*Call The Salva Judum's Bluff * *APOORVANAND** Social commentator*
*Finally, some official voices do see the harm to democracy in using people as cannon fodder * SUDDENLY, THERE is hope. Hope and renewed confidence in the ability of the Indian State to correct itself. Observations made by a two-member Supreme Court bench comprising Chief Justice KG Balakrishnan and Justice Aftab Alam while hearing two petitions seeking directions to the State to stop patronising the Salva Judum have established that the fundamental constitutional principles have not given way to the expediencies of present- day politics. What our learned judges have done is to state the obvious that the government cannot arm the militia and allow it to kill as doing so would make it an abettor under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code. Is it not elementary, one would ask? Frankly, one had little hope from the highest court of the land given that another SC bench rejected the bail petition of civil rights activist Dr Binayak Sen where the bench did not deem it fit to verify the blatant lies of State counsel Gopal Subramaniam about Dr Sen's Maoist connections. It was as if one could justify any illegal act of the State by raising the spectre of Maoism. At the trial stage, the prosecution had built its argument against Dr Sen on the ground that he was opposing the Salva Judum. As if criticising the Salva Judum was an act of sedition. One remembers Mahendra Karma, the notorious brain behind Salva Judum, claiming in an interview to TEHELKA that Delhi University professor Nandini Sundar was opposing the Judum because she was a Maoist. Incidentally, Sundar is one of those who have filed the petition challenging Salva Judum. What is more horrifying is that in its reply, the State has described Sundar and other petitioners as pro- Maoists hellbent on demoralising the government and the police by criticising the Salva Judum. Read it with the pronouncement of the Chhattisgarh DGP that Shankar Guha Niyogi was a Naxalite. His intention becomes clear when one realises that the Niyogi-founded Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha is in the forefront of the opposition to the Salva Judum. Are they not aware that Maoists are unhappy with scholars like Sundar who have criticised their use of violence? Doesn't the State know that Niyogi invented a new language of politics that differed from the Maoists'? There is a definite pattern in the State's depiction of the Salva Judum's critics as either Maoists or sympathisers. The recommendation of the private militia's disbanding by the Administrative Reforms Commission headed by Veerappa Moily, just after the Supreme Court's comments on Salva Judum, is also remarkable. Moily is unambiguous when he says that campaigns like the Salva Judum are unacceptable and that law and order is the responsibility of the State. The conflict in states like Chhattisgarh is about the rights of the tribals on their forests, their insistence on their own ways of life as opposed to the theories of progress advocated by the modern State that is increasingly becoming the protector of big capital. Moily rightly says that instead of treating the unrest in tribal areas as a law and order problem, the State needs to take a holistic view of it. One cannot miss the relation between the launch of the Salva Judum and the entry of companies like the Tatas, Essar and others in mineral rich Chhattisgarh. Yes, there was Maoist-led unrest here but violent reprisals by the Salva Judum on tribals defying it meant that the State was determined to secure land for big capital. The SC will also have to take into account the fact that the government has set up camps claiming to shelter villagers who were evicted by Naxalites. It cannot overlook the report by National Commission for Protection of Child Rights chairperson Shantha Sinha which notes that the government has moved anganwadis and mid-day meal schemes from village schools to the camps making it even more difficult for those who want to live in the villages. The idea is to turn camps into legitimate revenue villages and, thereby, make the evacuated villages uninhabitable and available for the companies. What is most disturbing is the way the State is practicing lies to support its position. It would take more than a CBI to nail the lies in this case. It has been suggested by the court that an independent investigation be ordered. How can the reports of the Administrative Reforms Commission and the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, apart from the ones prepared by scholars and journalists be ignored to admit the assertions made by a state which is in the habit of making false claims? It would do good to the health of the Indian State if it goes back to the discussions between Nehru, Patel and tribal leaders like Jaipal Singh and Raphael Horo on the eve of the framing of the Constitution rather than fall to the temptation of short-cuts like the Salva Judum. Though there were differences between the nationalists and the tribal groups, Nehru asked them to frame some directive principles to state policy. In an article, Shiv Vishwanathan quotes the proposition of the Jaipal Singh group: "A technological project is not an act of innocence. But it needs a new democracy of vigilance. We propose: That human rights teams be attached to every project. - That every project be subject to rules of transparency. - That the methodology of doubt and scepticism that science made famous be applied to every project beginning with the Damodar Valley Corporation. - That each project be subject to referendum and occasional recall. - That the language of evaluation should be also in the language of subjects, their notions of memory, their ideas of well-being, their sense of fairness." It is a tragedy the Indian State ignored these words and chose to label everybody who dared to question its prescription of progress as enemies of the nation, thereby creating space for violent politics. It would be useful to recall the expectations of the tribals articulated by the tribal group: "The paradox of the Indian Constitution is that it disenfranchises thrice. It disenfranchises, outlaws and negates the tribe. Its ideas of sovereignty, its notion of the eminent domain assures the tribal or the peasant has no access to the forest... His food, his medicines, his play all came from the forest but forest is no longer a commons…. It is the ultimate paradox of anthropology where the native becomes outlaw in his own land. We face the paradox of a Constitution that criminalises its own citizens." NOTES OF another member of the tribal group, Ram Dayal Munda, added that the disenfranchisement of the marginal tribal peasant was hidden in the abstractness and alleged universalism of the Constitution. A Constitution that floats in abstract time is genocidal. Worse, it has no memory of its own executions as it fails to record the logic of its own erasures. A constitution must embody multiple time — the time of the nomad, the seasonal time of pastoral groups, the time of agriculture and women's time. The ecological embedding of the Constitution needs not only an embedding in time, but in the life-worlds of its people. It has to connect life, life world, life cycle, livelihood, lifestyle to the life chances of the people. To speak of electricity and nuclear power in the world of the forest is lethally paradoxical. A Constitution cannot tacitly speak the language of an official science. If every citizen is a man of knowledge, then the Constitution must be a referendum of multiple knowledges... To officialise Western science is to pre-empt a future. It privileges the synthetic fertiliser over the earthworm and all the other organisms that make life possible… We understand the dreams of science but we demand it understands other forms of knowledge not in the museum or the laboratory but in the domain of life." One can only hope that the discussion in the Supreme Court would rise above the mundane topics of law and order and would bring back the focus on some long-forgotten fundamental issues on the nature of Indian democracy, its relationship with its subjects, the questions of sovereignty of the State and the individual. The implications of this case would be farreaching for the present and future of Indian democracy. We can only wish that the hope generated by the Supreme Court's comments on March 31 sustains. *From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 15, Dated April 19, 2008* http://www.tehelka.com/story_main38.asp?filename=Op190408callthe.asp
