Sanhati, a collective of activists/academics who have been working in solidarity with peoples' movements in India by providing information and analysis, brought together voices from around the world against the Indian Government's planned military offensive in Central India.
Sanhati , a collective of activists/academics who have been
working in solidarity with peoples' movements in India by providing information
and analysis, brought together voices from around the
world against the Indian Government's planned military offensive in Central
India.

The Indian government is ignoring the issues of its people, choosing
to kill the poor instead of killing the poverty. Sanhati says that India's
democracy will be compromised if the government tries to subjugate its own
people militarily without addressing their grievances.

We are deeply concerned by the Indian government's plans for launching
an unprecedented military offensive by army and paramilitary forces in
the adivasi (indigeneous people)-populated regions of Andhra Pradesh,
Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Orissa and West Bengal states. The
stated objective of the offensive is to "liberate" these areas from the
influence of Maoist rebels. Such a military campaign will endanger the
lives and livelihoods of millions of the poorest people living in those
areas, resulting in massive displacement, destitution and human rights
violation of ordinary citizens. To hunt down the poorest of Indian
citizens in the name of trying to curb the shadow of an insurgency is
both counter-productive and vicious. The ongoing campaigns by
paramilitary forces, buttressed by anti-rebel militias, organised and
funded by government agencies, have already created a civil war like
situation in some parts of Chattisgarh and West Bengal, with hundreds
killed and thousands displaced. The proposed armed offensive will not
only aggravate the poverty, hunger, humiliation and insecurity of the
adivasi people, but also spread it over a larger region.

Grinding
poverty and abysmal living conditions that has been the lot of India's
adivasi population has been complemented by increasing state violence
since the neoliberal turn in the policy framework of the Indian state
in the early 1990s. Whatever little access the poor had to forests,
land, rivers, common pastures, village tanks and other common property
resources has come under increasing attack by the Indian state in the
guise of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and other "development" projects
related to mining, industrial development, Information Technology
parks, etc. The geographical terrain, where the government's military
offensive is planned to be carried out, is very rich in natural
resources like minerals, forest wealth and water, and has been the
target of large scale appropriation by several corporations. The
desperate resistance of the local indigenous people against their
displacement and dispossession has in many cases prevented the
government-backed corporations from making inroads into these areas. We
fear that the government's offensive is also an attempt to crush such
popular resistances in order to facilitate the entry and operation of
these corporations and to pave the way for unbridled exploitation of
the natural resources and the people of these regions. It is the
widening levels of disparity and the continuing problems of social
deprivation and structural violence, and the state repression on the
non-violent resistance of the poor and marginalized against their
dispossession, which gives rise to social anger and unrest and takes
the form of political violence by the poor. Instead of addressing the
source of the problem, the Indian state has decided to launch a
military offensive to deal with this problem: kill the poor and not the
poverty, seems to be the implicit slogan of the Indian government.

We
feel that it would deliver a crippling blow to Indian democracy if the
government tries to subjugate its own people militarily without
addressing their grievances. Even as the short-term military success of
such a venture is very doubtful, enormous misery for the common people
is not in doubt, as has been witnessed in the case of numerous
insurgent movements in the world. We urge the Indian government to
immediately withdraw the armed forces and stop all plans for carrying
out such military operations that has the potential for triggering a
civil war which will inflict widespread misery on the poorest and most
vulnerable section of the Indian population and clear the way for the
plundering of their resources by corporations. We call upon all
democratic-minded people to join us in this appeal.