Demand the Immediate Release of People’s Leader Abhay Sahoo in Orissa, India

The International Campaign Against Forced Displacement and SEZs launched in June 2008 during the Third International Assembly of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) urgently call on all people’s movements, activists and allies to protest against the arrest of Abhaya Sahoo. Sahoo is President of POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti (POSCO Resistance Struggle Committee), which has been leading the people’s movement against a big land grab in the state of Orissa by POSCO, a South Korean steel company. Sahoo was arrested on the evening of 12th October while undergoing treatment in a local hospital. Villagers under the leadership of Abhaya Sahoo have rejected the government’s “development plan,” the first step of which is giving 4,000 acres of land to POSCO to build a huge steel plant and captive port that will displace 7 villages and 22,000 people. In addition to the farmers who will be displaced, thousands of fishermen and villagers in the port area will lose their livelihoods if this project goes ahead. For three years, POSCO has been trying, unsuccessfully, to acquire the farmers’ land. Many protests and rallies have been organised by the villagers against the project. Farmers have kept the company from establishing offices in the villages, and have set up “check gates” at the entrances to the villages to check on the identification of outsiders and to prevent POSCO from starting to survey and demarcate the land. Blocked in its land acquisition efforts, POSCO has hired outside goons to destabilize the situation and provide a pretext to bring in police and paramilitaries. Abhaya Sahoo has been in the forefront of the uncompromising resistance of the people of the village of Erressema to save their land. For the last 3 years he has resided in the project site. The Orissa government has arrested him to make the people leaderless, and have charged him under about 70 false cases so that he cannot get bail. We condemn this repressive act by the Orissa government. The arrest of Abhaya Sahoo is an attempt to suppress the people’s struggle. Stand with the people of Erressema who are fighting to save their land and livelihood and demand the IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL RELEASE of ABHAYA SAHOO. The International Campaign against Forced Displacement and SEZs info@no2displacement.com

Operation ‘Tribal’ hunt spills over into State

November 24, 2009

 B Satyanarayana Reddy

 KHAMMAM: Operation Green Hunt, the massive offensive against Maoists in the neighbouring Chhattisgarh, seems to be spilling over into the State. Thousands of tribals, mainly Gotti Koyas, have migrated from Dantewada and Bijapur districts in Chhattisgarh, to the plains and forest regions of Bhadrachalam in Khammam district in the past one year. Importantly, the influx has increased of late, in the past two months ever since the clean-up operation against Naxalites was launched. State Forest and Police Departments, apprehensive that Maoist sympathisers could be among these tribals, are seeking the State Government’s permission to pack the migrants back to their native places. The Bhadrachalam Division police have already arrested hundreds of Naxal sympathisers from among the migrated Gotti Koyas. According to a recent survey, over 16,000 Gotti Koyas have migrated from Chhattisgarh between 2005 and July, 2009. Official sources said the tribals were crossing over to escape harassment by police and Salwa Judum members.Besides, forest department officials are ‘‘concerned’’ that the tribals, who are settling in forest regions, could pose a danger to the ecology by resorting to massive deforestation. The police and forest departments reported the matter to the district collector and sought permission to evacuate Gotti Koyas. Officials of both the departments held discussions too.A police officer said, ‘‘We do not have a right to send them back.Once we start vacating them, human rights organisations will create an issue. We urged the government to give permission to vacate at least those who have settled in the forest area’’. Another official said once the permission was given, they would evacuate the tribals. IE

Citizens Initiative for Peace and the Maoist Challenge

   By Nandita Haksar. This article appeared in Mainstream, October 31 2009.

I have read the Resolution (entitled “Stop offensive Hold Unconditional Dialogue” in Mainstream) made by the Citizens Initiative for Peace very carefully and I would like to raise some questions about the list of six demands that have been formulated in the light of the discussion and debates around the question of the Indian State’s decision to deal with the “Naxalite problem” with brute military force. 

The Resolution has put forward six “simple yet urgent demands”. The demands are addressed to both the Central Government and the Maoists because it calls upon both parties to stop the “offensive” and the “hostilities”, and start a dialogue. However, the Resolution states that the Government should take the initiative. 

If we closely examine the six demands we will see that the Resolution has fallen into the trap of the Indian State which wants the focus to be on the question of violence and not on the very real problems that the Maoists have focused on. It is interesting that many of those people who have very deep ideological differences with the Maoists, including Gandhians committed to non-violence, have also taken the position that the basic political issues must be addressed before there is any discussion on the use of violence by the Maoists. 

There is a very real danger that the State will not only try and crush the Maoists but will put down all resistance to the very unjust and unconstitutional economic policies being pursued which have deprived hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens of their rightful share in development. 

The whole debate (and this includes other initiatives such as the one under discussion) around the issue of the Indian State’s response to the Maoist challenge reflects a certain political bankruptcy and poverty of philosophy. It lacks political imagination. 

Let us examine each of the six demands and see if the demands formulated by the Citizens Initiative for Peace will help create democratic space for discussions on the real political issues or will in effect close the space and unwittingly justify the State action against the Maoists and so allow the repression of all protest, dissent and criticism of the State’s economic policies which are clearly in violation of the Directive Principles of State Policy (Part IV of the Indian Constitution). 

The first demand states: “The Government should stop the offensive in the areas where the CPI (Maoist) and other Naxalite parties are active, in order to facilitate a ceasefire.” 

The second demand states: “The CPI (Maoist) and other Naxalite parties should cease all hostilities against the state forces to facilitate a ceasefire.” 

The third demand is: “There should be no attacks on civilians and their lives must be secure.” 

Does the Citizens Initiative for Peace make a distinction between civilians and combatants in this “war”? Are those adivasis who have some arms to protect themselves from Salwa Judum or the COBRA to be counted and equated with State forces and denied the protection to be given to civilians? 

My first question is: who is to cease their offensive first and why? Even those people who have fundamental political differences with the Maoists have warned that if the Maoists lay down arms it will only allow the State not only to crush the Maoist organisation but also the tens of thousands of adivasis—the poorest citizens of our country. Many adivasis have armed themselves to protect themselves from the brutal repression let loose by the security forces which include cutting off breasts, shooting women in the legs and torture. 

It is true that the brutal tactics used by the Maoists have repulsed many people. The beheading of an intelligence officer and the threat to carry out the same is reminiscent of the Taliban type justice. But violence or brutal tactics has to be distinguished from disciplined armed resistance. 

My second question is: with whom are we having a debate on violence? 

The Home Minister states that the Government would be willing to have talks if the Maoists abjure violence. He obviously does not acknowledge the institutionalised violence against the adivasis which has resulted in their starvation deaths, their deaths from curable diseases and the alienation of their land and means of livelihood. 

And what does the Resolution of the Citizens Initiative for Peace mean that the Naxalites “should cease hostilities”? 

Does the Citizens Initiative for Peace want the Maoists to lay down arms and disown armed resistance or do they want them not to use violence on individual State officials? 

If the Citizens Initiative for Peace really wants “peace” they must demand that the Government of India must first address the very real grievances of the adivasis in the region when the Maoists and Government enter into a dialogue. Those issues which have been raised by the Maoists have also been raised by other organisations and parties working in the region (the so-called Red corridor). Above all, those are the issues around which there has been a sustained adivasi movement since Indian independence. 

The political and economic issues in question are broadly related to: 

1. hunger, malnutrition and starvation deaths of adivasis largely due to massive land alienation and the dispossession of adivasis due to development projects; 

2. the secret dealing with the Transnational Corporations by which hundreds of MoUs have been signed which will allow the TNCs to exploit the rich mineral resources of the region without benefit to either the local people or the nation as a whole;this is an issue related to corporate governance; 

3. denial of basic rights to health, water, housing, education and above all food. 

The Citizens Initiative for Peace must make a list of specific demands for each of the affected States: Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar and West Bengal. And then demand that the State governments and Government of India announce the measures they will take in a time-bound fashion on each of these issues. This will bring back focus on the real urgent issues. 

The Resolution of the Citizens Initiative for Peace includes the demand: “People’s basic livelihood rights and democratic control over their natural resources must be urgently ensured. We resolve to work for this.” But it does not state what those demands are and how the people have systematically been deprived of their means of livelihood. More importantly, how the Citizens Initiative for Peace intends to work on these issues—something which would be of great interest to those who read their Resolution. 

After all, the systematic denial of citizens of food, medicines and homes is institutionalised violence which cannot be equated with the beheading of a state official. Apart from the violence on the entire adivasi population of this region (not to speak of other parts of the country) the security forces have been committing human rights violations of individual adivasi activists, and anyone else they decide to dub as Maoist. The law does not allow the torture of even the members of a banned organisation. 

If the Resolution is genuinely meant for the people at large then it must spell out the political issues; otherwise the language of the Citizens Initiative is indistinguishable from that of the language of the State. 

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Does that mean I am condoning the violence (as opposed to armed resistance) used by the Maoists? Not at all. It is not a question whether one condones or supports a particular act. The basic political question is related to the efficacy of armed resistance and the relationship between armed resistance and democratic means of struggle. Lenin in Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder had warned that the communist resistance should not result in increasing the resistance of the opposition. 

From the time I began working in the human rights movement I have seen how the Maoists always increase the resistance of the class enemy by their tactics and then claim there is no democratic space in the system. The human rights groups have exposed the State’s role in repression and how it always intervenes in favour of the rich but they have no understanding of how democratic space within this system works and how it can be enlarged. 

By way of example, a certain revolutionary group in Central America had abducted a government official and in exchange for the person they demanded masses of food for the entire slum population. Instead, the whole drama of exchange of prisoners took away the focus on the real issues and wasted the valuable time they had on national television to mobilise public opinion. 

There is a need to evolve tactics to effectively intervene within the system and radically engage with the democratic institutions such as the courts, media, legislative assemblies and Parliament etc. This entire area of work has been appropriated by the NGOs who have depoliticised the democratic space. 

Thus there is an urgent need to have a dialogue, debate and discussion among Marxists, Communists and others who support the Maoists. But that debate is not a debate that can be mixed with the debate between citizens and the State. 

The fourth demand of the Citizens Initiative for Peace is: “Unconditional dialogue must begin between Government and CPI (Maoist).” 

I am not at all sure what the word “uncon-ditional” means. It could refer to the Home Minister’s pre-condition for talks must be cessation of violence by Maoists. So, the Citizens Initiative’s call for unconditional talks would mean that they think the Government should not put this pre-condition. Perhaps it needs to be spelt out. 

Here I have several questions. The premise of this demand seems to be that the Citizens Initiative for Peace has implicit faith in the honesty of the Government of India or the Indian State to have a genuine dialogue. The history of independent India clearly shows that the Indian State does not represent the interests of the poor. My experience in the North-East shows that the State uses the peace initiatives as part of its counter-insurgency strategies to weaken and penetrate the organisation. Peace processes are never used to raise awareness of the basic political issues such as the nature of Indian federalism and the inability of the Indian State to respond to the democratic aspirations of the peoples of the North-East. 

Does that mean dialogue or peace processes should be shunned? No. However, the militant or revolutionary organisation involved in political negotiations has to have a clear idea of strategies and tactics and use them to reach out to the people and explain the political issues and mobilise them around those. However, neither the militants nor the civil society have shown any ability of effective lobbying, advocacy or other democratic means to pressurise the State. The Indian State will not change its basic policies, but we must know what can change if we are able to have a sustained campaign. 

Sustained campaign of course means the need for time and funds. The professionalised activist has little time, quite a lot of money and very little political understanding. Campaigns degenerate into shoddily written resolutions, glossy posters and occasionally in-house meetings with songs and candles. 

There is no systematic documentation exposing the State with facts and statistics, effort to reach out to the general public and raise political awareness of the political issues and follow up on each issue. 

There is one other matter. Does the Citizens Initiative for Peace recognise the Maoist party as the only representative of the people? The dialogue between the Maoists and the Government would include specific demands of the Maoist organisation such as lifting of the ban on the party, release of political prisoners etc. But there is a need to have a time-bound process by which the Government is made to take specific steps to alleviate the suffering of the adivasi people living in the region. 

The fifth demand of the Citizens Initiative for Peace is: “Free Access to the affected areas should be provided to the independent civil organisations and media.” There is nothing wrong with the demand but why is the Committee fighting on behalf of the media which is in any case reducing the whole issue to violence versus non-violence. They have done nothing to focus on the basic issues of the Indian citizens who have been victims of institutionalised violence, bad governance, and now brute repression. 

The Citizens Initiative for Peace needs to engage with the media on a sustained basis. Take the example of Vir Sanghvi’s editorial entitled “Let’s Listen to Common sense” where he attacks the activists and intellectuals who are arguing that ”we care about the poor” only if we “support murderers who behead policemen”. He argues that “peace first and everything else second”. The resolution of the Citizens Initiative for Peace sounds almost like Vir Sanghvi’s editorial because it has not once talked about the institutionalised violence of the state and society. 

In fact one of the demands should be addressed to the media to report on the basic issues and not make it a debate on violence versus non-violence. There is a need to have a media watchdog which continuously exposes the lies and distortions of the media. There was a magazine in the USA called Lies of our Time dedicated to exposing the lies in the New York Times. We need something like that to expose the electronic channels. 

The greatest danger of the Resolution of the Citizens Initiative for Peace is that the focus on peace, ceasefire and dialogue will take away public focus from the real, urgent political, economic and cultural problems faced by lakhs of people living in abject poverty while surrounded by natural resources which are going to make the transnational corporations richer. 

This is a historic opportunity for Indian citizens to intervene and stop natural resources from being handed over to the transnational corporations. It is an opportunity to demand that the Indian State make public the MoUs signed with these transnational companies. This is the time that we should demand a moratorium on all land transfers and mining leases or licenses till there is an informed public debate on the economic policy for this region. 

It is the duty of every citizen to stop the State from destroying the means of livelihood of Indian citizens, from wiping out their culture and crushing their resistance—all in the name of national security and dealing with Maoists. 

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In the light of the above discussion the Citizens Initiative for Peace, if it wants to make a meaningful intervention, must set itself the following tasks: 

1. Make a list of concrete demands of the adivasis in each State and make concrete suggestions how the Government can ameliorate the situation. An example is of how Shankar Guha Neogi challenged the Government policy of mechanisation of iron ore mines by providing a detailed study to show that semi-mechanised mines would be economically be more viable. 

The making of this list involves talking across to many more people including those who have expertise and those who have experience. 

2. Widely publicise these demands through whatever ways that can be found. This is essential in order to keep the focus on the real political issues and not allow the State to hijack the whole momentum and reduce it to an issue between violence and non-violence. People need to be constantly reminded that what is being described as a war against the Maoists is in fact a war against the citizens of India who are economically the poorest and politically the most disempowered. 

3. If there is to be a real dialogue then there must be a transparent framework for the dialogue process that needs to be put in place. This means it must be a dialogue between responsible members of the Maoists and political representatives of the State. So far all the talks between the Indian State and militant groups have been handled primarily by the intelligence agencies. The role of intelligence agencies has not even begun to be questioned by the human rights groups. 

In fact the whole process of dialogue between militant groups and the State has raised the question of the role of intelligence agencies and democratic polity. 

Of course the Maoists too have little under-standing how to effectively use the dialogue to increase the democratic space. And it is also not clear whether they have worked out concrete proposals for a talk and whether they have any strategies or tactics other than using the process to gain time. 

4. A careful monitoring of the media and exposing how it is manufacturing consent for the ultimate State repression on the adivasis and the victims of development who are the main targets of this offensive and not the Maoists. 

Ever since the public attention has been focused on the Maoists the intelligence agencies have been working overtime, creating a lot of confusion in the minds of the civil society, trying to create divisions and take away the focus on the critical issues and concrete situation in the region. 

There is an attempt to undermine their credibility in the eyes of the public and create an atmosphere where the violence of the State against its own citizens would be justified. The Maoists and their sympathisers have done little to counter this trend by their narrow sectarian approach and lack of commitment to norms of political democracy. There is an urgent need for a debate with the Maoists on democratic norms and democratic politics. Their recent announcement that henceforth they would treat their prisoners as Prisoners of War and their decision to release the policeman is an indication that the Maoists may have learnt something from the public reaction to their brutal tactics designed to shock rather than educate. 

Lastly, the name of the Initiative is rather unfortunate. It seems to suggest that if the Maoists and Government of India start negotiations we would have peace. It smacks of the non-violent conflict resolution promoted by foreign funded NGOs who are responsible for the depoliticisation of all issues. Should it not have been Citizens Initiative for Justice? 

The author is a human rights lawyer and a writer.

Peace can come to Bastar only when the State stops treating the adivasis as its enemy

September 17, 2009

Source: Open Space

Peace can come to Bastar only when the State stops treating the adivasi people at large as its enemy and lets them return to their villages.

The Government of Chhattisgarh admits that since the start of Salwa Judum in the year 2005, 644 villages of district Dantewada, whose overwhelmingly adivasi population is about 3.5 lakhs, have been emptied out. Our common sense understanding that enmasse displacement on this scale could only have been made possible by extreme violence, is vindicated by the horrifying incidents of arson, loot, murder, rape, and widespread arrests by the SJ and security forces that have continuously been coming to light, and which can no longer be ignored.

In honest moments, the security experts of the Jungle Warfare School, Kanker admit, that this is the well known American counter insurgency strategy of “draining the water to kill the fish”. Though many of us, who are witness to widespread displacement all over Chhattisgarh for rich mineral resources, believe that there is also considerable evidence, that the motive for ground clearing is acquisition for mining companies. Whatever the motive, what is the situation in Dantewada today?

Recently the Home Minister admitted, that out of the 50,000 “internally displaced persons” who were being housed in the roadside SJ camps since 2005, now barely 8,000 remain, the rest of them have run away. The recent incidents of a trigger happy CRPF jawan killing a woman and baby in the Cherpal camp, or of SPOs beating three persons to death in the Matwada camp, perhaps illustrate why. And yet – all schools, health centres, ration shops, (of course polling booths), which have been totally withdrawn from the 644 villages, (and even gram sabhas for determination of forest rights!) continue to be run from those camps.

The administration openly declares that the people of all those villages who have refused to come to the camps, all those villagers who have not joined/ co-operated with the Salwa Judum, those who are still daring to sow their fields in the affected villages (only to flee when the security forces arrive leaving the vulnerable behind to be killed or arrested), and certainly those, who are living in the forests, are automatically “Naxalites”. All youth found in the abandoned villages, and all persons from these villages who come to markets are beaten black and blue and thrown into jail on mere suspicion. And there is always a stock of uniforms and rusty “bharmars” to show as seizures.

Even conceding that around 50,000 persons might have fled to Andhra Pradesh and maybe another 50,000 to Orissa or Maharashtra, this means that at least 2 lakh people, by virtue of being in the forests or “Naxal stronghold” areas, have now been declared “Naxalites” by the State, and therefore it is considered legitimate that they can be starved of food, medical supplies and access even to village markets. No doubt “anti-Naxal operations” against them have, and would further result, in swelling the ranks of armed militants. For now, the ever present issues of land and livelihood have turned into the burning issue of the very survival of these lakhs of people. And history tells us, that in those circumstances, the adivasi people have always fought fiercely. Even 14 battalions of paramilitary forces, who, apart from occasional forays for “searching” within a small radius of their base, remain holed up in thanas, jails and schools with electrified barbed wire fencing, are feeling quite helpless against the swarm attacks of hundreds of Naxalite militia. In the past few months, at least 25 jawans have committed suicide after killing their officers and colleagues out of sheer stress.

That the Government of Chhattisgarh is hell bent on demolishing any “middle ground” is amply illustrated by its treatment of the Vanvasi Chetana Ashram, an NGO inspired by Gandhian ideology, which has been trying to implement the recommendations of the NHRC with regard to rehabilitation of the displaced villagers, and to provide legal aid for the filing of FIRs/ complaints in the cases of disappearances and rapes. The Ashram was demolished recently; rice being taken to the villages of Lingagiri, Basaguda and Nendra, which have been resettled by the Ashram, was confiscated as “being supplied to Naxalites”; and a young volunteer of the Ashram – Sukhnath – has been booked under the draconian Chhattisgarh Special Public Safety Act. The voice of civil liberties is still sought to be silenced: two more supplementary charge sheets, again not disclosing any legally admissible evidence, have recently been filed against Dr Binayak Sen, General Secretary of the Chhattisgarh PUCL, even after unconditional bail was granted to him by the Supreme Court. Apart from the cases filed against Salwa Judum in the Supreme Court, numerous cases filed against fake encounters in the High Court of Chhattisgarh, and private complaint cases in the lower courts drag on without providing substantial relief, despite the best efforts of the Petitioners. Strident demands made in rallies of local adivasi organizations in Bastar, protesting the handing over of their lands to companies, meet with no response, either from the district administration or the Governor – the constitutional authority of the Scheduled Areas.

It is in this context that the implications of “clearing out the Naxalites by military operation” have to be understood. Today, this can only mean an indiscriminate genocide of adivasis, a full scale war against lakhs of people, against the people at large. How can “civilians” and “combatants” possibly be distinguished under such a dispensation? Have not our experiences in the North East and Kashmir told us that there is no “quick end” to such a war? We are already witness to the recent incidents of Singhavaram…Kokawada….Vechapal, cases where people came out on the streets in Bastar to protest that the so-called “militants” killed by the security forces and SJ SPOs were actually only simple villagers.

That is why, it is with a sense of great urgency, and in defiance of the fascist attitude of the Government of Chhattisgarh, that we appeal to all democratic minded people of this country to demand that -

First and foremost, the lakhs of displaced adivasis of Dantewada be allowed to return to their villages and rebuild their ravaged agrarian and forest based economies. Thus their rights to food, to basic health, to land and livelihood, and above all – to life, must be assured.
It is only this, that can ensure a de-escalation of the polarization between security forces on the one hand and the adivasi people at large on the other, and can avoid genocide in the name of counterinsurgency.

If you agree with us, please raise and support this demand.

Sudha Bharadwaj
On behalf of
Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha (Mazdoor Karyakarta Committee)
C/o CMM Office, Labour Camp, Jamul,
District Durg, Chhattisgarh.
Mobile No: 09926603877

Analysis of Classes in India: A Preliminary Note on the Industrial Bourgeoisie and Middle Class

 November 24, 2009

By Deepankar Basu, Sanhati.

 (Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst) In a previous paper [Basole and Basu (2009)] an attempt to begin an analysis of social classes in contemporary India organized around the idea of economic surplus was initiated, by revisiting the 1970s mode of production debate. The focus in Basole and Basu (2009) was on the rural classes and the unorganized industrial and service sector workers. In this paper, I extend that analysis by shifting attention to the classes that had been left out in Baole and Basu (2009): the industrial bourgeoisie and what might be called the middle class. Introduction In the Marxist tradition, the notion of class is intimately related to the idea of economic surplus. Thus, I would like to begin this paper with a few brief and introductory comments on the relationship between the two. Every society, if it is to reproduce itself over time, must organize social production in such a way that it manages to reproduce the material and non-material conditions of its existence. Production in excess of what is necessary to reproduce the material conditions of its existence is the production of what we can call economic surplus. Thus, a society produces economic surplus when it produces more than what is necessary to cover the costs of social production, i.e., when it produces more than is necessary to replace (or replenish) the labour and non-labour inputs used up in the production process. This allows us to divide the total labour time of society into two parts: necessary labour time, which corresponds to the labour time required to merely replace the labour and non-labour inputs to production; and, surplus labour time, which corresponds to the economic surplus. It is the economic surplus, moreover, that allows any society to grow and develop, to not only increase the scale, scope and sophistication of material production and encourage and facilitate technological change but also to increase the scale and depth of its non-material products. Every viable, growing society, therefore, must produce an economic surplus to sustain its material and non-material growth. Of course, reproduction of a society requires not only the continuous production of an economic surplus but also the reproduction of its social relations of production. While the problem of the reproduction of the social relations of production is an important one and deserves serious study, here I would like to draw attention to another, though related, issue: the relationship between economic surplus and class. What is class? Here I can do no better than give a fairly comprehensive definition of class by Lenin: “Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation in most cases fixed and formulated in law to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people, one of which can appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy” (Lenin 1919 (1972), p.421). Thus, classes, as understood in the Marxist tradition, are defined by the appropriation of the surplus labour time of the group of direct producers by the group of non-producers (or exploiters). This appropriation is made possible by the differential location of the classes in the process of social production and the differential ownership of the means of production. The appropriation is guaranteed by the existing legal system enforced through the power of the State. But if classes are defined by the appropriation of surplus, then they can only come into existence when the productive capacity of society has progressed to the extent that it can produce a surplus over and above what is needed for bare subsistence. Thus, class-divided societies are made possible and materially supported by the existence of economic surplus, corresponding to the surplus labour time of direct producers. Being defined by the relationship between exploiters (those who appropriate the surplus) and exploited (those who produce the surplus), class-divided societies have often been studied with two-class models: master and slave, serf and lord, worker and capitalist. It is of course clear that two-class models arise as abstractions from the more complex class structures of real societies; the presence of groups which lie in the “middle” of, or straddle, both class locations, i.e., exploited and exploiters, needs to be taken into account to arrive at a more realistic class analysis of real societies. Before proceeding to take account of the “middle” in Indian society, it needs to be reiterated that even though two-class models are simplified representations of reality, they are useful for understanding the basic dynamics of the societies they refer to at a high level of abstraction. For instance, Marx’s analysis of the dynamics of capital accumulation presented in Capital, Volume 1 (Marx, 1992), where he works primarily in terms of two fundamental social classes – the proletariat and the capitalists – is extremely useful in understanding the long term tendencies of capitalist societies. With these preliminary comments in place, let me propose the following three-class typology as a first approximation to the class structure of contemporary India: the working classes, the ruling classes and the middle classes, the plural being used to draw attention towards the internal heterogeneity of each of these three classes. Three Fold Classification for India The working classes are the only productive classes in Indian society and are defined by the fact that they produce the economic surplus in the following specific sense: the income that accrues to this class, which is equal to the value of its labour-power, is lower than the value added by the use of that labour power during any period of time (say a year). Taking account of the internal heterogeneity of the working class in India, it can be broadly divided, with two important qualifications, into two large groups: (1) the unorganized workers (i.e., workers in the unorganized sector of the economy) as defined by the National Commission for Enterprise in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS), and (2) productive workers in the organized sector of the economy. The first qualification relates to the fact that the NCEUS defines the unorganized workers to include almost all of the agricultural sector; hence we must exclude the following two rural classes from the NCEUS definition of the unorganized workers: (a) rich farmers and landlords, and (b) middle peasants. The second qualification relates to a tiny portion of the workers in the organized sector whom we will include in the middle class and not in the surplus-producing working class, viz., the highly skilled workers, the professionals, the managers, and all the employees of the State sector. Thus, in India, the working class consists of: (1) the landless labourers, (2) the marginal and poor peasants, (3) the workers in the unorganized industrial and service sectors, and (4) a large part of the workers in the organized private sector. At the other pole of Indian society resides the dominant, or ruling, classes. These classes are defined by the fact that they not only appropriate the economic surplus (that has been produced by the working classes defined above) but also determine the direction and mode of its utilization. For historical and structural reasons, the ruling class combine in India has been, and still is, internally heterogeneous and consists of the following three elements: (1) the industrial bourgeoisie, (2) the rich farmers and landlords, and (3) the professionals (State-elite, i.e., the top-level managers of PSUs, the top-level officers of the bureaucracy, the police, the army and the judiciary, and the top-level managers and professionals in the private sector). The industrial bourgeoisie is the dominant element in the ruling class combine. Lying between these two poles, the productive and the non-productive poles, is what we might call the “middle class” which is defined by the following two characteristics: (1) this class is the recipient of a part of the economic surplus, i.e., the total compensation earned by the middle-class is higher than the value of its labour power (i.e., the cost of producing and reproducing the labour power); and (2) the middle class is crucial for the reproduction of the existing social relations in India which is what fetches it the extra income, i.e., the income above the value of its labour power, in the form of rent from the ruling classes. There are two main segments of the middle class: (a) the petty bourgeoisie, who largely own their means of production: middle peasants in agriculture, the merchants, the traders, and the owner-operators of small enterprises, and (b) the professionals: the technical experts, the managers, and the skilled workers in large-scale private enterprises, and the large majority of the employees of the State sector. Basole and Basu (2009), by revisiting the 1970s mode of production debate, attempted to begin an analysis of social classes in contemporary India organized around the idea of economic surplus. The focus in Basole and Basu (2009) was on the rural classes and the unorganized industrial and service sector workers. In this paper, I extend that analysis by shifting attention to the classes that had been left out in Baole and Basu (2009): the industrial bourgeoisie and what might be called the middle class. But before moving on to an analysis of the industrial bourgeoisie and the middle class, let me briefly summarize the findings of Basole and Basu (2009) about the rural classes and the unorganized workers. The main input into agricultural production is land and so the analysis of property and power in the agricultural sector has to carefully look at the ownership distribution of land. While the aggregate distribution of land ownership remains as skewed today as it was five decades ago, interesting and important patterns are visible within this unchanging aggregate picture. The share of land owned by large (10 ha or more) and medium (4 ha to 10 ha) landholding families has steadily declined over the last few decades from around 60% to 34%; the share owned by small (1 ha to 2 ha) and marginal (less than 1 ha) landholding families has increased from around 21% to 43%, while the share of semi-medium (2 ha to 4 ha) families has remained unchanged at around 20%. Going hand-in-hand with the decline in the share of land owned by large landowning families, is the steady decline of tenant cultivation and its gradual replacement by self cultivation in Indian agriculture. The share of operational holdings using tenant cultivation declined from about 24% in 1960-61 to about 10% in 2002-03. There are large geographical variations in the extent of tenancy, with the largest share of leased-in land as a share of total operated area occurring in Punjab and Haryana, two prominent examples of what Basole and Basu (2009) called large landholding states; Orissa has high prevalence of tenancy and is an example of a small landholding state. The proportion of area owned and the proportion of area operated by the different size-classes are almost equal; hence, there is no evidence of reverse tenancy on any substantial scale at the aggregate level, though this might hide reverse tenancy at state or regional levels. Disaggregating total incomes of rural households engaged in agriculture according to types of income showed that wage income has become the main source of income for a large majority of the population. For about 60% of the rural households in 2003, the major share of income came from wage work, supplemented by income coming from petty commodity production, both in the agricultural and non-agricultural sector. Another 20% of rural households drew equal shares of their total income from wage work and cultivation, both at about 40%. The natural corollary to this is that “effective landlessness” is large and has steadily increased over the past few decades. The share of effectively landless households in total rural households has increased from about 44% in 1960-61 to 60% in 2002-03. These, and other related, facts led Basole and Basu (2009) to conclude that: (a) the hold of semi-feudal landlords had declined significantly over the past few decades; thus, the primary element of the rural ruling class today seems to be the rich farmers; (b) there has been a significant growth of the rural proletariat, and (c) the prevalence of petty production, in agriculture, industry and services, remains undiminished; hence the petty bourgeoisie remains numerically and politically important; (d) the vast majority of the industrial proletariat is seen in India today as unorganized workers, who lack social security, work security and employment security (NCEUS, 2007). Let us now turn to a study of the industrial bourgeoisie and the middle classes. The Industrial Bourgeoisie The dominant element in the ruling class combine is the industrial bourgeoisie, which emerged and grew under the long shadow of British colonialism. Accumulating capital through merchant and trading activities related to the colonial economy, this class gradually diversified into industrial activities, beginning with the textile industry in an around colonial Bombay. Significant portions of the industrial bourgeoisie has been, and continues to be, organized along family lines, with the Tatas and the Birlas being the most prominent historical examples. Three characteristics of the Indian industrial bourgeoisie demand further analysis and comment: its attitude towards other elements, especially the semi-feudal landlords, of the ruling class combine; the evolution of its internal structure and its relationship with the State; and, its relationship with the center of the global capitalist system. The Indian bourgeoisie has, because of its historical origins, always had an ambivalent attitude to the whole gambit of semi-feudal interests in the economy. Even though it hesitantly supported the nationalist leadership of the Indian National Congress, it was never strong enough to push for its hegemony either in the nationalist movement or in the post-colonial State. It never fought a frontal battle with feudal interests, the biggest indicator of which is the half-hearted nature of land reforms in independent India. As a result, it could neither fashion an independent capitalist development path for the country based on the home market nor consistently democratize the polity. If the nationalist struggle for independence is, therefore, understood as the beginning of the bourgeois democratic revolution in India, then it largely remains unfinished even 60 years after political independence from British colonialism. Even though the Indian bourgeoisie has not initiated and led a broad-based capitalist development, which could have improved the material conditions of the vast masses of the country, it has nonetheless managed to significantly widen and deepen the industrial structure of India. Starting with consumer goods industries like textiles, it has diversified into the production of basic capital and intermediate goods, and consumer durables. This has been largely possible because of the protection and patronage of the State, with which this class has had a complex relationship. On the one hand, it has resisted all attempts at disciplining by the State for larger development programmes (Chibber, 2006); on the other, it has utilized industrial, tax, credit, export and import policies of the State to further its own narrow class interests. At the time of political independence, the industrial structure in India was very concentrated at the top, with a few large monopoly business houses controlling large swathes of the market. Three trends have emerged, slowly at first, since then. The first trend has been the differentiation of the economy into an organized and an unorganized sector, roughly coterminous with large and small scale industries; policies of the Indian state helped in this differentiation. The second trend has been the relative growth and proliferation of the small scale sector, i.e., relative to the large-scale, organized sector. The third trend has been the slow but steady growth of a regional bourgeoisie, different from and often competing with the established large business houses. Thus, concentration and centralization of capital has proceeded in several branches of the organized sector; but this has also been accompanied by increased regional and sectoral competition and growth of the small scale sector. To get a sense of the evolution of the concentration of Indian capital at the very top let us look at some data. In 1971, total sales of the top 20 industrial houses in India accounted for about 61 percent of the net domestic product of the private organized sector; the corresponding figure for 1981 was 87 percent (Bardhan, 1998). To come to the situation in the early part of this century, note the continued dominance of what the business press regularly calls the “big four” of Indian business: the Tatas, the Birlas, the Ambanis and the Mittals. In key industries like energy, telecom, steel, automobiles, IT and retail, these four business houses either continue to dominate or are poised to do so in the near future. Another measure of the concentration of Indian capital at the top can be seen from the following: according to data from the ET 500, in 2008 the top 20 private companies accounted for about 40 percent of the sales, 47 percent of after-tax profits and 45 percent of market capitalization of the top 500 private companies. Though not strictly comparable with the earlier data for the 1970s and 1980s, the data about 2008, when situated in a historical setting, suggests the following: the monopoly power of Indian big capital increased continuously after political independence till the mid-1980s, and has seen a relative decline since the inception of the process of economic liberalization. While Indian capital continues to be highly concentrated at the top in many industries, we notice another trend too: regional capital has grown by leaps and bounds over the past two decades and has made serious forays into industries such as automobile ancillaries, capital goods, casting and forging, chemicals, construction, diamond and jewelery, entertainment and media, textiles and transportation and many others. The relationship of Indian capital to the center of the global capitalist system has been the focus of much debate and discussion within left circles in India with one prominent strand characterizing the big bourgeoisie as comprador and the Indian state as semi-colonial, both these characterization meant to convey the continuing hold of foreign capital on the Indian economy and polity, especially since the beginnings of the 1990s. Concrete evidence regarding the presence of foreign capital in the Indian economy and the continuous overseas expansion of Indian capital seem to suggest a more complicated story. Let us first look at the evidence on the presence of foreign capital in the Indian economy. In 1981-82, “only about 10 per cent of total value added in the factory of mining and manufacturing was accounted for by foreign firms.” (Bardhan, 1998); if only large firms are kept in the picture, foreign firms still account for only about 13 per cent of the value added. Of course, there were a small number of industries where foreign presence was substantial: industries producing cigarettes, soap and detergents, typewriters, electrodes, etc. To the extent that there was a rise of foreign collaboration during this time, “the overwhelming proportion of such agreements [did] not involve any foreign participation in equity capital.” (Bardhan, 1998). Similarly, there has been an increasing trend of outright purchase of technological imports thereby reducing the dependence of domestic capitalists on the foreign suppliers of technology. Of the top 25 industrial units in 1983, only 4 were foreign. The contemporary picture is tilted even more towards the domestic bourgeoisie. Of the top 500 companies in 2008, only 2 were foreign: Larsen & Tubro and Maruti-Suzuki; if we restrict ourselves to only private companies, then the corresponding figure is 3 out of the top 25: Larsen & Tubro, ITC and Maruti-Suzuki. If we look at the same issue at a more disaggregated level, there are only three major industries which has substantial foreign capital: capital goods (Larsen & Tubro), fast moving consumer goods (ITC and Hindustan Lever), and retail (Pantaloon retail). Other than these three, all the major industries are controlled by Indian capital: automobiles, banks, chemicals, construction, consumer durables, entertainment, fertilisers, finance, metals & mining, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, power, real estate, steel, textiles, transportation (ET 500, 2008). The overseas expansion of Indian capital in recent years has been commented on a lot, especially in the ecstatic business press in India. Some of the prominent examples that have been splashed across the national media are: Videocon’s acquisition of South Korea’s debt-burdened Daewoo Electronics; Tata’s acquisition of Corus; ONGC Videsh’s acquisition of Exxon Mobil’s stake in the Campos Basin Oil Fields in Brazil; Suzlon Energy’s acquisition of Belgium’s Hansen Transmissions International NV; Ranbaxy’s acquisition of Terapia, the largest independent generic drug company in Romania; Wipro’s acquisition of United States-based Quantech Global Services; and the largest acquisition of all, Reliance’s reported move to acquire controlling stake in LyondellBasell, the world’s third largest chemical company. Going beyond such anecdotal evidence from the business press, there is substantial evidence based on detailed research that major fractions of Indian capital, with active assistance from the State, has successfully entered the global scene. Researchers have pointed out that Indian investments abroad has moved through two stages. During the first stage of the 1970s and 1980s, the quantity of investments was small, and the destination was primarily in the developing world, shifting from Africa to Southeast Asia. During the second phase, starting roughly from the mid 1990s, there has been a dramatic quantitative increase of outward flow of capital, accompanied by a widening breadth and depth of industries where investment has been directed to; interestingly, in this phase, an increasing share of the investment have found destinations in the imperialist core: USA and Europe. (Pedersen, 2008). Thus, taking account of these recent trends, viz., growing concentration and centralization of capital in certain key sectors of the Indian economy, the rise and growth of the regional bourgeoisie, and the increasing overseas expansion, especially into the core of the global capitalist system, it seems that the characterization of the big bourgeoisie as “comprador” and the Indian state as semi-colonial needs to be seriously rethought. What this implies is not the absence of imperialism but a suggestion to carefully rethink how imperialism operates in the Indian context, i.e., to rethink how the Indian economy is articulated to the global capitalist system by imperialism. Two issues that might be helpful in this context, and needs to be explored further, are the following: (a) the role and effect of financial capital (i.e., flows of portfolio capital as opposed to direct foreign investment) on the Indian economy, and (b) the possible influence of imperialism operating through the channels of government policy rather through the channel direct investment, i.e., export of ideas replacing the primacy of the export of capital à la Lenin. Next, we look at the middle classes. The Middle Class What I have called the middle class, for lack of a better expression, is composed of two distinct segments in contemporary India, the petty bourgeoisie and the professionals (technical experts, managers, skilled workers scientific personnel and state sector employees). The first segment of this class owns its means of production and thus, does not produce, surplus value; the second segment, on the other hand, receives a small portion of the total surplus value due to their crucial position in the production process and their important role in the reproduction of the existing social relations. The petty bourgeoisie owns its means of production and, therefore, does not need, in the main, to sell its labour power for ensuring its livelihood. In the agricultural sector, the petty bourgeoisie refers to the middle peasants, i.e., families whose main source of income is cultivation and who mainly rely on family labour for organizing cultivation. In the industrial and service sectors, the petty bourgeoisie refers to owner-operators of small enterprises operated mainly with family labour and the small traders and merchants. There is internal differentiation within the petty bourgeoisie, with one section managing to produce surplus and accumulating capital while the other part lives perpetually in poverty, barely managing to reproduce themselves at a constant level of operation. The privileged position of the professionals in the production process can be better understood if we focus on two crucial dimensions of the production process: skill and expertise, and exercise of authority in the production process. The analysis of professionals in this paper draws heavily on the pioneering work of Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright (Wright, 1997). Let us consider authority first by looking a little more carefully at the production process. Capitalists not only hire labour in the market, but also dominates labour in the production process relating, for instance, to the pace, intensity and other dimensions of work; this aspect of power and control of capital by labour is crucial. As the scale and scope of production increases it becomes increasing difficult for capitalists to carry out this function; hence, they delegate this function to the class of managers and supervisors: managers and supervisors exercise the authority of capital over labour in the production process on behalf of capital. Thus, this dimension of delegated authority is one crucial dimension along which working people are differentiated, creating a contradictory class position: managers and supervisors can be seen as belonging both to the capitalist class and the working class. To the extent that they exercise the delegated authority of capital in the process of production, they act as capitalists; to the extent they are themselves controlled by capitalists, they resemble workers. There is, of course, a whole range of such contradictory class positions with lower level supervisors strongly resembling workers and top level managers, like corporate directors and CEOs, identifying completely with capital. How do capitalists, in turn, monitor and control the managers and supervisors? Thinking about this question gives us a way to explain the earnings differentials, compared to the working class, of managers and supervisors. For the smooth functioning of the production process and the continuous generation of surplus value, capital needs managers and supervisors to exercise the power and authority over workers in an effective manner. This cannot be ensured by surveillance and monitoring of managers, both because it is difficult to monitor managerial effort and because coercive methods hamper creative managerial intervention. The alternative is to pass off a part of the surplus value to the managers so as to build loyalty of the managers towards the organization, internalize the imperatives of capital and thereby do capital’s bidding effectively in the production process. This part of surplus that goes to the managers and supervisors, and explains the huge differentials in earning from the working class, can thus be understood as a “loyalty rent”that capital pays to maintain its power and control in the production process. Let us now turn to the other dimension: skill and expertise. Much like the class of managers and supervisors, workers who manage to acquire skills and expertise relevant to the production process attain a privileged position. There are two aspects of this privileged position. First, not only are skills always in short supply but there are systematic obstacles to the acquiring of these skills by members of the working class which often operates through the monopoly of the middle class on the educational system and training programs. This allows skilled and technical workers and the so-called experts to derive a “skill rent” from capital, which partly explains the wage differential vis-a-vis the working class and is an indicator of their privileged position. Second, technical and skilled work often cannot be effectively monitored; hence, capitalists generate optimal effort from skilled and technical workers by building up their loyalty to the organization, again through a part of the surplus being passed off as a “loyalty rent” to the skilled workers. Among what we have called professionals, there is a special category that deserves separate attention: state sector employees. There are two characteristics of this group that deserves mention. First, their income comes from the tax revenue of the State, and thus can be easily seen to be a part of economic surplus of society; their income is thus a deduction from the surplus, they do not produce surplus in the sense in which workers produce surplus value for the valorization of capital. But this also means that they are not dependent on capitalist profit making for their livelihood; this might have important implications in terms of class consciousness vis-a-vis capitalism. Second, following Wright (1997), the various institutions of the state can be broadly divided into two parts, the political superstructure and the decommodified state service sector. The political superstructure consists of all the institutions that work for the reproduction of the existing social relations: the police, the courts, the military, the legislature and other such institutions. The decommodified state service sector, on the other hand, produces use values, and not exchange values, directly beneficial to the people at large: health care, educational services, public infrastructure and utilities, public recreation and entertainment, etc. The rationale for separating the two sets of institutions is that the second, the decommodified state service sector, operates largely outside the logic of commodity production and capital accumulation. Production in this sector is not subordinated to the imperatives of profit maximization; hence, this sector can be viewed as part of the institutional set-up of a post-revolutionary State and hence would need to be preserved even when the current configuration of power is dismantled. The political consciousness and orientation of workers working in these two sectors of the State might be expected to be radically different, a point of particular relevance to radical mass movements. It goes without saying that there is a gradation of the middle classes, and the upper sections merge into the ruling class while the lower sections are very close to the working classes. The upper sections of the middle class share in the decision-making process relating to the use of the economic surplus (CEOs, top managers, and directors of corporate sector firms, etc.), have significant control over a large part of the productive resources of society in the form of public sector units (top managers of the PSUs) and have a monopoly over the use of the ideological and repressive apparatus of the State (top level bureaucrats, army officers, members of the judiciary). They seamlessly merge into the ruling class. Relative Population Shares, Income and Wealth: Initial Estimates What are the numerical strength of the three broad classes – the ruling class, the middle class and the working class – in Indian society today? Some very interesting recent research (Jaydev, et al., 2009; Vakulabharanam, et al., 2009) can throw some light on this important question. In their comparative study of the changing nature of inequality in India and China, Vakulabharanam, et al. (2009) use data from two rounds of the National Sample Survey (NSS) to provide a detailed picture of class structure in India. They use the National Classification of Occupation (NCO 3-digit, 1968 scheme) to divide households into various occupational categories, which can used to roughly compute relative shares of what I have defined as the ruling, middle and working classes. Using data from Table 2 in Vakulabharanam, et al. (2009), I get the rough picture presented in Table 1. Table 1: Class structure in India (Percentage share in population) 1993-94 2004-05 Ruling Class 11.89 11.71 Middle Class 24.26 21.08 Working Class 63.85 67.21 Though lot more work needs to be done to get a more accurate and refined picture, Table 1, nonetheless provides a rough estimate of the relative shares of the three social classes in contemporary India. Ruling classes, in Table 1, consist of the following: owners or managers of the formal and informal sector enterprises and the rich farmers; the middle class consists of the following: professionals and skilled workers in manufacturing and services, middle peasants, rural professionals and moneylenders; the working class is composed of the rest of the population: the unskilled workers in manufacturing and services, the small and marginal peasants and the landless labourers. An interesting, though expected, fact that emerges from Table 1 is the relative squeezing of the middle class and not their growth, as the mainstream media constantly suggests. Since the size of the ruling class has remained more or less constant over the decade, it must mean that sections of the middle class is getting pushed down into the working class. The picture presented in Table 1 is only an approximate picture; hence some caveats are in order. First, the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) consumption expenditure surveys, which is used by most researchers including Vakulabharanam, et al. (2009), do not give a correct picture of the members of the big bourgeoisie (the super rich in terms of wealth and income); they need to be oversampled if they are to be truly representative of their population weight in the sample. Second, some of the owners and managers that are currently part of the ruling class would actually need to be included in the middle class; this is because many of the owners would be owner-operators of small scale enterprises and some of the managers would occupy lower levels in the firms’ hierarchy; but this adjustment could not be carried out because of lack of more disaggregated data at the moment. That is why the sample share of the ruling class in Table 1 seems to be an overestimate of their true population share. Both these facts, moreover, suggest that the figure for the ruling class in Table 1 needs some serious modification. Third, some of the skilled workers that are currently part of the middle class in Table 1 should be actually included in th working class; again, this could not be done because of lack of more disaggregated data. This is the reason why, just like in the case of the ruling class, the sample share of the middle class in Table 1 is an overestimate. A more disaggregated analysis to arrive at a more accurate picture will be conducted in the future. My conjecture is that the disaggregated analysis will throw up a picture which will correspond closely to the distribution of households according to consumption expenditure that was reported in Table 1.2, NCEUS (2007): the ruling class would be roughly 4 percent of the population and their average consumption expenditure would be greater than 4 times the official poverty line, the middle class would be roughly the next 19 percent of the population with an average consumption expenditure between 2 and 4 times the poverty line, and the rest, about 77 percent, would be what I have called the working class and which corresponds to what the NCEUS called the poor and vulnerable section which, in 2004-05, spent less than Rs. 20 per day on consumption (Table 1.2, NCEUS, 2007). Of course, the consumption expenditure distribution that is deduced from the NSSO surveys do not provide an accurate idea about the true income and wealth of the big bourgeoisie and the top professionals in India. There are two sources that provide a much more accurate picture of the income and wealth of this class: income tax data that has been used to estimate top Indian incomes from 1922 to 2000 (Banerjee and Piketty, 2005) and the World Wealth Report and the Forbes list of the richest persons in the world (which now, quite understandably, has a separate list for India). To get an idea of the wealth of the big bourgeoisie, note that in 2009, India had 52 billionaires, which was close to twice the number in 2007; the wealthiest them of all, Mukesh Ambani, has a net worth of $ 32 billion (Times of India, Nov., 19, 2009). The combined net worth of the richest 100 Indians in 2009 was US$ 276 billion; their Chinese counterparts had a combined net worth of US$ 170 billion (Livemint, Nov., 20, 2009). To make the comparison fair recall that China’s GDP in 2008 was $ 7.992 trillion (PPP) while India’s GDP in 2008 was only $ 3.304 trillion (PPP): wealth is far more concentrated at the top in India than it is in China. Moving on to incomes of the richest Indian, Banerjee and Piketty (2005) present some very interesting facts. First, the top 1 per cent of the population accounted for about 12-13 per cent of total income in the 1950s; the share fell to 4-5 per cent in the early 1980s, and then picked up again to reach 9-10 per cent in the late 1990s; whatever the problems of the Nehruvian policy frameowrk, it did manage to redistribute income away from the rich. This U-shaped pattern, which is very similar to patterns observed in the USA too, can be an entry point into understanding the sharp policy change from the mid-1980s onwards in India: the big bourgeoisie pushed for the change in policy direction to reverse the trend of income distribution. While the top 1 per cent have more or less gained back their pre-Nehruvian era share, there are interesting patterns if we look more closely at the various sections within the rich: there has been a rapid divergence in the income shares accruing to what can be termed the super rich (the top 0.01 per cent), the moderately rich (the top 0.1 per cent) and the rich (the top 1 per cent). Conclusion Mao’s analysis of the class structure of Chinese society in the 1920s was extremely influential in the Chinese communist movement and facilitated the formulation of the strategy and tactics of the Chinese revolution. Given the widespread use of Mao’s basic framework of class analysis in Third World settings, it would be useful to contrast the results of the analysis presented in this paper with Mao’s characterization of classes in pre-revolutionary China (Mao, 1926). For Mao, the ruling class in pre-revolutionary China consisted of “the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big landlord class and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them.” In contemporary India, the ruling class consists of the big bourgeoisie, the rich farmers and the top sections of the professionals and bureaucrats; the crucial difference, to our mind, is the absence in contemporary India of what Mao called the comprador class (the class of merchants who acted as agents of foreign capital) and the big feudal landlords. The big bourgeoisie in India today seems to be less under the influence of foreign capital than their counterparts in pre-revolutionary China; similarly, the big feudal or semi-feudal landlords that held sway over the economy of rural China seem to have been largely replaced by the rich farmers as the key ruling class element in rural areas of contemporary India. Mao’s analysis had identified a tiny proletariat in China, which, according to him, would be the leading force in the revolution. In contemporary India, in sharp contrast to China, the proletariat is significantly larger, not only in absolute terms but also in relative terms, i.e., relative to the other social classes. This is the direct result of the wider and deeper industrial development following political independence in India compared to pre-revolutionary China. The proletariat consists, in contemporary India, of the vast majority of workers in the unorganized industrial and service sectors, part of the lower level workers in the organized sector and the effectively landless laborer families in the agricultural sector, and thus partially includes what Mao had called the semi-proletariat. In Mao’s analysis, the petty bourgeoisie was accorded “very close attention” both because of its size and because of its class character. He had concluded that this large and important group would be an ally of the revolutionary proletariat. In contemporary India too, the petty bourgeoisie – composed of the middle peasant and the owner-operators of small enterprises and small traders and merchants – is numerically very large and because of its objective economic position will play an important role in radical social change. What Mao did not stress and what seems to have become important in contemporary India is the place occupied by the second segment of what I have called the middle class: the professionals. With the growing complexity of social organization and social production, this group will become even more important, not only in the present social order but also in any radically different society that might arise in the future. In both the Russian and the Chinese revolutions, the post-revolutionary regime had to rely very heavily on this class to ensure functioning of the economy. According more attention to this segment of the middle class, therefore, seems warranted. REFERENCES Banerjee, A. and T. Piketty. 2005. “Top Indian Incomes, 1922-2000,” The World Bank Economic Review, 19(1), pp. 1-20. Bardhan, P. 1998. The Political Economy of Development in India (expanded edition with an epilogue on the Political Economy of Reforms in India). Oxford University Press: Delhi. Basole, A. and D. Basu. 2009. “Relations of Production and Modes of Surplus Extraction in India: An Aggregate Study.” Working Paper, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Available at: http://www.umass.edu/economics/publications/2009-12.pdf and http://sanhati.com/non-excerpted/1506/ Chibber, V. 2006. Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ. ET 500: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Features/ET-500-companies/articleshow/3603974.cms Jaydev, A., Motiram, S. and V. Vakulabhranam. 2009. “Patterns of Wealth Disparities in India during the Era of Liberalization,” in A Great Transformation? Understanding India’s Political Economy (forthcoming). Lenin, V. I. 1919. “A Great Beginning: Heroism of the Workers in the Rear.” Collected Works, Volume 29, pp. 409-434. 4th English edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972. Available at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/jun/28.htm Marx, K. 1992. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. Penguin Classics. (first published in 1887). National Commission for Enterprise in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS), 2007. “Report on the Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganized Sector.” Government of India. Tse-tung, Mao. 1926. “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society.” available online at:http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_1.htm Pedersen, J. D. 2008. “The Second Wave of Indian Investments Abroad,” Journal of Contemporary Asia, 38(4), pp. 613-637. Vakulabhranam, V., Zhong, W. and X. Jinjun. 2009. “Patterns of Wealth Disparities in India during the Era of Liberalization,” Working Paper, Graduate Economics Research Center, Nagoya University. World Wealth Report, 2009. Available at: www.ml.com/media/113831.pdf Wright, E. O. 1997. Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK. 2 Responses to “Analysis of Classes in India: A Preliminary Note on the Industrial Bourgeoisie and Middle Class” 1. Mike Harmon Says: November 24th, 2009 at 10:30 am Just wanted to say HI. I found your blog a few days ago on Technorati and have been reading it over the past few days. 2. Buta Singh Says: November 25th, 2009 at 3:43 am Hi friend, Your analysis is interesting. I have just taken a glimpse and go through it thouroughly regard

Police unable to trace Maoist movements

November 2, 2009

K Mahender

WARANGAL:

Intent on reviving their activities in the district, Maoists of late have revamped their strategy in such a way that police are unable to trace their movements.After a long lull, they surfaced at once and shot dead four persons branding as informers in the forest region adjoining Khammam, Warangal and Karimnagar district borders in the recent times.They shot dead one in Kalva Srirampur mandal in Karimnagar district and other in Pinapaka mandal in Khammam district. Two days later they shot dead UK Saraiah, a sarpanch of Lingala village of Tadwayi mandal on October 18.K Narasimha Reddy (48), a local Congress leader was shot dead by Maoists at Konapur village of Kothaguda mandal on October 28.As there was an intelligence alert that the Maoists who maintained calm for sometime might launch attacks, DGP SS Girish Kumar even visited the district recently and held a review meet with district police. In view of the developments, police have kept a strict vigil in the district apart from launching combing operations. They suspect that Maoists are going ahead with their activities while keeping an eye on police’s strategy.Earlier, they used to hold meetings after having meals in villages making it easier for police to track their movements. As part of their strategy they bade goodbye to the practice and are not entering villages which has been confirmed by a police official.Though their numbers have come down in the district, police apprehend that their activity might be revived in the district as nearly 100 Maoist leaders belonging to the district are working in the top leadership of various states. Yapanarayana alias Haribhushan is currently working as Khammam, Karimnagar and Warangal (KKW division) secretary as his predecessor Ganesh was sent to neighbouring states.Lathakka is working as Warangal In-charge. Several action teams are moving in Mulug, Narsampet, Kothaguda, Parakala and Jangaon areas.Instead of moving in big numbers they are finding it easy to eliminate targeted persons with the help of one or two member action teams.Mohan Rao, former sarpanch of V Ramakrishnapuram of Chityala mandal was shot dead by one such action team member.

War Against the Maoists: But Who Are They and What Do They Want

Radical Notes Journal, November 19, 2009

Rita Khanna

Author’s Note: This is meant to be a simple and brief exposition of the goals and strategies of the Maoist movement in India for people who may not have much awareness about it and are confused by the propaganda in the mainstream media. This does not go into the arcane debates about mode of production in India, the debates among communist revolutionaries over strategy and tactics etc. This aims at people who, for example, are perplexed why the Maoists, instead of trying to ensure safe drinking water like an NGO, rather, often resort to violent activities against the Government.

The Indian government is launching a full-scale war against the Maoist rebels and the people led by them in different parts of the country. The initial battles, without any formal announcement, have already started. For this purpose, they intend to deploy about 75,000 security personnel in parts of Central and Eastern India, including Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Jharkhand. The government will organize its regular air-force in addition to paramilitary and specially trained COBRA forces. The air-force has begun to extend its logistic support.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Home Minister P. Chidambaram have declared the Maoist rebels to be `the biggest internal security threat’ to India and a hindrance to `development’ . The mainstream media seem to have taken them at their face value. Their publications and television programmes seem to be building a war-hysteria against the Maoist rebels regardless of the fact that this attack by the government will be directed against some of the most deprived of the Indian people. Indeed this is turning into a war of the state against its own people!

While paying lip service at times to the notion that the current people’s insurgency led by the Maoist rebels has its root in decades of vicious exploitation of the poor, especially the dalits and tribals, the blare of government propaganda tries to convince us that the Maoist rebels are dangerous, blood-thirsty terrorists determined to establish their areas of influence. The Government is preaching that the Maoists can go to any extent to maintain their influence in these areas – by either preventing the government from undertaking development activities or using the power of their guns, killing disobedient individuals. Their ideology is to terrorise the common people, wrest power from the democratically elected governments and destroy the entire fabric of the society.

The government and the media want us to believe that the only people, apart from a few romantic misguided intellectuals, who willingly support Maoists are the poor, ignorant, uneducated, uninformed tribal people. They seem to claim that no sensible, intelligent person living in a society like ours would support them voluntarily. But is this a true picture?

Could it be that the Maoist rebels are supporting and organizing the poor, exploited people to fight oppression, to establish a more egalitarian society where the wealth of our growing economy will be spread among all, not merely among a very small minority? Could it be that in the name of suppressing the Maoists, the state is going all out to break the backbone of these poor peoples’ fight? Could it be that the government is planning to wage a war, in our name, against our own sisters and brothers to help line the pockets of the rich?

In this hour of crisis, we must ask those questions that the government seeks to suppress.

What do we really know about the Maoist rebels, their ideology, their plans and programs? Why does the government need to go to war against its own people and inside its own territory? Are the Maoists really blocking development? Who are these Maoists anyway and what do they want?

Let us take one question at a time.

Who are these Maoists?

The Maoists are revolutionaries mainly consisting of the extremely poor people including a large number of dalits and tribals. They come mainly from the toiling masses of India and they are trying to organize the vast population of such masses of this country. They seek to arm and train them so that these masses can resist the onslaught of the rich. In this effort they go beyond the idea that mass movements should focus on some specific issues like increase of wages, better health care, more honesty of public servants and so forth.

The view of the Maoist rebels is that the poor and exploited people must first and foremost establish their own democratic political power and their own state power in various places. This is because without controlling state power, the poor and the exploited can at most hope for only limited improvements in their living conditions, i.e., so long as it does not inconvenience the rich who usually control the state power. So, the Maoists mobilize the poor to fight against the existing state, even armed fight if possible, as they consider the existing state to be a set of agents acting for the big multinational corporations, rich landlords and the wealthy in general.

The fight is an extremely challenging and unequal one as the rich are aided by the government bureaucrats, the police and even the military. Also, contrary to what the Government and the mainstream media are propagating, the Maoist rebels are actually completely opposed to individual killings, they openly denigrate such stray terrorism-like acts. What they have been attempting to build up is a mass movement, even armed, to take on the violence of the ruling classes and its representative state machinery.

The Maoist movement was born in India in the late 1960s, after a radical section of political workers broke away mainly from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM) because they felt the CPIM and other such parties like CPI, RSP, etc. had discredited themselves with their opportunist politics of placating and compromising with the rich. The movement has a long history of development. The present party, CPI (Maoist), came into being in 2004 by the merger of a number of fraternal organizations.

Is development in India arrested because the Maoist rebels are blocking it?

What is the state of the people of India at present? With its current high rate of growth, this is also a country of abject poverty and extreme inequality. Home to 24 billionaires (second largest in Asia according to Forbes), India can also boast of 230 million people who go to bed on a half empty stomach (World Hunger Report).

A country whose economy grows at 9% cannot feed its own population – at least 50% of the people live below the official poverty line and 47% of children below the age of three are underweight [World Bank report, Undernourished children: A call for reform and action]. In this so called `hub of knowledge economy’, only 11% of the total population can afford higher education and 50% of the students drop out before class eight to start living as casual labourers (Education Statistics, Ministry of Human Resource Development). This is true of most of India not just the areas where Maoist influence and control is high. Then how can we say that development in India is being blocked by Maoists?

Maoists do not oppose `development’ at all, they only oppose the `pro-rich development’ at the expense of destitution or often total destruction of the poor. For example, in Dandakaranya region of Chhattisgarh they oppose setting up of helipads but there, the poor themselves, led by the Maoist rebels, have built irrigation tanks and wells for help in agriculture something the Indian government did not bother to do. The Indian government routinely blames the Maoist rebels that they blow up schools! But what the Government tries to suppress is that these blown-up school buildings were actually being used or requisitioned to become camps for security personnel!

And what changes do they want? Why do they want these changes?

(1) Overhauling the entire structure of oppression instead of piecemeal reforms

In addition to all the woes described above, India is also a country, where thousands of Muslims can be butchered in broad daylight by fascist Hindu forces (the most widespread and gruesome such pogrom in recent times happened in Gujarat in 2002), while the ministers and police look the other way. And these features are not stray results of the misdeeds of a few villains. The existing socio-political system in India has a built-in mechanism which ensures that the common masses would be oppressed by a rich and powerful few. Widespread systemic violence is required and is routinely applied by the Indian state so that common people remain disciplined and do not revolt in the face of oppression.

(2) Land to the tillers and destruction of the landlord class

About 60% of the Indian population is still dependent on agriculture. However the primary input, land, is predominantly concentrated in the hands of a few landlords and big farmers. Close to 60 percent of rural households are effectively landless [NSS report]. The elite in the villages, by their collusion with the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats have blocked any meaningful land reforms. In the last four decades the proportion of households with little or no land (landless and marginal farmer households) has increased steadily from 66% to 80%. On the other hand the top ten percent rural households own more land now than in 1951 (NSS report).The Maoist revolutionaries want to change this to ensure equitable distribution of land. They do not deter from collective armed fight of the landless and poor peasants and the poor rural labourers against the existing state power for achieving this goal.

(3) Freedom from money lenders and traders

Indebtedness in rural India has been increasing by leaps and bounds especially in the recent decades. Public rural banks are closing down due to relaxation of government regulation. Therefore, instead of securing credits from public institutional sources, rural folk are now being forced to approach the village money lenders (who are often big landlords or rich farmers as well) on a larger and larger scale. Unscrupulous traders are adding to the misery of the poor peasants. They sell spurious inputs to small and marginal peasants at exorbitant prices. They also make huge profits by buying their harvest at throwaway prices and selling them in urban areas at a premium.

Not-so-well- off peasants, in this no-win situation, of course end up needing substantial credit. Private moneylenders and various for-profit financial companies take advantage of this situation by extracting enormous sums from peasants. Interest rate could be as high as 5% per month. The BBC News reported that more than 200,000 farmers have committed suicide in India since 1997 under the pressure of such indebtedness. The Maoist rebels want to change this.

(4) End of caste system and eradication of untouchability

It is well known that the caste system is still thriving in India. Economically it keeps the overwhelming majority of the people in dire poverty and politically it suppresses their fundamental democratic rights. Often the lower castes are robbed of their human dignity. They are even denied access to public facilities like some sources of drinking water, schools etc. An expert group of the planning commission reports that in 70% villages lower caste people cannot enter places of worship and in more than 50% villages they don’t have access to common water sources (Expert committee report to the Planning Commission).

According to an NCDHR report, on average, 27 atrocities (including murder, abduction and rape) against dalits take place every day. The well-off landed sections in the villages still come mainly from the upper castes. They use brahminical ideology to try to keep all other sections of the population under domination. The same is true for usurers, merchants, hoarders, quarry owners, contractors–all mainly come from the upper castes. In short, the upper castes are still very much in command in all aspects of rural life. Often with their own private army of goondas they run a parallel raj. The Maoists want to break this stranglehold of the upper castes and ensure equal rights for dalits and adivasis.

(5) Freedom from exploitation by foreign multinationals and its local partners

Since 1991, foreign capital in alliance with big capitalists like Reliance, Tata and state bureaucrats, has penetrated vast sectors of the Indian economy. Every sphere of our life, starting from road construction, electricity generation, communication networks to food retail, health and education are under direct control of this coterie. In the name of `development’ thousands of acres of land are being transferred to big business and multinationals. For example, in Bastar, Chattisgarh, in the name of Bodh Ghat dam, tens of thousands of Adivasis are being forcibly evicted from their “jal-jangal- zameen” (water-forest- land). In Niyamgiri, Orissa the land which is the abode of several Dongria tribes has been handed over to the multinational Vedanta group which will completely destroy the livelihood of these tribes affecting more than 20,000 people. The state government and the mainstream opposition parties of the state are actively supporting such activities. The Maoists, over the years, have been resisting such plunder.

(6) Ensuring people’s democratic rights

It is well known that elections are often a sham in India. The parliament, as we have seen several times, is a bazaar where the rich and the super-rich can buy the MPs. According to ADR (Association of Democratic Reform), the average asset of an MP has gone up to 5.12 crore in 2009 from Rs 1.8 crore in 2004. In our democracy the erstwhile rajas and maharajas, like Scindias, are still proliferating and controlling the local economy and polity at many places.

And we also know the state of judicial system in our country. Salman Khans and Sanjeev Nandas can kill by running cars over common people and still they can escape the law for very long, perhaps forever. B.N. Kirpal, the judge, who arbitrarily ordered that Indian rivers be interlinked, ignoring the resulting ecological and human calamity, joined the environmental board of Coca-Cola after he retired. The Maoists want to establish people’s court where poor people can get true justice. In fact, such courts run in many places where the Maoist movement is strong.

(7) Self-determination for the nationalities

The Indian government ruthlessly suppresses national aspirations of a number of people. These people and their land became part of India by accident – because the British raj annexed their homeland or a despotic king wanted their land to be a part of India. Lakhs of Indian troops have been deployed in Kashmir and north-eastern states to curb such struggles of the people in these states for their national self-determination. Since 1958, AFSPA has been imposed in north-eastern states, which allows armed forces to conduct search and seizure without warrant, to arrest without warrant, to destroy any house without any verification and to shoot to kill with full impunity. In Kashmir, there is 1 military personnel for every 15 civilian. Cold blooded murders, like those of Thangjam Manorama Devi, Chungkham Sanjit, Neelofar and Asiya Jan, are carried out frequently in the name of `countering terrorism’. The Maoist rebels seek to establish freedom of self determination for all nationalities.

So, to sum up, the new society the Maoists want to establish will have the following components:

–Land to the poor and landless. Later on cooperative farming is to be established on voluntary basis.

–Forest to the tribal people.

–End of rule of the rich and the upper caste in villages and uprooting of caste system. Uproot all discriminations based on gender and religion.

–Seizure of the ill gotten wealth and assets of multinational corporations and their local Indian partners.

–Self determination for the nationalities, political autonomy for the tribes.

–Establish a state by the poor, for the poor where the present day exploiters would be expropriated.

–Participation of people in day to day administrative work and decision making. Democracy at the true grassroot level with people having the power to recall its democratic representatives.

In summary: ensuring that all types of freedom, rights and democracy for all sections of toiling masses.

What have the Maoists-led people’s struggles achieved so far?

Information in this section is taken, purposely, from the expert group report to the planning commission, which is available on the web.

Contrary to what the media try to portray, the government’s own report says that the movement led by the Maoist rebels cannot be seen as simply blowing up of police stations and killing individual people. It encompasses mass organization. Mass participation in militant protest has always been a characteristic of such mobilisation.

Although the Maoists by their own admission are engaged in a long term people’s struggle against the oppression by the present India state, their movement has already achieved some short term successes in improving the condition of the poor people.

Maoist movement in India was built around the demand of `land to the tillers’. Numerous struggles, led by the Maoists, have been fought all over the country especially in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, to free land from the big landholding families. In many such cases landlords have been driven away from the villages and their land has been put in the possession of the landless poor. But the police and paramilitary do not allow the poor to cultivate such lands. In Bihar, landless Musahars, the lowest among the Dalits have struggled and have taken possession of fallow Government land. This has had the support of Maoists.

Under the leadership of the Maoists the adivasis have reclaimed forest land on an extensive scale in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, Orissa and Jharkhand. The adivasis displaced by irrigation projects in Orissa had to migrate to the forests of Visakhapatnam district of Andhra Pradesh in large numbers. The forest department officials harassed and evicted them on a regular basis. The movement led by the Maoists put an end to this.

In rural India the Minimum Wages Act remains an act on paper only. In the forest areas of Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand, non-payment of the legal wages was a major source of exploitation of adivasi labourer. Maoists-led struggles have put an effective end to it. These struggles have secured increases in the rate of payment for picking tendu leaves (used for rolling beedies), washing clothes, making pots, tending cattle, repairing implements etc. The exploitation previously had been so severe that as a result of the sustained movement led by Maoists the pay rates of tendu leaves collection have over the years increased by fifty times.

The movement has given confidence to the oppressed to assert their rights and demand respect and dignity from the dominant castes and classes. The everyday humiliation and sexual exploitation of labouring women of dalit and tribal communities by upper caste men has been successfully fought. Forced labour, begari, by which the toiling castes had to provide obligatory service for free to the upper castes was also put an end to in many parts of the country.

In rural India, disputes are commonly taken to the rich and powerful of the village (who are generally the landlords) and caste panchayats, where the dispensation of justice is in favour of the rich and powerful. The Maoist movement has provided a mechanism, usually described as the `People’s Court’ whereby these disputes are resolved in the interests of the wronged party.

Why then, does the government need to go to war against its own people led by these rebels instead of hailing them as true patriots?



There is a simple answer. Chattisgarh, Orissa are rich in mineral wealth that can be sold to the highest multinational bidder. The only obstacle standing between the corrupt politicians and ALL THIS MONEY are the poor, disenfranchised tribal people (and the Maoists leading them). So, this war. This is not something new in India or for that matter in other parts of the world. Mobutu’s corrupt regime selling off the Belgian Congo piece by piece to the US, Belgium and other countries comes to mind. In the sixty years of independence from direct colonial rule, the Indian state has been doing the same. It has systematically impoverished the overwhelming majority to serve the interest of a powerful few and their foreign friends.

The impending war to evict the tribal people from their villages, in the pretext of eliminating the Maoists, will be fought at the behest of big corporations, who want to control and plunder our resources such as mineral, water and forest. It is high time that we recognize this pattern of waging war which will be fought by the poor on both sides, but will benefit only the big capitalists and their cheerleaders in the government.

Kisenji Interview on Armed Struggle, Peace Talks and People’s Democracy

I Am the Real Patriot [Desh Bhakt]“

Tusha Mittal, Tehelka, November 13, 2009

In this interview, underground Maoist leader Kishenji speaks on issues such as peace talks, armed struggle, the party’s sources of funding, the difference between people’s democracy and India’s formal democracy, and the goals of the CPI (Maoist).

With unmistakable pride, he says he¡¯s India¡¯s Most Wanted Number 2. CPI (Maoist) Politburo member Mallojula Koteshwar Rao alias Kishenji, 53, grew up in the interiors of Andhra Pradesh reading Gandhi and Tagore.  It was after understanding the history of the world, he says, that he disappeared into the jungles for a revolution. During search operations in 1982, the police broke down his home in Peddapalli village. He hasn¡¯t seen his mother since, but writes to her through Telugu newspapers.  After 20 years in the Naxal belt of Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh, he relocated to West Bengal. His wife oversees Maoist operations in Dantewada [a district in southern Chhattisgarh] . Now, at a hideout barely a few kilometres from a police camp in Lalgarh, he reads 15 newspapers daily and offers to fax you his party literature. If you hold on, he¡¯ll look up the statistics of war on his computer. Excerpts from a midnight phone interview:

Tell me about your personal journey. What made you join the CPI (Maoist)?

I was born in Karimnagar in Andhra Pradesh (AP). In 1973, after a BSc mathematics degree, I moved to Hyderabad in to pursue law. My political journey began with my involvement in the Telangana Sangarsh Samiti, which has been pressing for a separate Telangana state. I launched the Radical Students Union (RSU) in AP. During the Emergency in 1975, I went underground to take part in the revolution. Several things motivated me: Writer Varavara Rao, who founded the Revolutionary Writers Association, India¡¯s political atmosphere and the progressive environment in which I grew up.

My father was a great democrat and a freedom fighter. He was also vice-president of the state Congress party. We are Brahmins, but our family never believed in caste. When I joined the CPI (ML),my father left the Congress saying two kinds of politics can¡¯t survive under one roof. He believed in socialism, but not in armed struggle. After the Emergency ended in 1977, I led a democratic peasant movement against feudalism. Over 60,000 farmers joined it. It triggered a nationwide peasant uprising.

The Home Minister has agreed to talks with CPI (Maoist) on issues like forest rights, land acquisition and SEZs [Special Economic Zones]? Why did you reject his offer? He¡¯s only asking you to halt the violence.

We are ready to talk if the government withdraws its forces. Violence is not part of our agenda. Our violence is counter violence. The combat forces are attacking our people every day. In the last month in Bastar, the Cobra forces have killed 18 innocent tribals and 12 Maoists. In Chhattisgarh, those helping us with development activities are being arrested. Stop this; the violence will stop. Recently, the Chhattisgarh DGP [Director-General of Police] called the 6,000 Special Police Officers of Salwa Judum a force of pride. New recruitment continues. These people have been raping, murdering and looting tribals for years. Entire villages have been deserted because of the Salwa Judum. The government can say whatever it likes, but we do not believe them. How can they change policy when they aren¡¯t even in control? The World Bank and America is.

On what conditions will you de-escalate violence?

The PM should apologise to the tribals and withdraw all the troops deployed in these areas. The troops are not new, we have been facing State terror for the last 20 years. All prisoners should be released. Take the time you need to withdraw forces, but assure us there won¡¯t be police attacks meanwhile. If the government agrees to this, there will be no violence from us. We will continue our movement in the villages like before.

Before it agrees to withdrawing troops, can you give the State assurance you won¡¯t attack for one month?

We will think about it. I¡¯ll have to speak with my general secretary. But what is the guarantee there won¡¯t be any attack from the police in that one month? Let the government make the declaration and start the process of withdrawing. It shouldn¡¯t be just a show for the public. Look at what happened in AP. They began talks and broke it. Our Central Committee member went to meet the AP Secretary. Later, the police shot him for daring to talk to the government.

If you really have a pro-people agenda, why insist on keeping arms? Is your goal tribal welfare or political power?

Political power. Tribal welfare is our priority, but without political power we cannot achieve anything. One cannot sustain power without an army and weapons. The tribals have been exploited and pushed to the most backward extremes because they have no political power. They don¡¯t have the right to their own wealth. Yet, our philosophy doesn¡¯t insist on arms. We keep arms in a secondary place. We faced a setback in AP because of that.

The government says halt the violence first, you say withdraw the troops first. In this mindless cycle, the tribal people you claim to represent are suffering the most.

So let¡¯s call international mediators then. Whether it¡¯s Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal or Maharashtra, we never started the violence. The first attack always came from the government. In Bengal, the CPM [Communist Party of India (Marxist)] cadre won¡¯t let any non-party person enter villages under their control. Police has been camping in the Lalgarh area since 1998. In such a situation, how can I press for higher potato prices and drinking water? There is no platform for me to do that. When the minimum wages in West Bengal were Rs 85 per day, people were being paid Rs 22. We demanded Rs 25. The Mahabharat [war] began when the Kauravas refused to grant the Pandavas even the five villages they asked for. The State refused our three-rupee hike. We are the Pandavas; they are the Kauravas.

You say violence is not your agenda, yet you¡¯ve killed nearly 900 policemen in the past four years. Many of them came from poor tribal families. Even if it is counter violence, how is this furthering a pro-people goal?

Our battle is not with the police forces, it is with the State. We want to minimise the number police casualties. In Bengal, many police families actually sympathise with us. There have been 51,000 political murders by the CPM during the last 28 years. Yes, we have killed 52 CPM men in the last seven months, but only in retaliation to police and CPM brutality.

How is the CPI (Maoist) funded? What about the allegations of extortion?

There are no extortions. We collect taxes from the corporates and big bourgeoisie, but it¡¯s not any different from the corporate sector funding the political parties. We have a half-yearly audit. Not a single paisa is wasted. Villagers also fund the party by voluntarily donating two days¡¯ earnings each year. From two days of bamboo cutting in Gadchiroli we earned Rs 25 lakh. From tendu leaf collection in Bastar we earned Rs 35 lakh. Elsewhere, farmers donated 1,000 quintals of paddy.

What if a farmer refuses to donate?

That will never happen.

Because of fear?

No. They are with us. We never charge villagers even a paisa for the development activity that we initiate.

What development have you brought to Maoist-dominated areas? How has life improved for the tribals of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand?

We¡¯ve made the people aware of the State¡¯s real face, told them how rich people live and what they¡¯re deprived of. In many of these areas the tendu leaf rate used to be one rupee for 1,000 leaves. We got it hiked to 50 paise per leaf in three districts of Maharashtra, five districts of AP and the entire Bastar region. Bamboo was sold to paper mills at 50 paise per bundle. Now the rate is Rs 55. But these victories came after we faced State resistance and brutality. In Gadchiroli alone, they killed 60 people on our side, we killed five.

The CPI(Maoist) also sends medical help to 1,200 villages in India almost daily. In Bastar, our foot soldiers are proficient doctors, wearing aprons, working as midwives in the jungles. We don¡¯t give them arms. We have 50 such mobile health teams and 100 mobile hospitals in Bastar itself. Villagers go to designated people for specific illnesses: for fever go to Issa, for dysentery to Ramu and so on. There is so much illness in these areas that there are not enough people to pick up the dead bodies. We give free medicines to doctors for distribution among the people. The government doesn¡¯t know that the medicines come from their own hospitals.

If the State sends civil administration to the Naxal belt, will you allow it?

We will welcome it. We want teachers and doctors to come here. The people of Lalgarh have been asking for a hospital for decades. The government did nothing. When they built one themselves, the government turned it into a military camp.

What is your larger long-term vision? Outline three tangible goals.

The first is to gain political power, to establish new democracy, socialism and then communism. The second is to make our economy self sufficient so we don¡¯t need loans from imperialists. We are still paying off foreign loans from decades ago. The debt keeps increasing because of the devaluation of our currency. It will never be repaid. This is what the World Bank wants. We need an economy that works on two things ¡ª agriculture and industry. First, the tribals want land. Until they own their land, the State will exploit them. The people should be entitled to a percentage of the crop depending on their labour. We are not opposed to industry; how can there be development without it? But we should decide which industries will work for India, not America, not the World Bank. Instead of big dams, big industries, we¡¯ll promote small-scale industries, especially those on which agriculture depends. The third goal is to seize all the big companies ¨C from the Tatas to the Ambanis, cancel all the MoUs [Memoranda of Understanding] , declare their wealth as national wealth, and keep the owners in jail. Also, from the grassroots to the highest levels, we will create elected bodies in a democratic way

But look at the history of communist governments the world over. They became as oppressive as the ones they overthrew. There are ample examples of coercion and absence of dissent in Maoist regimes. How is this in the best interest of the people?

These are all stories spread by the capitalists. People in the villages are dying by the hundreds, but all our doctors want to live in the cities. All our engineers want to serve Japan or the IT sector. They reached their positions using the nation¡¯s wealth. What are they doing for my country? The State cannot insist you become a doctor. But if you do, it should insist you use your skill for two years in the villages. How oppressive the State is depends on who is controlling the reigns of power.

We want to have a democratic culture. If there is no democracy, ask the villagers to start another revolution and overthrow us. In an embryonic form, we already have an alternative democratic people¡¯s government in Bastar. Through elections, we choose a local government called the revolutionary people¡¯s committee. People vote by raising their hands. There is a chairman, a vice-chairman, and there are departments ¨C education, health, welfare, agriculture, law and order, people¡¯s relations. This system exists in about 40 districts in India at present. The perception that Maoists don¡¯t believe in democracy is wrong.

What exists in India today is formal democracy. It¡¯s not real. Whether it¡¯s Mamata Banerjee, or the CPM, or the Congress party, it is all dictatorship. We negotiated the release of 14 adivasi women in Bengal to show the world who the State is keeping in jail; to expose their real face.

If you believe in democracy, why do you shun the democratic process that already exists? The Maoists in Nepal contested elections.

To create a new democratic State, one has to destroy the old one. Nepal¡¯s Maoists have compromised. What elections? There are 180 MPs with serious criminal charges. More than 300 MPs are crorepatis [someone who is worth more than 10 million rupees]. Do you know the US Army is already conducting exercises at a base in Uttar Pradesh? They openly said they can take the Indian Army with them wherever they want. Who allowed them this audacity? Not me. I am opposing them. I am the real desh bhakt (patriot).

What kind of nation do you want India to be? Pick a role model.

Our first role model was Paris. That disintegrated. Then Russia collapsed. That¡¯s when China emerged. But after Mao, that too got defeated. Now, nowhere in the world is the power truly in the hands of the people. Everywhere workers are fighting for it. So there is no role model.

When communism hasn¡¯t worked elsewhere, why will it work for India? China now admits Mao¡¯s theories were fallible. In Nepal, the Maoists are already seeking foreign investment.

What the Maoists in Nepal are doing is wrong. Following this path will only mean creating another Buddhadeb [the "Marxist" Chief Minister of West Bengal] babu. We have appealed to them to come back to the old ways. Wherever socialism or communism took root, imperialism tried to destroy it. Of course, Lenin, Mao, Prachanda ¨C all have weaknesses. After winning the Second World War, Lenin and Stalin replaced internal democracy with bureaucracy. They disregarded the participation of the people. We will learn from their mistakes. But capitalism too has had to stand up after being shot down. How can you say that capitalism has been successful? Socialism is the only way out.

But in power, you could be as fallible as the Nepal Maoists or the CPM?

If we change, the people should start another krantikari andolan (revolution) against us. If the ruler ¡ª no matter who ¡ª becomes exploitative, then the people need to stand up to demand their democracy. They should not have blind faith in a Kishenji, or a Prachanda or a Stalin. If any neta or party deviates from their own ideology, then end your faith in them and revolt again. The people should always keep this tradition alive.

Have you ever faced any personal dilemmas? Is violence the only way you can mount pressure on the State?

I believe we are trying to do the right thing. We are waging a just war. Yes, there can be mistakes along the way. Unlike the State, when we make mistakes, we admit it. The beheading of Francis Induwar was a mistake. We apologise for it. In Lalgarh, we are trying different strategies. We have recently made concrete development demands and given the government a November 27 deadline. We¡¯ve asked for 300 borewells and 50 make-shift hospitals. I have also knocked on the doors of Left Front parties ¨C Forward Bloc, RSP, CPI and even CPM. I¡¯m even in touch with ministers within the Bengal government. I¡¯ve spoken to the Chief Minister himself.

The CM office has rubbished this.

I have spoken to the CM. I told him to stop State brutality and said we have mailed our development demands. He said he is under pressure from his own party and from Home Minister Chidambaram.

Why isn¡¯t the police able to catch you?

In eight states, there are day and night search operations on for me. I¡¯m India¡¯s Most Wanted Number 2. In 1,600 villages in Bengal, people are currently on night guard to ensure the police can¡¯t find me. There are 500 policemen in a camp 1.5 kilometres from where I am right now. The people of Bengal love me. The police have to kill them before they can get me.

The Home Secretary recently alluded to China giving you arms. Is this true?

Clearly, he doesn¡¯t know the basics of our philosophy. To win a war, you need to know your enemy. Our position is diametrically opposite to China. I thought Chidambaram and Pillai were my competition, but never imagined I have such low-standard enemies. They are flashing swords in the air. Victory will be ours.

What is your opinion of the Lashkar-e-Taiba? Do you support their war?

We may support some of their demands, but their methods are wrong and antipeople. LeT should stop its terrorist acts because it cannot help accomplish any goals. You can only win by taking the people along with you.

LAND AND JUSTICE FOR THE PEASANTS AND FARM WORKERS OF HACIENDA LUISITA

Issued by the Office of the Chairperson

International League of Peoples’ Struggle

16 November2009

Today, the working people of the world are launching various forms of
protest actions to mark the International Day of Action against Trade
Union Repression. This provides a meaningful context for commemorating
and protesting the massacre of striking peasants and farm workers in
Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac province in the Philippines in 2004. The
working people of Hacienda Luisita exemplify the plight and struggle of
the working people of semicolonial and semifeudal countries, who still
comprise the majority of the world’s population.

Hacienda Luisita is the vast 6,000-hectare tract of land in Central
Luzon owned by the wealthy and powerful Cojuangco family to which former
Pres. Corazon “Cory” Aquino belonged . It stands as a bulwark of feudal
and semi-feudal exploitation and oppression within the context of the
world capitalist system. It demonstrates how the big comprador-landlords
exploit the working people and wield state power to oppress them. It
exposes as a sham the so-called “comprehensive agrarian reform program”
that the Aquino ruling clique had launched since the 1980s.

Earlier the Cojuangco family bought Hacienda Luisita from the Spanish
Tabacalera corporation with a loan from the government in the 1950s..
The loan was granted with the provision that a major portion of the land
(2000 hectares) would be distributed later on to the peasants, within
the frame of the government’s “land reform” program.

The Cojuangco family not only failed to distribute the designated
portion of the land, it maneuvered to keep it and used violence to
suppress those who demanded land reform. In 1985, a trial court ruled
that the lands be distributed to the peasants, but 1986 saw the ascent
to the presidency of Aquino. The Aquino regime crafted an agrarian
reform program which was riddled with so many exemptions, including one
called the Stock Distribution Option (SDO) that was used to exempt
Luisita from land distribution.

In this context, we can fully appreciate the significance of the strike
launched by Luisita peasants and farm workers in November 2004. They
were protesting the P9.50 take-home pay per day at the hacienda – a
result of the Stock Distribution Option scheme hatched by the Cojuangcos
and the landlord class to gain legal exemption from the fake agrarian
reform program being implemented by the government. They were also
protesting the dismissal of 300 workers from the hacienda’s sugar
refinery, an act intended to bust the local union which was then
becoming militant.

Before and during their strike, the peasants and farm workers of Luisita
– with the active support of patriotic and progressive mass
organizations and alliances throughout the country, and with the help of
alternative media – won the attention and sympathy of the working people
of the country and the world. Many among the urban petty-bourgeoisie in
the Philippines were shocked to learn about concrete forms of feudal
exploitation and oppression that were persisting in the countryside. The
working people of the Philippines and the world applauded and encouraged
the working people of Luisita .

The Cojuangcos, the big comprador-landlord classes, and the reactionary
state were all shamed by the justness of the calls of the Luisita
peasants and farm workers. They reacted swiftly and viciously to the
strike. Patricia Sto. Tomas, then-labor secretary of the US-backed
regime of Mrs. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, issued an Assumption of
Jurisdiction order on the issue, ordering the strikers to go back to
work and authorizing the deployment of military and police forces to
dismantle the strike. Gen. Hermogenes Esperon, Jr., who was widely
believed to have been promoted to his post for helping Mrs. Arroyo cheat
in the 2004 elections, was the military’s chief of staff.

The military and police forces went to the hacienda, bringing tanks,
tear gas, and high-powered rifles. The Luisita peasants and farm workers
stood their ground. With their unity and militance, they repelled
various attempts at breaking the strike. Thousands upon thousands of
workers, peasants and farm workers, together with their women folk,
locked arms and pushed away with their bodies the military and police
who were armed with shields. After reaching the ground, canisters of
tear gas thrown by the military were immediately covered with soil. A
farmer, speaking to the military, summed up their spirit: “Since you are
already killing us, we might as well die fighting.” These could only
have aroused fear and panic in the hearts of the oppressors..

In the afternoon of November 16, 2004,after the strikers promised in a
negotiation with military and police officials to lay down the pieces of
wood they were holding for defending themselves and to defend the strike
with just their bodies, the military and police forces opened fire. A
few minutes of gunfire left Jhaivie Basilio, Adriano Caballero, Jhune
David, Jesus Laza, Juancho Sanchez, Jaime Pastidio and Jessie Valdez
fatally wounded. Some of them could have been kept alive, but hospitals
in Cojuangco-dominated Tarlac refused to admit patients from the
hacienda. Calling for land to the tillers, they died fighting for the
just cause of the peasants and farm workers of Luisita and the country.

The owners of the hacienda, the reactionary government and the bourgeois
mass media tried to spread the canard that it was the Luisita farmers
and farm workers who started the violence and that it was fighters of
the New People’s Army,.who started the shooting. Their propaganda could
not stand up to the truth of the audio-visual evidence taken by
progressive filmmakers who covered the strike. The bursts of gunfire
came from the ranks of the military and the police. Subsequently, death
squads of the military went on a spree killing strike leaders and
supporters, including a bishop and a city councilor.

While the touters of the reactionary justice system in the Philippines
often cite the adage that “justice delayed is justice denied,” justice
has clearly been delayed and has been denied to the peasants and farm
workers of Hacienda Luisita. Five years after the massacre, no one has
been punished for the crime. There are many victims, but none of the
criminal perpetrators is imprisoned. Investigation of the cases has been
proceeding at snail pace, and the only significant development is that
de facto president Arroyo, her labor secretary Sto. Tomas and the
military butcher Esperon have been removed from the list of those
charged. The ones remaining on the sham charge sheet are the police and
military officers who tested positive in paraffin tests. But they are
scot free and biding their time.

The power of the labor secretary to issue Assumption of Jurisdiction
(AJ) orders remains in place – despite the graphic demonstration by what
happened in Luisita of its lethal consequences for working people. After
the massacre, the labor secretary issued AJ orders for numerous
workplaces in Central Luzon, thus facilitating the militarization of
that region. Since it was approved as part of the Labor Code in 1989,
the AJ has been used as license to suppress workers’ actions in
workplaces throughout the country. It is being imposed even before a
strike is initiated – when collective bargaining negotiations end in
deadlock or when notices of strike are filed before the government.

Pressured by the strike and the widespread condemnation of the massacre
locally and internationally, the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council
(PARC), in December 2005, revoked the Stock Distribution Option (SDO)
scheme being implemented in the hacienda and placed the lands previously
under the SDO into the “compulsory coverage” scheme of the government’s
agrarian reform program. The Hacienda Luisita management, losing no
time, filed for a Temporary Restraining Order in January 2006 against
the resolution. In June 2006, the Supreme Court issued a TRO and ordered
the PARC and the Department of Agrarian Reform to implement the
revocation of the SDO.

Seeing the opportunity in this deadlock, and knowing that waiting for
government intervention will get them nowhere, the peasants and farm
workers of the hacienda took the initiative and launched their
“kampanyang bungkal” or campaign to till, which called on all working
people of the hacienda to plant crops that are necessary for everyday
nourishment, such as rice and vegetables, and can be sold for added
income, such as fruits. With the participation of more than a thousand
families, the hacienda land, which used to showcase sugarcane, now
boasts of golden fields of rice. The campaign caused an improvement in
the lives and livelihood of the working people of Luisita.

The Cojuangco family, however, has not given up on the fight to own the
Luisita lands. Last December 2008, emboldened by the passage of a law
extending the government’s anti-peasant agrarian reform program – which
still contained the SDO as one of the (non-)distribution schemes – the
Hacienda Luisita management issued a memorandum to the peasants tilling
the 2,000-hectare portion of the hacienda which ordered them to stop
using the lands for whatever purpose. After a public clamor directed at
Sen. Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III – a member of the Cojuangco family
who’s running in the 2010 presidential elections – the Hacienda Luisita
management was forced to backtrack.

Now, the Hacienda Luisita management is carrying out what it calls an
“enlistment” of peasants who would become the “beneficiaries” of
agrarian reform in the hacienda – as if it were the authorized body to
implement agrarian reform in that area and as if it were authorized to
do so despite the TRO. It is complaining of “illegal tillers”
encroaching upon the hacienda, who are actually the working people of
Luisita. It is also undertaking land-use conversion schemes in various
parts of the land. The creation of a vast highway that passes through
the hacienda is being seen as an opportunity to increase the value of
hacienda land and an opening to commercial uses of portions of the
hacienda.

Five years after the massacre, the struggle of the Luisita peasants and
farm workers for justice, including the junking of the Assumption of
Jurisdiction power of the labor secretary, and land continues. They
deserve the full support of the working people of the Philippines and
the whole world. We hope that our International Day of Action against
Trade Union Repression and the fifth anniversary of the Hacienda Luisita
massacre will be an occasion for working people everywhere to discuss
and raise the issues of trade union repression in their work places and
countries. We should not allow trade union repression to weaken our
ranks and spirit. It should goad us to fight back and gain strength
through struggle.

We have to continue and intensify our struggle not just against trade
union repression but also against the forms of feudal and semi-feudal
exploitation which are aligned with the world capitalist system. Let us
keep in mind that monopoly capitalist control of global agriculture and
the food system has now created a global famine afflicting over a
billion people for the first time in world history.

The struggle of the Luisita peasants and farm workers is instructive. It
is only through the militant struggle of working people that they can
gain strength and aim for their national and social liberation. We may
win victories in our struggle for reforms within the present world
capitalist system but these will continue to be at risk until we, the
people of the world, are strong enough to overthrow the exploiters and
oppressors.

Hail International Human Right Day!

Join Dharna Against Military Attacks on Democratic and Revolutionary Movements!

Place ¨C Jantar Mantar, Delhi, Date ¨C 10th December 2009. Time ¨C 11 A.M. to 4 P.M.

Dear Countrymen,

The security of the country is the most important issue of any country. Generally, the patriotic sentiment is very high among the countrymen. And the exploitative ruling community wages different kinds of unjust war for the sake of their benefits by utilising this very sentiment of the people.

Formerly, the ruling community of our country was endlessly talking about the danger from outside enemies ¨C sometimes from Pakistan or China, and sometimes from both the countries. But now they have chosen their enemy within the boundary of the country. They have declared those sections of people, who are fighting for their just demands, as the ¡®danger for the unity and integrity of the country¡¯. At one time they target different oppressed nationalities, fighting for their right of self-determination, and other time the Maoists, fighting for the ¡®liberation of the people of the country.¡¯ The state power of the ruling classes attacks more sharply on the sections of the people who fight more resolutely and militantly.

Since the Maoists are waging ¡®armed struggle¡¯ or ¡®revolutionary war¡¯ against the exploitative and oppressive state power and system, and their aim is to establish a New Democratic system through revolution, the central government has declared them as ¡®the biggest internal enemy¡¯. The Prime Minister Manmohan Singh already announced about 2 year back that the left extremism and Maoists had become ¡®the single greatest danger for internal security of the country.¡¯

After that the special police and paramilitary forces began to attack on Maoists and their support base. At first, a barbaric repressive campaign in the name of ¡®Salawa Judum¡¯ was taken up in Chattisgarh, and then ¡®Operation Lalgarh, and ¡®Operation Green Hunt¡¯ were started this year. And now the central government directly co-ordinating with related state governments (like Chattisgarh, West Bengal, Orissa, Jharkhand and others) has almost declared a war upon the struggling people. Especially those tribal dominated areas have been targeted where Maoists movement is relatively more intense. More than 1 lakh special security and para-military forces have been deployed there to launch intense military campaign. Besides, the central government is also planning to use Infantry and Air force to ¡®liberate the areas from the Maoists¡¯. Different departments of the Army are already involved in making plans for this special repressive campaign and providing special training to security forces to execute them. Air Force Helicopters are continuously providing logistics support, since long. Now the central government has allowed the forces boarded on these Helicopters to fire upon in ¡®self defence¡¯. It¡¯s to note that the American Satellite and Army Intelligence Agencies are also providing different kinds of support to this unjust war.

Overall the war upon the struggling people of India is going to be the part and parcel of the American ¡®war on terrorism¡¯. US imperialist attacked and occupied Iraq and Afghanistan mainly to gain control on their natural resources. Likewise the Indian government has started this war to capture the costly natural resources of the tribal dominated areas. Manmohan Singh has already given the statement in the Parliament that ¡®If left extremism is getting strength in the areas of mines and other natural resources, the atmosphere of investment will be affected¡¯. This statement clearly exhibit the design of the government to handover the natural resources to the multi-national companies, and also to serve the interest of US imperialists.

With this very aim and objective the UPA government is waging war upon different sections of the Indian people. Fake encounter killings are going on in Kashmir and Manipur. The workers of Delhi and Gurgaon are being brutally attacked. Punjab and UP farmers are facing police lathicharge and firing. Even the Gandhian Hut of ¡®Vanvasi Chetana Ashram¡¯ has been demolished. The office of Narbada Bachao Andolan is being locked and its leaders arrested on false charges.

In this situation these lines of the poetry of Gorakh Pandey are very relevant ¨C ¡®Kanoon Apna Rasta Pakarega¡¯; ¡®Desh Ke Nam Par Janta Ko Giraftar Karega¡¯; ¡®Janta Ke Nam Par Bech Dega Desh¡¯; ¡®Suraksha Ke Nam Par Asurakshit Karega¡¯. In the words of Pash, ¡®Yadi Desh Ki Suraksha Aaisee Hoti Hai… To Hamen Desh Ki Suraksha Se Khatara Hai.¡¯ (If the security of the country is like this …. We are in danger with the security of the country.¡¯

If we are to establish the ownership of people upon Jal-Jangal-Jamin (Water-Forest-Land), minerals and other natural resources and to protect the country from its real enemies, we will have to unit all the progressive, patriotic, democratic and revolutionary forces at first. There in an urgent need to from the broadest possible unity of all people¡¯s forces and to accelerate the process of building a pro-people genuine democratic state and the system.

Our PDFI (a united platform of progressive, patriotic, democratic and revolutionary forces) is going to organise the Collective Dharna (sit in) of 10^th December in order to expose the repressive design of the ruling classes and their system and to help the process of building a people¡¯s democratic system.

PDFI appeals to all the pro-people and justice loving people to join the Dharna, and make the programme successful.

Our Demands :

1.      Stop state repression on all the democratic, revolutionary and nationality movement;

2.      Don¡¯t allow to use Army against any people¡¯s movement;

3.      Stop all military operation in the tribal areas in the name of the ¡®security of the country¡¯ or ¡®liberating the areas from Maoists¡¯, and withdraw all security forces deployed in those areas;

4.      Scrap Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and release all the political prisoners arrested under this and other acts.

5.      Resolve the issues raised by Maoists and other struggling forces by dialogue, rather than using arms and security forces.

ALL INDIA CO-ORDINATION COMMITTEE,

PEOPLE¡¯S DEMOCRATIC FRONT OF INDIA (PDFI)

 

 

Printed and Published by Arjun Prasad Singh C/o Darshan Pal,

900, Adarsh Nagar, Patiala, Punjab on behalf of the All India Co-ordination Committee of PDFI.

Contact : 09868638682, 09417269294 / Email-pdfi.india@gmail.com

Dr. Darshan Pal, Convener, PDFI
900, Adarash Colony, Bhadson Road, Patiala, Punjab (India)
email: pdfi.india@gmail.com
mob: 094172-69294
Arjun Prasad Singh, Convener, PDFI
Mobile:098686-38682