Inside the Red corridor:- Maoism in India
Who are Maoists?
They are the indigenous people trying to protect their land from corporate take over. Let me explain further.
The Maoist movement in India has had several avatars in states such as West Bengal, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar. It started in a village called Naxalbari. But, unlike other places in the world there have always been the indigenous at the center of the movement. Their movements predate Mao by centuries.
So why did they become an internal security threat now? In May 2005, the Indian government signed MoU‘s for mining with global companies. To give you the scale of these MoU’s, lets see this number. The bauxite ore in just Orissa is worth $ 2 trillion.
In June 2005, government sponsored people militia called “Salwa Judum” was let loose into 640 villages where the ore exists.They burned the villages down, killing people and raping women. People were forced to move into police camps. Around fifty thousand people went into the camps and around 300,000 were escaped to other states to work. Due to this more people became part of the Maoist movement. This is the start of the modern Maoist movement in the region named by the government as the “Red corridor”.
Why did they choose this path?
When the government sends crooks and ill managed militia to destroy your home land without any prior notice from the government or provocation from your side , what do you do? Sit down on the road and do “Satyagraha”?
When a thousand armed policemen with overactive trigger fingers surround your village at night, what do you do? Pick a gun or do a hunger strike, especially when you are malnourished.
These people have been pushed into the corner by the very government that has to protect them. Who will protect them now? They themselves have to do it. The result is what we see today as Maoism in India.
Whats going on right now?
Do you think the US is the only country which manipulates the citizens minds so that it can wage wars on other countries for oil? Think again.India does that too.If any consolation , the US does it to wage wars on foreign soil. India does it to colonize its own people.
The Indian army launched “operation Green Hunt” in the heart of India. An army of around 300,000 CRPF personnel are already deployed in these forests. Whats more ? They are importing “DRONES” from Israel to fight this so called “war”. Well, we always condemn drone attacks by the US in Pakistan.What about the drone attacks by India in India?
Why is this happening?
Of its 1.2 billion population India has about 800 million are impoverished .About 300 million are them the Urban middle class. These 300 million are the consumers . The other 800 million are what the Germans used to call “the superfluous eaters”. They are not “required”.
This is a very large middle class. Their appetite for consumption is insatiable. Their goods are coming at the cost of the underclass. The underclass are being displaced , robbed of their lands and looted of their homes.
India, now, has become a democracy not of 1.2 billion people but of 300 million people.
Finally.
How can we ever sell the tribal people our inferior “modernism” to their superior “sustainable” living?
I am gonna go a little further and ask this question. What is development?Is it just mining and looting the resources from the tribal people to give it to the “over” consumerist middle class? .Is it the number of sky scrappers in our mega cities? Is it the number of billionaires in a country?
If we don’t define it soon enough ,the I don’t think we will be left with any earth to “play” with.
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