the rape continues and this time...konkan region

The power plants coming up along the Konkan coast threaten to turn the region into a wasteland,

SEVENTY-YEAR-OLD MURLIDHAR Sadashiv of Nandivade in Jaigad taluk of Maharashtra’s Ratnagiri district begins his morning by worshipping the earth. It’s a tradition he inherited from his forefathers, along with the orchard that nurtures him and his family. But it’s a legacy he won’t pass on to his grandchild, scampering up a mango tree nearby. “Come back in a decade, and this will be wasteland. None of this will remain – not the land, not the trees,” he says bitterly. He’s referring to the JSW Energy’s 1,200 MW thermal power plant in Jaigad. Nandivade is no exception in the region. In what is the largest concentration of its kind in India, a nuclear power plant and seven thermal power plants are proposed – on just 120 km of land. These plants stretch from Ratnagiri to Hanakon in north Karnataka.

n Ratnagiri, a notable casualty will be the prized Alphonso mango, which is very susceptible to air pollution. A study by scientists from the Lucknow-based Industrial Toxicology Research Centre has found that sulphur dioxide — a common pollutant from coal-fired thermal plants — affects the quality and yields of mangoes. This will hit more than seven lakh people in Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg who depend on horticulture, mainly mangoes, cashew and coconuts.

Pradeep Parulekar, a lawyer based in Ratnagiri, questions the logic of thermal plants in a region that, in 1997, was declared a horticulture zone. Encouraged by subsidies and special packages, farmers poured their savings into mango crops. Those trees — and their investments — are finally bearing fruit. Exports of Alphonso to Japan and Europe began last year. Not for long, since, “stringent quality controls specify that there should not be any coal-burning industry near the mango crop,” says Vivek Bhide, president of the Ratnagiri Zilla Jagruk Manch, an organisation leading the campaign against the power projects.

The reversal of policy is even worse in the case of Sindhudurg. In 1997, it was declared an eco-sensitive area and specially designated tourist destination, given its pristine beaches and forests and historical forts. In January, a resolution allowing thermal power plants and mining in the district was passed by the government. More than 20 villages along the Sindhudurg-Goa border have been zoned for mining aluminium ore.

The Jaigad power project threatens fishermen as well. Fly ash and hot waste contaminants raise water temperatures, killing fish. Dhamankhol is one of 50-odd fishing villages nestled in Jaigad creek. On a good day, a rich catch of mackerel, lobster, pomfret and shrimp might fetch up to Rs 4,000. These days, the dinghies and catamarans return almost empty. “Continuous dredging around the jetty changes the composition of the water and the seabed,” explains fisherman Bashir Sangre. If just a jetty can have such harmful consequences, what will happen once hot toxic waste is spewed into the sea? The locals of Dhamankhol are bitter. “Motha masa chotya mashala khato (Big fish eat smaller fish),” says Yunus Mohammed, grimly.

“The Konkan coast is strategically ideal for power generation from imported fuels – in this case, coal,” points out a senior official from the Ministry of Power, who requested anonymity. But is there anything like clean coal? “It’s like dry water – it doesn’t exist,” says the official. Anil Razdan, former power secretary warns, “We must achieve a balance between the imperative for power and environmental concerns. Power plants must follow environmental norms.” Realistically, few do, given that the plants were founded on deception. JSW’s mandatory Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) for the Jaigad plant has omissions that would be hilarious in any other context. Rather than list the myriad flora and fauna of this biodiversity hotspot, it says that the animals endemic to the region are: “dog, cat, pig, cow and buffalo.” It ignores the existence of reserve forests, mangroves and corals. It goes against the law and omits mention of any alternative site. And yet, this assessment breezed through the portals of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) and was even passed by the National Environment Appellate Authority (NEAA). Hearing an appeal against the NEAA’s decision, the Delhi High Court recognised the shoddy manner in which the EIA was dealt with and has directed that the clearance be re-examined.

IN THE case of Ind-Barath’s Hanakon power plant in North Karnataka, intense local opposition and political pressure have won a temporary reprieve and clearances are under review. Ind- Barat’s EIA also brushes aside the potential impact on agriculture, fisheries and coconut, cashew and mango orchards – mainstays of livelihood in the region. There is also no word on how proposed dredging in the Kali river will affect local ecology and health. It also lies about its proximity to the Catigao Wildlife Sanctuary in Goa (five km away) and the Dandeli- Anshi tiger reserve (12 km away), clearly violating MoEF rules against such projects within 25 km.

All attempts to get in touch with both JSW Energy Limited and Ind-Barath (Hanakon) proved futile.

In neighbouring Raigad district in Maharashtra, five thermal power plants barely eight to 10 km apart are planned. The area is already under stress from heavy chemical industries. Jairam Ramesh, Minister of State for Environment and Forests, says, “It is important to assess the cumulative impact of these power projects and isolated studies draw an incomplete picture.”

But, there are no easy integrations or easy solutions. Maharashtra currently faces a massive 5,000 MW deficit, while Karnataka has a 4,000 MW deficit. Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg require a mere 167 MW, the proposed power plants will generate 30,003 MW, an astounding 180 times the actual requirements of the region.

“We won’t reap any benefits. Why must we then bear the burden of ‘development’? What is the ‘greater common good’ that is destroying our life and livelihood?” asks Sadashiv Jog, who refused to part with his land. It is now being acquired and three transmission towers and a railway line for coal will run through his flourishing orchard. A groundswell of popular protest is building. In Pawas in Ratnagiri, villagers protested with a hunger strike and have also taken legal recourse. The women of Karwar interacted with women in Bhatinda to understand the impact of power plant emissions on their children’s health and farm produce. In Niweli, in Jaitapur taluka, villagers refused to accept compensation from the state government for their land for the nuclear plant, which, say officials, will then be acquired under the Land Acquisition Act. But the villagers are adamant and say they will fight till the bitter end. Like in Nandigram.

“Growth must be in sync with Konkan’s fragile ecology,” stresses Jayendra Parulekar, who is part of the Save Konkan Movement, “and the future is in horticulture and tourism.” Bhide agrees and gives the example of Ganpatipule. Ten years ago, the gram panchayat of this tiny village had an annual budget of Rs 15,000. Then, tourism came in, drawn by the unspoilt beaches and the ancient Ganesh temple. Local business expanded. People opened guest houses, small eateries, shops selling souvenirs and taxi services. Today, the gram panchayat has a Rs 12 lakh annual budget.

Yet, it cannot be denied that India needs power. Razdan points out that the country suffers from a power shortage of 1,18 lakh MW. “This shortfall must be bridged, especially if we are to meet our targeted growth rate of 8 to 9 percent. Our current per capita is 600 MW, and we need to increase this to 1000 MW.”

“The energy deficiency argument won’t suffice. Energy — coal or hydel — comes at a heavy cost to health (radiation, respiratory diseases), agro-horticulture, fish, diversity, ecology and tourism. This should be communicated to the affected people, who must then be made part of the decision-making process, not have projects thrust upon them. Is that democratic?” argues Ritwick Dutta of The Access Initiative, a group promoting environ mental democracy.

Senior conservation scientist Ullas Karanth insists that ‘nogo areas’ — critical biodiversity hotspots covering 5 to 10 percent of India’s landmass — be identified and mapped on an urgent basis through a scientific exercise. He agrees that the energy shortfall must be met, especially for rural areas where the deficit is high. “One possible alternative is a rational mix of nuclear power generated the modern way and gasbased energy. Both, of course, come with their own share of risks, which must be minimised with the best available technology,” says Karanth.

OPERATION GREEN HUNT.....

the mainstream media and for that matter people living in their protected urban enclosures are living far away from the naked reality of the nation's affairs that democracy has woefully failed. this is a state that is making war on its own people, people who have received nothing, no basic health care, no water taps, no ration cards but have lost their forests courtesy the unsatiable demand for furniture from the growing cities and the middle class of the nation that only knows how to aspire but doesnt know the cost at which those aspirations are met.
so while can continue to give a thumbs up to the armed forces, the point is even they dont know what they are fighting for. it is the state and the ruling elite that decides who is the enemy so that the armed forces can be pushed into it. these are all tactics to divert attention from the pressing issues of the nation. for a vast portion of our nation doesnt even know what dusshera is or what a diwali is, all they care about is survival, the gods never favored them and the state only accentuates their misery...
so well yes as one gentleman says, its dusshera time, yes but then its one more phantom that the armed forces are fighting...the problems shall not get addressed by bullets of the state but shall only get manifested...times to come shall bear testimony to this brutality that the state is unleashing in the name of maintaining order....
as arundhati roy does ask, 'what is democracy when she is at home'...well in india, she is raped, tortured and assaulted at home and then gagged and presented as a mannequin when it comes to international stages....

DEMOCRACY AND INDIA..?????

come another independence day and the crooning shall begin yet again on national media about how great a country we are and we being the largest democracy of the world. events that when studied over a period of five and a half decades shall convince several of the true nature and ugly face of the nation's state of affairs, a situation that should ideally put the politicians of the nation to shame but then when was the last time a politician was born with an iota of sense and shame.....

let us have a look at the displacement that has been taking place very quietly and with ruthless efficacy in the hinterlands of the nation. over the last 50 years some 50 million people have been displaced on account of several power projects, dams, mining most of it being illegal but then legal and illegal in my nation are identical twins...

well the problem here is that most of those displaced have been people who come under what we all know as the marginalised communities, most of them Scheduled castes and tribes. the government had no idea of what resettlement meant hence for the last 50 years there has been nothing of that sort and people have been thrown away from their homes, entire villages razed across madhya pradesh, chattisgarh and jharkhand, protestors tortured to death, women raped and cattle killed.....some development right....well that is the kind of reality that the tribals of this nation live in while urban india continues to croon in its magnificently flawed notion of being democratic...

so the resettlement stats stand at 25% only...abysmal is too nice a word for the plight of the millions who have lost all in the name of some twisted notion called development.....collateral damage people tell me but then do they understand what it means to have one's home bulldozed right in the dead of night.....visit lanjigarh in kalahandi district of orissa to know what it is like....

by the way what kind of a democratic government arrests people who do satyagraha in protest over their lands being submerged by a hydel power project which they have been opposing since day 1 ....what recourse does the ordinary citizen of this nation have over injustice....we have a supreme court whose jurisdiction is limited to the permiters of the supreme court compound in delhi....

where else in a self proclaimed democracy would one see an entire battalion of the army engaged in ethnic cleansing like the naga battalion is doing in chattisgarh....a people's army acting against its own people.....where else would one find the government arming 15, 16 year old kids with Ak 47 rifles so that they can fight maoists who are those who have decided to act against a state which stirs into action only when bombs and IED's go off...and not when women are gangraped by the salwa judum, the indian army, houses burnt, protestors hacked off....with garrotes....

democracy.....why not that's what the preamble of my failed nation cries out so loudly that it is not clear whether how long will it resist......

NO COUNTRY FOR GOOD MEN.....

FAR AWAY from the glittering salons of Bombay and Delhi, away from its obsessions with booming malls and plummeting stocks, a good man waits in jail. He’s been in for nine months. But it is unlikely that the story of Dr Binayak Sen would have caught your attention. He’s been written about in bits. Some channels have covered him. But even though he is a mesmeric character — intense, articulate, idealistic, a man of privilege who seeks nothing for himself — and his imprisonment is a scandal that should shame any civilised society, for the most part, news of him here has been overwhelmed by hotter media preoccupations. Lead India competitions. And polls on who should be awarded Indian of the Year. Shah Rukh, Manmohan, or Vijay Mallya? Men like Dr Binayak can wait their turn in jail.

The story of Binayak Sen is the story of the dangerously thin ice India’s democratic rights skim on. The story of every dangerous schism in India today: State versus people. Urban versus rural. Unbridled development versus human need. Blind law versus natural justice. It is the story of an India unraveling at the seams. The story of unjust things that happen — unreported — to thousands of innocent people, the story of unjust things waiting to happen to you and me, if we ever step off the rails of shining India to investigate what’s happening in the rest of the country. Most of all, it is the story of what can be done to ordinary individuals when the State dons the garb of being under siege.

But, first the facts of the story.

A paediatric doctor by profession — a gold medallist, in fact, from the prestigious Christian Medical College (CMC) in Vellore — Binayak Sen, 56, has worked for more than 30 years with the tribal poor in Chhattisgarh, battling malnutrition, tuberculosis, and the lethal falciparum malaria strain rampant in the area. As a young man — star pupil with the world at his feet — he had turned his back on the many rich career options before him to take a job at a rural medical centre in Hoshangabad run by Quakers, where he was greatly influenced by Marjorie Sykes, Gandhi’s biographer. Ideas of public health, sustainable development and a just society obsessed him. Walking the slums of Vellore as a graduate, he had understood very early that there is a crucial link between livelihood, living conditions and health. Bolstering this with a degree in social medicine from JNU, Delhi, he moved from Hoshangabad to Chhattisgarh in 1981, to work with Shankar Guha Niyogi, the legendary mine workers’ unionist. Here, famously, he helped set up the Shaheed Hospital at Dallirajhara, built from the workers’ own mo - ney. Later, he moved away to the Mission Hospital in Tilda, and then, in 1990, joined his wife, Ilina Sen in Raipur, to set up Rupantar, an NGO through which the couple have worked for the last 18 years in training village health workers and running mobile clinics in remote outposts.

Drive 150 kilometres away from Raipur into the unforgiving dustiness of the forest around Bagrumala and Sahelberia in district Dhamtari, where Binayak ran his Tuesday clinic, and the heroic dimension of his work overwhelms you. There is nothing that could have brought a retired colonel’s elite, accomplished son here but extraordinary compassion. Scratchy little hamlets, some no more than 25-houses strong. Peopled by Kamars and other tribals, the most neglected of the Indian human chain, destituted further by the Gangrail dam on the Mahanadi river. No schools. No drinking water. No electricity. No access to public health. And increasingly, no access to traditional forest resources. Here, stories of Binayak Sen proliferate. How he saved young Lagni lying bleeding after a miscarriage, how he rescued the villagers of Piprahi Bharhi jailed en masse for encroaching on the forest, how he helped Jaheli Bai and Dev Singh, how he helped create grain banks. “Do something. Save the doctor,” says an old man in Kamar basti. “We have no one to go to now.”

OVER THE YEARS, Binayak’s medical work had morphed into social advocacy — the two umbilically linked in a state like Chhattisgarh. As Dr Suranjan Bhattacharji, director, CMC Vellore, says, “Binayak walked the talk. He was an inspiration for generations of doctors. He stirred us. He reminded us that it takes many things — access, freedom, food security, shelter, equity and justice — to make a healthy society. He was the alternative model.” In 2004, CMC honoured Binayak with its prestigious Paul Harrison Award. In a moving citation, it said, “Dr Binayak Sen has carried his dedication to truth and service to the very frontline of the battle. He has broken the mould, redefined the possible role of the doctor in a broken and unjust society, holding the cause much more precious than personal safety. CMC is proud to be associated with Binayak Sen.”

Yet, barely three years later, on May 14, 2007, in a Kafkaesque twist, the State pressed a button and deleted Binayak Sen’s long and dedicated history as a humanist and doctor. The police arrested him as a dreaded Naxal leader and charged him with sedition, criminal conspiracy, making war against the nation, and knowingly using the proceeds of terrorism (sic). Imagine the bewilderment. “Just a namesake doctor” the prosecution asserted, and with that act of wilful cynicism, a life of soaring vision and service was extinguished. Reduced to the rubble of the Indian justice system.Since Binayak was arrested, three courts have denied him bail, most damagingly, the Supreme Court on December 10, 2007 — International Human Rights Day: an ironic detail. In this august court, Gopal Subramaniam, Additional Solicitor General of India and counsel for the Chhattisgarh government, argued that the Indian State was investigating terrorism in Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra and Binayak Sen was not only a part of this network of terrorism, but a key figure in the web. Granting him bail would jeopardise the health of the nation. The evidence available to back this claim would make dishonest men blanch, and honest men weep.

Sometimes the true measure of people is revealed in the small, random remarks of those who know them. When the Supreme Court denied him bail, an old man told an activist at a rally for Binayak, “If the courts are not going to free our doctor, should we storm the jail?” Then he continued ruefully to himself, “But what’s the use? All the other prisoners would run away, but Dr Binayak would stay back.”

DESPITE THIS formidable reputation, nothing has succeeded in bailing out Binayak Sen. Not affidavits by doctors from AIIMS and CMC who, inspired by Binayak, left cash-rich urban jobs to start the rural Jan Swasth Sahyog medical centre in Ganyari. Not 2000 signatures of doctors across the world. Not Binayak’s years in the Medico Friends circle. Not his stints as a member of the government’s own advisory committee on public health, not his pioneering work in creating the Mitanin health workers programme. Not even the fact that he voluntarily ret urned from Kolkata, where he was visiting his mother, to Raipur to confront the police about what he thought was a “simple misunderstanding”. In a crushing irony, on 31 December 2007, seven months after he was arrested, the Indian Academy of Social Sciences conferred the R.R. Keithan Gold Medal on Binayak. Its citation said, “The Academy recognises the resonance between the work of Dr Binayak Sen in all its aspects with the values promoted by Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of the Nation.”

Reasonable, one supposes, to incarcerate such a man in jail. As Vishwa Ranjan, the Director General of Police, Chhattisgarh, says, “So what? One can be a humanist and idealist and still be a Maoist.” You could safely take his to be the wise voice of the State.

The most pressing question then, why was Binayak Sen arrested? What catalysed the catastrophic switch of identities that has overtaken his life? The surface details first.

Two years ago, in January 2006, Narayan Sanyal, 67, an elderly Maoist ideologue was arrested in Bhadrachalam, Andhra Pradesh. He was suffering from an extremely painful medical condition in his hand called Palmer’s Contracture. The jail officials at Warangal had sanctioned treatment when Sanyal was let out on bail. He was immediately arrested by the Chhattisgarh police on a murder charge in Dantewada and taken to Raipur jail. In May 2006, Sanyal’s elder brother, Radhamadhab, who lived in Kol - kata, wrote a letter to Binayak Sen, as the general secretary of PUCL (People’s Union for Civil Liberties), copied to other human rights organisations, asking for help in getting Sanyal a lawyer, as well as medical attention. As one of the most eminent human rights activists in the region, Binayak intervened. He got Bhishma Kinger, a lawyer who lived in the flat opposite his, to take up Sanyal’s case, and also began corresponding with jail officials to facilitate Sanyal’s surgery. Radhamadhab, old and himself ailing, came less and less from Kolkata, happy to have Binayak substitute in his affairs. Routine burdens of conscience, as any human rights activist will tell you.

On May 6, 2007, the Raipur police suddenly arrested Piyush Guha, a small Kolkata-based tendu patta businessman and an acquaintance of Radhamadhab, who was carrying Rs 49,000 to deliver to Binayak as fees for Kin ger. They also claim they found three unsigned letters on him addressed to a ‘Mr P’, a ‘Friend V’, and ‘Friend’, innocuously complaining about jail conditions, age, the onset of arthritis. These letters, which the police believe are from Sanyal, also contain amorphous advice to P, V, and Friend to expand work among the peasantry and urban centres, congratulations on a successful “Ninth Congress”, and sundry other things. The police claim that Guha confessed that these ludicrously explosive letters of uncertain origin had been given to him by Binayak, acting as an illegal courier from the jailed detainee. As soon as Guha was produced before a magistrate, however, he said he had actually been arrested on May 1, and illegally detained and tortured for five days before being forced to sign a blank statement. The police further claim — in what seems a preposterous leap of imagination — that the Rs 49,000 was “a proceed of terrorism,” despite the fact that, even nine months later, they have not been able to unearth any terrorist act whatsoever from which that money proceeded.

On this flimsy evidence, the police declared Binayak, who was in Kolkata, an absconding Naxal leader. The local media faithfully carried the story. Hearing of this and completely appalled, Binayak — certain of his own integrity, certain of his impeccable track record, and believing in the constitutional framework of the Indian State — returned to Bilaspur to sort out the misunderstanding, contrary to advice by well-wishers to stay away and take anticipatory bail. In Bilaspur, the police asked him to “just stop by” at Tarbahar police station for a statement. He did so, and was promptly arrested on May 14, 2007, under two of the most draconian laws in the country: the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and the Chhattisgarh Special Security Act: aggravated mirror images of the dreaded TADA and POTA.Under these outrageous laws, merely to think something can land you in jail. As Kinger says, “I knew the judges would deny bail. If you are booked under these laws, you are done for. They are designed to create prejudice and a particular mindset in the judges.”

One of the prosecution’s weightiest accusations against Binayak is that he met Sanyal – a known Naxal ideologue — in jail 33 times. Set aside for a moment the many valid reasons why he might have done so: Sanyal’s medical condition, the surgery, the intricacies of his case. Suppose even for a moment that Binayak was indeed a passive Naxal sympathiser, the moot point here is that each of those meetings were legally sanctioned and conducted under supervision. Is that fair reason to steal a man’s freedom? The prosecution claims Binayak masqueraded as Sanyal’s relative, but his wife, Ilina invoked the RTI Act and extracted all the letters Binayak had written to the jail authorities seeking permission to meet Sanyal: all of them were on official PUCL letterheads, duly signed by Binayak as its general secretary.

SINCE BINAYAK was arrested, the police has continually gone fishing and, post facto, pulled out the most absurd evidence against him, building the case up desperately, bubble by bubble, on the most laughable of things: a confessional love letter between supposed Maoists in which Binayak’s name appears as a possible source of moral advice; a scrap of paper in Gondi allegedly recovered from an encounter site, which no one can decipher but in which the words PUCL and the Chhattisgarh Special Security Act features; a letter by Naxal leader Madan Barkade to Binayak complaining about jail conditions which he published among the human rights community. Innocuous, explainable things. Nothing there to the common eye that suggests Binayak is a grave threat to national security who must be denied bail pending trial.

What then explains the State’s inordinate zeal to put away Binayak? What explains its intractable need to erase his gentle, morally unim-peachable, identity and erect a dread criminal in its place? Why is it literally manufacturing evidence against the good doctor? For instance, DGP Vishwa Ranjan claims Piyush Guha is their main evidence against Binayak. Yet, in a seemingly desperate attempt to make Guha look more incriminating than he does, weeks after he was arrested, the police suddenly took him to Purulia on June 4, 2007, and made him an accused in an old bomb blast case in Thana Bundwan — a case in which his name was not even mentioned in the original FIR, filed a full year and a half earlier in October 2005! Why this inordinate zeal to paint Binayak black?

TO UNDERSTAND the full horror of Binayak Sen’s case — to get a grip on its significance for the sanity of this country at large — one needs to take a close look at the state of Chhattisgarh. The story of Binayak is just the most high-profile example of hundreds of unnamed individuals like him, caught in the cross-hair of a State at war with its own people. Like theirs, his story is the story of suspended reason, suspended logic and suspended freedom that is the inevitable outcome of a State that paralyses itself with the scare of “national security.” In many ways, Chhattisgarh is now seen as the epicenter of a Maoist insurgency that cuts across 13 states. In Chhattisgarh, by the government’s own admission, most of Bastar and Dantewada are out of its jurisdiction. This is undoubtedly a difficult situation. Each year, hundreds of policemen, hapless tribals, and symbols of the state — bridges, jails, telegraph poles — are blown up by extremists. By Home Ministry estimates, there were 311 casualties in Chhattisgarh in 2007; 571 nationwide. Sympathisers will tell you Maoists have local support — how much of this is voluntary, how much coercion, one can never accurately tell: the only way you can report on the Maoists is if they take you into the jungles to their camps. What you get then is obviously selective information. Typically though, all the regions under Maoist influence are regions where the government has been culpably remiss. Either schools, primary health care, roads, electricity, livelihood — all the benign functions of State — are completely missing. Or, the government is on a rampage of development and industrialisation, which is at odds with local aspirations and needs.

With predictable myopia, the Indian State has been meeting grievance with violence, illness with extermination. Not cure. Draconian laws. CRPF battalions. IRP battalions. Increased militarisation. Thousands of crores for upgrading police. Special funds for Naxal-affected States. An invitation to competitive violence: that has been the government’s response to grassroots militancy. In Chhattisgarh, this manifested itself particularly harmfully in 2005 as the government-sponsored counter-revolution: the now infamous Salwa Judum, which pitted villager against villager and triggered a bloody civil war. 644 villages have been forcibly evacuated by the government, their residents forced into sub-human camps. Smoke out the support, is the State’s war cry. Civil rights activists tell you, the State’s real quarry is not even the Maoists, but the iron-rich soil, ready to be handed to private corporations, Nandigramstyle. There are rumours that the makeshift camps are now going to be turned into official revenue villages, which will force tribals to abdicate all the original evacuated land to the government. All of that is speculation still; but the excesses of the Salwa Judum are real.

It is against this backdrop that Binayak Sen caught the self-serving eye of the State. Narayan Sanyal is perhaps the least controversial case he had espoused. Santoshpur fake encounter. Gollapalli fake encounter. Narayan Kherwa false encounter. Raipur false surrender. Ram Kumar Dhruv’s custodial death. Ambikapur. Lakrakona. Bandethana. Koilibera. Each of these hieroglyphs has a searing back story: some excess of State that Binayak and other human rights activists investigated and criticised. Most damningly, in December 2005, Binayak led a 15-member team from different organisations and published a scathing report on the Salwa Judum. It was the first of many reports that would expose and embarrass the government.

It’s this back story that made Binayak so unpalatable to the government. Consciously or subconsciously, it wanted to make a lesson of him. Perhaps even that is to accord more coherence to the State than it deserves. The real story of Binayak is the myopia of an unintelligent, scare-mongering State. Having declared Maoists as the “gravest threat to national security”, the Indian government has got itself into a George Bush like-twist. It sees weapons of mass destruction where there are none. Men like Binayak Sen start to look like Osama Bin Laden. Such are the perception tricks the “national security” prism can play on you.

In a mellow moment, DGP Vishwa Ranjan will admit there has been a miscarriage of justice. “Left to myself, I would have kept Binayak under surveillance, not arrested him,” he says. A big admission. In the same breath though, he will tell you conspiratorially that they have a mountain of evidence gathering against him. Evidence they can neither show you, nor yet present in court. Binayak Sen however can moulder in jail, while they construct their paranoid jigsaw.

ON FEBRUARY 2, 2008, a windy, brisk morning in Raipur, Binayak Sen is produced in the sessions court, nine months after his arrest, for the framing of charges. A surreal mood descends. The jostling cops contrast badly with the dignified calm of the frail handsome man who climbs down from the police van. A cold, firm handshake, a clear, refined voice, “Thank you for being here.” Then everyone is in the court room. Judge Saluja mumbles out the charges, distinctly uncomfortable. He can drop some of the inflated accusations, but he doesn’t. Binayak, listening in the witness box, denies all the charges, then asks for some time with his wife and lawyers. The judge concedes.

There is a palpable fear in the air. Several doctors who’ve come in solidarity are afraid to talk. There have been a series of arrests across Raipur the previous day: two women making an arms drop, a travel agency owner, a journalist. Everyone’s feeling hunted. It’s difficult to tell truth from lie. The framed from the genuine.

Binayak Sen, however, seems curiously aloof from all of this. As the police hustle him into the van, he presses his face against the iron bars and says urgently, “You must understand, there is a Malthusian process of exclusion going on in the country. You cannot create two categories of human beings. Everybody must wake up to this, otherwise soon it will be too late.” The concerns of the humanist are apparent even through the imprisoning bar. “If they arrest people like me, human rights workers will have no locus standi. I have never condoned Maoist violence. It is an invalid and unsustainable movement. Along with the Salwa Judum, it has created a dangerous split in the tribal community. But the grievances are real. There is an on-going famine in the region. The body mass is below 18.5. Forty percent of the country lives with malnutrition. In Scheduled Castes and Tribes, this goes up to 50 and 60 percent respectively. We have to strive for more inclusive growth. You cannot create two categories of people…”

Hardly conversation designed to dismantle the Indian nation. Ask him why he lent his services to Narayan Sanyal, a self-confessed Naxal, and Binayak’s answer captures the essential sanctity of civil rights across the world. “I knew I was entering the lion’s mouth,” he says quietly, “but if you start stepping back, where do you stop? You cannot discriminate. Everybody has the right to legal aid and medical care. That is written in the Constitution. That is the basis of individual, human rights.”

One of DGP Vishwa Ranjan’s grouses is, “Why does he criticise the Salwa Judum more than the Maoists?” Binayak’s answer would be that the Indian State has a greater responsibility to abide by the Constitution and due process of law than Maoists who’ve abdicated from the State. But that’s a moral nicety official India obviously finds difficult to grasp.

Ask Ilina Sen where she finds the strength to fight this battle, and she says, “I realise this goes beyond Binayak and my family. We are part of a much larger fight. We are struggling for the right to dissent peacefully. Our commitment to that gives me strength.” Again, a moral nicety official India would find difficult to grasp. Take Medha Patkar: 20 years of peaceful resistance. No result. Take Sharmila Irom: 7 years of heroic fasting. No result. Take Binayak Sen…

Binayak Sen will soon be on trial. To continue his imprisonment during this period is to foreclose the space for peaceful protest in India. It is to nurture weapons of mass destruction. It is to invite violent conversations. It is to further rent a tattered Gandhian dream.

DEATH ON THE MARGINS....

ONE YEAR ago, before the campaign on his behalf had gained m o m e n t u m , TEHELKA did a cover story on Binayak Sen — doctor and human rights activist, jailed on false charges under the draconian Chhattisgarh (People’s) Public Security Act (See TEHELKA: No Country for Good Men). On May 25, when Supreme Court judges Markandeya Katju and Deepak Verma took just sixty seconds to undo an injustice that had been wilfully perpetuated by the State for two long years, it should have been an occasion for another cover story, more celebratory, documenting among other things, Binayak’s wife, Ilina’s Herculean legal struggle for his release. But Binayak and Ilina’s story is merely symbolic of a much bigger, on-going and faceless struggle. And so, even as the human rights community exploded in joy with the May 25 victory, 400 kilometers from Raipur, another big battlefront was being opened.

It is two days after 59-year-old Binayak Sen got to go home. May 28, scalding, red dust everywhere, a hot loo blowing. A man in a white lungi and kurta sits under a leafy tree, listening to ten Gond tribals tell their story of how two nights earlier their village was looted. Every ration burnt. Every goat taken, every hen kidnapped. Not even a little chick left behind. The tribals have trekked from faraway Kamanar village in the hope that this man in white will help them access the ear of the State. It is a difficult proposition because it is the State that has looted the village: How do you lodge an FIR with the police when it is the police that have stolen your chickens?

As the man listens, his mobile rings. It is Raju, another tribal boy from village Lingagiri. Raju’s sister had been raped and shot through the mouth some time earlier, their father killed by a bayonet slicing through his stomach. Raju is calling now because there is no rice to eat in the village, people are dying of hunger. The man in white promises to do something. Send rice. Call the district collector. Do anything he can to try and staunch the inhuman civil war going on in central India below the radar of national media.

THIS IS Dantewada, a remote district in the south Bastar region of Chhattisgarh. The man in white is Himanshu Kumar, a Gandhian human rights activist from Meerut who has been working in Dantewada for 17 years. And the war is an old triangular one: between the State, the Naxals, and the tribals — cleft violently from within by the infamous government-sponsored Salwa Judum.

As he listens to the troubled stories swirling around him — trying to give it voice, trying to draw the nation’s attention — a vast debris stretches behind Himanshu. He himself has been brutally looted a few days earlier. On 17 May, a day after the Lok Sabha election results, a police force of over 500 surrounded Himanshu’s Vanvasi Chetna Ashram, ten kilometers from Dantewada town. He was given half an hour to wrap up two decades of work. Then, the bulldozers moved in. They broke everything: home, dispensary, dormitories, training halls, kitchen, telephone towers (sanctioned by the government itself), swing, even a lone hand-pump that was the only source of clean water for the villages around. “Like skimming malai from milk”, says Veena, Himanshu’s wife.

As the bulldozers stamped the ashram out, it began to rain. Himanshu and Veena sat under a tree with their daughters — Alisha, 12, a student of Rishi Valley School, and Haripriya, a spunky 7-year old — and watched. Alisha began to cry. “I told her, if you do good work, you have to be ready for the tough times. I am glad they saw it happen. It was good training for my daughters,” says Himanshu. (It was good training for others too. The police caught two students from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru who were visiting for field work and beat them. They yanked a journalism student, Veronica, by the hair and beat Javed Iqbal, a young freelance photographer from Mumbai, who had been travelling in the interiors, photographing the State’s assault on its villagers.)

WE VISIT the ashram site ten days later. Demolished is a poor word. Erased is more accurate: erased with an implacable anger: an obscene violence. There is nothing there but crushed cement and strewn papers. A tiny pink crocus that has escaped the bulldozers droops in the heat. For 17 years, Vanvasi Chetna Ashram had functioned as a kind of fine nerve connection between the tribals and a forgetful State. Come from distant Meerut and Delhi, painstakingly learning Gondi, Himanshu and Veena had focused on teaching tribals about their entitlements, traveling on foot into villages deep inside the forests, slowly tugging isolated communities into the democratic system. Building concepts of community monitoring: what government schemes had been announced in their name, how were they to access them, how were they to hold corrupt officials to account, how were they to file FIRs and applications, how were they to demand teachers in their schools. “Our work was to strengthen democracy at the roots,” says Himanshu, bending down to pick up a paper fluttering in the rubble. It’s a pamphlet teaching tribals how to vote. Another sheaf of papers lying in the dusty ground documents which children are in school, and why others are out. “The government accuses us of being Naxalites, but Naxals are out to prove that the system can’t work. We are strengthening the system, bringing trust back into it by asking questions, holding it accountable. We are friends of the system — it is the system that is destroying itself from within.”

Rani Devi is one among a few tribals standing mutely at the site. “I don’t feel like eating,” she tells Himanshu. “My head has been spinning since this happened. I feel dizzy. You have to rebuild the ashram here.” There are other tribals standing around whose own homes have been burnt nine or 10 times by the police and Salwa Judum vigilantes. They know what it is to be raped, driven out of their homes, live on the run, live without food. They know what it is to be booked under false charges and what it is to be beaten when you go to complain about an injury. Their stoic silence — their unspoken understanding as they look at the wasted remains of the ashram — tells you they also know how to live without the hope of justice.

The demolition of Vanvasi Chetna Ashram is part of the Chhattisgarh state’s on-going and illegal war against its own people. Part of a wilful and cynical intimidation of human rights workers who dare to ask questions. Binayak Sen and Himanshu Kumar are part of a continuum: their stories matter because they approximate the stories of hundreds of other anonymous tribal men and women who do not command our attention because they cannot speak English and live below the line of who the metropolis considers Indian.

Himanshu — a man of irrepressible positivity and a humblingly ready smile — came to Dantewada in 1992. His father, Prakash Kumar had given up college in 1942 to join the Quit India movement; he met Gandhi in Sewagram in 1945. Later, he joined Vinobha Bhave’s Bhoomidan movement. “My father helped give away over 20 lakh acres of land in Uttar Pradesh,” says Himanshu, “but he and I do not possess one acre between us.” Inspired by his father and men like Vinobha Bhave, Himanshu started out under a tree in Dantewada, asking tribals questions about their lives and needs, slowly helping them heal ailments like diarrhoea, snake bites, malaria and pneumonia. As their trust grew, the local gram sabha offered Himanshu a patch of land and built him a mud hut to live with them. For 13 years, there was no trouble as Himanshu and Veena — unusual daughter of a garment exporter in Raja Garden, Delhi, and a woman of equally inspiring positivity — went about their advocacy work. The trouble began in 2005, when the Chhattisgarh government started the Salwa Judum.

Early in 2005, a young anganwadi worker called Sonia from Kamalur village was brutally beaten by the police on the pretext of being a suspected Naxal sympathiser. They hit her with poles then tied her hair to rope and dragged her through the mud. Broken, fractured, she came to the ashram seeking help. Himanshu hesitated. He had two young daughters himself. If he took up her case, he knew he was walking towards a dragon’s lair. “For the first time, I was afraid,” says Himanshu, “but Veena urged me on. You call yourself a human rights worker, she told me. After that, we have not looked back.”

Like Binayak, Himanshu began to protest against the excesses of the State, in particular the police and Salwa Judum vigilantes. He sent Sonia’s story to the National Women’s Commission: chairperson Girija Vyas did not think it worth investigating. Since then, Himanshu has sent hundreds of complaints to the Human Rights Commission. Their response? A committee led by the police to investigate police atrocities. Himanshu then also sent at least 1,000 complaints to the Superintendent of Police (SP) in Dantewada. He refused to file FIRs. (In fact, when Himanshu took up a recent false encounter case in Singaram, where 19 tribals were shot dead by the police, SP Rahul Sharma brazenly told the Bilaspur High Court that he had refused to file FIRs because Himanshu always lodged false complaints — forgetting that it is for the courts and not the police to decide whether a FIR is baseless or not.)

Like Binayak, Himanshu’s advocacy brought him increasingly into hostile radar — erasing his past reputation for humanitarian work. In 2006, suddenly — 13 years after he began to work here — the state government sent him a notice declaring his ashram an illegal encroachment. Himanshu produced all the relevant papers. The issue went to court. In January this year, the government suddenly cancelled his FCRA and choked off his foreign grants. Himanshu had to let go of almost a hundred full-time workers. On May 16 — as the country was celebrating Indian democracy and the mandate for a stable government — Himanshu was suddenly handed a notice that his ashram was up for demolition the next day — illegally, since it was a Sunday. He called Chhattisgarh Chief Secretary P Joy Oomen and reminded him that the issue was still in court and that the next hearing was on June 17. Oomen assured him the ashram would not be demolished. The next morning the bulldozers moved in.

THERE IS a reason for the State’s precipitous intimidation of Himanshu Kumar. After the growing outcry against the Salwa Judum in 2008 the Supreme Court had ordered the State to dismantle the camps and militia. The Chhattisgarh government promised to do so and in February 2009 told the court that the Salwa Judum is ‘slowly disappearing’. On the ground, no such thing has happened. The truth is, the Chhattisgarh government is now sitting on a situation that it does not know how to control.

In the four years since the Salwa Judum was launched, more than 600 villages have been forcibly evacuated. Many tribals have been driven into relief camps. Others have fled into the jungles or to neighbouring Andhra Pradesh to work as construction labour. But tired of living in fear and on the run, many are now slowly returning to their villages. Himanshu has started a “human shield” programme to help them return and rehabilitate: this involves volunteers from his group living with the villagers till life has been restored to some normalcy. “We reject the theory that every tribal is either a Naxal or part of the

Salwa Judum,” says Himanshu. “We are trying to tell the tribals about the Supreme Court order, and urge them to return and start farming.”

Nendra village was the first such experiment. Others have slowly followed. Basagoda, Avapalli, Dimapur, Lingagiri, Dholaigura — Himanshu calls it the “peer effect”.

But all is not well. The men and women from Kamanar village sitting under the leafy tree, telling Himanshu about their kidnapped goats and hens, are merely the tip of a growing social malaise. Their attackers comprised both police and tribals from the Salwa Judum camps. “The tribals in these camps have become criminalised,” says Himanshu. “They have no source of income in the camps. They have no land, they cannot farm. Looting has become their only employment.” What makes them more deadly is that they have the sanction of the police. The police do not dare file a single FIR against the SPOs — the tribal ‘Special Police Officers’ the State has armed. If they do, the SPOs, fattened with the power of the gun, will turn on the police. “The government has divided tribal society dangerously,” says he. “It will prove a historic mistake.”

IT IS PRECISELY this sort of statement the government wants to intimidate Himanshu from making. On 26 April, 19 houses in Badepalli village were burnt by the Salwa Judum. The urgent call for rice from Lingagiri is proof that the relief committees the Supreme Court had ordered have not kicked in. The ration shops have not been restarted. Himanshu is the only vocal witness to State failure here: the government wants to snuff the witness out.

But the will to fight intimidation is the first lesson a human rights worker learns. The night their ashram was demolished, Himanshu and Veena moved in with their daughters and their core workers into a makeshift house just a few kilometers away, ironically just a little way down a three-way cross-road: one road leading to Dantewada jail, one to the old ashram, and one to a new beginning. Here, while Veena cheerfully sorts through the debris of 17 years — a daunting mess of cupboards, mattresses, computers, and files rescued from the ashram — Himanshu, without a trace of bitterness, has already begun work anew. Back where he started 17 years ago — under a tree.

His father, 82, a dignified old man, has come to give him moral support. He sits calmly, uncomplaining, amidst the heat and mess. “I fought in the freedom movement. I know truth always prevails, but it takes time and much sacrifice. Himanshu is my only son. I don’t know what the solution is, but I know the road he is on is right. The more consciousness he generates among the tribals, the more they will be able to claim their right to life.”

MINUTES AFTER he emerged from jail, Binayak Sen told waiting media that there is a state of war in Central India and his battle lay in replacing that war with peace. The fight against the immoral intimidation of the State is a big part of restoring that peace. It is what kept his wife, Ilina going for two years as she fought to get him out of jail. “The McCarthyism was really hard at first,” says she. “I am a very private person and valued my anonymity. But suddenly everyone was talking about us and looking at Binayak and me as these big Naxal leaders. I have lost a lot of innocence in these two years, but I have come out stronger. Today, I know I can win.”

But fatigue can be an insidious thing. Two baseless years in jail can make any warrior want “to lower their pitch”. The battles Himanshu and Veena and Binayak and Ilina — and countless other human rights workers — are fighting are not their own. They have made it their own because they are fighting to preserve our democracy, fighting to articulate “a particular perception of reality”, as Binayak puts it. Fighting — to quote Binayak again — to dismantle the “structural violence” that perpetuates inequity and poverty. The fact that they do not lower their pitch cannot be taken for granted. India needs to strengthen the jurisprudence in favour of human rights workers and magnify their voice. Men like Binayak Sen and Himanshu Kumar are voluntary ICUs at the most wounded edges of our society. If we crush them, we will not even hear the echoes of the greater tragedies, and greater wars brewing beyond.

WATER PRIVATISATION IN CHATTISGARH

In March 2007, a Public Accounts Committee came down heavily on the Chhattisgarh government for allowing a private company to appropriate the waters of the Sheonath river. Nevertheless, business continues as usual. In fact, more corporate houses have been given easy access to river waters in the state at the cost of the drinking water and irrigation needs of local communities

Gopinath Saura and Krishna Kumar didn’t know how valuable water was until it was taken away from them. Like these two residents of Bonda Tikra village of Raigarh district in what was then Madhya Pradesh, all the villages in the district have had to contend with water scarcity ever since a factory put up by Jindal Steel started lifting water from the Kelo river a decade ago. Water levels in ponds have dropped and the villagers have little water even for drinking purposes.

Tribals in these villages united and protested against the factory’s usurpation of their rights to a basic necessity like water. The village had the first right over the river’s water, they said, as they lobbied government departments from Raigarh to Bhopal for justice. When their demands fell on deaf ears, they started a hunger strike. One of those who sat on the hunger strike was Gopinath Saura’s wife. “When my wife Satyabhama started a hunger strike, I expected that the government would understand the importance of the matter and would take back its decision to provide water from the Kelo river to Jindal. But that didn’t happen,” says Saura.

Satyabhama’s voice was not heard and her health deteriorated after she refused to eat for seven days. On January 26, 1998, when the whole country was celebrating the 48th Republic Day, Satyabhama died of hunger and lost the battle for water.

Says Satyabhama’s son Krishna Kumar: “A court case should have been filed against Jindal and the government officers in this matter, but on the contrary, the government jailed the people who were staging the movement alongside my mother against privatisation of the Kelo river.

It is ten years since that tragic incident. In those ten years hundreds of small and big factories have come up in Raigarh, enveloping the whole district in dust and black smoke; a separate state of Chhattisgarh was created with the ostensible aim of development of tribals. Many things changed, but the one thing that hasn’t changed is the story of how rivers in Chhattisgarh have been exploited by private companies with the connivance of successive state governments.

The state of Chhattisgarh, formed on November 1, 2001, is not a water starved state. It had an average of some 126 ponds in every village. It receives approximately 1400 mm rain every year. Most of its 2.5 crore people, however, depend on the rivers for water and other needs. With five river basins – the Mahanadi, Godavari, Ganga, Narmada and Brahmani Kachar, and several rivers -- Mahanadi, Sheonath, Indravati, Jonk, Kelo, Arpa, Sabri, Hasdev, Eib, Kharun, Peri, and Maand -- water scarcity should not be a problem in the state.

But it is, for ordinary people. The entire riverine economy is in tatters. People cannot use a single drop of water from the rivers for drinking purposes, or cast a single net to fish for their livelihood, and farmers who grew crops along the river banks are out of a livelihood. Once the only reason for constructing dams on rivers was to irrigate farmland, nowadays the aim is to provide water to industrial houses. In fact the government has actually imposed a ban on providing water for irrigation during the summer season. Faced by protests and resistance, successive governments have made promises to free the rivers from private hands, but their actions have been exactly the opposite, allowing more rivers to be privatised.

How the rivers were sold

The Sheonath and Mahanadi rivers contain 58.48% of the state’s water resources. The Sheonath river originates in Durg and flows through Raipur, Bilaspur and Janjgir-Champa before merging with the Mahanadi. The Sheonath was the first river to be privatised in a shocking story of government abetment and corruption.

In 1981, MP Aydhyogik Kendra Vikas Nigam Ltd (MPAKVN), Raipur, was formed to assist industrial development centres. On June 26, 1996 M/s HEG Ltd of Durg Industrial Centre, Borai, wrote a letter to MPAKVN stating that they were being supplied 12 lakh litres of water, but after two months they would need 24 lakh litres extra water daily. MP Aydhyogik agreed to supply the extra water but said that since there was less water in the Sheonath river between February and June, it could not supply the same quantum of water during that period. However, it proposed that HEG Ltd should join with it to construct an annicut dam, since it didn’t have the necessary resources for building the dam itself. After a series of meetings, whose proceedings are unknown, a new tender notice was issued for the dam on the Build, Own, Operate and Transfer (BOOT) basis.

This tender made a provision for inclusion of ‘tilting gates’. The bizarre fact is that before the tender was released, on October 14, 1997, Kailash Engineering Corporation of Rajnandgaon had written to MP Aydhyogik that they had developed automatic tilting gates and they therefore held the patent. Clearly, the provision of tilting gates in the tender meant that the water project could only be executed by Kailash Engineering or by some other company with Kailash’s consent.

Soon after, MPAKVN handed over its entire infrastructure in Borai, and assets worth Rs 5 crore, to Kailash Soni, owner of Kailash Engineering, for a token Re 1, for establishing the water supply project on BOOT basis.

Radius Water Limited, the company set up by Kailash Engineering to execute this project, was granted the contract on October 5, 1998; it was to be effective from October 4, 2000 to October 4, 2020.

The company didn’t conform to any of the standards relating to minimum capital and experience mentioned in the tender. MPAKVN didn’t take the permission of, or even inform, the irrigation, revenue, or any other department of the government before entering into the contract with Radius. Every clause and part of the tender and contract shows rank favouritism towards Radius. Constructing on BOOT basis means that the company will be responsible for both construction and maintenance through its own resources. But MPAKVN had handed over all its resources to Kailash and on top of that had signed another contract which stated that Radius would receive Rs 650 crore in the form of a loan and Rs 250 crore through equity shares, amounting to a total of Rs 900 crore which will be expended on this project.

Every month, 3.6 mld water was being supplied by MPAKVN from the industrial area of Borai to various factories. The day the water supply project was handed over to Radius Water Ltd, the latter guaranteed MPAKVN that it would supply 4 mld water immediately. If MPAKVN had the capacity to supply 4 mld water, what was the need for a new project?

Further, another contract for a period of 22 years was made between Radius and MPAKVN that even if the latter didn’t take 4 mld water, it had to compulsorily pay for it. The truth was that MPAKVN only needed 2.4 mld water.

The payment rates that were fixed were also shocking. While MPAKVN paid Re 1 per cubic metre for the Murethi project of the irrigation department which is on the river Sheonath in Raipur district, it contracted to pay a whopping Rs 12.60 per cubic metre to Radius Water!

The responsibility of building the annicut dam on the Sheonath and supplying water lay with Radius Water Ltd. By the time the whole process was completed, the state of Chhattisgarh had come into being and MPAKVN became the Chhattisgarh State Industrial Development Corporation (CSIDC).

Radius also started fencing in 22.7 kilometres of the Sheonath after 2000 and had taken possession of thousands of square feet of land apart from the 176 acres adjoining the river bank.

In the first year after taking over the resources of MPAKVN or CSIDC for a paltry Re 1, Radius collected Rs 15.12 lakh every month from the latter for the 4 mld of water it supplied under the contract. This means that without investing a single rupee as capital, Radius received payments worth Rs 1,81,44,000 from the state government in the first year. Moreover, there were only two industries in Borai and they could not possibly have needed more than 2.4 mld whereas CSIDC was compelled to pay for 4 mld. Also, CSIDC received Rs 12 per 1,000 litres from the industries to which it was supplying water, but it had contracted to pay Radius Rs 15.02 per 1,000 litres, thereby making a loss of Rs 3.02 per 1,000 litres.

The Sheonath river is the main source of water for most of the surrounding villages and was freely available to everyone. But after Radius Water Ltd took possession of the river, the villages situated on its banks have been prohibited from using its waters for irrigation, bathing, or anything else. Hundreds of fishermen, whose forefathers had fished here, have been forced to move out. Domestic animals can’t get water. Land on the banks of the river which was used for cultivation, has been submerged following the hoarding of water for the annicut. A board has come up stating ‘Bathing and fishing in this river are strictly prohibited. It may cause danger to your life’.

Thousands of farmers in the surrounding villages were shocked to learn that a river whose waters they used freely had been sold to a private company. “What kind of Panchayati Raj is this where rivers are sold without the consent of villagers?” questions an indignant Bathvaram Tandon, sarpanch of Mohlai. “We won’t be surprised if our government tomorrow sells sunlight and air.”

Gautam Bandhopadhyay, coordinator of the Nadi Ghati Morcha which has been protesting the sale of the river and its water, says, “Radius has banned the use of hand pumps and digging of new wells in the villages. Company officials move from one village to another and threaten the villagers. Radius also captured the pumps from villagers involved in irrigation.”

The upstream villages of Mohlai, Khapri, Rasmara, Siloda, and Mahmara have been badly affected. But the situation is worse for villages situated below the Borai annicut. Farmers of Chirbali, Nagpura, Malud, Jherni, Piparchhedi, and Belodi found that all the water was concentrated in the upper reaches because of the dam, causing the lower portion of the Sheonath to dry up.

When the demand for water increased in the summer months, the villagers began coming together. The Nadi Ghati Morcha started a movement from Durg that spread to Raipur and then Delhi. They adopted strategies like processions, roadblocks and protests.

Political games over water

The public protests prompted the first chief minister of Chhattisgarh to announce on April 2, 2003, that the contract with Radius would be abrogated, that the issue would be investigated “and whoever is found guilty will be prosecuted”.

But no action was taken -- it was just a political gimmick. Rather than any action being taken against Radius, it was Radius who was calling the shots. It started filing cases against journalists who published reports against it, and also cases against the protestors.

In 2003, the legislative assembly of the state set up a Public Accounts Committee (PAC) to investigate matters relating to the privatisation of the Sheonath river. The PACs submitted its report to the legislative assembly in March 2007. It came down heavily on MPAKVN for its “preplanned tactics” for removing HEG Ltd and awarding the contract on “less beneficial terms and conditions to a private institution which was inexperienced in the field of water supply.”

The PAC said further: “Contracting on BOOT basis for water supply and annicut construction has made the project irrelevant and purposeless. As a result of which the government is facing losses from the first day of this project. Providing the assets of water supply project to private institution on lease at a meagre token money of one rupee is a deceiving conspiracy made to purposefully have the government in unbeneficial situation and have the committee benefited, whose other similar citations are difficult to find in a democratic country.”

The PAC further said that many changes made in the documents which the inspection committee unearthed “can be categorised as criminal offences, previous citations of which can only be found in criminal world. Any government officer in cahoots with an industrialist can plan such a conspiracy, is beyond reach of the imagination of committee.”

The PAC also made several recommendations:

The contract and lease-deed executed between Radius Water Ltd and MPAKVN (or CSIDC) should be declared null and void within a week of presenting the report.
CSIDC should take back ownership of all assets and the water supply project.
The then managing directors of Madhya Pradesh State Industrial Development Corporation Limited and its chief engineer should be prosecuted for conspiring to cause losses to the government and for handing over its assets to a private institution by preparing false documents.
Criminal charges should be initiated against the chief executive officer of Radius Water Ltd for cooperating in this criminal conspiracy and for making profits by fraudulently harming the government.
A probe should be initiated into those officers of MPAKVN and the state water resources department whose involvement in this whole conspiracy is apparent, and strict disciplinary action should be taken against them within one month.

The PAC also recommended that the responsibility of implementing the recommended course of action should be given to an officer of secretary level. And that, further, the government should engage quality legal aid to safeguard its interests.

But the process of legal consultation following the recommendations wasn’t completed till December 2007, leave alone declaring the contract between Radius and MPAKVN null and void. The current situation is that the report of the PAC has been completely ignored by the government.

MLA Ramchandra Sinhdev, who was a member of the PAC and is well acquainted with the matter, says: “It’s like making a mockery of our Constitution. Nothing is more appalling than the way the PAC report has been ignored.”

The Sheonath is still owned by private players. From time to time protestors raise their voices, but their voices are lost in the echoing chambers of power and corruption.

River after river, it’s the same story

Emboldened by the success of the Sheonath privatisation, a series of privatisations of other rivers started. The Kelo, Kurkut, Shabri, Kharun, and Maand rivers have, one after the other, been handed over to private companies.

The 95 km-long Kelo passes through Raigarh and is its lifeline. In 1991, Jindal Steel and Power Ltd set up a sponge iron factory here with a capacity of producing 5 lakh tonnes of iron every year. As it expanded, it set up a power plant too. In 1996 it made a bid to lift water from the Kelo, but the government refused, saying that it would cause a drinking water shortage. When Jindal persisted, the government caved in. Not only was Jindal allowed to take water from the Kelo, it was also allowed to erect a stop dam that enabled it to lift 35,400 cubic metres of water every day from the river.

When the people of Bonda Tikra and other villages on the banks of the river felt the impact of increasing water shortages, they began to protest. The farmers of Bonda Tikra and Gudgahan were most affected because their lands had been taken over in the name of another irrigation project and the only way they could irrigate their fields was from the waters of the Kelo.

The battle against Jindal Steel resulted in marches, demonstrations and rallies. Tribal farmers started a hunger strike and on January 26, 1998, Satyabhama Saura died of hunger. There were further protests in 2004 over Jindal Steel & Power Ltd’s acquisition of extra land for its 1000MW power plant set in 143 acres which would affect more than 6,000 families in 15 villages. Apart from the Kelo, the Kurkut river too has been affected by various plants that Jindal has erected.

Ramesh Agrawal of Janchetna, who is actively involved in issues related to water and its pollution, says: “Villagers were very agitated at the possibility of almost 355 hectares of forest land and thousands of hectares of irrigated land being submerged under this dam. After all, for them it is a question of life or death.”

Villagers of Rabo village decided not to allow their village to be sacrificed for a dam. They cut trees and made a barrier of them around the work site with a banner voicing their protest. They also guarded the entrance to the village for several nights.

Finally, public anger forced the chief minister to order work on the dam stopped on November 4, 2004. Jindal, however, ignored the instructions of the chief minister and resumed work after a week. “Jindal always has the last word in this state,” says Venudhar, a young man from Rabo village.

Sure enough, government officials were soon at work furthering Jindal’s interests. Local bureaucrats reportedly called the villagers to a meeting and said that any person who opposed the dam would be jailed. The police said if the villagers didn’t give in, disputes would happen. The local judicial authorities maintained that the land belonged to the government and that’s why the villagers pay agricultural rent.

The government kept delaying the mandatory public hearings because huge crowds turned up for them. When the hearings got underway, thousands of objections were registered. But it was all an eyewash. The contract that Jindal has executed with the government states that the government will help Jindal in getting permissions and approvals at state and central level apart from any other aid it may render.

And the theft continues…

But the story of private hold on rivers doesn’t end with the Sheonath, Kelo and Kurkut. A large part of the Shabri river that flows through Naxalite-affected Dantewada in Bastar district is under the occupancy of Essar Steel Chhattisgarh Ltd. Essar has a pipeline network from Dantewada to the port of Vishakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh. It plans to send iron-ore through this pipeline with the force of the water from the Shabri river.

Industrial houses such as Monnet Ispat and Neco Jaiswal have private dams on the Kharoon river in Raipur. Neco Jaiswal lifts 3 mgd and Monnet Ispat 2 mgd water from the Kharoon. Lafarge India possesses rights to 0.75 mgd of water of the Sheonath river.

Bajrang Ispat & Power Ltd, SKS Ispat, and M/s South Asian Agro Ltd are in queue for signing contracts with the government for getting proprietary rights over these rivers.

And the government’s take?

Not surprisingly, no government officer or minister is ready to talk about the issue of water.

A LUCID DREAM AND REALITY

The 2009 General election is going to witness a dawn of professional politics where political parties will be marketed as commodities to lure potential voters. It will not be merely a traditional competition between Congress and BJP but a plethora of small parties with regional interest will compete to get a share of people’s sympathy. Isn’t it good news for the general voter? The potential voter will get to choose from a variety of political parties thus making an end to the politics of ‘either or’ (read Congress or BJP). Welcome to the era of coalition politics where the interests of two mainstream political parties will be subject to strict scrutiny of smaller parties. The threat from smaller parties is so strong that some politicians are flouting the idea of a Congress-BJP alliance! The days of political monopoly are over!

The five years of UPA rule was supposed to benefit Aam Aadmi (Common Man) but it has only served the interests of Khaas Aadmi. UPA’s Common Minimum Programme was replaced by Uncommon Minimum Programme based on four ‘achievements’: Indo-US nuclear deal, Chandrayaan moon mission, 9% growth and Slumdog Millionaire Oscar win! None of this is directly related to the common man.

Indo-US nuclear deal is still no-clear deal to many; it will take at least 8 years to generate nuclear power. Chandrayaan moon mission is part of a satellite programme which any government would have followed it. The “9% growth rate” is indeed related to the fellow Indians but nobody is asking this: what percentage of Indians have benefited from the 9% growth rate? Merely 10%! This figure sums up the economic policy of the UPA government which is ironically headed by an economist and has the “dream economic team.”

The government of “Aam Aadmi” has shown remarkable generosity in subsidising big business houses and SEZs (Special Economic Zones). UPA has tacitly ignored small and medium enterprises which constitute the majority of Indians. The rich-poor divide has widened but yet UPA is singing a tune of good times! In the last five years India has not witnessed economic prosperity but economic regression. This fact can be gauged from Human Development Index of United Nations Development Programme where India’s rank has slipped from 124 to 132 in 2008. Even countries like Bhutan, Algeria, Tajikistan, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Iran have performed better than India!

What is the role of UPA government in a British movie with Indian actors? The euphoria over Slumdog Millionaire at best can be described as an act of individual creativity. The movie depicts the story of India’s poor and the bottom-line is the survival spirit of Mumbai. The movie must remind our shameless politicians a fact that gathers dust in government files that at least 30% of India’s population still leaves below the poverty line. There are at least 260 million Indians who still go to bed hungry every night.

The UPA, very subtly, is doing an NDA. It is building a momentum similar to NDA’s India Shining campaign. NDA had pumped 4000 million rupees of Indian taxpayer’s money in the form of advertisement just to communicate Indians how good they are feeling! P. Sainath, rural editor of The Hindu had commented then, “The fastest growing sector in India Shinning is not IT or software, textiles or automobiles. It is inequality.” His comment still holds relevance.

If Congress has miserably failed in its economic policy then BJP has floundered in making it a real issue which affects fellow Indians irrespective of their caste and religion. BJP is still trapped in its stone-age politics despite the fact that its allies have made it abundantly clear that they don’t support BJP’s Ram Janambhoomi movement. The BJP’s poll strategists have forgotten a fact that Indian economy was performing better in NDA’s rule.

None of the political parties have a slogan to communicate what they stand for. Congress does not have a stand to stand on. It is in self-congratulatory mode. BJP reeks of infighting and its Prime Ministerial candidate is behaving like Alice in Wonderland! Mayawati, the touchable politician of India’s untouchables, is doing a Hillary Clinton. Mulayam Singh and Amar Singh Company do not belong to anyone; they only understand the politics of selfishness. Sharad Pawar is a man of vested interests. He can go to any extent to save his party’s interests; even an alliance with Shiv Sena can not be ruled out. Shiv Sena, which used to be like a family managed business has suffered partition. Raj Thackeray, the “stray cub” has begun to bite in order to save Marathi interests.

Slogans have altered the course of history but our political parties are indulging in mud-slinging. None of the parties have a slogan to define themselves and their party’s ideology. In the recent history, two slogans had a profound impact on people all across the world. George Bush Senior, a strong contender for retaining American presidency in 1992, was defeated by a young and charismatic Bill Clinton who coined the famous slogan ‘it’s the economy stupid!’ It highlighted a deteriorating economy which had undergone recession. Bush senior had emerged successful in Cold War and first Gulf war against Iraq but yet it was only on the basis of a powerful slogan his government was brought down.

The second slogan consumed Republican Party of George Bush Junior. Obama’s slogan ‘We need change’ captured the imagination of ordinary Americans who were fed up with a war-infested President and an economy that was on the verge of collapse.

Indira Gandhi knew her party’s slogan; Sonia Gandhi does not have a slogan. L.K. Advani does not know the art of sloganeering! Leftist parties have an old slogan which Prakash Karat is not very keen to modify. Mulayam Singh has fresh slogan for fellow politicians: Hum Saath Saath Hain!

Isn’t it slightly confusing for the fellow Indian voters? The voters want to identify with political parties but not a single party is willing to identify itself with a cause! Each political party is trying to shine its old and rusty ideology but as P. Sainath wrote, “All the shine we work up will not conceal the darkness.”

Is a new light in the form of Third National Front needed to illuminate a new India?

That remains a lucid drea