Home minister P Chidambaram recently said it is ‘certainly condemnable’ if big corporates are funding the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist). “We will pass on information about such payments to the state governments... it is for them to take action,” he said in Raipur, Chhattisgarh.
Wonder how anyone who’s been following the systematic manner in which the state has been colluding with big corporates to uproot and displace (often with force) adivasis so that it can facilitate the creation of mines, dams and power stations can take this as anything but balderdash—to borrow Mr Operation Greenhunt’s oft-used Britishism.
Surely, Chidambaram cannot be serious about action against corporates even in UPA-ruled states. It will be recalled how the then Assam CM Prafulla Kumar Mahanta sent shockwaves through the country in
September 1997 when he publicly alleged that ULFA was receiving funds from Tata Tea. Since then the Intelligence Bureau and other security agencies have often spoken of the tacit symbiotic understanding between big corporates and Maoists in the ‘mineral corridor.’
Surely Chidambaram’s stint with Vedanta Resources as non-executive director before he became the finance minister in 2004 must have made this abundantly clear to him. Do we really expect him to push for action under these circumstances?
Yet see how the same government uses its security forces against adivasis resisting displacement. Tribal rights activist Gladson Dungdung, who gave the Birsa Munda Memorial Lecture at TISS on Wednesday, pointed out how the most common charge trumped up against defenceless tribals is of being a Maoist sympathiser.
“They are told they are sympathisers since they provide food to the Maoists,” says Gladson who wonders, “Without protection, will any senior officer/minister do otherwise if 20 gunmen descend on their house demanding food?”
Look at the fate of activists like Arun Fereira, whose only crime was working toward educating tribal chidren. In 2008, Fereira was implicated in a case where 11 students from Chandrapur were arrested for links with the Maoists. Though Fereira was in jail, his name was added as an accused. Like in the past, on September 23, he was acquitted in this case too only to be rearrested for an offence registered in 2007.
Tired of Maharashtra home minister RR Patil not acknowledging anguished reminders sent by Fereira’s family, they went to meet state police chief K Subramaniam asking him to intervene on Thursday. In the presence of St Xavier’s college principal Fr Frazer Mascarenhas and BJP leader Shaina NC, Subramaniam promised “to look into the matter” and do his best.
Wonder how much relief that will provide to Arun’s five-year-old child who has not seen his father since he was six months. Wonder how one explains to a little kid that since his father is no corporate big shot, different standards apply.
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