No more a war on adivasis alone... It is now an all out war on all the oppressed people of the sub-continent!
- Published on Thursday, 02 May 2013 11:06
- Written by www.,icawpi.org
Forum against
War on People, Public Meeting: 4th May (Saturday)
2pm, Rajendra Bhawan, Deen Dayal Upadhyay Marg,
Near ITO, New Delhi
Since 2009 the ground level reports show that lakhs
of adivasi people have been pushed out of their natural habitats in the name of
fighting ‘Left Wing Extremism’, a pet word for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, to
hide his pro-imperialist outright servile model of development that can only
bring further miseries to the masses of the people. Thousands of adivasis have
been killed, maimed, raped, and brutally wounded, injured. Many of their homes
in hundreds have been razed by security forces—who talk, right from the foot
soldier to his officer, only about ‘development’ in these areas—setting them on
fire. All characteristics of a genocidal war are evidently showing up in these 3
years that have gone by.
Yet no statistics, no Government Commissions, no
proof of the War at all! The sullying silence from various arms of the state is
the only answer to democratic voices that have marked their protest. The
adivasis since 1947 have been an expendable people for the various governments
and its pro-imperialist model of development. The war on them in the name of
their ‘development’ as well, by successive governments, continues till date
unabated. While a pampered new middle class is being wooed to the tilt to hide
the ugly face of this so-called largest democracy in the world the Adivasi still
remain the subject, as were in the colonial days, to be ‘redeemed’ and
‘civilized’ !
As the policies of Liberalisation, Privatisation and
Globalisation takes its violent toll on the various sections of the masses of
the people, every avenue of livelihood, of production and reproduction of the
material world has been transformed into a war zone, as is being waged on the
workers in cities and their factories, slums all over the subcontinent further
aggravated by the worst ever economic recession since the Great Depression.
Maruti Suzuki workers at Manesar, Haryana are at the forefront like the adivasis
in their resistance against such dog-eat-dog exploitation and plunder. Left with
little option to survive workers of Yanam in Andhra Pradesh, UP and elsewhere in
the subcontinent are increasingly militating against the crisis-ridden system
that has nothing to offer as meaningful solutions to the deepening problems of
the workers in terms better employment, working conditions and pay. Farmers and
other cultivators are also raising their banner of revolt against acquisition of
their land for different projects as well as extremely detrimental policies that
can starve the agrarian sector without any future of promised sustainability in
production and distribution. The resistance is brewing against the all pervasive
war of India’s corrupt rulers among all sections of suppressed and oppressed
people of the subcontinent.
It has been more than three years since the Indian
state launched a massive military campaign in August-September 2009 against the
people of central and eastern India, which was euphemistically codenamed
‘Operation Green Hunt’. This hunting campaign by the rulers of the country –
against the oppressed and fighting people of the country in general and the
adivasis in particular – have left a bloody trail of mass murders, ‘encounter’
killings, and ‘disappearances’. Thousands of people are put behind bars;
custodial torture is the face of increasing impunity of India’s security
forces; rape and other forms of sexual violence is being resorted to against
women; arson, plunder, destruction of people’s property every aspect of the
violent beast is being institutionalised and legalised through policies teethed
with draconian laws. The initial fanfare and media-glitz with which Operation
Green Hunt was launched soon evaporated due to the stiff resistance put up by
the people directly on the line of fire.
The vocal and steadfast protests by the
conscientious citizens and people’s organisations inside and outside the country
too have put the Indian state on the back-foot. As a result, there is a strong
public opinion and resentment against Indian state’s war on the people of the
subcontinent. This is an achievement of the various forms of resistances that
have refused to die down in the face of desperate and brutal repression of the
State. Forum against War on People which derives its spirit from the innumerable
resistances of the masses of the people too has played its role from its
inception in November - December 2009.
The war on the people, however, still continues. On
the face of stiff resistance, the state has merely changed its tactics in
scaling up its fascist war of attrition. In the second phase of Operation Green
Hunt, the doctrine of ‘Low Intensity Warfare’ perfected by the US imperialist
army against the heroic people of Vietnam and later used against several peoples
of the world for dreaming a world free of imperialist oppression and
exploitation has now been deployed by the Indian state. In the name of ‘carpet
security’ thousands of additional central paramilitary troops are being raised,
trained and stationed in the ‘war zone’. The Indian Army has already established
its base over a six hundred square kilometre area in Narayanpur district of
Chhattisgarh, ready to begin its assault on the people of the region. The Indian
Air Force too is being introduced in a combat role – not only transporting
troops and supplying logistics – but arming its aircrafts with machine guns and
commandos. This is in addition to the high-tech surveillance system including
UAVs and drones imported from the US and Israel, which has been put in place to
monitor the mineral-rich regions of central and eastern India after dividing
them into ‘security grids’. The war mongering, jingoist media plays second
fiddle to this grant design often glorifying/mystifying the unprecedented and
unmitigated violence on the people.
This intensified but carefully-calibrated phase of
the war on people is being guided by the central Home Ministry through the
Unified Command system in coordination with the state governments. Irrespective
of the party in power –be it the Congress, BJP, BJD, JD (U) or SP – all the
ruling class parties have joined hands against the people to unceasingly unleash
Operation Green Hunt and such synonymised interventions such as Operation Hakka,
Operation Octopus, Operation Vijay, Operation Thunderbolt etc. The memory of the
most brutal episode of this extermination campaign – the Bijapur massacre of
June 2012 – is still fresh in our memory. With the deepening of the worldwide
crisis of the imperialist economy and its fault lines getting clearer in the
Indian subcontinent, the desperate rulers of India are resorting to more brutal
fascist methods against the oppressed people of the country, in their last gasp
attempt to attract decadent capital abundantly into the local markets in order
to facilitate unbridled corporate plunder of people’s resources. War and the
various euphemisms to justify the bloody war is nothing but a cold and
calculated yet desperate manoeuvre of the Indian rulers as an integral part of
the strategy of the imperialists to tide over this crisis. The stage, therefore,
is set for a renewed attack on the vast masses of people, their lives,
livelihood, and democratic rights.
A united, uncompromising and unrelenting resistance
against the Indian state’s war on people is the only and certain way for all of
us. The blood in the streets, the blood in the countryside, the blood in the
jungles all are definite signs of singing in the air of massive countrywide
resistance in defense of our right to life; right to liberty; to a dignified
existence; in defense of our jal-jangal-jameen!
Speakers:
Amit Bhaduri
Aparna
Arundhati Roy
Ashok Bhowmick
BD Sharma
Bhasha Singh
Eddie Rodrigues
G Haragopal
Justice Sachar
Karen Gabriel
Mangalesh Dabral
Mohd. Ahmad
Pankaj Bisht
Prashant Bhushan
PUCL
PUDR
RAMAKRISHNAN AK
Sharique
Sumit Chakravarty
Vara Vara Rao &
others.
S A R Geelani, Mrigank, G N Saibaba,
Convenors
Let us
raise our collective democratic voice against this all
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