"....As Gush-Up concentrates wealth on to the tip of a shining pin on which our billionaires pirouette, tidal waves of money crash through the institutions of democracy - the courts, the Parliament as well as the media, seriously compromising their ability to function in the ways they are meant to. The noisier the carnival around elections, the less sure we are that democracy really exists.
Each new corruption scandal that surfaces in India makes the last one look tame. In the summer of 2011 the 2G spectrum scandal broke. We learnt that corporations had siphoned away $40 billion of public money by installing a friendly soul as the Minister of Communications and Information who grossly underpriced the licences for 2G telecom spectrum and illegally auctioned it to his buddies. The taped telephone conversations leaked to the press showed how a network of industrialists and their front companies, ministers, senior journalists and a TV anchor were involved in facilitating this daylight robbery. The tapes were just an MRI that confirmed a diagnosis that people had made long ago.
The privatization and illegal sale of telecom spectrum does not involve war, displacement and ecological devastation. The privatization of India's mountains, rivers and forests does. Perhaps because it does not have the uncomplicated clarity of a straightforward, out-and-out accounting scandal, or perhaps because it is all being done in the name of India's 'progress', it does not have the same resonance with the middle classes.
In 2005 the state governments of Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Jharkhand signed hundreds of memorandums of understanding (MoUs) with a number of private corporations, turning over trillions of dollars of bauxite, iron ore and other minerals for a pittance, defying even the warped logic of the Free Market. (Royalties to the government ranged between 0.5 per cent and 7 per cent.)
Only days after the Chhattisgarh government signed an MoU for the construction of an integrated steel plant in Bastar with Tata Steel, the Salwa Judum, a vigilante militia, was inaugurated. The government said it was a spontaneous uprising of local people who were fed up with the 'repression' by Maoist guerrillas in the forest. It turned out to be a ground-clearing operation, funded and armed by the government and subsidized by mining corporations. In the other states similar militias were created, with other names. The prime minister announced the Maoists were the 'single largest security challenge in India'. It was a declaration of war.
On the 2nd of January 2006, in Kalinganagar, in the neighbouring state of Orissa, perhaps to signal the seriousness of the government's intention, ten platoons of police arrived at the site of another Tata Steel plant and opened fire on villagers who had gathered there to protest what they felt was inadequate compensation for their land. Thirteen people including one policeman were killed and thirty-seven injured. Six years have gone by and though the villages remain under siege by armed policemen the protest has not died. Meanwhile in Chhattisgarh, the Salwa Judum burned, raped and murdered its way through hundreds of forest villages, evacuating 600 villages and forcing 50,000 people to come out into police camps and 300,000 people to flee. The chief minister announced that those who did not come out of the forests would be considered 'Maoist terrorists'. In this way, in parts of modern India, ploughing fields and sowing seed came to be defined as terrorist activity. Eventually the Salwa Judum's atrocities only succeeded in strengthening the resistance and swelling the ranks of the Maoist guerrilla army. In 2009 the government announced what it called Operation Green Hunt. Some 200,000 paramilitary troops were deployed across Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and West Bengal.
After three years of 'low-intensity conflict' that has not managed to 'flush' the rebels out of the forest, the Central government has declared that it will deploy the Indian Army and Air Force. In India we don't call this war. We call it 'Creating a Good investment Climate'. Thousands of soldiers have already moved in. A brigade headquarters and airbases are being readied. One of the biggest armies in the world is now preparing its Terms of Engagement to 'defend' itself against the poorest, hungriest, most malnourished people in the world. We only await the declaration of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which will give the army legal impunity and the right to kill 'on suspicion'. Going by the tens of thousands of unmarked graves and anonymous cremation pyres in Kashmir, Manipur and Nagaland, it has shown itself to be a very suspicious army indeed.
While the preparations for deployment are being made, the jungles of Central India continue to remain under siege, with villagers frightened to come out, or go to the market for food or medicine. Hundreds of people have been jailed, charged for being Maoists under draconian, undemocratic laws. Prisons are crowded with Adivasi people, many of who have no idea what their crime is. Recently, Soni Sori, an Adivasi school teacher from Bastar, was arrested and tortured in police custody. Stones were pushed up her vagina to get her to 'confess' that she was a Maoist courier. The stones were removed from her body at a hospital in Calcutta, where, after a public outcry, she was sent for a medical check-up. At a recent Supreme Court hearing, activists presented the judges with the stones in a plastic bag. The only outcome of their efforts has been that Soni Sori remains in jail while Ankit Garg, the superintendent of police who conducted the interrogation, was conferred with President's Police Medal for Gallantry on Republic Day...."
-- Arundhati Roy, "Broken Republic"
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