Maoist Resistance

Indian Vanguard Archive July to September

2009-10-04T04:58:00.001-07:00

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

Kerala: Armed struggle Maoists’ aim

2008-02-11T03:19:00.003-08:00

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

2008-02-11T03:19:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-11T03:09:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-11T03:08:00.001-08:00

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.

THE RED STAR, Nepal's National Magazine.

2008-02-09T04:41:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-09T04:32:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-09T04:24:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-09T04:20:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-09T04:19:00.003-08:00

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

2008-02-09T04:19:00.001-08:00

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

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

2008-02-07T02:48:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-07T02:43:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-07T02:40:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-07T02:39:00.001-08:00

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.

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

2008-02-06T06:47:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-06T06:43:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-06T06:40:00.001-08:00

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)

2008-02-06T06:36:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-06T06:35:00.001-08:00

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.

Close shave for jawans as Naxalites trigger landmine blast

2008-02-06T06:34:00.001-08:00

BARIPADA (ORISSA): Eight policemen on Tuesday had a narrow escape when landmines planted by Naxalites exploded just after their vehicles passed the spot at Jamapani in Orissa's border with Jharkhand.

The explosion took place soon after the Special Operation Group jawans on four motor-cycles travelled along the place where the Naxalites had planted the landmines on the hilly road at Gorumahisani, Superintendent of Police Dayal Gangwar said.

The extremists present in the surrounding areas opened fire at the SOG personnel, after which the security men retaliated, triggering a gunbattle which continued for over half-an-hour, he said.

The exchange of fire stopped when the Naxalites escaped into Jharkhand. No security man suffered any injury in the gunbattle while it could not be ascertained if the ultras had suffered any casualty.

Combing operation and patrolling have been launched in the area to keep a tab on the movement of the Naxalites, he said.

Naxal menace: Forest dept’s attitude flayed

2008-02-06T06:31:00.001-08:00

Naxal menace: Forest dept's attitude flayed
Wednesday February 6 2008 08:24 IST

Express News Service

HURRY! GEMS Portfolio closing on 15th Feb'08

MADIKERI: The negligent attitude of the Karnataka Forest Department will help the naxals have their base in the Pushpagiri Hills, alleged Coorg Western Ghat Inhabitants Rehabilitation Organisation convener K U Ravi Thammaiah.

Addressing the media here on Tuesday, Thammaiah said that a group of thirteen naxals were sheltered in the Western Ghats of Kodagu for the last two to three months.

Despite it was brought to the notice of the Forest department, it didn't initiate any action against them, he charged.

"The Forest department has converted 8,000 acres of revenue land as forest land at the Pusphagiri Wildlife division by erecting boards throughout the areas in Hammiyaala, Mandalapatti and Mukkoldu villages of Madikeri taluk.

Eventhough, the High Court has directed to maintain status quo, the department has violated the court directions," he said.

Newindpress

Maoists to focus attention on welfare of prisoners in State

2008-02-05T02:53:00.001-08:00

HYDERABAD: After commencing sustained efforts to revive the naxalite movement in Andhra Pradesh, Maoists have now begun focussing on building a movement for the welfare of prisoners in the State.

The latest decision to organise a movement against the delay on part of the Government to release prisoners on good conduct on national days comes in the backdrop of a resolution passed by the Maoist party at its ninth congress meeting held in Bheembandh forests of Bihar in January last year.

Following the congress resolution on "Prisoners' Struggles", the Maoist party had organised one of the biggest jail breaks, when it's fighting force, the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) and the People's Militia carried out a surprise raid on the district jail in Dantewada of Chhattisgarh on December 16, 2007.

The Maoist raid led to the escape of 299 prisoners including 110 Maoists from the jail. The Dantewada jail break had indicated the resolve of the Maoists to get their jailed cadres released in consonance with the decision of the party to "carry out every possible means to free our comrades from the jails," as enunciated in the resolution.

Though the Maoist movement is not strong in Andhra Pradesh, as it is in the Bastar forests, the party has been sparing no effort to revive the movement here.

In this backdrop, the North Telangana Special Zonal Committee (NTSZC) secretary, Chandranna, and the Godavari Valley regional committee secretary of Janashakti, Bharat, issued a joint statement condemning the "inordinate delay" in releasing the prisoners of good conduct in State jails.

Incidentally, the jailed Maoist cadres also issued a statement condemning the delay in the release of prisoners. The jailed comrades announced that the Maoist and the general prisoners had launched a hunger strike in Warangal jail from January 26.

The Maoist prisoners called upon other prisoners to join their agitation to force the government to release those who had been certified as having good conduct.

The release of prisoners has been hanging fire ever since a public interest litigation was filed in the Supreme Court alleging that the ruling Congress was trying to release some of its convicted leaders under the fig leaf of 'good conduct'.

Controversy surrounded the reported move by the ruling Congress to release Gouru Venkat Reddy, husband of Gouru Charita Reddy, a ruling party legislator from Kurnool district.

The Maoist party has decided to form action committees ('Jail Bandi Sanghursh Samiti') to fight for the rights of prisoners.

One of the main demands is to force the authorities to keep all Maoist prisoners in one barrack.

The resolution says that "such action committees are quite helpful in further enhancement of the spirit of unity and sacrifice, and in identifying vacillators and coverts."

Clearly the Maoist party is worried about the security forces winning over the jailed naxalites and using the information ferreted out to launch counter-strikes.

Naxalism recruits victims of progress

2008-02-05T02:49:00.001-08:00

Crimson Concentrate
Naxalism recruits victims of progress . This is a warning.

Dilip Simeon

RED SUN: TRAVELS IN NAXALITE COUNTRY
by Sudeep Chakravarti
Penguin/Viking
Pages: 320; Rs. 495

Red Sun evokes a sense of distance. Not geographically—the author's travelled widely in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Bengal. He has interviewed activists, bureaucrats, policemen, businessmen and intellectuals. He has discussed Maoism with the legendary Kanu Sanyal and K.P.S. Gill, probed links between Nepali and Indian Maoists, met health ministers who want to solve the problem via vasectomies, security experts who want bigger budgets, and students convinced

that India will soon become their version of a People's Republic.

Rather, it's the distance that separates its readers from those he writes about; industrialising India from its victims; the dreams of middle-class youth from those of the impoverished cadres who look forward to an ideologically-driven dictatorship. The author's investigations highlight the apartheid-like tendencies that have resulted in a spiral of violence, and the lackadaisical attitude of the political class to the administrative failures of which Maoism is a glaring symptom.

The writing is unpretentious and readable. Errors have crept in—the Khairlanji atrocities were committed by backward castes, not upper castes. Neither Saroj Datta nor Sushital Ray-Chowdhury 'disappeared'. The first was found dead in the Calcutta Maidan and the second died a natural death. Chakravarti's descriptions are interspersed with reflective comments, but no political theory. That is their strength, for the book raises grievous questions. Why has our political system created masses of desperate people? Millions of Indians have no idea what citizenship means. Development budgets for conflict-affected areas evaporate, with no benefit to the people. The judiciary has allowed lakhs of suits to accumulate—we tend to overlook how much this failure has contributed to the alienation of the poor. When even the middle-class despairs of justice, what might the poor expect? Andhra's police (and not only them), Chakravarti reminds us, are notorious for their extra-judicial functioning. In a word, the activities of state personnel have undermined the Constitution and fostered the Maoist argument that the Indian state is treacherous. Chakravarti could have mentioned the acceptability of lawlessness when it follows a communal script. Major parties have used violence as a political tool. 1984 and 2002 are iconic years in modern India, yet some of our opinion-makers can denounce Naxalite violence in the same breath as they extol Narendra Modi's bloodstained achievements. Chhattisgarh's human rights activist Binayak Sen rots in jail while genocidal maniacs command state institutions. Our establishment couldn't do more to assist Maoist propaganda.

There's no end in sight. Maoists have concentrated on the mineral-rich forests in central and eastern India. These are home to tribal communities, prey to land seizures by corporates and real-estate sharks. Meanwhile, the war economy has spawned millionaires. Informal paramilitaries such as the Ranvir Sena (insufficiently dealt with) and the Salwa Judum (which enjoys semi-legal standing) have sunk roots. They habitually seize or receive resources, reportedly paying salaries and compensations. Scarred people acquire a psychological commitment to conflict—we could name this the 'revenge investment'.

Chakravarti reminds us of the casual Indian yearning for extreme solutions. "Maoists are practising what we preach daily without a second thought." They build upon a philosophical tradition that grants the owners of great ideas the right to take unilateral action. Ideologically conceived revolutions derive their legitimacy not from democratic processes, but from their assumed intellectual superiority. Since there is no criterion by which this may be tested, debates are conducted at knifepoint.That's why differences amongst revolutionaries lead to factionalism. Meanwhile, those who despise democracy demand the 'right' to murder whom they like. Democracy is the last hope of the poor, but both right- and left-wing extremists have undertaken to destroy it. And our establishment gleefully seizes the opportunity to turn authoritarian. Paramilitaries have emerged as capitalism's loyal opposition.

Chakravarti foresees a polity of gated city-states with captive hinterlands; an India consisting of a privileged In-Land and a desolate Out-Land for the victims of development. (The Shiv Sena has long admired the Soviet and Chinese device of internal passports.) This forecast was also made by Aseem Shrivastava, when he argued that SEZs are the germ of corporate city-states, the first stage of an assault on agriculture that may entail the demolition of Indian democracy. With over 500 SEZs on the anvil, some 250 million Indians may be displaced in the coming decades. Naxalism will someday be seen as the stepchild of the Indian Constitution. Red Sun should be read widely, especially by those mesmerised by newfound wealth.

CPI appeals to Naxals to contest polls

2008-02-05T02:40:00.001-08:00

UNI

Dantewada, (CG) Feb 2 Appealing to Naxalites to enter the poll arena in Chhattisgarh on the lines of Nepal, the CPI has urged the Raman Singh-led BJP government to initiate dialogue with the ultras in order to bring them back to the mainstream.

A resolution in this regard was adopted at the CPI's two-day Dantewada district conference that concluded at Dhurli village today. Briefing reporters, CPI's state secretary, Mr C L Patel and national executive member, Mr Chittaranjan Bakshi said the conference appealed the Naxalites to join the electoral battle.

It urged the Chhattisgarh government to suspend the anti-naxal 'Salwa Judum' movement launched since June, 2005 and invite the Naxalites for talks through some NGO as mediator. "Peace in Naxal-hit areas could be restored only after the ultras were brought to negotiating table", said Mr Bakshi.

Declining to play the role of mediator due to ideological differences, the CPI leader said some NGOs were ready to act as mediator. Stating that backwardness and poverty led to the growth of Naxalism in the state, Mr Bakshi said the state government should initiate programmes for all-round development of the backward region. "The government is responsible for the backwardness," he said, adding the government should also facilitate the return of tribals, given shelter in relief camps, to their native villages.

The conference also opposed preparation of voters lists at relief camps, where those displaced due to the 'Salwa Judum' movement had been given shelter. It took exception to preventing senior CPI leader, Mr Gurudas Das Gupta from addressing a public meeting at Lohandiguda.

Residents of about 600 villages and hamlets in Dantewada had been given shelter in about 23 relief camps close to police stations. About 300 schools in these villages had been closed down and teachers attached with the relief camps.

Rural economy is in shambles with fields left uncultivated and domestic cattle let loose in forest or sold in panic after the villagers were caught in hostilities between Naxals and government-supported Salwa Judum volunteers.

Children housed in relief camps were covered under the mid-day meal scheme meant for school children, while other camp inmates were initially given subsidised foodgrain as ration. Now they eke out a living by working in construction works occasionally.

http://www.navhindtimes.com/articles.php?Story_ID=020314

Childhood lost in India's war against Maoists

2008-02-01T03:06:00.001-08:00

10 hours ago

DANTEWADA, India (AFP) — Asha and Ranu were just in their teens when they were given khaki uniforms and .303 rifles to help local police fight Maoist rebels in the forests of central India.

"We thought we should do the same as these Naxals do, who come with knives and catch hold of people and beat them up," said Asha, a member of India's escalating war on the Naxalites, as the Maoist rebels are known.

"So we joined the police," said the bright-eyed 17-year-old, who says she was recruited about two years ago as a state-supported backlash against the rebels in central India's forests got underway.

Ranu is a year younger and was also recruited as a "special police officer" in the tribal region of Dantewada, the epicentre of India's Maoist insurgency.

"Every house has to send one person, so I went in," said Ranu, who along with her family fled her village in Chhattisgarh state and went to a state-run relief camp where thousands of people live under police security.

Maoist rebels, who control large swathes of the impoverished state, made inroads here two decades ago by fighting for better wages for villagers who live by gathering leaves for Indian cigarettes for a pittance.

The rebels have now been branded by India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the biggest single threat to national security.

With regular police shunning the combat zone in the south of Chhattisgarh, authorities appear to have enrolled child soldiers from the special security camps that now house 50,000 villagers who have fled or have been brought in from Maoist areas.

In the camps, officials urged families to send one member to the special police, a rag-tag force of 3,600 in south Chhattisgarh that outnumber the regular police.

Ranu, who, like other youngsters interviewed, is fearful of speaking out and does not want her full name used, said at first her task comprised of standing at a check post.

With rifle in hand, she asked people "where they were coming from and where they were going to."

As rebels began attacking the special police, she now mostly does guard duty in the camp. "We will be able to fire and we have fired," she said. But when asked when she had actually used her gun, she replied that she has only used it during training.

Officials, however, deny minors are fighting on behalf of the state.

"No minor as an SPO (Special Police Officer) is the stated policy of the Ministry of Home Affairs and we strictly adhere to that," insisted Dantewada superintendent of police Rahul Sharma.

"We have proper documented reports where their age is above 18."

Sharma also countered that the rebels recruit children as young as seven into their youth wing, using them as informants and to lay explosives.

But human rights groups say that youngsters in the police force appeared to be schooled to say they were eighteen in response to any inquiries.

And a lawsuit filed in India's Supreme Court last year by two noted academics and a former government officer called for an enquiry into human rights violations related to the state's anti-Maoist operation, alleging minors have been enlisted.

The SPOs, whose male members help guide paramilitary forces to remote villages to find Maoists, have been increasingly targeted by the rebels, with some 62 killed last year out of 188 security force deaths.

The young policewoman Ranu, who earns about 35 dollars a month, hinted that ages were indeed bumped up on paper.

"We have all been made 18," she said defensively.

Recruits are required to show that someone in their family lost their life or was hurt in some way by the Maoists -- implying that the authorities want a force that is bent on revenge.

Police say the requirement is needed to ensure their loyalty.

Munna, aged 18 and also living in a security camp, said he joined because his older brother was hacked to death with an axe by the Maoists two years ago.

"What was the point of just sitting around in the camp?" said Munna, dressed in a ribbed shirt and track pants, a self-loading rifle over one shoulder. "I needed to earn money."

Maoist leader Anna Reddy arrested

2008-02-01T03:03:00.001-08:00

Bhubaneswar, (PTI): A day after the arrest of four naxalites from a hospital here, the Orissa police on Thursday claimed that one of them was a hardcore Maoist leader, Anna Reddy, who was involved in anti-industry violence.

According to Jajpur District Superintendent of Police (SP), D S Kutte, the four were identified as Anna Reddy, Rani Jamuda, Manjeresh Hansda and Ramachandra Das alias Babuli.

Kutte said he along with a team of police personnel rushed to the private hospital in the state capital after receiving information that Anna Reddy was among the three persons visting a woman patient.

"We confirmed the trio as naxalites after verifying their movement and telephone calls," the SP said. Reddy was wanted in at least 14 criminal cases including murder, extortion and abduction for ransom. Reddy was also wanted for the killing of a forest guard in Dhenkanal district.

The three as well as the patient, Rani Jamuda, were arrested in a carefully executed operation, the police said.

Besides instigating the tribal people in Kalinga Nagar area in Jajpur district against industrilization, Reddy heading CPI(ML-Janashakti) in Orissa was also active in neighbouring Dhenkanal and Keonjhar district, the SP said.

"He was also supporting anti-Vedanta stir near Puri. The local people near Puri were opposed to the establishment of a world-class university by Vedanta," Kutte said. He was leading a faction of maoists who opposed to industrialisation in the state.

The man identified by the police as Anna Reddy, however, claimed that his name was Gumai Naresh Lu, a resident of Andhra Pradesh. He alleged that the police was 'falsely framing' charges against him.

Kutte said the police had evidence to prove that the man arrested was Anna Reddy.

The SP said Anna Reddy had gone to the hospital in the city to look after his 'close relation', Rani Jamuda, a woman associated with the anti-industry movement at Kalinga Nagar.

India: Fasting People’s March editor hospitalised, denied bail

2008-02-01T03:00:00.001-08:00

January 30th, 2008

21 January 2008. A World to Win News Service. P. Govindan Kutty, editor of the Indian Maoist monthly magazine People's March, was transferred from jail to hospital 9 January. He had been on hunger strike since 20 December, when he was remanded to prison following his arrest the day before. On 18 January, before the Kerala High Court, the state government opposed the third and latest effort to obtain his freedom on bail. Once again adjusting the charges against him, the authorities have now made the political nature of this case perfectly clear. According to The Hindu (21 January), "In a statement filed in response to his bail petition, the police said there was a possibility of the accused indulging in anti-national activities if he was released on bail. The police said he had been propagating the CPI (Maoist) ideologies and programme and publishing the CPI (Maoist) mouthpiece People's March."
There has been no further news about Kutty's health and the conditions of his imprisonment. His age is variously given as between 60-68.
A group of five Indian human rights activists was able to meet with the journalist in prison 8 January. They told a press conference that after his arrest, Kutty had been permitted to talk to a lawyer only with the authorities present. Acting on "orders from higher authorities," they said, his jailers were force-feeding him glucose after tying his hands and legs. They characterized his treatment as "torture". The next day, the authorities announced that he has been transferred from Viyyur prison to a hospital following what they called the "deterioration" of his state of health.
People's March is a licensed, government-registered publication. It has never before been banned or faced legal proceedings, although it seems to have been outlawed since Kutty's arrest. There is nothing clandestine about it. Kutty has long been publicly identified as its editor, publisher and owner, with his address figuring in the masthead. Calling itself "The Voice of the Indian Revolution", it has never claimed to be an organ of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist). Some of its articles have been reprinted by the mainstream Indian press.
Apparently the authorities first arrested the editor and then tried to find suitable charges. According to The Hoot, the blog of a Delhi-based media watch group, which has been one of the few sources of information on this case, after Kerala police raided the small office of this journalist, ransacked the premises and confiscated the computer and literature, they initially announced he would be accused of helping two alleged CPI(M) members find shelter. The two, Malla Raya Reddy and Suguna, had been captured in a secret police raid on a group of construction workers from neighbouring Andra Pradesh living alongside a road in Kerala a few days before. The columnist, N. P. Chekkutty, who identifies himself as "a fellow Kerala editor," the hue and cry raised by local people who stopped the police vehicle carrying the two prisoners may be what forced the police to take them to court rather then simply killing them, as often happens in such cases.
However, no evidence of any connection between Ketty and the two arrested persons was ever presented, and no charges seem to have been brought in this regard. Instead, the main accusation against him was that he had written an article five years ago allegedly praising an attack on the widely hated Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandra Babu Naidu. No legal action had been taken against him or the magazine in this regard before now. The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act under which these accusations have been framed is usually used against common criminals, not in political cases, and never against a media person. Now, at his most recent bail hearing, he has been charged purely and simply with the content and opinions expressed in his magazine.
The blog columnist goes on the say that following the arrest, the police fed the local media stories about Kutty's personal life "which vilified the man as a demon." Since then the Malayam language press in Kerala has published little or nothing about his case, and even news in the Kerala and national English-language media is sparse. A media columnist writing in The Hindu (6 January), one of India's leading national publications, noted that there had been practically no mainstream press coverage of the cases of Kutty and two other figures imprisoned on charges of Maoist associations in 2007, Binakayak Sen, a well-known doctor arrested after he treated an accused Maoist prisoner in jail with the permission of prison authorities in Chhattisgarh, and Prashant Rahi, a well-known journalist in Uttarakhand. Much of the news has been spread by newspaper blogs and others run by political activists, often shut down by the authorities, only to reappear on other sites.
Nevertheless, some local and national media and people of various political persuasions have begun to make Kutty's case more broadly known. Statements of support have come from the Kerala Human Rights Samithi, student organizations, journalists, writers, scientists and others, as well as the Revolutionary Democratic Front of India (rdfindia@gmail.com).
The treatment of the human rights activists who saw Kutty has also stirred some further protests. The five, including several lawyers and a publisher, came from Delhi and Tamil Nadu as well as other cities in Kerala. They were initially blocked by the prison authorities, who wanted to force them to urge the editor to give up his protest fast. They succeeded in entering the prison the following day, but as they were leaving, the police tried to take them to a police station to "verify their identities" because they were suspected of being "extremists". The five protested that they had already presented their identification documents to the jail authorities. "Somehow, they managed to escape," wrote the newspaper Newindpress. They made a public appearance later that day at a conference at the Press Club in Thrissur, where they demanded that the state of Kerala drop the "false case" against Kutty and compensate him for his illegal detention.

CPI-Maoist declares its presence in Kerala

2008-02-01T02:56:00.001-08:00

M.P. Prashanth

HURRY! GEMS Portfolio closing on 15th Feb'08

KOZHIKODE: For the first time since its inception in 2004, the CPI-Maoist has come out in open with a statement from its state organising committee confirming the outfit's presence in the state.

The statement from Mohan, the state organising secretary, says that many in the CPI and the CPM are co-operating with Maoists in Kerala and that they are covertly working for the organisation.

Till now the Maoists have been operating in the state under the cover of the Revolutionary People's Front (RPF), the frontal organisation formed in July 2007.

But now they have decided to declare their presence after they found that the developments after the arrest of their central committee member Malla Raja Reddy are turning to their favour.

The CPI-Maoist formed its state organising committee way back in 2005. It has full-fledged district committees in Wayanad, Kozhikode, Kannur and Palakkad.

Raja Reddy, who is known as Sathyanna among Maoists, has been deputed to co-ordinate the party activities in Kerala. He is the secretary of the party's south west regional bureau which includes Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

The Maoists do not intend to replicate the activities they are engaged in their liberated zones in areas like Dandakaranya. In Kerala, the Maoists will be concentrating more on land agitations and price hike.

They feel that the supporters of Left parties are dejected over their stand on vital social issues. The attempt is on to wean away the disgruntled elements in the traditional Communist parties.

The Maoists in Kerala are in the initial phase of the protracted people's war which means that stress will be on party-building and squad work. During this period the Maoists will be keeping a low profile and they would avoid any engagement with the security agencies.

The coming days will witness more activities on the part of the RPF which will be organising functions related to land issues at Ernakulam and Wayanad.

There are also attempts to form a students organisation to attract the the SFI activists who are at loggerheads with the official faction of the outfit.

Revolutionary Students Front is the name temporarily suggested for the organisation.

The statement from state organising secretary says that the Maoist will be engaged in working against the pro-imperialist policies pursued by the Centre and the State Governments.

"Sixty years of parliamentary practice has only added to the woes of the people. The arrest of Sathyanna has been presented with an element of mystery by the government.

Maoists have been in contact with people from various segments of society who have realised the hollowness of both fronts," the statement said.

The statement says that People's March editor P. Govindan Kutty is in no way related to the CPI-Maoist. People's March is not the mouthpiece of the CPI-Maoist.

"Whether the CPI-Maoist is a banned organisation or not is not an issue to be discussed in connection with the arrest of Govindan Kutty," the statement said.

Anti-Maoist cells in offing as Delhi feels the ultra-Left heat

2008-01-29T04:35:00.001-08:00

Raipur, January 28 After keeping the establishment in over a dozen states and some 150 districts on their toes, Naxalite extremism seems to have now reached the Capital. The Delhi Police has identified 16 police stations as prone to "Maoist infiltration".

Twelve of these stations fall in the north-west police district.

The threat has forced the security apparatus to plan for an anti-Naxalite cell in the city, say Intelligence sources.

Sources in Delhi Police say senior officers are in touch with their counterparts in Naxal-affected states such as Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, and West Bengal. "The arrangement is essentially for intelligence sharing to check the spread of ultra-Left extremism in Delhi," a police source said.

Chhattisgarh DGP Vishwaranjan said, "States like Gujarat and Delhi, where some Maoist activity has been detected, get in touch with us through the Intelligence Bureau."

About the proposed anti-Naxalite cell, sources said it has been planned on the lines of the anti-terror unit of Special Cell. "Unlike the Special Cell, which attempts to thwart terrorist activities in general, the focus of this cell would entirely be on containing Maoist extremism."

Delhi Police Commissioner Y S Dadwal neither confirmed nor denied the proposal of forming an anti-Naxalite cell but told Newsline that the city police are looking into Naxalite menace with "seriousness".

Senior officers said the idea of forming the cell follows revelations by several arrested senior Maoists ideologues that the extremists were planning to move towards big cities, the national capital being one.

Intelligence inputs gathered by the security forces reveal that several meetings between Naxalite cadres and their sympathisers have already taken place in Delhi.

Cop Shoots Self, Says Maoists Did It

2008-01-29T04:33:00.001-08:00

Apparently desperate for a transfer from this Maoist-infested eastern Vidarbha district, a police constable shot himself and tried to pass it off as Maoist attack last weekend.

Anand Kulkarni, posted in remote Etapalli village of the district for the last 10 years, was highly disturbed about the health of his old parents in Pune in western Maharashtra, police sources here said.

The young constable created quite a flutter during a sports festival as he limped to the ground from the nearby bushes and shouted that he was hit by a Maoist bullet when he was answering a nature's call.

The police officers who were led to the spot by the injured cop grew suspicious when they saw a bullet buried in the ground besides a cartridge, a water bottle and a bullet-riddled handkerchief.

Quizzed whether the Maoists fired at him from the sky, Anand spilled the beans saying he fired a shot in his left thigh and another in the air in a disturbed state of mind.

'He was recently engaged to be married and apparently tried the trick in the hope of getting transferred to his home district', Superintendent of Police Rajesh Pradhan told IANS.

'The constable should have apprised his superiors of his problems if any, through the laid down procedure; he could have received a personal hearing from me,' said Pradhan.

Pradhan clarified that a constable recruited in a district is normally supposed to serve the entire term there.

R.M. Rokde, additional superintendent of police, told IANS that the on-going sports festival was meant to be an awareness and confidence building measure about the government schemes for the people in the Maoist infested district.

'The Maoists, who have recently surrendered before the district collector and are being rehabilitated, are specially participating in the festival', he said. Such desperate acts committed during such occasions would send a wrong signal, he added.

Describing the constable's attempt as a serious matter, Pradhan said an offence has been registered against him and he would also have to face a departmental inquiry

Monitor 'red corridor' in North East: Centre

2008-01-29T04:32:00.001-08:00

Worried over the gradual extension of the 'red corridor' to the Northeast, the Centre has asked the intelligence agencies to closely monitor the growing network of the Maoists and their nexus with the militant outfits of the region.

"The Home Ministry has sent instructions to the intelligence departments of different security forces, seeking detail information about the network established by the Maoists in several parts of Northeast, especially Assam and Nagaland," a top defence official told PTI here.

The Centre's instruction comes in the wake of a revelation from an arrested senior Maoist cadre in Jharkhand that the rebel group has already formed units in different districts of Assam, including Karbi Anglong and Golaghat.

Defence sources confirmed that CPI-Maoist central committee member Mahru Mahto alias Narayan Mahto, who was arrested in November last from Bokaro, had revealed during interrogation about the growing network of the Maoists in the Northeast, especially in Assam.

What is more worrying, according to the official, is the nexus between the Maoists and some rebel groups of the Northeast like All Adivashi National Liberation Army (AANLA) and the NSCN (IM).

Top Naxal Papi Reddy plans to give up???

2008-01-29T04:28:00.001-08:00

Tuesday January 29 2008 08:15 IST

WARANGAL: CPI (Maoist) Central committee member and Bihar State in-charge, Lanka Venkata Papi Reddy alias Ranganna alias Lachanna, is planning to surrender to the police due to ill health, it is learnt.

The 47-year-old top Naxal leader, most wanted in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar and Jharkhand, is carrying a reward of Rs 10 lakh on his head. The police department has recommended to the State Government to raise the reward amount to Rs 12 lakh.

Papi Reddy hails from the remote village of Takkellapadu in Atmakur mandal of Warangal district.

He went underground in 1980 and worked for the party in various capacities including member of the district committee, secretary of Mulug area committee, member of North Telangana Forest Division Committee (NTFDC) and squad commander of Warangal district committee up to 1990.

Then he moved to Bastar forest and strengthened the party there. He worked as secretary of the Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee (DKSZC) for a long time before the present secretary Kosa.

He has been working as the Central committee member of the party for the one decade. After the state-sponsored tribal movement Salwa Judum came into existence in Bastar region three years ago, the Maoist party strategically shifted him to Bihar and made him in-charge of the State party unit.

About 45 cases were registered against him in four states. Papi Reddy married a tribal woman in Bastar 15 years ago. He has a 13-year-old daughter, Lanka Tejasri, who is studying Class VIII in a school at Hanamkonda in Warangal district.

Papi Reddy kept his daughter in the care of his mother Lakshmikanthamma, who lives in his native village Takkellapadu. She discontinued her studies after Class VI due to financial constraints.

Learning about Tejasri's plight at a meeting with the parents, children and other relatives of Naxalites, Warangal Superintendent of Police Soumya Mishra adopted her and made arrangements for her studies. The SP is looking after her for the past 15 months.

Maoist leader’s whereabouts a mystery

2008-01-29T04:25:00.001-08:00

HYDERABAD: Confusion reigns over the whereabouts of CPI (Maoist) State secretary Sambasivudu as his relatives allege that he was picked up by police while the latter deny the same.

The parents and a brother of the Maoist leader have already met Home Minister K. Jana Reddy twice with a request to produce him but Mr. Reddy clarified to them that he was not in the custody of police.

DGP S.S.P. Yadav refused to meet them when they sought his appointment. Mr. Yadav was supposed to report to the State Human Rights Commission on Tuesday following an appeal by Sambasivudu's relatives. It was rumoured that Sambasivudu was apprehended by an outfit styled 'Blue Tigers'. The AP Kranthi Voice Sangh alleged that the Blue Tigers was a name assumed by Greyhounds, the anti-naxalite force of State police.

Press Release - PUCL, Gujarat is disturbed by the arrest of Mr. Kutty, the editor of the Maoist paper, People's March

2008-01-28T03:14:00.001-08:00

PRESS RELEASE

Date: 27^th January 2008

PUCL, Gujarat is disturbed by the arrest of Mr. Kutty, the editor of the Maoist paper, People's March. Earlier the Chhattisgarh Government arrested the prominent human rights activist Dr. Binayak Sen. This trend of Governments arresting activists and the journalist who have different viewpoint must be condemned. If India is to emerge as a genuine democracy, everyone must have a right to freedom of ex-pression. The only limit is that it should not endanger the life of another person. We may disagree with someone, but we must defend her/his right to express her/his viewpoints.The litmus test of a democracy is the right to dissent. Democracy is not about showing the door to one who dares to disagree with your viewpoint. The right to dissent is an integral part of democracy. Democracy is about granting the right to dissent from within the fold.

Dr. J. S. Bandukwala
Rohit Prajapati
People's Union for Civil Liberties, Gujarat.

___________________________________________________________________
         Rohit P rajapati & T rupti S hah
        37, Patrakar Colony, Tandalja Road,
         Post-Akota, Vadodara - 390 020
        GUJARAT, INDIA
        Phone No. + 91 - 265 - 2320399
         Email No: (1) rt_manav@sancharnet.in (2) rohit.prajapati@gmail.com

Keralites with Bengal connection cautioned

2008-01-28T02:55:00.001-08:00

Thiruvananthapuram • Anyone in Kerala who had also lived in Bengal, beware! The Kerala police could take you for a Maoist, raid your premises and launch proceedings. This is what happened to C Jayashree, the former principal of the Oriental English Medium School at Thriprayar in the central Kerala district of Thrissur. Her Bengal connection is that she had lived in Bengal for two years as part of her daughter's education.

Two vanloads of policemen barged into her residence yesterday, supposedly searching for a laptop that had belonged to CPI (Maoist) Central Committee member Malla Raji Reddy. Both Reddy and his wife, Suguna alias Sangeetha, were arrested from a town near Kochi in December.

The laptop, according to the police, contained secret files and correspondence of Malla Raji Reddy and this has been taken for safe keep by someone close to the jailed leader, already facing various charges, including murder, in Andhra Pradesh.

Jayashree had come under the police radar after the local netas of the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist) alleged that she was "a woman with dubious identity because she had lived in Bengal for two years and had links to Maoists". The police searched in vain for hours and left the house, threatening her and husband, K A Appu because they had refused to sign on the mahzar without t reading the contents.

Former Supreme Court justice V R Krishna Iyer — after Jayashree apprised him of the police action — rang up Home Minister Kodyeri Balakrishnan and asked him to stop such "senseless police acts against innocent citizens". The Minister apparently had no clue to what had taken place and promised "to look into the matter".

Local CPM activists have been at loggerheads with Jayashree for running a campaign against brick-making units that sprung on what had been once an extensive stretch of paddy. Some 700 migrant labor, especially those from Bengal, make up the major workforce. They live close to brick-kilns at make shift camps lacking in proper hygiene and sanitation, seriously impacting the local environment.

Jayashree and concerned people of Erayamkudi and Elvaur panchayats on the Ernakulam-Thrissur border formed a people's committee and launched a satyagraha on November 29 last year, demanding the closure of brick-kilns and resumption of paddy cultivation. "This antagonised the local CPM leaders, who have thrived on the brick-making industry. They had tried all possible things against us but when we then realized we wouldn't relent, they branded me a Malla Raji Reddy sympathizer".

But Jayshree says there's no giving up. She had taken the case right up to Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan. The Revenue Divisional Officer had cleared a plan to resume paddy cultivation. The people's committee plans to plan to sow the seeds in February, hoping to restore paddy on nearly 700 acres.

Publisher held for links with Maoists

2008-01-28T02:53:00.001-08:00

Raipur, January 23 A Kolkata-based publisher was arrested on Wednesday for his alleged links with Maoists, police said.

"Asit Sen Gupta was arrested after huge amount of literature related to the banned Naxal outfit CPI (Maoist) was recovered from his house in Tikrapara area of Raipur," a senior police official said.

Gupta was apprehended and his house raided after the women naxal commanders, arrested yesterday, revealed their links with him, said police.

A local court here, meanwhile, remanded Maoist spokesman Gudsa Usendi's wife Malti and another woman naxal commander to police custody till January 29.

Freelance journalist Prafulla Jha, also arrested yesterday, was sent to police custody till January 25, police added.

Police conducted raids at a couple of other places today after 96 firearms, including nine foreign-manufactured pistols, and 23 wireless sets were recovered from Raipur and Durg district in the last two days.

Code Red: No Dissent In Marxist Land

2008-01-28T02:50:00.001-08:00

Activists decry the arrest of People's March editor saying he was denied several fundamental rights

KA SHAJI
Kochi and Thrissur

INTERNAL SECURITY has often been the cover for the State to clamp down on people with an ultra-Left background. In the latest case, the editor of a Kerala based pro-Maoist monthly, People's March, was arrested a month ago from his office in Trikkakara near Kochi. The 68-year-old editor, P. Govindan Kutty is on an indefinite hunger strike in judicial custody to highlight the human rights violation. But barring a few activists of the People's Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL), civil society in the highly literate state still seems to be completely unmindful. The PUCL activists have threatened to launch an agitation near the Kerala High Court protesting against the unlawful manner in which the arrest was carried out.

The Kerala Police and Home Minister Kodiyeri Balakrishnan have said that a close watch is being kept on activists demanding the protection of Kutty's rights. They have also said they would not allow anyone like him to run any publication that voices dissent against State atrocities. Authorities at the Central Jail in Viyyur are reported to be injecting glucose drip to Kutty as he is determined not to break the fast. Activists say he is often straitjacketed to inject the drip. At the time of filing this report, he was being shifted to the Government Medical College in Thrissur.

According to PUCL state president PA Pouran, Kutty is continuing his fast alleging that even the minimum legal procedure was ignored and the basic rights of a prisoner, including access to a lawyer, had been denied him. When he was arrested and remanded to judicial custody in December, the authorities insisted that he could talk to his lawyer only in the presence of jail officials.

Kutty, who was a government servant, had come in contact with Maoist thought while working in Andhra Pradesh about two decades ago. He returned to Kerala five years ago and launched his small publication, which sells only a few hundred copies. The publication has never been proceeded against and meets legal requirements such as registration with the Registrar of Newspapers for India and has permission to be carried at concessional rates by the postal department.

Charges against Govindan Kutty are framed under Sections 134, 124A, 133B of the Indian Penal Code and under the 1967 Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, which has never been used against a journalist. One of the main charges against Kutty is that he wrote an article some five years ago hailing the Maoist attack on the then Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu.

Human rights activists say the arrest and the consequent developments raise several disturbing questions. "First of all, it exposes the palpable intolerance being shown by the police and the present government in Kerala towards any kind of dissent. The second is the scant respect for human rights and the fundamental rights of every citizen, including prisoners. The third is the selective and arbitrary manner in which the civil society in Kerala, including intellectuals and the mainstream media, seem to behave even on issues where fundamental rights are violated," says NP Chekkutty, noted journalist and editor of Malayalam daily Thejus.

PUCL's Pouran says Kutty was arrested soon after the Andhra Pradesh Police picked up two Maoist activists, Malla Raja Reddy and Suguna, from Angamaly near Alwaye on December 17 last year. The two were living among construction workers from outside the state. The AP team had come in plainclothes without informing local authorities as required by law, and was attempting to get away with the two until the local people stopped their vehicle. It was only then that the AP Police agreed to produce the two in a court and get a transit warrant.

Such secret raids seem to have become a routine affair. In June 2007, another Maoist, Raja Mouli, was forcibly taken by a group of AP policemen from the Kollam railway station. He was not produced in any court and his body was recovered two days later in Andhra Pradesh.

THE KERALA Police, which raided the offices of Govindan Kutty alleging he was helping Malla Raja Reddy find shelter in Kerala, still maintain that he is a man of terror. But they could not find any evidence to link him to Reddy and hence the decision to charge him for an article written five years ago. It is also said the police manipulated the mainstream Malayalam media to demonise Kutty. The stories about his personal life were carried without his version. Only a handful of media houses took his version of the story, thereby highlighting the police's blatantly false claims.

While opposing his bail application in the Kerala High Court, the police said Govindan Kutty was providing ideological backing to Maoists of different streams for the last five
years and his release would help Naxalism grow in Kerala. But the home department has no answers as to why they allowed him to engage in such activities for the past five years
and what prompted his arrest in December.

"We are not against taking proper legal action against him if he is guilty. But throwing basic human rights to the wind in the name of Naxal raids is not justified," said Pouran.

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 4, Dated Feb 02, 2008

Top Maoist Sambasivudu arrested ?

2008-01-28T02:39:00.000-08:00

HYDERABAD : The special police arrested state Maoist secretary Sambasivudu and his colleague Kudumal Ravi from the Andhra-Orissa border late on Thursday night, according to reliable sources.

sadf Sources said Sambasivudu and Ravi were training locals along with Guthi Koya tribals brought from the Dantewada region of Chhattisgarh when they were surrounded by Greyhounds personnel and arrested. About 40 tribals escaped into the forests.

The Vizag superintendent of police, Akun Sabharwal, refused to confirm any arrest of Maoists during last couple of days. Earlier in Hyderabad, the State Human Rights Commission asked for a report on the reported arrest of Sambasivudu.

The commission told the director-general of police, S.S.P. Yadav, to submit the report by 9 am on January 26. Lakshmamma, the mother of Sambasivudu, had approached the commission chairperson, Justice B. Subhashan Reddy, on Friday stating that her son had been arrested on January 20 and that his life was under threat.

Constable rapes 10-year-old, tribals protest

2008-01-28T02:38:00.001-08:00

GIRIDIH: A 10-year-old tribal girl was raped by a cop in a remote village of Giridih districtin Jharkhand leading to protests by hundreds of tribals armed with bows and arrows at a police station. Arvind Kumar, 24, was arrested on Friday and district police chief M L Meena said he would be dismissed from service. The cops were in the village for an anti-Maoist operation.

According to the girl's elder brother, his sister had gone from their village Ganhar to collect firewood at Chandwa, 17 km from Giridih, along with her six-year-old brother when three policemen approached them. "Two of the policemen kept my brother in their custody while the other cop took my sister to the nearby jungle," he said in a complaint to the police. The girl's father had died a few years ago.

He said the three cops later gave Rs 500 to his younger brother and told him not to disclose the incident. When the girl didn't return home even after several hours, her mother went to the jungle with her neighbours and found the girl unconscious.

Another Nandigram in making in Rajasthan

2008-01-23T20:40:00.001-08:00

"You can come and drop bombs on my village. Kill me," Bhanwar Singh, a 75-year-old farmer, thundered before government officials as his hands trembled violently. "That is the only way you can get my land!" Grandfathers wept. Children lay down on roads. Everyone else in the Rajasthan village angrily told the carloads of government officials that no one would give what they had come for: their farmland. Far removed from national attention, the next Nandigram is simmering in the border district of Barmer, Rajasthan.

The Rajasthan government has planned to build the state's largest power project in partnership with private firm Raj West Power Ltd in the district's Bhadres village. More than 20,000 acres of village land need to be acquired for the Rs. 5,000-crore, 1,000-megawatt project. Government officials began surveys this week to finalise compensation money for land acquisition — the last step in the process.

More than 60,000 people — and, more importantly, 250,000 livelihood-providing cattle — live across 29 villages in this area, and villagers are refusing to sell their land for any amount of money. They allege that the company, Raj West Power, is the real gainer, not the state or nation as the government argues, and certainly not the farmer. The company refutes this, saying the project will generate huge job opportunities for the local populace.

http://www.indianpad.com/story/185077

Chhattisgarh:More arrests in Maoists arms case

2008-01-23T20:35:00.001-08:00

A Kolkata-based publisher was on Wednesday arrested in Raipur for his alleged links with Maoists, police said. "A publisher from Kolkata, Asit Sen Gupta was arrested after huge amount of literature related to the banned naxal organisation CPI (Maoist) and other things were recovered from his house from Tikrapara area of Raipur," a top police official told PTI here.

Sen Gupta's was apprehended and his house was raided after the women naxal commanders, arrested yesterday revealed their links with him, they said.

Meanwhile, Maoist spokesman Gudsa Usendi's wife Malti and another woman naxal commander Meena were on Wednesday sent to police custody by a local court in Raipur till January 29 as police said they need to recover a couple of things.

Freelance journalist Prafulla Jha, who was also arrested yesterday, was taken to police custody till January 25, they added.

Police conducted raids at a couple of other places today after 96 fire arms, including nine foreign manufactured pistols, and 23 wireless sets were recovered from Raipur and Durg district in last two days.

Hindustan Times

Maoists for militant stir to get Telangana

2008-01-23T00:00:00.001-08:00

HYDERABAD: Maoists have called for building a militant movement for achieving statehood for Telangana, pointing out that all political parties were raking up the issue only with an eye on winning the next elections.

          In a hard-hitting statement issued here on Tuesday, the CPI (Maoist) spokesman in Andhra Pradesh, Janardhan, said political leaders from Telangana region were now being forced to speak in favour of carving out a separate State in view of the growing aspirations among the people of Telangana region.
          Janardhan accused the Congress of backstabbing the people of Telangana as it had supported the separate Telangana demand before elections and then abandoning it later. Telugu Desam Party leaders like T. Devender Goud, who had opposed the separate Telangana demand, were now too shedding 'crocodile tears.'
          The BJP, which had taken up the issue now, had conveniently forgotten the issue when it was in power at the Centre. Similarly, the TRS which had threatened to make all its elected representatives resign from their posts, was also not willing to tell people why it had kept quiet for past four years.

Maoist bloggers seek release of People’s March editor

2008-01-22T23:55:00.001-08:00

T'PURAM: As the wait of arrested Maoist leader and People's March editor P Govindankutty for bail continues, the human rights activists standing for his cause have found unexpected support from different parts of the world.

The Communist Party of Greece (Marxist-Leninist) strongly condemned the arrest of Govindankutty and demanded his immediate and unconditional release.

In a statement issued on pro-Maoist websites and blogs, the party `expressed solidarity to Indian comrades and to the people of India who are being subjected to state terror by the Government Of India'.

"The governments and the imperialists all over the world are trying to gag the progressive and revolutionary individuals, organisations and parties. They are trying to keep the people in the dark, to stop them from organising themselves and fighting back," said the statement issued by Chris Mais of the International bureau of CPG (ML).

The arrest of Govindankutty 33 days ago and his hunger strike in prison and medical college are hotly debated on blogs and websites.

The statement in www.aworldtowin.com, a hot site for the extreme leftists, also condemned the arrest of Govindankutty. It asked the government to allow People's March to resume publication in the country.

There are blogs like maoist resistance .blogspot.com, peoplemovementsupportgroup.blogspot.com and goodmorningrev. wordpress.com, which had also been debating the Govindankutty issue seriously. All information from the arrest to the progress of legal battle in the Kerala High Court are available on these sites.

"The support we receive from human rights activists across the globe is really soothening. We expect that the High Court would deliver an order that will uphold the human rights on Wednesday," said an activist who is part of the team that carries out the legal battle in defence of Govindankutty.

Newindpress

Left divided over Red Flag tag for Maoist

2008-01-22T23:47:00.001-08:00

New Delhi, Jan 22 The increasing Naxalite violence and the 'approach' towards addressing Maoist extremism have divided the Left brigade with two of its major allies, the CPI(M) and the Forward Bloc, taking different views on the issue. While the CPI(M) underlines that the Maoists cannot be treated as Leftists, the Forward Bloc argues that the Left unity will not be possible by treating 'potential Left forces' as enemies.

The CPI(M) had decided to consider the various Marxist-Leninist (ML) outfits while deliberating upon the idea of 'Left unity'. But after Nandigram issue, in which the ML ganged up against the CPI(M), the recently released draft political resolution states that the Maoists still believes in armed struggle. The party had also alleged that they incited violence in Singur and Nandigram.

''We can't just ignore Maoists menace as a socio-political issue. They are killing our men even in West Bengal,'' a senior CPI(M) leader told FE. The political resolution has also categorically termed Maoists as 'anti-Left'. ''The Maoists cannot be treated in any manner as a Left force as they actually harm its movement,'' the resolution said.

But the Forward Bloc, who stridently opposed the CPI(M) on Nandigram, said the 'Left unity' cannot be strengthened without the 'ultra Lefts'. ''A narrow based unity of a couple of Left parties (considering their representation in the Parliament) will be unhelpful and inadequate. We cannot discard many of our outfits simply by branding them extremists or ultra-Left. It needs to give up the narrow partisan look,'' a document released ahead of the Forward Bloc's national council said.

''Forward Bloc is a different party and has different views. But we don't think eulogising the Maoists and other extremists will do any good,'' the senior CPI(M) leader added. The CPI(M), the leader said, will try to accommodate some major splinter groups of the ML movement in raising common issues. ''The Red Flag fraction of the ML had associated with us on a number of issues in Kerala,'' the leader added.

http://www.financialexpress.com/news/Left-divided-over-Red-Flag-tag-for-Maoist/264444/

Three Maoists arrested in Malkangiri

2008-01-21T21:47:00.001-08:00

KalingaTimes Correspondent

Malkangiri (Orissa), Jan 21: The district police on Monday claimed to have arrested three Maoists who were allegedly planning to create untoward incidents ahead of the Republic Day celebrations.

The three were arrested from their hideout inside Kotaguda forests under Motu police station area around 3 am.

According to Malkangiri Superintendent of Police Satish Kumar Gajbhiye, two kg of explosives, a country-made gun, two electronic detonators, 49 gelatin sticks and two bundles of wires used in the laying of landmines were seized from the possession of the extremists.

The extremists were identified as Salbam Mukta alias MLA alias Vijay, Kotam Malla and Motum Rama, police said.

Salbam Mukta, who hailed from neighbouring Chhattisgarh, was wanted in several cases of murder. The two others were from Motu area of the district.

The three were produced before a Malkangiri court. While Salbam Mukta was taken on police remand for questioning by Chhattisgarh police, the two others were remanded to judicial custody.

Indo-Nepalese People’s Solidarity Forum Press Release

2008-01-21T21:44:00.001-08:00

January 22, 2008 alese People's Sity

Kathmandu,
December 17, 2007
Press Release
The struggle to establish a Democratic Republic on Nepal has reached a decisive stage. As the polarization between the republicans and the monarchists has sharpened there has also been an increase in cross-border instead of curbing the activities of criminal gangs from Bihar and UP has apparently encouraged them. The involvement of notorious politicians such as Anand Mohan Singhm Dadan Pahalwan, Shakuni Chowdhury in the in the Gaur Massacre on March 21, 200 in which 28 Maoist supportersj were killed shows how mercenaries are being recruited. Nepalese media have revelaed the presence of Indian RAW agents at meetings of the Terai factions in Patne. Finally the role of Hindu fascist forces such as Yogi Adityanath in fomenting trouble inside Nepal by organizing conference in December 2006 of Vishwo Hindu Sangam in support of the Hindi king shows how precarious the situation has turned for the Nepalese people. There is a growing fear in Nepal that outside forces and agencies are vitiating the politics in Nepal.

Therefore, we have decided to set up an All India Indo-Nepal People's Solidarity Forum to rally the revolutionary, preogressive and genuine democratic forces of India in support of the Nepalese people's right to decide their destiny without any outside interference.

We have a three member presidium for the time, a general secretary, a treasurer along with 22 members of executive committee from different states of India. Out patron is Professor Randhir Singh, a renowned Marxist thinker and scholar.

The list of executive moeemttee members are as following:
Ananda Swaroop Verma, Samkaleen Teesari Duniya (member of presidium)
M. Raratnamala, Independent women rights activist (Member of presidium)
Prof. Amit Bhattacharya, Jadavpur University (Member of presidium)
Pavan Patel (General Secretary)
Abhishek Srivastav(Treasurer )
Anjani Kumar, Revolutionary Democratic Front
A. Mukundan, President, New Democratic Labout Front, Tamilnadu
Sheomangal Siddhantkar, General secretary CPI (ML) New Proletarian
Dhruv Narayan, PCC, CPI(ML)
Somnath Chatterjee, West Bengal State Organising Committee, CPI(ML)
Chandrabhan, Communist Gadar Party of India
Mrigank, Naujawan Bharat Sabha
Sidhartha, Struggle India
Amitava Bhattacharya, Gen. Secy. Majdoor Kranti Parishad
Justice Ajit Singh Bains, Chairman Punjab Human Rights Organisation
Ajayprakash, Anti-Inperialist Writer Forum
Harish, Krantikari Lok Adhikar Sangthan
Nagendra, Inqlabi Majdoor Kendra
Narain Dutt, Inqlabi Kendra Punjab
Prof. Vijay Singh, Revolutionary Democracy
Representatives from (CPI(ML) Liberation and Nepali Janadhikar Suraksha Samiti, Bharat

Along with this Gautam Navalakha and Debojoti Basu are special invitees in the forum.

With Regards,
Pavan Patel
General Secretary
Indo-Nepal People's Solidarity Forum

Govindan Kutty : Bail plea opposed

2008-01-21T21:43:00.001-08:00

The State government had opposed the bail plea of Govindankutty arrested on charges of sedition from Kakkanad in Ernakulam. In a statement filed in response to his bail petition, the police said there was possibility of the accused indulging in anti-national activities if he was granted bail.

The police said he had been propagating the CPI (Maoist) ideologies and programmes and publishing the CPI (Maoist) mouthpiece 'People's March'. The organisation had been banned by the Central government under Section 13(1) (b) of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, the statement said.

http://www.hindu.com/2008/01/19/stories/2008011952440400.htm

Orissa: Maoists spreading tentacles to urban, coastal centres

2008-01-21T21:40:00.001-08:00

SAMBALPUR/JAGATSINGHPUR: The arrest of Damdeo from Khadia Basti in Rourkela, James from Badbazar in Sambalpur and now Prashant Rout from Jagatsinghpur besides disclosure of Damdeo that they had sent Rs 25 lakh to their leaders in Cuttack have exposed that the Naxals have spread their tentacles to urban centres.

While Sambalpur SP Kumar admitted that they have presence in urban areas including Cuttack, experts feel easy availability of logistics and dense population have helped Maoists strengthen base in urban centres.

The recovery of MCC literature, which called for 'Vote Barjan - Mukti Arjan' (Boycott Poll, Get Freedom) and was distributed before the panchayat polls, in Jagatsinghpur also exposed the Maoist network in the district.

In fact, even Jagatsinghpur SP Radhakrishna Sharma in a recent press meet had confirmed that Maoists have links with the district.

Meanwhile, to drive home the point, Sambalpur police on Friday conducted raids in Jagatsinghpur district to find out clues about the presence of ultras.

During a recent combing operation in Sambalpur, a few Maoists had been injured in police firing and one of them had been identified as a resident of Kusupur village in Jagatsinghpur district.

Sambalpur police raided the hide-outs of the ultras at Kusupur, Dhanurubellari and other areas under Ersama police limits.

The cops also got a clue that the Naxals were carrying on their activities with the knowledge of a retired police officer and thus raided the house of the officer at Jagatsinghpur besides another house in Deliligramsewar village.

The cops got sufficient evidence about the movement of their sympathisers in these areas. According to police, the ultras have targeted the district to take advantage of the Posco imbroglio.

Contacted, Balikuda police station OIC S K Kanungo confirmed that Sambalpur police had raided Balikuda areas.

MAOISTUKAL ARAAJAKAVAADIKALO?

2008-01-21T21:36:00.001-08:00

Maoist resurgence

B. R. P. BHASKAR

MAOISTUKAL ARAAJAKAVAADIKALO: R. Sunil and S. Mohammed Ershad — Editors; Banner Books, Kollam. Rs. 100.

THE TITLE translates as "Are Maoists anarchists?" The contents list is studded with such famous names as Manmohan Singh, V.P.Singh, Justices S. B. Sinha and Markandeya Katju, Prakash Karat, A. B. Bardhan, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, Sitaram Yechury, Anil Biswas, Vara Vara Rao, Aparna Sen and Arundhati Roy.

The book appears even as increased Maoist activity is reported from several states. All this raises expectations, but the book fails to deliver on the promises. The book is a compilation of essays, statements and interviews with a bearing on Maoist activity, which, the foreword notes, now extends to 160 districts in the country. V.P. Singh is quoted as saying he wants to become a Maoist if this is the model of development, "but I can't at this age." The two Supreme Court judges are included on the strength of a judgment in which they reportedly made an appreciative reference to Maoist people's courts. The CPI (M) leaders' condemnation of Maoists as anarchists is followed by essays that seek to rebut their criticism.

The editors are researchers but this is not an academic work. They have downloaded most of the material from pro-Maoist websites. They have not gone to original sources even for the Prime Minister's remarks and the Supreme Court judgment. However, there are a few informative pieces like Anand Patwardhan's profile of Binayak Sen, the human rights defender, and the editors' own report on the counterinsurgency movement in Chattisgarh.

http://www.hindu.com/br/2008/01/22/stories/2008012250031503.htm

West Bengal: Girl accused of Maoist links gets bail

2008-01-21T21:32:00.001-08:00

Kolkata, January 21 The Calcutta High Court granted bail to Putul Haldar (19), charged with being involved with a Maoist outfit, on Monday. A Division Bench comprising Justices Girish Chandra Gupta and KK Prasad upheld the bail petition moved by advocate Uttam Mazumdar.

In August 2007, members of a suspected Maoist group snatched two rifles from the police at Chapra in Nadia district. Suspecting the girl's involvement, Chapra police picked up Putul on August 19. She was kept in the lock-up for a few days but the police did not file any case against her. Her father Rabin Haldar then lodged a complaint with the Nadia Chief Judicial Magistrate, stating that the police had taken her into custody without levelling any charge. The CJM had asked the SP to file an inquiry report within seven days.

In the report, the SP said Putul had links with Maoists in the area. Chakdah police, meanwhile, alleged that Putul was involved in illegal trafficking of narcotics, including ganja. She was arrested on August 23 with 2.8 kg of ganja but even after five months in jail, the police failed to frame a chargesheet against her.

Toady Mazumdar moved the plea, stating that the police arrested Putul on the mere suspicion of involvement with Maoists. He added that this was an example of how the police were harassing innocent people in the name of action against Maoists.

Kamatapur Liberation Organisation Press Statement

2008-01-21T00:49:00.001-08:00

BOYCOTT INDIA'S REPUBLIC DAY

SOLIDARITY STATEMENT

OF

Kamatapur Liberation Organisation (KLO)

Manipur People's Liberation Front (MPLF)

Tripura People's Democratic Front (TPDF)

United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA)

20 January 2008

India's 'Republic Day' celebrated every year on 26 January is the day India's constitution was
imposed on the peoples of our Region so as to 'legalise' their colonial occupation. Indian colonial
 occupation of the Region completes 58 years this 26 January.

We have reiterated time and again that the destiny of the Region lies only in interdependent
unity and coexistence with sovereign independence among the fraternal peoples of the Region.
 The imposed Indian constitution has undermined the basic unity of the Region by fragmenting
 it on ethnic lines as part of their colonial policy of 'divide and rule'. Creation of 'tribes', 'castes',
 'OBCs', etc. pitching them as contending opponents in the societies concerned for 'benefits' from
 Indian government have created almost antagonistic contradictions among us. This has also
degraded the value of individual life. The Indian constitution has never been and can never be
 our constitution.

However, we are pained to note that the liberation forces in the Region remain divided into two
 lines, that is, those in 'ceasefire' and 'peace talk' process with India on one line, and those actively
 continuing armed struggle against India on the other. India's two-pronged strategy is to
 suppress the armed struggles by massive military force on the one hand, and to destroy the
revolutionary character and organisational capability of those under 'ceasefire' and 'peace talk
 process' by corrupting them with money and comfort. This is the 'Indian solution' to the conflict
 situation in the Region. But we are confident that liberation forces of the Region will ultimately
emerge victorious.

We congratulate the freedom fighters and struggling peoples of the Region for their unrelenting
resistance against offensive after offensive of the Indian Occupation Forces for the last several
 years. This has encouraged us to call upon those of our brothers now in 'ceasefire' and/or 'peace
 talk' with India to return to the path of armed struggle, the only path to our freedom and
independence. We firmly believe that only armed struggle and people's resistance against
 Indian colonial occupation can forge the unity of our Region for a common future. At the same
time we would reiterate our stand for a satisfactory political and peaceful resolution of the
 conflicts with India.

In the above spirit of unity and common struggle, this Solidarity Statement calls upon all the
 freedom loving peoples of the Region to BOYCOTT India's Republic Day and also to prevent
any such celebrations from being held in our Region. In connection with the boycott a GENERAL
 STRIKE will be observed on 26 January 2008 from 1 am to 6 pm throughout the Region.

We appeal to all the patriotic organizations of the Region also to endorse this Solidarity
Statement and observe the Boycott and General Strike in their own capacity.

"Reject Indian Constitution!"

"Overthrow Indian Colonial Rule!"

20 January 2008

20/01/08

Jiban Singha

Chairman

Kamatapur Liberation Organisation

Nandigram - the lull before another storm?

2008-01-21T00:36:00.001-08:00

Blood-red banners naming 'martyrs' and proclaiming 'shame on Buddha', walls painted with war cries, trees tied with black and red flags, burnt houses and a broken pathway lead to Nandigram, an ordinary village that turned into an unlikely battleground between communists and local residents protecting their land and livelihood.

Almost three kilometres before entering the main Nandigram area, which lies about 170 km from state capital Kolkata, Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) troopers flank both sides of the road, which then meanders through a busy market that sells everything from shoes to shampoos.

Even though things appear to be in an absolute state of peace, it is hard to get over the eerie feeling that engulfs anyone who crosses over into the vast tracts of land dotted with camouflaged graves.

'People think the guns have fallen silent here, everything looks normal, people going to work, a busy marketplace opening and shutting every day - but all this is apparent,' said a visibly shaken 70-year-old Narmada Sheeth, who runs a small tea stall in the market.

'This is the kind of silence that is followed by a storm. People here know that they can be killed, shot, harassed, women molested anytime, yet we are not ready to give up the land,' said Sheeth.

She is one of the elderly members of the Bhumi Uchched Pratirodh Committee (BUPC), a group of protestors who are against the acquisition of land here for a proposed special economic zone (SEZ) and chemical hub in eastern India, told IANS.

While narrating the incidents that occurred last year when the CPI-M allegedly wanted to 'recapture the land', Sheeth suddenly stands up and starts beating her chest, wailing the names of those who have died and shouting, 'Buddhadeb is a killer! Kill us! Come kill us! Kill me! But we will not give you an inch of our land!'

There are thousands like Sheeth all across Nandigram who put the blame on the CPI-M government in West Bengal and its Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee while denying the involvement of any Maoist element in the protests.

'I don't know who did what? But what I know and what the BUPC members tell me is that this was by the 'harmat bahini' (as locals call the CPI-M cadres),' said a sobbing Rinku Mondol, 24, who is a mother of three and the widow of slain Bharat Mondol.

Bharat Mondol, a BUPC supporter and resident of Sonachura in Nandigram, was shot Jan 7 last year. His younger brother Pushpendu Mondol was also shot in March but the family has got a compensation of Rs.500,000 from the government only for the latter.

'The government has given us compensation only for Pushpendu and not for Bharat. In any case, I don't want money, I want my family to earn benefits from the land,' said their father Pulin Behari Mondol, a farmer and weaver by profession.

Nandigram, a constellation of villages in West Bengal's east Midnapore district, first saw unrest in January last year when the natives protested against selling their land for the chemical hub, which resulted in a massive eruption of violence in the region.

Lives were lost, mostly in the months of January, March and October last year.

Even though the situation has been slightly better ever since the deployment of the CRPF, Nandigram continues to simmer. The villagers fear every moment that troop withdrawal may again lead to severe unrest.

'And this time it's going to be worse. This time we will also not keep quiet,' Amirun, a young BUPC supporter, said standing near a citadel like area, which is now regarded as 'Shahid Mor', a cross-section that has been dedicated to the slain villagers.

The BUPC wants the CRPF to stay there till the panchayat elections, which is scheduled to happen in May this year. The CRPF, which was deployed there Nov 12, 2007, is to be stationed there till Feb 15.

'The troopers are a gift of god to me. It's because of them that my family can sleep at night, my children can play now. If they go, I will lose everything, I know those people (CPI-M men) will come and kill us and burn down my house again,' said the mother of 11-year-old Bulu Mir who was injured in October last year.

The bullet hit the child while he was playing with his friends. Even though Bulu survived he is suffering from serious trauma.

According to official figures, the death toll in Nandigram is 35 but as per BUPC's data, it is about 150, including those who are missing.

After major unrest engulfed Nandigram, Chief Minister Bhattacharjee assured people that there would be no chemical hub and no forceful acquisition of land.

'Who says there will be no chemical hub here? I don't believe in what the government says. Ask them to give it to us in writing and if that does not happen, our protest will continue,' averred BUPC president Sheikh Sufiyan.

The West Bengal government, which is the world's longest serving democratically elected communist rule, and the Indonesian conglomerate, Salem Group had agreed upon establishing a hub here in July 31, 2006.

http://www.indiaenews.com/politics/20080120/92709.htm

Police distribute TVs to villagers in AP's naxalite-hit interior villages

2008-01-21T00:31:00.001-08:00

Friday, 18 January 2008

Warangal, January 18: In an effort to win over the hearts of the people of naxalite-hit interior villages, the district police administration today distributed colour television and Direct To Home (DTH) systems free of cost to each of the 20 village committees.

At a function organised here, Superintendent of Police Soumya Mishra handed over the TV sets to the members of the village committees. Almost all the villages were predominantly tribal ones that remained cut off from the mainstream of the society.

''People living in far off corners should know what is happening around them. How fast the world is changing and how the people are benefitting from the initiatives of individual efforts and Government schemes,'' the SP said.

Kerala CPM Internal Tussle and Naxal Shadow

2008-01-21T00:20:00.001-08:00

Further to the recent arrest of Peoples' War Group leader Malla Raja Reddy, Kerala Police has become Hyperactive in the hunt for "Naxal and Maoist" elements in Kerala. A great move. But one wonders why Kerala Police is not showing same enthsiasm to crush Jehadi Elements. As during the same time a suspected Hizbul Mujahideen activist Altaf Ahamad Khan who was wanted in connection with several cases relating to terrorist activities was also captured from Kerala.

The fight in the CPM between VS and Pinnarai Faction is suspected to be one of the reasons behind the police's hyperactiveness in the name of Naxal hunt. Those who are close to Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan inside and outside the party are upset over the increasing isolation of their leader and his inability to oppose the forces of capitalism which control the party. There are indications that a few in the SFI and the CPM are getting closer to outfits whom the party labels as 'left extremists'. This link may get stronger if VS is completely marginalised after the Kottayam meet of the party.
Recently, The students union of the Guruvayurappan College here invited CPI-ML central secretary K.N. Ramachandran to inaugurate a seminar recently, shocking the SFI leadership. The VS loyalists at the Government College, Madappally, openly challenged the official faction of the SFI with the behind-the-curtain support from the Kerala Vidyarthi Sanghatana, the student wing of the CPI-ML.

The official faction of the CPM is aware of the possible danger of the disgruntled elements in the party forming a common platform, joining hands with the 'left extremists'. There are many common areas between the pro-VS forums like the Adhinivesha Prathirodha Samithi, Padom Prathikarana Vedi andthe 'left extremists' who take aggressive stand on issues like ADB loan. In fact, CPM state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan himself had branded the pro-VS group as 'left adventurists'.

It is suspected that the CPM is using the police to create a terror and to break the possibility of an alignment force against the party. Such a possibility could be nipped in the bud by branding these forces as Maoists and creating a confusion among those who are willing to co-operate with the group.

HOIL

Kerala Human Right Activists taken into police custody

2008-01-17T23:54:00.001-08:00

KOCHI: Human rights activists from West Bengal alleged that the police searched the house in which they were staying in Kalamassery and 'illegally' detained them in the police station on Wednesday night.

Addressing presspersons at the Ernakulam Press Club on Thursday, Shyna P.A. (in whose house the activists were staying) said the detained people included Debolina, secretary of the Matangini Mahila Samithi and Chhabi, a samithi activist. Two activists of the United Students Democratic Front too were staying in the house, when the police searched the area.

"The police had no search or arrest warrant. They said they got information about some Maoist activists staying in the house and hence the search. The men were taken to the Kalamassery police station, while the women were taken to the women's police station and detained overnight. The aim is to demoralise those who are engaged in democratic modes of protest," she said.

Ms. Debolina, a student of International Relations, said the samithi was formed in the aftermath of the 'torture' meted out to women of Nandigram. "We are fighting against special economic zones and imperialism."

City Police Commissioner Manoj Abraham said the Criminal Procedure Code permitted the police to search any premises if they got information that people had assembled in a place with weapons. "They were released on establishing that they did not seem to have any link with extremists."

Hindu

Kerala Human rights activist flays police action

2008-01-17T23:49:00.001-08:00

KOZHIKODE: Police are unleashing a reign of terror in the state in the name of fighting against the Maoist threat, said Varavara Rao, poet, human rights activist and founder leader of Revolutionary Writers Forum (Virasam) in Andhra Pradesh.

"The news from Kerala is disturbing. Govindan Kutty, the editor of People's March, is arrested. There was another move to arrest the human right activists and lawyers who went to see him in the jail.

I came to know that a team from Nandigram was taken into custody in the wee hours of Thursday. All these point to the dangerous situation of stifling the voices of dissent," Rao told this website's newspaper.

People's March is not the official organ of the CPIMaoist. It is the voice of Indian revolution. The charge that the magazine carried interviews of CPI (Maoist) general secretary Ganapathi is frivolous.

Even the mainstream dailies had carried his interviews, he said. "I would request the human rights activists to challenge the arrest in the court. Govindan Kutty himself should file a petition from jail," Rao said.

The team from Nandigram came to Kerala to narrate their experience to the people of the state which is ruled by the CPM.

"I don't understand why the team and Shyna, the activist of the People's Democratic Front of India who accompanied them, were arrested. Such moves should be condemned in the strongest possible terms," he said.

Rao, who acted as the emissary for talks between the Naxalites and the AP government, said police repression is unabated in Andhra.

"Yesterday also there was a fake encounter in Warrangal in which a leader of the CPIML (Prathigatana) was killed. AP police are going to states like Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Kerala to pick up Maoists.

They are immune to all laws of the civil society and do not bother to follow any accepted rules," he said.

CPI(M) set ablaze BUPC supporters houses

2008-01-17T23:43:00.001-08:00

Friday, January 18, 2008 (Nandigram)

Five houses belonging to supporters of the anti-land acquisition Bhoomi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee (BUPC) were set ablaze allegedly by CPI(M) activists at Khodambari village in Nandigram area on Thursday night, police said on Friday.

This is the first instance of violence since the CRPF was deployed in the area about two months ago following ''recapture'' of the area by CPI(M) and the forces were present at the village when the houses were set on fire.

Nandigram MLA Sisir Adhikari (TC) said local CPI(M) activists had been threatening the BUPC members for the past few days and set afire their houses last night.

East Midnapore District Superintendent of Police S Panda said the fire was put out by the CRPF and the police but the extent of damage was yet to be known.

Police had been rushed to the village immediately after receiving complaints at Nandigram police station, he said adding there was no report of any casualty.

Police picket has been posted in the area, he added.

NDTV

'Naxals want us to shelve outposts plan’

2008-01-17T23:42:00.001-08:00

Varanasi, January 17 The recovery of three improvised explosive devices (IEDs) from the Naxal-affected Sonebhadra district on Wednesday has put security forces in a state of high alert, Inspector General (Varanasi Zone) Kashmir Singh told The Indian Express on Thursday. Extensive combing operations have also been started, he said.

"A major mishap has been averted by alert CRPF and state police personnel. If the IEDs were not detected in time the entire convoy could have been affected," Singh, who heads Naxal operations in the state, said today.

The explosives were attached to electronic detonators and were planted on the Maholi-Banswari route, through which Singh's convoy was to pass a few hours later.

"The area under the Machi police station area of Sonebhadra falls near the borders of UP, Bihar and Jharkhand, and is treated by Naxalites as their liberated zone. Out of 11 new police outposts coming up in three Naxal affected districts, two are located in Maholi and Banswari, which prompted the Naxals to plant the explosives on our route," Singh said.

Plans to establish the outposts - five in Chandauli, four in Sonebhadra and two in Mirzapur - will go ahead despite the recovery of explosives, he added.

Meanwhile, SP (Sonebhadra) Ram Kumar said special operations camps of the CRPF and UP Police were underway at Maholi and Banswari and the IG's convoy was slated to return to Maholi from Banswari through the same route. The explosives were recovered during a preventive exercise before the convoy was to arrive. "The high powered explosives were packed with iron rods, which in the event of a blast would have acted like bullets," he added.

"The Naxalites want us to shelve our plans of setting up police outposts in the area where three state boundaries meet, which they consider to be their liberated zone," the SP said.

In November 2004, 14 policemen were killed when their convoy was blown up in an IED blast in Hinauta Ghat, under the Naugarh police station area, of Chandauli district.

Expressindia'

Left extremists foment trouble: Kodiyeri

2008-01-17T23:41:00.001-08:00

Thiruvananthapuram: Home Minister Kodiyeri Balakrishnan has said that Left extremist groups are attempting to create problems in Kerala after having realised that they can no more use the State as a safe haven.

Speaking to journalists here on Thursday, the Minister said the arrest of a top Maoist leader (Malla Raja Reddy in Kochi in December) seemed to have provoked such elements to create problems in Kerala. They seek to foment trouble at some point in the future by attempting to propagate their extremist ideology among certain sections of the population.

There were no Maoist pockets of influence in Kerala. There was no evidence of any Hizbul Mujahideen activity in Kerala. However, certain extremist elements were using human rights organisations as a front for their activities. "We know these people and the masks they use," Mr. Kodiyeri said. They chose such facades because they were afraid to openly identify themselves with their extremist causes. Kerala's progressive society, armed with its strong democratic traditions, would defeat all forms of extremism in its territory, he said.

The HIndu

Govindankutty shifted to hospital

2008-01-17T05:18:00.001-08:00

THRISSUR: P.Govindiankutty, who is on remand in Viyyur prison here, has been shifted to the Medical College Hospital here following deterioration of his health condition. He was arrested from Aluva on December 19.

He was fasting since December 20 in the prison and the human rights activists who visited him in the prison on Tuesday alleged that the prison authorities were indulging in forcible feeding of glucose after tying his hands and legs.

Meanwhile, in a statement issued here, the state committee of the Kerala Human Rights Samithi has urged the state Human Rights Commission to inquire into the inhuman treatment accorded to Govindankutty in the prison and take urgent appropriate steps.

http://www.newindpress.com/NewsItems.asp?ID=IER20080109234324&Page=R&Title=Kerala&Topic=0

CPI Maoist karnataka Press Release

2008-01-17T05:10:00.001-08:00

Respectable editors and the media representatives,
struggle greetings to you.
We came to know that some miscreants were sent a press release in our party's name regarding president of rashtreeya udyaana virodhi okkuta and its president.
We are sending this press communique to clarify about that press release,dated 5th janaury 2008, in our party's name.
We clarifying that above stated press release is not ours. We did not sent such press release to anybody.Earlier also one such fake email sent with our party's name about vokkuta president.
We are requesting to check our press release with our id ganga_dhara2007@rediffmail.com. Please check digit 0 and letter o in 2007 digits.
Requesting to publish this clarification in the media with due consideration.
yours in struggle
Gangadhara
For the state committee
CPI(maoist)
16-1- 2008 karnataka

'Nandigram still in the grip of fear’

2008-01-16T00:21:00.001-08:00

Staff Reporter

THRISSUR: Human rights activists from West Bengal have said that villagers of Nandigram are still in the grip of fear.

Addressing a discussion on the Nandigram issue, organised by the People's Democratic Front of India and People's Union for Civil Liberties, Binayak Bhattacharya of the Left-oriented United Students' Democratic Front and Debolina Chakraborty and Chabi Maity of the Matangini Mahila Samithy alleged that Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M) was still unleashing terror in Nandigram.

"In view of the upcoming panchayat elections, the CPI(M) has terrorised the entire Nandigram. Villagers are yet to recover from the shock of the events of March 14 and November 10, 2007. Fourteen persons were killed in the March violence. More than 50 persons died in the November violence. About 80 persons are reported missing. Bodies are still being retrieved from fields. The CPI(M) workers still torture poor peasants," alleged Ms. Chakraborty.

Mr. Bhattacharya said the objective of the Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee was to protect the land of the villagers from land encroachers.

http://www.hindu.com/2008/01/15/stories/2008011556970500.htm

Mom says son is no Naxal , but police say there is proof

2008-01-15T23:59:00.001-08:00

CHANDRAPUR: Leena Shrawan Punekar, an unlettered construction worker, has no idea why the police, on Friday arrested her son Raman from their small hut in a congested labour colony in Ballarpur, 30km from here.

But police are suggesting he has links with alleged Naxalites arrested in Mumbai last year.

Now, a day after a special team of the Chandrapur police arrested Raman, 24, his distraught mother asks what his crime is. A first year BA student, Raman's family had no idea who his friends were.

The police, however, allege Raman is an activist with an underground Maoist outfit called Deshbhakti Yuva Sangathna that apparently has a strong following among students in Chandrapur.

Police claim they arrested Raman after Manoj and Vinayak, alias Vinod Sonule, two alleged Naxalites caught with a cache of China-made arms and literature said they knew him. Manoj and Vinod were arrested following information given by Vernon Gonsalves and an accomplice arrested in Mumbai last year.

Gonsalves' wife, lawyer Susan Abraham says the police are making false allegations about Vernon. "All these incidents are unconnected; cops want to frame my husband," she says. She added that Vernon has not been to Chandrapur since 1993.

Abraham adds her husband could not have given any information to the police since he has been unwell. The police now say more arrests may follow in the next few days.

"Our fear is that the Naxalites are trying to woo students from poor and Dalit
backgrounds, to join their cause," Anti-Naxal Operation chief Pankaj Gupta told DNA.

Leena says all she knows of her son's activities is that he was involved in some 'prachar' (propagation) about Bhagat Singh. She says he works as a part-time screen painter and an agent for private cellphone operators.

According to Chandrapur SP Chhering Dorje, Raman "doubled up as a courier for the Naxals, to deliver letters, money and sometimes arms".

A senior officer of the Anti Terrorist Squad clarified on Saturday that they had not recovered any rocket launchers from Raman, but a China-made stengun with 137 rounds. "It doesn't matter what Raman or anyone else says, we were working on leads from when we first took Vernon into custody last year," the officer added.

(With inputs from Neeta Kolhatkar)

Beltangady: Handbills Belonging to Naxals Found in Naravi

2008-01-15T23:53:00.001-08:00

Beltangady, Jan 15: Naxal menace has once again cropped up in the neighbourhood of Naravi here. Several hand bills belonging to Naxals were found on Monday, January 14 morning at the shops and bus stand in Naravi.

'Let the revolution strive to exit imperialist regime,' the statement of freedom fighter Bhagat Singh was found on the hand bills.

Naxal hand bills were found in almost twenty places in Naravi town. They were pasted in a few places while in some places they were thrown. It was believed that armed Naxals executed the task on Sunday January 13 night. A group of Naxals had visited a few families at Sigedady on Wednesday, January 9.

The policemen of Beltangady Anti-Naxal Force (ANF) arrived at the spot and recovered the hand bills which the Naxals left behind. Subash Gadimani, SP of ANF also visited the spot. ANF policemen led by Gangi Reddy, circle inspector have already begun combing operations in Naravi and Kutthoor surrounding areas. Lokesh Kumar, SP and Dr Harsha, ASP also visited the location.

Communist Party of Greece (marxist-leninist) DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL RELEASE OF COM. GOVINDAN KUTTY!!

2008-01-15T03:29:00.001-08:00

India is curbing the freedom of the press.

It wouls seem that India is curbing the freedom of the press. They have targeted the editor of a blog
The proves once again that a democrat in any country is someone you can push against a wall and they turn into a fascist.

The following is from:
__.http://www.groups.yahoo.com/group/MAOIST_REVOLUTION

STATEMENT OF Communist Party of Greece (marxist-leninist) on the arrest of com. Govindan Kutty, editor of People's March (Which has a link on this page, http://peoplesmarch.googlepages.com/ )

The Communist Party of Greece (marxist-leninist) strongly condemns the arrest of comrade Govindan Kutty, editor of People's March and demands its immediate and unconditional release.
We express our solidarity to the Indian comrades and also to the people of India who are being subjected to state terror by the GOI for many years. The governments and the imperialists all over the world are trying to gag the progressive and revolutionary individuals, organizations and parties. They are trying to keep the people into the dark, to stop them by organizing themselves and fighting back. They are trying to abolish all the democratic rights like the freedom of speech and of expression, rights that were won by the people through long and bloody struggles.
They are trying to stop the revolutionary attempts that are gaining ground in Southeast Asia, in Latin America and elsewhere. Day by day the people of the world find out their strength and the system its weakness. That's what they are afraid of and that's why they use state terror against progressive people and revolutionaries, that's what they are trying to stop. But they will not succeed. We will continue our right cause and struggle.

WE DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL RELEASE OF COM. GOVINDAN KUTTY!!
WE DEMAND THE CONTINUATION OF THE PUBLICATION OF PEOPLE'S MARCH MAGAZINE

International Bureau
Communist Party of Greece (marxist-leninist)
-- Chris Mais

Rs. 524.4-crore Central package for naxal-infested districts

2008-01-15T03:19:00.001-08:00

January 13, 2008

BANGALORE: There is good news for the people living in the remote areas of four naxal-infested districts in the State. The Union Government has cleared a special package amounting to Rs. 524.40 crore for strengthening communication links and infrastructure in these villages.

The Union Ministry of Rural Development cleared the special package to contain naxal activities and accelerate economic development in the villages of the Malnad region, two days ago. The package will cover eight taluks of the four districts, namely Chikmagalur, Shimoga, Udupi and the drought-prone Tumkur.

The State Home Department has declared these districts as naxal infested.
Reasons

There has been a spurt in naxalite activities in the past two years in these districts owing to lack of basic facilities and low wages. Regular drought and failure of crops are the main reasons for the spread of naxal activities in Pavagada taluk of Tumkur district which borders Andhra Pradesh.

Rural Development and Panchayat Raj (RDPR) Department Principal Secretary K. Jairaj told The Hindu that under the package "good communication links and all-weather roads will be provided to over 4,000 settlements in eight taluks, namely, Sringeri, Mudigere and Koppa (Chikmagalur district), Kundapur and Karkala (Udupi district), Tirthahalli and Hosanagara (Shimoga district) and Pavagada (Tumkur district). Chikmagalur and Shimoga districts have also been covered under the Rs. 2,689-crore Prime Minister's relief package for farmers."

Mr. Jairaj and RDPR Department Rural Basic Services Director N. Manjula held a meeting with Union Rural Development Secretary Rita Sharma and Joint Director G.K. Mahapatra on January 10 in New Delhi and discussed the significance of the package for development of remote settlements in the four districts.

The Union Ministry of Rural Development has, in principle, given clearance to the package.

Besides improving the living conditions of the people, the package will help in tackling law and order problems in these districts.

Out of 56,000 settlements in the State, nearly 8,000 settlements are still deprived of basic facilities such as roads, sanitation, schools, dispensaries and communication links.

Nearly 4,000 such settlements are located in the four districts.

Mr. Jairaj said 1,351 km of road would be laid and other facilities would be provided to the residents of these eight taluks. The project would be implemented during a five-year period. The Union and State governments would share the cost in the ratio of 90:10.

Last month, the Centre sanctioned a package of Rs. 634 crore for developing 2,450 km of rural roads in all districts under the Prime Minister's Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY). The project would be implemented within 18 months from commencement, the Principal Secretary said.
Separate proposals

Mr. Jairaj said the roads under the special package would be laid on the lines of PMGSY in the eight taluks. Separate proposals on development of roads and other infrastructure would be prepared for each taluk and would be submitted to the Union Ministry of Rural Development for approval.
Development activities

"This package will facilitate development activities in the forest areas of the three districts and drought-prone Pavagada taluk," he said.
Identified

Senior police officials have identified villages which have no roads and where naxalites have spread their activities. Since the naxal activity is a socio-economic problem, the Government has decided to implement the package and prevent people from being influenced by naxalites.

"This is the only way that we can considerably weaken the movement in Malnad areas," an official said.

Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand account for 68% Naxal violence

2008-01-15T03:18:00.001-08:00

NEW DELHI: As the security establishment grapples with unbridled Naxalite violence in over a dozen states, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand have earned the dubious distinction of accounting for 68.16 per cent of the total incidents and 76.42 per cent of the total casualties last year.

Latest official figures compiled till the end of November last reveal that security forces suffered heavy casualties in the fight against the Maoists as 214 personnel were killed compared to 133 during the same period in 2006.

Though the number of incidents of Naxal violence was 1,385 — almost the same as 1,398 in 2006 — the causalities suffered by civilians was less.

While 418 civilians were killed till November 2007, the toll was 501 during the corresponding period the year before, reflecting a shift in the Maoists' strategy, Home Ministry sources said.

Rather than targeting the people, the Naxalites have set their eyes on economic installations, with the Railways bearing the worst brunt in the badly affected states of Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa and Chhattisgarh, making senior officials in the security establishment sit up.

Realising that the menace, described by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at regular internal security meetings as the "single biggest security challenge" to the country, cannot be dealt with the gun alone, the Centre is concentrating on evolving a holistic plan with focus on all-round development to wean away misguided youth

Securing Indian jails against Naxal threats

2008-01-15T03:16:00.001-08:00

As the country grapples with growing law and order problems in one form or the other, the Naxals have been systematically escalating their fight against the so-called bourgeois Indian state. They have found new ways to organize themselves and make their presence felt.

Today, they are not only better-motivated and better-organized, but also better-trained and better-equipped against an ill-motivated, and poorly trained and equipped police force. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has termed the Naxalite insurgency as the single greatest threat to the country's internal security.

The Central government is busy coordinating with the affected state governments to work out a synergized policy to deal with the Naxal menace, including the formation of a specialized anti-Naxal force. However, the Naxals seem intent on upping the ante and taking the fight to higher levels as apparent from their recent drive to freeing their comrades lodged in different jails of the country.

There have been a string of incidents recently where the Naxalites have attacked jails in different parts of the country and succeeded in freeing a good number of hardened criminals (read Maoists) booked for waging war against the Indian state.

What initially appeared to be a one-off incident/accident seems to be have become a regular feature and reflects very poorly on the prison security system. While earlier jailbreaks used to be examples of dare-devilry by individual prisoners, the Maoists seem to be making it a habit, and now executing it in a well-planned and coordinated manner, highlighting serious lapses in the policing and prison systems.

In the celebrated Jehanabad jailbreak of November, 2005, about 1,000 well-armed Naxalites not only successfully managed to set free 341 prisoners lodged in that jail, but also succeeded in killing several Ranvir Sena men and cops.

Again in March 2006, about 200 armed Naxalites raided a jail in Gajapati town in Orissa and succeeded in freeing more than 40 prisoners after an extended encounter. In March 2007, there was a jailbreak in Nizamabad in Andhra Pradesh in which 72 under-trials, including Naxalites, escaped from the district jail. in December, 2007 when some 300 insurgents and their supporters were freed by Naxalites during a mass jailbreak in Chhattisgarh.

In the same month, hundreds of agitating Maoist inmates also took control of the inner wing of Patna's high-security Beur jail, protesting against alleged ill-treatment by jail authorities. Besides these jailbreaks, there have been regular reports of recovery from the inmates, of huge caches of arms, cash, mobile phones and other such items.

It only points to lax security inside the jail, and connivance and collusion by the jail staff. All these facts taken together underline the ills afflicting the Indian prison system. It also drives home the point that not only are initiatives needed for ensuring security inside jails, but there is also a need for better training and infrastructure for prison personnel to tackle such threats from any quarters including Naxalites.

The various security measures for preventing such jailbreaks include the installation of a bio-metric system of access control as recommended for installation in the nine prisons of the Tihar jail complex by the S K Cain Committee. In this system, the fingerprints of all the prisoners and jail staff is saved in a database and entry and exit from the complex will be permitted only if the fingerprints are matched.

This system should be installed in all jails across the country without exception. Besides, simple security measures like installation of closed-circuit cameras, metal detectors and automatic security lock systems should also be considered for better security of our jails and to pre-empt such daring jailbreaks as seen in recent times.

Manpower shortages have been the bane of the Indian prison system and needs to be addressed up for better prison management and security. If the state is really serious about improving the law and order and justice system, then it really needs to do some hard thinking about all these issues. India cannot hope to tackle the Naxal threat with a ramshackle prison security system.

Four CRPF men injured in Chhattisgarh Maoist ambush

2008-01-15T03:14:00.001-08:00

By IANS

Raipur : At least four paramilitary troopers of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) were injured Monday when Maoist guerrillas exploded a landmine followed by gunfire in Chhattisgarh's southern forested, restive Bastar region.

According to the police, the incident took place in a thick-forested hamlet, Jharaghati, in Narayanpur district, some 355 km south of the state capital Raipur.

The attack was launched at a road opening party of about 60 CRPF troopers, Pawan Deo, deputy inspector general in Kanker Range, told IANS by phone.

The officer said one of the four injured personnel critically wounded in the attack was airlifted to Raipur.

The leftist insurgents run a parallel government in forested interiors of iron ore rich Bastar region that comprises of five districts - Bastar, Dantewada, Bijapur, Narayanpur and Kanker - and is spread out over about 40,000 sq km.

The state recorded 436 deaths in Maoist violence in year 2007, including 200 policemen and special police officers (SPOs) and 165 civilians.

Four news but all co-related..........

2008-01-14T00:13:00.001-08:00

Bhumkal

(1)

(2)

Let me start with the news about Forest Officials raiding one of the camps for illegal tree felling by the SPOs.It shouldn't come as surprise to many people since the leader of Salwa Judum Mahendra Karma himself is a timber-mafia as cases are still pending against him under "Maalik maqbooja" expose.

But what is worth noticing in the above news is that even the Forest Officials were scared to raid the SPO Camps.Such is the terror of SPOs in Chhattisgarh.

Other news says that a Sarpanch was burnt alive by the villagers near Suhela.This also shows that how the politicians have succeeded in dividing the village communities in Chhattisgarh.

The Sarpanch belonged to "Satnami" community.The "Satnamis" in Chhattisgarh have suddenly become blue eyed boys of both Congress and BJP.

Ajit Jogi who says he is a tribal but is a Satnami did special favours to this community when he was the CM and now BJP has announced Rs.50 crores for the construction of a huge 'Jaith Khamb' for the 'Satnami' community.All this for the "Satnami" vote bank.On the other hand Tribals of Bastar are made to run around even for a grant of few lacs for contruction of a small "Gondavana Bhavan".

With so many people running behind you its normal for an individual to feel above others.And here was a Sarpanch with criminal record.Now with the villagers saying that they killed a "Ravana" and that they have become "Ram" will the State BJP Government let them free???

The other news "No clues about suspected maoist" is really very sad.It says that a "Gondi" speaking person near Durg district was picked up by the police for being a naxalite only because he didn't know any other language expect for "Gondi".This is the state of the real people of Chhattisgarh.The mentality of the people in the urban areas is such that anybody coming from Bastar is looked upon with suspicion.On one hand Raman Singh is talking about development of the Tribals in Bastar and on the other hand he and his men are wasting no time in killing and ridiculing the indigenous people of Chhattisgarh.

The news from Tripura says that an innocent youth was killed by the army on suspect of being a terrorist.So whats new for people of Bastar?Everday some family in Bastar looses a son,daughter,father,mother due to the innocence of armed forces(CRPF),State Police,SPOs who feel all tribals living outside 'Salwa Judum' Camps are naxalites.

"Lingo Mudyal Pen"

'Arrested Naxals were sending jobless youths to AP for training'

2008-01-14T00:11:00.001-08:00

BERHAMPUR: The two Naxalites, Siba Munikhal and Sunabhanja, who were arrested from Hanumantpur in Muniguda area in Rayagada district yesterday have divulged some vital information before the cops.

The two played an important role in sending many unemployed youths of the area to Andhra for Naxal training, police said.

On Friday night, Siba was nabbed at Hanumantpur while extracting money from two traders there. Later, he was interrogated by Rayagada SP Asish Kumar Singh during which he reportedly gave information about his associate Sunabhanja, who too was nabbed.

Siba, hailing from Sanabudahada village in Bisamcuttack block, told police that he came in contact with Sunabhanja of Kotogarh in Kandhamal two years back.

Sunabhanja, an active member of the Maoist group lured Siba and got him involved him in the radical work. Police also seized leaflets, literature and banners from them.

The two were wanted in connection with several offences, including the murder of Santosh, a former Naxalite, who was killed on December 22 last.

Student nabbed for Naxal link

2008-01-12T12:55:00.001-08:00

CHANDRAPUR: Close on the heels of arresting two alleged Naxalites with a Chinese carbine, Chandrapur police has nabbed a 20-year-old student Raman Punekar from Ballarpur. The police believe that Punekar, who is a student of BA Part-I, of Mahatma Jyotiba Phule College of Ballarpur, is an associate of the earlier arrested persons.

The police got a tip-off of his alleged involvement during interrogation of Manoj and Vinayak Sonule, who were arrested from Chandrapur a couple of days ago.

A police team conducted a series of raids in Rajura, Ballarpur and Wani areas before zeroing in on Punekar. It is learnt that Punekar stayed in Bhagat Singh ward locality in Ballarpur. The police claimed they recovered Naxal literature and two firearms.

Sources say that there was a long range ballistic weapon was recovered during one of the raids, but senior officers denied this.

While police was searching for more details they stumbled upon incriminating evidence which suggest that Mumbai-based Maoist Arun Thomas Ferreira, used to operate from Chandrapur area under the pseudonym Suresh Shukla.
Times Of India