NEARLY two-and-a-half centuries ago, in 1770, Oliver Goldsmith wrote these poignant verses in his pastoral poem, The Deserted Village: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey; Where wealth accumulates, and men decay; Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade; A breath can make them, as a breath has made; But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride, when once destroyed, can never be supplied.”
Peasantry is described as the “class constituted by small farmers, tenants, sharecroppers, and labourers on the land where they form the main work force in agriculture and forestry”. It is this “peasantry” that even today constitutes the backbone of India and feeds the 1.1 billion population, nearly half of which is undernourished as per global reports. Yet, what is happening on the ground in the name of development is the destruction of peasantry by depriving them of their land and in the process destroying the country’s food security.
In January 2008, the 15-member Committee on State Agrarian Relations and Unfinished Task of Land Reforms, headed by the present Minister for Rural Development, CP Joshi, with BK Sinha, Director General, National Institute of Rural Development, Hyderabad as the chief author, submitted its report. “The ‘temples’ of modern India,” the report said, “reduced millions of tribal people to ecological refugees”; now “the minerals seen as the ‘building blocks’ of modern India” are putting them “at risk of losing their land through acquisition and further disruption of their societies and economies”.
“Temple” was Prime Minister Nehru’s catch-phrase. This government has adopted the “building blocks” phrase. The fight to protect the tribal land is “the single-largest internal security threat” to the country. In the PM’s address to Parliament in June this year, he said: “If left-wing extremism continues to flourish in parts which have natural resources of minerals, the climate for investment would certainly be affected.”
In recent full-page newspaper advertisements, Vedanta, one of the world’s largest mining corporations, stated to have lease of Rs 4 lakh crore worth of bauxite mines in tribal Orissa, said: “India’s abundant natural resources like REUTERS coal, iron ore, bauxite and precious/semi-precious metals, on a par with countries like Australia, Canada, South Africa and Brazil, can contribute significantly to India’s GDP and become an alternative revenue source for infrastructure development in the country.”
The message is clear – huge investments by moneybags in mining and Special Economic Zones (SEZs) is all that is needed by India and for this the mines and minerals of the tribal heartland must be secured even if this means destruction of the peasantry and their precious forest wealth.
Governments in New Delhi and the States are pursuing an
amir aadmi agenda while mouthing aam aadmi slogans.
The second UPA government has assigned this mission to the Union Home Ministry. While the Home Minister has been known to represent mining companies as legal counsel, the Home Secretary was a diehard champion of SEZs during his tenure as Commerce Secretary. On their own, both would certainly like to see delivery of possession to the land-hungry mining/SEZ “investors”! This also appears to be a political agenda common to the BJP and Congress, as can be seen from recent happenings in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.
Hence the “Operation Greenhunt” against “Marxist rebels” planned and launched in consultation with US counter-insurgency forces. This “war on tribal terror” will deploy crack commandos and paramilitary forces and possibly the Army and Air Force. And it will hit mainly the poor peasants and tribals of Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal and Maharashtra, warns a protest document drafted by activist Arundhati Roy and a group of progressive intellectuals that has been submitted to the PM.
Facts about the country and its economy stated in the document are extremely distressing: 80 per cent of households have no access to safe drinking water; 77 per cent live on less than Rs 20 a day; only 42 per cent houses have electricity; 93 per cent of the workforce is of informal nature, lacking employment, work and social security; close to 60 per cent of rural households are effectively landless; in the 1997-2007 period, 182,936 farmers committed suicide and the number of the “poor and vulnerable” increased from 811 million in 1999-2000 to 836 million in 2004-05.
The state seems to have two faces. One is the ‘pro-poor’
façade with an avalanche of freebies like one-rupee-kilo
rice, colour TV and gas stove. The other is forced acquisi
tion of land belonging to the poor.
AT the other extreme, the millionaire population in India grew in 2007 by 22.6 per cent from the previous year – higher than any other country. Governments in New Delhi and the States are pursuing an amir aadmi agenda while mouthing aam aadmi slogans. Despite numerous public protests, negative Parliamentary Committee reports and warnings from academics, the Indian state has gone ahead with the establishment of 531 SEZs, a totally unsustainable development model which deprives the peasantry of land, shelter and livelihood, while fattening the real-estate business.
Around 60 million people have faced displacement between 1947 and 2004; involving about 25 million hectares of land, including 7 million hectares of forests and 6 million hectares of other common property resources. Only one in every three of the displaced people has been resettled.
This is tragic hijacking of grassroots governance. Civil servants and police are assisting the amir aadmi in their land grab agenda instead of providing life and livelihood support to the aam aadmi. The resultant turmoil and unrest is termed a threat to national security and Indian society is being managed and manipulated to believe it is necessary to eliminate these “terrorists”.
IAS (retd) with a distinguished career of 40 years - worked in Army, Govt, Private, Politics & NGOs.
