Chhattisgarh: Adivasis Defend Land from Incursion of Tata Steel

This article appeared in the Peninsula Observer and the Financial Times on March 10, 2010.


“There are slogans on walls saying ‘Naxals come and save us’,” says Arundhati Roy, the writer and social activist. “People are begging them, ‘just come and train us’.”

India’s tribes pitted against corporations over land

Disputes over forcible purchases are raging across the nation, says Amy Kazmin. First, the land surveyors came. Then the rumours spread through the villages: Tata, one of India’s biggest conglomerates, would build a steel mill in the district. Finally government officials came to ask the villagers in Lohandiguda in Chhattisgarh state, who are mainly illiterate farmers from the Gond tribe, to relinquish their fields for the promise of cash, jobs and a better future.

For Banga Ram, the 65-year-old patriarch of a large family, the request was absurd. “What will we do with the money?” he asked. “We have to do agriculture to feed these children.” But local officials were not taking No for an answer. Banga Ram was arrested. After he spent 13 days in jail, he says his sons signed away the land and accepted compensation.

In nearby Chindgaon village, Sundar Kashyap, who earns Rs10,000 ($219, €161, £146) a month working for the government animal husbandry department, says his bosses warned him of trouble if his younger brothers refused to sign over two of their five acres. They too signed.

Yet five years after Tata Steel announced its plans for the mill, the families of both men are still cultivating their ancestral fields. Officials are struggling to complete the contentious land acquisition, with 20 percent of the required 5,000 hectares still outstanding and a local civil rights lawyer threatening legal action against the process. “I am going to challenge it,” says Pratap Agrawal, an attorney in the nearby small town of Jagdalpur.

“Villagers are absolutely against handing over even an inch of their land.” Battles over forcible acquisition of agricultural land for industry are raging across India. But nowhere are they as fraught as in India’s tribal belt, where long-neglected indigenous animist tribes, known as adivasis, have upset the plans of corporate groups such as Vedanta, Tata Steel, Essar Steel and National Mineral Development Corp to tap mineral riches.

About 8.4 percent of India’s population are classified as adivasis, members of hundreds of distinct tribes whose languages have no written form. Living in severe poverty in remote areas with limited government services, tribal communities have India’s lowest literacy rates and its highest incidence of infant mortality and malnourished children. Ostensibly, tribal communities have special legal protection to prevent them from being involuntarily dispossessed of their land.

Yet critics say that pro-business government officials, who argue that mines and other large-scale industries would bring economic development and progress to neglected areas, are brazenly manipulating public consultation processes and overriding community sentiments to take tribal lands. “Indigenous people live in pre-industrial societies, so if the government goes to acquire their land for mining or special economic zones, it’s a matter of life and death for them,” says Prashant Bhushan, a prominent New Delhi-based civil rights lawyer. “But all they have been doing is having some sham formal consultation process in which the views of adivasis are not seriously sought.”

These conflicts, which tend to pit India’s most neglected people against its most powerful business houses, are helping to fuel the radical Naxalite guerrilla movement in the tribal belt, now increasingly considered India’s “Red Corridor”. “There are slogans on walls saying ‘Naxals come and save us’,” says Arundhati Roy, the writer and social activist. “People are begging them, ‘just come and train us’.” Among India’s most controversial mining projects is the plan by UK-listed Vedanta to mine bauxite from a mountain that the 2,800-strong Dongria Kondh tribe believe is its deity’s sacred home.

In a recent report, Amnesty International, the human rights group, said neither government officials nor Vedanta made any meaningful attempt to inform the illiterate tribes near the site about the project but merely published advertisements for a public hearing.

Vedanta, which says no one lives on the prospective mine site, says local government offices were notified about the project and given a chance to spread the word. India’s Supreme Court found all requirements were fulfilled. “The Indian regulatory system is robust – it does not leave room for anybody to take advantage,” says Mukesh Kumar, Vedanta Aluminium’s chief operating officer.

However, the Church of England and several other social investors recently sold their shareholdings in Vedanta, citing concern for the way the company had handled its relations with local communities. In Lohandiguda, Tata Steel says it has agreed to all but one of 13 conditions laid down by affected villagers for selling their land. Besides cash, Tata says villagers will be given “land for land”, skills training and the promise of a job to one member of every affected household.

“I think that development is something that everyone, especially if it’s brought by a company like Tata, would find acceptable,” says Sanjay Choudhry of Tata Steel. He says the mechanics of the land-buying process are handled by state authorities. “If and when they hand over the land, we will put up the industry in the best way we can.”

Mapping out legal rights

Schedule V of India’s Constitution maps out customary tribal lands where indigenous animist tribes are seen as requiring special protection against the threat of exploitation and dispossession. In 1996, India adopted a law requiring authorities to consult village councils before taking land in tribal areas for development or industry. Civil rights lawyers say this should be interpreted to require the consent of local communities.

India’s Supreme Court ruled in a 1997 judgment that Schedule V, combined with laws in Andhra Pradesh, prohibited the transfer of tribal land there to non-tribalsnon tribe members for a mining lease. It also suggested that 20 per cent of the profits from mining in tribal areas be set aside for tribalstribe members. It urged New Delhi to clarify policies about mining in tribal areasto ensure consistency across states. However, other states with large tribal areas have said the judgment does not apply to them.

Indian Media Unearths Alleged “Maoist Operation” in Delhi

This article appeared in Tehelka.

‘May You Live in Interesting Times’
The Maoists and Us


Could the cry of “Maoist terrorists” be the Congress led UPA governmet’s equivalent of the cry of “Islamic terrorists” during the BJP led NDA government? — asks PK Vijayan, Assistant Professor of English, Hindu College, Delhi University


On 20th February, the Hindustan Times, reporting on the chargesheet produced by the Delhi Police against Kobad Ghandy, stated that Ghandy was alleged to have been in direct contact with GN Sai Baba, a professor in Delhi University, and who is alleged to be in control of the CPI (Maoist)’s tactical counter offensive against Operation Greenhunt. Reporting on the same chargesheet, on the same date, the Times of India reported the investigators’ claim that civil rights groups like the PUDR and PUCL were actively helping the Maoists to spread their base; while Mail Today stated that there was an active Maoist operation amongst Delhi University students, specifically identifying the Democratic Students Union (DSU). Elaborating on this same chargesheet report the next day, the HT adds that a prominent research scholar and a human rights activist have been specifically identified by Ghandy as Maoist leaders in the capital, although they are not named by the newspaper. Interestingly, each of these details appears only in the particular newspaper mentioned, and not in any of the other papers: like the blind men and the elephant, it is as if each has ‘found’ something unique in the chargesheet, that characterises the contents of that document – but unlike the blind men in the story, who after all are each seeking to describe the same beast but end up describing only the part that they sense, these newspapers presumably all have access to the same ‘beast’ in its entirety (i.e., the chargesheet), but have chosen to report only on specific – but different – aspects of the extensive Maoist network that it alleges exists in Delhi. What, we may ask, is going on?

Very simply, if each newspaper reports on any one branch of this alleged Maoist network, each will have apparently reported something unique; further, each newspaper’s readership will have been made aware of one crucial way in which the Maoist ‘menace’ is apparently already in their neighbourhood, and spreading like a virus. But the total effect of all the reports is the imaging of a hydra, a Ravana, a many-headed monster conceived in the savage and distant tribal terrains of Jharkhand, Chhatisgarh and Orissa, and that is now slouching towards the safe cosmopolitan world of the NCR to be born. What is most disturbing in this picture – which would be fantastically ridiculous if it were not so dangerous – is that the heads of this monster that have been identified in the newspapers are intellectuals, civil rights bodies and university student organisations: the classic sites of dissent in any free society. In other words, Operation Green Hunt (or OGH) is no longer just ‘out there’, but is now itself slouching around in the NCR: dissent towards OGH is gradually itself being targeted under OGH.

Troublingly, sections of the press appear to be participating – wittingly or unwittingly – in this urbanisation of OGH. The fact is that if each of these papers had presented all that the others had also reported, the larger picture would have been self-evident, the elephant would have stood revealed as the state preparing to trample on intellectual dissent. One does not need to be particularly gifted visually or intellectually to see the connection between intellectuals, university students and civil rights activists. Every modern state has sought to control these sections of its society – and usually the press too – precisely because they have always been sources of political discomfort. When the press decides to go along with the state, or confines itself to being the voice of the state, it must ring a bell for us – in this case a very loud alarm bell, that tolls the names of Joseph Goebbels, over and over again. The question before us is, did the newspapers noted above choose to remain blind men? Or were their reporters deliberately fed partial information by the police, to ensure that the fear of the Maoist virus spreading would be treated as a ‘real’ threat, and not be perceived for what it patently is: a strategy for clamping down on any questioning of the government’s armed offensive against large populations of its own citizenry, in the name of cleansing the Maoist ‘infection’? Even if it was the latter, it was and is incumbent on any press worth its name – as another important site of dissent in any free society – to have sought out the information in its entirety, before rushing to press. Otherwise, in true Goebbelsian fashion, it will simply be blindly repeating the lies, over and over again, till the lies become the truth.

That this did not happen, for whatever reason, is closely related to another issue, which is the absence in the mainstream press and media in general, of any real understanding of or interest in the anxieties and apprehensions that OGH has given rise to, and of the consequent concern over it. This anxiety and concern has been emanating from several very diverse quarters, and essentially pertains to whether it is appropriate for the state to take arms against its own citizenry. Very few of these voices may be considered even remotely sympathetic to the Maoist cause; several of them have explicitly, repeatedly and sometimes even vehemently spoken against it. Irrespective of their take on Maosim, however, these voices have focused on the fact that OGH is an operation that is unconstitutional, violative of fundamental human rights and pretty evidently underway in order to further the interests of big corporate investments in the ‘infested’ areas. They have repeatedly sought to point out that the perceived ‘infestation’ actually constitutes the local tribal populations living there. If large sections of the tribal populations in these areas – threatened with displacement, destitution and/or violent death at the hands of big-money private armies and/or the state’s own military and paramilitary apparatus – should choose to resist this apparently inexorable process of internal colonisation, sometimes violently, then should we in Delhi be surprised? Delhi’s denizens are now world-famous for resorting to fists, lathis and the odd baseball bat on what might be considered the slightest provocation: it might be a neighbour parking his car in my space, or another’s washing hanging over my balcony – our sense of our space as sacred is powerful. Then, when the tribal – for whom it is not parking space but her very livelihood, history and future that are being stolen with her land – decides to protest, should we not be stirred by sympathy? If we are not, we need to wonder why we are not. And at least part of the reason for that is because we have been buying into the Goebbelsian lies of the state: that these tribal movements are all controlled and managed by Naxals/Maoists; or that the tribals are actually being coerced by Maoists; or that there are no tribals, only Maoists. That these are people fighting for rights sanctioned to them under the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution, is a fact that gets drowned in all the noise.

The Indian state – which is thus explicitly enjoined by the Constitution (among other documents) to protect the social and economical interests of tribals in these scheduled areas – is financially and politically too deeply invested in the project of clearing these areas and making them accessible to corporate exploitation, to acknowledge this. It would lose legitimacy and become a global scandal. Or it would simply reveal what most states under this stage of capitalism are doing. Hence the extended exercise of labelling all tribals protesting its actions ‘Maoist’; all intellectual and civil rights attempts to dissuade it, ‘Maoist sympathisers’; and all dissent in general is increasingly being viewed as ‘terrorist’. This, as will be easily recognised, has long been the hallmark of McCarthyism. And as with that form of political repression, no doubt a chain of arrests will be initiated based on ostensible ‘confessions’, beginning with Kobad Ghandy’s, and spreading out in a network that will be produced as Maoist, with no way of knowing if it actually is.

It is particularly instructive that Joseph McCarthy’s strategy of labelling all dissent ‘communist’ arose at a time when the capitalist economy of the United States was, post-Depression, impatiently seeking to lose the shackles of Franklin Roosevelt’s socially oriented New Deal policies. Thus, any policy that carried even a whiff of being social-welfarist was immediately branded communist and dumped, and its proponents attacked socially, politically and legally.

The parallels are clear with our own context: we live, as the old Chinese curse goes, in interesting times – when our own capitalism is kicking with impatience at obstacles to (irony of ironies!) ‘economic reforms’; when its increasing population of dollar billionaires are panting to go forth and multiply their billions by raping the hinterlands of the country; when the state is itself eager to role back measures like the PDS and to massively fudge figures on poverty, even as prices of especially essential commodities continue to escalate and farmers continue to commit suicide; when ‘Islamic terror’ – that bogeyman that allowed the BJP to simultaneously terrorise the Muslim community as well as steamroll its own version of economic reforms through – has given way to the ‘red terror’ of ‘Maoism’ (after all, the Congress can’t be seen as anti-Islamic), but to the exact same end. While there may appear to be a kind of poetic irony in our own Chinese curse seeming to be Maoism, the not so poetic fact is that it is not the spectre of Maoism that haunts the land today but the multiple spectres of unbridled corporate capitalism, state collusion with and participation in this capitalist expansionism, the consequent and unprecedented assault on the lives and livelihoods of millions of tribals in the ‘infected’ areas. And the ideological cover for all this in our own brand of McCarthyism: OGH or ‘anti-Maoism’ (which is less of a mouthful than Chidambaramism, although that would probably be a more accurate term). (We shall for now not even touch upon the absurdity, in an ostensible democracy, of banning an ideology, as has happened with Maoism; who or what, we might well ask, even if we do not subscribe to this ideology, is being sought to be protected by this ban?) The Indian state is, it seems, learning well from Joseph Goebbels and Joseph McCarthy; perhaps it will very soon look to Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge too. And it seems, the first to be purged from the metropolises will be the nuisances identified above: inconvenient intellectuals, university students and civil rights activists who will all be identified as ‘Maoists’ (never mind that they may actually be socialists, Gandhians, environmentalists or other such ‘beasts’) and removed from ‘shining India’. And once the intellectuals and activists and students are disposed of, Mr. P (Joseph?) Chidambaram will no doubt find an able ally in Mr. Kapil Sibal, to ensure that they do not surface again – for the latter as we know, is already working hard to dismantle the higher education system and sack it off to private and foreign institutional interests – but that is another tale. Suffice it for now to reiterate that, thanks to Mr. Chidambaram and his ilk, we do indeed live in interesting times, and all the interest is accumulating in the pockets of our dollar billionaires.

Spring Thunder Anew

Monthly Review

by Bernard D'Mello

The white man called you Bhagat Singh that day,
The black man calls you Naxalite today.
But everyone will call you the morning star tomorrow.

-- Excerpt from the Telugu poem
'Final Journey: First Victory' by Sri Sri 1


It has been a long and tortuous route. Forty-three years ago, a group of Maoist revolutionaries conceived of and embarked upon a revolutionary road that still inspires their political descendants, alarms the dominant classes, and provokes slander and denigration on the part of the establishment left, post-modernists and well-funded NGO bosses. This is the path of protracted people's war (PPW). It relies on an alliance of the Indian proletariat with the poor and landless peasantry and the semi-proletariat to establish 'base areas' in the countryside, run them democratically as miniature, self-reliant states, carry out 'land to the tiller' and other social policies there, thereby building a political mass base to finally encircle and 'capture' the cities.

The aim is to usher in 'new democracy', a transitional stage in which capitalism is moulded to render it more compatible with democracy, thereby aiding the transition to socialism, all under the leadership of a 'Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party'. One would like to say, 'It's been a long time coming', but even today, the Maoist movement in India is nowhere near its 'new democratic' goal -- the dawn has been ever elusive. Yet, the dominant classes want it throttled, and the Indian state has recently launched Operation Green Hunt -- phase-2 of its present counter-insurgency strategy -- to accomplish its task. What has prompted this move?

Overall, can we make any sense of what is going on? We will rely on 'stylized facts' derived from the empirical evidence we have at hand, concentrating thereby on the broad tendencies (ignoring individual detail) to throw light on the state's strategy, the strategy and tactics of the Maoists, their successes and failures, and the interplay of continuity with change, focussing on their resistance to (what we characterize as) neo-robber baron capitalism. We argue that Operation Green Hunt stems from the fact that the movement now threatens neo-robber baron capitalism in its areas of influence -- albeit exaggerated by the dominant classes as so-called 'Red Corridor' -- and the Indian state is therefore bent on asphyxiating it.

Low intensity conflict or -- if one were to speak plainly -- terrorism with politics in command of the repressive apparatus has been the state's modus operandi of dealing with the Maoist movement. Complementing this, and taking into account aspects of the concrete in the close nexus of wealth and power at the local level, the state supports, sponsors, and organizes a network of informers and combatants among the civilian population as part of its counter-insurgency strategy. Nevertheless, the stick and the carrot go together. The Indian state, though an instrument of the dominant classes -- the big bourgeoisie, foreign capital, the landlords, a section of the rich peasants, and the controllers of the government machinery -- is, nevertheless, an arena of class struggle.

Over the period since 1967, laws and policies setting limits to the exercise of the power of the dominant classes have been won largely due to the very struggles led by the Maoists and other progressive forces. The dominant classes, of course, hope that the new rules and regulations and proposed actions will drastically diminish the support base of the Maoist movement. However, those very classes have in turn devised more sophisticated ways of controlling that base, actual and potential. For the very high rate of exploitation, the rampant pillage of Mother Nature, and the devious expropriation of social property that are characteristic of neo-robber baron capitalism have to go on, which, in turn, puts severe limits on democratic functioning, thereby keeping alive the very raison d'être of the Maoist movement.

How have the Maoists built and sustained the movement led by them, when their enemy, the Indian state, especially its repressive apparatus, is so powerful and the Communist Party of India (Maoist) [CPI (Maoist)], the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA), and the agrarian revolutionary movement are still weak? Uneven development, characteristic of capitalism, provides enough room for manoeuvre in the face of many a paramilitary offensive. The Dandakaranya region -- the forest area situated in the border and adjoining tribal districts of the states of Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Orissa -- is where the PLGA has established guerrilla zones. These are tracts where the agrarian revolutionary movement is strong, but where the party and its mass organizations are in power only as long as the guerrillas have the upper hand over the state's forces. Power reverts to the Indian state when they are forced to retreat.

The extensive area of Dandakaranya and beyond to some other parts of the four states just mentioned, and further on to parts of Bihar, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal are being built into a contiguous area of Maoist influence. Of course, the hilly regions with dense forest cover provide the most conducive terrain for the PLGA, followed by backward plain and semi-forest areas with some hilly terrain.

In spreading the movement, when an area is selected, a class analysis is undertaken, the concrete forms of exploitation and oppression are understood, the friends and the enemies of the movement are clearly identified, and the issues to be taken up which constitute the basis of mass mobilization are decided. For instance, in a predominantly tribal area, the economic basis of mobilization is located within both backward agriculture and forestry. When the erstwhile CPI (Marxist-Leninist) (People's War) [CPI(ML)(PW)], under the auspices of the Adivasi Kisan Mazdoor Sanghatan (AKMS), began organizing the tribal poor in the then Bastar district of Madhya Pradesh in the early 1980s, the 'enemies' were the oppressive forest, revenue and police department officials, and contractors, traders and moneylenders. Where considerable inequality in the distribution of cultivable land prevailed, landlords were also part of the adversaries.

The AKMS took up the question of pattas (instruments of ownership rights) on forestland under cultivation and on cultivable land in forest villages. Where landlords were in charge, the appropriation and distribution of land and grain were on the agenda. As the young, local, militant leaders in the AKMS-organized sanghams gained legitimacy and eventually displaced the village mukhias and other traditional village headmen, they increasingly influenced the decision-making process on local issues, and eventually, the jan adalats (people's courts), set up by them, settled disputes. The AKMS came to exercise control over the collection and sale of minor produce (for instance, tendu patta) in favour of the poor.

Expectedly, all this exacerbated the contradictions vis-à-vis the landed, the traders, the contractors, and the corrupt forest and revenue department officials, and the organized violence of the oppressors and the state was unleashed against the Maoists (the vigilante force, Salwa Judum, in Dantewara district of Chhattisgarh, formed in May-June 2005, is not without precedent).

Of course, the Maoists anticipate and plan for 'strategic defence' -- the decision to enter an area factors in the terrain with which they familiarize themselves. People's militia at the village level and local and special guerrilla squads are organized from the very commencement of their work, and later, upon coordination with other guerrilla zones, platoons and companies are formed, leading to a full-fledged PLGA. In situations marked by a close nexus between political and economic power, which is invariably the case in India's backward areas, the chances of violent confrontation are high. Indeed, over time, the contradictions with the exploiters and oppressors, already sharp in these areas of backward agriculture and forestry, inevitably get exacerbated manifold with the organization of the oppressed by the Maoists, and when the state sends in its paramilitary forces, a guerrilla war ensues.

The problem, from the Maoist perspective of progress in the PPW, is that they have not been able to turn any of the guerrilla zones into base areas. The latter are areas where the Maoists win the political (and military) struggle and establish a miniature state, where self-reliant economic development on the basis of 'land to the tiller', and the promotion of mutual aid and cooperation can, relatively uninterruptedly, be undertaken. It is impossible to advance the ongoing guerrilla war or the further spread of guerrilla zones without the establishment of base areas.

In the plains areas -- which are less suitable for guerrilla warfare and the establishment of guerrilla zones -- the higher guerrilla units have been unable to continue their operations and gradually have had to move to the forest and hilly areas. Some of the existing guerrilla zones are potential candidates for transformation into base areas, but 'the enemy' has to be defeated there and the organs of political power have to then be established, a formidable task in the face of severe repression.

Of course, the present Operation Green Hunt, from the perspective of the Indian state, is intended to turn existing guerrilla zones back into 'White Areas' where the writ of a relatively stable, reactionary government runs. And, even if the Maoists were to turn one of the guerrilla zones into a base area, there is no guarantee that it will remain one, i.e., it can revert back to a guerrilla zone. From the Maoist point of view, if they create and sustain a few base areas, the PPW will be able to sustain itself over a long period; in the absence of base areas, the Maoist guerrilla army will not last long or grow -- in guerrilla parlance, the base areas are its essential 'rear'.

There is another aspect of the imperative to establish base areas -- the sustenance of mass support. Difficult as it surely is, it is imperative for the CPI (Maoist) and its mass organizations to undertake economic development in the midst of the revolution, for the workers, the poor and landless peasants, and the semi-proletariat cannot be expected to put up with their abysmal living conditions over decades. But this can only take place on a relatively stable basis with the establishment of base areas, which is eluding the Maoists, and the longer this adverse situation prevails the greater the chances of a withering away of the movement's support base.

The present intense phase of the Maoist movement began with the unity of the CPI(ML)(PW) and the Maoist Communist Centre of India (MCCI) -- the two main Maoist parties practising armed struggle -- to form the CPI (Maoist) in September 2004. The movement's regeneration has occurred in the context of neo-liberal globalization with, among other things, a spurt in the conversion of agricultural lands into real estate, the setting up of special economic zones, the takeover of the commons, and encroachment of the natural resource base. All these have led to mass distress following the loss of non-market access to the means of subsistence and dispossession through displacement, both essentially without any legal redress for the victims. However, change must not be divorced from its interplay with continuity.

Beginning in May 1967, armed communist revolutionaries led a poor-tribal peasant uprising in Naxalbari that was crushed by the repressive apparatus of the state within a few months, but the movement spread, and 43 years later, the 'people's war' still goes on. In the first phase of the movement, from the late 1960s to the Emergency in the mid-1970s, the revolutionaries organized the poor and landless peasants based on armed guerrilla actions centred on the 'adventurist' line of annihilation of class enemies.

But internal differences over strategy and tactics soon led to the fragmentation and debilitation of the original party, the CPI(ML), and the brutal counter-insurgency campaign of the state crushed the movement, the final blow coming with the declaration of Emergency in 1975. What was, however, significant and lasting, although there are no traces of the movement where it all began, was the total rejection by the revolutionary left of the cultural, moral and political values that the establishment left had imbibed, since 1951, from the dominant classes.

With the revival of the movement in the post-Emergency period, all the major factions of the CPI(ML) seemed to have adopted, to a lesser or greater extent, the line of the Andhra Pradesh Revolutionary Communist Committee -- that of building mass movements backed by armed squads to defend the gains made by the former. And, paradoxically, in this phase (1977-1990s) it was the CPI(ML)(PW) -- although it focused on the building of a people's army and guerrilla zones in the countryside -- that organized legal and open activities through the Rythu Cooly Sangham, as also of students, youth, intellectuals and cultural workers. However, the crushing of these by the state provoked a tendency to assign greater priority to the building of a people's army and guerrilla zones in the countryside.

Elsewhere, mainly in Bihar, a prominent part of the movement, led by the CPI(ML) (Liberation), made a significant departure from the very core of the basic path that had been conceived by the original CPI(ML). The shift was towards mass movements sans armed struggle, even conceiving of a confederation of mainstream left parties. This, however, landed the party in an identity crisis for the new direction heralded a return to theoretical proximity vis-a-vis the CPI (Marxist), against which the MLs had rebelled in 1967.

Sadly, the change of strategy took the CPI(ML) (Liberation) towards parliamentarianism, which seems to have affected the further development of the party's mass movements. In any case, it seems to have lost a large section of its mass base with the 'Mandalization' and 'Kashiramization' of the political agendas of the 'bourgeois' parties. The return to armed struggle has been ruled out, at least for the present, given the CPI(ML) (Liberation)'s dismissal of that trend of the movement as 'anarcho-militarist'.

However, even as we comment on the party thus, we need to add that the unfolding of its strategy of new democratic revolution -- via mass movements sans armed struggle -- according to its inner logic has encountered severe impediments from the dominant classes. Just like in the case of the CPI(ML)(PW) and its 'legal' mass movements of the 1980s, the CPI(ML) (Liberation) could never have been allowed, unhindered by the dominant classes, a free run on its political programme.

The reverberating slogan of the CPI(ML)(PW) and the MCCI, 'Naxalbari -- ek hi rasta' (Naxalbari -- the One and Only Path), seems to have won the day, at least for the foreseeable future, more so after the two parties united to constitute the CPI (Maoist) in September 2004. After the demise of the Soviet Union and the completion of the 'great leap backward' to capitalism in China, capitalism on a world scale has taken its gloves off -- it has little qualms in resorting to brutal forms of expropriation in the process of accumulation, akin in some ways to what it did at its birth. Accompanying this is the class discrimination inherent in the practice of law where peasants, forced off their lands and denied access to the commons, have virtually no recourse to justice, which reminds me of this 15th century anonymous English 'fact of the matter' verse:

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals a goose from off the common,
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

Resistance seemed the only way out -- in such circumstances, 'to rebel is justified.'

The Dandakaranya region, rich in natural resources -- land, water, forests and minerals -- has become one of the main arenas for expropriation of social property by the Indian big bourgeoisie and foreign capital, mediated by the state and union governments. Planned mining and industrial projects and development of eco-tourist resorts have spurred the construction of highways, roads, railways, hydro-electricity, and an underground pipeline (taking a slurry of iron ore to Visakhapatnam port), which, taken together, constitute, in the official parlance, 'development'. The identities of the beneficiaries and the victims of this process of capitalist development tell a lot about the character of India's dominant classes.

In sharp contrast, the Maoists have initiated, albeit in a small way in some pockets in Dandakaranya -- considering that they have managed to set up only guerrilla zones, not base areas -- a series of popular activities. These include 'land to the tiller', mutual aid and cooperatives, the diffusion of modern knowledge about agriculture, together with the distribution of better seeds gathered from elsewhere, the deployment of voluntary labour in the construction of tanks with canal systems, measures to obtain 'just' prices for agricultural commodities and minor forest produce, and so on.

However, in the present adverse circumstances, an alternative pattern of industrialization benefiting the victims of neo-robber-baron capitalism can only be conceived of, not implemented. Meanwhile, adivasi livelihoods based on agriculture and minor forest produce are in jeopardy. The mining and industrial projects, the infrastructural facilities, including hydro-electricity, have led/are leading to mass displacement and environmental damage.

Indeed, the classic peasant question of dispossession via class differentiation in the 20th century is now metamorphosing into dispossession through displacement and environmental degradation. At the macro-level, millions of rural people are being rendered proletarians (in the form of casual and contract labour), hungry, malnutrition-ridden, homeless and landless paupers, forced migrants, threatened autochthonous peoples, lumpenproletariat, and so on. Indeed, those who hold on as poor and middle peasants against all odds are forced to grapple with the non-viability of agriculture in the context of higher input prices and freer trade in agricultural commodities under WTO auspices.

Fundamentally, the 'people's war' (of resistance) is about the path of development -- the neo-robber baron capitalism in which the poor are the victims or 'new democratic' development in which they are the intended beneficiaries. In Dantewara, Bastar and Bijapur districts in Chhattisgarh, in the context of large-scale acquisition of land by corporations in what is a mineral-rich region, entire villages have been evacuated and villagers forcibly herded into camps, from which those who escape are branded Maoists and hunted down. Indeed, the vigilante group, Salwa Judum (SJ), which organized the evacuation and forced herding 'was created and encouraged by the [state] government and supported with the firepower and organization of the central forces.'

No, this quote is not from a report of one of our civil liberties and democratic rights organizations, but taken from chapter four of a 2009 draft report authored by Sub-Group IV of the Committee on State Agrarian Relations and Unfinished Task of Land Reforms, set up by the Ministry of Rural Development, New Delhi. Without mincing words, it refers to 'the biggest grab of tribal land after Columbus' in the making as being initially 'scripted by Tata Steel and Essar Steel who want seven villages or thereabouts each to mine the richest lode of iron ore available in India.'

However, the land-grab operation, after nearly five years of violent attacks, loot, destruction, intimidation, rape, and killing on an unprecedented scale, and the forcible mobilization of the displaced into SJ ranks, has not succeeded, thanks to concerted resistance by the people and the Maoist guerrillas. However, the very failure has prompted a move to phase-2 of the state's counter-insurgency strategy. Greater emphasis is now being placed on trained commandos (instructed in jungle warfare) and a larger contingent of central forces, as part of Operation Green Hunt, wherein an attempt will be made to separate, indeed isolate, the tribal peasants from contact with and influence by the Maoist insurgents by creating 'fortified villages' or 'strategic hamlets' as the US forces tried to do in Vietnam.

Most likely, Green Hunt would concentrate on select guerrilla zones (it has already been launched in south Dantewara [in Chhattisgarh] and the contiguous Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra) and, over a period of two, three or five years (claims made by various representatives at the central and state levels), try to wipe out the PLGA and the party's mass organizations. (As for the party, there have been some press reports suggesting plots to assassinate its top-50 leaders.) Faced with an offensive of this kind, the Maoist guerrillas will likely extend the arena of the struggle, in turn, even daring to organize in the urban areas, but in the process some of the existing guerrilla zones will likely be converted back to 'White Areas'. Of course, the effectiveness of protests in India and elsewhere and the resistance offered by the tribal people and the Maoist guerrillas would set the limits to the state's onslaught.

In the absence of base areas, the movement now seems to be in a difficult situation -- the Indian state has made it almost impossible for the CPI (Maoist)'s political-cum-military strategy to unfold in accordance with its inner logic. The movement is, of course, a direct consequence of the tragedy of India ruled by her big bourgeoisie and governed by parties co-opted by that class-fraction. Operation Green Hunt stems from the fact that the movement now threatens the accumulation of capital in its areas of influence, defined more broadly by the dominant classes as the so-called 'Red Corridor', and therefore, the Indian state is bent on throttling it.

It seems that sections of monopoly capital -- including ArcelorMittal, the Essar Group, Vedanta Resources, Tata Steel, POSCO, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, and the Sajjan Jindal Group -- have given an ultimatum to the state governments concerned and the Union government that they will dump their proposed mining/industrial/SEZ projects if the local resistance to their business plans are not crippled once and for all. Surely, the wealthy oligopolists and financiers interested have friends in high places in Washington, London, Tokyo, Brussels and/or New Delhi.

As radical democrats, we need to speak out; as between neo-robber-baron capitalism and 'new democracy', one cannot pretend to be neutral. Evoking so-called 'sandwich theory' that the 'innocent adivasis are caught in the crossfire' between the Maoist guerrillas on the one side and the armed apparatus of the Indian state on the other, thereby morally equating the violence of the oppressed and the oppressors, is to endorse what the Indian state is doing -- backing the neo-robber barons to the hilt.

Neo-robber baron capitalism is based on the exploitation -- appropriation of part of the product of the labour of others -- of human beings, the pillage of nature and the expropriation of social property by any and all available means, these in the context of a close nexus between business and politics. As a specific form of monopoly capitalism, business strategy/tactics of the larger enterprises in the more monopolistically structured sectors focus ever more on ways and means of 'snatching' the surplus from relatively smaller enterprises in the more competitive sectors (the latter will be protected in a 'new democratic' regime).

In the neo-liberal milieu of deregulation, all these processes are generating inequality on an unprecedented scale. It is not irrelevant that India has the same number of $ billionaires as Germany, although the latter's GDP is four times the former's, and Germany's per capita GDP converted at market exchange rates to US $ is more than 40 times India's. And, in 2004-05, 77% of India's 362 million strong unorganized labour force (which makes up most of India's total labour force) earned less than Rs 20 per day (44 cents at Rs 45 to the $).

A 'new democratic' regime -- the Maoist alternative to neo-robber baron capitalism -- in the main will abolish landlordism and implement 'land to the tiller' in India's countryside and safeguard India's sovereignty, dealing with the imperialist powers on an equal footing. It will also confiscate the property of the imperialists and the big bourgeoisie -- those at the apex of wealth, power and privilege -- and hence stymie the anti-democratic opposition to socialism from their representatives and backers. From an ecological point of view, the redistribution of income and wealth -- as a result of such a programme -- will lead to a more just distribution of carbon footprints within the country, and priority will be assigned to satisfying the reasonable needs of all, in keeping with Maoist ethics.

Of course, 'new democracy' in India is nowhere yet on the horizon. Nevertheless, the ruling classes and those who govern on their behalf have realized that what they are up against is not merely a guerrilla army backed by a large section of the people in its areas of operation, but a party with a vision and a plan that does all it can to implement, against all odds, and which, if successful, will strip them of their wealth, power and privileges.

Evidently then, there is a lot at stake between neo-robber baron capitalism on the one side and 'new democracy' on the other -- for the neo-robber barons and their representatives, for the adivasis of Dandakaranya and beyond, indeed, for the Indian people, and, for a better world.



Notes

1 Thema Book of Naxalite Poetry edited and introduced by Sumanta Banerjee, Calcutta, 1987. Bhagat Singh, an Indian anti-imperialist and socialist revolutionary martyr (shaheed), was hanged on March 23, 1931 at the age of 23. Naxalite is what a Maoist in India is generally called. The name derives from the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal where the Maoist movement in India originated in 1967.

Bernard D'Mello (bernard@epw.in) is deputy editor, Economic & Political Weekly, and a member of the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Mumbai. He thanks Gautam Navlakha for his comments and suggestions on an earlier draft. The usual disclaimers apply. This article has appeared in Seminar, 607, March 2010 in a symposium -- "Red Resurgence" -- on the Naxal/Maoist challenge to the state.

Women hold up half the sky – once more than a dream

>(a Columbian Maoist guerilla fighter)


A World to Win News Service. Shortly after the Chinese revolution in 1949, new laws gave women the equal legal status and full rights denied to them in the days when the imperialists, their local capitalist allies and feudal landlords ruled the country. New laws put an end to child and arranged marriages, granted women the right to divorce and gave them the right to land so that they would no longer be the property of men in any way. The freeing of countless women from prostitution is another example of great changes brought about almost overnight.

But Mao Tsetung understood that the leap from formal equality under law to the complete emancipation of women from all that has oppressed them as an unequal sex would require protracted hard struggle – and that without it, the revolution could not go in the direction of overcoming all the birthmarks of oppression and exploitation left by the old society and would instead install capitalism. The revolution, as it developed and as women took part in creating a new society, would have to transform not only the traditional social and economic relations that oppressed women but also social institutions and people’s values and thinking. With the famous slogan "Women hold up half the sky", Mao and the Chinese revolutionaries proclaimed that there could be no emancipation for humanity without the participation and emancipation of half of society – its women.

Here we are reprinting excerpts from three books about women in revolutionary China that show the impressive steps toward the liberation of women in what was then one of the world's most backward countries. Such steps can only take place when the proletariat, the class whose own liberation requires the liberation of humanity from all forms of exploitation, holds state power. These accounts also show the powerful role women can play in driving forward that process. The reality of the achievements of socialist China give a glimpse of what can be accomplished in the future, when once again the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is established in one or more countries as part of the process of bringing into being communism, a world finally free of classes and class divisions and the institutions and thinking born of class society.

***

In the book Fanshen, A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (Vintage Books, 1966) William Hinton wrote about the countryside in the early days of the Chinese revolution, when the old feudal domination, institutions and customs were first being overthrown. He described typical cases of wives being beaten for going to evening meetings of the Women's Association. The Association members would arrange meetings for all the women in the village and summon the husband or the father-in-law to defend himself publicly against the accusations made by the woman or the daughter-in- law. If he refused to answer they would often give him a beating to show him that things would be different from now on and that he had better not abuse the woman once he was alone with her. The women's committee would be present, ever-watchful and ready to intervene again if necessary. Hinton writes:



"Among those who were beaten was poor peasant Man-ts'ang's wife. When she came home from a Women's Association meeting, her husband beat her as a matter of course, shouting, 'I'll teach you to stay home. I'll mend your rascal ways.' But Man-ts'ang's wife surprised her lord and master. Instead of staying home thereafter as a dutiful chattel, she went the very next day to the secretary of the Women's Association, militiamen Ta-hung's wife, and registered a complaint against her husband. After, in a discussion with the members of the executive committee, the secretary called a meeting of the women of the whole village. At least a third, perhaps even half of them, showed up. In front of this unprecedented gathering of determined women a demand was made that Man-ts'ang explain his actions. Man-ts'ang, arrogant and unbowed, readily complied: He said that he beat his wife because she went to meetings and 'the only reason women go to meetings is to gain a free hand for flirtation and seduction'.

This remark aroused a furious protest from the women assembled before him. Words soon led to deeds. They rushed at him from all sides, knocked him down, kicked him, tore his clothes, scratched his face, pulled his hair and pummelled him until he could no longer breathe.



"'Beat her, will you? Beat her, and slander us all, will you? Well, rape your mother. Maybe this will teach you.'



"'Stop, I'll never beat her again,' gasped the panic-stricken husband who was on the verge of fainting under their blows.



"They stopped, let him up, and sent him home with a warning – let him so much us lay a finger on his wife again and he would receive more of the same 'cure'.



"From that day onward Man-ts'ang never dared beat his wife and from that day onwards his wife became known to the whole village by her maiden name, Ch'eng Ai-lien, instead of simply by the title of Man ts'ang's wife, as had been the custom since time began."

***

The Great Leap Forward launched in 1958 brought women out of the household and into the swirl of the battle to create a new society in production, politics, culture and other fronts. The People’s Communes established as collective forms of ownership and governance in the countryside brought community dining rooms, nurseries, cooperative home repair and other things that not only provided for the peasants’ welfare but also began to free women from the confines of the family by providing collective solutions for social needs that formally rested on women’s shoulders alone. This made it easier for them to take part in the start-up of new factories and in irrigation projects, and to play a greater role in politics and other spheres.

This process was resisted by those in the Communist Party who wanted to halt the revolution with the modernisation of China and develop capitalism, a society in which the formal equality of all individuals hides real inequality, oppression and exploitation. Instead of being a bastion for the worldwide struggle for communism, they wanted to sell the country and its people to the world capitalist system.

That's why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, a great struggle of countless millions of people to take a further and bigger leap down the socialist road. The struggle between the two roads in the party and in Chinese society went on for a decade. Ultimately, after Mao's death in 1976, the ''capitalist roaders in the party'' Mao had warned about were able to carry out a military coup, arrest the revolutionary party leadership and begin to make China what it is today – an enormous source of profit for globalised capitalism, and once again a place where the needs of humanity count for nothing, and a special hell for girls and women.

The book Some of Us, Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era (edited by Xueping Zhong, Wang Zheng and Bai Di; Rugers University Press, 2001) offers accounts by individual Chinese women (who are now living and teaching in the U.S.) of memories of their participation in the Cultural Revolution and their experience as "educated youth" who went down to the countryside to work with the peasants. In general they regard that period as very positive and express no regrets – a refutation of what one editor calls the current "dark age narrative" of the Cultural Revolution and the "Mao craze". The editors and authors point out that memories of the Mao era in China are necessarily diverse, depending on class outlook and social context. The views of well-known "suffering memoirs" are hotly contested by these now-older "youth without regrets", educated youth who recount how they went from the urban environment to work with the peasants and help overcome the huge economic, social and intellectual gap between the cities and countryside.

In this book, they demand to know, "Whose experience and whose memories count as history"? While they have their own criticisms, they insist that the profound social changes for women and subsequent contradictions that were brought about by the revolution and Mao's gender equality policies and attempts to break down the disparity between rural and urban conditions require exploration. While in school, they felt no stigma as females. These young women eagerly took up their role in the revolutionary ferment. One of the writers remarks that for a young woman to be trained as a cheerleader in the West should be considered a form of ideological brainwashing in terms of a woman's position in society and exclaims how lucky she feels to have been "brainwashed to become a revolutionary" instead.

In this excerpt from Some of Us, Naiha Zhang describes the close bonds she formed with two peasant women her age and how she felt honoured to be able to work in the countryside. She emphasises the "can-do" atmosphere in which women were encouraged to play an active and often leadership role – and did.

"Both Guirong and Lifeng stood out among their peers. Guirong, a year older than I, was the head of the Brigade’s Women’s Federation. Lifeng, a year younger, was head of her village’s women’s team. Both were skilled at farm and needlework. Guirong looked and frail but was known for the farming skills she learned from her uncle, a master farmer. To watch her thin out sorghum seedlings was a treat. In her hands, the long-handled hoe moved with high efficiency and accuracy, a few agile and neat strokes would clear out a seedling. There was never a wasted or redundant move. She was equally adept at sorghum harvesting, another farm task that sets farmers apart in terms of their skills. She was quick, yet extraordinarily calm and graceful, leaving behind small bundles of sorghum in the exact same shapes and intervals, making a well-patterned design if viewed from the edge of the field…

"We often said to one another that there must have been some kind of lot or luck that brought us and kept us together. After a year at the brigade’s experimental station, we were transferred to the brigade’s small orchard, with me in charge. The orchard was located on a hillside next to Guirong's village, with a two-room earthen house overlooking rows of little Chinese pear-leafed crab-apple trees. We had three oxen and an old-style cart with wooden wheels. We grew short crops such as beans and vegetables in between the small fruit trees. After working at the brigade orchard for a year, the commune wanted to establish an agricultural experimental farm on the site of the commune, with me as its head. I told the commune leaders that I wanted Guirong and Lifeng to go with me, and they happily agreed. We remained together along with a dozen other people–farmers from various brigades and a few local zhiqing (urban youth who went to the countryside) – until I left the countryside to attend university three years later in 1977...

"Together, the three of us did all kinds of work–one of the most strenuous was throwing up mud and trowelling the roof of a house… All this may suggest we had a hard time. Yes, we encountered many difficulties and endured hardships, but, all in all, we were happy. At that time, all organizations or projects had to be self-reliant. We had to support ourselves before we could have money to do experiments or other tasks. We were proud that, as a result of our efforts, both the brigade orchard and the commune experimental farm were doing well economically. .. We studied together in the evenings. Guirong picked up books I had. Lifeng, who had very little schooling, began to learn to read and write. She had a little notebook with her and often took it out to review the words in it when she had a chance. We had shared dreams and aspirations and we had lived together like I would with my zhiqing friends. But we were all aware, even though we did not talk about it, that our final destinies would diverge because of the fact that I was from the city and they were from the countryside… I left Momoge in January 1977 with nostalgia and a sense of guilt. The experimental farm was dismantled at the end of 1977."

***

Claudie Broyelle visited China in 1971 during the Cultural Revolution with a group of French women activists intrigued by the difficult and untidy struggle for women’s liberation in China. They heard many stories from women about how they came out of the traditional roles that women play in the home and as child rearers, to learn to read, to grapple with intellectual ideas and to play their full role in transforming society. In her book Women’s Liberation in China (Harvester Press, 1977), she writes about what she along with other women experienced in the ChaoYan rural area:



"Inside the factory there was a feeling of solidarity, dynamism and dedication. It was quite common to see women workers staying on after their day's work to finish a job, or to practice a difficult technique. Of course we weren't forced to do that, and we weren't paid for the overtime. Must we get bonuses for making the revolution? And that was what it was about. Besides, our experiment didn't by any means please everybody. In 1961 some of the factory's managers, completely blinded by orders from the Peking town council, decided to 'rationalize' production. They decreed that there were too many of us working there and that we would have to stop making kettles since we were now a medical-apparatus factory. How contemptuous they were about our kettles! The 'reorganisation' would have meant a good number of us returning home. They thought they'd convince us by saying that the men would get a wage rise so that we could stay at home and look after our families. Wouldn't everything be simpler that way? But these plans encountered spirited resistance from the women, and they declared: 'We won't go back to our cooking, we won't give up our jobs!' Life in the factory became very tense. There was a desperate struggle between that faction of the management who wanted the factory to be run for immediate profit and who, above all, didn't want the women workers to liberate themselves, and the large majority of women workers who wanted to continue on their chosen path.



"This struggle was fought in full awareness of what it was all about. We understood what was at stake. In most cases our husbands and the other men supported us. That can easily be explained. What happened in Chao Yan wasn't an isolated incident. In all the factories a reactionary offensive arranged by Liu Shao-chi aimed either to re-establish capitalist norms of production, or to prevent their overthrow by the masses. This explains why the men, who were also having to confront the bourgeois offensive, understood and generally backed up the women's resistance. Since many of us were out of work, we got no pay. But it didn't matter. If we didn't have any work, we would make some for ourselves! If we got no wages, we would hang on by helping one another! We asked other factories to give us work that we would then do in 'our factory'. Some women workers would bring scrap to the factory (bricks, sheet metal and so on) and we salvaged and cleaned it for recycling. The women's work was useful, even if it wasn't 'profitable' , and we proved it. A few women, only about fifteen of us, were unable to go through with it. They either went to work in large factories or returned home. During the Cultural Revolution we came to understand even more clearly the real nature of this reactionary policy. We led campaigns to denounce the method of so-called 'rationalization' .



"Most of those who had supported Liu Shao-chi's line discovered the interests they had really been serving. They are now working side by side with us. Almost all the women who had left the factory have come back to work here. Recently the women workers at this factory have perfected a process for the manufacture of silicon. Previously the workers here were all former housewives and generally quite old, between forty and fifty. Now we also have some young school-leavers, who share their knowledge with the older workers, at the same time learning from them the qualities of revolutionary persistence and proletarian resilience. In this neighbourhood virtually none of the women stays home, only the women who are too old or who are in bad health – but even for them life has changed. They help one another and take on a few domestic chores to relieve the ones who have jobs away from home; they organize the political and cultural life of the district; they aren't as isolated as before. This transformation is the result of the move by thousands of women into productive and social activities. As for us, we are wage-earners, and it's important that we have won our economic independence. But it must be understood that it is still more important for us to stand four-square in the world, to be concerned about communal affairs rather than to care only about family problems. We have used production as a weapon to liberate ourselves, to serve the Chinese people and world revolution better."



The conditions for women today, whether in developed capitalist society or in the third world, remain grounded in oppression, taking different forms in different places. Capitalism has only updated this oppression with modern forms through super-exploitation in a globalised economy where women earn $2 a day in factories spread throughout the four corners of the globe. Women are still raped, killed are become prizes of war. Sex slavery of women and children has become a worldwide phenomenon. And everywhere women are evaluated in terms of their usefulness to men as mothers, wives and for sexual gratification. The liberation of women can only be attained through revolutionary transformation of the world and all of humanity, with the emancipation of women as one cornerstone of this emancipation.

Zizek On Avatar

This was originally posted on newstatesman.com.


Return of the natives


James Cameron’s Avatar tells the story of a disabled ex-marine, sent from earth to infiltrate a race of blue-skinned aboriginal people on a distant planet and persuade them to let his employer mine their homeland for natural resources. Through a complex biological manipulation, the hero’s mind gains control of his “avatar”, in the body of a young aborigine.

These aborigines are deeply spiritual and live in harmony with nature (they can plug a cable that sticks out of their body into horses and trees to communicate with them). Predictably, the marine falls in love with a beautiful aboriginal princess and joins the aborigines in battle, helping them to throw out the human invaders and saving their planet. At the film’s end, the hero transposes his soul from his damaged human body to his aboriginal avatar, thus becoming one of them.

Given the 3-D hyperreality of the film, with its combination of real actors and animated digital corrections, Avatar should be compared to films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) or The Matrix (1999). In each, the hero is caught between our ordinary reality and an imagined universe – of cartoons in Roger Rabbit, of digital reality in The Matrix, or of the digitally enhanced everyday reality of the planet in Avatar. What one should thus bear in mind is that, although Avatar’s narrative is supposed to take place in one and the same “real” reality, we are dealing – at the level of the underlying symbolic economy – with two realities: the ordinary world of imperialist colonialism on the one hand, and a fantasy world, populated by aborigines who live in an incestuous link with nature, on the other. (The latter should not be confused with the miserable reality of actual exploited peoples.) The end of the film should be read as the hero fully migrating from reality into the fantasy world – as if, in The Matrix, Neo were to decide to immerse himself again fully in the matrix.

This does not mean, however, that we should reject Avatar on behalf of a more “authentic” acceptance of the real world. If we subtract fantasy from reality, then reality itself loses its consistency and disintegrates. To choose between “either accepting reality or choosing fantasy” is wrong: if we really want to change or escape our social reality, the first thing to do is change our fantasies that make us fit this reality. Because the hero of Avatar doesn’t do this, his subjective position is what Jacques Lacan, with regard to de Sade, called le dupe de son fantasme.

This is why it is interesting to imagine a sequel to Avatar in which, after a couple of years (or, rather, months) of bliss, the hero starts to feel a weird discontent and to miss the corrupted human universe. The source of this discontent is not only that every reality, no matter how perfect it is, sooner or later disappoints us. Such a perfect fantasy disappoints us precisely because of its perfection: what this perfection signals is that it holds no place for us, the subjects who imagine it.

The utopia imagined in Avatar follows the Hollywood formula for producing a couple – the long tradition of a resigned white hero who has to go among the savages to find a proper sexual partner (just recall Dances With Wolves). In a typical Hollywood product, everything, from the fate of the Knights of the Round Table to asteroids hitting the earth, is transposed into an Oedipal narrative. The ridiculous climax of this procedure of staging great historical events as the background to the formation of a couple is Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981), in which Hollywood found a way to rehabilitate the October Revolution, arguably the most traumatic historical event of the 20th century. In Reds, the couple of John Reed and Louise Bryant are in deep emotional crisis; their love is reignited when Louise watches John deliver an impassioned revolutionary speech.

What follows is the couple’s lovemaking, intersected with archetypal scenes from the revolution, some of which reverberate in an all too obvious way with the sex; say, when John penetrates Louise, the camera cuts to a street where a dark crowd of demonstrators envelops and stops a penetrating “phallic” tram – all this against the background of the singing of “The Internationale”. When, at the orgasmic climax, Lenin himself appears, addressing a packed hall of delegates, he is more a wise teacher overseeing the couple’s love-initiation than a cold revolutionary leader. Even the October Revolution is OK, according to Hollywood, if it serves the reconstitution of a couple.

In a similar way, is Cameron’s previous blockbuster, Titanic, really about the catastrophe of the ship hitting the iceberg? One should be
attentive to the precise moment of the catastrophe: it takes place when the young lovers (Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet), immediately after consummating their relationship, return to the ship’s deck. Even more crucial is that, on deck, Winslet tells her lover that when the ship reaches New York the next morning, she will leave with him, preferring a life of poverty with her true love to a false, corrupted life among the rich.

At this moment the ship hits the iceberg, in order to prevent what would undoubtedly have been the true catastrophe, namely the couple’s life in New York. One can safely guess that soon the misery of everyday life would have destroyed their love. The catastrophe thus occurs in order to save their love, to sustain the illusion that, if it had not happened, they would have lived “happily ever after”. A further clue is provided by DiCaprio’s final moments. He is freezing in the cold water, dying, while Winslet is safely floating on a large piece of wood. Aware that she is losing him, she cries “I’ll never let you go!” – and as she says this, she pushes him away with her hands.

Why? Because he has done his job. Beneath the story of a love affair, Titanic tells another story, that of a spoiled high-society girl with an identity crisis: she is confused, doesn’t know what to do with herself, and DiCaprio, much more than just her love partner, is a kind of “vanishing mediator” whose function is to restore her sense of identity and purpose in life. His last words before he disappears into the freezing North Atlantic are not the words of a departing lover, but the message of a preacher, telling her to be honest and faithful to herself.

Cameron’s superficial Hollywood Marxism (his crude privileging of the lower classes and caricatural depiction of the cruel egotism of the rich) should not deceive us. Beneath this sympathy for the poor lies a reactionary myth, first fully deployed by Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous. It concerns a young rich person in crisis who gets his (or her) vitality restored through brief intimate contact with the full-blooded life of the poor. What lurks behind the compassion for the poor is their vampiric exploitation.

But today, Hollywood increasingly seems to have abandoned this formula. The film of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons must surely be the first case of a Hollywood adaptation of a popular novel in which there is sex between the hero and the heroine in the book, but not in its film version – in clear contrast to the old tradition of adding a sex scene to a film based on a novel in which there is none. There is nothing liberating about this absence of sex; we are rather dealing with yet more proof of the phenomenon described by Alain Badiou in his Éloge de l’amour – today, in our pragmatic-narcissistic era, the very notion of falling in love, of a passionate attachment to a sexual partner, is considered obsolete and dangerous.

Avatar’s fidelity to the old formula of creating a couple, its full trust in fantasy, and its story of a white man marrying the aboriginal princess and becoming king, make it ideologically a rather conservative, old-fashioned film. Its technical brilliance serves to cover up this basic conservatism. It is easy to discover, beneath the politically correct themes (an honest white guy siding with ecologically sound aborigines against the “military-industrial complex” of the imperialist invaders), an array of brutal racist motifs: a paraplegic outcast from earth is good enough to get the hand of a beautiful local princess, and to help the natives win the decisive battle. The film teaches us that the only choice the aborigines have is to be saved by the human beings or to be destroyed by them. In other words, they can choose either to be the victim of imperialist reality, or to play their allotted role in the white man’s fantasy.

At the same time as Avatar is making money all around the world (it generated $1bn after less than three weeks of release), something that strangely resembles its plot is taking place. The southern hills of the Indian state of Orissa, inhabited by the Dongria Kondh people, were sold to mining companies that plan to exploit their immense reserves of bauxite (the deposits are considered to be worth at least $4trn). In reaction to this project, a Maoist (Naxalite) armed rebellion exploded.

Arundhati Roy, in Outlook India magazine, writes that the Maoist guerrilla army

is made up almost entirely of desperately poor tribal people living in conditions of such chronic hunger that it verges on famine of the kind we only associate with sub-Saharan Africa. They are people who, even after 60 years of India’s so-called independence, have not had access to education, health care or legal redress. They are people who have been mercilessly exploited for decades, consistently cheated by small businessmen and moneylenders, the women raped as a matter of right by police and forest department personnel. Their journey back to a semblance of dignity is due in large part to the Maoist cadres who have lived and worked and fought by their sides for decades. If the tribals have taken up arms, they have done so because a government which has given them nothing but violence and neglect now wants to snatch away the last thing they have – their land . . . They believe that if they do not fight for their land, they will be annihilated . . . their ragged, malnutritioned army, the bulk of whose soldiers have never seen a train or a bus or even a small town, are fighting only for survival.

The Indian prime minister characterised this rebellion as the “single largest internal security threat”; the big media, which present it as extremist resistance to progress, are full of stories about “red terrorism”, replacing stories about “Islamist terrorism”. No wonder the Indian state is responding with a big military operation against “Maoist strongholds” in the jungles of central India. And it is true that both sides are resorting to great violence in this brutal war, that the “people’s justice” of the Maoists is harsh. However, no matter how unpalatable this violence is to our liberal taste, we have no right to condemn it. Why? Because their situation is precisely that of Hegel’s rabble: the Naxalite rebels in India are starving tribal people, to whom the minimum of a dignified life is denied.

So where is Cameron’s film here? Nowhere: in Orissa, there are no noble princesses waiting for white heroes to seduce them and help their people, just the Maoists organising the starving farmers. The film enables us to practise a typical ideological division: sympathising with the idealised aborigines while rejecting their actual struggle. The same people who enjoy the film and admire its aboriginal rebels would in all probability turn away in horror from the Naxalites, dismissing them as murderous terrorists. The true avatar is thus Avatar itself – the film substituting for reality.

James Cameron responded to criticisms [not to Zizek in particular] in this interview on The Charlie Rose Show

The Silda attack: Understanding the role of the EFR camp in CPI(M)s reoccupation strategies

What the Mainstream Media dont tell us

Rcently Eastern Front Rifles' camp in Silda in West bengal was attacked by the Maoist guerillas. 24 jawans lost their lives in the attack. All of a sudden India government condemned the attack and as usual described the maoists as cold blooded murderers. The mainstream media also as usual parroted the government version.

But is what the government and cpi(M) say true? This report appeared in SANHATI suggests otherwise. A report appeared in Ekdin with regard to this is also given here.

The Silda attack: Understanding the role of the EFR camp in reoccupation strategies


February 23, 2010There has been a recent attack on a Eastern Frontier Rifles (EFR) camp in Silda in West Midnapur district, West Bengal, in which 24 EFR jawans have lost their lives. It is necessary to examine the function of this particular camp and its relation with local politics, to understand the tactical reasons behind the attack conducted by the Maoists.

The main function of the EFR has been to escort CPI(Marxist) harmads (local term for armed vigilante group of the CPIM) when they go on operations to “reoccupy” tribal villages in the Lalgarh belt and to provide protection to the 22 harmad camps that have been set up in the area over the past three months. Six of these camps have already shut down following the attack, and it has been reported that the CPI(M) is now afraid to provide security to these camps (a small press report on this from the Bengali daily Ekdin is given below).

These harmad camps, filled with mercenaries brought in by Sushanta Ghosh from the Goaltore-Garbeta area, are wreaking havoc in the area in the name of “reoccupying” villages, in the same way as in Nandigram. And they are being provided security by the EFR and the West Bengal police, who are escorting the harmads when they are attacking villages or are working hand-in-gloves with the harmads. Sushanta Ghosh, it will be remembered, is the state minister in charge of the area, who has maintained a brutal stranglehold on the adivasis (the infamous “ghoskar bahini”, the armed cadre force of the CPI(M), is named after him and Dipak Sarkar).

A recent incident may shed light on the protective role played by the EFR camp in the area. Kajal Soren was a PCAPA activist who was killed in a CRPF firing, with three others, while he was working in his field. Three days after his death, his wife Sabitri Soren, was on her way to lodge a complaint at the police station in Salboni, when she was waylaid by CPI(M) harmads who brutally raped her. Her senseless body was then handed over to EFR jawans in the Salboni camp, who killed her. There are eyewitnesses who saw her senseless body being dragged to the EFR camp, after which her raped and dead body was discovered lying in fields nearby. Activists are in the process of a judicial case on this incident, and the local press has reported it.

The EFR camp in Sildah was set up by occupying a government health centre, the only one in Sildah, because the CPI(M) party bosses demanded that the camp be set up near their office. A report from the Daily Telegraph on this is attached. This illustrates the protective role played by the EFR in relation to reoccupation strategies, as well as the continuing tradition of militarization of schools, hospitals, and other essential services in an area of already utter destitution.

As has been widely reported, the jawans were involved in rampant alcoholism and prostitution. There has been considerable local support in this particular action, and there have been no civilian deaths.

*********

Ekdin report on withdrawal of Harmad camps

February 18 2010

Staff Report, Medinipur: Apprehending another Shilda-like Maoist attack the CPM is withdrawing its Harmad (local term for armed vigilante group of the CPM) camps from the area. Party leaders have decided that the number of Joint Forces camps would be cut down in the Jangalmahal region. Camps stationed in villages bordering forests would be wound up as soon as possible. Depending on evolving situation the hidden Harmad dens would be set up at a later date. To recapture Lalgarh, Salboni in the Keshpur, Garbeta style around two dozens Harmad camps had been erected in the Jangalmahal. Carefully selected Harmads had been stationed there. They also shelter modern arms and ammunitions apart from other essential supplies.

The Maoists had launched an unprecedented offensive on Monday evening. Concluding a flawless attack in a densely populated location they retreated to their secret hide out. The incident has stirred up CPM party machinery coniderably. Terror has gripped the party. Even the leaders are fearing a Maoist attack.

There are twenty two Harmad camps in Goaltor, Salboni, Medinipur Main block. Six of them were withdrawn on Wednesday according to party sources. They were located in the densely forested parts of Goaltor and Salboni. It is also learnt that the CPM has wound them up after such demands were made by the Harmads. However camps of mercanary forces in Kashijor, Sundra, Enayetpur, Kankaboti have been left intact. After the Shilda incident the Harmads do not want to stay in unprotected camps. After that unparallaled event the village recapturing venture of the CPM has also suffered a big set back. In the last two days the operation has virtually collapsed, the Harmads are reluctant to extend it to new areas

5500 Gujurati Farmers Detained While Protesting Corporate Land Grab

This article appeared on Prolefeed Dissident.

Mass Detention of over 5500 Farmers in Ahmedabad


Farmers protesting Nirma Factory and Limestone Quarry in Mahuva detained; Chunibhai Vaidya, Veteran Gandhian, Kanubhai Kalsaria, MLA and SanatBhai Mehta, ex Finance Minister among those detained

Over five thousand farmers from the Mahuva area in the Bhavnagar district of Gujarat have been detained and prohibited from taking out a peaceful rally protesting the government’s sanction for a Nirma factory and limestone quarry in their area. Chunibhai Vaidya, a veteran Gandhian who founded Gujarat Loksamiti, Kanubhai Kalsaria, MLA of Mahuva, and Sanatbhai Mehta, ex Finance Minister of Gujarat, Ilaben Pathak of AWAG and a senior editor Prakash N Shah are among those detained by the police in this illegal suppression of collective democratic rights.

The farmers were enroute to the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, from where they intended to start a peaceful march to Gandhinagar to submit their petition, signed by 11,111 affected individuals in their own blood, when the buses and other vehicles they were using were stopped by the police. The farmers have been taken to Shahibagh in Ahmedabad and have been detained in police grounds. Several hundred protestors who reached the Sabarmati Ashram directly were also whisked away in police vans and blocked from taking out the march.

These farmers from Mahuva area in Bhavnagar district are protesting the decision by the Government of Gujarat to sanction a cement plant by Nirma Ltd, which includes 288 ha. of land for the factory and another 3000 ha. for a limestone quarry. Mahuva area has among the most fertile lands in Gujarat, where farmers grow three crops, and export dehydrated onions and numerous other fruits. Moreover, the numerous onion dehydrating plants (turnover Rs. 300 crore) & cotton gins (turnover Rs. 3,500 crore) provide employment to an additional 10,000 people in the factories.

The cement plant which the government proposes to build in the area will employ only 418 people for an investment of 2500 crore (Rs. 2.5 billion), but will end up devastating around 50,000 land owners, farmers & farm labourers, besides polluting the air and destroying the pristine coastal & inland ecology. It was only in the last few years that the Government had invested tens of millions of public money to construct structures for water conservation & prevention of salinity ingress in this very area.

The farmers of the area have been protesting the government policies for over a year, and have been facing the combined wrath of the government and company goons for doing so. The government appointed a committee under SK Shelat (ex-Chief Secretary) to look into people’s grievances last year, and the company was required to stop work pending the presentation of the report of the Shelat Committee. This Committee, without either visiting the area or listening to the affected people, has now given the ‘go-ahead’ to the company for this project, which is likely to destroy the lives of around 50 000 people.

The attack on the protestors today follows a pattern of police repression of non-violent and peaceful expression of dissent by the affected villagers. On 13th December 2009, Dr Kanubhai Kalsaria, MLA, 92 year old Gandhian Chunibhai Vaidya, Sagar Rabari, Anirudh Jadeja, Lakhan Musafir and Anand Mazgaonkar were prevented from holding a public meeting in Vangar village. Two local leaders Shri Wamanbhai and Pravinbhai Kathiria were beaten up apparently by hired goons, and other villagers were manhandled by the police.

A few days ago, on 20th February, the police lathi-charged a peaceful rally of villagers, and ten activists continue to be imprisoned on false charges. Dr. Kanubhai Kalsaria, the MLA from Mahuva area, his wife and companions were again attacked o way to Doliya village on 21st February, and their 4 motorcycles were badly damaged. Undeterred by these clearly State sponsored backlash, the people from the area pressed on with their original plans of a massive march from Sabarmati Ashram to Gandhinagar (State capital) today to present their petition to the Chief Minister. This latest round of police suppression of this villagers’ rally today is a sad testament to the declining space available for voicing dissent in Gujarat today

Orissa: Struggle against $12 Billion US-Owned POSCO Steel Plant and Port Heats Up

This article appeared on MRzine on February 25, 2010.


POSCO: Tribal Dispossession, Environmental Destruction and Imperialism

by Analytical Monthly Review

Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review. Its February 2010 issue features the following editorial.


Orissa is the poorest State with an official estimate of 39.9 per cent of people living below the poverty line, yet in regard to proposed investment it stood at second position after Gujarat. According to Assocham Investment Meter, recorded investment proposals in Orissa reached Rs. 2,00,846 crore in 2009. The cause is the availability of rich mineral resources such as coal and iron ore along with cheap availability of manpower. Steel and power were among the sectors which attracted maximum proposed investments in the state.

The $12 billion POSCO (Pohang Iron and Steel Company) project in Orissa is the largest foreign investment project ever in India. This project has three components:

• Captive iron ore mines in three areas of Keonjhar District and Sundargarh District. Mining lease on 6204 Hectares in Sundargarh District recommended to be approved by the Supreme Court.

• Steel plant: in Jagatsinghpur District, coastal area.

• Private port: at the mouth of the river Jatadhari, close to steel plant area; the MoU only makes reference to the possibility of a “minor port” being created.

So vast a project of necessity strains the nation’s less than coherent institutional framework, and in the process illuminates today’s ruling forces and the way in which they go about achieving their aims. The elements of the assault are familiar: dispossession of tribal cultivators and the despoiling of the environment.

The parliamentary democracy has made something of a spectacle of the construction of legislation that would appear to strictly regulate, if not prohibit outright, what is today underway in Orissa (the Forest Rights Act, etc.). But statutory language does not interpret itself, and not surprisingly the ministries and judiciary are doing whatever is necessary on behalf of the ruling interests. Thus the tribal cultivators first disappear from the legal reality, before their disappearance from sensous reality itself courtesy of the next “Tribal Hunt” operation of Chidambaram&Co.

POSCO needs some 4004 acres, of which but ten percent belong to the cultivators. The rest of the land required belongs to the government, and this has been recorded as “under forest” in official documentation. Government records do not show that the vast majority of this land has been under cultivation by the people living in these areas for generations. But this is not new. B. K. Roy Burman in his article “What Has Driven the Tribals of Central India to Political Extremism?” (Mainstream, Saturday 17 October 2009) sets out the reality:

[A]s against involuntary displacement, in many predominantly tribal areas the tribal people are deliberately dispossessed of their lands and resources thereon in a meticulously planned manner. This is a serious charge. But this is true.

. . . [T]he Planning Commission’s statement submitted to Parliament admits that even in those areas beyond 10 per cent slope that did not attract the provision of the Forest Conservation Act, the rights of the tribal people were not recorded as “the Government of Orissa seems to have avoided even a survey in order to prevent alienation of fragile hill slopes”. Here it should be noted that the statement of the Planning Commission is incomplete. On behalf of the Government of Orissa the Deputy Director, Land Records and Survey had submitted a note in which it had been mentioned that the land beyond 10 per cent slope was entered in ‘Government Khata’. . . .

We made a field study in Orissa and found that during the land survey and settlement operation carried out in the late 1950s and continuing in the 1980s in some areas of Koraput district, hardly one per cent land in actual possession of the tribal communities was recorded in their favour.

Tribal cultivators are then termed “encroachers”, and their eviction from mineral rich forest and hill tracts follows “legally”. Much lauded statutory provisions that purport to give protection to indigenous forest dwellers are ignored (“interpreted”) by the relevant ministries to achieve the same result.

A recent letter of the POSCO PRATIRODH SANGRAM SAMITI explains:

“Ministry has granted final clearance for diversion of this forest land for the steel plant as of December 30, 2009.

If any such final clearance has been granted, it is in blatant violation of the law, the Ministry’s own orders and the assurances repeatedly given by the Ministry and yourself to the press and to Parliament. It would appear that the Ministry is actively colluding with corporate vested interests and lying to Parliament and the people about its commitment to the law.

Please note the following:

• The area technically classified as ‘forest’ proposed for the steel plant has a large number of people who have been living and cultivating the land for many decades, and who have claimed rights over it under the Forest Rights Act.

• Section 4(5) of the Forest Rights Act bars the removal of any forest dweller from their lands until recognition of rights is complete. This section came into force on January 1st, 2008, when the Act was notified. Section 3(1)(a) recognizes the rights of forest dwellers to lands that they are cultivating. Moreover, sections 3(1)(i) and 5 empower the community to protect community forests and their cultural and natural heritage. Section 7 further makes any violation of these provisions a criminal offence. From January 1st, 2008, it has hence been illegal to hand over forest land to anyone without complying with these legal requirements.

• On March 23rd, 2008, the gram (palli) sabha of Dhinkia village (the statutory authority to initiate the process of recognition of rights under section 6(1) of the Forest Rights Act) passed resolutions initiating the process of claims for rights, and further demarcating the boundaries of the village’s “community forest resource” and declaring its intention to protect it, including it’s resolve to deny consent to any diversion of this land. This forest land cannot now be disturbed without violating section 5 of the Act.

• On July 31st, 2009, your Ministry issued a circular in order to clarify these statutory requirements. This circular clearly requires that no diversion of forest land shall be approved without certification from the State government that the process of implementation of the Forest Rights Act is complete in the area (please note that complete implementation is required, not merely a claim that there are no eligible persons, which undoubtedly the State government has made). Moreover, the consent of the gram sabhas of the area to the diversion is required. The same has already been denied by the Dhinkia gram sabha and no further request for its consent has been received.”

POSCO has delinked the mining project from the plant construction in order to get the vast project under way. A license for over 2,500 hectares for the proposed Khandadhar iron ore mines has been recommended by the Orissa State government, despite opposition from other companies and locals. But existing iron ore mining in the region has already severely impacted the water resources of a large region inhabited by many thousands. In the immediate region of the proposed mines the only constant water source are waterfalls that are already contaminated from iron mining and the water is now not safe for drinking.

In the larger surrounding region the Central Underground Water Board has reported that the underground water level in Joda and Barbil river areas has subsided by four metres, that forty percent of the region’s 8,000 tube wells no longer function, and that nearly half of the irrigated land can no longer rely on water from the Khandadhar waterfalls.

The POSCO project as a whole requires an immense impact on one of the last forested areas remaining in central India. Particular concern has been voiced over the State government’s commitment to “facilitate” the provision to POSCO of 7,000 crore liters of water per year for the plant alone from the very limited water resources of the draught ridden state. This assault on the environment can only be comprehended in the context of a mistaken development paradigm, compounded by the brutalities of the post-1991 “reform” neoliberal regime. For an overview, we recommend to students the website of the Environmental Protection Group, Orissa epgorissa.org>.

But POSCO is not having a smooth run. The anti-POSCO movement is gearing up again against land acquisition. The POSCO struggle has now acquired strategic importance for other industries and corporate groups that face public agitation for destroying forests. This has added an extra dimension to anti-POSCO movement; caging the aspirations of agitators to basic minimum such as maintenance of status-quo or better compensation is profoundly mistaken. The movement against the POSCO project is the frontline of the most critical global struggle of our time; to preserve an environment in which the next generations can thrive, against the primary enemy of humanity, imperialist capitalism.

When South Korean President Lee Myung-bak was the chief guest of India’s most recent Republic Day celebrations, POSCO was — as always — presented as a “South Korean” company. In fact, it is not. POSCO is owned and controlled from the very center of world capitalism and imperialism in the United States.

The 1997-8 Asian financial crisis (already three financial crises ago) saw a co-ordinated assault on the South Korean currency by Wall Street arbitrageurs, the infamous George Soros and such like. South Korea went to the IMF and was forced to negotiate a “structural reform” cutting its social expenditures, “opening” its financial structures, and limiting its deficit. But this was not enough for Clinton’s U.S. Treasury Department, and — with the U.S. veto over the IMF — they rejected the agreement reached by the IMF and South Korea.

A “SWAT team” — in the words of Business Week magazine — from the U.S. Treasury composed of David Lipton, Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner descended upon South Korea to set out the additional imperial demands: control of South Korea’s leading state-nourished industries must be sold to leading U.S. interests at bargain prices. Facing a total financial collapse if dollars were not forthcoming, South Korean leaders gave in. Among the first to go was POSCO.

Today U.S. holders of POSCO stock greatly outnumber the South Korean shareholders. By far the largest block of shares in POSCO are the depositary receipts of Bank of New York Mellon, of which the largest holder is CITIGROUP. POSCO shares acquired for US$10 in 1998 sell for US$110 today. It is important for anti-POSCO activists to be aware, when they confront the various South Korean executives, or Orissa State politicians, or Chidambaram’s paramilitary police, that behind them are their masters at CITICORP and the U.S. Treasury.

Chidambaram’s murderous attack on resistance by adivasis to their dispossession is, we read, slated now to be extended to Orissa. If so, the POSCO project due to its size and strategic importance shall unavoidably be a spectacular example of the real — imperialist — interests involved.