Nandini Sundar

The Path to a Conflict-Free State

2012-01-28T10:47:00.003+05:30

Contrary to the dominant narrative that areas where Naxalites are strong are where the state has been absent, for the last 100-150 years, there has been a gradual expansion of the state in tribal areas regardless of whether the people want it or not. However, the state has been expanding in the wrong areas. You have an extension of the forest department, the bureaucracy, the patwari and the forest guard. But at the same time there is no state presence in the form of school teachers, healthcare workers and other services.

The problem here is that the state only wants to take a military approach towards ending Naxalism. This will not work as it has been proven in the case of Kashmir and the North East. It may have ‘worked’ in Punjab, but that was because the people were already alienated from the militants. The criterion of success is also debatable because of the grave violations of human rights. In terms of a constitutional approach to conflict resolution, I wouldn’t say that was an approach that worked.

This attitude [of the government] is reflected in the CRPF [Central Reserve Police Force] programme of winning the hearts and minds of the people, as part of which the paramilitary gifts people lungis and saris. Ironically, the CRPF personnel beat up people if they don’t accept the gifts and people laugh as they recount this.

In Chhattisgarh, in the areas where Maoists are strong, there is no voting in the villages, and many of the sarpanches have joined the Salwa Judum. So, when development work is routed through the sarpanches, it has no relationship to anything on the ground. The sarpanches don’t even live in the villages, and invent paper schemes in collusion with the block officer. It’s a fantasy of development where the paperwork looks good, but no one’s heart or mind is being won. Much of this is also being shown for roadside villages which were never Judum-affected or Maoist-influenced in the first place, so that the figures look good. But the real areas that are affected remain unaddressed.

The only way to proceed towards establishing peace in Chhattisgarh is to start on the plank of justice. Three villages had been torched last year and in 2007. The interesting part here is that in 2007, the average losses [claimed by the tribals] per household was around Rs. 1 lakh, but due to the recent incidents [attacks on the tribals by the paramilitary], in many households, the figure is as low as Rs. 20,000 per household. It is evident that the Adivasis are not only under relentless attack, but are also becoming paupers.

In this context, it is not clear what role the integrated action plan announced by Jairam Ramesh will play. Where people have been killed and raped and houses burnt and they get no justice, will their hearts and minds be won through roads and panchayat bhawans? For their part, the villagers will accept state intervention if it is seen as a part of a justice package and not as part of counter-insurgency. We [activists fighting on behalf of the tribals in Chhattisgarh] had submitted a rehabilitation plan that precisely ensured this—through an enumeration of what had happened in each village and a transparent compensation and criminal registration process with an appropriate monitoring committee. But the governmen—both Centre and state—have kept stalling.

If the Centre is serious about bettering the situation in Chhattisgarh, first it needs to withdraw troops to the barracks and hold peace talks with the Naxalites. But that seems unlikely as they have killed Kishenji [Maoist leader]. The Maoists, for their part, must stop initiating attacks and renew expressions of interest in peace talks. As unlikely as the prospect seems, there is no other way, but talks. As for other steps, the onus lies on the government alone. The second thing that the Chhattisgarh government needs to do is to implement the Supreme Court order disbanding Special Police Officers [SPOs] in its spirit. The state government has today recruited the SPOs into the Chhattisgarh Armed Auxiliary Force and they continue to threaten people.

The SPOs are allowed a free run by the police. Today, the SPOs who have been recruited into the auxiliary force earn four times the salary they used to draw earlier. While they were paid Rs. 1,500 earlier as SPOs, these people today earn around Rs. 7,000. They are the ones to benefit the most out of our petition. This would be fine in terms of giving them security, but for this to be constitutional, the guilty ones among them have to be taken to task. Otherwise, what you have is the regularisation of criminals.

The government needs to ensure that justice is delivered to the people of Chhattisgarh. It also needs to implement our rehabilitation plan and file criminal cases. Today, you can be a mass murderer and get away with it whether in Gujarat 2002 or 2005 onwards in Chhattisgarh. Unless there is an end to impunity, and a movement for this, just like the movement against corruption, we will never see a conflict-free country.

What needs to be done
☛ End the military approach towards Naxalism.
☛ To establish peace, one needs to start on the plank of justice and start peace talks.
☛ Disband Special Police Officers who threaten locals with impunity.

(As told to K.P. Narayana Kumar)
his article appeared in Forbes India Magazine of 03 February, 2012

The University must trust its own teachers and students

2011-11-12T15:01:00.001+05:30

If Delhi University’s academic council is to be believed, Indians who are eligible to drive, to vote and to get married are, however, not adult enough to be exposed to the idea that there are multiple versions of the Ramayana. We are ‘reassured’ that A.K. Ramanujan’s essay on Three Hundred Ramayanas has not been banned, it has simply been deemed unfit for undergraduate pedagogy. After all, how can teachers, especially women and non-Hindus, who effortlessly teach reproductive biology in high school, talk about sexuality and desire in the epics? How can students distinguish between faith and historiography?

There is a clear political agenda to the removal of this particular text, which has little to do with allegedly ‘hurt community sentiments’, starting with the 2008 ABVP attack, the subsequent court case, and the pressure on the OUP to cease publishing the book, to which it so cowardly caved in. What must cause deeper concern, however, is that the academic council of one of India’s leading universities enabled this particular agenda. Not only does this show lack of reflection on the university’s role as a public institution, but also indicates serious problems with university procedures.

A case for engagement

In a poor country like India, university teachers, especially post 6^th pay commission, must justify their burden on the public exchequer. The question is how best to engage with the wider public and yet maintain one’s autonomy.

When scholars from the Northeast point to its absence in standard histories of nationalism, we should welcome this correction in perspective. If a dalit community were to object to the teaching of allegedly casteist texts, we would be obliged to investigate this complaint seriously, even if the grievance was later found misplaced. In fact, this is what the appointment of experts to look into the Ramayana reading was meant to do, before the academic council decided to substitute its own expertise for theirs.

More fundamentally, however, what the public pays a university for is not specific bits of research or teaching, but to enable young people to think, to go beyond their own narrow experiences. Thus fundamental research in mathematics, philosophy or literature is as essential to a university as market led courses in commerce or management. If there is one message that the academic council decision on the Ramanujan text sends out, it is that the university does not trust its students or teachers to think.

A case for autonomy

The controversy over the Ramanujan text highlights two basic problems in the Indian university - distrust and discipline. Whatever else the advantages of the semester system, for many in authority, its real value lies in the regulatory power of frequent exams. As one college principal noted, “this ensures that all teachers and students attend from the first day of college.”

As for distrust, far from being self governing collegiate structures, the Ministry of Human Resource Development and the UGC exercise over-riding control. For instance, the UGC decides on selection criteria for recruitments because it cannot trust academics not to exercise favouritism in drawing up shortlists. All that the department does – and it requires a panel of four Professors to carry out what is essentially clerical work - is slot people into grades, depending on their marks and degrees.

This control translates in turn into the university bureaucracy. Small things which should be handled at the department level, go up some long food chain to the Vice Chancellor and equally slowly come down again. Department heads spend considerable time signing bus passes and library cards, presumably because the clerical staff cannot be relied on. PhD thesis titles have to be approved at the start of the PhD and require an elaborate procedure should the hapless student want to change. And so on.

It is intrinsic to this whole system of institutionalized distrust that the academic council decides what should be taught, rather than leaving it to the department or faculty concerned. Indeed, the whole system of syllabus formation often borders on the absurd. Courses stay unrevised for decades because of the painful procedures. It took me three years to get a new MA course on the sociology of law passed. The academic council becomes a site to show off knowledge. No-one dares challenge the hard sciences but everyone claims to be an expert on the social sciences, even if they have no idea of the craft that goes into the simplest looking text. If teaching about the Ramayana might have consequences for people’s faith, by the same logic, learning chemistry might enable people to make bombs.

True, teachers often betray their profession, a fact which their unions must address. Absenteeism and nepotism are major problems. Quotas are required because left to themselves, few people actively implement affirmative action. Yet, the solution is paradoxically, not more discipline, but more autonomy. If your employer does not pay you to think, why do that extra work of thinking? And once you stop thinking, why bother to have a university at all?

The Politics of Prizes and Silencing of Adivasi Voice

2011-10-22T17:32:00.001+05:30

Last weekend, I attended a wonderful rally by the Adivasi Mahasabha in Raipur – some 10-15 busloads of people came from Dantewada and Bastar alone, while large numbers came from other parts of Chhattisgarh and even other states like Maharashtra, Orissa and West Bengal. The procession was flagged off by Dhurwa dancers while the rear end was brought up by Marias with their large dhols and bison horns. In between were thousands of militant marchers shouting slogans against militarization, demanding peace talks, the release of their arrested leaders, the implementation of the Supreme Court judgement on Salwa Judum, and all their constitutional rights with respect to land, forest and water. These were men and women who had lost everything to arson and loot by Salwa Judum, who had been interned in camps but managed to return home and pick up their ploughs again, who face the daily threat of arrests, beatings and encounters by the security forces, who have to negotiate with the Maoists everytime they wanted to access panchayat funds, who live a life on the razor edge of survival. And yet here they were, laughing, cheering and wowing to fight till the last breath, fight for their constitutional rights and in a constitutional way.

This remarkable struggle has been waged, not just over one weekend, but over years. Indeed, the Salwa Judum leaders themselves credit the CPI with the destruction of their movement – both through mass actions and through legal means. The first reliable account of what Salwa Judum was doing came from a CPI fact-finding in November 2005. It was at an Adivasi Mahasabha rally held in Cherla in June 2007 that villagers broke the silence which had engulfed them since Salwa Judum began and gave written accounts of what had happened to them – accounts which later formed the basis of a writ petition before the Supreme Court by Manish Kunjam, Kartam Joga and Dudhi Joga. Kartam Joga has since been jailed for his efforts, along with several other CPI leaders all of whom have anywhere between 5- 7 heinous cases against them. In the Tadmetla case of April 2010 when 76 CRPF men were killed, for example, there is a fungible and expansive list of accused where anyone inconvenient can be grandfathered in, regardless of how far they were from the actual site or their political persuasion.

Subsequent rallies organized by the CPI have each been historic – one in Jagdalpur in November 2007 which was attended by over a lakh of people, broke the fear of returning home and led to the slow and gradual emptying out of camps. Much public attention has been focused on a few villages where NGOs have worked to resettle IDPs, and important and brave though that was, the much larger scale and quiet impact of the CPI work - as well as the Maoists own efforts at restoration - has gone unremarked. The CPI has also been fighting against Tata and Essar’s plans to displace people for their steel plants. Despite the fact that the CPI cannot compete with the money power of the Congress and BJP and win elections, Manish Kunjam is easily the most popular adivasi leader in the undivided district of Bastar. The CPI is also the only party in a field which includes the Maoists, which is led and peopled entirely by adivasis in the area. This is of no mean significance. Indeed, speaking at the adivasi mahasabha meeting on the 16^th, PA Sangma recalled how on a visit to Jagdalpur, he was introduced by the Congress leaders to their local functionaries. In a tribal dominated district, with all seats reserved (Jagdalpur has since been dereserved), not one of them was an adivasi!

So when I read a Tehelka article which describes Soni Sori and Lingaram Kodopi as “the last men left standing in Dantewada district” after Binayak and Himanshu were arrested or evicted, or Shoma Chaudhury’s quote from some unnamed (and obviously ignorant) CRPF commander that “earlier the tribals didn’t have a voice, but these two people changed that”, I had to rub my eyes in disbelief. It is evident to everyone on the ground and outside that Soni and Linga are being framed, but in Chhattisgarh, whether you are a hero or a zero, you have equal chances of being arrested. Some would argue that it is perhaps not surprising that a party like the CPI which has consistently fought against Essar and Tata – which coincidentally are funding a major Tehelka event- is off its radar. But the Tehelka article displays a deeper malaise.

For far too long, the dominant activist mode of engaging with Dantewada has been in the language of ‘sole spokesmanship’ or “saviourism” by “human rights defenders”, who are usually non-adivasis. This is not to belittle their important work in bringing attention to the issue or the very real sacrifices that Binayak Sen and Himanshu Kumar have undergone in being arrested or having their house demolished – but simply to remind readers that were it not for the bravery of the adivasis who tell their stories to fact-finding teams, the media or lawyers and adivasis who guide outsiders to their burnt villages – none of these stories would ever have come out. I have had students in Delhi university refuse to even fill out anonymous teacher evaluation forms for fear that they would be found out and victimized. It is clear that if anyone deserves a prize for defending human rights, it is the very people whose human rights are being violated, but who have refused to take it lying down.

When it comes to the CPI, there are of course, political reasons why their sterling contribution to the ongoing struggle in Chhattisgarh is not recognized. There is the history of the party left’s betrayal in West Bengal and their own ossification and failure at media outreach; but also the increasingly personality centred campaigns of the independent left; the way in which the media and internet list-serves amplify the views of those who are tech savvy; the media requirement of a person/face to provide the human interest angle; the interests of the Maoists in undercutting any support for a potential rival; and also the interests of corporate funded media which find it easier to celebrate individuals as against communist parties, individual heroism as against organized resistance. But this glossing over is also, I am convinced, in the Bastar case, because their cadre and leaders are adivasi.

Questions of representation have repeatedly surfaced in a variety of social movements, including among the Maoists who claim to be the quintessential party of the adivasis and dalits. Dalits in Andhra Pradesh have broken away claiming submerged casteism in the party. For the Nepali Maoists, ethnicity is a major question; while even an organization like the RSS has formed separate fronts for dalits and adivasis even if the aim is ultimately to Hinduise them. Ethnicity or caste does not always manifest itself in visible ways, but through hesitancies and silences. For instance, I have observed a class full of adivasi boys in Jashpur fall silent and allow one or two non adivasi boys to dominate when it came to discussing the merits of reservation.

Historically the university has provided a good ground to study the coming to voice of an oppressed group. In the first stage, people who have been oppressed want to work on their own problems and histories – women, adivasis, dalits, immigrants – and this provides a valuable corrective to the dominant view on the subject which is historically male or upper caste or white. It is, however, in the second stage when people break away from their own past and begin to assert the right to write the histories of other communities or so-called universalist accounts, that they have more truly gained power. Indeed, the people who have really become well known from their communities like Dr. Ambedkar, Jaipal Singh and Prof. Ramdayal Munda, all excelled in things which went beyond their own social background, though they later took up the cause of their own people. Sadly, that state is still far off for most adivasi and dalit students in India.

Adivasis, dalits or others rarely take unmarked leadership positions. Even though their struggles are saving the rest of us from environmental disaster, they are seen as victims rather than as leaders in the search for universal solutions. On the contrary, non adivasis and non dalits rarely feel uncomfortable when representing the problems of these communities, even if a residual modesty may make them deny that they are the voice of the community in question, and I confess to being part of this privileged group.

It is against this background, that we must welcome the recent controversy over the Gandhi Peace Prize awarded to “The Tribal Peoples of India” and the designation of Dr Binayak Sen and Bulu Imam to receive it on their behalf. A group of human rights and indigenous rights activists from Jharkhand had written a letter to both the Gandhi Foundation and the recipients of the award pointing out the irony in handing over an award meant for adivasis to non-adivasis, thereby implying that there were no adivasi leaders capable of receiving the prize on their own behalf. Expressing the highest respect for the awardees in question, they wrote: “Therefore, we humbly request you that if you are really willing to give the ‘International Gandhi Peace Award 2011’ to the Adivasis of India then you must give the award to the Adivasi recipients and not the non-Adivasis. However, if you want to recognize the precious contribution of Dr. Binayak Sen and Shree Bulu Imam to the society then you must change the title of the award and honor them, we would highly appreciate you for it.”

Today it would be inconceivable for a prize meant to honour women being given to a man, even if he invented a foolproof cure for breast cancer; or one for blacks or dalits being given to someone from another community. That a prize for adivasis can be awarded so blithely and unthinkingly to non-adivasis is thus perhaps one of the best indicators of precisely how silenced adivasis are.

At the same time, however, it is true that assertions of indigeneity and adivasi identity are often voiced by middle class activists in international fora far away from the everyday struggles of adivasis against displacement which are led by non-indigenist parties or organizations; and presume a homogeneity which does not in fact exist. Sometimes the adivasi card is played by politicians who have no hesitation in looting their own people. Thus Ilina and Binayak Sen have responded by noting that for them the greatest issue is the debate over what kind of development should take place in the country: “We have great regard for the many leaders named in your letter, but seeing the debate entirely in ethnic terms might lead to a tribal leader of the salwa judum claiming to represent the Adivasis purely on grounds of racial purity!”

The Gandhi Foundation has since changed its citation to honour Binayak Sen and Bulu Imam for their own work, which is a valid decision. But any organization which wishes to move beyond the Gandhian tradition of “tribal uplift”, must award a prize to the adivasis of India. Fortunately the only choices to represent them are not Mahendra Karma or Madhu Koda, but we also have Manish Kunjam, CK Janu and a host of others, who embody both symbol and substance.

Why the Court disbanded Chhattisgarh's SPOs

2011-07-22T22:30:00.001+05:30

Why the court disbanded Chhattisgarh’s SPOs

Nandini Sundar Posted online: Fri Jul 22 2011, 00:39 hrs

Imagine if, in the aftermath of the Mumbai blasts, instead of improving intelligence gathering and local policing, the government set up squads of armed locals to help identify and neutralise the terrorists? Taking a cue from Chhattisgarh, where an ideal Special Police Officer is either a former Maoist, or a victim of the Maoists, the police could recruit people from families bereaved in the blasts, as also former members of the underworld, the Indian Mujahideen and Abhinav Bharat. Members of this force need only be “5th class pass”. They would be paid Rs 3000 per month with no certainty of tenure, pension or training, and guaranteed a much higher mortality rate than the regular police. In the meantime, the crores being spent on police modernisation would remain unaccounted for; and if this force preyed on the general populace, the police could simply turn a blind eye.

Sounds bizarre? However, this cheap and dirty outsourcing of guerilla war, we are told, is the only efficient way of fighting Maoism. The home ministry’s “logic” that “state governments recruit SPOs to counter the advantage that Maoist jan militias have” betrays deep envy of the Maoists. No pretence of being the impartial steel frame of the country, or of apolitical adherence to the rule of law. My militia versus yours. It is precisely against the “institutionalisation of this policing paradigm” that Justice Sudarshan Reddy and Justice S.S. Nijjar’s recent landmark judgment on Salwa Judum is directed.

In April 2008, while hearing this case, the Chief Justice had observed: “You cannot give arms to somebody (a civilian) and allow him to kill. You will be an abettor of the offence under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code.” If the government succeeds in a review petition, the court will be going back on the collective wisdom of at least 10 judges who have heard this matter at one time or the other.

Since 2008, the court has repeatedly ordered the state government to file FIRs, compensate all victims, close down camps and vacate schools occupied by security forces. The state has been derelict on all counts. Instead of accusing the court of judicial overreach, they should be grateful they have not been hauled up for contempt.

While the order has been widely welcomed, much media space has been occupied by those opposed to the judges’ framing of the problem in terms of neo-liberalism. Yet few have been able to dispute their facts — the growing inequality, the massive displacement of people from their resources, the desperation that drives people to arms. Even the home ministry’s 2006 status paper conceded: “Naxalites operate in a vacuum created by inadequacy of administrative and political institutions, espouse local demands and take advantage of the prevalent disaffection and injustice among the exploited segments of the population and seek to offer an alternative system of governance which promises emancipation.” If the judges are wrong, why the need for a food security bill, resettlement and rehabilitation bill, or an integrated action plan?

I have talked to Sikh and Muslim massacre victims in Delhi 1984 and Gujarat 2002. But the Chhattisgarh situation is unique in the extent to which the victims have been silenced. The camps where people were herded in 2005 were tightly controlled by Salwa Judum leaders while access to the villages was closed off by SPOs and security forces. It was only after the CPI organised a rally across the border in Andhra Pradesh in June 2007 that villagers openly testified in writing as to what had happened. And what tragic reading this makes, written in broken Hindi and Gondi, of houses and grain burnt, of women raped, of six-year-old children drowned in ponds by Salwa Judum, SPOs and security forces. It is these testimonies which underpin the PIL filed in 2007 by Dantewada residents Kartam Joga, Manish Kunjam and Dudhi Joga, a companion petition to Nandini Sundar and others.

Now imagine that the victims of 1984, 2002 or the families of Jessica Lall or Nitish Katara had won a major legal battle, and no reporter asked for their views. In 2010, through sheer vindictiveness, the police jailed Kartam Joga on trumped up charges of being involved in Maoist attacks. No one has interviewed his family. Instead, media coverage of the verdict has focused on the reactions of the accused, interviewing rapists for whom there is a standing arrest warrant, like the SPO Kartam Surya and Salwa Judum leader Soyam Mooka. Naturally, they describe the SC order as a bad thing.

If the government is truly worried about the safety of the SPOs, they should instantly file and investigate FIRs. The guilty ones will be safest in jail, and the rest can go home or be absorbed in less dangerous occupations.

Who is the victim here — Kartam Joga, the law abiding petitioner, or Kartam Surya, the criminal SPO? And who will be the ultimate victor in this case — the Constitution, in whose name the judges have spoken, or sheer expediency? As someone who has faith in the idea of India, I have no doubt it will be the former.

The writer teaches sociology at Delhi University and was the lead petitioner in the Salwa Judum case

Landmark Supreme Court order on Salwa Judum

2011-07-06T20:31:00.001+05:30

On 5th July Justice Sudershan Reddy and Justice SS Nijjar delivered a landmark order on the unconstitutionality of the Special Police Officers used in anti-Maoist counterinsurgency operations and also directed the state to stop supporting movements like Salwa Judum in any form whatsoever....

http://www.scribd.com/doc/59445570/Salwa-Judum-Order-July-2011

http://www.scribd.com/doc/59445795/Hindi-Orders-Salwa-Judum

Salwa Judum Judgement in Hindi

2011-07-05T12:04:00.002+05:30

Nandini Sundar: Disarming The Jungle Lords

2011-07-04T11:16:00.001+05:30

Nandini Sundar: Disarming The Jungle Lords

Chhattisgarh’s strategy of arming civilians to fight Naxalites will continue despite the Supreme Court’s verdict, activist Nandini Sundar tells Forbes India

by K.P. Narayana Kumar | Jul 18, 2011

NANDINI SUNDAR
Age: 43
Profession: An activist for the cause of Adivasis caught in the anti-naxal operations in Chhattisgarh; Head of the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics; was previously Associate Professor, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Education: M.A., M.Phil & Ph.D in Anthropology, Columbia University, New York. B.A. Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Oxford University
Interests: Reading, walking

What do you think would be the repercussions of the Supreme Court order which has banned the use of Special Police Officers in anti-naxal operations? How would it change things on ground in Chhattisgarh?
It will change things on ground only if the Chhattisgarh government is sincere about implementing it. But from the initial reactions, I don’t think they are serious about addressing the issue and in fact they are doing what they have always done, which is to refuse to follow the court’s orders. In 2008, the court directed them to compensate people affected by the (Salwa Judum orchestrated) violence, ensure that people can return home, ensure that there is a list of missing people and file FIRs, but they have done nothing. If you read their affidavits over the years, their only defense has been that all these people are naxalite supporters. They have displayed complete contempt for the court. I am afraid that they will try and do that again. They now say they will file a review petition.

What sort of a role do you think the centre could play in the wake of the judgment?
There is a close overlap between the central government’s home ministry and the Chhattisgarh establishment. Sometimes I feel the home ministry in the centre is an extension of the BJP rather than being run by the Congress government in terms of the way in which it has consistently supported the Chhattisgarh government in all its violations, even when it has been to the detriment of the Congress in Chhattisgarh. The fact is that this whole policy of Salwa Judum was a joint policy of the centre and the state and so the home ministry has defended this policy. I think it is going to be difficult to admit that this is wrong. From my understanding, the judgment is being welcomed by the public and it is the security establishment which is upset about it.

How do you see the order being implemented?
They will have to implement the order; if not we will be filing contempt. They say they are going to file a review petition but that’s not going to be easy as they think. Right from the beginning, when matter was first heard, the courts have being saying that the government cannot arm civilians to fight insurgencies. It’s not just this judge; it is the view of the Supreme Court as a whole…They seem too understand instantly that you cannot arm one section of the society to fight another. This is exactly what they are doing in Chhatttisgarh, it is entirely up to the Station House Officer to appoint Special Police Officers. There are no regulations or background checks in these appointments.

How difficult would it be to disarm the Salwa Judum?
The process will not be easy because they have al these people who are used to lording over the areas, have become local contractors and have become used to the power of the gun. But they do have to be disarmed. When the collector and commissioner was trying to get relief to Tadimetla, Dimapur and Modpalli villages, after they came under attack, they were not allowed to go by the SPOs. Swami Agnivesh was also attacked by the SPOs. This is crazy because they have become complete law into themselves which cannot be allowed.

Will the recent rise of the civil rights movements, such as that of Anna Hazare, lead to activists taking up the cause of Adivasis also getting more elbow room with the government?
The problem is that the two constituencies are very different. The people behind Anna Hazare have been largely middle-class. This (the anti-corruption movement) is something that is at least seen as legitimate by both the ruling parties and civil societies as an issue to be debated, but when it comes to the issue of the Adivasi community, they are completely marginalised. There are no Adivasi journalists in the mainstream media, and even in Chhattisgarh there are very few. There is such a huge disconnect between what people in Delhi think they know about the country and what is actually happening in the rest of the country. Everybody is hugely upset about Operation Green Hunt (the Government’s anti-naxalite offensive) in Adivasi areas.

The security personnel in the state say that they are not even able to build roads as they come under attack. Are these roads not necessary for development?
The way it is being put (now) is: Should we have security first or development first. The way it should be put is should we have justice first? Once you have provided justice, then you can get started on development and don’t need this kind of heavy handed approach. The judgment talks about the constitutional principles and how you cannot violate constitutional principles while fighting counter-insurgency.

What is the sense you get when you travel to Chhattisgarh?
I have not been able to go to Chhattisgarh for a while because I have been stopped by the SPOs. The last time I had gone, people had asked, “please do something about these peace talks”. I was amazed because some of these people were former Salwa Judum leaders, the Chambers of Commerce in Jagdalpur and the Central Reserve Police Force (personnel). There is a huge need for the peace talks right now. Instead of taking to the Sri Lanka Model, we need to look at a truth and reconciliation model and talks. That’s a much better model.

The recent move to appoint activist Binayak Sen to a committee in the Planning Commission is being seen as an attempt to reach out to the human rights activists by the government. Do you think such a gesture indicates that the situation could become better with the centre becoming more accommodative?
I think the situation has gotten worse. When operation Green Hunt started in 2009, there were people talking about peace talks. It was not serious but at least that kind of conversation was going on…. But now no one is talking about Green Hunt (or peace talks). In fact it was amazing that as soon as the Home Ministry said there was no need to talk of Green Hunt, the media also stopped talking about it. It has become so hard to raise the issue of peace talks now and they are just sending in the army for training and we do not know whether they will be deployed or not. So I think it’s kind of settling down into this long war. On the one hand they are sending more and more troops and on the other hand they have this integrated action plan, which is really a security plan and is not about development. They think they can win this war through military means and this integrated development plan is just a fig leaf for what they are doing.

This article appeared in Forbes India Magazine of 29 July, 2011

Sparring partners

2011-06-29T10:09:00.000+05:30

Rather than shutting its doors on ‘civil society’, the government should be thanking its stars that the latter wants to make law, not war. Distributing tee-shirts with this slogan would be a better use of the government’s ‘hearts and minds’ funds than the integrated action plan to counter Naxals, or the army’s tourism trips to Pune for Kashmiri schoolgirls.

The UPA regime has been unprecedented for the spate of legislation that has been pushed by various people’s movements — on information, education, employment, and forest rights. And now we have the Communal and Targeted Violence (CTV) Bill, the Food Security Bill and the Jan Lokpal Bill. Apparently born out of a disillusionment with existing institutions, they, in fact, reflect the opposite — a renewed public faith in the idea of government and law. If there is any danger from the flirtation, it is certainly not to the State, but to civil society, through the risk of an over-judicialisation of resistance and aspirations. The adivasi rebels of the colonial period struggling for jal, jungle and jameen never sat in the offices of advocates to frame their political strategies that their counterparts today often end up doing.

A signal of how much power a group enjoys is not the noise it makes on the street but how silently it can effect the changes it wants. Apart from the Special Economic Zones Act 2005, the UPA has in place a number of legal and regulatory instruments to promote corporate interests. Quite apart from industry representatives serving as experts on drafting committees (and now even as parliamentarians), given the frequency with which the PM or his ministers attend corporate functions, there is no need for them to go on hunger fasts or camp at Jantar Mantar to make their point heard. More insidiously, one of the biggest sources of law-making today is through supposedly ‘apolitical’ channels, through the importation of best-practices in particular projects, by the World Bank, or consultancy organisations like McKinsey. In its 2004 ‘Initiatives in Legal and Judicial Reforms’, the World Bank made no bones about the fact that legal reforms were conditionalities for structural adjustment programmes. Many of these legal reforms prioritise market-friendliness and downsizing the State, and were they to be openly debated, it is doubtful whether most parliamentarians could justify them to their constituents or to the Constitution.

Paradoxically, all the solutions suggested by civil society involve an expansion of government bureaucracy. Each bill — the Lokpal included — envisions a separate authority. But past attempts at creating such institutions of exception, to redress the failure of the ordinary course of government or law, have been noticeable by their calculated ineffectiveness. The most significant function of the Commissions for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, for example, is to redress the grievances of SC and ST government employees. They have played no role on the major issues affecting these communities today. The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) is overwhelmed by complaints and its most common strategy is to refer the matter back to the concerned government department for comments. In the case of Salwa Judum, its investigation wing comprising serving police officers on deputation, was devoted to defending the police cause, but because they functioned under the NHRC, they managed to set the cause of human rights back by several years. Even under laws like the Domestic Violence Act that try to fast-track cases to completion within six months, cases can last for years together.

Civil society’s response has been to try and ensure independence at the top — through transparent nomination and selection procedures. But little thought has been given to the fact that they will have to work through the same bureaucracy. By refusing to provide office space and staff, the best initiatives can be successfully stalled. Take for instance the government’s current flagship Right To Education Act. Despite mandating the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) to do the monitoring the Act requires, the government has not created a secure post for this and the NCPCR is dependent on consultants.
Even as new laws are added on, fundamental colonial era laws like the Indian Penal Code or the Land Acquisition Act remain unchanged. Without addressing these and the structural problems in the bureaucracies they underpin, both State and civil society are evading the real problem.

The problem with the mainstream political parties is not that they object to pressure from outside per se, but that they want organisations they can control and use. The BJP is adept at this, with the Liberhan report describing the demolition of the Babri Masjid as a “joint common enterprise” between the BJP-ruled government and the various fronts of the RSS in civil society. In praising the Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh as a “self-initiated people’s organisation”, the BJP was trying to claim the mantle of civil society, even as it denied legitimacy to the Maoists, who, whatever else they are, are self-initiated. The Congress has been no pushover either, with Rajiv Gandhi claiming helplessness in the face of so-called ‘public’ anger in 1984: “When a big tree falls, the earth is bound to shake,” he had said after the anti-Sikh riots following Indira Gandhi’s death.

However, activists too forget how malleable this imaginary public is. If Anna Hazare claims to represents ‘the people’, so does Baba Ramdev and so does the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. And so does the elected government. Since the criteria for measuring public support are themselves contentious, the ultimate measure to test laws should not be public backing, but whether they fulfill the constitutional ideals of equality, liberty, secularism and transparency. The path to this, too, is debatable. But at least we are on a different terrain.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/714934.aspx

March 2011 affidavit Nandini Sundar and ors vs. State of Chhattisgarh

2011-03-26T16:04:00.004+05:30

On 18.1.2011, the Court had given three specific directions:

a. In the circumstances, we direct the State Government to file a comprehensive affidavit duly stating the details of the action plan for disbanding/winding of these relief camps so that the Tribals living in these camps go back to their respective villages.

b. In the affidavit filed by the State, it is stated that the State Government has been reviewing and monitoring the relief, rehabilitation and compensation given to the `'victims of violence''. We presume that the victims of violence means as the victims of conflict. In the circumstances, it will be proper to direct the State Government and the Rehabilitation Committee to file a comprehensive affidavit providing the details of the relief and rehabilitation provided to the victims of conflict.

c. There shall be a direction to the Union of India and the State of Chhattisgarh to ensure that the security forces vacate all the educational institutions, school buildings and hostels within a period of four months from today.

For a critique of the state's response to these directions and a summary analysis of their responses since 2008 read our March 2011 affidavit at:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/59851802/Nandini-Sundar-vs-State-of-Chhattisgarh-March-2011-Affidavit

Chhattisgarh: The Future of India? Interview of me by David Barsamian 29 November 2009

2011-02-05T14:34:00.000+05:30

NANDINI SUNDAR
Chhattisgarh: The Future of India?
Interviewed by David Barsamian
New Delhi, India 29 November 2009

Nandini Sundar is a professor of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University.

Let’s start with Chhattisgarh, a state in India where you have spent a great deal of time and you’ve written about. There is an uprising there. What do people need to know about this particular state and the forces and issues at work?

One is that it’s a state which has a large population of Adivasis, indigenous people. Originally, when it came into being and was hived off from Madhya Pradesh, of which it used to be a part, the sort of official rhetoric was that in both Chhattisgarh and in the adjoining state of Jharkhand, there would be greater attention to Adivasi issues. Instead of that happening, what one has seen is that the hiving of the state actually was a way for the sort of local ruling elite to more concentratedly exploit the natural resources that both Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh have. So it’s a state which is, say, about 38% Adivasi, has a large proportion of Chhattisgarhi what are called other backward classes, or not upper-caste people. And it’s also very, very mineral rich and very forested. So it’s a sort of classic case of rich state, poor people.

In terms of the ruling—can I use a term such as oligarchy there—is it mostly from Chhattisgarh itself or are they mostly from outside the state?

The Chief Minister for the last two terms, Raman Singh, is from UP (Uttar Pradesh), and so are some of the leading ministers, and traders who settled in the region. And it’s actually the trading community which controls all the money that funds elections. So even if people run for office in what are called reserved constituencies, areas where only indigenous people can run, when it comes to the Congress and the BJP, their politics are determined by the trading community, because they are the ones who fund the campaigns.
And the BJP is the Bharatiya Janata Party. It is the ruling party in Chhattisgarh. What are their politics?
We know what their politics are from both their campaign to demolish the Babri Masjid in 1992 and to build a Rama temple in its place. The BJP and various other friends of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) demolished the Babri Masjid. There was this whole run-up to it and afterwards there were riots in which overwhelmingly Muslims were killed. The BJP was engaged in a huge double-speak: on the one hand, saying, “We think that it should be demolished,” but then, when it actually was demolished, saying, “We didn’t do it.”
We saw that again in Gujarat in 2002, where they were responsible for the killing of at least 2,000 Muslims and displacing thousands more. The RSS was clearly involved in carrying out the pogrom, mobilizing people, giving them swords and crucially voter lists to find and kill Muslims. At the same time claiming that they’re a government within the Constitution because Narendra Modi and the BJP won the elections.
This is exactly what they’re doing in Chhattisgarh. They’ve promoted what they call a people’s movement, but which is actually a state-sponsored vigilante organization. It’s called Salwa Judum. And they’ve used this vigilante organization to go around burning villages and killing people. So on the one hand, they can claim that it’s a people’s movement; on the other hand, they fully support it. So it’s sort of a classic example of the way the BJP works, trying to occupy both the space of the state and the space of civil society, quote, unquote.

The RSS is—I think I could describe it as a Hindu extremist formation.

It’s a Hindu fascist formation. It doesn’t believe in the Indian Constitution, it has its own flag. In fact, even now, after the report on the demolishment of the Babri Masjid, which has just come out after 17 years, BJP and RSS leaders are going around saying that “We are proud we did it, and we don’t think there was anything wrong.” So there is a complete disregard for the Constitution. The RSS is a sort of classic fascist organization, which wants to capture state power as well as wants to have its own wings outside of the state.

How do these Hindu fascist formations view Adivasis in Chhattisgarh and in other parts of India?

They start off viewing them with contempt. And if you look at the way that they sort of think about civilization, it’s all about upper-caste Hindu ideas of what constitutes civilization. But at the same time, they’ve been very successful mobilizing Adivasis through their friends, like the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, which has hostels and so on in Adivasi areas, and sort of bringing them into the Hindu fold. So there is a sense of inclusiveness which comes by sort of transforming and obliterating their original identities. So on the one hand whenever they talk about Adivasi languages, it’s with a great deal of contempt. On the other hand, many Adivasis are drawn to them because they say, “Well, finally we’re accepted by somebody as equals within this large Hindu nation.”

You said that the Adivasis constitute about 38% of the population of Chhattisgarh. How vulnerable are they in terms of protection under the law? What kind of umbrella do they fall under, if any?

Officially, the Adivasi areas in Chhattisgarh are governed under the fifth schedule of the Constitution, which is meant to provide special protection to Adivasis, to ensure that their lands are not alienated, that they can follow their own customs, and so on. But in practice, they’ve really been betrayed by the law. For instance, recently the government of Chhattisgarh shut down or closed 100,000 cases against Adivasis for minor forest misdemeanors. Going into the forest and cutting wood for firewood or plucking leaves, etc., could be something that the forest guards would charge you for. So Adivasis have always lived in a sense of emergency as far as the law has gone.

Chhattisgarh has, according to one report, the richest load of iron ore in the entire country. This obviously is a big economic prize, and who gets it will benefit greatly. Where is this iron ore primarily located?

It’s located in what are called the Bailadila Hills, which is sort of in the center of what is now the Dantewada district. Since the late 1970s, the National Mineral Development Corporation, NDMC, has been mining this area. They’ve had a monopoly of it. And all the iron ore has been exported to Japan. But now several private-sector companies are being given captive mines in these hills.

What does that mean, captive mines?

I mean that they would be mines that are dedicated to their steel plants. Actually, it’s a scam, because even if they don’t build a steel plant, because the rates of royalty on iron are so low and the profits to be made from selling iron in the open market are so high, you could actually just make a lot by having a mine that’s dedicated to you without having to necessarily invest in a steel plant for it.

Who are some of these corporations now that are moving into Chhattisgarh?

In this area both Tata and Essar are moving in. And in other parts of the state there are corporations like Jindal and Mittal, which are now, in fact, multinational. Tata is a multinational. It’s based in India, just the way that some multinationals are based in the U.S., but it’s acquiring properties across the world. There is also direct state involvement. The NMDC itself has tried to set up a steel plant near Jagdalpur in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar district. There is a whole range of MoUs being signed by the government with private firms.

MoU is a term that comes up a lot. What is it?

Memorandum of understanding.

Which is what exactly?

It’s another scam, because it’s sort of an agreement to invest. So now if you’re a private firm, you could say, “I’m going to invest so many crores,” which is tens of millions, “in building a steel plant.” Whether or not you actually do it, you would be then given various concessions and given some royal treatment in getting other kinds of leases. So it’s basically an agreement between a private firm and the government to invest for mining or for other purposes.

I’ve been noticing this term public-private partnership coming up a lot in the descriptions of what’s going in terms of resource extraction in the country. And it seems to be some kind of pernicious technique where the state is enabling private corporations to make profits.

The whole Indian state, in a sense, is run like a public-private partnership—in fact, not just the Indian state. Look at the American state. All states are run as public-private partnerships in the sense of who gets to make policy, who gets to determine what laws should be passed, and so on. So if you look at the way that governments are structured, they’re structured to sort of favor the private sector. That’s one level at which you have public-private partnerships just built into the very structure of the state.

And then there are other ways in which locally, even when land is being acquired for a private company, it’s a public-private partnership. It’s not officially in the sense of the way that the term is technically defined, but because the land is acquired by the government and then handed over to private industry, in effect what it is is a public-private partnership in terms of acquiring land from villagers. But this is different from the technical meaning of public-private partnership. All I’m trying to say is that when we think about public-private partnerships, we need to think about all the different ways in which government and industry work together.
The resources, particularly the iron ore, in Chhattisgarh are primarily on indigenous land, on Adivasi land.

What kind of push-back has there been from the Adivasi community about their land being lost?

There has been a lot of resistance, both at the local level where the land is being lost—for instance, in the ten villages which are going to be displaced by Tata, they have been protesting for the last two years, and there have been several beatings, arrests. People who didn’t even own that land have been fraudulently compensated for it—and money has been made by local-level officials. So there has been that kind of protest locally. And also big demonstrations by people across the district. So, for instance, in November 2007, there was a rally of about 100,000 people in Jagdalpur protesting both against displacement and against what is called the Salwa Judum, the so-called people’s movement that I mentioned earlier.

Salwa Judum is a vigilante formation that is entirely composed of local people.

It’s a vigilante organization which is state-supported and accompanied by the security forces. We have a lot of evidence to show that it is supported, both from police diaries, which talk about senior ministers providing encouragement and funding rallies, and photos of the security forces accompanying them.

So what happened was in the initial phase—this was in June 2005 to December 2005—people were told that if they didn’t come to mass rallies, then their villages would be burned, they would be fined. And then they were forced to go and burn other people’s villages. And the security forces went and took part in the burning as well. So this lasted for about two years in different parts of the district.

And this is well documented.

We filed a case in the Supreme Court in 2007, and we’ve provided evidence of how this has been state-sponsored.

“We” being?

“We” being—there are two petitions. One was filed by me along with Ramachandra Guha, a historian, and E. Sarma, a former civil servant. The other was filed by three Adivasi leaders of that area: one from the CPI, Manish Kunjam—he’s used to be a legislator there and is head of the CPI locally—and two others who had themselves been affected. Dudhi Joga had his house burned down, Kartam Joga was badly beaten. So in the second PIL, public interest litigation, which is a sort of class action suit, we submitted about 200 testimonies from villagers detailing killings, rapes, houses being burned, and we also provided evidence of government sponsorship.

I’ve read somewhere of something on the order of 640 villages have been emptied out. What does that mean? Does it mean that they’re depopulated and the people are shifted and moved elsewhere?

In the initial phases of the movement people were moved into camps along the highway. So official estimates say over 50,000 people were put into camps. This was a straightforward form of strategic hamleting. It was very similar to what the British did in Malaya between 1948 and 1960 and later what the U.S. did in Vietnam. So people were forcibly brought into camps, other people fled into the jungles with the Maoists, and a large numbers, say, 100,000, fled to Andhra. In the last year or two since 2007, people have become sort of slowly—they had started going back from the camps to the villages, but now, because the government has launched what it calls Operation Green Hunt, which is a huge military offensive, people have started fleeing again from the villages in large numbers, so hundreds of thousands of people are moving to the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh.

And these are entirely Adivasis?

Yes.

So if they’re coming from deep in the forest, as you say, to camps along a road, and now even being transported out of Chhattisgarh into the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh, how do they survive? These are forest people.

They’re actually not surviving at all. People talk about how a whole family of 11 would live on one kilogram of rice. There was a survey done earlier this year of those who fled to Andhra Pradesh which said that out of the sample, about two thirds of the children had third grade malnutrition. There is nothing in the forest. People’s houses were burned, all their grain was burned. They were just surviving on very, very little. And in Andhra Pradesh, too, they work for Andhra farmers for 20 rupees a day to get a little bit of rice, and they are under constant harassment from the Andhra Pradesh forest department. So it’s just a horrible, horrible situation as far as people’s subsistence is concerned.

You mentioned the strategic hamlet program, which the British used in Malaya and then the Americans in Vietnam. But the Americans used another tactic in Vietnam called the Phoenix program, which was kind of an extrajudicial assassination campaign to eliminate so-called terrorists, troublemakers, anyone who was resisting the government. Do you see that kind of parallel as well with the Salwa Judum?

Absolutely. What they have done is go around targeting the village- level workers of the Maoists. These are regular villagers. They’re not armed. What they do is perhaps organize a meeting. If the Maoists come to the village and talk about land distribution, they might be part of that, or they might help the Maoists by providing a lookout. The sort of standard stuff that villagers do when there is an insurgent movement going on. So what the government did was to target these sangam members. The local village organizations are called sangams. So they would catch them, force many of them to become what they termed as SPOs, special police officers, so they would paid something like 1500 in the first couple of years. It’s gone up a bit since then to 2,000 and something.

That’s 1500 rupees a month?

Yes. So that they’re really paying them very little and they were using them as informers to find other Maoists and sangam members. So that created this huge enmity between the villagers. Many of these SPOs were minors, so the government of India was actually using minors as the front-line soldiers in its war. And many of the Maoist soldiers are also minors. The Maoists have said that we recruit people after the age of 16 and we don’t recruit them below that. On both sides you have these 16-year-olds fighting each other. It’s a really tragic situation.

Fifteen hundred rupees is about $30.

It’s a lot of money in these areas, where there is such a high level of unemployment. Many people joined thinking they were going to get a job. And then also this idea of having a gun.

The state and the media demonize the Maoists as dangerous, bloodthirsty terrorists with no redeeming features or ideology. What would you say on their behalf in terms of the Maoist program in Chhattisgarh?

I can’t say anything on behalf of the Maoists, because I’m not a sympathizer of theirs.

I didn’t mean you were sympathetic. But what is their agenda? How do they recruit? Obviously, they must be saying something that is appealing to some number of people in Chhattisgarh to take up arms and resist.

They have been working in Bastar since late the 1980s. The kinds of issues that they took up are land distribution, freedom from harassment by the Forest Guard, higher rates for tendu leaves. Tendu leaves are a big issue there because they’re used to make the local cigarette, and that’s the major source of cash for villagers. So the Maoists managed to get the rates raised for tendu from about 25 paise to 95 paise. It may not seem like a lot, but for people there, if you work really hard and you get 100 bundles, you could actually get 95 rupees (about $2.) a day instead of getting 25 rupees a day. So this is a major source of their popularity. Also, they have a cultural troupe which explains things to people in their own language, to value their culture, their language, their songs. They’ve really established themselves in the villages. And also all the cadres are local. Some of the leaders have come from Andhra Pradesh, but given that the Maoists are local people, there’s bound to be a lot of the support for them.

They have also committed a lot of murders. Especially since Salwa Judum began, there has been escalation of violence on both sides. Media coverage? For instance, the 2002 genocide of Muslims in Gujarat, or when Sikhs were killed in Delhi by Congress workers in 1984, there was hardly anything in the papers. Recently, the government put out a half-page ad in all the major newspapers saying Maoists are nothing but cold-blooded murderers, they never said Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, is nothing but a cold-blooded murderer or the people responsible for the 1984 killings were nothing but cold-blooded murderers, when that’s exactly what they are. So the state is completely demonizing one section and ignoring its own violence and its own culpability for mass crimes.

In an article in Outlook magazine, you also make the observation about how New Delhi, the central government, is trying to hold Pakistan’s feet to the fire in terms of non-state actors, that they should be able to control them. But when it comes to Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh, it’s not the case at all.

Absolutely. Both the major parties which rule the Indian political scene, the BJP and the Congress, are masters of double-speak. The BJP, as I said, makes a practice of supporting non-state actors while it’s in the state, so that it can have the advantage of both violating the law and pretending to uphold it, and the Congress, again, by supporting the Salwa Judum. What’s interesting about the Salwa Judum is that this is something that’s being supported by both the Congress and the BJP and by the Chhattisgarh government and by the security establishment of the Center. So there is a strong police lobby, a security establishment lobby, which wants to promote this kind of use of non-state actors across the country. In fact, if you look at the Home Ministry reports, they talk about promoting local resistance groups. For the state to be as a policy promoting local resistance groups is more than a little ironic considering there are lots of resistance groups, very peaceful resistance groups, people protesting against the lack of rehabilitation by the Narmada Dam authorities, for instance, who get routinely beaten up and arrested.

Is Chhattisgarh a kind of template for what’s going to happen to the rest of India or what already is happening in the rest of India?

I think the real template for what’s happening now in central India is northeast India. In fact, what the Indian government is doing in Chhattisgarh, and has been doing since 2005, is exactly what it did in Mizoram between 1968 and 1980. The state of Mizoram was almost completely transformed. About 80% of the population was shifted. It’s now one of the most urban states in India, because people were moved out from their villages into camps. And the use of emergency laws which allow the police to kill with impunity, like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, all of this has been tried in the northeast for the last 50 years, and now they’re doing exactly the same to the indigenous people of central India.

And what’s happening in Chhattisgarh, they’re trying to replicate that in Orissa and elsewhere. The Indian government has lots of examples that it draws from its own counterinsurgency efforts across the country. Its use of SPOs, for instance, is something that they’ve adopted from Kashmir, where you have surrendered militants who are called Ikhwan, who are then used to identify. And in Punjab in the 1980s they used what were called cats, who were, again, surrendered militants who were assisting the police as informers in plainclothes. There is no accountability with people like these renegade militants.

This kind of information was not very evident in U.S. media descriptions of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Washington in late November 2009. There was a lot of “the world’s greatest democracy,” “we share the same values,” “we have so much in common,” etc. This is the part of India that’s totally unknown, particularly in the U.S. You just mentioned Kashmir, an area with 3 million people with something like 700,000 security forces keeping the population in line. It’s one of the most densely occupied places on the face of the earth.

Right. And it’s scary, the creeping number of parts of the country which are getting militarized. Kashmir has been militarized for so long as has the northeast. Again, if you go to Manipur, as soon as you get off the plane, you see all these army people, The Assam Rifles at the corner with their guns. It was really scary for me when I first went to Manipur to see so many armed personnel across the state. Now in Chhattisgarh you see again people are living with constant combing operations, with the drone of helicopters overhead. These are people who may have never seen a train in their life. Buses are not something that are often available in interior villages, and suddenly you have this heavy, sophisticated weaponry being used. And people know now, they’ve been introduced to a whole new vocabulary of weaponry—horrible, militarized language that was not a part of their consciousness before this.

But the geographical aspect of this is also rather dramatic, because Kashmir is in the northwest corner of India. Then you mentioned the northeast. Chhattisgarh is central India. This is in the so-called heartland of the country.

And that’s why there has been a bit more coverage of the offensive that the Home Ministry is planning than there has been, say, of what’s been going on in the northeast for last 50 years. Because the media does cover mainland India a bit more than it covers the northeast.

But, again, if you look at the coverage of what’s happening in Chhattisgarh, it’s been kind of nonexistent. For something of this scale, there has been maybe one front-page headline about Salwa Judum when the planning commission had a report or something. Now, because of this major offensive, there was a brief period when Maoists were on the front page of newspapers every day. But all these killings by the Salwa Judum and security forces never get reported. The fact that 644 villages were affected, so many thousands of people migrated to Andhra, none of this was sort of prominently covered in the newspapers, even here, leave alone in the U.S.

Do you think racism is a factor? Because these are overwhelmingly Adivasis, indigenous people.

Absolutely. I think we really have to understand the sort of deep levels of racism. But it’s a combination of things as to why there has been no coverage of Chhattisgarh, partly because there are no Adivasi journalists. It’s partly about racism, partly about a whole host of structural factors to do with the way the media works generally. Because generally the media, especially when it comes to matters related to crime, reproduces the police point of view because they’re the organized force which feeds the media. That’s a sort of standard Herbert Gans or Stuart Hall argument about how the media work and the police work as a primary definer of news.

The police here has been consistently putting out its version of the story. There has been the Chhattisgarh Special Security Act, which has made it a crime to write about the Maoists, in a sense. Anybody could be arrested under this act for simply reporting on a village being burned. Local journalists have been threatened. So there is a huge amount of sort of direct censorship and intimidation.

But apart from that, there are also reasons like there is no middle class, unlike in West Bengal when Lal Garh happened, again, a similar sort of attack on villages. There was a middle class in Calcutta who took it up and protested about it. Here, nobody speaks Gondi, the local language. All the journalists are non-indigenous. Also, very few newspapers had stringers, because it was a new state. So, for instance, I know that The Hindu didn’t have a stringer there. So the only paper they had, really, were The Express and the Hindustan Times. So there has been a whole series of factors as to why this area has been so silenced, but I would say the major reason is just state intimidation.

In the late 1960s, there was a Naxalite movement in West Bengal. This was a communist left formation. Today you see in reports Maoists and Naxalites used interchangeably. Are they the same thing?

The Maoists really refer to the CPI (Maoist), the Communist Party of India (Maoist), which was formed in 2004 after two major parties merged, the People’s War Group, which was active in Andhra Pradesh and in Chhattisgarh, and Maharashtra-Orissa belt in central India, and the MCC (Maoist Coordination Center), which has been active in Jharkhand and Bihar. And earlier the Maoist Coordination Center, the MCC, had merged with another group called Party Unity. So these three major Naxalite formations came together and are now the CPI Maoists.

But there are also other groups, like Jan Shakti, which are also called Naxalite, but they’re not part of CPI (Maoist). So Naxalite is a broader category, and it’s a term that the state uses, really, in a kind of derogatory, pejorative way. But, again, because it’s so widely used, it could be seen as a common shorthand as well.

The CPI (Maoist) is banned by the central government?

Yes, and so are all its fronts.

Under what law can the government do that?

It has something called the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, under which it has a list of banned organizations. In Chhattisgarh, the Chhattisgarh Special Security Act, under which the various fronts of the CPI (Maoist) are banned.

Do the Indian Maoists look to China and Chairman Mao and his “Little Red Book” for inspiration?

No. In fact, they sort of keep accusing China of having succumbed to capitalist roaders. They also disagree with the Nepal Maoists for having adopted a parliamentary path. So they aren’t really influenced by either China or Nepal. They have their own sort of homegrown version of what their vision of India should be. In fact, it’s quite interesting, because they wrote an article in the Economic and Political Weekly, which is all about local-level, small-is-beautiful type economy. And their vision is not very different from the sort every Gandhian vision of many organizations in the country, about promoting local-level irrigation, small-scale industry, stuff like that.

There’s talk also of a “red corridor” in the country. Is that another media fiction?

A lot of it is hyped, partly because police stations want to declare themselves Naxalite affected so they can get money under what is called the Security-Related Expenditure scheme. So once you’re Naxalite affected, then you get resources, you get modern equipment, wirelesses, and so on. So there has been an interest in expanding the threat by the security establishment.

I guess the Maoists are also happy to show that they’re a powerful force. They’re a very small organization, really. A couple of years ago, official estimates said something like there were 10,500 armed cadres across the country. Even if you count village-level sympathizers, how much can it be compared to the number of troops that the central government is sending in? Today there was an article that the Border Security Force, BSF, is sending in 13 battalions to counter the Maoists. This is in addition to all the CRPF battalions that already work there. CRPF is the Central Reserve Police Force, which is a paramilitary force. There are three types of things—and I’m doing this very crudely: there is a regular state police; then there are paramilitary forces like the CRPF, the BSF, which are under the Home Ministry, the central government; and then there is the army. So the paramilitary forces are in between the regular police and the army.

So the state is bringing a tremendous amount of military firepower to focus on what you described as a rather small group of fighters.

Yes. The top Maoist leaders may have sophisticated weapons like AK47s. I think they also manufacture some—there is a lot of low-level explosive activity going on, bombs being laid and so on. But this heavy firepower is being used against villagers who really have nothing but bows and arrows to protect themselves. I’ve been to villages where they’ve dug up the approach road and covered it up with grass so that security forces fall into it. It’s that kind of low-level activity. And they’re sending in thousands and thousands of troops. Actually, what people need is food and water and hand pumps and health workers. You just don’t see battalions of health workers being sent in or battalions of schoolteachers being sent in.

In that Outlook article, you cite the home minister who said that there will be some development in Chhattisgarh. And you ask, where have they been for 62 years with development?

What the Home Minister is trying to say is that they’re going to adopt what they call a hearts-and-minds approach, which is once you can consolidate control, then you bring in development. But what they’re actually following is what is known as a cost/benefit approach, which is to make the costs of supporting insurgency so hard for villagers, make their lives so terrible that they’re going to give up supporting the insurgents.

We’ve seen with the Salwa Judum camps, which were also meant to be a kind of hearts-and-minds thing, once people were forced into camps, there was a lot of corruption over there. There was a huge amount of pilfering. People were starving inside the camps as well. That’s why many people started going back, because it was better to be in their own homes, even if they had been burned down, than to be in camps. Just in terms of the way the government is going about it, in purely military terms and in terms of counterinsurgency, this hearts-and-minds thing, they’re just simply not serious about it.

But otherwise, also, if you look at, say, the slums in Delhi, where there are no Maoists, where is the development? You are in total control. What has prevented you from providing housing for the poor in Delhi? Or what’s prevented them from them providing basic sanitation in Bombay? You have area domination for all these years in so many parts of the country, and you’re not doing anything. This is a country where 50% of the people are at low subsistence levels. What’s prevented you from addressing that issue?

On my way over here today I noticed a huge parking garage being constructed in the center of the city for the Commonwealth Games, which will be held later in 2010. There are people living on the streets, there is no housing for them, but there will be a parking garage for cars.

Many people in the slums in Delhi have been forcibly displaced. All of central Delhi has been, quote, unquote, cleaned up and people have been moved 30 kilometers out into the outskirts. The government has a policy which is supposed to provide low-cost housing to people. That they never do. There is no way of penalizing the government for not providing that. But it’s the people who are suffering from the lack of government implementation of its own policies who are penalized.

To get back to Chhattisgarh, you say that the Prime Minister and the Home Minister, when they talk about the Maoist uprisings and various forms of resistance, never mention one crucial word, and that is “justice.” What would constitute justice, in your view?

In the case of Chhattisgarh, what we’ve been asking for in the courts is an independent judicial commission which will hold an inquiry into all these killings, rapes, arson that we’ve provided evidence for. And we’re hoping that if there were such an independent commission, people would be able to come forward and give their testimonies.

Just to give you an example, there was a young woman who was raped. In order for a criminal trial to proceed, you need to have a First Information Report, FIR, something registered in the police station to say that this crime has happened, and then the police investigate. So the police refuse to register these because they are the ones who go around committing the crimes. She had been raped and appealed to the head of the local police in Dantewada, the SP, superintendent of police, saying she had been raped and she wanted an FIR registered. And nothing happened. Then we filed her complaint in the Supreme Court. And in the meantime she went to court. And she was able to do this only with the help of a local NGO. Otherwise it would have been impossible for her to get this far.

And then the police superintendent files a letter in the Supreme Court saying, “We checked with so-and-so,” and he names all the people that she has accused, and they denied it, saying ‘We didn’t do it and we are being falsely maligned.’ So she’s made a false complaint.” So basically you ask the rapist whether they did it, they say no. This is the standard practice in the state. And they also claimed that she wasn’t available, when just the day before, she had actually submitted her testimony in court. So justice would mean that you don’t work through the existing police and the existing system but you have an alternative mechanism.

The Supreme Court has also asked the Chhattisgarh government to compensate people, rehabilitate them, move security forces out of schools. They asked them to implement the recommendations of the National Human Rights Commission, which did an investigation on Supreme Court orders in 2008 on our matter in the court. And the Chhattisgarh government has done nothing. They have not drawn up any rehabilitation plan. All those people whose houses were burned have just sort of built them on their own, if they could.

So justice would mean an inquiry, it would mean compensation, it would mean rehabilitation, it would mean an end to all these extrajudicial killings, to begin with. And I think that could make a huge difference in terms of bringing down the level of conflict.

But what kind of voice or what kind of amplification are these views receiving, let’s say, in the media or in parliament, for that matter?

Zero. Because both the mainstream parties are not interested in providing justice or even acknowledging that the state has actually carried out this violence. It’s amazing. The same newspapers which front-lined the violence in Gujarat have, in fact, supported the Salwa Judum and said, it’s a really good thing that the government is doing this and you need to get rid of the Maoists. So the media is not taking it up as a campaign, which is what you need for this kind of thing to actually happen.

Not just in Chhattisgarh but in other parts of India the Adivasis live in areas where there is a huge number of resources, not just forest resources but bauxite, for example, in Orissa and, in other states, coal, manganese, uranium, and the like. How big of a factor, then, is the economics of this, the political economy of corporations enriching themselves, with a state enabling that to happen?

It’s a huge factor in the sense that in all these scheduled Adivasi areas, lands cannot be acquired by non-tribals. In Andhra, for instance, if there is any land that is in the possession of a non-tribal in a scheduled area it has been illegally acquired. So the Supreme Court, in fact, issued this great judgment in Andhra saying that any land that is acquired for mining should be done through a joint venture or locals should benefit, etc. But none of this has happened across the country.

The way that industries get land is through the government acquiring it for them. Everywhere you see that land is being acquired forcibly. Since 2001, there have been several cases of people being killed in police firings when they’ve been protesting against their land being acquired. In Torpa in Jharkhand, people are protesting a steel plant by Arcelor-Mittal. In Meghalaya state people are protesting against uranium mining. There are actions in Kalinganagar in Orissa. So there is this huge sense of land being taken away from people. And that’s brought increasing support for the Maoists. What’s happening is that the government is using the Maoist hype to suppress all these peaceful movements as well, which are protesting against land acquisition.
And industry, if you read FICCI reports, which is the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce, they talk very openly about needing to sanitize the area of Maoists so that they can come in and invest. And their recent task force report on dealing with Naxalism and terrorism actually talks of the need to arm private security guards. It’s a really scary report, because they’re basically saying the state needs to come in strongly and wipe out the Maoists, get us to invest. So, yes, industry is fully behind this policy.

Arundhati Roy, in an article in Outlook, points out the centrality of resources, minerals in particular, and the enormous deposits of iron ore in Chhattisgarh. What do you think about that?

Rather than saying that everything is explained by resources, I think it’s more accurate to say that there has been a coming together of several different interests. On the one hand, you have the interests of the security establishment, because they have been doing exactly the same kind of counterinsurgency operations in Mizoram, where resources were not an issue. There is this whole thing about the Maoists actually control parts of India and we have to wrest them back. And the police have their own interests in getting promotions, which happens when you kill people in encounters. So there is that whole security establishment interest, which is a strong driver. On the other hand, you also have the corporate interests and government’s interest in signing these MoUs. These are coming together.

And it’s the same personnel often who are involved in both at the local level. So, for instance, Mahendra Karma, who is the leader of the Salwa Judum, he and his sons were the local agents for the Tatas in trying to get villagers to part with their land. So there is, yes, a happy meshing of interests at this time. Because it’s also important to see that in a way land acquisition is happening without the Salwa Judum as well. The government is acquiring land all over the country using force. The militarization of these areas helps in that process. It helps you to acquire land. Take the Posco steel plant coming up in Orissa. Private armies were used to break the resistance, or at least they tried to break the resistance. But I think they’re not entirely reducible to each other.

Is Mahendra Karma, the head of the Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh, from the Adivasi community?

Yes. And he was also involved in a major timber scam in the mid-1990s. Because only Adivasis are able to buy Adivasi land, he actually bought up a lot of Adivasi land at very cheap rates in order to be able to sell the trees. Because the trees are very valuable. They’re teak trees. So he’s the kind of Adivasi who goes around exploiting his own people and really fattens off them.

So the state has been fairly successful in peeling off Adivasis and then using them.

A certain class of them, at any rate. So there is a growing degree of stratification. It has been successful in using some Adivasis against others, yes, as in the northeast again, where you have a ruling elite which is part of the legislature, which is part of the regular mainstream parties, etc., and then continues to support the Armed Forces Special Powers Act.

Given the amount of military firepower that the state is going to introduce into Chhattisgarh and in other parts of central India to subdue the Maoist uprising, what are the prospects of the military actually subduing the Maoist rebellion?

The prospects of killing people are very high. They’ve already started killing people across Dantewada. In September, they killed about 17 people in two villages. Again, recently they’ve killed seven, eight more. So in terms of subduing the Maoists, I think low. But this could just carry on for years—and already Chidambaram has said --

Who is --

The Home Minister. At one point there was this huge amount of coverage of what was going on, and then he said, this Operation Green Hunt is a figment of the media’s imagination, and no such thing is really happening. And then almost to the day media coverage stopped. So this could just carry on for a long, long time. And the government itself is talking about at least one or two years, by which time people are going to be really desperate. I don’t think a military solution will work.

Have there been any openings or overtures to the Maoists?

Chidambaram has been saying, We will agree to talks if the Maoists “abjure violence,” whatever that means, and the Maoists have said that they will agree to talks if the Home Ministry withdraws central forces from these areas and also follows the Constitution by implementing a judicial commission on Salwa Judum and saying some of the things we’ve been asking for in the Supreme Court as well. It’s not clear how serious both sides are. We’ve formed this committee called the Citizens’ Initiative for Peace, which is a kind of large umbrella organization of people across the country. There’s a retired speaker of parliament, some ex-judges, several senior bureaucrats, academics. And we’ve basically asking both sides to agree to a ceasefire and unconditional talks.

Isn’t it likely, given past historical examples, that if there is a huge insertion of military force, that it will generate more opposition?

Wherever it’s happened—again, in Mizoram, which is a very similar example, the introduction of increased forces immediately generated a huge amount of support for the insurgents. But both sides have to understand that talks are the only way. It’s just going to mean a lot of misery and bloodshed for people whom both sides claim to represent.

What gives you hope for some kind of settlement? Are there any NGOs, are there any women’s groups in Chhattisgarh that are working for justice?

There is the Adivasi Mahasabha, the CPI, which has been really active, asking for justice, peace talks, etc. They’ve organized huge rallies. There is also one local NGO led by Himanshu Kumar, who has been trying to get cases to court and highlight the issue. But really it has to be a sort of nationwide effort, because it’s not just confined to one state now. The central military forces are being sent to many states, and the Maoists are also active in many states.

How is it for you as an educated, sophisticated urban dweller to go into those rural areas?

Chhattisgarh is now like my second home. I’ve been going there since 1990, and I have people that I stay with when I go. It’s like family. Some of my closest friends are there. But for, I guess, other urban dwellers it’s really difficult because it’s just a very different world. It’s just a different part of India.

It’s a part that you care about.

I’ve been visiting there for 20 years now, so I care about it a lot. But for most urban people it’s just something that’s completely alien to their experience. They have no conception of what it’s like. Adivasis are sort of strange creatures who they may see on the roads of Delhi building their houses, but that’s really their only experience of Adivasis.
(article courtesy Alternative Radio: http://www.alternativeradio.org/)
http://nakedpunch.com/articles/56

Interning Insurgent Populations

2011-02-05T09:59:00.001+05:30

‘Interning Insurgent Populations: The Buried Histories of Indian Democracy.’ Economic and Political Weekly, February 5, 2011, XLVI No. 6, pp. 47-57

http://www.scribd.com/doc/52895674/Interning-Insurgent-Populations-EPW-Feb-2011

Infosys Prize 2010 citation

2011-01-06T15:01:00.001+05:30

SOCIAL SCIENCES - SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

The Infosys Prize 2010 for Social Sciences - Social Anthropology is awarded to Nandini Sundar in recognition of her contributions as an outstanding analyst of social identities, including tribe and caste, and the politics of knowledge in modern India.

Citation by the Infosys Prize 2010 Social Sciences Jury

Professor Nandini Sundar is an outstanding social anthropologist of South Asia, who has made major and original contributions to our understanding of environmental struggles, of the impact of central and state policies on tribal politics, and of the moral ambiguities associated with subaltern political movements in contemporary India. These contributions are anchored in her deep grasp of the legacies of colonial rule for cultural politics in contemporary India, and in theoretically innovative understanding of the relationship of major historical events to persistent structural tensions in Indian society. Professor Sundar has placed her detailed studies of tribal politics in Central India in the broader frame of studies of the law, bureaucracy and morality in modern India. In so doing, she has combined innovative empirical and ethnographic methods and cutting-edge approaches to those sociological debates which link the study of social change in modern India to central debates in comparative social theory.

Biography

Professor Nandini Sundar obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University in 1988 and Master of Arts, Master of Philosophy and Ph.D. degrees in Anthropology from Columbia University in 1989, 1991 and 1995 respectively.
Professor Sundar is the co-editor of India's flagship sociology journal 'Contributions to Indian Sociology' along with Professor Amita Baviskar. She is associated with several governing boards of academic journals, government committees and non-governmental organizations in various capacities and working on issues related to the environment, tribal rights and discrimination/exclusion.
She is currently a Professor in and the Chairperson of the Department of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics. She has held visiting positions at Paris, Yale, Michigan, Cambridge and Chandigarh universities. She was awarded the M. N. Srinivas Memorial Prize of the Indian Sociological Society in 2002-03, the L. M. Singhvi Visiting Fellowship at Cambridge in 2003 and the Hughes Visiting Fellowship at Michigan in 2005.
Her publications include Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar and Branching Out: Joint Forest Management in India. Her research interests are wide and include citizenship, war and counterinsurgency in South Asia, indigenous identity and politics in South Asia, the sociology of law and inequality.

Scope and impact of work

Professor Nandini Sundar's career has been characterized by an exceptional ability to combine the study of the most important problems in the sociology of India - including those of caste, tribe, state and economy - with issues that have emerged as objects of social-scientific interest in more recent times, such as the study of violence, subaltern identities and moral culpability. Professor Sundar's work has had major impact on a new generation of young scholars of sociology and anthropology working in India, as well as in Europe and America, and is a significant bridge between the social sciences based on Indian data and fieldwork and international debates about theory and methodology. At the same time, her work brings the highest scholarly standards and impartiality to controversial subjects in which social scientists encounter the conflicting interests of policy-makers, activists and political parties. Her ability to address different audiences has allowed her to engage in public and policy spheres in India while making major contributions to social scientific scholarship at the highest international level.

At War with Oneself: Constructing Naxalism as India’s Biggest Security Threat.

2011-01-02T09:52:00.000+05:30

At War with Oneself: Constructing Naxalism as India’s Biggest Security Threat. In Michael Kugelman ed. India's Contemporary Security Challenges, Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2011.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/52895132/At-War-With-Oneself

Pleading for Justice

2010-12-31T18:31:00.003+05:30

This is a summary of the PIL against Salwa Judum published in Seminar, 2010. Full text available at:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/46103008/Pleading-for-Justice

Educating for Inequality

2010-12-31T16:48:00.004+05:30

Educating for Inequality: The experiences of India’s ‘Indigenous’ Citizens. Asian Anthropology, Vol. 9, September 2010, pp. 117-142.

This report deals with the contradictions and dilemmas concerning education faced by adivasis, the preferred local term for “indigenous people,” in central India. The full article is available at:

http://www.scribd.com/full/46102521?access_key=key-12e1xsut7f0dtudx14ze

Rediff Interview: Infosys prize winner to spend money to educate Bastar youth

2010-12-13T21:58:00.002+05:30

December 13, 2010 11:13 IST, Rediff.com

Sumita Vaid Dixit

Professor Nandini Sundar who won the Infosys Prize 2010 in social anthropology speaks about the apathy of Indian bureaucracy

Professor Nandini Sundar's passionate study of issues of counterinsurgency, adivasi politics and identities has not only created awareness among people, but has also sensitised policymakers.

Sundar, Head of Department of Sociology at Delhi School of Economics, talks to Sumita Vaid Dixit of Careers360 about her Infosys prize, the bureaucracy's apathy and her third book.

How do you feel about winning the Infosys prize?

Great. I received a call on October 25, some time in the morning from Prof Amartya Sen and members of the Infosys Foundation and they told me that I had won the prize.

It feels good to know such a distinguished jury thinks your work is worthwhile. Now I hope other people will take the issues I study more seriously, such as adivasi rights and the terrible effects of counterinsurgency.

Has the prize changed your life?

No, but it has certainly brought me some recognition among a different group of people than the ones I normally interact with. It has also encouraged me to pursue my research even when things may seem tough.

Apart from using the money for research, one of the things I want to do with the prize money is help in the education of youth in Bastar. The education model I have in mind is one that will allow these children to learn what is taught in the best schools as well as give them pride in their own culture and history.

What kind of challenges have you had to face?

One of the biggest challenges is bureaucratic ignorance. Some time back, I was at a meeting to discuss studies of alternative systems of dispute resolution and one law school had suggested studying how Chambal dacoits solve local problems. A bureaucrat from the Law Ministry who was present at the meeting said 'How can you study this. You would then be legitimising the dacoits."

Every researcher ought to have the freedom to study or research any subject whether it is the Naxalite movement or the collusion between big business, politicians and journalists that the Nira Radia tapes reveal.

I have been going to Chhattisgarh for the past 20 years for my research work and now the government is preventing me from carrying on with my work. They sent some 50 special police to surround me in my field village, so that the villagers would get intimidated. But no government is going to stop me doing the kind of research that I think needs to be done.

Then what kind of research is respected in this country?

Traditionally, the emphasis has been on research that is useful for the government. In the '50s and '60s development institutes were set up to help the government frame policies because a developing country needed research for growth. But what governments must also understand is that independent research is equally important as it helps to develop an independent stance on the country's problems. This kind of bias is especially seen in Sociology as it is considered a poor cousin of Economics.

What would be the other issues surrounding research work?

Increasingly, our work takes place in an international context, where we both cite and collaborate with foreign scholars. We need to develop our own independent questions and style, even as we go global. A lot of thought also needs to be given to how collaborative research is done across countries to avoid replicating colonial models of authorship and direction.

You have written one book, co-authored the other; is the third in the wings?

I have been planning to convert all my work on counterinsurgency in Chhattisgarh into a book. I see the book as an opportunity to understand movements such as the Salwa Judum, how they are encouraged by the State, what such movements mean in the context of a democracy, how people's emotions are fashioned by media reports. To give you an example, when CRPF jawans get killed, it always makes the news, sometimes on the front page, but there is little or no reporting when ordinary adivasis are killed by the security forces.

The country's diversity is its biggest strength, but it is now being seen by the government and others as its weakness.

As a teacher, do you get enough time to conduct field research?

We don't get leave for field work. The university system is structured to understand the needs of scientists who sit in their labs and conduct research. But we have to go to the field, which may be Mizoram or Karnataka - not all of us can conduct research in Delhi in the evenings or only during the summer vacations.

Civil Society and Democratic Change

2010-11-30T16:58:00.000+05:30

Civil Society and Democratic Change. In Mia Mellin and Heidi Moksnes ed. Power to the People? (Con-)Tested Civil Society in Search of Democracy, Outlook on Civil Society, No. 1, pp. 41-56, Centre for Sustainable Development, Uppsala University, 2010.

Civil Society and Democratic Change

This article is divided into two sections. The first part maps civil society in Asia, exploring the range of non-governmental actors which exist, and which contribute to the struggle for democratic change or obstruct it. While civil society is a useful locus to explore this contest, given that it is internally divided, we need to analyse constituent elements separately for their relationship to the state, and for their democratic potential. The State is not a neutral actor, standing high above these contending agencies, but actively intervenes in the very constitution of these agencies as well as in social movements. We must keep in mind too, that sometimes progressive states may falter before regressive societies, i.e. the locus of democratic change must be looked for not only in civil society but also in the state. The second half of the article focuses on India, attempting to show, through one particular case study, the prospects and problems for democracy.

Read full article at:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/59043974/Civil-Society-and-Democratic-Change

Funding is a privilege Indian varsities must earn

2010-11-14T21:48:00.001+05:30

About a tribal family from Chhattisgarh

2010-10-16T18:57:00.001+05:30

Read this heartrending report, sent by the Andhra Pradesh solidarity group, on an IDP family from Dantewada. This was submitted to the Court in October 2010, as Annexure P 12. Follow the hyperlink to see the photos

Report sent by Solidarity Committee for Internally Displaced Tribals (Andhra Pradesh), 16 October 2010.

Now wage labour, starving family after forced to leave 20 acres of land and 30 cattle

On 23 September 2010, a young couple along with their 3 male children approached the mobile health team being run by an NGO that is working for the displaced tribal from Chattisgarh with a complaint that their 3^rd son, who is 10 days old, stopped sucking mother’s milk for the past 24 hours.

Not only the mother, the child and the entire family including father and other 2 children are also looked like severe anemic and not at all eating properly from so many days.

The only available advice to that family was to rush to Area Government hospital, Bhadrachalam without delay. As they were prepared to go to the hospital the mobile team has decided to take them to the hospital in Bhadrachalam in the mobile health team’s vehicle, to avoid delay.

The team reached the hospital in the evening, and treatment was started for the mother and 2 younger children as they were severely anemic.

After four days of treatment, two children and mother was referred to Nutrition and Rehabilitation Center (NRC), being run by the ITDA, Bhadrachalam.

In Bhadrachalam for the past 15 years an NRC is being run by the ITDA where anemic children and the mothers are provided treatment till they recover normal; in the NRC, patients will be given 3 times quality food and required medicine. Treatment in the NRC will be given on a long term basis for which one should stay one week to three weeks, depending on the severity. But the Chattisgarh tribe hesitates to join and stay in the NRC because the staffs in NRC are not familiar with their language and these tribal are ill-treated and discriminated. To overcome the situation the NGO, working for the displaced chattisgarh tribal appointed female staffs who know their language to look after their needs and offer required counseling and support. She also maintains a brief profile of each family of Chattisgarh tribal, joined in NRC.

On the enquiry some details of this family was gathered: Madivi Nanda son of Pandu about 25 years old, along with his wife, Chukki (20 years) and two sons Somudu (5 years) and Budra (3 years) came to Kukunur forest area of Khammam district from Duleed of Chattisgarh, two years back.

Madivi nanda said that they came to Khammam to escape violence, threats and attacks from the Salwa Judum. His family owns 20 acres of land and 30 cattle in their native village but he came here with only 4 cows and 2 quintals of food grains.

To support their family Nanda and his wife started coolie work in the adjacent villages particularly in the cotton, mirch (chili) and tobacco fields. In initial days both were attending the coolie and were getting Rs. 60/- each. Later, when his wife became pregnant, her health condition slowly deteriorated and she was unable to do labour work. Then their wage from labour work decreased day by day, the food intake of the family also reduced and they all were pushed into all sorts of crisis.

Treatment given in NRC:

In NRC it was found that Budra, the second son (3 years) is only 4.87 kg and the youngest son (15 days old) weighed only 1.5 kg and both were declared as 4^th grade malnourished. The mother and her 2 children were admitted in NRC for 2 weeks and discharged on 12^th October, 2010. While they were discharged they were strictly advised to have good food such as milk, mutton, vegetables, green leaves, fruits, etc for at least 3 months that would help improving their health condition.

The above photos are taken on 12 October 2010, in the NRC, Bhadrachalam on the day of their discharge.

Report sent by Solidarity Committee for Internally Displaced Tribals (Andhra Pradesh), 16 October 2010. Now wage labour, starving family after forced to leave 20 acres of land and 30 cattle

2010-10-16T17:50:00.004+05:30

Report sent by Solidarity Committee for Internally Displaced Tribals (Andhra Pradesh), 16 October 2010.

Now wage labour, starving family after forced to leave 20 acres of land and 30 cattle

Not only the mother, the child and the entire family including father and other 2 children are also looked like severe anemic and not at all eating properly from so many days.

All the above photos are taken on 23 September 2010, in the hospital- photos covered - younger child, ten days old; both the younger children in the hospital bed; mother with the child and the family

The team reached the hospital in the evening, and treatment was started for the mother and 2 younger children as they were severely anemic.

After four days of treatment, two children and mother was referred to Nutrition and Rehabilitation Center (NRC), being run by the ITDA, Bhadrachalam.

Treatment given in NRC:

The above photos are taken on 12 October 2010, in the NRC, Bhadrachalam on the day of their discharge.

Interview by Virginia Dominguez on AAA

2010-08-19T15:21:00.016+05:30

Virginia Dominguez, President of the American Anthropological Association recently interviewed me - on my passions, anthropology, journal editing and so on. The full recording can be found at:

http://blog.aaanet.org/2010/08/05/inside-the-presidents-studio-nandini-sundar/

Hosted by AAA President Virginia R. Dominguez, “Inside the President’s Studio” features interviews with anthropologists about their ideas, research and passions. It is part of an ongoing effort to foster public, visible and active engagement with anthropologists. Become a part of the conversation by reading and listening to the interviews, adding your comments to the blog, and suggesting people or topics for future pieces.
This month the studio features Delhi University anthropologist Nandini Sundar. She talks about the lure of anthropology, involvement in litigation on the behalf of indigenous communities, becoming a public figure, the state of anthropology in India, and perceptions of the discipline, among other topics.
Nandini’s written answers are copied below:
(1) What are you most passionate about? And how long has this been a passion?
For the last five years I have been engaged in a campaign for justice for the indigenous communities with whom I first did fieldwork in central India in the face of counterinsurgency and strategic hamletting, to finish a Maoist guerilla movement. Of this, in the last three years, I have been engaged in litigating on their behalf. This had to be an obsession because without that it would have been difficult to take on the state. But the passion has begun to fade because it no longer requires my involvement at the same level – other people have got into the act, and I also have much less time to spare. However, I have to hold on to the work because it has to be seen through.
(2) What drives you?
See above.
(3) What makes you mad?
Double standards and lack of logic, regardless of whether its by academics or public officials or activists.
(4) Have you ever thought of running for public office?
No.
(5) Have you ever contemplated a different career? Which?
For a long time I was torn between being a full time activist with local communities because intellectual work alone seemed sterile, but now I am certain that I really am an anthropologist, and that’s what I like doing best. I think this is a dilemma that anthropologists are familiar with.
(6) What is something that only your closest friends know about you but that you are now willing to share with others?
Don’t know.
(7) What makes you smile (perhaps especially amid all the frustrations and chores at work or in life)?
Students writing silly things; politicians making sillier statements.
And for you:
(1) Your own work focuses on violence and ways to call attention to it and ameliorate it. If this is not a good description, or not a good enough one, could you fix it?
It has not always done so – its only been an obsession in the recent past. But I am equally interested in questions of inequality and discrimination, the politics of memory and representation, and directions in intellectual history. I actually long to move away from this current focus and revert to other issues, but before that I need to work the current project out of my system in a book form. I don’t know whether that will ever happen though, because now I’ve been landed with being head and dean and am overwhelmed with admin work. I feel as if my research life has come to an end, and three years down the line, the subject will be passé.
(2) Are there certain types of violence you prefer to address and others that just seem too entrenched to do much about?
One huge area which I have never engaged in is questions of discrimination due to disability, illness etc.. The kind of violence I am interested in is violence in which the state is involved or in which it has some role to play – e.g when it could stop domestic or religious/caste violence but does not.
(3) I know you were partly educated in India and partly in the U.S. Were you also in Canada or the U.K.? How did you end up choosing to come to graduate school in the U.S.? Did you ever consider other countries? Did the U.S. seem appealing to you in a particular way?
I graduated from Oxford University (BA hon in Philosophy, Politics and Economics). I think in terms of an undergraduate education it was far superior to anything else I have seen, but graduate work in the US is more exciting than in the UK – there is much more interdisciplinarity and experimentation.
(4) I know that you have been co-editing the prestigious journal, CONTRIBUTIONS TO INDIAN SOCIOLOGY. As a fellow (and now past) editor, I would love to hear you talk about some of the surprises you encountered when becoming coeditor? Some of the delights? Any real pleasures?
The real pleasure is seeing an article by a young scholar or someone from the academic boondocks which starts off as a good idea but is badly written or under-referenced or something – transform into a good article. (I know you do a lot of this kind of affirmative action Virginia, so I know you will understand).
(5) Could the journal nowadays be renamed CONTRIBUTIONS TO INDIAN SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY, or is “anthropology” still too suspect a term in the Indian academic or governmental world? I ask because I know that there are official professional associations of anthropologists in India, two of them now members of the World Council of Anthropological Associations. And yet I recall South Asianists telling me while I was in graduate school in the 1970s and early in my professorial life in the 1980s that it was better to be a sociologist in India than to label oneself an “anthropologist.”
Actually most of our articles are more anthropological than sociological, but in part the idea is to protest against the artificial geographical division into which subjects of anthropology and sociology have been divided.
But our more immediate concern is not to change the disciplinary nomenclature but how to become a journal of South Asia without changing the name. We already encourage contributions from other countries in the region but the name remains a limiting factor. On the other hand, the journal is fifty years old, so it would require a lot to change the name.
(6) What is your greatest frustration about India these days? About the U.S.? About anthropology?
My greatest frustration about India is the bureaucracy in the university system, and the lack of good research and training in the regional universities. And in the US, it was the valorization of theory at the expense of good empirical research, though I dislike UK style empiricism as well. I dislike theorizing on the basis of thin ethnography and the kind of scholarship on India that finds purchase in the US is often that. But I think this may be changing, and I do not want to generalize.
(7) What brings a true smile to your face when you think of India today? And the U.S.? And anthropology?
I like controversy – both intellectual and political – and am happy whenever there is more of it, though I am often too lazy or busy to engage in it myself. And both India and the US have plenty of it.
As for anthropology I love reading a good book and feeling as if a whole new world has opened up.

Chart of Affidavits filed till August 2010 in Nandini Sundar & Ors, Kartam Joga and ors, and respondents

2010-08-08T20:51:00.000+05:30

Chart of Annexures/Evidence updated till July 2010

2010-08-08T20:50:00.000+05:30

Nandini Sundar & Ors August 2010 Written-Submissions

2010-08-08T20:48:00.000+05:30

The Trophies Of Operation Green Hunt

2010-06-26T19:27:00.001+05:30

Outlook Opinion
The Trophies Of Operation Green Hunt
When rape is routine and there’s a paucity of condemning voices

If the security forces can treat dead women like hunting trophies, not only trussing their bodies to poles, but taking pride in displaying their kill, is it surprising that their behaviour towards the living is so atrocious? After every deadly attack by the Maoists, ‘civil society actors’ are summoned by TV channels to condemn the incident, substituting moral indignation for news analysis. And yet, the same media is strangely silent on police or paramilitary atrocities against civilians. On June 9, The Hindu published stories of rapes in and around Chintalnar in Dantewada by special police officers (SPOs) of the Chhattisgarh government. To my knowledge, no one has asked P. Chidambaram, Raman Singh or the Chhattisgarh DGP to condemn these incidents or even asked what they are going to do about it. These are people in positions of power, who are elected or paid to uphold the Constitution, and the ‘buck stops with them’, not with ordinary citizens.

If channels can run all-day programmes on justice for Ruchika Girhotra, why not for the adivasi girls who were raped and assaulted in and around Chintalnar between May 26-28? Is it because they are not middle class and their plight will not raise TRP ratings? Or because they are considered ‘collateral damage’ in the war between “India” and the “Maoists”—who, not being part of “India”, are presumably from outer space—that TV commentators advocate?

While rape is often described as a weapon of war, it is not uniformly practised, and indeed nothing distinguishes the two parties in a guerrilla war more than their attitude to rape. In her careful analysis of sexual violence during civil war, the political scientist Elizabeth Woods points out that while it was common in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, sexual assault was less frequent in El Salvador, Sri Lanka and Peru. In the latter cases, the vast majority of rapes were committed by the government or paramilitaries, this also being a primary reason why women were motivated to join the insurgents. The rebel armies—who carried out other violent acts, including the killing of civilians—almost never committed sexual violence, including against female combatants in their own ranks. In Mizoram, women recalling the regrouping and search operations of the 1960s described only rapes by Indian soldiers and none by the Mizo National Front. One said to me, “It is as if the vai (outsider) army was hungry for women.” Today, despite government claims that the Maoists sexually exploit young women, the distinction between insurgent and counter-insurgent is clear for the women of Dantewada. They are safe from one army (the PLGA) but not from the other (the Indian paramilitary and SPOs/police). And in any war to win hearts and minds (‘WHAM’), surely this is not an unimportant distinction.

After the 76 CRPF men were killed at Chintalnar, many in the media pointed to the complete lack of intelligence on the ambush. What kind of intelligence do they expect from villages from where young girls are picked up and kept as sexual slaves in Salwa Judum camps? In July ’08, I recorded two testimonies from the village of Mukram, right next to the site of the attack. These, along with several others, were submitted to the nhrc, which was investigating the situation on behalf of the Supreme Court, and to the National Commission for Women, but till date, nothing has come out of it. But this is how the testimony of Kawasi Lakhmi (all names of victims changed) went:

“I was four months pregnant and was visiting my parents’ house in June 2007 when Salwa Judum leaders and SPOs attacked my village. It was about 9 or 10 pm and I was sleeping when they surrounded my house. They beat up my parents and dragged me to the main road. From there, along with Hidme and Madvi Unga, a 20-year-old boy, I was taken to Jagargunda camp. There I was kept for a week and raped every night by different SPOs. I do not recognise the others, but I recognised Bhima aka Ramesh of Jonnaguda village and Somdu of Kunder village.

“We (the two girls) were kept locked up in one house and Unga was kept separately. We were given only a little food and not allowed out at all, except to relieve ourselves. My clothes fell apart in tatters and my jewellery was taken away. After a week, I was given a small cloth to cover myself. Unga was badly beaten and was ill for a long time. Hidme and I were also ill and could not work for two months. The Chintalnar police took money from our families for having saved us.”

The benevolent police of Chintalnar had told the girls’ families that they had sent a wireless message to Jagargunda camp and the girls were safe. In return for this, they had extracted Rs 1,500 from each family. The same SPOs appear in other testimonies, such as this one from Kottaguda:

“Around April ’07, Salwa Judum, SPOs, police officers and CRPF men came to our village. I was on my way to fill water while Kosi was at home at this time. The Judum and security forces caught us, called us Naxalites and forcibly took us to Jagargunda camp. There they kept us in a room where SPOs raped us several times during the next few weeks. We can recognise them and know some of them by name also because they are from nearby villages, like Bhima of Jonnaguda village, Somdu of Kunder village, Dasru of Millampalli, Nanda of Lakhapal village and Muka of Nagram village.”

Another common pattern that emerges is of gangrapes by SPOs on combing operations. For the young girls, who have so little to begin with, the loss of jewellery and clothes is an important part of the narrative. And yet their resilience in the face of horror is remarkable. A 17-year-old I met in Arlampalli village recounted:

“On July 29, ’07, I was breaking tora in the courtyard of my house when four SPOs came. I ran inside but they dragged me out and took me about one km away. There they tied my hands and feet and blindfolded me and all four gangraped me. They tore all my clothes and broke my jewellery. After that, I managed to escape on the pretext of drinking water and hid in a grain bin in someone’s house. I recognise three of the SPOs—Rajesh from Polampalli, Kiche Soma of Korrapad and Linga from Palamadgu. Even after this incident they came to my house and threatened me. I was too scared to report to the police and, anyway, what would have been the point? I was even too scared to go to the market for fear of being caught and raped again. After being beaten and raped, my body was badly swollen. I was also bitten by a snake while running away that day, but could not go to a doctor. I was treated with local medicine.”

Nothing brings out the hollowness of the government’s claim on WHAM more than its stand on sexual violence. Rapes cannot be justified as actions done in the line of duty. Unlike an encounter, there is no question of who fired first. Even if rogue police or armymen commit rapes, a concerned government can take steps to identify and punish the guilty. And yet, the record on this is abysmal, from Kashmir to Manipur to Chhattisgarh. In practice what emerges is that, rather than WHAM, the Indian government is following a ‘cost-benefit approach’ aimed at making the costs—including starvation, murder, torture and rape—far higher than any benefit the public might gain from supporting the guerrillas or remaining neutral.

In Dantewada, the police have bent over backwards to defend the SPOs and Salwa Judum leaders accused of rape. Take the case of Markami Budri, originally from Bhandarpadar village. In March ’09, she wrote to the Dantewada SP complaining that she had been raped by SPOs in Konta thana, who picked her up when she was on her way to a relative’s house. Among those she accused was one Soyam Mooka, Salwa Judum leader in Konta. Since the SP refused to file an fir, she and five other girls were helped by a local NGO to file a case in the lower court. Her first deposition was on June 16, a hearing which the police clearly had knowledge of. In the meantime, we had already filed her complaint with the Supreme Court. In a letter to the SC dated June 17—a day after her court deposition— the SP Dantewada wrote that “the police enquired about her”, and “nobody knows as to where she has gone away”. Further, the people he had enquired from, Salwa Judum leaders Boddu Raja, Soyam Mooka and Dinesh (the very people accused by her), claimed the charges were fabricated to malign them. On October 30, the Konta magistrate issued an arrest warrant for Soyam Mooka and the other accused. On December 10, the police declared they were all absconding. But less than a month later, on January 6, 2010, Soyam Mooka was seen under police protection leading a demonstration of the Ma Danteshwari Swabhimaan Manch (a new name for the Salwa Judum) against Medha Patkar and others in Dantewada town.

Once rapes become routine, what any responsible commander should be worried about is not so much the brutality of the other side, but the degeneration of his own. The victims will be not just the adivasi women of Dantewada or Lalgarh, but women from all the areas where the jawans come from. What do we want—an India at war with its women?

Gunda Dhur ki Talaash Mein, Penguin 2009

2010-06-05T14:49:00.000+05:30

Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological history of Bastar 1854-2006, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2007 (2nd edition), (1st edition 1997, OIP 1999).

2010-06-05T14:45:00.001+05:30

Anthropologists are often accused of wanting to keep tribals or indigenous people as museum pieces. Subalterns and Sovereigns shows how misplaced this charge is, arguing that forested and hill areas like Bastar have never been outside the ‘mainstream’ of history, and that the flattening out of local politics to create the appearance of isolation and homogeneity is essentially a product of colonialism and post-colonialism. The choice today, as in the past, has never been one between ‘tradition’ and ‘modern civilisation’ or between ‘development’ and ‘backwardness’, but over alternative visions of democracy.

By exploring the expansion of the state in Bastar over the past century and a half, and resistance to the particular forms it has taken, this book has been part of redefining the way in which history and anthropology are thinking of tribal India.

Based on an unusually rich combination of field and archival research, deployed in methodologically innovative ways, the book is divided into three parts: the ethnohistorical first section portrays the pre-colonial economy and polity, showing also how the significance of kingship and Bastar’s famous Dussehra festival have changed over time. The second part uses more standard archival sources to explore critical rebellions, yet these too are countered by oral histories of the same events. This section documents the growing restrictions on popular access to land and forest, the multiple historical understandings that shaped the encounter between different actors, and the relationship between colonial anthropology and contemporary laws. The final section, `Uncertain Futures,' highlights the contradictions faced by tribal societies today. The book is brought up to date for the second edition, by an afterword on the ongoing Naxalite movement and the government’s counterinsurgency efforts in Chhattisgarh.

'Does Mr Chidambaram believe in democracy?' Rediff Interview, by Girija Shivakumar, May 2010

2010-05-24T15:29:00.001+05:30

The last six weeks have seen a series of deadly attacks on security forces and civilians by the Maoists or Naxalites, the insurgent group present in eight states, which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh describes as the gravest threat to India.
While the Maoists claim they are fighting a war on behalf of landless tribals, their opponents call them armed terrorists exploiting tribal sentiments.
In their worst-ever attack on April 6, Maoists massacred 76 Central Reserve Police Force personnel in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh. In another murderous attack on May 17, they killed 40 civilians and special police officers in Bijapur, Chhattisgarh.
The recent attacks have left Union Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram grappling with the most serious internal security crisis on his watch.
As the government revisits its anti-Maoist strategy with Congress party President Sonia Gandhi advocating a redressal of the root causes of the problem, the debate on how to tackle the issue has gained in significance in the public space.
Sociologist Nandini Sundar has been doing research on Adivasi issues for the last twenty years. She is the author of Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar (1854-2006). Along with two others she filed a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court in 2007 against the excesses of the Salwa Judum, the anti-Maoist organisation of tribals in Chhattisgarh.
In this interview with Girija Shivakumar, Sundar, a professor at Delhi University, argues how the home minister has no grasp of the situation and highlights the importance of peace talks in finding a solution.

Breaking the mistrust in Chhattisgarh

2010-05-22T16:59:00.002+05:30

The Maoists’ unconscionable attack on a passenger bus once again underlines the urgent necessity for a new approach to the problems of Dantewada. Even if the SPOs on board the bus were returning from an operation in Gumiapal where they allegedly killed two innocent civilians, nothing justifies the bombing of a vehicle known to be carrying civilian passengers. But if Maoists have lost the distinction between civilians and combatants, the government must ensure that its own counterinsurgency practices stringently make the difference. The line is important not because combatant deaths are any less mourned, but because even war has rules.

Unfortunately, both the Union home minister and the Chhattisgarh chief minister are obsessed with civil society actors, as if they are responsible for the decades of governmental neglect and injustice that enabled Naxalism, and as if their insistence on the rule of law is equivalent to IED blasts by Maoists. Tomorrow, if the Supreme Court were to dismiss our PIL against Salwa Judum and ensure full impunity for the excesses by the police and vigilantes, this would not lead to any reduction in Naxalite attacks. On the contrary, seeing that every avenue for justice is closed to them, people would only join the Maoists in greater numbers. Government intelligence sources are on record saying that Maoist recruitment went up dramatically after Salwa Judum burnt homes, killed people and raped women on a large scale.

Those who continue to defend the Salwa Judum as a self-initiated movement against the Maoists, as Chief Minister Raman Singh did at Delhi’s Constitution Club on May 20, lose sight of the fact that past “origins” matter less than present conduct. After all, the Maoists too are a self-initiated resistance movement against the state. Not only has the NHRC clearly indicted the Salwa Judum for burning houses, but the Chhattisgarh government has admitted as much in its affidavit of October 17, 2008, stating that “necessary relief money be given in cases of properties damaged by Salwa Judum activists/security forces, besides Naxalite violence, after village-wise analysis”.

The Chhattisgarh government cannot take refuge in the fact that it is going through a violent phase as its latest affidavit before the court (May 3) suggests. After all, it has had two years to announce a compensation and rehabilitation package. If it was unable to do a village-wise survey, why not admit that the area is not within its control and invite outside observers, as international law suggests, or at least allow a high level monitoring committee consisting of eminent citizens who are willing to help? Such a body is needed to break the mutual distrust between people and government. This is what we are asking the Supreme Court to set up. The other alternative is to follow the 5th Schedule, which gives the Centre full powers in Scheduled areas. Are villagers, whose stocks of grain were burnt by vigilante violence, supposed to stop eating till “area domination” is complete? Should they die from untreated diseases because of the government’s ego?

The Chhattisgarh government’s position seems to be that if their police cannot go in freely, nobody else should be allowed to visit either. A group of eminent Gandhians who had recently gone on a peace mission were chased away by slogan-shouting BJP and Congress goons. The collector of Bijapur admitted (‘Salwa Judum’s reverse march’, IE, April 25) that he is now able to visit Lingagiri and Basaguda villages — but the credit for that goes not to the Salwa Judum, which drove the villagers away, but to a group of NGOs who rehabilitated them and invited essential services back in.

More shocking is the government’s refusal to even recognise the majority of the people who are affected. In their May 3 affidavit, they argue that there is “no point in keeping such a category” (of people needing rehabilitation in their own villages) and that allegations regarding refugees in Andhra are “baseless”. If the government ignores the legitimate needs of some three lakh persons (the estimated population of 644 affected villages), and focuses only on the 25,000-30,000 SPOs and Salwa Judum supporters left in camps, what peace do they expect? Even the data on relief camps is two years old, reproduced from the 2008 affidavit.

In the plan we submitted to court, we outlined some immediate steps precisely to take account of this war-like situation. Apart from a high level committee which would work with the Chhattisgarh government to ensure rehabilitation, we suggested a survey of affected villages to be carried out by local college youth, and retired district judges to hear complaints in block headquarters. If this process were publicised in the local newspapers, and independent observers allowed free access, people might feel emboldened to register complaints. It is impossible for people to file FIRs with the very police who have been responsible for the violence.

For their part, the Maoists must respond positively to the home minister’s clear offer on May 21 of a suspension of operations in return for their own suspension of violence for a limited period, so that talks can be fixed. The adivasis of Bastar need justice and peace, and for too long they have been denied both.

Will counting caste help to reduce inequality?

2010-05-11T10:46:00.001+05:30

More thought needs to be given to the kind of data generated and its practical implications

Yesterday when the census enumerator visited, I asked him how he felt about the current debate on counting caste in the census: “Not comfortable at all”, he said, “I don’t even like asking whether someone is SC/ST or Other, leave alone what their caste is”. But, he added, “caste is an inescapable reality of Indian society.”

The debate on counting caste in the census has not moved on from 2001, when opinion was equally divided. Supporters of caste enumeration argue that census categories merely reflect existing classifications, and that only the census can provide the figures necessary to map inequality by caste. Opponents argue that the census does not mirror but actively produces social classifications and ways of thinking. They point to the history of mobilisation around caste in the census and the consequent dangers of both distorted data and increased social tensions. In neither case has much thought been given to how the data might be used, the different kinds of figures needed for different purposes, or alternative ways of collecting the required data.

On the surface, caste enumeration appears to be a UPA concession to its OBC allies, but more fundamentally, it fits with the larger political agenda of moving people off the land, holding out the illusory promise of formal employment. For social justice, we are made to believe there is no alternative to reservation, and for reservation, no alternative to counting caste. With over 90% of people in the informal sector, reservation can hardly be the primary solution to greater equality. There is no doubt that stringent affirmative action policies are required to make formal institutions more socially inclusive, but to shackle the census to this agenda betrays a failure to learn from the past or to think imaginatively about the future.

University degrees are important for certification, especially for those historically deprived of education, but they do not necessarily contribute to the creation and expansion of knowledge. For instance, there are over 20,000 rice varieties in Chhattisgarh, some 6000 of them in Bastar alone, yet this knowledge is rarely factored into discussions around educational expansion. ‘Social Justice’ becomes simply whether certain castes get admission into agricultural universities, not whether those insitutions enhance existing knowledge or contribute to people’s well being. And in the meantime, the holders of such knowledge are being decimated through land acquisition, displacement and inhumane forms of counterinsurgency. The counting of SCs and STs in the census has not led to any greater justice for them - not only do Mirchpur type incidents continue; but even in terms of planning or the everyday provision of services in villages, common educational or health facilties are often situated in upper caste hamlets, even when there are clearly larger populations of Muslims or Dalits in the village.

The transformation of caste through the census

While earlier rulers also created lists of castes and occupations, such as those in the Ain-i Akbari or the Rajatarangini, the urge to map every single caste is commonly attributed to the colonial need to know their populations in order to govern. Caste and religion were seen as key categories with which to explain native behaviour: to explain insanity, to help in the recruitment of ‘martial races’ to the army, or to determine which groups had a propensity to crime.

Yet successive Census Commissioners like Risley in 1901 and Yeatts in 1941 described the caste tables as the most troublesome and expensive part of the census: Risley complained: "If the person enumerated gives the name of a well known tribe or caste...all is well. But he.. may give the name of a sect, of a sub-caste, of an exogamous sept or section....his occupation or the province from which he comes.” In 1881 in Madras presidency alone, the inhabitants returned 3208 different castes, which the census then regrouped into 309 castes.

Enumeration also required people to be slotted into categories that were mutually exclusive even if untrue to their lived experience. A person could not have two castes or two religions. Where the 1911 census had recognised several sects as Hindu-Muhammadans, in 1921 they were reclassified as either one or the other, except for the Sindh Sanjogis who refused and were relegated to `other'. The Meos today face similar problems, caught between the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Tabligh e Jamaat.

As people began to realise the value of census categories for economic, social and political advancement, mobilisation around the census increased, particularly after Risley’s 1901 ranking of castes in order of “native opinion of social precedence”. Numerous petitions to the census commissioners asked to have the names of castes changed or be ranked higher in the social hierarchy. For instance, the Khatris claimed that their name was really a corruption of Kshatriya. The census also initiated a wider transformation, with hundreds of caste associations formed between the 1880s and 1930s, addressing their demands both to the state and towards internal social reform.

Caste was not the only ascriptive identity politicised by the census. Religion, especially pre-partition, and language were equally explosive, and saw complaints against alleged enumerator bias. For instance, in 1941, the Dalit Chuhras in Punjab complained of pressure to be recorded as Sikhs or Hindus by Sikh and Hindu enumerators and demanded that their religion be entered as Adh Dharm instead.

Given such battles, and the concern that India’s innumerable castes and religions were used to justify colonial rule, the constituent assembly framing the Census Act of 1948 decided to exclude caste returns (except for SCs and STs). However, since caste did not disappear from public life as was hoped, political attitudes towards counting it have changed dramatically. Similar debates have taken place over the counting of race and ethnicity in the US and UK census respectively, with some people pointing to the unscientific nature of race, and others arguing that "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take a count of race."

Nature of Data

Assuming (optimistically) that the demand for caste enumeration is driven by an anti-discrimination, pro-equality impulse, we need to consider how the data thrown up by the census will fit public needs. Unlike earlier censuses which were caste and religion based, any proposed caste inclusive census would not have caste as a key variable, but simply as one return among others. It will depend on the precise tabulations decided upon whether we get a caste wise breakup of literacy, sex ratio, female work force participation etc. One argument being made is that it will help to identify weaker castes among the OBCs, but that would depend on the level of caste detail (sub-caste, caste) at which tabulations are carried out.

The major benefit the census will provide is the numbers of each caste by region, making it possible for researchers to conduct other kinds of surveys, e.g. to assess through additional sample surveys, the percentage of civil servants from a particular caste. On the other hand, because of returns which fluctuate according to identity politics, it may be difficult to construct accurate time series records to assess changing mobility trends.

Even for the purpose of measuring ‘backwardness’, the census is only a beginning, not an end in itself. While the Mandal Commission extrapolated from 1891 and 1931 census data, this alone was not the basis for its classifications. The comprehensive socio-economic survey conducted by the Second Backward Classes Commission (BCC) in Karnataka under Justice Venkataswamy yielded generally accepted population figures for each caste, but its indicators of backwardness were flawed. As Justice Chinappa Reddy, who chaired the Third BCC noted, simply aggregating all the indicators of backwardness (data potentially available through a census) and ranking castes on that basis as was done by the 2nd BCC would place Vokkaligas in Karnataka on par with Darzis. The Third BCC therefore developed its own indicators of backwardness on the basis of several different kinds of data which included: personal touring; representations from caste associations; a sample socio-economic survey covering 600 villages; information from taluks on caste wise land holding; survey of caste and socio-economic background of gazetted officers, MPs, MLAs, leading Advocates, Professors, etc.; information on caste, occupation and income of parents for students appearing in the SSLC exam; information on admissions into medical, engineering, dental colleges, etc; and information from the Karnataka Public service commission and other recruitment agencies on 3.47 lakh government employees and 1.20 lakh public sector employees.

In short, while the census can provide base figures, it cannot substitute for the kind of information needed both for inclusion of castes in an OBC list or for `graduation’ of castes out of the list, even assuming the latter were ever to be politically feasible. In his discussion of sources, Justice Chinappa Reddy pondered over the wisdom of excluding caste from the census, noting that such data would have saved the commission many problems. However, he went on to add: "On closer thought, I think it is just as well that caste is ignored in the census operations. A beginning has to be made somewhere to forget caste."

The author is Professor of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics.