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India has been beset by violent insurgencies and secessionist movements practically from the very moment the independent nation was founded in 1947. The Indian state has consistently responded with brute force, unwilling to brook any breach in its authority and territorial integrity where hostile neighbors Pakistan and China threaten its periphery. More recently, the country has faced an escalating Maoist insurrection in its heartland. To this too, the response has been one of force.
The human rights of Indian citizens caught in the crossfire are among the casualties of these conflicts. Thousands have been killed. Others have been tortured, raped, detained or beaten. Villages have been destroyed, homes blown up. While rebels have perpetrated heinous crimes against civilian targets and are responsible for some of this mayhem, the state has also wielded violence with imprecision if not an outright arrogant disregard for human rights. As with all armed insurgencies, it is difficult for Indian forces to tell the enemy from the civilian population. Inevitably, everyone ends up looking like a potential suspect. Excesses, alas, occur.
Buried Evidence, a just-released report on mass graves in Kashmir documents the fate of more than 2,943 unidentified individuals killed in staged "encounters" with security forces. The full report, photographs and video clips are available at WWW.KASHMIRPROCESS.ORG In Indian-administered Kashmir over the course of the past 20 years, over 70,000 people have died. The region is occupied by 700,000 Indian troops.
The toll on the psyche of the Kashmiri people, especially on youth who have grown up entirely under conditions of occupation or who had to flee with their families to refugee camps in Jammu is difficult to measure. Basharat Peer has written a heart-breaking memoir of his own experience, Curfewed Night: ONE KASHMIRI Journalist's Frontline Account of Life, Love, and War in His Homeland, forthcoming from Scribner in early 2010. MTV has assembled an impressive collage of interviews, music by Kashmiri youth groups, and testimonials that convey the reality of the conflict far more eloquently than political analyses.
India's insurgency troubles are not limited to its periphery. The country is currently in the grip of a widening civil war in its heartland. A vast region covering some of the country's poorest states - Orissa, Jharkand, Chhasttisgarh, Bihar - has become the theatre of a civil war pitting determined Maoist revolutionaries against national and state para-military forces. The Maoists now control 223 districts out of the country's total of 610. They have become very bold in their attacks: holding up passenger trains, assassinating accused informants, beheading political targets, bringing mining and industrial activities to a halt, blowing up police vehicles and attacking the lone government outposts in these areas: schools.
Unfortunately, paramilitary forces have used schools to base their operations, turning them into targets and making it impossible for children to continue their educations at a time when India is facing an education emergency among its poorest and most neglected citizens.
The Maoists have flourished in areas where the government of India as well as different state governments have virtually abandoned the rural poor. These populations are completely cut off from the economically vibrant, rapidly growing India of the country's major cities and more prosperous rural areas. Often, they are low-caste or so-called tribals or Adivasis, people shunned by India's upper-caste dominated elite and, though benefiting from positive discrimination in areas of government employment, marginalized from the country's increasingly private-sector driven economy.
The Maoists have been successful in areas such as Bihar where the low-caste "mouse people" or Musahars, so dubbed because they are reduced to trapping and eating mice to survive, live in unimaginable conditions of penury. As journalist Pryaag Akbar points out in A Harrowing Report, India's democracy has utterly failed these people. It is in this vacuum that the Maoist rebels have flourished.
The situation has intensified as India's drive to develop its natural resources and expand its industrial base has increased. It is no coincidence that the Maoists are most active in areas where the discovery of vast mineral deposits, especially iron ore and bauxite, are now being tapped by Indian and multinational mining companies including Tata, Vedanta and Jindal. The only thing many of the people in these regions have is their land. They are now being forced off their land to make way for the "development" of the resources that lie Under THEIR Farms AND Forests. The Indian government's record on compensating citizens who are displaced by "development" - who number in the millions - is abysmal. Its record on consulting these people to find out what development might mean to them and how they would like to see their lives improved is even worse.
In his Nobel ACCEPTANCE SPEECH, President Obama cautioned that "security does not exist where human beings do not have access to enough food, or clean water, or the medicine they need to survive. It does not exist where children cannot aspire to a decent education or a job that supports a family. The absence of hope can rot a society from within."
India's prime minister Manmohan Singh has admitted that the solution to India's Maoist revolt must include extending "development" to populations too long IGNORED, but the bald fact is that these people are in the way of the kind of development - rapid industrialization fueled by the exploitation of natural resources - his government is pursuing with gusto. They dare not be consulted about their fate. Building their own secure future on their ancestral farm and forest lands is simply not an option the government of India, nor the powerful corporate interests that stand to profit from mining and manufacturing in these areas, is ready to admit. There's the rub, and the root of revolt.
A 40-year long civil war has been raging in the jungles of central and eastern India. It is one of the world's largest armed conflicts but it remains largely ignored outside of India.
Caught in the crossfire of it are the Advisas, who are believed to be India's earliest inhabitants. A loose collection of tribes, it is estimated that there are about 84 million of these indigenous people, which is about eight per cent of the country's population.
For generations, they have lived off farming and the spoils of the jungle in eastern India, but their way of life is under threat. Their land contains mineral deposits estimated to be worth trillions of dollars. Forests have been cleared and the Indian government has evacuated hundreds of villages to make room for steel plants and mineral refineries.
The risk of losing everything they have ever known has made many Adivasis fertile recruits for India's Maoist rebels or Naxalites, who also call these forests home.
The Maoists' fight with the Indian government began 50 years ago, just after India became independent. A loose collection of anti-government communist groups - that initially fought for land reform - they are said to be India's biggest internal security threat. Over time, their focus has expanded to include more fundamental questions about how India is actually governed.
In their zeal for undermining the Indian government, Maoist fighters have torched construction equipment, bombed government schools and de-railed passenger trains, killing hundreds. In the name of state security, several activists who have supported the Maoists have been jailed and tortured. Innocent people have also been implicated on false charges. These are often intimidation tactics used by the government to discourage people from having any contact with the Maoists.
The uprising by Maoist fighters and its brutal suppression by the Indian government, has claimed more than 10,000 lives since 1980, and displaced 12 million people. Many of the victims are not even associated with either side. They are simply caught in the crossfire. And the violence is escalating as both sides mount offensive after counter-offensive.
Al Jazeera's Imran Garda travelled to the Indian states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal to get a secret glimpse into the world of the Naxalites and to meet with rebel fighters as well as those victimised by this conflict.
In February 2002 the western Indian state of Gujarat, governed by the Hindu nationalist chief minister Narendra Modi, witnessed one of the country's biggest pogroms. Responding to reports that Muslims had set fire to a train carriage, killing 58 Hindu pilgrims inside, mobs rampaged across the state. The riots flared up again on 15 March – 10 years ago on Wednesday – and killing, raping and looting continued until mid-June. More than 2,000 Muslims were murdered, and tens of thousands rendered homeless in carefully planned and coordinated attacks of unprecedented savagery.
The killers may have been in touch with police and politicians. According to the2011 Amicus report, two cabinet ministers even sat in police control rooms. A senior police officer and minister, murdered in 2003, claimed that Modi explicitly instructed civil servants and police not to stand in the killers' way. Of course, Modi has always denied involvement and condemned the riots.
The pogrom was extensively televised by India's innumerable – and then much less complacent – TV channels. Many middle-class Indians were shocked to hear how even the very young had not been spared – the slayers of Muslims were seen smashing the heads of children against rocks. There was some unease even within Modi's parent outfit, the RSS – whose most revered chief, Guru Golwalkar, wrote in a 1939 book that http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Total/Fascism.India.htm]Nazi Germany had manifested "race pride at its highest" by purging itself of the "Semitic races"[/url].
Since then Indian activists have doggedly pursued Modi through the courts and in the media. In a sting carried out in 2007 by the weekly magazine Tehelka, politicians, businessmen, officials and policemen were caught on tape, delightedly recalling how they murdered and raped Muslims with the full imprimatur of their superiors.
No matter: Modi walks out of hostile interviews and ignores rulings from the country's courts: last month his government was issued a contempt notice for failing to compensate 56 people whose shops were destroyed in the riots. He can describe the relief camps that house thousands of dispossessed Muslims as http://www.flonnet.com/fl1920/stories/20021011003602700.htm]"child-breeding centres"[/url]. The impunity derives from the fact that Modi, though still denied a visa to the US, remains the unchallenged leader of a big-business-friendly state which his American PR firm, Apco – that also represents brutal dictators such as Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev – has successfully rebranded as "Vibrant Gujarat".
One recent commentator even tried to dismiss it as an anachronism from India's apparently dark pre-1991 "socialist" past, claiming that it http://www.hindustantimes.com/editorial-views-on/Edits/The-mood-s-different/Article1-817544.aspx]"represented an autarkic economy riot in the era of globalisation"[/url]. Apparently, the beneficiaries of Brave New India, educated by an alert media and motivated by economic gain, have a "declining tolerance for violence" – and even someone as fanatical as Modi realises that news of wholesale murder of Muslims, quickly disseminated in the age of globalisation, is bad for business.Hailed by India's leading industrialists, including Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani, as "dynamic" and "visionary", and buoyed by landslide victories in state elections, Modi now projects himself as the face of a democratic, economically vigorous and pro-westNew India. He has been able to persuade many of his Gujarati compatriots of a liberal-leftist conspiracy against their plucky, entrepreneurial selves. And there are many in the Indian media – bigger, more affluent and more gung-ho since 2002 – ready to complement Apco's exertions by making the 2002 pogrom seem part of a happily superseded history.
A recent profile of Modi in Caravan, India's best English-language magazine, eviscerates this self-flattering image of a democratic and enlightened entrepreneurial class – one that has no time for the Muslim-scalping that people in benightedly socialist India used to get up to. Wholly untouched by remorse, Modi comes across in a carefully researched article by the journalist Vinod Jose as a classic authoritarian populist, bending others to his will rather than bowing to progressive opinion. Jose describes how Modi demanded an abject apology from the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) (CII), India's most prestigious and important business association, which had criticised the Gujarat chief minister over the killings in his state. Faced with a revolt from businessmen from wealthy Gujarat, the CII buckled; it was soon helping to arrange Modi's first meeting with foreign investors. It was only a matter of time before Tata struck up a beautiful relationship with Modi.
In any case, the non-recurrence of 2002-style killings in India provides little reason to credit its elites with heightened tolerance and compassion. Left behind by economic growth, Muslims are more demoralised and depressed than ever; and the country's extreme inequalities, often enforced with violence, express themselves in new forms, ranging from suicides by tens of thousands of farmers, to militant insurgencies. Old-style rioting has been replaced by state terrorism, often cheer-led by the elites. (In 2007 India ranked just behind Iraq in annual incidents of "terrorist" violence.) Under Modi's rule, Gujarat has seen a steep rise in extrajudicial killings.
Economic globalisation, far from spurring moral and spiritual growth among its beneficiaries, has helped to create new constituencies – among haves as well as have-nots – for xenophobia and Modi-style authoritarian populism. Riot Politics, an excellent new book based on close ethnographic study of riot-affected areas in Gujarat by the Dutch scholar Ward Berenschot, shows how it was the state's integration into the global economy, and resulting extreme inequalities, that made poor areas of the state so exposed to anti-Muslim violence. Indeed, the 2002 killings may have been an early example of what the social anthropologistArjun Appadurai calls "a vast worldwide Malthusian correction, which works through the idioms of minoritisation and ethnicisation but is functionally geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalisation, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers".
Like Modi, the strongmen who supervise these bloody purges of economically depressed and unproductive people are often elected by landslide majorities, and tend to be audacious free-marketeers rather than hopeless socialists. The start of the crony-capitalist regimes of Thaksin in Thailand and Putin in Chechnya coincided with vicious assaults on ethnic minorities. Ten years later, the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom too seems to have been a necessary blood rite – anointing not just Vibrant Gujarat but also the New India.
The human rights of Indian citizens caught in the crossfire are among the casualties of these conflicts. Thousands have been killed. Others have been tortured, raped, detained or beaten. Villages have been destroyed, homes blown up. While rebels have perpetrated heinous crimes against civilian targets and are responsible for some of this mayhem, the state has also wielded violence with imprecision if not an outright arrogant disregard for human rights. As with all armed insurgencies, it is difficult for Indian forces to tell the enemy from the civilian population. Inevitably, everyone ends up looking like a potential suspect. Excesses, alas, occur.
Buried Evidence, a just-released report on mass graves in Kashmir documents the fate of more than 2,943 unidentified individuals killed in staged "encounters" with security forces. The full report, photographs and video clips are available at WWW.KASHMIRPROCESS.ORG In Indian-administered Kashmir over the course of the past 20 years, over 70,000 people have died. The region is occupied by 700,000 Indian troops.
The toll on the psyche of the Kashmiri people, especially on youth who have grown up entirely under conditions of occupation or who had to flee with their families to refugee camps in Jammu is difficult to measure. Basharat Peer has written a heart-breaking memoir of his own experience, Curfewed Night: ONE KASHMIRI Journalist's Frontline Account of Life, Love, and War in His Homeland, forthcoming from Scribner in early 2010. MTV has assembled an impressive collage of interviews, music by Kashmiri youth groups, and testimonials that convey the reality of the conflict far more eloquently than political analyses.
India's insurgency troubles are not limited to its periphery. The country is currently in the grip of a widening civil war in its heartland. A vast region covering some of the country's poorest states - Orissa, Jharkand, Chhasttisgarh, Bihar - has become the theatre of a civil war pitting determined Maoist revolutionaries against national and state para-military forces. The Maoists now control 223 districts out of the country's total of 610. They have become very bold in their attacks: holding up passenger trains, assassinating accused informants, beheading political targets, bringing mining and industrial activities to a halt, blowing up police vehicles and attacking the lone government outposts in these areas: schools.
Unfortunately, paramilitary forces have used schools to base their operations, turning them into targets and making it impossible for children to continue their educations at a time when India is facing an education emergency among its poorest and most neglected citizens.
The Maoists have flourished in areas where the government of India as well as different state governments have virtually abandoned the rural poor. These populations are completely cut off from the economically vibrant, rapidly growing India of the country's major cities and more prosperous rural areas. Often, they are low-caste or so-called tribals or Adivasis, people shunned by India's upper-caste dominated elite and, though benefiting from positive discrimination in areas of government employment, marginalized from the country's increasingly private-sector driven economy.
The Maoists have been successful in areas such as Bihar where the low-caste "mouse people" or Musahars, so dubbed because they are reduced to trapping and eating mice to survive, live in unimaginable conditions of penury. As journalist Pryaag Akbar points out in A Harrowing Report, India's democracy has utterly failed these people. It is in this vacuum that the Maoist rebels have flourished.
The situation has intensified as India's drive to develop its natural resources and expand its industrial base has increased. It is no coincidence that the Maoists are most active in areas where the discovery of vast mineral deposits, especially iron ore and bauxite, are now being tapped by Indian and multinational mining companies including Tata, Vedanta and Jindal. The only thing many of the people in these regions have is their land. They are now being forced off their land to make way for the "development" of the resources that lie Under THEIR Farms AND Forests. The Indian government's record on compensating citizens who are displaced by "development" - who number in the millions - is abysmal. Its record on consulting these people to find out what development might mean to them and how they would like to see their lives improved is even worse.
In his Nobel ACCEPTANCE SPEECH, President Obama cautioned that "security does not exist where human beings do not have access to enough food, or clean water, or the medicine they need to survive. It does not exist where children cannot aspire to a decent education or a job that supports a family. The absence of hope can rot a society from within."
India's prime minister Manmohan Singh has admitted that the solution to India's Maoist revolt must include extending "development" to populations too long IGNORED, but the bald fact is that these people are in the way of the kind of development - rapid industrialization fueled by the exploitation of natural resources - his government is pursuing with gusto. They dare not be consulted about their fate. Building their own secure future on their ancestral farm and forest lands is simply not an option the government of India, nor the powerful corporate interests that stand to profit from mining and manufacturing in these areas, is ready to admit. There's the rub, and the root of revolt.
A 40-year long civil war has been raging in the jungles of central and eastern India. It is one of the world's largest armed conflicts but it remains largely ignored outside of India.
Caught in the crossfire of it are the Advisas, who are believed to be India's earliest inhabitants. A loose collection of tribes, it is estimated that there are about 84 million of these indigenous people, which is about eight per cent of the country's population.
For generations, they have lived off farming and the spoils of the jungle in eastern India, but their way of life is under threat. Their land contains mineral deposits estimated to be worth trillions of dollars. Forests have been cleared and the Indian government has evacuated hundreds of villages to make room for steel plants and mineral refineries.
The risk of losing everything they have ever known has made many Adivasis fertile recruits for India's Maoist rebels or Naxalites, who also call these forests home.
The Maoists' fight with the Indian government began 50 years ago, just after India became independent. A loose collection of anti-government communist groups - that initially fought for land reform - they are said to be India's biggest internal security threat. Over time, their focus has expanded to include more fundamental questions about how India is actually governed.
In their zeal for undermining the Indian government, Maoist fighters have torched construction equipment, bombed government schools and de-railed passenger trains, killing hundreds. In the name of state security, several activists who have supported the Maoists have been jailed and tortured. Innocent people have also been implicated on false charges. These are often intimidation tactics used by the government to discourage people from having any contact with the Maoists.
The uprising by Maoist fighters and its brutal suppression by the Indian government, has claimed more than 10,000 lives since 1980, and displaced 12 million people. Many of the victims are not even associated with either side. They are simply caught in the crossfire. And the violence is escalating as both sides mount offensive after counter-offensive.
Al Jazeera's Imran Garda travelled to the Indian states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal to get a secret glimpse into the world of the Naxalites and to meet with rebel fighters as well as those victimised by this conflict.
In February 2002 the western Indian state of Gujarat, governed by the Hindu nationalist chief minister Narendra Modi, witnessed one of the country's biggest pogroms. Responding to reports that Muslims had set fire to a train carriage, killing 58 Hindu pilgrims inside, mobs rampaged across the state. The riots flared up again on 15 March – 10 years ago on Wednesday – and killing, raping and looting continued until mid-June. More than 2,000 Muslims were murdered, and tens of thousands rendered homeless in carefully planned and coordinated attacks of unprecedented savagery.
The killers may have been in touch with police and politicians. According to the2011 Amicus report, two cabinet ministers even sat in police control rooms. A senior police officer and minister, murdered in 2003, claimed that Modi explicitly instructed civil servants and police not to stand in the killers' way. Of course, Modi has always denied involvement and condemned the riots.
The pogrom was extensively televised by India's innumerable – and then much less complacent – TV channels. Many middle-class Indians were shocked to hear how even the very young had not been spared – the slayers of Muslims were seen smashing the heads of children against rocks. There was some unease even within Modi's parent outfit, the RSS – whose most revered chief, Guru Golwalkar, wrote in a 1939 book that http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Total/Fascism.India.htm]Nazi Germany had manifested "race pride at its highest" by purging itself of the "Semitic races"[/url].
Since then Indian activists have doggedly pursued Modi through the courts and in the media. In a sting carried out in 2007 by the weekly magazine Tehelka, politicians, businessmen, officials and policemen were caught on tape, delightedly recalling how they murdered and raped Muslims with the full imprimatur of their superiors.
No matter: Modi walks out of hostile interviews and ignores rulings from the country's courts: last month his government was issued a contempt notice for failing to compensate 56 people whose shops were destroyed in the riots. He can describe the relief camps that house thousands of dispossessed Muslims as http://www.flonnet.com/fl1920/stories/20021011003602700.htm]"child-breeding centres"[/url]. The impunity derives from the fact that Modi, though still denied a visa to the US, remains the unchallenged leader of a big-business-friendly state which his American PR firm, Apco – that also represents brutal dictators such as Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev – has successfully rebranded as "Vibrant Gujarat".
One recent commentator even tried to dismiss it as an anachronism from India's apparently dark pre-1991 "socialist" past, claiming that it http://www.hindustantimes.com/editorial-views-on/Edits/The-mood-s-different/Article1-817544.aspx]"represented an autarkic economy riot in the era of globalisation"[/url]. Apparently, the beneficiaries of Brave New India, educated by an alert media and motivated by economic gain, have a "declining tolerance for violence" – and even someone as fanatical as Modi realises that news of wholesale murder of Muslims, quickly disseminated in the age of globalisation, is bad for business.Hailed by India's leading industrialists, including Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani, as "dynamic" and "visionary", and buoyed by landslide victories in state elections, Modi now projects himself as the face of a democratic, economically vigorous and pro-westNew India. He has been able to persuade many of his Gujarati compatriots of a liberal-leftist conspiracy against their plucky, entrepreneurial selves. And there are many in the Indian media – bigger, more affluent and more gung-ho since 2002 – ready to complement Apco's exertions by making the 2002 pogrom seem part of a happily superseded history.
A recent profile of Modi in Caravan, India's best English-language magazine, eviscerates this self-flattering image of a democratic and enlightened entrepreneurial class – one that has no time for the Muslim-scalping that people in benightedly socialist India used to get up to. Wholly untouched by remorse, Modi comes across in a carefully researched article by the journalist Vinod Jose as a classic authoritarian populist, bending others to his will rather than bowing to progressive opinion. Jose describes how Modi demanded an abject apology from the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) (CII), India's most prestigious and important business association, which had criticised the Gujarat chief minister over the killings in his state. Faced with a revolt from businessmen from wealthy Gujarat, the CII buckled; it was soon helping to arrange Modi's first meeting with foreign investors. It was only a matter of time before Tata struck up a beautiful relationship with Modi.
In any case, the non-recurrence of 2002-style killings in India provides little reason to credit its elites with heightened tolerance and compassion. Left behind by economic growth, Muslims are more demoralised and depressed than ever; and the country's extreme inequalities, often enforced with violence, express themselves in new forms, ranging from suicides by tens of thousands of farmers, to militant insurgencies. Old-style rioting has been replaced by state terrorism, often cheer-led by the elites. (In 2007 India ranked just behind Iraq in annual incidents of "terrorist" violence.) Under Modi's rule, Gujarat has seen a steep rise in extrajudicial killings.
Economic globalisation, far from spurring moral and spiritual growth among its beneficiaries, has helped to create new constituencies – among haves as well as have-nots – for xenophobia and Modi-style authoritarian populism. Riot Politics, an excellent new book based on close ethnographic study of riot-affected areas in Gujarat by the Dutch scholar Ward Berenschot, shows how it was the state's integration into the global economy, and resulting extreme inequalities, that made poor areas of the state so exposed to anti-Muslim violence. Indeed, the 2002 killings may have been an early example of what the social anthropologistArjun Appadurai calls "a vast worldwide Malthusian correction, which works through the idioms of minoritisation and ethnicisation but is functionally geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalisation, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers".
Like Modi, the strongmen who supervise these bloody purges of economically depressed and unproductive people are often elected by landslide majorities, and tend to be audacious free-marketeers rather than hopeless socialists. The start of the crony-capitalist regimes of Thaksin in Thailand and Putin in Chechnya coincided with vicious assaults on ethnic minorities. Ten years later, the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom too seems to have been a necessary blood rite – anointing not just Vibrant Gujarat but also the New India.
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