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Editorial
Join The Dots,
Re-do The Maths
 For
a long time now, vast swathes of land in
India have virtually been under the control of Naxalites/Maoists
even as New Delhi struts the world stage as a growing power. The
world recently saw the helplessness of India's rulers in Lalgarh
before they were forced the only path that was the most inadvisable:
heavy handed action against poorest of the poor. Shorn of all the
frills, divested of the fact as to whose write runs or not, what
were these men and women (yes, a large number of them were women)
trying to do in Lalgarh? Running wells, trying to keep schools open,
ensuring that kids go there...What kind of terrorism was going on?
Lalgarh poses questions even for the others Reds? The two main
communist parties in
India will have to come out clean. Particularly because the question
will only increase as now news is coming in that Orissa has got its
own version of Lalgarh in Koraput. India's poor, marginalised
teeming millions are increasingly becoming not just sick but also
tired of New Delhi. Now you see an open war between these
pushed-to-the-wall poor and the Indian Nation State. As troops
rolled into Lalgarh, the world saw the grit of the poor who came out
with bows and arrows.
What does it take for someone to pull out an arrow when he sees a
tank hollering on into his fields? A clear realization that those
riding the tanks cannot and will not be friends of the poor, their
incessant claims of social responsibility apart. That they see even
some Red faces behind those tanks, the ones who go by the name of
communists, and that killed their last hope.
Now, as the reprisals by the central and state governments that have
followed will surely result in the suppression of the local Adivasi
movement that was striving to assert the rights of the Santhalis in
the region. Caught in the three-pronged attack by the CPI(M), the
Maoists and the State, the Lalgarh tribals are, sadly, now doomed to
further subjugation.
For years, these teeming millions have struggled to be heard but the
Indian state ahs become deaf to the cries of those who are dying at
its doors. Indian media has little time for the issues and concerns
of tribals; besides the reporting of military style operation makes
for better TV and sparkling copy.
In vast areas of the Indian state now, the tribals are fighting to
keep the state administration and the police out of the lives of the
local community. And they have a region that
New Delhi apathetically calls the Red Corridor. The fact is that
this Red Corridor is also the region of abject poverty, a complete
and willful absence of the Indian state in even trying to make a
miniscule difference to the lives of the poor. The tribals are a
huge number of people similarly discriminated against as Dalits by
India's entrenched brahamanical forces.
Put together, the minorities, the tribals, the Dalits, and indeed
that huge huge community called women, perhaps one of the most
discriminated against in Brahamanical paternalistic chauvinistic
system, are a huge majority. The Muslims who had the last remnant of
hope even after 1992 Babri and 2002
Gujarat
have seen what
India is capable of after the Liberhan Commission report is out.
Sikhs have never been less than clear about the real nature of the
brahamanical regime. The Dalits have learnt the lesson perhaps the
hardest way, having suffered for centuries. And as for women,
scripture after scripture that brahamanical forces spout as pious is
loaded against woman.
Come on, we are a huge, huge majority. And they tell us the kind of
arithmetic that makes us perceive ourselves as a minority. What is
needed is a movement to join the dots so that New Delhi understands
what it is up against when a frail woman with piercing eyes
stretches a bow and aims an arrow at a tank.
8
July 2009
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