K. Balagopal - Political violence and human rights: The case of the naxalite movement in A.P.

Systematic and calculated violence begins with the enemy, but soon turns to the agents of the enemy within and among one’s friends. That is why all strategies of systematic violence consume more of their own social base than the enemy. The naxalites social base consists of the ladles poor, the peasants, and the miners and factory labor, with the middle class as a potential ally. Yet the majority – overwhelmingly – of the victims of naxalite violence belong precisely to these classes/groups... Another problem with systematic violence used as a method of struggle is that it creates a gap between the leaders and the led that in turn enlarges the questions ever present in human affairs about the congruence between ends and means. 

Human Rights activists have generally found political violence to be problematic. By political violence I mean here the violence of rebel movements. There is no theoretical difficulty in understanding the kind of political violence that stems from the attempts of oppressors to sustain their domination over the oppressed. The Human Rights movement finds it easy and unproblematic to condemn it. Nor is there much problem with intra-elite violence. The Human Rights movement has sometimes ignored it as a matter of no concern, or else analysed it and opposed it from the point of the harm it does to the life, livelihood or other interests of the poor and the oppressed.

There is no difficulty here because the two major concerns of the Human Rights movement are congruent here. The Human Rights movement is on the one hand concerned about the taking of life by acts of violence; on the other hand it is also concerned about political, social and economic deprivation and subjugation. In other words, the Human Rights movement is equally concerned about physical violence and structural violence, the violence inherent in the social structure. When physical violence is resorted to in the cause of the beneficiaries of structured violence in society, the two forms of violence are congruent with each other, and then there is little philosophical difficulty in expressing simultaneous opposition to both, whatever the practical difficulty of fighting them.

But when rebel movements take up physical violence in the cause of their rebellion, they indulge in physical violence in order to fight the structured violence of social iniquity or economic deprivation. Here the two concerns of the Human Rights movement are at variance with each other. One form of violence is undertaken to purportedly get rid of another form of violence. Does the Human Rights movement defend the choice and implicitly sanction the taking of life? Or does it defend the right to life and lay itself open to the charge that it is implicitly defending or protecting structured iniquity?

This is a very difficult but very real dilemma.  It is frequently sought to be by-passed either by claiming that all resort to violence in the fight against inequality and injustice can always be rejected; or that the violence undertaken by rebel movements is precisely such as – in quantity and in kind – is necessary and indeed essential if the injustice being fought is to be overcome. Neither claim is sustainable. Nonviolence is certainly desirable but not always practical as a policy of the struggle against injustice; but the violence of rebel movements is rarely as well balanced and exactly sufficient for its stated aim of establishment of justice as the movements claim it is. It frequently results in injury of a kind and quality that cannot be justified as essential or unavoidable for the cause of justice.

The solution to this dilemma does not lie in closing one’s eyes to this infirmity of one’s position or that. Nor, therefore, in choosing one infirm position or the other. But in maintaining a balanced position that will do as much justice as possible to the totality of the concerns of the Human Rights movement.

Of course, at this level of discussion one is not going into certain tricky philosophical questions. Can it ever be said – and if so in what sense – that the taking of a particular life is essential or necessary in the interests of justice?  How is the taking of a life today justified by the justice that is to dawn tomorrow? Or how is the loss of one person’s life justified by  the relief it gives to a dozen other people? These are familiar moral questions, but I am not going into them here. I am abstracting from these questions to reduce the human rights dilemma to manageable proportions. That is to say, I am presuming that there can be a goal – such as social, economic and political justice for all – whose realisation is an overriding aim of human activity, so much so that if it really requires the taking of the life of a person who is an obstruction to that goal, then the taking of that life is justified, if there is no other way (that is not prohibitively costly) of getting over the obstruction he causes. This is already conceding a lot. Yet, the dilemma remains, as explained above.

A reasonably -though not entirely – satisfactory way of resolving the dilemma is to simultaneously educate society about the need to mitigate and minimise the iniquitous conditions that call for, or appear to call for, violence as a necessary answer, and to caution those who resort to such violence about the necessity of maintaining congruence between the need and the response, in kind as well as in quantity. Whatever the philosophical dilemmas that still remain, this is a response that affords a reasonable answer to the dilemma, provided one believes in it honestly and emphasises both sides of the response equally.

The naxalite movement:

The naxalite movement provides a convenient illustration. And while considering it one discovers that there are other problems with political violence as well. The violence of the naxalite movement finds justification in argument at three levels. At the primary level, an oppressor who lords it over the poor must be dealt with violently if the poor are to breathe freely. There is considerable attraction to this notion, though difficulties creep in the moment one qualifies it by saying that it must be demonstrated fairly that a given individual is actually such a person and that there is no other way (that is not too costly) of handling his oppressive domination, before acting violently against him. But then comes the second level justification. The poor and the oppressed must establish their authority or power over society and social relations if oppression is to be put an end to once for all. This provides justification of acts of violence that go well beyond the killing of an individual oppressor. The third level is that the poor and the oppressed, through their party, must capture State power and rebuild society by means of that power. This carries the range of acts of violence sought to be justified even farther.

As a matter of fact, only a small fraction of the acts of violence indulged in by the naxalites can be said to belong to the first level of violence. Most belong to the second and third. At these levels, it is quite difficult to assess the congruence of ends and means or the price paid and the result achieved ( ignoring, as already indicated, the question whether the price paid by one can ever be justified by the result obtained by another).

But I have said there are other problems as well. Let us see a few of them.

The election of systematic violence by the naxalites has gone hand in hand with the State electing a response of systematic  violence to the naxalite movement. (Which of the two is the cause and which the consequence is a question that need not detain us at this point). The latter may  in principle be totally condemnable while the former only an object of criticism when it exceeds determinable limits, quantitative or qualitative. Yet it is an undeniable practical observation that the two copy a lot from each other because they set each other’s terms. One end product is that on both sides it is the weak and the vulnerable that get injured. Over a period one begins to see that this systematic violence on both sides bleeds society, something which one can accept with equanimity only if one is able to abstract oneself from the society in which it is going on and set one’s sights on the millenium that is to result from it. That is a tall order, especially for one whose idiom is that of human rights, which allows one little freedom to abstract oneself from present suffering.

Systematic and calculated violence begins with the enemy, but soon turns to the agents of the enemy within and among one’s friends.... Read the full article:

http://balagopal.org/?p=858#more-858

See also

Chitrangada Choudhury, Ajay Dandekar - Dealing With The Maoists // Kishore Chandra Deo likely to force a rethink on tribal mining

RAMACHANDRA GUHA - The continuing tragedy of the adivasis

An open letter on undertrials: Adivasis need speedy and impartial justice

Collateral damage? Maoists say sorry for killing Bastar journalist

 Javed Iqbal: The Killing of Journalist Nemichand Jain

Dilip Simeon: The Other side of Maoism

On the Salwa Judum

Maoism and the philosophy of insurrection

The Futility of Common Sense: An Essay on Ahimsa

K. Balagopal: Political violence & human rights: The case of the naxalite movement in A.P.

Jairus Banaji: Fascism, Maoism and the Democratic Left

A Hard Rain Falling - private armies & political violence in India-EPW, July 2012

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Sualeh Keen on the exodus of Kashmir's Pandits

Besides providing a background to the controversy over Rahul Pandita's book, Our Moon Has Blood Clots, this is a response to the review of the book by Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal in this journal (27 April 2013). Sualeh Keen is a Kashmiri writer, poet, graphic artist and cultural critic. He created the group Moderate Voice of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh (moderatekashmir.blogspot.in).

What happened to the Ottoman Armenians in 1915 was a major thing that was hidden from the Turkish nation; it was a taboo. But we have to be able to talk about the past.

– Orhan Pamuk

It is self-evident that the Pandit (Hindu) community fled from Kashmir in the early 1990s in terror. Their burnt homes and the widespread desecration of their temples are for all to see. It is certain that many Pandits were killed out of communal animus. It is well known that anti-Kafir and anti-Pandit slogans were raised. With these undeniable facts, one would expect academic debate to delve into an examination of fascistic militarisation of civil society and of the dangers of romanticising violent utopian mass movements. Unfortunately, thanks to the Muslim majority’s effort at falsifying the experience of Pandits, a false controversy has been created regarding the role of terror and communalism in the displacement of the Pandits.

Modes of Denial

The Pandit experience is subject to various forms of outright denial, falsification and conspiracy theories by Kashmiri Muslim “Deniers”.

The first form of denial casts the Pandit victims as outright liars by claiming that there was no threat to the minority in 1990, a time when thousands of Kalashnikov-toting Mujahideen walked openly in Kashmir. If there was no atmosphere of threat and terror, why did the Pandits flee? The Deniers’ answer: The then governor of Jammu and Kashmir, Jagmohan, instructed Pandits to leave the Valley so that the security forces could crack down on Muslims. This unsubstantiated theory portrays Pandits as Little Eichmanns whose “absence” facilitated the massacres of Muslim separatists following the state’s use of counter force to crush militancy and indiscriminate shooting to disperse mobs. The Deniers go on to say that the Pandits used their refugee status to get educational reservations and relief in refugee camps. This not only brushes aside the Pandits’ encounter with terror, it transforms them from victims of terror to profiteers who connived with the governor against Muslims.

The tenure of Jagmohan did oversee brutal repression of Muslims. Coincidently, around the time of his appointment, the Pandits had started fleeing the Valley in droves. However, coincidence does not establish correlation. The night of 19 January 1990 sounded the death knell for Pandits, when the Muslims celebrated Azadi in mosques and, in many places, shouted anti-Kafir and anti-Pandit slogans on loudspeakers. But Jagmohan had yet to set his foot in the Valley. Some Pandits had been murdered in 1989 and many had left their homes before Jagmohan’s arrival. Threatening “Quit Kashmir” eviction notices had been served to Pandit families as early as 1 January 1990. Valley-based newspapers published ultimatums from militant organisations for Pandits. Even so, many Pandits left as late as the autumn of 1990 and in the years to come. Ergo, the “exodus” did not happen overnight in a well-planned flash-mob fashion “to clear the ground”. Pandits were abandoning their homes in duress to escape persecution.

The pre- and post-Jagmohan terror attacks on Pandits belie the notion that Pandits gleefully abandoned their homes for a sojourn in the hot and dusty southern plains in refugee camps with inhuman living conditions. Where is the survey in which Pandits say that they left on Jagmohan’s behest? Other than the unanimity of their claim, the Deniers have no proof.

The second form of denial accepts that Pandits were targeted by the Mujahideen, but creates a neat but untenable dichotomy between the armed militants and the non-combatant Muslims. The Mujahideen were Muslim civilians before they picked up guns. Who supported the Mujahideen? Ordinary people. In an atmosphere of social anarchy, it has been often observed that ordinary people take advantage and attack the most vulnerable, such as minorities, with an eye for property or promotion, or to settle personal scores. Even if we call them “criminal elements”, the perpetrators were nonetheless the neighbours, colleagues, students, customers, and acquaintances of the victims. Most Muslims were not involved, but many Muslim non-combatants were certainly involved.

The third form of denial grudgingly accepts that Pandits were targeted, but denies or downplays the role of communal animus. This form of denial cites a “socio-economic factor” and “class struggle” as the reasons for animus. This seemingly leftist variant justifies the terrorising of Pandits in 1990 by cherry-picking instances of oppression by Hindu Dogras and Pandits from the pre-1947 feudal era history, which had no bearing on the social status of Pandits in 1990.

Purposes Served by Denial

The question arises: why deny? To begin with, blaming Jagmohan, the non-existent high status of Pandits circa 1990, or red herrings like “more Muslims were killed” gives the Deniers absolution from collective guilt: the Pandits either did it to themselves, were asking for it, or were “collateral damage”. Further, after the successful “non-violent” stone-pelting campaign, Kashmiri Muslim separatists feel that for the first time they have a moral upper hand over the Indian state, making it imperative that past misdeeds be disavowed vehemently, lest they compromise international support for the movement. Also, there is a post-9/11 compulsion to distance the Kashmiri insurgency from religion-driven terrorism.

A generation of Kashmiri Muslims who came of age after the Pandit exodus have been brainwashed into firm conviction of the denial.

Reviews as a Tool for Denial

With this background, no wonder that all reviews that emanated from Kashmir tried to discredit Rahul Pandita, the author ofOur Moon Has Blood Clots, which gives an account of the Pandit experience. The local media has over the years found it profitable to feed and reinforce prejudices and conspiracy theories. For example, a Srinagar-based newspaper published four hostile reviews of Rahul’s memoir within a couple of weeks, keeping the alternative perspective out of Kashmir. Of late, despite demand, booksellers in Srinagar have stopped stocking the book, lest it tarnish the image of the majority.

The review “A Moon of Many Shades” (EPW, Vol 48, No 17) written by Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal, executive editor ofKashmir Times, traverses similar ground. It contains the same syllogistic fallacies, “whataboutism” and perpetuates the same conspiracy theories.

In his book, Pandita had credited Bhasin for providing him access to the Kashmir Times archives. In her review, however, Bhasin withdraws her largesse and taunts him of having “only sketchy details in newspaper archives to grapple with”. She presumptuously assumes that Pandita did not cross-check police records, eyewitness accounts, etc, with the “sketchy details” of her newspaper. She subjects Pandita to a memory test, when she recounts her own visits to the Valley, matter-of-factly. This indicates the confirmation bias and double standards of Bhasin.

Using the modus operandi of the Deniers, Bhasin suggests that Pandita is lying and says “the memoir (is) open to challenge”. She informs the readers that Pandita has misread the subtext of the murder of Ravi, who, as per Bhasin, was murdered because he was Hindu, not because of his Pandit ethnicity. But she neglects to enlighten the readers on precisely how Muslim hatred for Hindus is different from Muslim hatred for Pandits. In any case, Bhasin herself is misreading or telling a lie here. Ravi and two other Pandits were murdered at Gool by the Mujahideen for being Pandits, not just for being Hindu, since all the non-Pandit Hindus on that bus were spared. Thus, Bhasin misrepresents the subtext to establish Pandita as an “unreliable narrator”. This in itself makes Bhasin’s review unreliable.

Bhasin uses the backdrop of the erstwhile harmony between Muslims and Pandits to discredit the Pandit version of the exodus. By that token, the Gujarati Muslims’ version of post-Godhra riots cannot be right either, for there were no riots before that. Bhasin accuses Pandita of drawing a seamless link between the Tribal Raid of 1947 and the terrorism of 1990, when Pandita has publicly taken a stand against holding historical grudges. That Pandita’s maternal family had to flee from Baramulla to Srinagar to escape the advancing tribals is a fact. Should he, in his personal memoir, not talk of the two migrations that occurred since 1947 within his family?

Bhasin says she wishes Pandita had embraced “complexity” in his account. Such calls for complexity attempt to marginalise the Pandit experience. One sees a pattern: a deliberate attempt to misrepresent Pandita. Such reviews conveniently disregard the declaration that the book’s sole purpose is to counter the denial, and is not intended as a comprehensive history of conflict of the peoples of Jammu and Kashmir. Bhasin further tries to frame Pandita as being indifferent to the suffering of Muslims, conveniently ignoring that before this book was published, he had been writing about human rights violations of Kashmiri Muslims more than he had of Pandits. Bhasin’s review too attempts to recast Pandita’s personality ex nihilo to prejudice potential readers.

It is telling that Bhasin’s review devotes so much space to Jagmohan. Even if Jagmohan had uttered those anti-Muslim words, what does that have to do with the Pandit experience? What of the threats issued from mosques, the threat letters, the ultimatums in newspapers, and the murders of Pandits in 1989, before Jagmohan? And what were the myriad Mujahideen groups up to? Tellingly, Bhasin’s moon does not use shades from that palette.

Bhasin cites unreferenced Muslims who maintain that a particularly terrorising anti-Pandit slogan was not part of the popular discourse, though it may have been used by a “few” people. Nonetheless, a “few” of an overwhelming majority is more than enough to terrorise a minuscule minority. Bhasin says Islamic slogans were part of Kashmiri history, and, simultaneously, concedes that these slogans may have terrified Pandits. Bhasin questions selective killings on the basis of community because “there is no empirical evidence”, and then furnishes statistics that suggest a disproportionately high number of killings of Pandits. Bhasin’s contradictory statements remind one of kettle logic. In effect, she ends up confirming exactly what she initially denies.

Rahul Pandita’s book is not history; it is but a tiny dot that will connect histories. But, this tiny dot is an indelible blot on the immaculate moon of the Deniers. Thus, the vigorous attempts to erase it.

Conclusion

A wrong had been committed against a religious minority that needs to be admitted and acknowledged. The very denial or an obscure admission leaves a big question mark on the justness of the Azadi dream and the character of the Muslim majority. Circa 1990, when the Mujahideen roamed the streets of Kashmir, the Pandits were the inconvenient people, and therefore expendable. In 2013 when there are no Mujahideen around, Pandits are still the inconvenient people, for they are repositories of an inconvenient truth.

references

Jamal, Arif (2009): Shadow War: The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir, Melville House Publishing.

Sinha, Aditya (2000): Death of Dreams – A Terrorist’s Tale (being an account of Babar Badr, real name Firdous Syed Baba), Harper Collins.

http://www.epw.in/discussion/inconvenient-people.html

http://www.epw.in/system/files/pdf/2013_48/23/Inconvenient_People.pdf

Also see: 

Superflous people - a review of Rahul Pandita's Our moon has blood clots

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A glimpse at the global ruling class : Bilderberg 2013

When you're picking a spot to hold the world's most powerful policy summit, there's really only one place that will do: Watford. I guess the Seychelles must have been booked up. On Thursday afternoon, a heady mix of politicians, bank bosses, billionaires, chief executives and European royalty will swoop up the elegant drive of the Grove hotel, north of Watford, to begin the annual Bilderberg conference.

It's a remarkable spectacle – one of nature's wonders – and the most exciting thing to happen to Watford since that roundabout on the A412 got traffic lights. The area round the hotel is in lockdown: locals are having to show their passports to get to their homes. It's exciting too for the delegates. The CEO of Royal Dutch Shell will hop from his limo, delighted to be spending three solid days in policy talks with the head of HSBC, the president of Dow Chemical, his favourite European finance ministers and US intelligence chiefs. The conference is the highlight of every plutocrat's year and has been since 1954. The only time Bilderberg skipped a year was 1976, after the group's founding chairman, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, was caught taking bribes from Lockheed Martin.

It may seem odd, as our own lobbying scandal unfolds, amid calls for a statutory register of lobbyists, that a bunch of our senior politicians will be holed up for three days in luxurious privacy with the chairmen and CEOs of hedge funds, tech corporations and vast multinational holding companies, with zero press oversight. "It runs contrary to [George] Osborne's public commitment in 2010 to 'the most radical transparency agenda the country has ever seen'," says Michael Meacher MP. Meacher describes the conference as "an anti-democratic cabal of the leaders of western market capitalism meeting in private to maintain their own power and influence outside the reach of public scrutiny".

But, to be fair, is "public scrutiny" really necessary when our politicians are tucked safely away with so many responsible members of JP Morgan's international advisory board? There's always the group chief executive of BP on hand to make sure they do not get unduly lobbied. And if he is not in the room, keeping an eye out, then at least one of the chairmen of Novartis, Zurich Insurance, Fiat or Goldman Sachs International will be around.

This year, there will be a great deal more "public scrutiny" of Bilderberg. Pressure from journalists and activists has won concessions from the venue: for the first time in 59 years there will be an unofficial press office, staffed by volunteers, on the grounds. Several thousand activists and bloggers are expected, along with photographers and journalists from around the world.

Back in 2009 there were barely a dozen witnesses – harassed and arrested by heavy-handed Greek police. This year there is a press zone, police liaison, portable toilets, a snack van, a speakers' corner – all the ingredients for a different Bilderberg. A "festival feel" has been promised. If you are concerned about transparency or lobbying, Watford is the place to be next weekend. Whether the delegates reach out to the press and public remains to be seen. Don't forget, they've got their hands full carrying out the good works of Bilderberg. The conference is, after all, run as a charity.

If you've been wondering who picks up the tab for this gigantic conference and security operation, the answer arrived last week, on a pdf file sent round by Anonymous. It showed that the Bilderberg conference is paid for, in the UK, by an officially registered charity: the Bilderberg Association (charity number 272706).

According to its Charity Commission accounts, the association meets the "considerable costs" of the conference when it is held in the UK, which include hospitality costs and the travel costs of some delegates. Presumably the charity is also covering the massive G4S security contract. Fortunately, the charity receives regular five-figure sums from two kindly supporters of its benevolent aims: Goldman Sachs and BP. The most recent documentary proof of this is from 2008 (pdf), since when the charity has omitted its donors' names (pdf) from its accounts.

The charity's goal is "public education". And how does it go about educating the public? "In furtherance of these objectives the International Steering Committee organises conferences and meetings in the UK and elsewhere and disseminates the results thereof by preparing and publishing reports of such conferences and meetings and by other means." Cleverly, it disseminates the results by resolutely keeping them away from the public and press.

The charity is overseen by its three trustees (pdf): Bilderberg steering committee member and serving minister Kenneth Clarke MP; Lord Kerr of Kinlochard; and Marcus Agius, the former chairman of Barclays who resigned over the Libor scandal.

Labour MP Tom Watson remarks: "If the allegations that a cabinet minister sits on the board of a charity that discreetly funds a secretive conference of elites are true then I hope the prime minister was informed. It was David Cameron who heralded the new age of transparency. I hope he asks Kenneth Clarke to adhere to these principles in future." At the very least, George Osborne and Clarke may consider adhering to the ministerial code when it comes to Bilderberg and declare it in their list of "meetings with proprietors, editors and senior media executives" as they've failed to do in the past. Of course, with the lobbying scandal in full spate it's possible our ministers will steer clear of such a major corporate lobbying event. We'll find out on Thursday.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/02/week-ahead-bilderberg-2013-watford

Also see:

Banks in front line of nuclear arms campaign

Book review: War Is Still a Racket

The twenty-first Century - the End of History?

The Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955

Paul Fussell, ex-soldier, literary Scholar & critic

John Mack: The Enemy System

John Horgan on erasing war from the human condition

Hitler's annihilation of the Romanis 

Hiroshima City Peace Appeal 2011

Nagasaki City Peace Declaration 2011

Mini Atomic bomb exhibit:

Has violence become a way of life?

Book review - An Enduring Condition: On War Time

Eternal war (Chapter n+1) - Panetta’s Pacific Vision 

The military spending map of the world

Annihilation as world religion

Albert Camus: 'Neither Victims nor Executioners'

Book review: Albert Camus‘ 'Algerian Chronicles’ // PDF of 'Reflections on the Guillotine

'Military Inc' by Ayesha Siddiqa (pdf):

Shadow War: The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir by Arif Jamal

What war does to us: Afghanistan - a soldier's view

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Photo Gallery: Galaxies

See more: http://science.nationalgeographic.co.in/science/photos/galaxies-gallery/#/black-eye_839_600x450.jpg 


Hubble Space Telescope detail of the Antennae galaxies, an intense star-forming region created when 
two galaxies began to collide.


The Andromeda galaxy, also known as Messier 31, is the largest neighboring 
galaxy to the Milky Way


The Black Eye or Evil Eye galaxy gets its nicknames from the band of light-
absorbing dust that appears in front of the star system's bright center

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Garga Chatterjee: A thousand mirrors - Nakbas near home-their homeland, our homeland

Nakba was remembered in many parts of the world. It is the Palestinian day of catastrophe. Palestinians fled their lands in the wake of the 1948 war — never to be able to return.

They hold on to keys, real and symbolic, asserting their right to return to their lands, adding flesh to ‘the struggle of memory against forgetting’. Palestine has become a codeword for injustice to a people who had to flee their homes unwillingly. Most leading university campuses in the West have some form of Palestine solidarity activism.

The present author was denied a competitive position due to his involvement with such initiatives at one point. Palestine spills over to general activism against militarism and occupation. Activist forces, however marginal and removed from the Middle East, support Palestine. The Nakba was a time when millions were frantically trying to prevent knots from untying — ancient knots out of which selfhoods emerged and thrived. Leaving behind the land of ancestors is something subcontinentals know too well.

Once, I was chatting with a friend who is very passionate about Palestinian rights, their denied statehood and most importantly, their right to return to their ancestral homes in Palestine from their diasporic homes, including many in refugee colonies.  He is a Bengali baidya, born and raised in the CR Park locality of New Delhi. The discussion turned to ancestral origins and he revealed his family was from Dhaka. I asked him, so what about your right to return? He looked perplexed. I said, I am guessing your East Bengali family, like most others, did not flee Dhaka voluntarily.

Like Palestinians, their ancestral abode, even if razed or occupied, is as sacred to them. The Rs 20,000 per square foot property value of CR Park almost hid the earlier name of this ‘posh’ locality — East Pakistan Displaced Persons (EPDP) Colony. Most ‘EPDP’ colonies are not ‘posh’ — especially those inhabited by people from backward castes. Such colonies, authorised and unauthorised, have been the site of state repression, including large-scale massacres, as in Marichjhhapi in 1979. My friend answered ‘that is different’. Yes, there are differences from Palestine, but what prevents anyone from seeing the similarities?

Palestinians are not the world’s largest or longest displaced people. What determines its pre-eminent position in the ‘global’ mindscape? Imperialism, that unfashionable word, also determines the pecking order of resistances and solidarity causes, inside our heads. If the child of Bengali refugees cared only about Bengal and nothing about Palestine, that would be termed ‘insular’ and ‘inward’ looking. Our sensibilities are skewed indeed.

People who question such fundamental things as the nation-states in the subcontinent do not call for the right to return of Muslims who fled Ambala and Kolkata, or Hindus who fled East Bengal. What do these blind spots reveal? What is so natural about the displacement from Ambala to Multan that it merits no call for justice and the ‘right to return’? When did the national constitution become an excuse to suspend humanity, especially with regards to homestead connections that predate all sub-continental constitutions?

It is harder to confront one’s immediate surround. We know them — the university rebel who is a docile son at home, the fire-eating caste-hating savarna who predictably marries a savarna, etc. Distant ‘cause’-mongering helps preserve the semblance of an ethical pedestalled self, and hides disturbing mismatches between rhetoric and action.

Why not have this and that — a cafeteria choice of causes.  Because not all causes stand a crucial test: does it hit home? Is one directly affected by the consequences of one’s actions in the furtherance of a cause? It matters.

The writer is a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/1840373/column-a-thousand-mirrors-nakbas-near-home-their-homeland-our-homeland

Some relevant thoughts:

'The notion that statelessness is primarily a Jewish problem was a pretext used by all governments who tried to settle the problem by ignoring it. None of the statesmen was aware that Hitler’s solution of the Jewish problem, first to reduce the German Jews to a non-recognized minority in Germany, then to drive them as stateless people across the borders, and finally to gather them back from everywhere in order to ship them to extermination camps, was an eloquent demonstration to the rest of the world how really to “liquidate” all problems concerning minorities and stateless. After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved – namely, by means of a colonised and then conquered territory – but this solved neither the problems of the minorities not the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of the twentieth century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people. And what happened in Palestinewithin the smallest territory and in terms of hundreds of thousands was then repeated in Indiaon a large scale involving many millions of people. Since the Peace Treaties of 1919 and 1920 the refugees and the stateless have attached themselves like a curse to all the newly established states on earth which were created in the image of the nation-state.

For these new states this curse bears the germ of a deadly sickness. For the nation-state cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law has broken down. Without this legal equality, which originally was destined to replace the older laws and orders of the feudal society, the nation dissolves into an anarchic mass of over- and under-privileged individuals. The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police' - Hannah Arendt, The origins of totalitarianism, (1948) New York, 2004; p 368

Also see: 
Book review: Superflous people - Rahul Pandita's 'Our Moon has blood clots'

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Nandini Sundar: On the Media's Need for Whipping Boys // On the Killing of Mahendra Karma

On the Killing of Mahendra Karma

Any keen observer of Chhattisgarh could have foreseen Saturday’s deadly Maoist attack at Jeeram ghat in Bastar, though not perhaps its magnitude.  Mahendra Karma’s death was long expected, though politicians like him who flirt with the dark side usually have enough security to keep themselves safe.  With a string of killings of Maoist leaders under their belt, the security establishment thought the Maoists could be written off. However, like other insurgents elsewhere have always done, the Maoists scaled back only to strike hard.

Calls for more concerted military action ignore what has actually been happening. In fact, in recent months, the security forces have ratcheted up operations, densely carpeting Maoist strongholds with CRPF camps. In the 46 km stretch between Dornapal and Chintalnar, there are now 7 camps, with the latest two, Burkapal and Minpa, having come up in the last fortnight.  Overnight, large stretches of forest were cleared in Burkapal, for a helipad on one side and a CRPF camp on the other, and the question of forest clearances for this, or any other security installation, is never even seen as an issue. The biodiverse forests of Bastar – which are national treasures - have been one of the biggest casualties of this war, which rages across trees, roads, transformers, schools and the bodies of men, women and even little children.

Skeptical villagers argue that rather than reducing hostilities, the presence of the camps will mean constant skirmishes between the forces and the Maoists, following which the forces will take it out on them. They report that security forces steal chickens from their homes when they are out in the fields; and indeed, with camps close by, even going out to defecate, cultivate or collect fuelwood becomes a hazard, especially for women. In Chintagufa, where several buses are parked to ferry security personnel back and forth, the forces have taken over the primary health care centre and the school. The Supreme Court’s orders on keeping off schools mean nothing to them.  

Simplistic morality plays may be good for the TRPs, but will not address the real issues. The Maois ambush came barely a week after an equally terrible attack by the security forces, again during area domination, on the villagers of Edesmetta in Bijapur who were celebrating Beeja Pandum, the seed sowing festival. Eight villagers, including four children, were killed, while severely injured villagers were given medical aid only a day later after local media coverage.  The Beeja Pandum is one of the most important festivals of the adivasi calendar.  The only glimpse that non-adivasis get is when they are stopped at roadside blocks placed by women and children, and they assume it is just for some easy money.  But the ritual significance is that anyone crossing the village during beeja pandum must be fined for taking the seed away with them. 

The equivalent of what happened would be the police opening fire on a garba dance during Navratri in Ahmedabad, saying the presence of so many people at one place was suspicious. Yet, there has been little national outrage around Edesmetta.  For once, the government has promised compensation, but as one CRPF jawan said about the 2010 killing of 76 CRPF personnel, “Nothing can recompense the loss of a loved one.” Don’t adivasis have loved ones too? Unlike the CRPF, they did not even sign up to fight. If what happened in Edesmetta can be dismissed as “collateral damage,” then why not apply the same logic to Saturday’s ambush, where Mahendra Karma was the main target? This is, after all, a war. But once we dismiss any citizen, whether a Congress Pradesh president or a Gond child, as expendable, we are on a slippery path. In particular, a democracy that holds this stand loses its raison d’etre.

As in Tadmetla March 2011, where security forces burnt 300 homes, raped and killed; Sarkeguda June 2012, where they shot dead 17 villagers  during their Bijja pandum last year; and Edesmetta 2013,  the Chhattisgarh government has ordered a judicial enquiry into the Jeeram ambush. But since the Congress knows well what this means, they have preferred to enlist the NIA. Given a list of 537 killings by salwa judum and security forces, the state government has ordered magisterial enquiries into 8 cases since 2008, of which 7 are still pending!

The Chhattisgarh police claim they need SPOs for intelligence gathering, refusing to disband them as the Supreme Court ordered. But what kind of intelligence are they getting if they claim Edesmetta was a Maoist gathering, and could not predict the Jeeram ambush? Instead, the fortification of SPO’s with better guns and more money as the renamed ‘Armed Auxiliary Forces’ only increases alienation. 

Even if they support massive human rights violations, politicians are not combatants. The same is true for unarmed villagers who may support the Maoists ideologically.  An attack on party leaders engaged in electoral rallies must be strongly condemned, and the Maoist’s expanding hit list is truly reprehensible. However, it is only partially true to say that what happened is an attack on democracy. In a democracy, someone like Mahendra Karma would have been jailed long ago. Even when confronted with evidence of his personal involvement in the Salwa Judum atrocities, quite apart from the CBI FIR against him for his role in a major tree felling scam, the Congress chose to retain Karma within the party.  And despite declaring Naxalism the gravest security threat facing the country, never once so far has the PM felt the need to visit the area himself to find out why people support them, or console grieving adivasis

Under the Constitution, Chief Minister Raman Singh, and the Union Home Ministry who are as responsible for Salwa Judum as Mahendra Karma, should also be held accountable. At least 644 villages were affected, over a thousand people killed, hundreds raped, and some 150,000 displaced. Small children were cruelly bashed to death or thrown into ponds, and old people who could not run away were burnt alive. Yet there has been no prosecution or compensation, despite the Supreme Court’s repeated orders. Indeed, there is a danger that, with Karma gone, the more uncomfortable questions regarding official culpability for Salwa Judum will be closed. The Constitution and Democracy are not terms of expediency, as the Congress and BJP seem to think – they embody difficult moral principles which must guide our collective behavior

To respond with even more force now would be a grave mistake, for insurgencies thrive on government excesses. The combing operations underway must take great care to see that ordinary villagers are not harassed. It is unlikely that anyone will countenance calls for peace talks now, as the war has become a prestige issue on both sides. But eventually, there is no alternative to negotiations. If a country like the US with its military might could get bogged down in Vietnam and Afghanistan, what makes us think we can succeed militarily? A far better model would be the Latin American countries, like Peru and Guatemala, with similar histories of guerilla war and exploitation of indigenous people which resolved their conflicts through Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. If FARC and the Colombian government can come to an agreement on land reforms after thirty years, what prevents a democracy like India?   
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?285795

http://nandinisundar.blogspot.in/2013/06/on-killing-of-mahendra-karma.html

On the Media's Need for Whipping Boys
I am sick to death of TV panel discussions which ask whether human rights activists are soft on the Maoists, romanticise the Maoists and so on. Why doesn't someone ask if our honourable politicians and security experts are soft on police torture and extra judicial killings? Television is not interested in a serious discussion - all they want are whipping boys. The sight of Arnab Goswami mocking Prof. Haragopal for giving an "academic analysis" was especially nauseating, compounded by his showing off about "Emily Durkheim" (sic!). Why bother to have a panel at all,  if only hysterical calls for the army to be sent in to wipe out the Maoists count as 'analysis', and every other viewpoint is seen as biased? 
  

The media's vocabulary is also very limited. I remember a particular excruciating interview with Binayak Sen where he said he "decried" violence and the anchor repeatedly asked him if he "condemned” it. As far as I know, the two words mean roughly the same thing. Nowadays, even before the media asks me, I start shouting "I condemn, I condemn." I wake up in my sleep shouting "I condemn." I am scared to use other words to describe complex emotions, because the media is unable to understand anything else.

The only reason why I agree to participate in any television discussions at all or give interviews to the media, is because I have such limited space to express my views. Most of the time the media is completely unconcerned about what happens in places like Bastar, and when there are large scale deaths of civilians, no-one runs non-stop news or panel discussions. Perforce “human rights activists” have to speak in unfavourable circumstances, because that’s the only time when the media is interested in our views; and that too, not because they want to hear us, but because they need a "big fight" to raise their ratings. That's what is called 'balance'. One can almost see visible disappointment on the anchor's part when panelists who should disagree actually agree on many issues. 

Since May 25th I have been inundated with calls from journalists asking for my views. But when I want to write, there is little space. A leading national newspaper refused to publish me on the killing of Mahendra Karma, till they had enough pieces which promoted a paramilitary approach. Even when I do get published it is under strict word constraints. I wrote the first opinion piece ever written in the national media on the Salwa Judum in 2006, but was given 800 words, under the fold. In the first year of Salwa Judum, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of articles on Salwa Judum. I personally met several editors and showed them photographic evidence; and begged TV editors for panel discussions, but no-one was interested. If they had been interested then, perhaps things would not have come to such a pass. 

I am unable to write my own book on Salwa Judum because of the court case and all that it takes.  I have been wanting to write on it since 2005 because I am, above all, an anthropologist.  In any case, my mental space is so clogged by the media noise and the strain of being confined to "opinion pieces" that keep saying the same things because no one is listening, that I can't write. I am almost glad the IPL has taken over again, and we can all forget about Bastar and the Maoists till the next major attack. 

I reproduce below an extract from my article, Emotional Wars, on the public reactions to the death of the 76 CRPF men in April 2010.  This was published in Third World Quarterly,  Vol. 33, No. 4, 2012, pp 1-17:

"Government anger was directed not just at the Maoists but at their alleged ‘sympathizers in civil society’, whose verbal and written criticism of government for violations of the Constitution and fundamental rights, was morally equated with the Maoist act of killing in retaliation for those policies.[i] Within minutes then, given the government’s role as the primary definer of news,[ii] whether the alleged sympathizers had adequately condemned and expiated for the attack, became as critical to the framing of the news as the attack itself. 

The largely one-sided government and media outrage - the targeted killings or rapes of ordinary adivasis rarely, if ever, invite direct calls upon the Home Minister to condemn each such incident - easily summon to mind Herman and Chomsky’s distinction between “worthy and unworthy victims” as part of what they call the media ‘propaganda model’.[iii]  While news coverage of the worthy is replete with detail, evokes indignation and shock, and invites a follow-up; unworthy victims get limited news space, are referred to in generic terms, and there is little attempt to fix responsibility or trace culpability to the top echelons of the establishment.[iv].....

…………..In times of civil war, the emotions performed by the state range from the inculcation of fear to a calculated display of indifference to the exhibition of injured feelings, as if it was citizens and not the state who were violating the social contract, and that the social contract consisted of the state’s right to impunity.

1. For example, after a Maoist attack in which 4 men of the Central Industrial Security Force were killed, the Home Ministry put out a statement asking “What is the message that the CPI (Maoist) intends to convey? These are questions that we would like to put not only to the CPI (Maoist) but also to those who speak on their behalf and chastise the government…We think that it is time for all right-thinking citizens who believe in democracy and development to condemn the acts of violence perpetrated by the CPI (Maoist)." Chidambaram slams Maoist sympathizers, Times Now, October 26, 2009,http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2009-10-26/india/28067149_1_maoist-sympathisers-cisf-jawans-chhattisgarh, accessed 12 November 2011

[ii] Hall, S. et al., Policing the Crises: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, London: Macmillan Education Ltd, 1978; Gans, HJ.  Deciding What’s News,  Northwestern University Press, 2004 (1979).

[iii] Herman, E. S. and Chomsky, N.  Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media,Pantheon Books, 2002, pp 37-86)

[iv] An enquiry was immediately ordered into the Tadmetla attack headed by a former Director General of the Border Security Force, EN Rammohan.  He found several lapses in the leadership and functioning of the CRPF, including their failure to adhere to standard operating procedures. However, the commander responsible for this debacle, DIG Nalin Prabhat, while initially transferred, was given a gallantry medal a year later in 2011. Further, the government itself takes no responsibility for orchestrating this mindless war on its own people. 

See also: Collateral damage? Maoists say sorry for killing Bastar journalist (March 31, 2013)

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Deadly Ambush by Maoists in Chhattisgarh - Statements in response from social movements, human rights fora and concerned citizens

For more statements: http://sacw.net/article4599.html

CHHATTISGARH LOK SWATANTRYA SANGATHAN

(PEOPLES UNON FOR CIVIL LIBERTIES, CHHATTISGARH)

Chhatisgarh PUCL condemns the abduction and killings of Congress Party men in Darbha Ghati in Bastar area of the State

Calls for urgent intervention by democratic forces to end the spiral of violence in the Region

Raipur, 25th May, 2013

The Chhattisgarh PUCL strongly condemns the attack by suspected Maoists on the convoy of Congress Party leaders in the course of their election campaign in the forested Darbha Ghati in Sukma area in which, according to news reports till the present time, Congress leader Mahendra Karma and Uday Mudaliar have been killed and the President of the Congress Party Nand Lal Patel is suspected to have been abducted. More than 20 people have been reportedly killed with several seriously injured and the numbers of missing, injured and fatalities are on the increase.

The PUCL has always had a principled stand opposed to violence and the politics of killings and abduction. The spiraling violence in the Bastar region in which the present killings and abduction have occurred, and only a week ago on 17th May, 8 villagers including 3 children and a jawan were killed in an operation of security forces in Village Edesmeta, district Bijapur. For the first time, the police actually admitted that those who were attacked were innocent and instituted an enquiry. This situation requires the urgent intervention of all democratic forces in the country as also expressed in the recent strong and anguished letter issued by the Union Minister for Tribal Affairs Shri K Chandra Deo to the Governors regarding the situation in the Scheduled Areas.

Sudha Bharadwaj

 General Secretary
(Chhattisgarh PUCL)

See also:
conversation re maoism on ndtv - बेवजह हत्याएं कर रहे माओवादी : दिलीप सीमियन

Collateral damage? Maoists say sorry for killing Bastar journalist

In the latest massacres in Bastar, the Maoist spokesman says: "The aim behind this attack was to kill Mahendra Karma and other Congress leaders. During the two-hour long gunbattle between commanders of CPI(Maoist) and security forces, some innocent people and low-level Congress workers were killed. They were not our enemies but they lost their lives. We express regret over their death and offer our condolence to the bereaved families."  (The same statement says that the action succeeded in "wiping out of at least 27 Congress leaders, activists and policemen" If all 27 people killed were legitimate targets, then who were the 'innocent people and low level Congress workers'? Or are we to understand that 5 or 6 people were their targets and they killed 27 people and injured 32 including bystanders to achieve that? Is human life just biomass for the comrades? If the state is brutal and oppressive must the comrades imitate the state? Will such actions bring justice to the people of the area or more repression? If the comrades claim to have knowledge of how society and political systems work, don't they also know that murder and killing generates a deadly cycle of violence in which politics recedes into the background and revenge becomes a force of its own? Have four decades of peoples war achieved any betterment of the political environment? Any change for the good in terms of democracy and human rights? Did they launch a struggle to protect the Babri Masjid? Did they ever even warn the communalists who have murdered innocents in thousands? Will they launch armed struggle to protect women all over the country who are under constant threat of violence and molestation? All they have succeeded in doing is to give the state a handle to attack all popular movements under the cover of combating maoism...

http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.in/2013/05/collateral-damage-maoists-say-sorry-for.html#uds-search-results

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