Corporate India versus indigenous people

Violence in the name of development

Consistent with the unjust, decaying economic model of our deficit times, the commodification of everything and everyone proceeds apace in India. The commercialisation of the land is shattering the lives of millions of India’s poorest, hungriest most malnourished people, who are being murdered and raped, violently displaced and falsely arrested as huge multi-nationals, financially favoured and militarily armed by the Indian government, ravage the land.

The state has more or less abandoned rural people (70% of the population) and turned the countryside over to corporate India. Mineral extraction, dam building, infrastructure projects, water appropriation and industrial farming make up their burgeoning business portfolios. The acclaimed author and political activist, Arundhati Roy [discussing ‘The changing face of democracy in India’ (CFDI)] makes clear that the land and everything inside it, is now owned “by the corporations, every mountain, every river, every forest, every dam, every water supply system”. Add to this the telephone networks and the media, and some say the judiciary, and the world’s largest democracy looks rather less democratically sparkling clean. Indeed, to the persecuted people in the forests and the urban poor crying out for justice, democracy is a city fable of little significance and no reality.

Land sympathetically and sustainably nurtured by Adivasi families for generations (the original or native people), is being violently taken from them in what Arundhati Roy describes as “the biggest land grab since Christopher Columbus”. In varying degrees of intensity, conflict and resistance is taking place throughout the areas affected by the land appropriation, although Roy suggests the violence is even more widespread, “all across India there is insurrection, there is a bandwidth of resistance” – made up of various marginalized groups. Massive numbers are being displaced, villages destroyed, women raped, hundreds, as Human Rights Watch (HRW) state, “have been arbitrarily arrested, [and imprisoned] tortured, and charged with politically motivated offenses that include murder, conspiracy, and sedition”. Charges manufactured and enforced under one or other of the draconian laws passed by the world’s largest democracy, to stifle dissent and confine the troublesome poor to the shadows. They are relentlessly victimized, targeted, Roy states, “in the name of development”: A perverse idea of development that whilst feeding corporate coffers, is destroying the lives of millions of indigenous people and causing devastation to the natural environment.

Within some of the poorest states of India, from West Bengal and Chattisgarh in the Northeast, to Karnataka in the Southwest, (taking in Orissa, Andra Pedash, Jharkhand, Utter Predash, and Manipur) sits a treasure trove of minerals worth trillions of dollars. A huge area incorporating large tracks of ancestral Land, where Adivasi who number around 150 million (half the population of the USA) and Dalit groups have lived for millennia. Rich in bauxite, iron ore and uranium, this area is an Aladdin’s cave of minerals, which India’s corporations, and the one percent beneficiaries of a decade of economic growth, see as theirs by right.

To facilitate easy access to “their bauxite”, corporations need the land to be cleared of obstacles – indigenous people and their homes. According to Ashish Kothari, author of Churning The Earth, “In recent years the country has seen a massive transfer of land and natural resources from the rural poor to the wealthy. Around 60 million people have been displaced (although some put the figure much higher) in India by large-scale industrial developments”. The millions of mainly Dalits and Adivasi, made homeless and destitute, forced to ‘re-locate’ to the slums and shanty colonies of small towns and mega cities, where they are also unwelcome.

A violent undemocratic river of greed and indifference is attempting to drown the indigenous people of Eastern and Central India. The Adivasi and Dalit people, living in the vast Dandakaranya forest are, Arundhati Roy (CFDI), states, “being surrounded [by government forces], they are cut of from their resources, they can’t come out of the forest they are dying of malnutrition“, all of which constitutes genocide by attrition. As well as trampling on a range of international treatise the Indian government is vandalizing the constitution, in support of Indian businesses, as they attempt to clear tribal land of millions of people, and extract the treasures sewn into the fabric of the Earth.

Such government negligence and indifference fits hand in glove with an obsessive desire for economic development and accelerated growth divorced from social justice. Destructive (government) policies pursued for the last two decades are at the root of the intense suffering being caused to millions of Adivasi and Dalit people, not just in the Dandakaranya forest but also in towns and cities across India. They are seen as a refuge of the past, to be swept aside, eradicated, lest India’s image as a financial destination of choice and the great shopping center of Asia be tainted in western centres of corporate/power.

Growth and development, pseudonyms for profit and more profit, are the lead players of market fundamentalism, a system like all totalitarian ideologies, which is destructive, divisive and (often) violent in its methods and impact. It is a model of civilization that promotes separation and inequality, which seeks to reduce mankind to think in limited and limiting material terms, and sees everything and everybody as a commodity to be exploited until utterly spent. Every corner of every city, town and village viewed as a market, everyone a banded consumer. Crude by any standards, such subtleties of ‘development’ fuel the corporate political machinery that is violating the lives of millions of India’s most vulnerable people in the forests of central and eastern India.

Out of step with the new time that speaks of cooperation, unity and social justice, the ‘Neo Classical’ model has served its purpose and had its day. It does not meet the needs of the overwhelming majority of the people of India or the world. It has hold of the minds of men, restricting the possibilities for change to its own limited paradigm. It is a model, which has quashed the imagination of the unimaginative who deny even the possibility of a fair and just alternative. A system that grows out of and perpetuates injustice and suffering, as market totalitarianism does, is one for which an alternative is not only required, it is essential for the health of the planet, the wellbeing and survival of humanity, indeed ‘there is no alternative’. A pragmatic alternative rooted in principles of goodness, sharing, justice and freedom – the birthrights of every man, woman and child, which if imaginatively modeled and simplistically applied, offer a just and fair alternative. One that, if mankind is to flourish and not simply persist, is, I suggest, our only choice.

Graham Peebles is director of the Create Trust. He can be reached at: [email protected]