisgarh since 1981. He and Ilina Sen train rural health workers in Adivasi and poor peasant areas, organise rural clinics and promote campaigns against alcohol abuse and violence against women. Their work has substantially reduced the deaths of children due to diarrhoea and dehydration, helping to bring down the overall infant mortality rate in the state. This success has made Sen one of India's most prominent public health specialists.
As a senior member of People's Union for Civil Liberties that works for the tribal poor, he earned the wrath of the Chhattisgarh authorities because of his political advocacy for Adivasis and his vocal opposition to the Salwa Judum, a state-backed militia formed to fight the Maoist-led revolutionary movement among them. His 2007 arrest came shortly after he exposed a massacre of tribal people. He was charged with sedition and waging war against the state.
Dr. Sen spent two years in prison before he finally won bail. Two co-defendants, Narayan Sanyal (said to be a senior Maoist leader) and Piyush Guha, were not granted bail and have remained in custody. Sen is accused of passing letters from the imprisoned 74-year-old Sanyal, whom he visited in his capacity as a physician. The letters were allegedly found on Guha.
To prevent planting of evidence, Indian laws require that material seized from an accused's home be signed and sealed before witnesses. At his court statement, Sen described the police process in the raid on his house:
"Several policemen in the search party were involved in the process of the search at my house. Having found a document, the person finding it would hand it over to Mr Rajput. Mr Rajput would first read it, and then hand it over to me for my signature. He would also sign it himself. After we had both put our signatures on the document, he would dictate to TI Jagrit what was to be written in the seizure memo. Mr Jagrit would then make the entry, following which Mr Rajput would then hand over the document to Mr Jagrit. In this manner, each document was seized, signed, and entered in the seizure memo. None of the documents were signed by the public witnesses in my presence. Nor were the documents sealed in my presence. At the end of the search process the documents were carried away in a paper bag in an unsealed condition." The manufactured letter that is the ''key'' to Sen's conviction is a simple computer printout. It is not signed either by Sen or the police who raided his house and is not mentioned in the list of seized material taken from his house.
According to an article in Economic and Political Weekly, Sen's visits to Sanyal were so closely monitored that even their conversations were listened to. Sanyal's jailers denied the police story about passing letters. The prosecution could not prove that Sen ever met Guha. Witnesses who came forward in support were discredited as Naxalites, as Maoist revolutionaries are called in India.
Sen's wife, who is also a doctor, says she will challenge his conviction and launch an international campaign. She and her family no longer feel safe in India as they face continuous harassment and threats by the authorities and others. She has publicly stated they may have to request political asylum.
In another blatant case of injustice on the same day in Chhattisgarh, Asit Kumar Sengupta – former publisher of the English-language edition of A World to Win magazine – was sentenced to eight years in prison. (See the CPI (M-L) Naxalbari press release included in this news packet and AWTWNS090629 for background on Sengupta.)
Arundhati Roy, also a well-known opponent of Operation Green Hunt and India's bloody repression of the Kashmir struggle for self-determination, has also been threatened with arrest for sedition. While no formal charges seem to have been filed against her so far, despite howls from the media demanding that she been imprisoned, her home was attacked by a mob organized by the Hindu fascist BJP in what she called a government act of "outsourcing" repression.
In response to the outrageous sentencing of Sen and Sengupta, the CPI (Maoist) has called for a week-long protest starting 2 January 2011.
Operation Green Hunt is an unprecedented military offensive against the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and the masses hungry for radical change who make up the army they lead. This war is being waged in the jungles and forests that are home to the tribal peoples known as Adivasis in central and eastern India (the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkand, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and West Bengal). That large swaths of these areas are under the control of the Maoists is intolerable to the Indian government. And it is desperate to ensure that India's continued economic growth and heightened role in the global economy remain unhindered by any vision and struggle for an alternative to the present system of poverty and humiliation for the masses.
The legitimacy of Operation Green Hunt has been sharply called into question by many well-known intellectuals, activists and academics. Whether or not the Indian government can silence them will have serious repercussions on both the government's ability to carry out this military offensive and the struggle to make revolution in India.
A graduate of one of India’s leading medical schools, Sen has been working in the state of Chhattisgarh since 1981. He and Ilina Sen train rural health workers in Adivasi and poor peasant areas, organise rural clinics and promote campaigns against alcohol abuse and violence against women. Their work has substantially reduced the deaths of children due to diarrhoea and dehydration, helping to bring down the overall infant mortality rate in the state. This success has made Sen one of India's most prominent public health specialists.
As a senior member of People's Union for Civil Liberties that works for the tribal poor, he earned the wrath of the Chhattisgarh authorities because of his political advocacy for Adivasis and his vocal opposition to the Salwa Judum, a state-backed militia formed to fight the Maoist-led revolutionary movement among them. His 2007 arrest came shortly after he exposed a massacre of tribal people. He was charged with sedition and waging war against the state.
Dr. Sen spent two years in prison before he finally won bail. Two co-defendants, Narayan Sanyal (said to be a senior Maoist leader) and Piyush Guha, were not granted bail and have remained in custody. Sen is accused of passing letters from the imprisoned 74-year-old Sanyal, whom he visited in his capacity as a physician. The letters were allegedly found on Guha.
To prevent planting of evidence, Indian laws require that material seized from an accused's home be signed and sealed before witnesses. At his court statement, Sen described the police process in the raid on his house:
"Several policemen in the search party were involved in the process of the search at my house. Having found a document, the person finding it would hand it over to Mr Rajput. Mr Rajput would first read it, and then hand it over to me for my signature. He would also sign it himself. After we had both put our signatures on the document, he would dictate to TI Jagrit what was to be written in the seizure memo. Mr Jagrit would then make the entry, following which Mr Rajput would then hand over the document to Mr Jagrit. In this manner, each document was seized, signed, and entered in the seizure memo. None of the documents were signed by the public witnesses in my presence. Nor were the documents sealed in my presence. At the end of the search process the documents were carried away in a paper bag in an unsealed condition." The manufactured letter that is the ''key'' to Sen's conviction is a simple computer printout. It is not signed either by Sen or the police who raided his house and is not mentioned in the list of seized material taken from his house.
According to an article in Economic and Political Weekly, Sen's visits to Sanyal were so closely monitored that even their conversations were listened to. Sanyal's jailers denied the police story about passing letters. The prosecution could not prove that Sen ever met Guha. Witnesses who came forward in support were discredited as Naxalites, as Maoist revolutionaries are called in India.
Sen's wife, who is also a doctor, says she will challenge his conviction and launch an international campaign. She and her family no longer feel safe in India as they face continuous harassment and threats by the authorities and others. She has publicly stated they may have to request political asylum.
In another blatant case of injustice on the same day in Chhattisgarh, Asit Kumar Sengupta – former publisher of the English-language edition of A World to Win magazine – was sentenced to eight years in prison. (See the CPI (M-L) Naxalbari press release included in this news packet and AWTWNS090629 for background on Sengupta.)
Arundhati Roy, also a well-known opponent of Operation Green Hunt and India's bloody repression of the Kashmir struggle for self-determination, has also been threatened with arrest for sedition. While no formal charges seem to have been filed against her so far, despite howls from the media demanding that she been imprisoned, her home was attacked by a mob organized by the Hindu fascist BJP in what she called a government act of "outsourcing" repression.
In response to the outrageous sentencing of Sen and Sengupta, the CPI (Maoist) has called for a week-long protest starting 2 January 2011.
Donnerstag, 28. Oktober 2010
Kashmiris defy Indian troops for self-determination
25 October 2010. A World to Win News Service. The pictures of young people and teenagers with their faces covered throwing stones at security forces firing real bullets remind us of the Palestinian intifada, but this time in another corner of the world.
In another photo, we see no dead or funerals, but the cries of grief from women of different ages standing next to each other clearly indicates that they are mourning a murdered family member.
The body of a young man is held high by a crowd while hundreds of people gather around in another picture. The men's faces are full of anger. Some point their finger as if they were threatening someone. Some are full of grief. Teenagers standing quietly in the corner of the picture seem to be thinking of revenge.
These pictures clearly depict the life of many people in Indian-controlled Kashmir as masses of young men and women defy curfew and challenge the security forces who brutalize and kill them.
The Kashmiri people are simply not allow to shout "Azadi" ( Freedom) and other slogans against the Indian government's national oppression and suppression. The Indian government has responded to their demand for self-determination not only by sending in these armed forces, but even by giving these occupiers legal immunity in advance for any beatings, rapes and murders they may commit under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA ) and the Public Safety Act (PSA). These laws are a clear signal by the Indian government that the men have been sent in for the purpose of committing atrocities and abusing human rights.
In the summer of 2010 the security forces had to confront stone-throwing youth daily. Few people would fail to admit that these youth have had the support of their sisters, mothers, fathers, uncles and even grandparents. As a result of the Indian forces policy of trying to deter protests by meeting stones with automatic weapons fire at demonstrations, terrify the people by murdering suspects and sometimes raping and killing at random, and imposing strict curfews to control the whole population, the crisis of the occupation has deepened.
Some commentators put it as the India's most serious crisis in recent history. But the Indian government faces rebellion on several fronts, including other struggles for self-determination in border regions. Along with Kashmir, it has also sent in large numbers of troops to inflict intense repression in India itself, with Operation Green Hunt, a military offensive to put down tribal and other peoples who are rising up in a people's war under the leadership of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). On 30 September of this year the Maoist party called for a 24 hour bandh (shutdown of work, business and transport) in six states in support of the Kashmiri people's struggle against the Indian government. (See their full press release, go to bannedthought.net, '' Statement on the Killing of Kashmiris'' ).
It is notable that even though the armed actions against the Indian government that took place in Kashmir in the early 1990s were largely replaced by unarmed protests in the new wave of protests since 2008, the Indian government has continued to kill unarmed demonstrators and has even escalated its violence, not in response to the violence of the resistance but its growing determination in the face of this brutality. In turn, the Kashmiri protests have intensified even more. Outraged people have attacked police offices, government buildings and power companies and set fire to armed forces and government vehicles.
In the more than a thousand protests and clashes between the protesters and the security forces last summer, the security forces murdered over a hundred people and injured a great many more. According to the Indian government, stone-throwing youth have injured more than 1,200 security forces.
What sparked this year's summer protests was the death of a 17-year-old student, Tufail Ahmad Mattoo. He was walking home from a tutoring centre in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian controlled-Kashmir, when he was hit in the head by a tear gas canister fired from close range. He died immediately. This act angered a whole population that has seen this kind of brutality repeatedly in the past.
In fact summer 2010 was the third successive year that massive street protests have broken out in Indian-controlled Kashmir. This year's demonstrations and clashes were the most intense in decades. People's anger has been accumulating. They were less willing than ever to obey the curfew and more willing to confront the security forces.
Last year protests (2009) flared after two young women were found dead by a river near the town of Shopian. It appeared that they had been raped and killed by security forces, but Indian investigators excluded this possibility in advance and concluded the women had drowned accidentally. But that was not the end of it. In order to deter people, the Indian government filed charges against the doctors who performed the post-mortem, and against the lawyers who had filed charges against the state. As one comment put it, ''Charges are filed against everybody except a possible suspect for the rape and murder, or the many officials who had visibly botched up the investigations.'' (Economic & Political Weekly, 11 September 2010)
Even in the midst of the protests this past summer, the security forces continued committing the brutalities and human rights abuses that angered the people in the first place. For example in Anantanag, security forces chased a 10 year-old boy who in order to save his life had to jump into a river.
In defiance of the curfew, thousands of angry people protesting this marched in the boy's funeral procession. According to residents, the officers fired at the marchers.
The repeated imposition of round-the-clock curfews had another damaging aspect on the life of the people in Kashmir. The curfew effectively shut at least Srinagar city down completely throughout the summer. Residents experienced a desperate shortage of basic foods, even milk for children, and medical supplies. Schools and universities were closed and the economy as a whole came to a halt. People could not even go to a doctor or a hospital. There are reports that hospital workers and doctors could not get to their posts without taking tremendous of risks. Some doctors on their way to work were arrested or brutalized by police and security forces, or turned back, according to Dr. Shahida Mir, the principal of the Government Medical College. (The New York Times, 2 September 2010)
The extent of India's deliberate atrocities come to light when the security forces extended their mistreatment even to people who had no intention of taking part in the protests. A resident in Srinagar, in the midst of the summer, said, ''We can't even move out or look outside from the window. It is suffocating.'' (The New York Times, 5 August 2010)
This year, the confrontations that began in mid-June are continuing, as the hot summer turns into what people call the '' bitter fall''. Another curfew was imposed in Srinagar and three other towns in September, and in response a general strike and shutdown against the occupation was called for 25 October.
Some historical background
What is the source of the problem? The Kashmiri people, like some others in the region, have been denied their rights of self-determination by the imperialists and regional powers. When the British were forced to give up their colony in 1947, instead of becoming a separate country Kashmir was divided between India and Pakistan.
Kashmir lies on the northern borders of India and Pakistan. Its more than 12 million people are mainly involved in farming or work in workshops and small factories making shawls, rugs and carpets. Kashmir's population is multi-ethnic and multi-religious, with a Moslem majority but also many Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Christians. After World War 2, before British imperialism ended its formal rule and left the subcontinent, the colonialists deliberately aggravated the differences between various nationalities and religions, as they did in other parts of the world. This policy resulted in the partition of the former colony of India and the creation of the country of Pakistan after a bloody war between Hindus and Moslem that led to millions of deaths and several millions refugees. It was the biggest displacement history had ever seen until then.
After partition and the creation of Pakistan, the subcontintent's small states that had never been under direct British colonial rule were not allowed to choose whether or not they wanted to be independent. In practice, they were forced to choose to be part of India or Pakistan. Kashmir was ruled by a brutal Maharajah called Hari Singh. India expected to secure the domination of Kashmir because the Maharajah was a Hindu ruler. Pakistan had its own excuse to seek control of Kashmir because the majority of the population was Moslem. This gave rise to the first India-Pakistan war over Kashmir in 1947.
Pashtun tribal groups backed by Pakistan invaded the Kashmir valley, and India sent in troops with the cooperation of the Maharajah. Finally with the involvement of the United Nations, two Security Council resolutions (39 and 47) in April 1948 required that a plebiscite be held to determine whether Kashmiris want to join India or Pakistan.
Independence was not a choice.
The Indo-Pakistani war of 1947 established the rough boundaries of today's Kashmir. India controls the Kashmir Valley, and two areas called Jammu and Ladakh, with a total population of around eight million. Pakistan set up its own Kashmir, called Azad (Free) Kashmir, in a tiny western chunk that it controls. The much larger region of Pakistani Kashmir is in the North-West. This province was once called the Northern Areas. In 1982 Pakistani President General Zia ul Haq proclaimed that the people of the Northern Areas were Pakistanis. In 2009, the Pakistani government renamed the Federally-Administered Northern Areas Gilgit-Baltistan. The population of the part of Kashmir controlled by Pakistan is nearly four million.
India and Pakistan fought another two wars over Kashmir in 1965 and 1999. They have also been involved in several skirmishes and disputes over the north eastern part of Kashmir. In short, Kashmir has been a prisoner of the rivalry between the two countries.
The national oppression of the Kashmiri people and their right to self determination
Despite the existence of a so-called legislature in Kashmir and a chief minister Omar Abdullah elected in 2008, the real power in Kashmir is widely regarded to be in the hands of India's army and intelligence agency and the Indian-appointed governor Narinder Nath Vohra.
Although Chief Minister Abdullah is from Kashmir, like his predecessors, people consider him no more than an Indian puppet. In fact, as the protests intensified during last summer's uprising, he rushed to New Delhi to ask for more specially trained anti-riot forces to add to the many thousands of Indian troops already occupying the area.
Even before the curfew established last summer, Indian security forces routinely encircled and raided towns and villages, murdering, arresting and torturing people. Rape and other abuses of human rights have long been a common practice. Tens of thousands of Kashmiri people have been killed, imprisoned and tortured. Some estimates say that 50,000 people were killed by Indian security forces in 1990s.
At that time half a million Indian troops poured into Kashmir, supposedly to fight the Islamic fundamentalist groups backed by Pakistan that were very active for a few years during that decade. Today there are no longer any strong Islamic fundamentalists groups in Kashmir, so neither they nor their Pakistani sponsors can be blamed for the disturbances. But the occupation troops remain to enforce the national oppression of the Kashmiri people that has been going on and meeting resistance for more than 60 years.
The imperialists played an important role in denying the right of self-determination to Kashmir. The policy of British imperialism that led to the division of India into India and Pakistan and divided smaller nations between larger ones is not an unfamiliar policy. Not far from Kashmir, the dividing up of Baluchistan between Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the division of the Pashtun areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan in a different form (since the Pashtuns are the dominant nationality in Afghanistan), are only a few examples of this policy and its consequences.
The UN, too, bears responsibility. It declared that Kashmir could only be considered a disputed area between India and Pakistan. This is the stand of the U.S., the UK and all of the imperialist powers. In other words, all deny the Kashmiri people′s right of self-determination.
The majority of people of Kashmir are not fighting to free themselves from India in order to join Pakistan, a no less brutal ruler.
Despite the activities of some religious figures and groups, the Kashmiri people's protests over the last three years have not asked for Islamic rule. In fact, religious slogans and demands are little heard. There were few if any symbols or banners carried by the protesters to indicate they were supporting Pakistan. What they chanted was ''Azadi'' (Freedom), ''Independence'' or nationalist slogans such as ''The Kashmir we have watered with our blood – that Kashmir is ours!''
This is the just demand that the reactionaries in the region and the world hate and fear the most.
In another photo, we see no dead or funerals, but the cries of grief from women of different ages standing next to each other clearly indicates that they are mourning a murdered family member.
The body of a young man is held high by a crowd while hundreds of people gather around in another picture. The men's faces are full of anger. Some point their finger as if they were threatening someone. Some are full of grief. Teenagers standing quietly in the corner of the picture seem to be thinking of revenge.
These pictures clearly depict the life of many people in Indian-controlled Kashmir as masses of young men and women defy curfew and challenge the security forces who brutalize and kill them.
The Kashmiri people are simply not allow to shout "Azadi" ( Freedom) and other slogans against the Indian government's national oppression and suppression. The Indian government has responded to their demand for self-determination not only by sending in these armed forces, but even by giving these occupiers legal immunity in advance for any beatings, rapes and murders they may commit under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA ) and the Public Safety Act (PSA). These laws are a clear signal by the Indian government that the men have been sent in for the purpose of committing atrocities and abusing human rights.
In the summer of 2010 the security forces had to confront stone-throwing youth daily. Few people would fail to admit that these youth have had the support of their sisters, mothers, fathers, uncles and even grandparents. As a result of the Indian forces policy of trying to deter protests by meeting stones with automatic weapons fire at demonstrations, terrify the people by murdering suspects and sometimes raping and killing at random, and imposing strict curfews to control the whole population, the crisis of the occupation has deepened.
Some commentators put it as the India's most serious crisis in recent history. But the Indian government faces rebellion on several fronts, including other struggles for self-determination in border regions. Along with Kashmir, it has also sent in large numbers of troops to inflict intense repression in India itself, with Operation Green Hunt, a military offensive to put down tribal and other peoples who are rising up in a people's war under the leadership of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). On 30 September of this year the Maoist party called for a 24 hour bandh (shutdown of work, business and transport) in six states in support of the Kashmiri people's struggle against the Indian government. (See their full press release, go to bannedthought.net, '' Statement on the Killing of Kashmiris'' ).
It is notable that even though the armed actions against the Indian government that took place in Kashmir in the early 1990s were largely replaced by unarmed protests in the new wave of protests since 2008, the Indian government has continued to kill unarmed demonstrators and has even escalated its violence, not in response to the violence of the resistance but its growing determination in the face of this brutality. In turn, the Kashmiri protests have intensified even more. Outraged people have attacked police offices, government buildings and power companies and set fire to armed forces and government vehicles.
In the more than a thousand protests and clashes between the protesters and the security forces last summer, the security forces murdered over a hundred people and injured a great many more. According to the Indian government, stone-throwing youth have injured more than 1,200 security forces.
What sparked this year's summer protests was the death of a 17-year-old student, Tufail Ahmad Mattoo. He was walking home from a tutoring centre in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian controlled-Kashmir, when he was hit in the head by a tear gas canister fired from close range. He died immediately. This act angered a whole population that has seen this kind of brutality repeatedly in the past.
In fact summer 2010 was the third successive year that massive street protests have broken out in Indian-controlled Kashmir. This year's demonstrations and clashes were the most intense in decades. People's anger has been accumulating. They were less willing than ever to obey the curfew and more willing to confront the security forces.
Last year protests (2009) flared after two young women were found dead by a river near the town of Shopian. It appeared that they had been raped and killed by security forces, but Indian investigators excluded this possibility in advance and concluded the women had drowned accidentally. But that was not the end of it. In order to deter people, the Indian government filed charges against the doctors who performed the post-mortem, and against the lawyers who had filed charges against the state. As one comment put it, ''Charges are filed against everybody except a possible suspect for the rape and murder, or the many officials who had visibly botched up the investigations.'' (Economic & Political Weekly, 11 September 2010)
Even in the midst of the protests this past summer, the security forces continued committing the brutalities and human rights abuses that angered the people in the first place. For example in Anantanag, security forces chased a 10 year-old boy who in order to save his life had to jump into a river.
In defiance of the curfew, thousands of angry people protesting this marched in the boy's funeral procession. According to residents, the officers fired at the marchers.
The repeated imposition of round-the-clock curfews had another damaging aspect on the life of the people in Kashmir. The curfew effectively shut at least Srinagar city down completely throughout the summer. Residents experienced a desperate shortage of basic foods, even milk for children, and medical supplies. Schools and universities were closed and the economy as a whole came to a halt. People could not even go to a doctor or a hospital. There are reports that hospital workers and doctors could not get to their posts without taking tremendous of risks. Some doctors on their way to work were arrested or brutalized by police and security forces, or turned back, according to Dr. Shahida Mir, the principal of the Government Medical College. (The New York Times, 2 September 2010)
The extent of India's deliberate atrocities come to light when the security forces extended their mistreatment even to people who had no intention of taking part in the protests. A resident in Srinagar, in the midst of the summer, said, ''We can't even move out or look outside from the window. It is suffocating.'' (The New York Times, 5 August 2010)
This year, the confrontations that began in mid-June are continuing, as the hot summer turns into what people call the '' bitter fall''. Another curfew was imposed in Srinagar and three other towns in September, and in response a general strike and shutdown against the occupation was called for 25 October.
Some historical background
What is the source of the problem? The Kashmiri people, like some others in the region, have been denied their rights of self-determination by the imperialists and regional powers. When the British were forced to give up their colony in 1947, instead of becoming a separate country Kashmir was divided between India and Pakistan.
Kashmir lies on the northern borders of India and Pakistan. Its more than 12 million people are mainly involved in farming or work in workshops and small factories making shawls, rugs and carpets. Kashmir's population is multi-ethnic and multi-religious, with a Moslem majority but also many Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Christians. After World War 2, before British imperialism ended its formal rule and left the subcontinent, the colonialists deliberately aggravated the differences between various nationalities and religions, as they did in other parts of the world. This policy resulted in the partition of the former colony of India and the creation of the country of Pakistan after a bloody war between Hindus and Moslem that led to millions of deaths and several millions refugees. It was the biggest displacement history had ever seen until then.
After partition and the creation of Pakistan, the subcontintent's small states that had never been under direct British colonial rule were not allowed to choose whether or not they wanted to be independent. In practice, they were forced to choose to be part of India or Pakistan. Kashmir was ruled by a brutal Maharajah called Hari Singh. India expected to secure the domination of Kashmir because the Maharajah was a Hindu ruler. Pakistan had its own excuse to seek control of Kashmir because the majority of the population was Moslem. This gave rise to the first India-Pakistan war over Kashmir in 1947.
Pashtun tribal groups backed by Pakistan invaded the Kashmir valley, and India sent in troops with the cooperation of the Maharajah. Finally with the involvement of the United Nations, two Security Council resolutions (39 and 47) in April 1948 required that a plebiscite be held to determine whether Kashmiris want to join India or Pakistan.
Independence was not a choice.
The Indo-Pakistani war of 1947 established the rough boundaries of today's Kashmir. India controls the Kashmir Valley, and two areas called Jammu and Ladakh, with a total population of around eight million. Pakistan set up its own Kashmir, called Azad (Free) Kashmir, in a tiny western chunk that it controls. The much larger region of Pakistani Kashmir is in the North-West. This province was once called the Northern Areas. In 1982 Pakistani President General Zia ul Haq proclaimed that the people of the Northern Areas were Pakistanis. In 2009, the Pakistani government renamed the Federally-Administered Northern Areas Gilgit-Baltistan. The population of the part of Kashmir controlled by Pakistan is nearly four million.
India and Pakistan fought another two wars over Kashmir in 1965 and 1999. They have also been involved in several skirmishes and disputes over the north eastern part of Kashmir. In short, Kashmir has been a prisoner of the rivalry between the two countries.
The national oppression of the Kashmiri people and their right to self determination
Despite the existence of a so-called legislature in Kashmir and a chief minister Omar Abdullah elected in 2008, the real power in Kashmir is widely regarded to be in the hands of India's army and intelligence agency and the Indian-appointed governor Narinder Nath Vohra.
Although Chief Minister Abdullah is from Kashmir, like his predecessors, people consider him no more than an Indian puppet. In fact, as the protests intensified during last summer's uprising, he rushed to New Delhi to ask for more specially trained anti-riot forces to add to the many thousands of Indian troops already occupying the area.
Even before the curfew established last summer, Indian security forces routinely encircled and raided towns and villages, murdering, arresting and torturing people. Rape and other abuses of human rights have long been a common practice. Tens of thousands of Kashmiri people have been killed, imprisoned and tortured. Some estimates say that 50,000 people were killed by Indian security forces in 1990s.
At that time half a million Indian troops poured into Kashmir, supposedly to fight the Islamic fundamentalist groups backed by Pakistan that were very active for a few years during that decade. Today there are no longer any strong Islamic fundamentalists groups in Kashmir, so neither they nor their Pakistani sponsors can be blamed for the disturbances. But the occupation troops remain to enforce the national oppression of the Kashmiri people that has been going on and meeting resistance for more than 60 years.
The imperialists played an important role in denying the right of self-determination to Kashmir. The policy of British imperialism that led to the division of India into India and Pakistan and divided smaller nations between larger ones is not an unfamiliar policy. Not far from Kashmir, the dividing up of Baluchistan between Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the division of the Pashtun areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan in a different form (since the Pashtuns are the dominant nationality in Afghanistan), are only a few examples of this policy and its consequences.
The UN, too, bears responsibility. It declared that Kashmir could only be considered a disputed area between India and Pakistan. This is the stand of the U.S., the UK and all of the imperialist powers. In other words, all deny the Kashmiri people′s right of self-determination.
The majority of people of Kashmir are not fighting to free themselves from India in order to join Pakistan, a no less brutal ruler.
Despite the activities of some religious figures and groups, the Kashmiri people's protests over the last three years have not asked for Islamic rule. In fact, religious slogans and demands are little heard. There were few if any symbols or banners carried by the protesters to indicate they were supporting Pakistan. What they chanted was ''Azadi'' (Freedom), ''Independence'' or nationalist slogans such as ''The Kashmir we have watered with our blood – that Kashmir is ours!''
This is the just demand that the reactionaries in the region and the world hate and fear the most.
Donnerstag, 15. Juli 2010
India: Leading comrade Azad murdered - CPI (Maoist) statement
12 July 2010. A World to Win News Service. It was with great sorrow and anger that we learned that the authorities in India captured and cold-bloodedly murdered Comrade Azad (Cherukuri Rajkumar), a leading member of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) known throughout the world for his work as the party's spokesperson, and party comrade Hemchandra Pandey. Following is a slightly edited statement by the CPI (Maoist Central Committee released by the party's North Regional Bureau Press 3 July 2010.
On July 1st, the Andhra Pradesh Special Intelligence Bureau police, a unit notorious for its abductions and cold-blooded murders, arrested comrade Azad (Cherukuri Rajkumar), CPI (Maoist) Political Bureau member and spokesperson, and comrade Hem Pandey (Jitender), a zonal committee-level comrade, in Nagpur city around 11 o'clock when they went to meet a comrade from Dandakarnaya zone who was supposed to receive them. Comrade Azad reached Nagpur around 10 am on the fateful day along with comrade Hem Pandey, after travelling a long distance. Acting with specific information, the lawless goons of the AP SIB abducted them, and took them, perhaps by helicopter, to the Adilabad jungle near the Maharashtra border and killed them, shooting them point blank and in cold blood.
We pay our red homage to our beloved comrades…
The life of comrade Azad
Comrade Azad was one of the senior-most party leaders of CPI (Maoist). He was born in Krishna district of AP, in a well-to-do family. He did his school education in Sainik School, at Korukonda of the present Vizianagaram District. Comrade Surapuneni Janardhan, a legendary comrade of the student movement, brought comrade Rajkumar into the Radical Students Union in 1974.
A brilliant student at the Regional Engineering College, which became famous as the Radical Engineering College in those days, he finished his degree in chemical engineering and moved to Vishakhapatnam as per the Party's direction. He was the second president of the AP RSU until 1984. He was the catalyst behind many Andhra-wide student agitations and people's movements in that period. He became a district committee member of the CPI (ML) (People's War).
He moved through the length and breadth of India to organize the Seminar on the Nationality Question held in Madras (now Chennai) in 1981. He was shifted to Karnataka in 1982, where comrade Azad was one of the founder members of the party there and worked as the secretary of the State Committee. He became a member of the Central Committee of the CPI (ML) (People's War) after the Central Plenum in 1990 and its Political Bureau at the All-India Conference in 1995. He continued in those posts after the formation of the CPI (Maoist) in 2004. He has been the spokesperson of the CC since then.
Known for his simple life and hard work, voracious reading and brilliant analyses of situations, crystal clear articulation and sharp logic, and fine organizational skills, he contributed widely to the revolutionary movement in many spheres.
He wrote profusely for People’s March, People's War (the party theoretical organ) and the Maoist Information Bulletin. He wrote a fine critique of the intellectuals of AP who got disillusioned and lost faith in the revolutionary movement after the collapse of Soviet imperialism and its satellite regimes.
With his death, the Indian revolutionary movement lost an exemplary comrade and a shining star, who served the movement more than three and half decades…
Comrade Hem Pandey, 30, hailed from the nearby village of Pithoragarh in Uttarakhand State. He did his MA in history at Nainital University and got himself registered in PhD studies. While he was in college, he was active member of AISA. Slowly realizing the pseudo-revolutionar y character of AISA politics, he moved to the radical groups. Later, in 2001, he joined the then-CPI (ML) (PW). He organized peasants in the mountainous villages in Almora district, taking up umpteen numbers of issues of the peasantry.
Soft-spoken, bespectacled, lean and energetic, comrade Hem won the love of the people of that region. He was moved into more important work in 2005. He did his new assignments with patience and endurance. His appetite for learning new things, reading more and more, and zeal for penning his ideas, are to be emulated by all revolutionaries. He wrote articles for news magazines under various pen names. We request the civil rights organisations to demand that the AP police send the body of comrade Hem Pandey to his bereaved mother in Haldwani, Uttarakhand state, who is his sole surviving parent.
AP SIB - the Indian avatar of Mossad
The Andhra Pradesh Special Intelligence Bureau has been partly trained by the Mossad [Israeli intelligence]… It has been moving across state borders, and conducting abductions and cold-blooded murders with impunity. This is all happening with clear blessings of Manmohan [Prime Minister Manmohan Singh], Sonia [Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi] and [Home Minister] Chidambaram. This fascist gang has established its tentacles all over India, resorting to the killings of revolutionaries, scoffing at the recent AP high court judgement that all encounters [where the authorities kill captured or kidnapped revolutionaries and then falsely report that they died in an "encounter" – a gun battle] are to be first booked as murders... [and brought before a judge for an investigation into possible culpable homicide].
Will Chidambaram expect the CPI (Maoist) to sit for talks with the blood of comrades Azad and Hem Pandey on his hands?
CPI (Maoist) never contested or raised any hue and cry in the case of real encounters. The AP police are resorting to Goebbels-like lies, not believed even by the gullible. CPI (Maoist) stood for truth and accountability to the people, and always stated facts. Azad was not going to Sarkepally forest in Adilabad. When there is no movement and organization in Adilabad, why would he go there? Azad was going to discuss with our comrades, inter alia, the concrete proposals of well-meaning people like Swami Agnivesh [a figure who has been trying to arrange talks between the CPI(M) and the central government] about particular dates for a mutual ceasefire. He was carrying a confidential letter written to him from Swami Agnivesh dated 26 June 2010. Will Chidambaram expect CPI (Maoist) to sit for talks with the blood of comrades Azad and Hem Pandey on his hands? He repeatedly calls on us to abjure violence. Killing unarmed comrades by the AP police with your blessings – is this not like devils chanting scriptures?
AP police lies
That the police found an AK47 is again a lie. Comrade Azad alighted from a train around 10 am along with comrade Hem Pandey in Nagpur Station, and was caught by the AP SIB unarmed. Is the government following article 21 of its own constitution? Is the government following the kernel of the Geneva Convention, that “defenceless persons” should not be harmed? Is it not utter hypocrisy and a hoax that while the government is presenting the prevention of torture bill, the police are every minute resorting to the torture of the detained? These concocted encounter stories have been repeated ad nauseum by the AP police, churned out to the media umpteen times. The right to life, guaranteed under the constitution, is mocked, and the right to be brought before a judge within 24 hours of arrest has metamorphosed into being killed within 24 hours of arrest, so that there is no scope for any redress by their near and dear.
We appeal to the civil rights organizations, democrats and patriots to rise to the occasion and thoroughly investigate this fake encounter as an example of the extra-judicial killing that are happening in scores in this country and bring out the truth before the people.
- Ajay, spokesperson, CPI (Maoist)
On July 1st, the Andhra Pradesh Special Intelligence Bureau police, a unit notorious for its abductions and cold-blooded murders, arrested comrade Azad (Cherukuri Rajkumar), CPI (Maoist) Political Bureau member and spokesperson, and comrade Hem Pandey (Jitender), a zonal committee-level comrade, in Nagpur city around 11 o'clock when they went to meet a comrade from Dandakarnaya zone who was supposed to receive them. Comrade Azad reached Nagpur around 10 am on the fateful day along with comrade Hem Pandey, after travelling a long distance. Acting with specific information, the lawless goons of the AP SIB abducted them, and took them, perhaps by helicopter, to the Adilabad jungle near the Maharashtra border and killed them, shooting them point blank and in cold blood.
We pay our red homage to our beloved comrades…
The life of comrade Azad
Comrade Azad was one of the senior-most party leaders of CPI (Maoist). He was born in Krishna district of AP, in a well-to-do family. He did his school education in Sainik School, at Korukonda of the present Vizianagaram District. Comrade Surapuneni Janardhan, a legendary comrade of the student movement, brought comrade Rajkumar into the Radical Students Union in 1974.
A brilliant student at the Regional Engineering College, which became famous as the Radical Engineering College in those days, he finished his degree in chemical engineering and moved to Vishakhapatnam as per the Party's direction. He was the second president of the AP RSU until 1984. He was the catalyst behind many Andhra-wide student agitations and people's movements in that period. He became a district committee member of the CPI (ML) (People's War).
He moved through the length and breadth of India to organize the Seminar on the Nationality Question held in Madras (now Chennai) in 1981. He was shifted to Karnataka in 1982, where comrade Azad was one of the founder members of the party there and worked as the secretary of the State Committee. He became a member of the Central Committee of the CPI (ML) (People's War) after the Central Plenum in 1990 and its Political Bureau at the All-India Conference in 1995. He continued in those posts after the formation of the CPI (Maoist) in 2004. He has been the spokesperson of the CC since then.
Known for his simple life and hard work, voracious reading and brilliant analyses of situations, crystal clear articulation and sharp logic, and fine organizational skills, he contributed widely to the revolutionary movement in many spheres.
He wrote profusely for People’s March, People's War (the party theoretical organ) and the Maoist Information Bulletin. He wrote a fine critique of the intellectuals of AP who got disillusioned and lost faith in the revolutionary movement after the collapse of Soviet imperialism and its satellite regimes.
With his death, the Indian revolutionary movement lost an exemplary comrade and a shining star, who served the movement more than three and half decades…
Comrade Hem Pandey, 30, hailed from the nearby village of Pithoragarh in Uttarakhand State. He did his MA in history at Nainital University and got himself registered in PhD studies. While he was in college, he was active member of AISA. Slowly realizing the pseudo-revolutionar y character of AISA politics, he moved to the radical groups. Later, in 2001, he joined the then-CPI (ML) (PW). He organized peasants in the mountainous villages in Almora district, taking up umpteen numbers of issues of the peasantry.
Soft-spoken, bespectacled, lean and energetic, comrade Hem won the love of the people of that region. He was moved into more important work in 2005. He did his new assignments with patience and endurance. His appetite for learning new things, reading more and more, and zeal for penning his ideas, are to be emulated by all revolutionaries. He wrote articles for news magazines under various pen names. We request the civil rights organisations to demand that the AP police send the body of comrade Hem Pandey to his bereaved mother in Haldwani, Uttarakhand state, who is his sole surviving parent.
AP SIB - the Indian avatar of Mossad
The Andhra Pradesh Special Intelligence Bureau has been partly trained by the Mossad [Israeli intelligence]… It has been moving across state borders, and conducting abductions and cold-blooded murders with impunity. This is all happening with clear blessings of Manmohan [Prime Minister Manmohan Singh], Sonia [Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi] and [Home Minister] Chidambaram. This fascist gang has established its tentacles all over India, resorting to the killings of revolutionaries, scoffing at the recent AP high court judgement that all encounters [where the authorities kill captured or kidnapped revolutionaries and then falsely report that they died in an "encounter" – a gun battle] are to be first booked as murders... [and brought before a judge for an investigation into possible culpable homicide].
Will Chidambaram expect the CPI (Maoist) to sit for talks with the blood of comrades Azad and Hem Pandey on his hands?
CPI (Maoist) never contested or raised any hue and cry in the case of real encounters. The AP police are resorting to Goebbels-like lies, not believed even by the gullible. CPI (Maoist) stood for truth and accountability to the people, and always stated facts. Azad was not going to Sarkepally forest in Adilabad. When there is no movement and organization in Adilabad, why would he go there? Azad was going to discuss with our comrades, inter alia, the concrete proposals of well-meaning people like Swami Agnivesh [a figure who has been trying to arrange talks between the CPI(M) and the central government] about particular dates for a mutual ceasefire. He was carrying a confidential letter written to him from Swami Agnivesh dated 26 June 2010. Will Chidambaram expect CPI (Maoist) to sit for talks with the blood of comrades Azad and Hem Pandey on his hands? He repeatedly calls on us to abjure violence. Killing unarmed comrades by the AP police with your blessings – is this not like devils chanting scriptures?
AP police lies
That the police found an AK47 is again a lie. Comrade Azad alighted from a train around 10 am along with comrade Hem Pandey in Nagpur Station, and was caught by the AP SIB unarmed. Is the government following article 21 of its own constitution? Is the government following the kernel of the Geneva Convention, that “defenceless persons” should not be harmed? Is it not utter hypocrisy and a hoax that while the government is presenting the prevention of torture bill, the police are every minute resorting to the torture of the detained? These concocted encounter stories have been repeated ad nauseum by the AP police, churned out to the media umpteen times. The right to life, guaranteed under the constitution, is mocked, and the right to be brought before a judge within 24 hours of arrest has metamorphosed into being killed within 24 hours of arrest, so that there is no scope for any redress by their near and dear.
We appeal to the civil rights organizations, democrats and patriots to rise to the occasion and thoroughly investigate this fake encounter as an example of the extra-judicial killing that are happening in scores in this country and bring out the truth before the people.
- Ajay, spokesperson, CPI (Maoist)
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