Israel is a Rouge Nation ...US must distance from it

Reflections On The Flotilla Massacre

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By Pervez Hoodbhoy

Sunday, June 13, 2010

 
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Israel’s premeditated murder of the Mavi Marmara’s peace activists could become the turning point for the Palestinian struggle. Or, if the wrong conclusions are deduced, there’s a lot more misery ahead for the people of Gaza. A week after the event, it is time to ask some key questions and suggest answers.

Question: The decision to attack the 6-ship flotilla and stop it “at all cost” was a deliberate decision by the Israeli government. Given that international condemnation would surely follow, how can one understand Israel’s decision to go ahead?

Answer: The attack had little to do with “restoring Israel's deterrence” or capping the peashooters in Gaza. To understand Israel’s decision, one must hark back to Moshe Yaalon, then chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, who in 2002 said that “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”

The flotilla attack was aimed to send a clear message: foreign nationals and peace activists will be treated just as violently as the inmates of the Israeli gulag. The Israeli bulldozer that crushed Rachel Corrie, the 23-year old American-Jewish pro-Palestinian activist, stands ever-ready to crush challenges to absolute Israeli supremacy. It scarcely mattered that the world was watching or that on board was a Holocaust survivor, white-as-lilies members of parliament from European countries, and even a six-month baby of unknown color and descent. Discounting those from Muslim countries, including three from Pakistan, the constellation of those calling for an end to Gaza’s blockade was impressive. The hope of a violence-free ending was therefore reasonable. But that did not happen. Israel wanted Gazans to know that even the international community cannot save them. It reasons that a hopeless people would eventually give up fighting.  

That the peace flotilla was attacked in international waters, and that a Hamas leader was murdered this year by the Mossad in Dubai, is also noteworthy. Israel, in effect, has declared that it knows no boundaries.  It is truly a rogue nation.

Question: Why did the United States refuse to condemn the Israeli action, even though the cost it shall pay will be large?

The cost is indeed huge! Imagine that the US had allowed a meeting of the UN Security Council to criticize Israel, and had called for an open investigation by the International Court of Justice. In a jiffy, the key US interest across the world – that of fighting Al-Qaeda and Islamic extremism – would have been immensely strengthened. This one act may have bought more security for the US than increasing its defense budget by 100 billion dollars. The world would have felt so much better about America. The steam would have gone out of rabid jihadist organizations. Conversely, in refusing to condemn the atrocity, the United States lost an opportunity to rescue its tarnished international image of being a slave of Israel.

It is unprecedented in history for one state to set aside its own security, and that of its allies, in pursuing the interests of another state. So what on earth makes the US behave in this way? This is a fascinating question. Most people think that this is because of shared US-Israeli strategic interests and/or some compelling moral imperative.

But John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, two leading American academics whose book caused a storm, argue that neither is true. Unqualified US support for Israel, they say, is unnatural and unnecessary. Far from being a loyal ally, Israel regularly spies on its principal patron. Moreover, Israel is racist while the US is democratic. Unlike the US, where people enjoy equal legal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state where citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Indeed, even Pakistan’s America-hating ulema think this way – they line up to send their children to the US and pray for grant of their Green Cards.

But, say Mearsheimer and Walt, America’s uncritical support for Israel actually owes to the Israeli lobby in the US. AIPAC (American Israel Public Action Committee) is a hugely influential organization that was ranked second behind the American Association of Retired People, but ahead of the AFL-CIO and the National Rifle Association. Thus, during the bombardment of Lebanon in the summer of 2006, the House of Representatives passed a resolution of total solidarity with Israel by 410 votes to eight. Today the Israeli tail wags the American dog. This is remarkable: Jews belonged to the oppressed people of America until a few decades ago, and only conditionally allowed to set foot on American soil although Hitler was sending them off to be gassed.

Noam Chomsky, my guru and friend, who was turned away from entering the West Bank some weeks ago, has long argued that Israel’s time is running out. Decades ago he wrote that “Israel is deliberately turning itself into perhaps the most hated country in the world, and is also losing the allegiance of the population of the West, including younger American Jews, who are unlikely to tolerate its persistent shocking crimes for long.” 

Is Chomsky right? Maybe. America’s formerly unqualified support for Israel is now qualified. Polls show that Democrat voters are unwilling to give Israel a blank check anymore. And, a glance at the Israeli press shows that while President Obama refused to condemn the massacre, his clear disapproval has made him Israel’s enemy number-one. But Obama, like other US presidents, is helpless before a political establishment which has internalized a belief that Israel should never be criticized. The consensus on Israel-can-do-no-wrong is only just beginning to crack.

Question: why are the Palestinians losing so badly when others have won against larger, more powerful, enemies?

The fact is that Vietnam lost a million people but won; Timor finally achieved independence from Indonesia; Cuba has withstood siege for 50 years; and Venezuela under Chavez is resisting America.

The usual excuses for Palestinian failure can be trotted out: grand conspiracies, disunity, and lack of firepower. But surely it’s time to get to the real reasons. The first is that of poor tactics: the weak cannot behave as the strong do. The leadership made disastrous decisions in Lebanon in 1982, then Lebanon again in 2006 (Hasan Nasrallah admitted his mistake), and Gaza in 2009. In arguing Palestine’s case before the Western world, Palestinian leaders and diplomats have performed pathetically, and American Zionists readily shot holes into them. But they viewed men like Edward Said and Eqbal Ahmad with great alarm because, with passion and reason, these stalwarts of secular humanism refuted Israeli propaganda in an idiom that the world could understand. Alas, they are gone.

Human history is a long story of injustice and cruelty. In our times, nothing stands out more vividly than Palestine. But, tragically, this struggle for justice has been turned into a religious cause. When the secular PLO led the Palestinians, it commanded power and respect. After the 1982 debacle in Beirut, Hamas took over. Sending suicide bombers on to Israeli civilian targets decimated international support, heightened Israeli repression, and led to The Wall.

The tragic loss of life notwithstanding, the flotilla episode is a huge moral victory for Palestine and a defeat for Israel. Israel was shown up to be paranoid, dominated by fundamentalist nuclear-armed crazies, and trigger happy. The moral high ground has again turned out to be the Palestinian’s principal weapon. It must not be wasted by firing off a few toy rockets from Gaza. Israelis love war and fear peace. This is why struggle for Palestine must be fought with different tactics.

Question: why are we Pakistanis so hyped-up about what Israel does but blind to what we do to our people and those in neighboring countries?

Let’s face the truth: Israeli crimes are extremely serious but they pale in front of those committed almost daily by religious extremists in Pakistan.  Israel murdered nine peace activists of the Mavi Marmara, but just hours earlier jihadists had killed over ninety Ahmadis peacefully praying in a mosque in Lahore.  Israel starves Gaza, but the Taliban have imposed an even more brutal blockade of Shias in Parachinar and Kurram. Israel does not amputate the limbs of its enemies or decapitate them, but the Taliban do. Israel has destroyed schools for Palestinians in Gaza, but the Taliban have blown up nearly a thousand schools.

Of course, it is not just the religious extremists but also our state – the Pakistani state and army – that is guilty of atrocities. Israeli forces have never been accused of mass rape, but the Bengalis have never forgiven the Pakistani army for what it did in 1971. Israel is responsible for many abductions and disappearances, but does anyone have an estimate for the number of “disappeared persons” in Baluchistan? One could go on. So, instead of riding the moral high horse and using different yardsticks here and there, it is time for us Pakistanis to also reflect upon the crimes of those from within us – and stop more wrongs from happening.

The author teaches at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad

Monsanto :The Principal Enemy of Peasant Sustainable Agriculture and Food Sovereignty for People.

By Beverly Bell
A new earthquake" is what peasant farmer leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste of the Peasant Movement of Papay (MPP) called the news that Monsanto will be donating 60,000 seed sacks (475 tons) of hybrid corn seeds and vegetable seeds, some of them treated with highly toxic pesticides. The MPP has committed to burning Monsanto's seeds, and has called for a march to protest the corporation's presence in Haiti on June 4, for World Environment Day.

In an open letter sent May 14, Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, the executive director of MPP and the spokesperson for the National Peasant Movement of the Congress of Papay (MPNKP), called the entry of Monsanto seeds into Haiti "a very strong attack on small agriculture, on farmers, on biodiversity, on Creole seeds ... and on what is left our environment in Haiti."(1) Haitian social movements have been vocal in their opposition to agribusiness imports of seeds and food, which undermines local production with local seed stocks. They have expressed special concern about the import of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

For now, without a law regulating the use of GMOs in Haiti, the Ministry of Agriculture rejected Monsanto's offer of Roundup Ready GMOs seeds. In an email exchange, a Monsanto representative assured the Ministry of Agriculture that the seeds being donated are not GMOs.

Elizabeth Vancil, Monsanto's director of development initiatives, called the news that the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture approved the donation "a fabulous Easter gift" in an April email.(2) Monsanto is known for aggressively pushing seeds, especially GMOs seeds, in both the global North and South, including through highly restrictive technology agreements with farmers who are not always made fully aware of what they are signing. According to interviews by this writer with representatives of Mexican small farmer organizations, they then find themselves forced to buy Monsanto seeds each year, under conditions they find onerous and at costs they sometimes cannot afford.

The hybrid corn seeds Monsanto has donated to Haiti are treated with the fungicide Maxim XO, and the calypso tomato seeds are treated with thiram.(3) Thiram belongs to a highly toxic class of chemicals called ethylene bisdithiocarbamates (EBDCs). Results of tests of EBDCs on mice and rats caused concern to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which then ordered a special review. The EPA determined that EBDC-treated plants are so dangerous to agricultural workers that they must wear special protective clothing when handling them. Pesticides containing thiram must contain a special warning label, the EPA ruled. The EPA also barred marketing of the chemicals for many home garden products, because it assumes that most gardeners do not have adequately protective clothing.(4) Monsanto's passing mention of thiram to Ministry of Agriculture officials in an email contained no explanation of the dangers, nor any offer of special clothing or training for those who will be farming with the toxic seeds.

Haitian social movements' concern is not just about the dangers of the chemicals and the possibility of future GMOs imports. They claim that the future of Haiti depends on local production with local food for local consumption, in what is called food sovereignty. Monsanto's arrival in Haiti, they say, is a further threat to this.

"People in the US need to help us produce, not give us food and seeds. They're ruining our chance to support ourselves," said farmer Jonas Deronzil of a peasant cooperative in the rural region of Verrettes.(5)

Monsanto's history has long drawn ire from environmentalists, health advocates and small farmers, going back to its production of Agent Orange during the Vietnam war. Exposure to Agent Orange has caused cancer in an untold number of US veterans, and the Vietnamese government claims that 400,000 Vietnamese people were killed or disabled by Agent Orange, and 500,000 children were born with birth defects as a result of their exposure.(6)

Monsanto's former motto, "Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible," has been replaced by "Imagine." Its web site home page claims it "help[s] farmers around the world produce more while conserving more. We help farmers grow yield sustainably so they can be successful, produce healthier foods ... while also reducing agriculture's impact on our environment."(7) The corporation's record does not support the claims.

Together with Syngenta, Dupont and Bayer, Monsanto controls more than half of the world's seeds.(8) The company holds almost 650 seed patents, most of them for cotton, corn and soy, and almost 30 percent of the share of all biotech research and development. Monsanto came to own such a vast supply by buying major seed companies to stifle competition, patenting genetic modifications to plant varieties and suing small farmers. Monsanto is also one of the leading manufacturers of GMOs.

As of 2007, Monsanto had filed 112 lawsuits against US farmers for alleged technology contract violations of GMOs patents, involving 372 farmers and 49 small agricultural businesses in 27 different states. From these, Monsanto has won more than $21.5 million in judgments. The multinational appears to investigate 500 farmers a year, in estimates based on Monsanto's own documents and media reports.(9)

"Farmers have been sued after their field was contaminated by pollen or seed from someone else's genetically engineered crop [or] when genetically engineered seed from a previous year's crop has sprouted, or 'volunteered,' in fields planted with non-genetically engineered varieties the following year," said Andrew Kimbrell and Joseph Mendelson of the Center for Food Safety.(10)

In Colombia, Monsanto has received upwards of $25 million from the US government for providing Roundup Ultra in the antidrug fumigation efforts of Plan Colombia. Roundup Ultra is a highly concentrated version of Monsanto's glyphosate herbicide, with additional ingredients to increase its lethality. Colombian communities and human rights organizations have charged that the herbicide has destroyed food crops, water sources and protected areas, and has led to increased incidents of birth defects and cancers.

Vía Campesina, the world's largest confederation of farmers with member organizations in more than 60 countries, has called Monsanto one of the "principal enemies of peasant sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty for all peoples."(11) They claim that as Monsanto and other multinationals control an ever larger share of land and agriculture, they force small farmers out of their land and jobs. They also claim that the agribusiness giants contribute to climate change and other environmental disasters, an outgrowth of industrial agriculture.(12)

The Vía Campesina coalition launched a global campaign against Monsanto last October 16, on International World Food Day, with protests, land occupations and hunger strikes in more than 20 countries. They carried out a second global day of action against Monsanto on April 17 of this year, in honor of Earth Day.

Nongovernmental organizations in the US are challenging Monsanto's practices, too. The Organic Consumers Association has spearheaded the campaign "Millions Against Monsanto," calling on the company to stop intimidating small family farmers, stop marketing untested and unlabeled genetically engineered foods to consumers and stop using billions of dollars of US taypayers' money to subsidize GMOs crops.(13)

The Center for Food Safety has led a four-year legal challenge to Monsanto that has just made it to the US Supreme Court. After successful litigation against Monsanto and the US Department of Agriculture for illegal promotion of Roundup Ready Alfalfa, the court heard the Center for Food Safety's case on April 27. A decision on this first-ever Supreme Court case about GMOs is now pending.(14)

"Fighting hybrid and GMO seeds is critical to save our diversity and our agriculture," Jean-Baptiste said in an interview in February. "We have the potential to make our lands produce enough to feed the whole population and even to export certain products. The policy we need for this to happen is food sovereignty, where the county has a right to define it own agricultural policies, to grow first for the family and then for local market, to grow healthy food in a way which respects the environment and Mother Earth."

Many thanks to Moira Birss for her assistance with research and writing.

1. Group email from Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, May 14, 2010.
2. Email from Elizabeth Vancil to Emmanuel Prophete, director of seeds at the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture, and others; released by the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture, date unavailable.
3. Ibid.
4. Extension Toxicology Network, Pesticide Information Project of the Cooperative Extension Offices of Cornell University, Michigan State University, Oregon State University and University of California at Davis.
5. Jonas Deronzil's comments are from an interview in April. He was not specifically discussing Monsanto.
6. "MSNBC," January 23, 2004. "Study Finds Link Between Agent Orange, Cancer." The Globe and Mail, June 12, 2008. "Last Ghost of the Vietnam War."
7. www.monsanto.com
8. La Vía Campesina, "La Vía Campesina carries out Global Day of Action against Monsanto," October 16, 2009.
9. Center for Food Safety, "Monsanto vs. US Farmers," November 2007.
10. Andrew Kimbrell and Joseph Mendelson, Center for Food Safety, "Monsanto vs. US Farmers," 2005.
11. La Vía Campesina, October 16, 2009, Op. Cit.
12. La Vía Campesina, "La Vía Campesina Call to Action 17 April 2010 - Join the International Day of Peasant Struggle," February 23, 2010.
13. Organic Consumers Association, "Taxpayers Forced to Fund Monsanto's Poisoning of Third World," Finland, Minnesota.
14. Center for Food Security, "Update: CFS Fighting Monsanto in the Supreme Court," May 11, 2010.

Am I A Maoist?

By Gladson Dungdung

I appeared in public life through my human rights works, writings and speeches. However, I reached to a larger audience when I got a chance to appear in CNN-IBN and NDTV-24×7 debates on the issue of Naxalism last year. After these debates, I got immense positive and negative responses from across the country. I was upset for sometime precisely because of the most negative responses I got from youth who are running behind the market forces unknowingly. They ruthlessly questioned me about whether I get money from Pakistan, Nepal or China for speaking against the Indian State. I responded to a few of them with detailed explanations, but many believe P Chidambaram’s theory of this side or that side; therefore they are not ready to accept my rational arguments.
Meanwhile, I continued my work of raising the genuine issues of the marginalized people of India. Amidst, the so-called operation green hunt (OGH) was also launched in the state of Jharkhand in the name of cleansing the Maoists. I passionately attempted to bring out the truth of the OGH, intention of the state behind the OGH and sufferings of the villagers caused by the OGH. As a result, so-called educated people intensified more personal attacks against me. There are also some e-groups where they attempted to coin me as a Maoist sympathizer and supporter. Finally, they have portrayed me as a Maoist Ideologue. I just laugh, laugh and laugh. Precisely, because how can a person suddenly become a Maoist ideologue without having an in-depth study on Maoism? I have never read about Maoism.
I deliberately do not read about any ideology because I know that Maoists teach the Adivasis about Maoism, Gandhians preach them about Gandhism and Marxists ask them to walk on Marxism; but no one bothers about Adivasism, which is the best ‘ism’ among these, which perhaps leads to a just and equitable society. I have been raising questions about how the Indian State has deliberately destroyed the Adivasism. The Adivasi religion was not recognized by the Indian constitution, traditional self-governance was neglected, culture was destroyed, lands were grabbed and our resources were snatched in the name of development. But what do we get out of it? Should we still keep quiet? Are we not the citizens of this country who need to be treated equally? Do they care about our sufferings?
I’m one of those unfortunate persons, who have lost everything for the so-called development of the nation and am struggling for survival even today. When I was just one year old, my family was displaced. Our 20 acres of fertile land was taken away from us in the name of development. Our ancestral land was submerged in a Dam, which came up at Chinda River near Simdega town in 1980. We lost our house, agricultural land and garden but we were paid merely Rs.11 thousand as compensation. When the whole village protested against it they were sent to Hazaribagh Jail. Can a family of 6 members ensure food, clothing, shelter, education and health facilities for whole life with Rs.11 thousand?
After displacement, we had no choice but to proceed towards the dense forest for ensuring our livelihood. We settled down in the forest after buying a small patch of land. We used to collect flowers, fruits and firewood to sustain our family. We also had sufficient livestock, which supported our economy. Needless to say that the state suppression continued with us. When we were living in the forest, my father was booked under many cases filed by the forest department (the biggest landlord of the country) alleging him as an encroacher and woodcutter. There was no school building in our village - therefore we used to study under the trees, and when there was rain our school was closed. But my father taught us to always fight for justice. Though he was struggling to sustain our family, he never stopped his fight for the community.

Unfortunately, on 20 June 1990, my parents were brutally murdered while they were going to Simdega civil court to attend a case and 4 kids were orphaned. Can anyone imagine how we suffered afterwards? The worst thing is the culprits were not brought to justice. Can anyone tell us why the Indian State did not deliver justice to us, who snatched our resource in the name of development? Why there is no electricity in my village even today? Why my people do not get water for their field whose lands were taken for the irrigation projects? Why there is no electricity in those houses, who have given their land for the power project? And why people are still living in small mud houses whose lands were taken for the steel plants? It seems that the Adivasis are only born to suffer and other to enjoy over our graves.

After a long struggle, we all got back to life but my pain and sufferings did not end here. When I was working as a state programme officer in a project funded by the European Commission, a senior government officer and an editor of a newspaper (both from the upper caste) questioned my credentials saying that being an Adivasi, how could I have gotten into such a prestigious position? Similarly, when my friend had taken me to meet a newly wedded couple of the upper caste in Ranchi, I was not allowed to meet them saying that being an Adivasi if I meet the couple, they might become unauspicious and their whole life would be at stake. Was I a devil for them?
However, when I joined another firm, I was totally undermined and not given the position which I highly deserved. I was racially discriminated against, economically exploited and mentally disturbed. Can anyone tell me why I should not fight for justice? Can those so-called supporters of the unjust development process, who have not given even one inch of land for the so-called national interest, coin me as the Maoist ideologue, sympathizer and supporter respond to me: why should I shut up my mouth and stop writing against injustice, inequality and discrimination?
I have lost everything in the name of development and now I have nothing to lose therefore I’m determined to fight for my own people because I do not want them to be trapped in the name of development. I have taken the democratic path of struggle, which the Indian Constitution guarantees through Article 19. A pen, mouth and mind are my weapons. I’m neither a Maoist nor a Gandhian but I’m an Adivasi who is determined to fight for its own people, whom the Indian State has alienated, displaced and dispossessed from their resources and is continually doing it in the name of development, national security and national interest even today.

Gladson Dungdung is a Human Rights Activist and Writer from Jharkhand. He can be reached at gladsonhractivist@gmail.com

Their Final Letters

Farmers' Suicides

By P. SAINATH
Seeking authenticity for his letter to the Prime Minister and the President, Ramachandra Raut composed it with care on Rs.100 non-judicial stamp paper. Then he added a few more addressees, including his village sarpanch and the police, in the hope that it got home someplace. Then he killed himself. A mere digit in the nearly 250 farm suicides that hit Vidarbha in four months; but a villager desperate to be heard on the reasons for his action: “The two successive years of crop failure is the reason.” Yet, “bank employees came twice to my home to recover my loans”. (Despite a government order to go slow on recovery in a region hit by crisis, crop failure and more recently, drought).
Raut's suicide being the third in a month in Dhotragoan in Washim district, the village wants to see it spreads no further. “We try and meet every evening for an hour, all of us, anyone who will come,” says Nandkishore Shankar Raut from Dhotragaon. “The idea is to keep people's morale up.” So Dhotragaon counsels itself. Ramachandra Raut's letter was also an appeal not to be misunderstood. “Don't trouble anyone in my home,” it tells the police. “I am fully responsible for my action.” The stamp paper suicide note carries the seal of the deputy treasury officer of Mangrulpir tehsil dated March 29, and that of the stamp vendor who issued it to Raut on April 7. Raut filled it in and took his life the same day.
The family owes the banks Rs.1.5 lakh ($3,285). His village pooled money to observe his 13th day ritual, sparing Raut's indebted family further expense.
Unique
Vidarbha's farm suicides have been unique in one respect. Some of those taking their lives have addressed suicide notes to the Prime Minister, the Chief Minister or the Finance Minister. In August 2006 Rameshwar Lonkar of Wardha complained, in his note, to Dr. Manmohan Singh, just a month after the Prime Minister went to his region. “After the Prime Minister's visit and reports of a fresh crop loan, I thought I could live again,” Lonkar wrote. But he found himself rebuffed at every stage while seeking that loan. Sahebrao Adhao's last testament in Amravati the same year painted a picture of usury, debt and land grab.
In November 2006, cotton grower Rameshwar Kuchankar addressed the then Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh in his note. He scribbled it down moments before taking his life in Yavatmal. “We are fed up with the delay in procurement and crashing prices ... Mr. Chief Minister, give us the price.” He also warned State Home Minister R.R. Patil that if the price did not improve at once, suicides would soar. They did.
“These notes are the last cry of despair of people trying to tell their government the reasons for agrarian distress,” says Kishor Tiwari. Mr. Tiwari heads the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti, a body fighting for farmers' rights. “We set up expert committees to tell us why farmers commit suicide when they are themselves telling us the reasons with such clarity in their suicide notes.” The notes often speak of debt, soaring cultivation costs, high cost of living and volatile prices. Some of them trash regressive policies and a credit crunch that have destroyed thousands of farmers here in the past decade. Crop failure and drought coming atop these, ruin fragile lives.
Two years of crop failure in a single crop district can mean 34 months with no income. Vidarbha gained little from the 2008 Farm Loan Waiver which addressed only bank debt. The waiver excluded those farmers holding more than five acres, and made no distinction between dry and irrigated holdings. In Western Vidarbha, farmers take more loans from moneylenders than from banks. And, the average land holding is around seven acres in this mostly unirrigated region.
Of the five states that account for two-thirds of all of India's farm suicides, Maharashtra is by far the worst. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) the State logged 41,404 farm suicides between 1997 and 2008. That is, more than a fifth of the national total of nearly 200,000 in that same period. Of those 12 years, NCRB data show, the years 2006-08 have been the very worst. Within the State, Vidarbha has been the focal point of the tragedy.

Back to square one
However, the situation here seems like a throwback to that of 2005-06, before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit. Hit by a spate of suicides at the time, the State government spoke in many voices. In mid-2005, it gave out a figure of just 141 distress suicides across the whole State since 2001. Challenged in court, it revised this to 524. When the National Commission of Farmers team led by Dr. M.S. Swaminathan visited later the same year, it conceded there had been over 300 in the single district of Yavatmal. The final figure for the whole State that year, put out by the NCRB, was actually 3,926 suicides.
“For a while,” says Mr. Tiwari of the VJAS, “the State revealed real numbers on the website of the Vasantrao Naik Farmers' Self-Reliance Mission. That was because of Dr. Singh's visit and a lashing from the courts.” In fact, those figures were far higher than anything even the VJAS had recorded. This year, however, the website's columns for 2010 are so far blank. The Agriculture Ministry's reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha, based on State claims, says just 23 farm suicides occurred between January and April 8.
This, even as other arms of government (and the Leader of the Opposition) put out figures ten times as high. The Vasantrao Naik Mission has itself given out signed data confirming there were 62 such deaths in January alone. (Though it has not put this up on its website.)
The numbers are routinely lowered by tagging hundreds of suicides as “non-genuine”. That is, “ineligible for compensation”. Aimed at curbing the amounts the State has to fork out to bereaved families, this move has caused much damage. “We are deluding ourselves,” says a senior official. “No wonder Ramachandra Raut felt the need to address his letter on stamp paper to the Prime Minister and President as well. He knew nothing would be taken seriously here in Maharashtra.”

(P. Sainath is the rural affairs editor of The Hindu, where this piece appears, and is the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories From India's Poorest Districts. He can be reached at: psainath@vsnl.com)

Voices of Resistance Becoming Clearer

Chidambaram's Dominoes Are Beginning To Fall

By Trevor Selvam

17 April, 2010

The dominoes are knocking over each other at such a rapid pace that India should not be surprised if Naxalites and Maoists find curious backers in the highest echelons of the State. Not because people up there are particularly endeared to Naxalite strategy and tactics, but some of them are reconsidering their options and have realized that in this insane rush towards ramrodding India into a neo-liberal Valhalla, a large majority of the citizens of India are being ripped apart, torn asunder and shoved into the gutters, sewers, swamps and bogs of this nation. Something is going wrong and if a course correction is not made now, things are going down the tubes to hell in a hand basket. The collateral damage has been so obvious that no less than the Central Government’s own offices have declared the attempts at displacing the “poorest of the poor” (the PM’s own words), and the forced evacuation and hamletization of aboriginal people, as the “biggest land grab since Columbus. ” Whoever drafted that phrase or statement is an extraordinarily thoughtful and historically wary person. Because she or he knew what was around the bend. And it has come about faster than the powers ever imagined. It was supposed to have been done surreptitiously, quietly and with the fanfare and dog and pony show associated with 9% growth drowning out the screams of the displaced. It did not pan out that way.

Indians, be they analysts, economists, bureaucrats, historians, scientists, advocates, IAS officers and even retired senior commanders in the services are not unconscious and ahistorical babblers. After all Indians bore the brunt of the British Empire for two hundred years. The process of colonization is such that it leaves behind a genealogy of awareness, of remembrance, the ability to connect the dots and not be taken for a ride. Indians pass on the lessons of their parents’ generation to their next in line. To put it bluntly, Indians are not fools. They do not take kindly to the incessant repetition of official speak. Just as Iraqis and Afghanis aren’t either. Indians know that occupation, whether it is by goras or by their proxies are never tolerated quietly.

The sons and daughters and the grandchildren of freedom fighters, of Gandhian activists, of Sarvodaya activists, followers of Vinoba Bhave, of the Congress Socialists, of the followers of “Nehruvian socialism”, of the followers of JP Narayan, of those the British chose to call “terrorists” and old-style retired Communists from the Tebhaga and Telengana period, know where “the buck stops.” They may not be supporters of the Maoists, but they know that this time around, something is going terribly wrong and this mad race to “modernize” India has only one group of takers—those who salivate over the glam and glitter of Ratan Tata, Narendra Modi, the Ambanis, the Jindals, the Mallyas and their main backers, Chidambaram, Ahluwalia, Kamal Nath and a handful of others.

The dominoes are beginning to fall. And despite the clear cut statement by the PM’s office that all statements on the Maoist issue will only come from the Home Minister’s office, within twenty four hours, Mr. Digvijay Singh spoke up, and he is no small fish.

“He (Mr Chidambaram) is treating it purely as a law and order problem without taking into consideration the issues that affect the tribals," Digvijay Singh, wrote in the Economic Times. Further on he went on to say, “We can't solve this problem by ignoring the hopes and aspirations of the people living in these areas... In a civilised society and a vibrant democracy, ultimately it is the people who matter," he added.

Mr. Mani Shankar Aiyar, the former Minister of Petroleum and Panchayati Raj had at one time this to say about Chidambaram. “His deposition over four sessions in the witness-box has shown him up to have been a most incompetent minister of state for internal security (1986-89) and most negligent as minister in charge of the investigation into Rajiv Gandhi's assassination from May 24, 1995, till his defection to the TMC on April Fool's Day, 1996. ” And in an add-on to Digvijay Singh’s recent article in the Economic Times, Aiyar said, "Digvijay is not one hundred per cent right, he is not even one thousand per cent right, he is one lakh per cent right." At an MSN India site, the following is stated. “ And at a conference on The Dynamics of Rural Transformation, organised by Planning Commission member Mihir Shah, Aiyar presented a paper which said "the consistent failure of the state governments concerned, and the total lack of conscientiousness on the part of the Centre in urging the states concerned to conscientiously implement, in letter and spirit, the provisions of PESA -- Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act -- have contributed more than any other single factor to the aggravation of the situation in forest areas. This has facilitated the mushrooming of insurgency directed against the state in the heart of India."
In the article in The Economic Times on Wednesday, Digvijay Singh further accused Chidambaram, of "intellectual arrogance". There are many in the Congress, including those who are close to Mrs. Sonia Gandhi and her son, who have maintained a significant distance from the genocidal verbiage of “wiping out, sanitizing and cleansing” that has come from the entourage of Mr. Chidambaram, his Police and Paramilitary as well as the loyal mainstream media. In the final analysis, there is nothing sanctified about “law and order” and they know it. Because lawlessness has been a defining character of governance in the Indian countryside.

The chips are going to fall, one by one. It is only a matter of time, before Indians from all walks of life will speak up. It does not have to be the tireless voices of the Roys, the Navlakhas, Sundars, Bhusans, Himanshu Kumars only. And it will not be the voices of Justice PB Sawant and Suresh, Professor Yash Pal, Drs. Giri, Bhargava and Subramanium who officiated in the Indian Peoples Tribunal either. Soon other journals and magazines will join Tehelka, Outlook, Mainstream, Open magazines and occasionally The Hindu and even 24 Ghanta (the Kolkata TV channel), as well. Because, there is a tradition in India of quietly re-visiting the past and not simply concocting a present. There is a tradition of thoughtfulness and a renaissance mentality that gently warns against the rabid promotion of the “us and them” dichotomy. There is a tradition in India of being alert to upstarts who want to steal the show.

Actors, actresses, scientists, sports personalities will also speak up. News channels, despite the corporate sponsorship they enjoy, will eventually break their bondage and slip in the truth from the hills and rivers of Dandakaranya. There is a limit to how much an entire nation can be duped into this proto-fascist frenzy. Shades of George Bush, post-911! It lasted for a while and Ms. Susan Sonntag, Gore Vidal and a host of others were similarly brutally abused for questioning the rabid war-mongering and xenophobia that followed. So will it happen in India. Even in the Bombay movie tradition, there is a long list of Sahnis, Kapoors, Azmis, Abbas, the heirs in Bengal of Bijon Bhattacharya and Shombhu Mitra and the musical tradition of Salil Choudhury, Sahir Ludhianvi, Majrooh Sultanpuri and others all over the country will come out and have their voices be heard.

This is a fork in the road. And if you take the wrong end of the fork, there is no retreat. Hidden agendas will not work in this India. Whether you are a Maoist supporter or not, the facts are clear that the Maoists are NOT on the wrong side of history. You cannot juggle the reality by endlessly discussing the dichotomy of law and order versus development. This is a falsification of the debate. To thump your chest and bemoan the plight of “ our Jawans” as the CPI(Marxist) and the BJP recently did in Parliament, smacks of the same anti-intellectual tradition that followed 911 in the US.

The Maoists have, as per their own interpretations, clearly figured out what is going disastrously wrong and they have chosen to highlight this. Their fight has been a fight of resistance, albeit violent. And while the Maoists did not choose violence as their first step ( the counter-Maoists can continue to whine away about the Maoists constitutional edict to seize power by armed struggle etc, highlighting the aspect of power seizure as if it is an overnight coup d’état and not a long drawn out struggle for structural change) they have no choice but to defend their gains. For a long time, the fathers and mothers of liberalization sold the story to the media and who in turn parroted it out, day in and out that India needed to “liberalize.” Behind that well chosen misnomer, the Indian state sold a bill of goods to India’s proto-gullible middle class that questioning this “liberalization” would amount to un-patriotic activity. And the bloggers, twitterers, facebookers went all out to spread the same gospel. Well, that balance is now being tipped. Scores of blogs and sites have now hit out hard against this one sided misrepresentation.

If India was the same nation, it was some fifteen years ago, it would not attract much attention, either internally or externally. The times have changed. Today, what happens in Dantewada is written about in Washington DC, in San Francisco, in Moscow, in Amsterdam, London, Singapore, Paris and Johannesburg within hours. Call it what you will, there are representatives of the new media, stationed everywhere, picking up on each other’s pronouncements and belting out stories instantaneously. And some of these stories do not bode well for the folks who quietly promoted the camp of the suave and cocky Mr. P. Chidambaram. Because word has gotten around that within the ruling corridors that there is considerable double taking or to put it somewhat euphemistically some soul searching going on. Mr. Chidambaram had some vague notions that one day he would be an applicant for the position of the PM of this country. Dynasty or not, the Gandhi family knows that Chidambaram is a chip of the old block. For those of you who remember, this is the progeny of the Old Congress Syndicate. The ruling class of India are not a monolithic block and they continue to have their own skirmishes and cock-fights like Morarji Desai and Sanjiva Reddy on one side and the VV Giris, Indira-clan on the other side. Let us not forget that out of the Indian electorate of 714 million, 153,482,356 voted for the Congress party (21% of the electorate) and Manmohan Singh had to run in Assam and Chidambaram required a recount to get their seats. Within the UPA, there are plenty of forces who are not going to put up with the high-handedness of the Chidambaram coterie.

Somewhere amongst the denizens in India’s ruling corridors there are families, groupings, influences that have a long lineage going back to India’s struggle to free itself from Britain. In that lineage, non-alignment did well. Playing one superpower against the other. Despite the hidebound theories of the ruling classes’ propensities, the fact is that after all is said and done, the ruling class is not united. On the one hand there are the outright compradors and on the other side are the compromisers who desperately wish for a new superpower. There has always been an Indian state of mind, which eventually shakes itself out of its torpor and calls a spade a spade.

The people of India and I mean those who do not read blogs and do not know who George Dick Obama could be, vote with their fists, when they are kicked around too much. Mrs. Indira Gandhi found that out. The BJP realized that in no time. Karat and Yechury smarted under the same blows and Buddhadev Bhattacharya is going to find it out pretty soon. Even though voter turn out in India is still hardly anything to be proud of, when Indians do vote they vote with their minds. (Countercurrents.org)

Tribes and Skies

 by Zygmunt Bauman

The 'tribe' focused on by Calvino, a tribe of coconut gatherers, is - as the title of the story suggests - addicted to 'watching the sky'. The sky it watches obsessively and intensely happens to be a sight that is genuinely fascinating and truly rewarding to watch: it is full of 'new celestial bodies', like jet planes, flying saucers, rockets, and guided missiles . . . While the tribe watches, the tribal witch doctors feel obliged to explain, authoritatively, to their fellow tribesmen the meaning of what they are seeing. They tell the tribesmen that what is currently happening in the sky is a sure sign that the day is fast approaching when the slavery and poverty which has tormented the tribe for centuries will come to an end. Soon 'the barren savannah will bring forth millet and maize', so the tribe will no longer be doomed to feeding itself and surviving, day in, day out, by picking coconuts. And so - here comes the crunch - 'it is hardly worth us racking our brains over new ways of emerging from our present situation; we should trust in the Great Prophecy, rally around its only rightful interpreters, without asking to know more . . .'

Meanwhile, on earth, in that valley where the tribe had built their huts of straw and mud, from which they wandered out daily in search of coconuts and to which they returned, day in, day out, things were also changing. Previously, merchants occasionally arrived in the valley to buy coconuts from the gatherers; the merchants cheated on price, but the clever tribesmen managed to outsmart and fool them time and again, avenging their cheating for good measure. Now, however, the merchants had stopped coming. Instead, an outpost had been opened in the valley by a brand new establishment called Nicer Nut Corporation, whose agents purchased, wholesale, the totality of the coconut crop. The corporation, unlike the old-style travelling traders, allowed no haggling and no opportunities for trickery: prices were fixed in advance, take it or leave it. But, of course, if you 'leave it', you might as well forget your chances of survival until the next batch of coconuts is brought into the valley from picking escapades. On one point, however, the agents of the Nicer Nut Corporation wholeheartedly agree with the tribal witch doctors (and vice versa). They all talk about missiles in the sky and about the news they augur. And the agents, just like the witch doctors, insist that beyond all reasonable doubt 'it is in the power of these shooting stars that our entire destiny lies'.

The teller of the story shares in the destinies and habits of his tribe. Like the rest of the tribe, he spends his evenings at the entrance of his straw and mud hut, closely watching the sky. Like the other tribesmen, he attentively listens to the witch doctors and takes to heart and memorizes what they, and the agents of the Nicer Nut Corporation, keep saying. But he also thinks for himself (or, more precisely, his thoughts think themselves in his mind, without having asked his permission: an idea occurs to him which, he confesses, 'I can't get out of my head'). He thinks that 'a tribe that relies entirely on the will of shooting stars, whatever fortune they may bring, will always sell off its coconuts cheap'.

In another short story, Beheading the Heads, Italo Calvino points out that television (here he goes straight to the point, skipping the allegory of a sky filled with shooting stars, 'television' itself being a potent metaphor for so many aspects of our liquid modern life) 'changed a lot of things' - though not necessarily the things which our own, new and improved, technologically sophisticated witch doctors (now renamed 'spin doctors') privately like to pride themselves on having craftily and stealthily changed, while praising television for those changes.

Among things that TV did indeed change, Calvino suggests, is the way we view our leaders (here, 'our leaders' stands for much a larger collection of people who were previously distant and whom we used to hear without seeing, let alone watching: idols, stars, celebrities, all those people we now watch daily, and closely, expecting entertainment, fun and all the illumination and guidance worth getting, and to whom television accords the same treatment as it does to 'our leaders'). Once they were remote figures somewhere high up on the platform, or shown in portraits 'assuming expressions of conventional pride'. Now however, thanks to TV 'everybody can pore over the slightest movements of the features, the irritated twitch of the eyelids under spotlights, the nervous moistening of the lips between one word and another'. In a nutshell, once they arrived so close to us, indeed inside our sitting rooms and bedrooms, our leaders came to appear terribly banal, like the rest of us. And mortal, like the rest of us - that is, arriving only to go away again. Appearing in order to disappear. Clinging to power only to lose it. The sole advantage they seem to have over us, ordinary mortals, is that they are destined for a public, not a private death - 'the death we are sure to be there for, all together' ...

Tongue in cheek, though not entirely, Calvino goes as far as suggesting that it is our new awareness of this which explains why, so long as a politician lives, she or he 'will enjoy our interested, anticipatory concern'.

And finally come words so poignant that they deserve to be quoted verbatim and in full:

For us democracy can only begin once we are sure that on the appointed day the television cameras will frame the death throes of our ruling classes to the last man, and then, as an epilogue to the same programme (though many will switch off their sets at this point), the investiture of the new faces who are to rule (and to live) for a similar period.

All that, Calvino concludes, is 'watched by millions of viewers with the serene absorption of one observing the movement of the heavenly bodies in their recurrent circles, a spectacle all the more reassuring the more alien we find it'.

It is, it seems, a custom of more than one tribe, and not necessarily tribes who are remote in space or time, to keep their eyes fixed 'on stars shooting in the sky'. And the reasons why eyes are fixed on stars do not change much from one tribe to another. The consequences of eyes being fixed there do not change much: it is only the equipment serving that activity/passivity that changes. As well as the names of the tribes and of the stars they watch, and the stories told by tribal witch doctors about the meaning of all those shooting stars on which those eyes happen to be fixed. Though not the message of those stories, nor the intentions and purposes of their tellers.

Truthout, Sunday, 11th April, 2010

Beyond Multiculturalism

Robert Jensen talks about Love in Action and Love in Dreams, Identities of Race, Gender and Class, Injuries coming out of Hierarchical Systems in today's world...Politics to grab Power vs Politics to Distribute Power.....And on many more topics...
Click here : Thinking a New world