India prepares to fight rebel Maoists (UPI)
"India is preparing for a prolonged counterinsurgency fight against Maoist rebels once discounted as a ragtag group of irrelevant ideologues, officials say.
"The Maoists, intent on overthrowing the government, are operating in 20 of India's states, and have become a strong and dangerous insurgency, The New York Times reported on its Web site Saturday.
"Indian leaders are prepared to deploy nearly 70,000 paramilitary officers for the extended counterinsurgency effort.
"The Maoists say they represent the dispossessed of Indian society. Especially hard-hit, they claim, are indigenous tribal groups burdened with the highest rates of illiteracy, poverty and infant mortality.
"The insurgents charge the government wants to push tribal groups from their lands to grab valuable natural resources, the Times says. Maoists have escalated their efforts to sabotage roads and bridges, and even have attacked an energy pipeline."
The heart of India is under attack by Arundhati Roy (The Guardian (UK), October 30, 2009):
"Right now in central India, the Maoists' guerrilla army is made up almost entirely of desperately poor tribal people living in conditions of such chronic hunger that it verges on famine of the kind we only associate with sub-Saharan Africa. They are people who, even after 60 years of India's so-called independence, have not had access to education, healthcare or legal redress. They are people who have been mercilessly exploited for decades, consistently cheated by small businessmen and moneylenders, the women raped as a matter of right by police and forest department personnel. Their journey back to a semblance of dignity is due in large part to the Maoist cadre who have lived and worked and fought by their side for decades.
"If the tribals have taken up arms, they have done so because a government which has given them nothing but violence and neglect now wants to snatch away the last thing they have—their land. Clearly, they do not believe the government when it says it only wants to 'develop' their region. Clearly, they do not believe that the roads as wide and flat as aircraft runways that are being built through their forests in Dantewada by the National Mineral Development Corporation are being built for them to walk their children to school on. They believe that if they do not fight for their land, they will be annihilated. That is why they have taken up arms.
"Even if the ideologues of the Maoist movement are fighting to eventually overthrow the Indian state, right now even they know that their ragged, malnutritioned army, the bulk of whose soldiers have never seen a train or a bus or even a small town, are fighting only for survival."
anti-caste: Marxists in India would seek to mobilize the working class to defend tribals and leftist guerillas against this threat of massive state repression.
Unlike liberals and reformists, Marxists would not call on the capitalist state to better the conditions of tribals rather than killing and displacing them; to do so is to reinforce the illusion that this state does not necessarily act in the interests of the Indian bourgeoisie and its imperialist masters. The masses of the subcontinent need a revolutionary workers’ state to serve their own, counterposed interests.
While defending them militarily against police and paramilitary forces, Marxists would give no political support to the Naxalite (guerillaist) Maoists who, though presently under the gun, openly seek an alliance with a mythical “progressive national bourgeoisie.” Despite their claims to Marxism, the Maoist guerillas have nothing to do with the working class and base themselves entirely on peasants and the landless. As Trotsky explained, these classes, unlike the industrial proletariat, lack the unity, organization, and social power to play an independent revolutionary role. The burning social questions of the region—including the liberation of tribals, who are among the most oppressed and marginalized populations on earth—will not be settled in the jungles.
See also anti-caste: INDIAN GOVT COMMITTEE: "LARGE LANDOWNERS INVARIABLY BELONG TO THE UPPER CASTES" WHILE TATA AND ESSAR STAGE "THE BIGGEST GRAB OF TRIBAL LANDS SINCE COLUMBUS" (October 25, 2009)
And see anti-caste updates on Operation Green Hunt
Campaign Against Operation Green Hunt!
War Against Naxals(Maoists): The War Against Adivasis, Fishermen and Peasants!
Resist the Naxal Witch Hunt!
Organise Under the Naxal Leadership to Fight Recolonization!
Campaign across Tamilnadu
Public Meeting, Chennai
January 30, 2010
Peoples Art And Literary Association
Peasants Liberation Front
Revolutionary Students And Youth Front
New Democratic Labour Front
Tamilnadu.
Contact:
Com. Mukundan,
110, Second Floor, Corporation Complex,
63, Arcot Road, Kodambakkam, Chennai – 600 024. India.
Ph: +91 94448 34519
http://vrinternationalists.wordpress.com/2010/01/02/campaign-against-operation-green-hunt/
Posted by: Internationalists | January 04, 2010 at 03:40 AM