Adivasi Movements in India: An Interview with Poet Waharu Sonavane

Adivasi Movements in India: An Interview with Poet Waharu Sonavane

Friday, 05 October 2012 10:57 Prachi Patankar The original interview was conducted in Marathi language in December, 2011.

All photos of Adivasi Ekta Parishad gathering in Rajasthan, India. Credit: Satish Londhe

I have known Waharu since I was a little girl growing up in India. I have many fond memories of him and his wife Hirkana. I used to accompany my family to activist conventions and meetings in various parts of our home state, Maharashtra. Waharu’s son Malema, myself, and other kids used to sing social-movement songs with our parents and other community organizers before the start of every meeting, and then play outside as the discussions and strategy sessions continued throughout the day. The indigenous and tribal identified peoples of India are part of hundreds of diverse tribes, nations, and ethno-linguistic peoples throughout South Asia. Many group themselves together with the umbrella term Adivasi; and many are recognized as Scheduled Tribes (STs) by the Indian government. Together, they number almost 90 million people today, almost 9% of India’s population.  The Bhil are one Adivasi people, all together numbering in the millions, rooted in various parts of western India and Pakistan.
Waharu is a Bhil Adivasi, long-time poet and activist. Since the 1970s, he has been organizing for Adivasi self-sufficiency among his community near his hometown in western India. He is a big part of my wonderful childhood growing up among dedicated organizers and activists who made fighting to change the world look like it was fun, exciting, and something everyone should be involved in. The poetry and the songs that came out of this movement are still etched in my memories, and come out of my mouth unthinkingly as remarks to certain circumstances in life.
As the first Bhil poet to be published, Waharu has gained much critical acclaim, being mentioned in the same company as great Marathi-language poets like Narayan Surve and Baburao Bagul -- both Dalits (members of Scheduled Castes (SCs) considered ‘untouchable’ in the caste system). Adivasis and Dalits are often considered the most oppressed sectors of Indian society. Surve was the poet of my childhood. His poetry was in my school textbooks and adorned the walls of my house.  His poetry challenged the status quo, bringing up topics that were often not talked about in Indian society. I remember, clearly, his poem about a sex worker who goes to admit her son to a school. When asked to submit her son’s father’s name, she hopelessly says to the school administrator, “Master bapachya thikani aata tumchach nav liva (Sir, instead of his father’s, now please just give him your name).”
Waharu’s poetry has now also made it into textbooks and universities. One of his poems has also been adapted by the rock band Indian Ocean for a song called “Boll Weevil.”  The poem is about Adivasi courage and pride. His most well-known poem, “Stage,” caused an important debate during a time when he was also questioning the leadership of one of India’s best-known mass social movements, Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), about Adivasi representation in its early years.
Like my father and many friends, Waharu is a member of Shramik Mukti Dal (SMD - toilers’ liberation league). SMD is a political organization in rural Maharashtra state, organizing with drought victims, dam evictees, poor women, and agricultural laborers -- against encroachments by the government and corporations, and working toward the annihilation of caste and patriarchy. Waharu’s main work continues through the Adivasi Ekta Parishad (Conference of Adivasi Unity), formed in 1992.  During my recent visit to India, I caught up with him at SMD’s 13th national convention in coastal Maharashtra.  I decided to interview him now, when some Adivasis are getting absorbed into the so-called mainstream, with its commercialization, caste hierarchy and patriarchy.
The problems of Adivasis remain.  Many indigenous peoples worldwide face some similar struggles and questions, whether on Turtle Island (North America), in Latin America, Australia, and elsewhere.  The word ‘occupy’ has raised discussions and debates in many places in the past year; Waharu is also talking about occupying and reoccupying, claiming and reclaiming – land, culture, values.  In this interview, I also wanted to learn the changes that occurred in his perspective, from the time he named his son “Malema” (named for Marx-Lenin-Mao), to the recent work of the Adivasi Ekta Parishad.  What shaped those changes, and why?

Stage

We didn’t go to the stage,
nor were we called.
With a wave of the hand
we were shown our place.
There we sat
and were congratulated,
and “they”, standing on the stage,
kept on telling us of our sorrows.
Our sorrows remained ours,
they never became theirs. 
When we whispered out doubts
they perked their ears to listen,
and sighing,
tweaking our ears,
told us to shut up,
apologize; or else...

--Waharu Sonavane; translated by Bharat Patankar, Gail Omvedt, and Suhas Paranjape

Prachi Patankar: How did you start working in the Adivasi movement?

Waharu Sonavane: I was born in Shahada, in Nandurbar district of northern Maharashtra. In 1970 when I left school, I came back to Shahada.  At that time there was a big drought in Shahada taluka (county).  My young brothers and cousins, who should have been in school, had to go to work in the fields.  My family wasn’t asking me to do manual labor because I was educated.  But I started feeling that I was living off the work of my little siblings and cousins. So one day I started going to work with them. They welcomed the extra income in the household. It was difficult at first, as I wasn’t as used to manual labor as before.
One day when I had finished work and sat down to eat, my aunt said, “Brother, how long can we toil like this? You’re so educated and you’re working like us. Forest plots have just been released.  We should get some share in this. Then we can live off our own land like farmers.“
I filled out two forms and went to the Member of Legislative Council.  I wandered for eight days trying to get the land. Then someone told me that if you want help there’s a grassroots Adivasi leader who fights for our rights, his name is Ambarsingh.  When I went to him, he said, “The community to which you have been born is burning in the fire of exploitation and atrocities.  It is shouting, ‘Save us!’  But, the one who has the power to save it is running after employment and position.”  That hit me.  I said to him, “Look, you don’t think I could work for our people?”  Ambarsingh said, “It’s easy to say, but something else to do it.  Many people have tried, have stayed on for a month or two and then gone back.  Sometimes doing this work for the community, you may remain hungry, get beaten up; sometimes you’ll have to go to jail.” I decided to stay.
Ambarsingh was once away; he was working for the Sarvodaya Mandal, a Gandhian cause.  I was staying in his hut and hadn’t eaten for two days.  At night there was no oil in the lamp.  I was sitting in the dark; it was raining and the rain was falling on me.  Then I thought, “I’m also human.  A dog even goes to different houses and fills his stomach. I’m going leave.”  But then I remembered Ambarsingh saying, “It’s easy to say, but to actually live it is something else.” Since then I’ve been committed to the movement.
PP: Tell us about the land liberation struggle that came up in the Dhule area.

WS: We started a struggle to get back the Adivasi land that had been lost to non-Adivasis. We carried out a survey to find out how the land was lost.  Was it given as a kind of mortgage, for some need for cash or something?  Was it lost in an old contract, or sold?  After the survey, on January 30, 1972, we had a bhu-mukti (“land liberation”) rally, inviting leaders from different organizations.  At that rally, Ambarsingh made a declaration that if Adivasis’ names were on the land record, and if they were the actual tillers, then we should re-occupy that land. This news flew like a big storm, and people throughout the villages started occupying land.  It was a big movement.  A fight between the Adivasis and the landlords!  The police were on their side; there were legal cases filed against Adivasis. But still, in this struggle, we won back 10,000 acres for the Adivasi community!
The next struggle was over education. Most Adivasis had not gotten any formal schooling. So when dealing with any paperwork, people who weren’t literate could only give their thumbprints, and they would get cheated. So we started night schools for adult education. The 6th and 7th grade students from our community would teach the adults. We also realized that alcoholism was rampant and was ruining people’s lives; this had to change.  We collectively mobilized, broke a lot of liquor-store jugs.
We then took up a struggle for women’s liberation. We were shouting all kinds of slogans like “victory to toilers,” but we only slowly realized that among the toilers were women, who also needed to stand up for their own rights. Ambarsingh used to say that women and men are wheels of the same chariot, and both wheels need to be strong! Women are exploited and oppressed by people within the community.  We started consciousness-raising about women’s equality. We then had a state-wide gathering on these issues of women’s rights.
This movement went forward through the formation of Shramik Sanghatana (toilers’ league).  People from different parties and tendencies were in the movement, from Sarvodaya and other Gandhians, socialists and communists, and from the Magowa group (one precursor to SMD).
PP: This was a time of great social unrest across India. Labor unions and student unions were going on strike all over the country. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a repressive state of emergency in 1975.  “Extraordinary laws” were being invoked and thousands of people were jailed for dissenting. How did this affect you?

WS: We also had been jailed during the Emergency period. Many of our activists were working underground. Within our movement, there were some differences about how we should work during the Emergency.  Sarvodaya people were saying that if we wanted to be against the Emergency we should do individual satyagraha, one of Gandhi’s tactics. We were saying that opposition should be through a collective people’s struggle. There was a split among us on this issue. Later, there were differences regarding what kind of organization we should build. Some people among us went to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (one of the major parliamentary parties in India). Some people formed Shramik Mukti Dal.  I was among those who went to SMD.
PP: You formed the Adivasi Ekta Parishad while you were already involved in Shramik Mukti Dal.  So, what was the trajectory from SMD to forming an Adivasi-only organization?
WS: While this work was going on, we were thinking about our Adivasi communities and cultures.  We needed to assess our situation.  Where are the Adivasis today?  They are divided among multiple religions, multiple parties, many organizations.  Adivasi life and culture is based on equality, belief in love, humanism -- these life-values must not be forsaken. We should return to these values. We should oppose all kinds of exploitation; economic, patriarchal, social, caste.  Even among Adivasis there are hierarchies now, since we are living within the larger societies. We should come together as Adivasis, rejecting hierarchies and caste.
Why shouldn’t we protect and conserve our own culture, which is based on great values?  This is what revolution is, we thought, we should have a movement for this.  And so in 1992, we put forward the principle of establishing an organization on the issues of existence, pride and self-respect, culture, history, education, self-reliance and development -- with Adivasi culture as our basis.  Any Adivasi who agrees with this and believes in these principles can come. This was called the Adivasi Ekta Parishad (AEP).
PP: You were/are still a member of SMD. What was the response of SMD to this? What about other organizations?
WS: Shramik Mukti Dal supported this. But other organizations were trying to dominate us. One organization said, “If you come here and propagate this, we’ll break your legs.”  Another distributed pamphlets against us. Their allegations were that we were self-declared leaders. They claimed that we were playing into the hands of powerful parties -- Congress party, Shiv Sena, etc. We continued our work. We met with different Adivasi movements. They also told us their experiences -- that whether it was the Communists (the parliamentary left), the Naxalites (Maoist rebels), BJP (Hindu nationalists), or Congress party (the main governing party in India), or whatever.... we Adivasis were always given a second-class status. They used us only as foot-soldiers, but never accepted us as leaders. We have the right to our own life.  Based on this determination, we continued the movement and decided to build a united organization.
PP: Your poem “Stage” elicited quite a debate among various activists and movements. Could you talk about the poem, and how some of this thinking has influenced the working process within AEP?
WS: So while we were carrying out this movement, in 1994 we had our first sammelan (gathering) of the AEP, which brought together Adivasis from four states: Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh. Up to this point, in the name of welfare and development for Adivasis, only others have spoken. People have said to Adivasis, “come into our religion; we’ll solve your problems and give you relief.”  Some became Hindu; some became Christian; some became Muslim.  Some went to different parties.  After all of this, many years, our situation remained the same.  We don’t have the decision-making power.  We decided that it is us, Adivasis, who should speak on our stage about our problems. This is what my poem “Stage” is about (recites poem).
Others can come to listen.  In the beginning, there were some problems; there was a journalist who was pleading to speak for fifteen minutes; we said no. In Rajasthan, there was a person who was working with an NGO among Adivasis; our people didn’t allow him to speak. Up until now, these are the ones who’ve been speaking, and we’ve been listening; now, it’s their turn to listen.  It doesn’t matter who comes -- even a big leader or minister sits among the people.  This is our discipline, our policy.
So the policy of the AEP is that there is a big stage that holds about 200 people.  Nobody sits on it; there is only a microphone.  Why?  Because everyone is equal, and anyone among the Adivasis can go on the stage to speak.
PP: What are some of the demands of AEP?
WS: The attack on our culture and life should stop.  We’re not called ‘Adivasis’ in the Indian Constitution, but ‘Scheduled Tribes.’  One demand is that we should be called Adivasis.
But really, who should we demand things from?  From the government that uses us in the name of development and welfare?  The question of ‘Adivasi development’ is not an Adivasi question; it’s theirs. The idea of development that they bring is in their mold, not ours. They say, come into the ‘mainstream.’  Have all the problems of people in the ‘mainstream’ been solved?  Has there been development and welfare for all the people in the mainstream?  If we come to the mainstream, the faults of the mainstream will also enter our life. That’s why we have to protect and care for our lives which are based on our values, our democracy.
I could give you many examples.  If someone dies in one house in the village, then no one sweeps their house or fills water or cooks food. The whole village is in mourning until after the burial. These people who try to teach us about ‘culture’.... I’ve seen in Mumbai city, if someone dies, neighbors close their doors and eat deep-fried food (a luxury), ignoring the pains of their neighbors.
In our weddings and rituals, we don’t have any brahmins (the upper-most, ‘priestly’ caste).  Brahmins promote inequality.  Our weddings are democratic. When people are offered gifts, they ask whoever is present there, whether they should accept.  In other weddings, brahmins utter some scriptural verses that no one understands, put some water here, put some rice there, do all kinds of things -- just giving orders. People just do these things, without understanding why they are doing it. This fight is between Adivasi values and brahmanic values -- not between Adivasis as persons and brahmins as persons.  It’s a fight between democracy and autocracy.
Another example:  If I haven’t been able to plow my land for some reason and time is passing, we give a call to the community, and whoever has a plow comes and does some of the work. They don’t ask for anything in return.  But non-Adivasis, the ‘mainstream’ -- they call us ‘drunkards’ and ‘beggars,’ if we work all day and then come to ask for our rightful pay and livelihood.  So we are working to stop this attack on our culture, and to preserve our values.
PP: Reflecting on her visit to Naxalite (Maoist) rebel-held area in Chhattisgarh state, the well-known Indian writer Arundhati Roy raised some questions in a 2010 essay. “Who are the Maoists? Are they just violent nihilists foisting an outdated ideology on tribal people, goading them into a hopeless insurrection? …. Is the Sandwich Theory—of ‘ordinary’ tribals being caught in the crossfire between the State and the Maoists—an accurate one?  Are ‘Maoists’ and ‘Tribals’ two entirely discrete categories as is being made out?  Do their interests converge?”  Your thoughts on all this?

WS: In some areas, Naxals work among Adivasis, and Adivasis have joined them. In other ways, they too treat Adivasis badly, as second-class, as foot-soldiers for their agenda. I feel that most everyone tries to fit Adivasis into their own model, their own ideology. But those who support Adivasis by helping them to stand on their own feet and give them leadership, that’s real solidarity and support.
We also fiercely fought and sacrificed our lives during the Indian independence movement. Adivasis also fought in the struggle; but no one talks about it.  During the great 1857 rebellion, the revolutionary Khajya Naik led a strong uprising against the British in Madhya Pradesh.  His head was hung for eight days from a tree. People know the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre of hundreds; they should also know Mangarh. Hundreds of Bhil Adivasis were shot there in 1913, because they revolted against the British.
This denial of our history has been happening since the Aryans entered this continent; it’s in the major mythology too. They killed Adivasis, calling them ‘rakshasas’ (demons), saying they eat human beings.  People invoke the god Rama, who killed many ‘evil’ rakshasas.  You know about the story of Ekalavya, right?  (He was an Adivasi boy who tried to learn archery, and for that was punished, made to cut off his own thumb. Bhils believe they descended from him, so when they use bow & arrow they don’t use their thumb.)
Adivasis believe in the values of nature -- the wind blows for all equally.  Our lives should be based on equality and love, and protecting and caring for this life.  Living life is not just eating, drinking and sleeping.  Revolution is not something you make one day and it is finished.  How we take this change towards humanity is our fight!
Prachi Patankar is an activist, educator, and arts administrator based in New York City.  She grew up in rural India among rural peasant movements.  Currently, Prachi works with South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI) and serves on the board of Afghan Women's Mission and the War Resisters League, an organization dedicated to resisting war at home and war abroad since 1923.
( courtesy - http://www.towardfreedom.com/home/asia/2994-adivasi-movements-in-india-an-interview-with-poet-waharu-sonavane )

Jharkhand: The failed promise of an adivasi state | Analysis | Human rights

Jharkhand: The failed promise of an adivasi state | Analysis | Human rights
By Richard Toppo 

A tribal perspective from Jharkhand describes how the creation of the state, ostensibly for the welfare of tribal populations, has only led to their exploitation and displacement

Almost a century ago, Katherine Mayo published a book titled Mother India that criticised the Indian way of living. Such were the author’s views that even Gandhi described it as “the drain inspector’s report” which examined only the drains of the country. Conflating with Mayo’s discriminatory work was another contemporary piece by Rudyard Kipling titled White Man’s Burden. Things would have been different had these works been considered the mere fancy of creative minds. But they were perceptions that became the paradigms of the western perspective, veiling the ground realities and on-going brutalities and actually making people believe that what the colonisers did was in the best interests of the colonised. As a result, most westerners were alienated from the plight of the colonised. Purpose well served -- unopposed exploitation.

Years later, India seems to walk the same line that it once so bluntly lambasted. Tribal communities in central areas of Jharkhand, Orissa and Chhattisgarh have been exploited, displaced and dispossessed of their resources by the state. But the government has successfully created an illusory perception of ‘development’ that has alienated the middle class from the plight of the tribals. As a result, the government ruthlessly exploits tribal populations, and does so almost unchallenged by other sections of society.

Placating tribals

On November 15, 2000, tribals, mostly from central India, had something to rejoice about. A demand articulated for over a century saw the birth of the state of Jharkhand.

Demands for separate statehood for Jharkhand were first raised in 1914 by tribals, as mentioned in the State Reorganisation Committee Report 1955-56. Tribal politicians vigorously took up the cause, supported by other indigenous communities. For long, the mineral-rich areas of Chota Nagpur and Santhal Pargana had been exploited and the tribal people displaced in the name of development. Racial discrimination of tribals by outsiders, referred to as dikus in the tribal tongue, was rampant. The demand for separate statehood was not merely to establish a distinct identity but also to do away with years of injustice. 

However, the creation of Jharkhand has only increased the vulnerability of tribals. The token concessions of a tribal chief minister and a few reserved constituencies were deemed a green signal to displace tribals for so-called ‘development’. According to reports of the Indian People’s Tribunal on Environment and Human Rights, a total of 6.54 million people have so far been displaced in Jharkhand in the name of development. The ongoingland acquisition at Nagri village (near Ranchi, Jharkhand) for the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) and National University of Study and Research in Law (NUSRL) may seem like development projects in the eyes of the educated and the affluent. But these elite educational institutes have displaced over 500 tribal villagers. The displacement in the name of dams, factories, mining, etc goes largely unreported.

In a place where displacement and development have become synonymous, the strategic reasons for such oppressive measures go beyond monetary gain. One senses, quite palpably, consistent attempts by various corporate firms to exert control over the policy formulation process. This political-corporate nexus was very apparent when 42 MoUs were signed as soon as Jharkhand came into being. According to a human rights report published by the Jharkhand Human Rights Movement (JHRM), the state government of Jharkhand has so far signed 102 MoUs which go against the laws of the Fifth Schedule. Vast tracts of land will be required to bring these MoUs to fruition.

People’s opposition and various constitutional laws against land acquisition have always been impediments to the corporations. In 2011, a people’s movement forced Arcelor Mittal to pull out of a proposed project in Jharkhand. The corporate sector has been trying hard to change the status quo in its favour, and in doing so has adopted some dubious means. The Chota Nagpur Tenancy (CNT) Act is one of several laws provided by the Constitution to safeguard tribal interests. It was instituted in 1908 to safeguard tribal lands from being sold to non-tribals. The law was meant to prevent foreseeable dispossession, and preserve tribal identity. Loss of land would naturally lead to loss of tribal identity as the issuance of a community certificate requires proof of land possession.

The private sector seems to have taken a special interest in drastically reforming or abolishing the CNT Act. Corporate-owned newspapers like Prabhat Khabar and Dainik Bhaskar have campaigned vigorously for reforming the Act to make transfer of land from tribals to non-tribals more flexible. Needless to say, any reform in this direction would directly benefit corporations that own mines in the tribal lands of Jharkhand, and pave the way for future land acquisition.

The state government, irrespective of party banner, has been part of such threats to tribal interests. Non-inclusion of the Sarna religion in the religion category of census data has drastically downsized tribal populations. There have been lapses on the part of the administration to provide accurate data on tribal populations, many of which are underreported.

With the never-ending displacement, the tribal population figure has dropped to a mere 28% on paper.

The dark side of anti-Naxal operations

There is little doubt that the Naxal menace has increased over the years. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has good reason to declare Naxalism the biggest internal security threat. In Jharkhand alone, since its formation, a total of 4,430 cases of Naxal violence have been reported so far; 399 police personnel, 916 Naxalites, and 395 common people have lost their lives in such violence. The brutal way in which Naxal violence is perpetrated -- beheading, mutilating body parts, slitting throats -- has greatly amplified people’s fears. Splinter groups like the People’s Liberation Front of India (PLFI), Jharkhand Liberation Tiger (JLT) and Tritiya Prastuti Committee (TPC) have further intensified the problem and led to the  administration using counter-violence.

The security forces deployed in Maoist infested areas face constant threat to their lives. While the terrain here is conducive to guerrilla warfare, the local police finds itself inadequately armed and trained to engage in such warfare. Hence, central forces armed with superior firepower and equipment and better training are called in.

People are told that the Naxalites wish to overthrow the government by violent revolution and undemocratic means, and that they need to be stopped to sustain India’s ‘bright future’. But some facts go unheard. According to a report by JHRM, since the creation of Jharkhand a total of 4,372 people have been arrested on the charge of being Naxalites. Of these, 315 are hardcore Naxals for whom the government had announced prize money. The remaining 4,057 have no record of any criminal offence; even the police has been unable to establish their Naxal involvement (1). In an extreme case, sources claim that the government was instrumental in sustaining the PLFI during the initial days of its formation, to counter the CPI (M). The move backfired and the PLFI became a prominent terror group in Jharkhand.

In other instances, countless innocent people (mostly tribals) have been killed during anti-Naxal operations. The incident that occurred on April 15, 2009 at Latehar, Jharkhand, exposed the dark side of these operations. Five tribals were picked up from their homes by the CRPF and district police, taken to a nearby place and shot dead. The initial police investigation tried to cover up the act, claiming the tribals were Maoists. Following protests, the Jharkhand police finally accepted that they were ordinary villagers who had no links with Naxalites.

The recent exposure of anti-Naxal operations in the Saranda jungle, home to over 125,000 tribals, is even more disturbing. Central and state forces deployed here under Operation Monsoon and Operation Anaconda destroyed homes and killed innocent people, not sparing even the food the tribals had. As revealed by JHRM, during Operation Anaconda, 33 villagers were arrested on charges of Naxal involvement. The police has been unable to provide any evidence to support this claim. 

The problem with an over-hyped ‘Red Corridor’ is that it justifies the actions of the security forces: they are seen as deployed in enemy terrain to ‘protect’ India’s ‘bright’ future. And so, a ‘few’ innocent casualties at the hands of the security forces are deemed inevitable. The victims are labelled ‘Maoist supporters’. As the Red Corridor mostly falls under tribal areas, a general, albeit fallacious, perception exists that the tribals in these areas are Naxalites or Naxalite supporters. What worsens the situation is the exclusion of such areas by the concerned state administration which, after 64 years of independence, has failed to establish any communication with people living in these areas. A district mostly falls in the Red Corridor zone not because the people here support the Naxal ideology, but because the administrative units in these areas are nowhere to be seen, giving a free hand to the Naxalites. It is the failure on the part of the state administration to reach out to rural tribal areas that has provided ample opportunity for Naxalism to flourish.

Decades after their exclusion, the government is trying to bring tribal societies out of their so-called ‘museum culture’ into the mainstream. But the methods being adopted are displacement, and the giving away of lands to multinational companies to set up factories, thereby reducing even the most affluent farmer to a petty labourer. The fact that abundant mineral resources sit beneath these tribal lands hardens the government’s stance, making it determined to counter any opposition with a heavy hand.

There is a dual strategy behind the tag ‘Red Corridor’. Multinational companies and mining corporations have incurred huge losses, mostly in tribal areas: firstly, as levy amount to several Naxalite outfits amounting to hundreds of crores in a single year; secondly, uncertainty over land acquisition even after signing MoUs with the concerned state government due to tribal laws and people’s opposition. By declaring districts Maoist zones, the government clears the ground for future operations to be conducted by the security forces. The mission: to ‘liberate’ such zones from the evil clutches of Naxalites and ‘anti-developmental’ forces. The ‘anti-developmental forces’, as termed by the government, are tribals whose protests are solely aimed at retaining their land; they have no intention whatsoever to topple the government. Several cases of tribals protesting against forcible land acquisition and being killed or imprisoned for allegedly being Naxals have been reported across the state of Jharkhand.

Tribals stand on a thin line between Naxalites and the government, exploited and destroyed by both. In areas where the Naxalites have a presence, not following their orders could result in gruesome killings. Thus, any meeting called by any of these outfits is an unspoken compulsion for the village, not an option.

In such a scenario, resorting to indiscriminate firing and blaming Naxalites for using innocent villagers as human shields is not only a failure on the part of the security forces but also on the state to provide safety to its citizens. The illusion presented to the common man has entwined tribals and Naxalites in such a complex manner that any number of killings in tribal areas fails to generate much sympathy among the people. The recent killing of 18 alleged Naxalites at the hands of the security forces in Chhattisgarh, and its aftermath, is evidence of the general perception that even if these people are not Naxalites, they are definitely supporters.

All in the name of ‘national interest’

In an interview with Shoma Chaudhary from Tehelka, in 2009, Home Minister P Chidambaram made the following comment: “No country can develop unless it uses its natural and human resources. Mineral wealth is wealth that must be harvested and used for people.” But who are the ‘people’ for whom mineral wealth must be harvested? The middle class and elites who own multinational corporations.

The mineral resources have more to do with profiting private firms than national growth. For example, the royalty fixed by the central government for iron ore is just 10% of the value of mined iron ore, extraordinarily benefiting private mining firms. Tribals have always remained outside the loop of beneficiaries. This was evident in thenon-implementation of the PESA Act until recently, for more than 10 years, in scheduled areas of Jharkhand even after a 2010 directive from the Jharkhand High Court. Adding to this was non-implementation of theSamatha judgment across areas under the Fifth Schedule, which would have hugely benefited tribals. Tribals have repeatedly been exploited, displaced and ruined in the name of ‘national interest’.

Jawaharlal Nehru once exquisitely explained the meaning of ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’, or ‘Victory to Mother India’, as victory to millions of people spread across the vast tract of India. The privileged classes who are fervently nationalistic must understand that their fellow nationals are being bludgeoned into a war-like situation. These wars are not only perpetrated by the juggernaut of so-called ‘development’ but are sustained by false myths that have blinded the general public. In a brilliant piece by George Monbiot, published in the Guardian, the author speaks about the injustices of the British Empire and the myths so well established that “we appear to blot out countervailing stories even as they are told”.

In order to sustain an actual inclusive growth, people need to do away with such false perceptions and not let exploitative action go unchallenged. Only then will the true essence of ‘Victory to Mother India’ materialise. National development is not just about showcasing the country’s economic growth on paper. A massive GDP growth rate is meaningless if tribals and other underprivileged peoples continue living underdeveloped lives. As a tribal, I expect the government to set aside its false perceptions of development that encourage exploitation of tribal communities, and bring about real meaningful growth.

(Richard Toppo is a researcher based in Ranchi, Jharkhand)  

Endnotes

1 Jharkhand Human Rights Report 2001-2011. Published by Jharkhand Human Rights Movement

Infochange News & Features, July 2012

(courtesy - http://www.infochangeindia.org/human-rights/analysis/jharkhand-the-failed-promise-of-an-adivasi-state.html )

Is central India’s civil war a resource war over metals for arms?

28 août 2012 — javier

Felix Padel
Ratan Tata takes off on fighter jetThere is a lot of evidence that the arms trade is an epicentre of corruption, and that it fuels conflicts around the globe. Andrew Feinstein’s brilliant new book, The Shadow World (2011, review by Padel 2012) shows this clearly. Less scrutinized are the centrality of the arms industry to the world economy, the industry’s links with mining, and its outstanding greenhouse gas emissions. However much we limit our individual carbon footprints, will this make any difference unless we curtail our wars?
Since 2005, the tribal areas in central-eastern India have plunged into a ‘slow war’, between security forces and Maoists. Underlying this, and a key reason for Maoist recruitment in these areas, is the displacement of millions of adivasis (indigenous or tribal people) from their land and resource base. The leadership on both sides is non-tribal, but the foot-soldiers are mainly adivasis – on the Maoist side, motivated by outrage at multiple injustice, and on the security force side through the system of SPOs – adivasis recruited as ‘Special Police Officers’ for a small salary in an area where numbers of displaced unemployed are growing – a recipe for civil war. Malnourishment among adivasis and dalits, according to India’s official statistics on nutrition, stands at over 50%.
Links between India’s mining companies and arms manufacturers are well known. For example, Nalco (National Aluminium Company) has close links with military aircraft factories run by HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd), and Balco (Bharat Aluminium Company) has had a contract to supply India’s nuclear missile programme, probably inherited by Vedanta.1 In January 2007, an agreement was drawn up for Indo-Russian collaboration on BrahMos missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, aimed at selling ‘about 1,000 missiles in the near future to clients in India, Rusia and some friendly countries’.2 India’s President Abdul Kalam, who worked on his country’s nuclear missile programme, devotes space in his book India 2020 (Kalam and Rajan 1998) to emphasizing the importance of India developing aluminium-lithium alloys, to keep up with the arms race.
The extraordinary spate of new mining deals signed by the state governments of Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand from 2000-2005 were accompanied by deals between India mining companies and international arms producers. Nothing symbolized this more potently than a photo on the front page of Indian newspapers on 8 February 2007 of Sir Ratan Tata, head of the Tata group, sitting for a flight in the cockpit of a F-16, grinning like a maniac. This was the emblem of a deal signed by Tata and HAL with Lockheed for manufacturing components for this plane, and came around the same time that Tata bought up Corus (British Steel), Landrover, and Jaguar.
Perhaps nothing defines the distinction between ‘developed’ and ‘developing country’ status more than the extent of a country’s arms industry: ‘developed countries’ are basically the key countries who have manufacture and sale of arms at the centre of their economy. So in the warped logic of global power and influence, perhaps India’s bid to raise itself in the global hierarchy through rapid expansion of its arms industry makes sense.
The trouble is, this comes at a terrible cost for thousands of villages, whose way of life has been basically in tune with nature since time began. Over 600 adivasi villages had been burnt by Salwa Judum (a tribal militia created to fight the Maoists in Bastar, south Chhattisgarh) within two years of its formation in mid-2005, creating at least 200,000 refugees. Bastar is (or was) India’s tribal heartland. Its Muria Gonds and other tribes had evolved a lifestyle based on long-term sustainability and extraordinary beauty. To those who knew these cultures, the atrocities taking place there over the last seven years are a descent into hell for those who least deserve it. A recent massacre at Sarkeguda village, near Bijapur (Dantewada District), has at least drawn wider attention to the situation whereby perpetrators in uniform commit appalling crimes with impunity, and villagers have no hope of getting justice. Nineteen adivasi villagers were killed on the night of 28 June, when about 800 armed police of the CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force) converged on an area between three villages, where a meeting was in progress about a forthcoming agricultural festival. CRPF sources claimed they were shot at, and six jawans were wounded (some say by friendly fire), and that some of the dead were ‘hardcore Maoists’ – as a result of which, Chhattisgarh’s Chief Minister and India’s Home Minister commended the CRPF involved for bravery. Civil rights groups and journalists contest every aspect, showing that these people had returned to villages close to a CRPF camp, that had been burnt by Salwa Judum and painstakingly rebuilt, and a high probability that cases registered against certain villagers were false.3
India’s Tribal Affairs Minister, Kishore Chandra Deo, has described this massacre as a ‘fake encounter’. It joins a woefully long list of well-documented fake encounters. In many ways, the Maoist-‘Operation Greenhunt’ conflict is a ‘false flag’ war, masking a war over resources. Maoists and security forces/mining companies share an ideology based on top-down power, sacrificing life and materialistic values: no-one imposed steel production more ruthlessly than Mao, and Bastar’s adivasis had managed to resist new iron-ore mines and steel plants with considerable success until Maoists undermined their traditional leadership.
Throughout central India, indigenous movements against new mines and metal factories, involving forced displacement and ecocide, are targeted on the grounds of Maoist infiltration. This is the case at Kalinganagar, where adivasis protesting a new Tata steel plant were shot dead in January 2006; in the Narayanpatna area of south Odisha, where an organisation called the Chasi Mulya Adivasi Sangha, orchestrating opposition to new mountain-top bauxite mines as well as mass takeovers of adivasi lands was viciously suppressed after Maoists publicly supported it; in the Saranda forest in south Jharkhand, where recent deals for new iron-ore mines were preceded by a mass invasion aimed at clearing out Maoists; in the vast Abhujmaar forest in Bastar, home to the Hill Mara Gonds, who have preserved a harmonious way of life shattered recently by an invasion of 3,000 CRPF, who reported several fatal encounters as they searched for Maoists hideouts; and in dozens of other key areas.
Khandadhara, a mountain range in north Odisha home to the Paudi Bhuiya tribe, is the site of an epic, though little-reported resource conflict: Paudi Bhuiya have been moved out of the forest in large numbers on the spurious grounds that their age-old practice of shifting cultivation destroys the forest, while a shady company called the Kalinga Commercial Corporation is already breaking production targets denuding mountains completely of their forest with iron and manganese mines, whose ore is already being exported in large quantities to China and South Korea (Mukherjee 2012).
In Kalinganagar and other contested sites, police often behave as a private army ensuring mining, construction and energy companies take possession of farmers’ lands. In an age of escalating conflicts worldwide, ‘mineral wealth’ becomes the touchstone of financial value, as the basic resource for waging war.
The irony is that villagers with cultivation systems based on highly developed principles of long-term sustainability are being displaced in the name of ‘development’. Can humans develop beyond the primitive stage we’re presently stuck at of ove-rexploiting Earth’s resources, and settling disputes through wars and atrocities?
Notes
1. The Telegraph, Calcutta, 2 March 2001
2. The New Indian Express, Bhubaneswar, 30 January 2007.
3. ‘Story of an Op Lost’, and ‘Factual Inconsistencies’, Outlook 16 and 23 July 2012, at http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?281550 and http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?281691, among many articles published about this encounter.
Feinstein, Andrew 2011. The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Kalam, A.P.J. and Y.S. Rajan 1998. India 2020: A Vision for the New Millenium. Penguin.
Mukherjee, Madhusree 11 June 2012. ‘The death of a waterfall’, Outlook, at http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?281092
Padel, Felix 22 September 2007. ‘A Cry against the Hidden War: Bastar’s Civil War’, in Tehelka magazine, at http://www.tehelka.com/story_main34.asp?filename=cr220907A_CRY.asp
_____ February 2008. ‘Mining as a Fuel for War’, in The Broken Rifle, issue no.77 p.1, at http://www.wri-irg.org/node/3576
_____ November 2010. ‘Deconstructing War on Terror’, Radical Anthropology, issue no.4, at http://www.radicalanthropologygroup.org/old/journal_04.pdf
_____ 7 April 2012. ‘Epicentre of Corruption’: review of Feinstein 2011, Economic and Political Weekly, vol.XLVII no.14, at http://www.theshadowworld.com/media/203-epw-review.pdf

(courtesy - http://www.wri-irg.org/fr/node/20305 )

The last of the asbestos miners 
By Javed Iqbal  

When miner Dansingh Bodra was asked about the people from his village who he worked with in the asbestos mines of Roro, who have all died before their time, he slowly starts counting, first to himself, and then loudly: “gyaara, Pooliya Sondi… baara, Rohto Gop… taira, Bagan Sondi… chowda, Vijay Singh Sondi… pandra, Gono Sondi… sola, Harish Sondi… sattra, Sukmon Sondi… atthra, Rahto Samadh.”

Dansingh himself suffers from cancer, a huge tumour grows out of his stomach.

It took him five minutes to remember the dead. A few seconds to denounce the company that laid them off one fine day when the mines shut down in 1983.

“They gave us nothing, no healthcare, no pension, just these illnesses.”

“I worked in the mines for 12 years, and from that day itself I used to cough, and slowly it started to get worse.”

This man with a lump growing out of his stomach remains a testament to the reality of internal colonisation, of a company that currently earns aggregate revenues of over Rs800 crore, of industrial development, and the idea that mining offers jobs. 
Dansingh Bodra awaits death in a village where his three grandchildren sleep behind him suffering from fever. The mines have long but closed down, but the dust and pollution that emanates from them, still spread across the fields.

Even today, as per law, especially as per section 22 of the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act 1981, all asbestos mines have to be closed. But Hyderabad Industry Limited, part of the CK Birla Group, did not close their mines at Roro village at Chaibasa, West Singhbhum, Jharkhand. As a result, the asbestos fibres that are blown into the wind, that seep into the fields and rivers, still exist 30 years after the mines shut down.

“So many people died before they turned forty,” said Birsingh Sondi, who points to his neighbours house, “There lived Mangalsingh Sondi, who was 25 when he died, and he never even worked in the mine. His father, Sukmon, worked there, and he died a few years ago too.”

A deadly carcinogen
Asbestos, whose use, manufacture and extraction is banned across the European Union, is still used widely across India and is part of a Rs4,000 crore industry dominated by around 18 companies who justify the use of asbestos as a substitute for affordable roofing, and claim that chrysotile asbestos can be safely manufactured and used without risks.

The companies claim that the kind of asbestos used in India isn’t carcinogenic, even as all forms of asbestos are classified as carcinogenic by the World Health Organisation, the International Labour Organisation, and the International Agency For Research On Cancer, who mention in a report that was published in 2010: ‘Epidemiological evidence has increasingly shown an association of all forms of asbestos (chrysotile, crocidolite, amosite, tremolite, actinolite, and anthophyllite) with an increased risk of lung cancer and mesothelioma.’ It goes on to mention that an estimated 125mn people are still exposed to asbestos at the workplace.

Yet, the Asbestos Cement Products Manufacturers Association, one of the main lobby groups for the continued production and use of asbestos, has repeatedly claimed, “Some five hundred other products and industrial processes are recognised as carcinogens, but this does not mean that we must prohibit their use.”

While the lobby has often reiterated that chrysotile asbestos is safe, the chairman of the Asbestos Cement Products Manufacturers Association, Abhaya Shanker, is also the managing director of Hyderabad Industries Limited. According to him, they have closed the Roro mine, and that the mountains of asbestos tailings from the mine are not carcinogenic.

“Roro is a finished chapter, a closed mine 30 years back, what’s the point of Roro? I don’t understand,” he exclaims in a telephonic interview. “That is all an old story, an old type of asbestos and that is all done. The mine is safely handed over, and closed, and handed over to the government of India, and there is no danger to the public. It’s all bullshit.”

“According to the Supreme Court directives in the CERC case, you have to monitor the health of your workers? Do you also monitor the health of your workers from Roro?” I asked.

“You can look at our world class health monitoring system, for our workers… for several years we keep calling them, for check-ups, for studying them…” responds Shanker.
“Even the Roro workers?”

“The Roro workers are all finished, we would have done them (the survey) for a couple of year, and it’s been 30 years now, nobody would be alive now,” says Shanker.
Closing the mountain

Roro Hills at Chaibasa were first mined for chromite in the early 1960s by the Tatas. The mines were sold to the CK Birla Group, as the Tatas moved onto mining chromite at Sukinda, in Odisha, which itself, aaccording to international environmental group Blacksmith Institute, is one of the 10 most polluted places in the world, where approximately 70% of the surface water is contaminated by hexavalent chromium, and 24.7% of the population living around the mines are suffering from pollution-induced diseases.

When I had visited the village of Suanla in Sukinda in 2010, an old man scoffed at the media’s ability to highlight the issue. He claimed that over 30 people have died in the past few months. Some called the deaths in Suanla an exaggeration, but in the house of Markand Hembram, four members of the household had died within a year.

Quoting the report by the Blacksmith Institute, the government itself had gone on to say: ‘It is unique, it is gigantic and it is beyond the means and purview of the [Orissa Pollution Control] Board to solve the problem.’

Back at Roro, there were attempts to close the mountain and clean up. Way back in 2003, a public hearing was held where villagers from 14 villages around the mines had spoken up about working in the mines and the health issues in their villages. The hearing was organised by Jharkhand Organisation For Human Rights, and was paneled by a group of prominent doctors and advocates.

The report of the hearing was taken to the District Collector and Chief Medical officer who were given representations for conducting medical camps, to monitor health of workers and non-workers, and to detail a scientific closure of mines and to hold Hyderabad Industries Limited accountable to pay for health and environmental damages.

Yet, till date, there have never been any attempt by any official body — from the Pollution Control Board, the Directorate General of Mines Safety, the Mining Department, the company or the local administration to remediate and clean up the mine tailings or do a proper closure.

At Roro, only three miners who worked with the Birla Group are left alive. But not everyone worked directly under the company since independent contractors had also taken on the work of disposing asbestos dust, and they paid workers Rs1.50 per day, for working from eight in the evening to eight in the morning, to clear dust.

“There was no izzat in mining, we should never have allowed them here,” says Dansingh Bodra, who had even worked underground, mining asbestos without any protective clothing. And there were accidents: Turam Sondi, Jida Sondi and Dausar Sondi were killed in the mines in a few years before the lockout and the closing of the mines.

“No one should ever have worked the way we did.”

( courtesy - The last of the asbestos miners - India - DNA )

Jharkhand mulls mining in Ho tribe's homeland

by -Nitin Sethi
NEW DELHI: The Centre's Saranda Action Planfor "all around development" of the Naxal-dominated 820 sq km patch in Jharkhand could soon come to naught with the state government planning to open iron ore mines in nearly 600 sq km of the largest sal forest in Asia.

TOI has documents showing that the Jharkhand government has sought and received applications for mining in more than 500 sq km of the dense forests -- home to the Ho tribe that the Union government wants to bring development to. Around 95 sq km of the forest is already leased out for mining.

Union rural development minister Jairam Ramesh pushed and got a Rs 150 crore special package to develop roads, community centres, hospitals, schools, provide jobs and set up CRPF camps in the heart of the dense forest that has remained an impenetrable zone for the administration - with the government finding several 'lost' villages just recently.

But much of this could become redundant if the Jharkhand government's plans come true with almost the entire green patch wiped clean with coal pits dotting the landscape and a few Ho villages left spattered around. Of course, it would also be then flooded with a new world of contractors, labour and all the paraphernalia of the mining industry.

At the moment, some of the leased out mines are not operational and most of them lie on the eastern fringe of the sal forests. But once all the proposed mines become operational, the forest, which is also a critical elephant terrain, could be fragmented beyond recognition.

The Union environment ministry had previously given clearance for Chiriya mines inside the Saranda forests despite internal views against the move and now SAIL has come back for more. This time, the ministry, while entertaining SAIL's demand for opening another 635 hectares, has demanded that the state government first share the entire mining plan for the region before it takes a call though it is still not mandatory for the ministry to take an overall view of the area or get a cumulative impact assessment done before hiving off individual patches.

The National Green Tribunal has suggested such a process to understand the larger picture while giving particular clearances.
( courtesy -Jharkhand mulls mining in Ho tribe's homeland - The Times of India

Recovering Budhni Mejhan from the silted landscape of modern India
by - Chitra Padmanabhan

• 
  SWITCHED ON, SWITCHED OFF:Budhni inaugurating the power station at the Panchet dam in December 1959. —PHOTO: NEHRU MEMORIAL MUSEUM AND LIBRARY, NEW DELHI
• 
  SURFACING STORY:With the silting up of the Panchet reservoir, a temple submerged by the dammed waters of the Damodar is now visible. —PHOTO: BULU IMAM

Of late, a childhood friend's 80-year-old mother has taken to writing. Emboldened by her single-mindedness, memories dulled by a lifetime of contingencies now respond readily to the daily rustle of pen on paper.

One memory stands out in Surjit Kaur's mind. In 1957, as a fresh eyed schoolteacher from Delhi she went on an educational tour to Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. It was 10 years after Independence and she was 25 years old.

As she rattled off her vintage itinerary for my benefit, I glimpsed in her account the fascinating glimmer of a narrative that we now soberly dust off the history shelves as India's Nehruvian past.

The teachers' orientation trip included predictable destinations such as Kanpur, Allahabad, Lucknow, Banaras, Ayodhya, Sarnath, Kolkata and Gwalior which conjured old, civilisational trails of history, culture, commerce and faith.

But some other halts pointed to a new map, a new trail of faith: a dam of the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC) projected to transform the face of eastern India — then in Bihar, now in Jharkhand; the Chittaranjan locomotive works in West Bengal; a cement refractory plant in Katni and the limestone mines in Satna, both in Madhya Pradesh — all adding up to an image of nation-building through Nehru's temples of modern India in the young schoolteacher's mind.

It was to individuals like her that the image of a boyish Sunil Dutt striding across a dam site in ‘Hum Hindustani' (1960) appealed through an evocative background song: ‘ Chhodo kal ki baatein, kal ki baat purani, naye daur mein likhenge mil ke nayi kahani, hum Hindustani (let go of the past; yesterday's talk is old; in this new age, we Indians we shall write a new story together'). The core of this nayi kahani was an idea of progress and development resting on an urban-industrial vision of a socialist society. It was powered by an abiding faith in science and technology, including the most significant element of scientific economic planning.

For Surjit, whose life had been marked by the splinters of Partition, there was perhaps something assuring — and non-threatening — about perceiving development as the yardstick of a new nationalism and modernity.

A few months ago, the retired schoolteacher's story became a part of my present when she asked me to gather information on the places she had visited in 1957. I want to write a detailed account of my best trip ever, she said with a glint in her eye.

Sometimes an innocuous request leads you to the past only to snake back into the present as a story sounding like a sigh, waiting for more than 50 years to be told. Who was to know that a straightforward task of collecting dry facts about a dam visited 54 years ago would bring me face-to-face with the story of Budhni Mejhan, a Santhal tribal, whose life became a testament to nation-building in a way that could never have been imagined; who lived all her life like a pebble trapped under a huge boulder?

I chanced upon Budhni while ferreting out information about the Maithon dam in Dhanbad district (Jharkhand) bordering West Bengal, which was a high point of Surjit's itinerary. The third dam of the ambitious, multipurpose DVC, established in 1948 on the lines of the Tennessee Valley Authority, it had been inaugurated around the time of the schoolteachers' visit.

After Maithon I could have moved on to Surjit's next destination. However, a predisposition to stray from the highways of search engines lured me towards material on DVC's fourth dam at Panchet in Dhanbad district, near its border with Purulia (West Bengal). The dam was built across the Damodar river known as the ‘sorrow of Bengal.' Not only was this Rs.19 crore dam DVC's biggest until then; its inauguration on December 6, 1959 had been graced by Prime Minister Nehru himself.

After his own fashion, Nehru had insisted that 15-year-old Budhni Mejhan, a worker on the site, press the button at the power station to signal the start of operations. Many search words later, I found a tiny photograph of this occasion sourced to the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) in Delhi. The mustiness of time had not managed to quell the palpable excitement of the moment in that blackened, indistinct image; it showed the teenager pressing the button, flanked by a broadly smiling Nehru and others.

However, when Budhni returned to her village, Karbona, the village elders told her that by garlanding Nehru at the function she had in effect married him. Since the Prime Minister was not a Santhal, she was no longer a part of the community. She was told to leave the village. The inflexibility of the community ensured that the excommunication was complete.

The youngster was given shelter by a resident of Panchet, Sudhir Dutta, from whom it was said she had a daughter, born to a destiny of exile like her mother. In 1962, Budhni was fired from her job at DVC and reduced to doing odd jobs.

In the 1980s, she travelled to Delhi. She met the then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of the Prime Minister she had garlanded, with a request: she wanted to be reinstated at DVC.

The last trace of Budhni was found in a 2001 news report uploaded on the website www.ambedkar.org. Headlined ‘Tribal ‘ wife' of Nehru is outcast, driven to poverty' it recounted these details of Budhni's life. Stating that the 58-year-old was working at DVC, the report quoted Budhni as saying, “I wish they would allow me to go back to Karbona.”

Assailed by a feeling of unreality I decided that Surjit's task would have to wait while I searched for Budhni in old newspaper records and photo archives at the NMML.

I wanted to see her face. The clarity of the inauguration photograph granted me that opportunity. I noticed the ornaments in her hair and the fine silver bangles on the burnished ebony of wrist. Most of all I was struck by the look of intense concentration in Budhni's eyes as her hand grasped the switch, the soft contours of innocence suffusing her face.

The Panchet dam inauguration had notched a euphoric lead in many newspapers. ‘Nehru: India marching to prosperity; Big projects a symbol of our resolve,' went the National Herald . The Statesman gave Budhni top billing along with the dam: ‘DVC's biggest dam in commission'; ‘Ceremony at Panchet; ‘Worker switches on power house.' Its reporter started on a breathless note: “Mr. Nehru, as he invited Mrs Budhni Majhi (sic), a young Santhal worker, to switch on the power station here, said it was right that those who had worked on a project should have the honour of declaring it open.” In doing so “Mrs. Majhi became the first worker in the country to declare a dam in commission when she switched on the power station.”

The same report added that “She spoke in Santhali, dedicating the 134-feet-high dam to the nation …” The image of a 15-year-old tribal girl dedicating a dam to the nation in a tongue not even officially recognised by the nation was somewhat ironic, but that detail seemed not to bother the writer. (Santhali was included as an official language in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution only in 2003.)

But try as I might, I could not locate even a passing reference to the split second turn in Budhni's life which sucked out the very meaning of her existence. The headlines of the month moved from one high to another: from the Panchet dam to the inauguration of the Durgapur steel plant blast furnace by President Rajendra Prasad, with a momentous visit of U.S. President Ike Eisenhower in-between.

At another level, a constant flow of reports showed up an all-pervasive sense of mission: ‘India needs 49,000 engineers for Third Plan,' ‘Scientific farming of potatoes,' ‘Progress in fertilisers,' ‘Self sufficiency in steel by 1961' and ‘Progress of Bhakra operations,' among others.

Against this spate of cold print, Budhni's fate almost seemed a figment of one's imagination. Her story sank in the media, just like the Santhal villages and historic old temples which got submerged by the waters of the Damodar river impounded by the Panchet dam. (Tribals constituted 56.46 per cent of the population displaced by the Panchet and Maithon dams, says a 1999 paper on ‘Dams, Displacement, Policy and Law in India,' authored by Harsh Mander, Ravi Hemadri and Vijay Nagaraj for the World Commission on Dams.)

Interestingly, in 1959-60, the term displaced persons referred more to the refugees of Partition; the uprooting caused by dams started becoming an issue of debate a decade later.

Of the many links fanning out from the Panchet dam page, one led to an article by well-known political psychologist Ashis Nandy on South Asia's first modern environmental activist Kapil Bhattacharjee. In his time the activist was dubbed a traitor in some quarters for speaking out against the immensely popular DVC project.

Yet, paradoxically, the displacement and impoverishment of tribal populations caused by the DVC did not figure in the writings of Bhattacharjee, who became a human rights activist in his later years, writes Nandy. He is of the view that this anomaly perhaps resulted from the environmental activist's basic faith in the idea of large scale industrialisation and science-based progress.

On reading this, a gust of childhood memory stirred my mind. I remembered an institution known as G.K (general knowledge) tests which loomed large in schools in the 1970s. From G.K digests printed on splotchy paper and sold at neighbourhood shops and roadside newspaper stalls, my generation religiously memorised a map of India characterised by exotic, faraway sounding names. Each name signified a factory or plant promising self-reliance, or heavy industries and multipurpose projects epitomising the sinews of development. The most awe-inspiring names conjured a vast concentration of mineral deposits; they held aloft the vision of industrialisation. Their bounty placed India among the top five or 10 nations boasting one or the other mineral resource in the world.

There was a measure of solemnity with which we committed these names to memory: Sindri (fertiliser), Pimpri (penicillin), Chittaranjan (locomotive), Perambur (coach factory); Rourkela, Bhilai (steel); Bhakra Nangal, Hirakud, Damodar Valley, Kosi, Tungabhadra, Koel Karo, Sardar Sarovar (multipurpose projects and dams); Ankleswar (petroleum); Narora (heavy water), Tarapur (atomic power plant)… so they went.

Then there were the sing-song names which flagged India's mineral wealth: Jharia (coal), Hazaribagh (mica), Singhbhum, Bailadila, Gadchiroli (iron ore), Neyveli (lignite), Keonjhar (manganese), Koraput, Gandhamardan (bauxite)… Questions on mineral resource areas were a huge hit with the teachers. An image of a teacher like Surjit talking animatedly about her visits to such places crossed my mind.

In an age of few distractions, the act of memorising embeds a grid in the mind which is not easy to dismantle. For years, the mention of one location would automatically revive the entire list in the mind — like they were one.

A thought came from nowhere that my classmates and I had grown up thinking of these places as heroic territories full of resources the nation needed to power ahead — huge expanses awaiting that magic prospecting touch to fulfil their destinies, and curiously devoid of any human presence. Not once had it occurred to us to ask if these areas were inhabited by people, which indeed they were.

Perplexed by this flashback, I mentioned it to an academician friend. She tossed a name at me — sociologist Satish Deshpande — saying that an essay whose title she did not remember, from his book Contemporary India: A Sociological View (Penguin, 2003), might help me grasp the pattern of my observations.

She was right. In his essay, ‘The nation as an imagined economy,' Deshpande outlines Nehru's visualisation of the nation primarily as an economic space. Disseminated through schools and state media, the nation became “a space of production … imagined via economic associations” — be it through a clear mapping of resources or projected targets through economic planning. That sounded so familiar.

The sociologist also tells you why this was so. The idea of “enshrining the economy as that part of the nation which stands for the whole” was one of Nehru's “distinctive personal contributions” to the nationalist cause — a way of overcoming the centrifugal pulls of “culture, language, religion, caste or ethnicity.”

The mystery of the powerful emotions aroused by the word development in our minds as youngsters was also solved for me by the don. The physical planning for development made it easier to anthropomorphise or to attribute human form to the economy — “… and to treat it as a sort of person writ large, in much the same way as Hindu gods and goddesses are thought of…”. Naturally, the nation was the most clearly and dramatically visible in giant projects such as dams and steel plants. After all it was from the Bhakra Nangal site that Nehru asked, “where can be a greater and holier place than this'.

No wonder The Statesman's report on President Rajendra Prasad's convocation address at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (December 28, 1959), was headlined ‘Too much stress on rights deplored'; ‘Dr. Prasad warns against neglecting the call of duty.' (About 50 million people were displaced by big projects in 50 years of independence, according to N.C. Saxena, then Secretary, Planning Commission, quoted in ‘Dams, Displacement, Policy and Law in India', 1999.)

Further, these “sites of development invited the citizens to see themselves reflected in the mirror of technological progress and development.” That was us — Surjit, Budhni, and I as a representative of my generation which through the compass of G.K. had memorised the nation as a geography of developmental shrines.

A historical juncture had brought the schoolteacher and the young Santhal tribal selling her labour on the same plane of Nehru's vision, but at different ends of the spectrum. The vision was of a modern economy “paired,” as Deshpande puts it, with a modernised culture unshackled from its conservative and moribund beliefs of the past. Except, the reality was vastly different at the grassroots and Budhni fell through the gaps in this vision with searing consequences. Surjit and I had never known of her existence.

In a way it was fitting that a simple enough assignment to collect information about a 50-year-old inspiring developmental trail should throw up a shadowy presence: a tribal girl who remained outside the radar of an entire generation attuned to the idea of building the nation through development as the highest act of patriotism.

Certain ways of seeing remain convenient even after the fading of a dream, such as the temptation to perceive areas solely in terms of its resources. For instance, on the occasion of Republic Day some years ago, Chhattisgarh created a tableau of the breathtaking Kotumsar caves with abundant limestone deposits in the mineral rich tribal region of Bastar. Only, the Bastar tribal was missing from that landscape. This gaze has only strengthened with the shifts of time — aided by an ideology of growth fuelled by private enterprise in a globalised world.

As lessons in citizenship have given way to lessons in consumerism for many of us, the temptation to dwell on economic geographies has intensified. But here's the change: these very economic geographies have metamorphosed into cultural and political topographies. There are people everywhere and that complicates things. For the hills we see as bauxite reserves they intimately know as the abode of their gods, the lineage of their ancestors and grove of medicinal plants. Wherever people live, they create intensely compressed layers of experience, expressed through a delicate ecology of connectedness. One needs to ‘see' them; that much I have learnt after becoming aware of Budhni's presence in an older narrative.

All this while, I had debated the merits of meeting Budhni. Last week, through a friend's friend in Ranchi I got news that Budhni died last year, disconsolate to the end. She was in her late 60s.

The Panchet dam that Budhni operationalised with the flick of a switch, too, has gone through its own vicissitudes. During my online parikrama around the dam I came upon an article written by Bulu Imam of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (Hazaribagh chapter) for the 2006-07 report of the International Council on Monuments and Sites. Imam describes how the ruins of at least one historic temple of Telkupi, submerged for decades under the waters of the dammed Damodar, have become visible due to the silting up of the Panchet reservoir. To my fanciful mind, the timing of Surjit's request, the retrieval of Budhni's story, her death and the re-emergence of temple ruins are a strong signal for a new G.K. of collective imagination which sings a land as well as its people into existence.

It would be interesting to know what Surjit makes of this narrative. I am yet to gather the courage to meet her gimlet gaze having delayed her work considerably. Though, knowing her feisty temperament she might want to revisit the landscape of her memories once she hears me out. This time I shall accompany her.

(Chitra Padmanabhan is a writer based in Delhi. Email: cpadmanabhan@gmail.com )

It's important that the Santhali worker who inaugurated one of Nehru's temples of modern India is resurrected in the national memory. She is a reminder that this land can be separated from its people only with tragic consequences
( courtesy - The Hindu : Today's Paper / OPINION : Recovering Budhni Mejhan from the silted landscape of modern India )