Walking with the Comrades by Arundhati Roy (Outlook India)
“The Indian Constitution, the moral underpinning of Indian democracy, was adopted by Parliament in 1950. It was a tragic day for tribal people. The Constitution ratified colonial policy and made the State custodian of tribal homelands. Overnight, it turned the entire tribal population into squatters on their own land. It denied them their traditional rights to forest produce, it criminalised a whole way of life. In exchange for the right to vote, it snatched away their right to livelihood and dignity.
“Having dispossessed them and pushed them into a downward spiral of indigence, in a cruel sleight of hand, the government began to use their own penury against them. Each time it needed to displace a large population–for dams, irrigation projects, mines—it talked of ‘bringing tribals into the mainstream’ or of giving them ‘the fruits of modern development.’ Of the tens of millions of internally displaced people (more than 30 million by big dams alone), refugees of India’s ‘progress,’ the great majority are tribal people. When the government begins to talk of tribal welfare, it’s time to worry.
“The most recent expression of concern has come from home minister P. Chidambaram who says he doesn’t want tribal people living in ‘museum cultures.’ The well-being of tribal people didn’t seem to be such a priority during his career as a corporate lawyer, representing the interests of several major mining companies. So it might be an idea to enquire into the basis for his new anxiety.
“Over the past five years or so, the governments of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal have signed hundreds of MoUs with corporate houses, worth several billion dollars, all of them secret, for steel plants, sponge-iron factories, power plants, aluminium refineries, dams and mines. In order for the MoUs to translate into real money, tribal people must be moved.
“Therefore, this war.”
See anti-caste: OPERATION GREEN HUNT: INDIA’S DIRTY WAR ON TRIBALS AND LEFTISTS
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