Response
From An Ordinary
Indian Citizen To Mr. Vishwaranjan
By Anoop Saha
23 September, 2007
Countercurrents.org
After
his detailed seven part interview with Daily Chhattisgarh, I was glad
to see Chhattisgarh DGP, Mr. Vishwaranjan's article
that appeared in this newspaper on 15th September. I am
highly impressed by his deep knowledge of naxalism, police and the history
of this country in general as is evident from that interview. Although
I don't agree with him on most of the points of the latter article "ardh
satya, tadarth chintan and rumaniyat se pare naxalwaad ka satya",
it is rare in this country that one sees a top ranking government official
responding to public questions and criticisms. I have heard from a lot
of people that Mr. Vishwaranjan is one of the most brilliant police
officers in the country and the fact that the DGP took time to present
his views publicly, proves that assertion once again. A person is judged
by not what he/she believes in, but how he/she reacts to the people
with oppossing views.
I have pointed out that I
don't agree with him. Let me specify why and how. Firstly, I am surprised
to see Mr. Visharanjan say that, 'ordinary indians is used to static
thinking and can be easily misled '. I am responding as a very ordinary
Indian citizen. The entire Chhattisgarh police's salary, as well as
the money for campaigns like Salwa Judum, comes from the taxes paid
by this 'ordinary Indian citizen'. Hence to term them as static and
nonserious is not only an affront to democracy; it is actually questioning
one's own infallibility. As an ordinary Indian, I would not mind my
taxes to fund any genuine anti-insurgent operations, I would encourage
higher salaries and better facilities for the police who are working
for my safety, and would be glad if more money is pumped into improving
infrastructure, health and education of all Indians, especially in naxal
affected areas. But this is not what I see from the ground. What I do
mind is if my money is being used to fund arson, rapes and murders of
innocent villagers in the name of Salwa Judum. There has been several
serious allegations against this movement, which I found convincing
enough to distress me a lot. If even 1 percent of those are true, then
my culpability in the crime increases if I don't speak up against the
wrongs. Forget about Salwa Judum for a moment, there are rape allegations
against one of the top district police officers of Chhattisgarh, and
I as an ordinary citizen, haven't seen any action taken against that
particular 'alleged rapist police officer'. Assuming that most of the
policemen/women in Chhattisgarh are honest, upright and hardworking,
what can be more demoralizing for them than such serious charges not
being acted upon against one of their senior officers? How can morale
be kept up in any department if an "alleged rapist" is promoted
and preserved?
I have also seen the video
of Chhattisgarh police hitting old men and women using their shoes in
Ambikapur a couple of months back. Being a student of psychology, I
know about the famous Milgram's obedience experiment conducted during
1961-1964. The results of the experiment was that "Ordinary people,
simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their
part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover,
even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear
and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental
standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed
to resist authority". In other words, given an explicit order from
an authority, normal people will rather follow the order, than ponder
about the moral and legal obligations of it. That explains much of the
behaviour of the police in Ambikapur. Most of the times whenever such
injustice happens, it happens because "orders came from the top".
So, if people at the top are not being acted against, then nothing can
be more damaging in sinking the morale of an ordinary policeman/woman.
This disgruntlement can then be used by forces like naxalites to further
their agenda. Like NGOs, the police become equally vulnerable to infiltration
by the naxalites. How equipped is our police in handling such scenarios?
It is also puzzling to see
Mr. Vishwaranjan define strategic hamletting as segregating the part
of the population that supports the army, and use them to enclose the
rebels from all four sides to cut their supply lines. He is wrong!!!
Being an ordinary citizen, who unlike his claim does not look for easy
ways out, and who is also not scared of technical terms, let me clarify
the true meaning of this term. Internationally, strategic hamlets as
a military strategy have only one meaning, as defined and implemented
by british military strategist RKG Thompson in Malaya. In the years
during 1948 to 1960, he "took villages and fortified them, and
then controlled the flow of rice and food and ammunition and so on and
so forth". Since then this tactic has been used across the world,
most notably by the US during the Vietnam War. Initially, like in Malaya,
the villages were fortified with barbed wire fences erected around them
and heavy security were deployed around these fortified villages. When
this was not found to be working because of the sheer volume of the
villages, the people were forcefully shifted to many designated camps
in Vietnam-Cambodia border. The basic aim of strategic hamletting was/is
"isolating the rural population from the (Viet Cong) communist
guerrillas". These camps were notorious for keeping their inmates
in forced detention inside and that was the reason the whole program
failed miserably and the eventual defeat of the US in that war. How
different is Salwa Judum? Why is it that all public amenities in the
other side of the Indravati river has been suspended since the start
of Salwa Judum? I have seen sworn affidavits from the people living
there. Why is it that the people living in villages are not allowed
to come to the haats? Why do they need to go to as far as Narayanpur
to get a packet of salt?
I am not sure if somewhere
in some police or home ministry office, someone actually sat down and
said, "Aha!! Look, this thing called Strategic Hamlets is a nice
little thing that the americans had tried in Vietnam against the communist
guerillas. Let's do the same thing here in Dantewada". Such a meeting
might not have ever happenned. What I do know is that there is a remarkable
similarity between the acts and execution of Salwa Judum with what we
read/hear about Strategic Hamlet program. People are forced to shift
in designated camps. The camps are fortified. Those who don't come to
camps are attacked. The people who choose to live in villages have their
houses burnt down, their crops destroyed, hitting them economically.
All connections between those living in the villages and the outer world
are systematically broken down. All allegations are summarily dismissed
as naxal propaganda.
(For more details please
read JFK's biography 'To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy
in the Administration of John F. Kennedy' by Kennedy's pointsman in
Vietnam and one time advocate of strategic hamlet program Roger Hilsman.
The pentagon papers describe what went wrong in Vietnam in quiet detail.
Also see "The Vietnamese 'Strategic Hamlets': A preliminary report"
by Donnell and Gerald and 'The Journal of Strategic Studies 1947-1972'
by Sylvia Potter)
The DGP also points out that
there is little similarity between Darfur crisis and Salwa Judum. David
Loyn of BBC, who visited both Dantewada and Darfur was the first person
to point out the similarities between the two. It might be too simplistic
to claim that Darfur crisis is nothing but sectoral violence between
two ethnic groups of Arab and Black muslims, as does the Sudanese government.
I am sad to see our DGP's summary dismissal of this most reprehensible
genocide in Darfur. Like Dantewada, the roots of the problem lie in
the years of neglect that the Darfur province faced in the hands of
Sudanese government. Darfur had a massive famine in 1983-84 killing
thousands of people, and that laid the seeds of rebellion. (Bastar also
had a famine in 1966-67 during which popular Raja Pravir Chandra Bhanj
Deo was killed in a police firing). Water, a precious resource in Sahara
lies in the root of the conflict. After two rebel groups started an
armed uprising in 2003, the Janjaweed, that is a ragtag bunch of private
goons with sophisticated arms, attacked the entire population. Janjaweed
would burn the entire villages. They would rape the women, and kill
at random. The rebels of Darfur also suppressed the people, but their
attrocities appear tame when compared to that done by Janjaweed. Janjaweed
would, after burning the villages and doing their loot, take possession
of the limited number of water points. On monday, 17th September, UN
Secretary general said that "this region's future also depends
on supplies of water". The kind of stories that came from Darfur
is not very dissimilar to what the people of Dantewada are saying in
sworn affidavits. Why did the Darfur crisis aggravate so much that around
200000 people killed and 2.5 million people are living in refugee camps
of Chad. Of course, the scale of casualties in Dantewada in last two
and a half years is nowhere close to what's happenned in Darfur. But
the politics and philosophy behind the crisis is the same.
The philosophy is that of
"arming local resistance groups". In May 2005, the top Janjaweed
leader, Musa Hilal, admitted that his militia was funded and supported
by the Sudanese national government. He said that in many regions, it
was the government that backed and directed the militia activities.
This has been proven as fact in numerous international fact finding
missions. It is this philosophy of forming, arming and supporting private
armies to do the state's bidding, is what sets the parallels between
Salwa Judum and the events across the globe. Another place where such
things were successfully tried is in Peru in the 90s, where its ex-president,
Alberto Fujimori armed private gangs to suppress a maoist kind of uprising
in that country. Last month Fujimori was proclaimed a human rights offender
in his country, and is now an absconder from Peru. Why would the state
ever arm and support private militia? Is the police not smart, capable
and equipped enough to fight insurgency? In almost all cases, these
untrained and unaccountable private militias are recruited to do the
dirty job. The jobs that the state armed forces cannot do because of
international obligations and the limits imposed by the constitution
of India. Who are these private armies accountable to?
Let me remind the DGP that
such tactics, although might seem to give results in short term, they
have always had disastrous consequences in the end. The private militia
always had proven to be a larger headache than the original rebellion.
Like, in Sierra Leone, the private militia turned into a private army
doing the bidding for diamond giant Debeers. They solved by force the
conflicts that the international diamond company had with the local
population. What is the future of Salwa Judum? What will the SPO do
after, let's suppose, the naxalites are driven out of Bastar. Will they
be regularised in the police force? Or will they end up doing the bidding
for Tata and Essar, two organisations that have already turned notorious
in Bastar for cheating the public.
Six years ago, George W Bush
asked the world to choose between liberty, freedom and democracy on
one side and mass murder, slaughter of innocents and terrorism on the
other. But using his excuse of protecting liberty, promoting freedom
and preserving democracy, Mr. Bush soon turned his attention towards
the oil-rich Iraq even before the attack on Al-Qaeda could reach a logical
conclusion. Some American companies considered close to the republicans,
like Haliburton (the oil company), Blackwater (the private security
group) , Dyncorp and CACI, to name a few, benefited immensely from this
war. But Al Qaeda has gotten stronger, America is more hated now, and
more than 1 million Iraqis lost their lives in the ensuing years.
Whatever genuine might be
his intentions, we don't want to be led down that path ever again. Mr.
Vishwaranjan asked us to take our pick between ''constitution and democracy'
vs 'people who want to destroy it using violence'. There is going on
a very prominent civil war in Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh in
the name of Naxalism and Salwa Judum. All of us have a right to know
who the real beneficiaries are in this civil war. The stories of Essar
and Tata steel plants, essar funds for Salwa Judum camps, their mining
leases, the MOUs being kept under wraps, the forced, undemocratic and
unconstitutional acquisition of land for these plants, the arrests,
the murders, the rapes, and the brazenness of the whole affair might
give us some clues.
Being an unabashed constitutionalist
and democrat myself like our DGP, I wish chhattisgarh police all the
success in their war against the naxalites. I would also offer all my
technical expertise in helping the police in their fight. But, just
like you cannot have sex to preserve virginity, you cannot destroy or
mess with the constitution to preserve it. If there are serious questions
regarding police's conduct, it is the moral responsibility of the DGP
to own them, and to find out ways to correct the institutional maladies.
I know that if there is anyone who is courageous enough to admit mistakes
and punish the wrongdoers, it is the current DGP of Chhattisgarh, Mr.
Vishwaranjan. Doing so will be the biggest morale booster for Chhattisgarh
police.
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