Maoist Resistance

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Indian Vanguard Archive July to September

September

Fake Encounter Killings: Political patronage

August

July

137 policemen killed by Naxals in Bihar since 2003 Jan

The Wound from Within

Lalgarh: Villagers recount tale of police atrocities

Monday, February 11, 2008

Kerala: Armed struggle Maoists’ aim

KOZHIKODE: With his blue denim jeans, blue T-shirt with white stripes and clean-shaven face showing a trace of stubble Mohan could easily pass as an IT professional or an IIT or IIM graduate.

It will take a while for you to stomach the fact that he is the most wanted Maoist leader in Kerala, a glimpse of whom would be valuable information for intelligence agencies.

When the state organising secretary of the banned CPI (Maoist) settles downs to speak it becomes clear that he means business. And that he represents the new generation of Naxalites.

The CPI (Maoist) is not interested in making its presence felt with symbolic agitation. And they are not inclined to go for the 'actions' of the Naxalite era like police station attacks. That doesn't mean that Maoists in Kerala are pacifists.

"Our line is armed struggle in Kerala too. We will set up base areas, people's militia and people's liberation guerilla army in due course.

Right now we are in the process of developing leadership at different levels," Mohan told this website's newspaper in his first ever interaction with the media.

Mohan says sophistication is essential for revolutionaries in all fields.

Repression in Kerala, says Maoist leader

KOZHIKODE: Mohan, the state organising secretary of the banned CPI (Maoist), has told this website's newspaper in an interview that "repression of any sort cannot wipe out revolutionary movements, which has been amply proved by the Maoist movement in Andhra Pradesh which went through many bad patches."

In Kerala too there is highhandedness on the part of the police. "Home Minister Kodiyeri Balakrishnan wanted to crush the movement in the initial stage itself. The Kerala police sent men to Andhra Pradesh to get trained under the Special Investigation Bureau (SIB) and the Grey Hounds."

The repression in Kerala is more intense than in places like AP. "Persons like Varavara Rao and Gadar are allowed to work there. Here Govindan Kutty, who is running a legal magazine, is put behind bars. Even environmentalists and human rights activists like Jayasree and Shyna are not spared," he said.

"Maoists in Kerala are being presented in a larger-than- life picture. We are at an infant stage and are engaged in building the underground party structure. We did not want to come out in the open now but have been forced to do so after the arrest of our central committee member Malla Raja Reddy," he Said.

Fighting With Posters - Police Vs. Naxalites

Police and Naxalites in Koraput district are fighting not only with bullets and bombs but have staged a virtual war against each other by pasting posters on the walls and distributing leaflets among the masses , especially in the naxal affected regions of Narayanapatna , Bandhugaon , Pottangi and Nandapur blocks in Koraput district.

While it was a practice by the naxalites to take the people on their side by staging street plays , meetings and revolutionary songs over the last many years , now the district police has also come up with similar strategies to spread the message on the welfare prgrammes of the government . District police has already organized 8 special camps in the naxal affected blocks of the district during the last month alone , Deepak Kumar , SP of Koraput said .

The camps were conducted to reach the common masses by addressing their own concerns and difficulties . Efforts were made to see that more and more people get involved in the performances and get in touch with the police through the cultural programmes , community feast and medical camps , he added.

Looking at the overwhelming response from the common people in the region , the district police has now come up with posters and leaflets written in Kuvi language , the prime medium of communication for most of the tribals from Kondh community living in the naxal affected regions of the district . While this move was thought to have emerged from the latest posters by the naxalites in Bandhugaon block which they had displayed after killing a businessman alleging him for being a police informer, the success of the move was also appreciated . The naxalites had for the first time used Kuvi language written in Oriya dialect asking people to support their mission .

While most of the posters & leaflets displayed and distributed by the naxalites had carried messages asking the traders , contractors and oppressors to stop their alleged anti tribal activities like selling liquor to the tribals , claiming their rights on the tribal lands and engaging tribal men and women to smuggle wood from the forests, few posters had also invited people to join their mission or to extend support to make the band calls given by them .

In addition , posters by naxalites were seen to have asked people to learn their rights and exercise them whenever required. But in contrary , the posters and leaflets distributed by the district police , carried the messages of the programmes and policies of the government with a mission to take the message of development and concern of the government towards the people at grassroots and the responsibility of people to approach the respective agencies to enjoy the benefits rather than taking laws into their own hands , Mr. Deepak added.

Further the police in its leaflets has asked the people to think over the actions performed by naxalites . The naxalites were using the arms and ammunition for anti national activities and were obstructing in developmental programmes in the rural areas , police alleged . While the leaflet with its 15 points were trying to invoke people to think over the intentions of the naxalites in the region , the poster was designed with multicolour pictorial presentation on the prohibition of liquor and the need to visit the police station, tahsil office and block offices in need .

Moreover contrary to the posters and leaflets of the naxalites which were handmade and handwritten , these posters were more attractive and printed with clear letters . But looking at the lower level of literacy in the tribal dominated regions while spreading messages of change through theater , culture and sports had begun to show some results , the impact of the posters and leaflets was still to be ascertained in the long run , Mr.Deepak added.
(EOM)

Bhutanese Maoists launch class struggle

Communist Party of Bhutan (CPB-MLM) led by Birat has owned up responsibility to the explosion that took place in Samtse district inside Bhutan yesterday night, reported refugee-run new agency Bhutan News Service.

According to the report, Central Committee Member of the party who identified himself as 'John' over a telephone conversation from undisclosed location quoted a press release issued today by Birat, general secretary of CPB-MLM, as saying that the party has begun launching 'armed rural class struggle' inside Bhutan to establish people's government.

John further informed that the party would launch program in three phases that include resettlement of Bhutanese people occupying the land and properties used by evictees of early 1990s, taking physical action against those spying against their democratic struggle, and deconstruction of government infrastructures in rural areas of the country.

CPB-MLM has also claimed that their Sunday attack damaged all properties meant for the upcoming necessary National Assembly election scheduled for March 24 that was kept at Renewal Natural Resources (RNR) office in Ghumauney gewog inside Bhutan. John further quoted Birat's press release as terming their armed lunch as a 'first successful attack'.

A bomb had exploded behind the Renewal Natural Resources (RNR) office in Ghumauney gewog at midnight on Sunday.

The RNR office was used as a polling station during the first phase of upper house election on December 31 and has been used as residence by returning officer and the national officer deployed for National Assembly election scheduled for March 24.

Saturday, February 9, 2008

THE RED STAR, Nepal's National Magazine.

Date:
Subject: Fwd: The Red Star, Issue-3.pdf

Dear Sir/Madam,

Please find the latest Issue of THE RED STAR, Nepal's National Magazine.

With Greetings,

The Red Star

Nepal's National Magazine

Kathmandu, Nepal.

Email- trs.nepal@gmail.com

Website- www.krishnasenonline.org

Police fail to arrest tribal leader, chased away

Statesman News Service

JAJPUR, Feb. 6: Tension is running high in Kalinga Nagar since yesterday night, after police team who had gone to arrest a tribal leader for being involved in anti-industrialisation movement was reportedly chased away by the tribals.

Sources said that the police entered Chandia village under the Kalinga Nagar police station limit to search for the tribal leader for his allegedly link with the Maoists following the recent revelation made by Anna Reddy. Vistapan Virodhi Jan Manch (VVJM), which has been spearheading movement in the area since the 2 January, 2006 firing in which 14 tribals were killed by police while opposing land acquisition for the Tata steel project, today organised a meeting. They reportedly decided to gherao the police station for entering the village. They also decided to restrict media movement.

Security has been tightened in and around Kalinga Nagar, fearing possible attack of Maoist-supporting tribals to free their leaders.
The Jajpur superintendent of police, Mr DS Kuttey, said that five platoons police have been deployed in and around Kalinga Nagar area. Anna and his aide, Nanika Jamuda were brought to Kainga Nagar police station on a four-day remand for interrogation.

west Bengal: ‘No results’ in hunt for Maoists

Nani Gopal Pal

BALARAMPUR, Feb. 7: A 36-hour "Operation Dalma" in and around Ahodhyapahar, was conducted by the security forces, 50 km from Purulia town, to arrest Maoists, with no results. District police had some information earlier about a "den of Maoists". As a result, police raided the village of Sirkabad, Maramu, Kharbera, Urma, Kantadih and Ghatbera. Police also blocked the areas.

Mystery shrouds the arrest of two Forward Bloc members, residents of Bandhdih in Balarampur, Purulia, Mr Sankar Singh Sardar and Mr Sankar Mondal last week. Perhaps, it was the first arrest of a political party in the left front partners in West Bengal. Both were arrested as the link-men of Maoists, who were allegedly involved in the killing of a CPI-M cadre there.

The president of Juba Trinamul Congress Barabazar block, Mr Pratul Mahato was also arrested, reportedly because of a Maoist link, and had was involved with the murder of a CPI-M activist at Bhikheri Cheliama.

Protesting against the arrest of the Forward Bloc members and the Trinamul Congress leader, both parties demonstrated in Balarampur and Barabazar, Purulia. They also set up road blocks in different areas of the district.

The arrested members were forwarded to Purulia court, when the court sent them police remand. In connection to the Barabazar agitation, police arrested 13 members of Trinamul Congress. A bodyguard's pistol was missing at Barabazar.
Mr Ashok Kumar Prosad, SP of Purulia said in Purulia town today that the police had some definite clues to arrest them. While talking to The Statesman, he further added: "We had also no intentions to arrest them without any cause and the court will now prove."
The president of Purulia district Trinamul Congress Mr Kamakshya Prasad Singh Deo and the secretary, Forward Bloc district committee, Mr Nishikanta Mehata also former Arsha MLA, strongly criticised the attitude of Purulia district police. Both separately alleged: "Police are now a kind of CPI-M party men."

Mr Manindra Gope, a leader of the Purulia district CPI-M committee cautioned the member of both parties. "They (police) are not maintaining their neutral attitude," he alleged.

Meanwhile, four more members of the CPI-M local and branch committees had to quit the party after receiving Maoist threats, raised to 25 in Balarampur and Barabazar. The CPI-M secretary of Balarampur zonal committee, Mr Gobardhan Majhi admitted: "Maoists force cadres to quit the party, distributing leaflets for consequences."

Forward Bloc top brass, including the MP, Mr Narhari Mahato, alleged the CPI-M is creating pressure with the knowledge the party will fight alone in the forthcoming panchayat elections in West Bengal.

The Congress leaders also blamed the CPI-M who were responsible of corruption charges in the panchayat. "They (CPI-M) are trying their best to hide out the corruption," they said.

Maoist doc, aide held

MALKANGIRI: The district voluntary force , a wing of the district police, nabbed six Maoist accomplices from Kondapalli forest area, some 10 km from Motu police limits, on early hours of Friday.

The arrested include a Maoist doctor and an expert in writing Maoist literature. This was informed by SP Satish Kumar Gajbhiye. The arrested are Marian Mukta Madiam, Sariam Rama, Rama Prasad Sana, Dr Sujay Dafatar, Ranjit Sarkar and Karam Sita. Police recovered six detonators, 26 gelatin sticks, 100 meter wire, gun powder and some life-saving drugs from them.

All the six were acting as couriers for Maoist leaders like Ashok and Jaga, attended Maoist meetings and extended logistics support to the movement.

Dafatar was also working as a physician for Maoists while Sarkar of MV-128 village, who is a sikshya sahayak, was an expert in writing Maoist banners, leaflets and pamphlets, he said.

They were involved in recent encounter between Maoists and police at Kondapalli.

SC raps Andhra for branding lawyer a Maoist

NEW DELHI: Advocate R Chandrashekar Reddy was branded a Maoist sympathiser and ordered to be put under surveillance by the Andhra Pradesh police soon after he moved the Supreme Court challenging the state's decision to release 1,500-odd prisoners much before they served their sentence.

Seeking the state's response to the allegations, a Bench headed by Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan said: "Somebody files a PIL, the court issues interim order and the very next day you brand him a Maoist sympathiser and put him under surveillance?" the court asked state's counsel T R Andhyarujina.

The state denied this and said police protection had already been given to the PIL petitioner. However, the court issued notice to the state and asked it to file its affidavit responding to the charges levelled by Reddy.

Everybody Loves A Naxal

As the word Naxal changes meaning, Sudeep Chakravarti's book is essential reading, says ADITYA NIGAM

NAXALISM, OR ITS current variant, Maoism, is back in the news with a bang. On its first coming, forty years ago, it expressed a radical utopian impulse that rapidly captured the imagination of a generation of the most brilliant students across the country. It started as a peasant revolt in 1967 in a small area of northern West Bengal but while the initial revolt was rapidly crushed by the governments of the day, the metaphor called Naxalbari and its anglicised derivative "Naxalite" took the political world by storm. Naxalism was a radical critique of the existing state of affairs — the corruption of the parliamentary democratic system, the political parties; the rot in the educational system; rampant joblessness, famines and food shortages and other contemporary issues of the late 1960s.

Naxalism became what contemporary social theorists would call a "floating signifier" — a wide range of meanings could be put into that term. That Naxalbari was a trigger for a radical cultural-political critique of the stranglehold of landlordism and caste power in rural India is also evident from the wide range of films, theatre and literary products that emerged in the decade immediately following. This first round of Naxalism was therefore widely studied and written about by scholars of different persuasions and we have a fairly rich documentation of that history. The subsequent two phases of the movement have hardly been studied. The second phase, that of silent regrouping and reorganisation, was long drawn out and unspectacular, compared to its first phase. But that is where the foundations of the present movement were laid.

The present phase, where the term "Naxalism" has been replaced by the more specific "Maoism" (referring to only one powerful strand of the movement) has been the least studied and understood. Sudeep Chakravarti's book is a timely and fascinating account of Maoism in the last decade or so. Written in the form of a journalistic travelogue, it gives a fascinating picture of the various elements that go into the making of this phenomenon. Chakravarti's specific focus is on the current flashpoint, namely Chhattisgarh, where he traveled and met a range of different people. Chhattisgarh is also important because it is currently the site of the most vicious and violent counter-insurgency operation unleashed by the state — the Salwa Judum which pits one section of tribals into a civil war with others.

RED SUN —
TRAVELS IN
NAXALITE COUNTRY
Sudeep Chakravarti
Penguin Viking
352 pp; Rs 495

Chakravarti's account provides readers an opportunity to form their own judgement as we are brought face to face with officials directly handling the insurgency on the one hand, and others who are involved in developmental activity (including Gandhians, now branded as crypto-Naxals by the administration) to give a glimpse of life in this embattled land. Chhattisgarh today is only a notch below (or maybe not) the directly Army-ruled states (thanks to the Armed Forces Special Powers Act) of the North-East and Kashmir, for example. With its own draconian Chhattisgarh Public Security Act, it is run today as a police state and Chakravarti's account brings out the situation there quite vividly.

However, despite its specific focus on Chhattisgarh, the author does not restrict himself to it and provides us with a fairly well-informed account of the larger picture of the movement, its current state, its different major tendencies and its general spread in different parts of the country. And he does it with interviews with a range of participants — including the legendary Kanu Sanyal — as well as with observers in the corporate sector or the media. These accounts are garnished with snippets of the Maoist movement in neighbouring Nepal, providing an excellent introduction for the lay reader.

Chakravarti's account should also serve as an eye-opener to the powers-that-be, for their myopic responses to Naxalism betray an utter lack of understanding of the challenges posed by it. It is time to recognise that Naxalism is a response, however perverse, to years of looting of public resources and dispossession of people
from their lands by state and corporate elites. This is a curious omission from the Chhattisgarh story in the book. It is, after all, clear by now that the state-sponsored Salwa Judum and anti-Naxal operations are but the smokescreen behind which large-scale corporate robbery of tribal lands is carried out. This is a story that remains to be told.

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 6, Dated Feb 16, 2008

Thursday, February 7, 2008

please sign the online petition demanding the release of P.GOVINDAN KUTTY

Dear friends,

This is the online petition demanding the release of P.GOVINDAN KUTTY the EDITOR of PEOPLES MARCH (the voice of Indian Revolution)

please sign and forward

http://www.petitiononline.com/govindan/petition.html

Regards,
Bimal

KLO NOT INVOLVED IN THE THEFT OF RABINDRANATH’S NOBEL PRIZE MEDAL

To
The Editor,
Dear Sir,
Kindly publish the enclosed Clarification in your esteemed daily as a news item. The matter being very sensitive, I would appreciate if the clarification is given a prominent space.
Thanking you in anticipation.
Yours sincerely,
Jiban Singha
Chairman,
Kamatapur Liberation Organization(KLO)
Date:- 04.02.08

KLO NOT INVOLVED IN THE THEFT OF RABINDRANATH'S NOBEL PRIZE MEDAL
The Govt of India, through their intelligence agencies, have been trying to malign the legitimate national struggle of the Kamatapuri people. Very recently they have circulated a news story complicating my name, Jibon Sigh, with the theft of the Nobel Prize Medal of the universal poet, Rabindranath Tagore, though they have given the home address wrongly. This is unthinkable, unfounded, and totally biased propaganda intended to create general hatred and ill feelings against me and our struggle. Therefore, this statement is issued to clarify categorically that neither the KLO nor myself is not all connected with the theft of the said precious memento, which is very unfortunate, and appeal to those peoples concerned not to be misled by the mischievous propaganda of the Indian government as well as the West Bengal Government.
***************************************

Desperate CPM ‘bribes’ voters

Statesman News Service
MIDNAPORE, Feb. 5: Anti CPI-M forces' winning spree continues in the ongoing elections to higher secondary school managing committees in Midnapore East as a direct fall out to police-cadre carnage in Nandigram in March and later armed recapture of Nandigram in November last year.

The BUPC-supported candidates wrested the managing committee of Gokulnagar Gobinda Jew Siksha Niketan in Nandigram from the CPI-M after 15 years by capturing all the six seats under guardians quota. Around 1,300 voters cast their votes in the election which was held on 3 January.

In Panskura, the BB HS school managing committee was also wrested by the Opposition though the CPI-M-affiliated ABTA had a strong base in the school over the years.

The Majajot candidates also won all the six seats at Gokulnagar Trilochanm Vidyapith in Moyna block in the district by an overwhelming margin against the CPI-M. The results were similar in the block in four other school managing committees where the Marxists were mauled. The elections were held on 27 January.

Aware that the winds have been blowing against them, the CPI-M leaders of the block have made a unique move as a last effort to bag the Kumorchowk Janakalyan Siksha Niketan managing committee in Moyna, which will go to polls on 10 February.

The Marxist cadres went to Pramanikpara and Ranapara villages last week to woo the voters to cast in favour of their candidates by getting them to promise by touching the Bhagawad Gita. They also offered money to some of them, villagers alleged.

But when the inmates, particularly the womenfolk, resisted and chased them, they fled the area. Mr Subrata Malakar, the Mahajot leader, said the CPI-M who had been at the helm of affairs of the school managing committee over the past decades are now desperate to cling to power for which they are not hesitant to indulge in this type of unfair means, he added.

However, the CPI-M MLA from Moyna, Mr Muziber Rahaman, who belongs to these areas refuted the allegations, saying those were nothing but anti-campaign against them by the Mahajot.

On the other hand, he has information that the Mahajot were offering money to the voters, he alleged.

Maoists in comeback move in North Telangana

HYDERABAD : The CPI Maoists are planning to comeback with a vengeance in its erstwhile stronghold of Dandakaranya (DK) in the north Telangana region by committing major offences to make their presence felt.

The protection platoon of North Telangana Special Zone Committee (NTSZC) is moving in groups of 25 to 30 members to commit a major offence and regain their lost ground. Later, the platoon committee members would split into smaller groups and move separately to commit offences on individual targets.
           These startling revelations were made by Ambir Kistaiah alias Krishna alias Shyam, commander of NTSZC protection platoon, who surrendered along with his wife, Alam Laxmi, a deputy dalam commander of Special Guerrilla Squad, here on Wednesday.
           The naxalite commander said that the NTSZC meeting was held in November last and it discussed about the economic support and strengthening of the dalams. He said that there were about 50 naxalites in entire NTSZC including 28 in KKW (Karimnagar, Khammam and Warangal districts).
           To a query, the surrendered naxalite said that the Chhattisgarh State police were not alert on par with the Andhra Pradesh police in tackling the naxalite menace. "The police stations in Andhra Pradesh are fortified perfectly to meet any eventuality," he said.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Blood and Bandh- Front’s force kills five Bloc activists

Blood and Bandh
- Front's force kills five Bloc activists

OUR BUREAU

Feb. 5: The blood of its own supporters today stained Bengal's ruling Left Front for the first time since it came to power 30 years ago.

Police opened fire on activists of the Forward Bloc, the front's second-largest partner, killing five protesters after the party's law-violation programme turned violent in north Bengal's Dinhata town, about 725km from Calcutta.

Bloc state secretary Asoke Ghosh condemned the firing as "barbaric" and called it a "shame" but ruled out withdrawing from the coalition.

The party has called a 24-hour state-wide bandh from 6am tomorrow, the first time a front constituent has called one against its own government. The Trinamul Congress, the Congress and the SUCI have extended support to the bandh, while front partner RSP has lent "moral support".

The Bloc has launched the law-violation programme to press for the implementation of a charter of demands that includes several hot-button issues.

The charter opposes special economic zones and big capital's entry into retail. But beneath the veneer, a battle for inheritance could also be at play with some similarities to the Mumbai violence by supporters of Raj Thackeray.

If the Mumbai vandalism was blamed on Raj, the Dinhata protest was led by Udayan Guha, the son of Kamal Guha, the Forward Bloc strongman who is no more. Unlike Raj, Udayan inherited his father's mantle but had been unable to hold on to it, losing the election to the Trinamul Congress last time.

The "law-violation" is the first programme in which Udayan is hogging the limelight, fuelling speculation that he is trying to regain the family pocket borough.

Police sources said 10,000 Bloc supporters marched up to the Dinhata sub-divisional office about an hour after noon, led by Udayan, the district secretary, as three rows of policemen stood guard.

The protesters, demanding that the government act on the Bloc's "pro-people" charter of demands, breached the first barrier. Events soon spun out of control, triggering arson, tear-gassing and eventually firing . Unofficial sources said about 50 rounds had been fired.

Bloc supporters said they heard Dinhata police station inspector-in-charge Sudhangshu Roy give the firing orders.

Four of the dead have been identified as Indrajit Chakrabarty, 25, who had just got a job through the School Service Commission, Niren Haldar, 65, a party leader, Swapan Mahanta, 50, a Bloc whole-timer, and Pradip Burman, 35, an employee of Dinhata municipality. The fifth person has not been identified yet.

The bodies lay on the road till fire brigade personnel took them to hospital.

Nearly 50 people, including 25 police personnel, were injured. Eight Bloc supporters suffered bullet injuries.

The crowd did turn violent but a preliminary assessment suggests the police fired indiscriminately – a charge levelled against the force after the March 14 firing in Nandigram which changed the complexion of the protest there and made it a national issue.

Most of those hit in Dinhata were shot above the waist — and the dead in the head or neck — which goes against guidelines laid down for crowd control.

The parallel with Nandigram and the telltale marks today raise questions whether Bengal police have either the skill or the resources to manage violent crowds.

Chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, who reached Delhi this evening, said soon after landing that "this is not an appropriate time" to comment but sources said the government was unhappy with the way the police responded in Dinhata.

Bloc leaders alleged a CRPF squad at the site also opened fire but officials said the central force was "only standing by".

Cooch Behar police chief Anil Kumar said his force had "no other means" to stop the violence. "They seemed determined to ransack the SDO's office and set it on fire."

Bloc secretary Ghosh, whose party has 23 MLAs, took pains to make a distinction between the police and the government. "We have called the police action barbaric and demonic. Had we described the government in the same terms, we would not have continued to be a part of it," he added.

"We are in the Left Front out of political necessity. So long as the necessity is there, we are with the front and will continue to be a part of it," Ghosh said.

But the veteran communist, who had criticised the government's industrialisation drive, had no harsh words for the chief minister who also holds the police portfolio.

"We have not demanded the police minister's resignation. Neither have we sought any explanation or condemnation of the police firing from the chief minister," Ghosh said.

Both Bhattacharjee and front chairman Biman Bose have spoken to Ghosh. In a statement this evening, the CPM called the incident "unfortunate and sad", but held the Bloc responsible for the violence.

Anna Reddy Of CPI ML Arrested in Orissa

BHUBANESWAR: Bommai Narasimha Goud. That's Anna Reddy who headed CPI (ML) Janashakti in Orissa. When the police arrested him, he was wearing a Moustache brand shirt, a Park Avenue trouser, an Omega wrist watch and Bata shoes.

A day after three radicals were picked up from a private hospital, police went on record saying one of them was him. A native of Ankireddygudam village of Andhra Pradesh's Nalagonda district, Reddy was the son of a 'toddy-tapper.'

He was into revolutionary movement since his student days and joined CPI (ML) Janashakti in 1992. Soon he was member of the provincial committee of the outfit's AP unit. In 2004, the central committee decided to expand base in Orissa and Reddy was the chosen one.

Reddy reportedly showed up at Kalinga Nagar in 2005 when displacement issue was beginning to boil in the industrial hub. After the police firing on January 2, 2006, police entry to the area was blocked and it facilitated his activities. His armed cadre strength swelled to 40 fanning out to Keonjhar and Dhenkanal besides Jajpur.

The outfit was getting into extortion big time. ''The annual collection could be to the tune of Rs 20 lakh or more. And it is the sharing of the booty, which led to a rift in the group,'' police sources said. On January 31, 2007, three forest officials were killed in Kandhar forests of Dhenkanal.

But police ran over a training camp in June that year dealing a body-blow with several local cadres breaking away. Meanwhile Nanika Jamuda, his partner who led the women's radical outfit, was garnering support. Her bank balance reportedly stands at Rs 3 lakh.

''One who led the mass struggle for poor and downtrodden had a rather lavish life style. When his followers would get treatment at government hospitals, his partner was admitted to Kalinga Hospital. That says a lot,'' an officer said.

Meanwhile, Nanika Jamuda, 23, who Anna and his aides the were attending to at Kalinga Hospital, has been shown as arrested but she continues to be hospitalised. The ultras, however, were said to have been arrested after their faction group tipped off police.

Police shoot dead 5 Bloc men, Bengal bandh today

Kolkata, February 5 Just when the Nandigram fires have begun to smoulder down, the CPM-led government in West Bengal is caught in another political headache: its partner Forward Bloc, testy for long, is now up in arms after at least five of its supporters were killed in police firing when they were protesting against the state government's failure to implement the job guarantee scheme and to give enough jobs to Muslims.

The incident happened outside the office of the Sub-divisional officer, Dinhata, in Coochbehar district this afternoon. This was a statewide protest but the maximum turnout was in Dinhata — a traditional bastion of the Forward Bloc — where a mob of about 12,000 gathered outside the SDO's office.

Police claimed that the protesters attacked them with bamboo staves and they had to open fire in self-defence at close quarters. One police inspector and a constable were seriously injured.

Shortly after news of the police firing reached the Forward Bloc's state headquarters in Kolkata, the party called a 24-hour statewide bandh. The bandh, the first-ever to be called by one Front partner against the CPM, is expected to disrupt life as it has the support of almost all Opposition parties, including the Trinamool Congress, the Congress, SUCI and even Front partners like the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP).

Nearly 50 people were injured in a police lathicharge and teargas. When the police failed to contain the rampaging mob, they resorted to firing killing four on the spot. Another supporter died in hospital later in the night. The fresh flare-up and the killings in police firing added fuel to a already charged political environment in which the two Front constituents have found themselves locked for quite some time now.

In fact, the Nandigram police firing, in which 14 people died, had prompted the Forward Bloc to demand a greater say for smaller partners in Left Front's decisions. Ashok Ghosh, the state secretary, rallied the Revolutionary Socialist Party and the CPI to set up an informal grouping dubbed the "mini-Left Front." Trinamool leader Mamata Banerjee, who has been trying to woo the Forward Bloc away from the Front ever since Nandigram, promptly called up Ghosh to tell him of her party's support.

Ghosh said the party has not been able to identify two of the four killed in police firing. "We are calling a bandh against police barbarism," he said alleging that the police had opened fire without any provocation. Sources said Ashok Ghosh and Biman Bose got into an argument, with the CPM leader pointing out that government vehicles had been set on fire by protestors before the police opened fire. Ghosh later told reporters: "I told Biman Bose not to spread lies and untruths."

The Chief Minister was not available for comment. A defensive CPM issued an official statement saying that the police had been attacked and police vehicles set on fire. "Police opened fire — and sadly, four people died," the CPM said.

Transport minister Subhash Chakraborty, demanded a judicial inquiry. "This incident will impact the unity of the Left Front," he said.

Replicate Greyhound Commandos In Other States: YSR (Interview)

Tuesday 05th of February 2008
To counter the spread of Maoist violence in the country, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S.R. Reddy believes the 'Greyhound commando experience' in his state must be replicated in other affected states.

'It has worked well in the state and I think the time has come where the Greyhound experience must be replicated elsewhere. Strong policing with an effective socio-economic programme is the answer,' Reddy, addressed commonly as YSR, told IANS in an interview here.

'As far as I see it, things are more or less under control. Every now and then, they (Maoists) indulge in high-profile attacks but that is just to show their token presence,' said YSR.

The Greyhounds, an elite commando force of Andhra Pradesh that was raised in 1989, have been dealing effectively with Maoist extremist violence and the force has acquired credibility in anti-extremist operations.

Only the best policemen of Andhra Pradesh make it to the Greyhound squad, which is one of the highest paid in the country - even better than the elite National Security Guard.

The state has been a long-time guerrilla hotbed but in the last two years, the elite force prowling the backcountry and supported by paid informants at the village level have managed to arrest or kill several top rebels.

The force, which numbers around 2,000 in the state, moves around in small bands of 15-25 commandos. They are specially trained for deep forest pursuit and combat.

Over the past two years, the rebel ranks have fallen from around 1,000 hardcore members to some 400 today, according to YSR.

'As I have been stressing, Naxal politics revolves around rural and land related issues. Hence, a streamlined strategy and a national agenda are also required to deal with the problem,' YSR said.

Recently, he formed a Land Commission and a separate department called Remote and Interior Area Development.

'These beginnings could become effective if we carry them forward them till the confidence of the poor and marginalized is regained because these measures attempt at dealing with the basic problems of Naxalite movement at present.'

'Under-development, poverty and unemployment have been the breeding ground for the Naxal movement.'

In 2006, Maoist rebels killed political leaders, including Telugu Desam Party leader T. Nageswar Rao and Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) district committee leader Rupu Reddy Ravinder Reddy.

Last year, former chief minister N. Janardhan Reddy and his wife Rajyalakshmi escaped unhurt while three Congress workers were killed in a Maoist attack in Nellore district.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has on several occasions referred to the Maoist threat as the country's most serious internal security challenge. Home ministry reports indicate that armed Maoists numbering nearly 10,000 have a presence in 170 districts in 15 states of the country, as of now, and spreading far and wide.

YSR also pointed out that he would not want to initiate peace talks with the armed rebels as he had done in September 2004. 'They refuse to lay down their arms. It won't work if I start another round,' he added.

Armed rebels were splintered into various armed factions, of which the biggest were the People's War Group and the Maoist Communist Centre. These merged and formed the Communist Party of India-Maoist in September 2004 even as YSR held abortive peace talks with local leaders.

(Murali Krishnan can be contacted at m.krish@ians.in)

Listening To Grasshoppers-Genocide, Denial And Celebration

By Arundhati Roy

(we are posting a speech by writer activist Arundhati Roy in Instambul on the occasion of first annivarsary of martyrdom of Hrant dink. Hrant Dink was a progressive journalist in Turkey was murdered by an assassin in front of his office in Istanbul On Friday January 19, 2007. Hrant Dink,a militant defender of democratic rights and freedom was the general editor of the weekly Agos, and was of Armenian descent. He was a vocal and active defender of human rights and persistently opposed violations of the people's rights by the authorities in Turkey. For his endeavours he was persecuted by the fascist regime and was hounded and vilified by the racist and the chauvinist media)

I never met Hrant Dink, a misfortune that will be mine for time to come. From what I know of him, of what he wrote, what he said and did, how he lived his life, I know that had I been here in Istanbul a year ago I would have been among the one hundred thousand people who walked with his coffin in dead silence through the wintry streets of this city, with banners saying, "We are all Armenians", "We are all Hrant Dink". Perhaps I'd have carried the one that said, "One and a half million plus one".* [*One-and-a-half million is the number of Armenians who were systematically murdered by the Ottoman Empire in the genocide in Anatolia in the spring of 1915. The Armenians, the largest Christian minority living under Islamic Turkic rule in the area, had lived in Anatolia for more than 2,500 years.]

***
In a way, my battle is like yours. But while in Turkey there's silence, in India, there is celebration.
***

I wonder what thoughts would have gone through my head as I walked beside his coffin. Maybe I would have heard a reprise of the voice of Araxie Barsamian, mother of my friend David Barsamian, telling the story of what happened to her and her family. She was ten years old in 1915. She remembered the swarms of grasshoppers that arrived in her village, Dubne, which was north of the historic city Dikranagert, now Diyarbakir. The village elders were alarmed, she said, because they knew in their bones that the grasshoppers were a bad omen. They were right; the end came in a few months, when the wheat in the fields was ready for harvesting. "When we left…(we were) 25 in the family," Araxie Barsamian says. "They took all the men folks. They asked my father, 'Where is your ammunition?' He says, 'I sold it.' So they says, 'Go get it.' So he went to the Kurd town to get it, they beat him and took all his clothes. When he came back there-this my mother tells me story-when he came back there, naked body, he went in the jail, they cut his arms…so he die in jail. …….And they took all the mens in the field, they tied their hands, and they shooted, killed every one of them."Araxie and the other women in her family were deported. All of them perished except Araxie. She was the lone survivor.This is, of course, a single testimony that comes from a history that is denied by the Turkish government, and many Turks as well.

I am not here to play the global intellectual, to lecture you, or to fill the silence in this country that surrounds the memory (or the forgetting) of the events that took place in Anatolia in 1915. That is what Hrant Dink tried to do, and paid for with his life.

***
Most genocidal killing from the 15th century onwards has been part of Europe's search for lebensraum.
***

The day I arrived in Istanbul, I walked the streets for many hours, and as I looked around, envying the people of Istanbul their beautiful, mysterious, thrilling city, a friend pointed out to me young boys in white caps who seemed to have suddenly appeared like a rash in the city. He explained that they were expressing their solidarity with the child-assassin who was wearing a white cap when he killed Hrant.

The battle with the cap-wearers of Istanbul, of Turkey, is not my battle, it's yours. I have my own battles to fight against other kinds of cap-wearers and torchbearers in my country. In a way, the battles are not all that different. There is one crucial difference, though. While in Turkey there is silence, in India there's celebration, and I really don't know which is worse.

In the state of Gujarat, there was a genocide against the Muslim community in 2002.

I use the word Genocide advisedly, and in keeping with its definition contained in Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The genocide began as collective punishment for an unsolved crime-the burning of a railway coach in which 53 Hindu pilgrims were burned to death. In a carefully planned orgy of supposed retaliation, 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered in broad daylight by squads of armed killers, organised by fascist militias, and backed by the Gujarat government and the administration of the day. Muslim women were gang-raped and burned alive.

Muslim shops, Muslim businesses and Muslim shrines and mosques were systematically destroyed. Some 1,50,000 people were driven from their homes.

Even today, many of them live in ghettos-some built on garbage heaps-with no water supply, no drainage, no streetlights, no healthcare. They live as second-class citizens, boycotted socially and economically. Meanwhile, the killers, police as well as civilian, have been embraced, rewarded, promoted. This state of affairs is now considered 'normal'. To seal the 'normality', in 2004, both Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani, India's leading industrialists, publicly pronounced Gujarat a dream destination for finance capital.

The initial outcry in the national press has settled down. In Gujarat, the genocide has been brazenly celebrated as the epitome of Gujarati pride, Hindu-ness, even Indian-ness. This poisonous brew has been used twice in a row to win state elections, with campaigns that have cleverly used the language and apparatus of modernity and democracy. The helmsman, Narendra Modi, has become a folk hero, called in by the BJP to campaign on its behalf in other Indian states.

As genocides go, the Gujarat genocide cannot compare with the people killed in the Congo, Rwanda and Bosnia, where the numbers run into millions, nor is it by any means the first that has occurred in India. (In 1984, for instance, 3,000 Sikhs were massacred on the streets of Delhi with similar impunity, by killers overseen by the Congress Party.) But the Gujarat genocide is part of a larger, more elaborate and systematic vision. It tells us that the wheat is ripening and the grasshoppers have landed in mainland India.

It's an old human habit, genocide is. It has played a sterling part in the march of civilisation. Amongst the earliest recorded genocides is thought to be the destruction of Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War in 149 BC. The word itself-genocide-was coined by Raphael Lemkin only in 1943, and adopted by the United Nations in 1948, after the Nazi Holocaust. Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as:

"Any of the following Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part; imposing measures
intended to prevent births within the group; [or] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

Since this definition leaves out the persecution of political dissidents, real or imagined, it does not include some of the greatest mass murders in history. Personally I think the definition by Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, authors of The History and Sociology of Genocide, is more apt.

Genocide, they say, "is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator." Defined like this, genocide would include, for example, the monumental crimes committed by Suharto in Indonesia (1 million) Pol Pot in Cambodia (1.5 million), Stalin in the Soviet Union (60 million), Mao in China (70 million).

All things considered, the word extermination, with its crude evocation of pests and vermin, of infestations, is perhaps the more honest, more apposite word. When a set of perpetrators faces its victims, in order to go about its business of wanton killing, it must first sever any human connection with it. It must see its victims as sub-human, as parasites whose eradication would be a service to society. Here, for example, is an account of the massacre of Pequot Indians by English Puritans led by John Mason in Connecticut in 1636:

Those that escaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw with their rapiers, so they were quickly dispatchte, and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyre, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente thereof, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice….

And here, approximately four centuries later, is Babu Bajrangi, one of the major lynchpins of the Gujarat genocide, recorded on camera in the sting operation mounted by Tehelka a few months ago:

We didn't spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire…hacked, burned, set on fire…we believe in setting them on fire because these bastards don't want to be cremated, they're afraid of it…. I have just one last wish…let me be sentenced to death…I don't care if I'm hanged…just give me two days before my hanging and I will go and have a field day in Juhapura where seven or eight lakhs of these people stay…I will finish them off…let a few more of them die…at least 25,000 to 50,000 should die.

I hardly need to say that Babu Bajrangi had the blessings of Narendra Modi, the protection of the police, and the love of his people. He continues to work and prosper as a free man in Gujarat. The one crime he cannot be accused of is Genocide Denial.

Genocide Denial is a radical variation on the theme of the old, frankly racist, bloodthirsty triumphalism. It was probably evolved as an answer to the somewhat patchy dual morality that arose in the 19th century, when Europe was developing limited but new forms of democracy and citizens' rights at home while simultaneously exterminating people in their millions in her colonies. Suddenly countries and governments began to deny or attempt to hide the genocides they had committed. "Denial is saying, in effect," says Professor Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima and America: Fifty Years of Denial, "that the murderers did not murder. The victims weren't killed. The direct consequence of denial is that it invites future genocide."

Of course today, when genocide politics meets the Free Market, official recognition-or denial-of holocausts and genocides is a multinational business enterprise. It rarely has anything to do to with historical fact or forensic evidence. Morality certainly does not enter the picture. It is an aggressive process of high-end bargaining, that belongs more to the World Trade Organisation than to the United Nations.

The currency is geopolitics, the fluctuating market for natural resources, that curious thing called futures trading and plain old economic and military might.

In other words, genocides are often denied for the same set of reasons as genocides are prosecuted. Economic determinism marinated in racial/ethnic/religious/national discrimination. Crudely, the lowering or raising of the price of a barrel of oil (or a tonne of uranium), permission granted for a military base, or the opening up of a country's economy could be the decisive factor when governments adjudicate on whether a genocide did or did not occur.

Or indeed whether genocide will or will not occur. And if it does, whether it will or will not be reported, and if it is, then what slant that reportage will take. For example, the death of two million in the Congo goes virtually unreported. Why? And was the death of a million Iraqis under the sanctions regime, prior to the US invasion, genocide (which is what Denis Halliday, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, called it) or was it 'worth it', as Madeleine Albright, the US ambassador to the UN, claimed? It depends on who makes the rules. Bill Clinton? Or an Iraqi mother who has lost her child?

Since the United States is the richest and most powerful country in the world, it has assumed the privilege of being the World's Number One Genocide Denier. It continues to celebrate Columbus Day, the day Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, which marks the beginning of a Holocaust that wiped out millions of native Indians, about 90 per cent of the original population. (Lord Amherst, the man whose idea it was to distribute blankets infected with smallpox virus to Indians, has a university town in Massachusetts, and a prestigious liberal arts college named after him).

In America's second Holocaust, almost 30 million Africans were kidnapped and sold into slavery. Well near half of them died during transportation. But in 2002, the US delegation could still walk out of the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, refusing to acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade were crimes. Slavery, they insisted, was legal at the time. The US has also refused to accept that the bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and Hamburg-which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians-were crimes, let alone acts of genocide. (The argument here is that the government didn't intend to kill civilians. This was the first stage in the development of the concept of "collateral damage".) Since the end of World War II, the US government has intervened overtly, militarily, more than 400 times in 100 countries, and covertly more than 6,000 times. This includes its invasion of Vietnam and the extermination, with excellent intentions of course, of three million Vietnamese (approximately 10 per cent of its population).

None of these has been acknowledged as war crimes or genocidal acts.

"The question is," says Robert MacNamara-whose career graph took him from the bombing of Tokyo in 1945 (1,00,000 dead overnight) to being the architect of the Vietnam War, to President of the World Bank-now sitting in his comfortable chair in his comfortable home in his comfortable country, "the question is, how much evil do you have to do in order to do good?"

Could there be a more perfect illustration of Robert Jay Lifton's point that the denial of genocide invites more genocide?

And what when victims become perpetrators? (In Rwanda, in the Congo?) What remains to be said about Israel, created out of the debris of one of the cruellest genocides in human history? What of its actions in the Occupied Territories? Its burgeoning settlements, its colonisation of
water, its new 'Security Wall' that separates Palestinian people from their farms, from their work, from their relatives, from their children's schools, from hospitals and healthcare? It is genocide in a fishbowl, genocide in slow motion-meant especially to illustrate that section of Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which says that genocide is any act that is designed to "deliberately inflict on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part".

The history of genocide tells us that it's not an aberration, an anomaly, a glitch in the human system.

Most of the genocidal killing from the 15th century onwards has been an integral part of Europe's search for what the Germans famously called Lebensraum-living space. Lebensraum was a word coined by the German geographer and zoologist Freidrich Ratzel to describe what he thought of as the dominant human species' natural impulse to expand its territory in its search for not just space, but sustenance. This impulse to expansion would naturally be at the cost of a less dominant species, a weaker species that Nazi ideologues believed should give way, or be made to give way, to the stronger one.

The idea of lebensraum was set out in precise terms in 1901, but Europe had already begun her quest for lebensraum 400 years earlier, when Columbus landed in America. The search for lebensraum also took Europeans to Africa: unleashing holocaust after holocaust. The Germans exterminated almost the entire population of the Hereros in Southwest Africa; while in the Congo, the Belgians' "experiment in commercial expansion" cost

10 million lives. By the last quarter of the 19th century, the British had exterminated the aboriginal people of Tasmania, and of most of Australia.

Sven Lindqvist, author of Exterminate the Brutes, argues that it was Hitler's quest for lebensraum-in a world that had already been carved up by other European countries-that led the Nazis to push through Eastern Europe and on toward Russia. The Jews of Eastern Europe and western Russia stood in the way of Hitler's colonial ambitions. Therefore, like the native
people of Africa and America and Asia, they had to be enslaved or liquidated. So, Lindqvist says, the Nazis' racist dehumanisation of Jews cannot be dismissed as a paroxysm of insane evil. Once again, it is a product of the familiar mix: economic determinism well marinated in age-old racism, very much in keeping with European tradition of the time.

It's not a coincidence that the political party that carried out the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, was called the Committee for Union & Progress.

'Union' (racial/ethnic/religious/national) and 'Progress' (economic determinism) have long been the twin coordinates of genocide.

Armed with this reading of history, is it reasonable to worry about whether a country that is poised on the threshold of "progress" is also poised on the threshold of genocide? Could the India being celebrated all over the world as a miracle of progress and democracy, possibly be poised on the verge of committing genocide? The mere suggestion might sound outlandish and, at this point of time, the use of the word genocide surely unwarranted. However, if we look to the future, and if the Tsars of Development believe in their own publicity, if they believe that There Is No Alternative to their chosen model for Progress, then they will inevitably have to kill, and kill in large numbers, in order to get their way.

Advani's chariot of fire: And so the Union project was launched

In bits and pieces, as the news trickles in, it seems clear that the killing and the dying has already begun.

It was in 1989, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the Government of India turned in its membership of the Non-Aligned Movement and signed up for membership of the Completely Aligned, often referring to itself as the 'natural ally' of Israel and the United States. (They have at least this one thing in common-all three are engaged in overt, neo-colonial military occupations: India in Kashmir, Israel in Palestine, the US in Iraq.)

Almost like clockwork, the two major national political parties, the BJP and the Congress, embarked on a joint programme to advance India's version of Union and Progress, whose modern-day euphemisms are Nationalism and Development. Every now and then, particularly during elections, they stage noisy familial squabbles, but have managed to gather into their fold even grumbling relatives, like the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

The Union project offers Hindu Nationalism (which seeks to unite the Hindu vote, vital you will admit, for a great democracy like India). The Progress project aims at a 10 per cent annual growth rate. Both these projects are encrypted with genocidal potential.

The Union project has been largely entrusted to the RSS, the ideological heart, the holding company of the BJP and its militias, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal. The RSS was founded in 1925. By the 1930s, its founder, Dr Hedgewar, a fan of Benito Mussolini, had begun to
model it overtly along the lines of Italian fascism. Hitler too was, and is, an inspirational figure. Here are some excerpts from the RSS Bible, We or Our Nationhood Defined by M.S. Golwalkar, who succeeded Dr Hedgewar as head of the RSS in 1940:

Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting on to take on these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been awakening.

Then:

In Hindustan, land of the Hindus, lives and should live the Hindu Nation…. All others are traitors and enemies to the National Cause, or, to take a charitable view, idiots….

The foreign races in Hindustan…may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment-not even citizen's rights.

And again:

To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races-the Jews.

Race pride at its highest has been manifested here…a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.

(How do you combat this kind of organised hatred? Certainly not with goofy preachings of secular love.)

By the year 2000, the RSS had more than 45,000 shakhas and an army of seven million swayamsevaks preaching its doctrine across India. They include India's former prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, the former home minister and current leader of the Opposition, L.K. Advani, and, of
course, the three-times Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi. It also includes senior people in the media, the police, the army, the intelligence agencies, judiciary and the administrative services who are informal devotees of Hindutva-the RSS ideology. These people, unlike
politicians who come and go, are permanent members of government machinery.

But the RSS's real power lies in the fact that it has put in decades of hard work and has created a network of organisations at every level of society, something that no other organisation can claim.

The BJP is its political front. It has a trade union wing (Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh), a women's wing (Rashtriya Sevika Samiti), a student wing (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad) and an economic wing (Swadeshi Jagaran Manch).

Its front organisation Vidya Bharati is the largest educational organisation in the non-governmental sector. It has 13,000 educational institutes including the Saraswati Vidya Mandir schools with 70,000 teachers and over 1.7 million students. It has organisations working with tribals (Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram), literature (Akhil Bharatiya Sahitya Parishad), intellectuals (Pragya Bharati, Deendayal Research Institute), historians (Bharatiya Itihaas Sankalan Yojanalaya), language (Sanskrit Bharti), slum-dwellers (Seva Bharati, Hindu Seva Pratishthan), health (Swami Vivekanand Medical Mission, National Medicos Organisation), leprosy patients (Bharatiya Kushtha Nivaran Sangh), cooperatives (Sahkar Bharati), publication of newspapers and other propaganda material (Bharat Prakashan, Suruchi Prakashan, Lokhit Prakashan, Gyanganga Prakashan, Archana Prakashan, Bharatiya Vichar Sadhana, Sadhana Pustak and Akashvani Sadhana), caste integration (Samajik Samrasta Manch), religion and proselytisation (Vivekananda Kendra, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Hindu Jagaran Manch, Bajrang Dal). The list goes on and on…

On June 11, 1989, Congress prime minister Rajiv Gandhi gave the RSS a gift. He was obliging enough to open the locks of the disputed Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which the RSS claimed was the birthplace of Lord Ram. At the National Executive of the BJP, the party passed a resolution to demolish the mosque and build a temple in Ayodhya. "I'm sure the resolution will translate into votes," said L.K. Advani. In 1990, he criss-crossed the country on his Rath Yatra, his Chariot of Fire, demanding the demolition of the Babri Masjid, leaving riots and bloodshed in his wake. In 1991, the party won 120 seats in Parliament. (It had won two in 1984). The hysteria orchestrated by Advani peaked in 1992, when the mosque was brought down by a marauding mob. By 1998, the BJP was in power at the Centre. Its first act in office was to conduct a series of nuclear tests. Across the country, fascists and corporates, princes and paupers alike, celebrated India's Hindu Bomb. Hindutva had transcended petty party politics.

In 2002, Narendra Modi's government planned and executed the Gujarat genocide. In the elections that took place a few months after the genocide, he was returned to power with an overwhelming majority. He ensured complete impunity for those who had participated in the killings. In the rare case where there has been a conviction, it is of course the lowly footsoldiers, and not the masterminds, who stand in the dock.

Impunity is an essential prerequisite for genocidal killing.

India has a great tradition of granting impunity to mass killers. I could fill volumes with the details.

In a democracy, for impunity after genocide, you have to "apply through proper channels". Procedure is everything. In the case of several massacres, the lawyers that the Gujarat government appointed as public prosecutors had actually already appeared for the accused. Several of them belonged to the RSS or the VHP and were openly hostile to those they were supposedly representing. Survivor witnesses found that, when they went to the police to file reports, the police would record their statements inaccurately, or refuse to record the names of the perpetrators. In several cases, when survivors had seen members of their families being killed (and burned alive so their bodies could not be found), the police would refuse to register cases of murder.

Ehsan Jaffri, the Congress politician and poet who had made the mistake of campaigning against Modi in the Rajkot elections, was publicly butchered. (By a mob led by a fellow Congressman.) In the words of a man who took part in the savagery:

Five people held him, then someone struck him with a sword…chopped off his hand, then his legs…then everything else…after cutting him to pieces, they put him on the wood they'd piled and set him on fire. Burned him alive.

The Ahmedabad Commissioner of Police, P.C. Pandey, was kind enough to visit the neighbourhood while the mob lynched Jaffri, murdered 70 people, and gang-raped 12 women before burning them alive. After Modi was re-elected, Pandey was promoted, and made Gujarat's Director-General of Police. The entire killing apparatus remains in place.

The Supreme Court in Delhi made a few threatening noises, but eventually put the matter into cold storage. The Congress and the Communist parties made a great deal of noise, but did nothing.

In the Tehelka sting operation, broadcast recently on a news channel at prime time, apart from Babu Bajrangi, killer after killer recounted how the genocide had been planned and executed, how Modi and senior politicians and police officers had been personally involved. None of this information was new, but there they were, the butchers, on the news networks, not just admitting to, but boasting about their crimes. The overwhelming public reaction to the sting was not outrage, but suspicion about its timing. Most people believed that the expose would help Modi win the elections again. Some even believed, quite outlandishly, that he had engineered the sting. He did win the elections. And this time, on the ticket of Union and Progress. A committee all unto himself. At BJP rallies, thousands of adoring supporters now wear plastic Modi masks, chanting slogans of death. The fascist democrat has physically mutated into a million little fascists. These are the joys of democracy. Who in Nazi Germany would have dared to put on a Hitler mask?

Preparations to recreate the 'Gujarat blueprint' are currently in different stages in the BJP-ruled states of Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka.

To commit genocide, says Peter Balkian, scholar of the Armenian genocide, you have to marginalise a sub-group for a long time. This criterion has been well met in India. The Muslims of India have been systematically marginalised and have now joined the Adivasis and Dalits, who have not just been marginalised, but dehumanised by caste Hindu society and its scriptures, for years, for centuries. (There was a time when they were dehumanised in order to be put to work doing things that caste Hindus would not do.

Now, with technology, even that labour is becoming redundant.) Part of the RSS's work involves setting Dalits against Muslims, Adivasis against Dalits.

While the 'people' were engaged with the Union project and its doctrine of hatred, India's Progress project was proceeding apace. The new regime of privatisation and liberalisation resulted in the sale of the country's natural resources and public infrastructure to private corporations. It has created an unimaginably wealthy upper class and growing middle classes who have naturally become militant evangelists for the new dispensation.

The Progress project has its own tradition of impunity and subterfuge, no less horrific than the elaborate machinery of the Union project. At the heart of it lies the most powerful institution in India, the Supreme Court, which is rapidly becoming a pillar of Corporate Power, issuing order after order allowing for the building of dams, the interlinking of rivers, indiscriminate mining, the destruction of forests and water systems. All of this could be described as ecocide-a prelude perhaps to genocide. (And to criticise the court is a criminal offence, punishable by imprisonment).

Ironically, the era of the free market has led to the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in India-the secession of the middle and upper classes to a country of their own, somewhere up in the stratosphere where they merge with the rest of the world's elite. This Kingdom in the Sky is a complete universe in itself, hermetically sealed from the rest of India. It has its own newspapers, films, television programmes, morality plays, transport systems, malls and intellectuals. And in case you are beginning to think it's all joy-joy, you're wrong. It also has its own tragedies, its own environmental issues (parking problems, urban air pollution); its own class struggles. An organisation called Youth for Equality, for example, has taken up the issue of Reservations, because it feels Upper Castes are discriminated against by India's pulverised Lower Castes. It has its own People's Movements and candle-light vigils (Justice for Jessica, the model who was shot in a bar) and even its own People's Car (the Wagon for the Volks launched by the Tata Group recently). It even has its own dreams that take the form of TV advertisements in which Indian CEOs (smeared with Fair & Lovely Face Cream, Men's) buy over international corporations, including an imaginary East India Company. They are ushered into their plush new offices by fawning white women (who look as though they're longing to be laid, the final prize of conquest) and applauding white men, ready to make way for the new kings. Meanwhile, the crowd in the stadium roars to its feet (with credit cards in
its pockets) chanting 'India! India!'

But there is a problem, and the problem is lebensraum. A Kingdom needs its lebensraum. Where will the Kingdom in the Sky find lebensraum? The Sky Citizens look towards the Old Nation. They see Adivasis sitting on the bauxite mountains of Orissa, on the iron ore in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. They see the people of Nandigram (Muslims, Dalits) sitting on prime land, which really ought to be a chemical hub. They see thousands of acres of farm land, and think, these really ought to be Special Economic Zones for our industries; they see the rich fields of Singur and know this really ought to be a car factory for the People's Car. They think: that's our bauxite, our iron ore, our uranium. What are those people doing on our land? What's our water doing in their rivers? What's our timber doing in their trees?

If you look at a map of India's forests, its mineral wealth and the homelands of the Adivasi people, you'll see that they're stacked up over each other.

So, in reality, those who we call poor are the truly wealthy. But when the Sky Citizens cast their eyes over the land, they see superfluous people sitting on precious resources. The Nazis had a phrase for them-überzahligen Essern, superfluous eaters.

The struggle for lebensraum, Friedrich Ratzel said after closely observing the struggle between Native Indians and their European colonisers in North America, is an annihilating struggle. Annihilation doesn't necessarily mean the physical extermination of people-by bludgeoning, beating, burning, bayoneting, gassing, bombing or shooting them. (Except sometimes. Particularly when they try to put up a fight. Because then they become Terrorists.) Historically, the most efficient form of genocide has been to displace people from their homes, herd them together and block their access to food and water. Under these conditions, they die without obvious violence and often in far greater numbers. "The Nazis gave the Jews a star on their coats and crowded them into 'reserves'," Sven Lindqvist writes, "just as the Indians, the Hereros, the Bushmen, the Amandabele, and all the other children of the stars had been crowded together. They died on their own when food supply to the reserves was cut off."

The historian Mike Davis says that between 12 million and 29 million people starved to death in India in the great famine between 1876 and 1892, while Britain continued to export food and raw material from India. In a democracy, Amartya Sen says, we are unlikely to have Famine. So in place of China's Great Famine, we have India's Great Malnutrition. (India hosts 57 million-more than a third-of the world's undernourished children.)

With the possible exception of China, India today has the largest population of internally displaced people in the world. Dams alone have displaced more than 30 million people. The displacement is being enforced with court decrees or at gunpoint by policemen, by government-controlled militias or corporate thugs. (In Nandigram, even the CPI(M) had its own
armed militia.) The displaced are being herded into tenements, camps and resettlement colonies where, cut off from a means of earning a living, they spiral into poverty.

In the state of Chhattisgarh, being targeted by corporates for its wealth of iron ore, there's a different technique. In the name of fighting Maoist rebels, hundreds of villages have been forcibly evacuated and almost 40,000 people moved into police camps. The government is arming some of them, and has created Salwa Judum, a 'people's militia'. While the poorest fight the poorest, in conditions that approach civil war, the Tata and Essar groups have been quietly negotiating for the rights to mine iron ore in Chhattisgarh. Can we establish a connection? We wouldn't dream of it. Even though the Salwa Judum was announced a day after the Memorandum of Understanding between the Tata Group and the government was signed.

It's not surprising that very little of this account of events makes it into the version of the New India currently on the market. That's because what is on sale is another form of denial-the creation of what Robert Jay Lifton calls a "counterfeit universe". In this universe, systemic horrors are converted into temporary lapses, attributable to flawed individuals, and a more 'balanced' happier world is presented in place of the real one. The balance is spurious: often Union and Progress are set off against each other, a liberal-secular critique of the Union project being used to legitimise the depredations of the Progress project. Those at the top of the food chain, those who have no reason to want to alter the status quo, are most likely to be the manufacturers of the "counterfeit universe".

Their job is to patrol the border, diffuse rage, delegitimise anger, and broker a ceasefire.

Consider the response of Shahrukh Khan to a question about Narendra Modi. "I don't know him personally…I have no opinion…," he says. "Personally they have never been unkind to me." Ramachandra Guha, liberal historian and founding member of the New India Foundation, a corporate-funded trust, advises us in his book-as well as in a series of highly publicised interviews-that the Gujarat government is not really fascist, and the genocide was just an aberration that has corrected itself after elections.

Editors and commentators in the 'secular' national press, having got over their outrage at the Gujarat genocide, now assess Modi's administrative skills, which most of them are uniformly impressed by. The editor of The Hindustan Times said, "Modi may be a mass murderer, but he's our mass murderer", and went on to air his dilemmas about how to deal with a mass murderer who is also a "good" chief minister.

In this 'counterfeit' version of India, in the realm of culture, in the new Bollywood cinema, in the boom in Indo-Anglian literature, the poor, for the most part, are simply absent. They have been erased in advance. (They only put in an appearance as the smiling beneficiaries of Micro-Credit Loans, Development Schemes and charity meted out by ngos.)

Last summer, I happened to wander into a cool room in which four beautiful young girls with straightened hair and porcelain skin were lounging, introducing their puppies to one another. One of them turned to me and said, "I was on holiday with my family and I found an old essay of yours about dams and stuff? I was asking my brother if he knew about what a bad time these Dalits and Adivasis were having, being displaced and all…. I mean just being kicked out of their homes 'n stuff like that? And you know, my brother's such a jerk, he said they're the ones who are holding India back. They should be exterminated. Can you imagine?"

The trouble is, I could. I can.

The puppies were sweet. I wondered whether dogs could ever imagine exterminating each other. They're probably not progressive enough.

That evening, I watched Amitabh Bachchan on TV, appearing in a commercial for The Times of India's 'India Poised' campaign. The TV anchor introducing the campaign said it was meant to inspire people to leave behind the "constraining ghosts of the past". To choose optimism over pessimism.

"There are two Indias in this country," Amitabh Bachchan said, in his famous baritone.

One India is straining at the leash, eager to spring forth and live up to all the adjectives t hat the world has been recently showering upon us. The Other India is the leash.

One India says, "Give me a chance and I'll prove myself."

The Other India says, "Prove yourself first, and maybe then, you'll have a chance."

One India lives in the optimism of our hearts; the Other India lurks in the scepticism of our minds.

One India wants, the Other India hopes… One India leads, the Other India follows.

These conversions are on the rise.

With each passing day, more and more people from the Other India are coming over to this
side. …

And quietly, while the world is not looking, a pulsating, dynamic, new India is emerging.

And finally:

Now in our 60th year as a free nation, the ride has brought us to the edge of time's great precipice….

And one India, a tiny little voice in the back of the head is looking down at the ravine and hesitating. The Other India is looking up at the sky and saying it's time to fly.

Here is the counterfeit universe laid bare.

It tells us that the rich don't have a choice (There Is No Alternative), but the poor do. They can choose to become rich. If they don't, it's because they are choosing pessimism over optimism, hesitation over confidence, want over hope. In other words, they're choosing to be poor. It's their fault. They are weak. (And we know what the seekers of lebensraum think of the weak.) They are the 'Constraining Ghost of the Past'. They're already ghosts.

"Within an ongoing counterfeit universe," Robert Jay Lifton says, "genocide becomes easy, almost natural."

The poor, the so-called poor, have only one choice: to resist or to succumb. Bachchan is right: they are crossing over, quietly, while the world's not looking. Not to where he thinks, but across another ravine, to another side. The side of armed struggle. From there they look back at the Tsars of Development and mimic their regretful slogan: 'There Is No Alternative.'

They have watched the great Gandhian people's movements being reduced and humiliated, floundering in the quagmire of court cases, hunger strikes and counter-hunger strikes. Perhaps these many million Constraining Ghosts of the Past wonder what advice Gandhi would have given the Indians of the Americas, the slaves of Africa, the Tasmanians, the Herero, the Hottentots, the Armenians, the Jews of Germany, the Muslims of Gujarat. Perhaps they wonder how they can go on hunger strike when they're already starving. How they can boycott foreign goods when they have no money to buy any goods. How they can refuse to pay taxes when they have no earnings.

Stamp out the Naxals: They have no place in Shining India

People who have taken to arms have done so with full knowledge of what the consequences of that decision will be. They have done so knowing that they are on their own. They know that the new laws of the land criminalise the poor and conflate resistance with terrorism. (Peaceful activists are ogws-overground workers.) They know that appeals to conscience, liberal morality and sympathetic press coverage will not help them now. They know no international marches, no globalised dissent, no famous writers will be around when the bullets fly.

Hundreds of thousands have broken faith with the institutions of India's democracy. Large swathes of the country have fallen out of the government's control. (At last count, it was supposed to be 25 per cent). The battle stinks of death, it's by no means pretty. How can it be when the helmsman of the army of Constraining Ghosts is the ghost of Chairman Mao himself? (The ray of hope is that many of the footsoldiers don't know who he is. Or what he did. More Genocide Denial? Maybe). Are they Idealists fighting for a Better World? Well… anything is better than annihilation.

The Prime Minister has declared that the Maoist resistance is the "single largest internal security threat". There have even been appeals to call out the army. The media is agog with breathless condemnation.

Here's a typical newspaper report. Nothing out of the ordinary. Stamp out the Naxals, it is called.

This government is at last showing some sense in tackling Naxalism. Less than a month ago, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked state governments to "choke" Naxal infrastructure and "cripple" their activities through a dedicated force to eliminate the "virus". It signalled a realisation that Naxalism must be stamped out through enforcement of law, rather than wasteful expense on development.

"Choke". "Cripple". "Virus". "Infested". "Eliminate". "Stamp Out".

Yes. The idea of extermination is in the air. And people believe that faced with extermination, they have the right to fight back.By any means necessary.

Perhaps they've been listening to the grasshoppers.