Whither Operation Green Hunt?
“Peace talks with Maoists” has become a hot topic for debate all over
the country once again. Apparently perturbed over the reports of large
scale massacre of innocent tribals on the pretext of weeding out
Maoists and sending of huge contingents of paramilitary forces into
forests, several intellectuals and representatives of various people’s
organisation have started bringing pressure on the government to give
up the offensive against Maoists. At a convention organised by
“Citizens Initiative for Peace” in New Delhi on Tuesday last,
intellectuals belonging to various fields, former judges and civil
rights activists advised the government not to launch an internal war
in the country and appealed that the government take initiative for
creating a congenial atmosphere for holding talks with Maoists.
Perhaps, Home Minister P Chidambaram seems to be waiting for such an
appeal. He immediately announced that the government would begin the
process for talks provided Maoists give up their violence. In his
letter to former Lok Sabha Speaker Rabi Ray, Chidambaram declared that
the government was ready to discuss on any issue with Maoists, if they
make a statement declaring ceasefire.
There may be people who take Chidambaram’s statement on its face value
and believe that he is confident of achieving peace through
negotiations with Maoists. But according to well-known writer
Arundhati Roy, one can’t believe his statements so easily. In an
interview to a foreign television channel, she explained the
contradiction between his words and deeds. Chidambaram is a
Harvard-returned attorney. He was a counsel for Enron Company, which
had resorted to the biggest-ever corporate fraud in the country.
During the P V Narasimha Rao regime, he had to quit the Cabinet for
buying shares in Fair Growth Services, involved in the securities
scam. Chidambaram was also on the Board of Directors of Vedanta, the
world’s biggest mining corporate company, taking up mining activity in
Orissa, though he had resigned from the Board on the first day of
taking over as Finance Minister in the Manmohan Singh cabinet. In
fact, he was attorney for several industrial majors, but withdrew from
their cases after becoming the Finance Minister. It is not a mere
coincidence that his wife Nalini had taken up those cases argued by
him.
So, one cannot expect Chidambaram displaying a different style of
functioning, beyond his family culture. He once said the country would
prosper if 85 per cent of people moved to urban areas; which means, he
wants more than 700 million people desert the rural areas and migrate
to urban areas. Perhaps with this idea, he is forcing thousands of
people vacate villages and flee into forests. Tens of thousands of
security and paramilitary forces are scanning to the Chattisgarh
forests in the name of Operation Green Hunt, to hound out Maoists.
Nobody knows how many Maoists were killed in this operation, but it
has claimed lives of hundreds of innocent tribals. Several tribal
families came to the Tuesday’s meeting of Citizens Initiative for
Peace in New Delhi. Most of them had no proper clothing on their
bodies. They lamented that the police forces had been torturing them,
branding them as Maoists. Himanshu Kumar of Vanavasi Chetanshram said
the police had evacuated tribals in thousands of villages. When the
tribals were rehabilitated elsewhere, the police had torched even
those villages. He wondered whether a mother of four children who was
killed in police firing and an old man who was on the death bed were
also Maoists. He argued that if Chidambaram had the right to live, the
tribals too have a similar right. Why can’t the government acknowledge
their rights, he questioned.
Surprisingly, the entire debate at present is focussed only on
violence, whether it is by the State or the Maoists. There are no
basic facilities in tribal areas even after 62 years of independence.
There are no schools, hospitals and electricity. Maoists have taken
advantage of this situation. There are many people who argue that they
would not have supported Maoists had the government provided them all
facilities and generated employment. “Nobody has come to us so far –
no government officials, Anganwadi workers, health workers or
teachers. All that we know are police forces, grey hounds, Octopus and
Cobra commandos, who have been pushing us into forests. When we want
to come back into our villages, they are setting our houses afire. In
a way, the police forces themselves are forcing us to go into forests,
join hands with Maoists and take to arms,” Himanshu Kumar said.
It is an indisputable fact that the government is focussing on tribal
areas only because of the presence of huge mineral wealth. And there
is no doubt that the government was preparing to wage a war within the
country only to allow multinational companies enter these areas and
exploit the rich mineral resources. It needed Finance Minister
Chidambaram for Manmohan Singh to invite multinationals into the
country in the past; and now, it needed Home Minister Chidambaram to
eliminate those who were obstructing these multinationals to carry out
their activities in the forest areas. So, who would believe that
Chidambaram is sincere in holding talks with Maoists? Even if talks
take place and Maoists come down a bit, does Chidambaram agree to
Adivasis returning to their villages and resuming their normal
activity?
Yet, intellectuals are optimistic. They are hopeful that wisdom would
dawn upon the government and peace would be restored, albeit
temporarily. It is not that they do not know the ideological
difference between the government and Maoists. Setting aside the
ideological contradictions between two sides, everybody desires that
the talks should not confine to just violence and counter-violence. If
Chidambaram is talking about elimination of Maoists, the latter is
harping on creation of guerrilla zones, base zones and strengthening
of people’s army.
It is here that there is a need for people like Dr Balagopal. Three
days after his sudden death, there was meeting of People’s Union of
Democratic rights (PUDR) at Indian Social Institute in Delhi. Not just
intellectuals like Arundhati Roy, Manoranjan Mohanty and Prof
Ranadheer Singh, but many other participants from Kashmir, Punjab,
Kerala and north and non-eastern states had recalled his glorious
contribution to the civil rights movement. The meeting was enough to
prove that Balagopal, despite being a Telugu, had come closer to the
hearts of all democratic-minded people belonging to all the states in
the country. He was an institution by himself, creating
self-confidence among the oppressed sections and spreading a human
rights movement across the length and breadth of the country. He once
lamented that though several mass movements, including that of
Naxalites, were successful in waging a war against injustice; they had
failed to bring about radical change in the government policies. He
was of the view that there was no single solution to the problems
confronting the society. It will be an appropriate tribute to
Balagopal, if one would try to find out a solution to every problem,
in the backdrop of the “dark angles” pointed out by him.
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