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India: Why businesses love Chhattisgarh | Sudeep Chakravarti

20 April 2016

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Livemint - 1 April 2016

Chhattisgarh: men, methods and madness

I call it war, this matter of the Maoist rebellion in Chhattisgarh, and it is now nearly 20 years old

Sudeep Chakravarti

I call it war, this matter of the Maoist rebellion in Chhattisgarh, where democratically elected governments practice ineluctable undemocracy in this most permissive of battlefields.

This war, now nearly 20 years old, colours everything from the arrest and harassment of journalists to threatening human rights activists, to brutal “collateral damage†of non-combatants, to accusations that business is behind it all. It goes beyond statistics of, say, the death of seven troopers of the Central Reserve Police Force who died on 30 March in southern Chhattisgarh when their truck was blown up by Maoist rebels; or the eight Maoist rebels who were killed in the region on 1 March in a shootout with security forces. But attrition through battle is not the same as how the war is being conducted.

Chhattisgarh inherited this war. But it has since added much fuel to the fire. That’s where attitude comes in, which I shall address in a series of columns.

There is little to dispute that the Maoists moved into the Dandakaranya region encompassing present-day Chhattisgarh (earlier a superciliously administered part of undivided Madhya Pradesh), south-west Odisha and western Maharashtra in the 1980s. Maoists found fertile ground for expansion among developmentally ignored and procedurally harassed tribal populations, along with deep forests as shelter. Through the 1990s, the situation in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh proved increasingly untenable for them with that state’s police birthing a brutally efficient anti-Maoist force. Much of the Maoists’ new, assiduously cultivated sanctuary became part of Chhattisgarh in 2000.

The full impact of Maoist ingress in Chhattisgarh became evident after the merger of two major factions in 2004 to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist). Meanwhile, the somnolent police force of the new state had by 2005 been transformed by chief minister Raman Singh into a battering ram against Maoists, with tribal folk and other Maoist target groups of the vulnerable, as it were, firmly in the middle. With the full backing of his organization, the Bharatiya Janata Party, as well as security dons of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government in New Delhi at the time—which began the practice of saturating Chhattisgarh with paramilitary forces at the state government’s request—Singh blessed Salwa Judum in mid-2005. He had an able and willing co-architect in a Congress leader, Mahendra Karma.

While this vigilante effort of recruiting tribal youngsters, even minors, as special police officers, and forcible corralling of tribal people with the help of police and paramilitaries to deny Maoists their support base proved operationally successful to an extent, the Salwa Judum chapter remains among the worst state-led human rights atrocities in India. Besides killing, raping, maiming and beating non-combatants, burning hundreds of houses, and destroying food stock and crops, the modus operandi for breaking the stranglehold of Maoists also included threatening local journalists, and resident and visiting human rights activists. Anyone who spoke against the goings-on in Chhattisgarh was labelled a “Maoist†or “Maoist sympathizer†.

A former superintendent of police of Bijapur went as far as to order this (I have the intercept, confirmed to me as genuine by a former director general of police of Chhattisgarh): “If any journalists come to report on Naxalis—get them killed,†he instructs, using the term interchangeably used with ‘Maoist’ in this area.

More than 10 years later, even with the formal discontinuation of Salwa Judum and the formal disbanding of special police officers—unsurprisingly, banded together since then under different names and changed rules of recruitment—the attitude has not changed. Indeed, three terms into his tenure, Singh, who has meanwhile pitched himself as a favourite of metals, mining and power-generation companies in this abundantly mineral-rich state, has driven a government that is low on democratic niceties like freedom of speech and expression. (Success with farming initiatives and the public distribution system have, among other things—including a disarrayed opposition and solid buy-in by the business community—contributed twice to his re-election.)

Singh is an imperious man (he once termed Salwa Judum “Gandhian†and like the “fragrance of the forest in the summer†) who breeds imperious underlings in the administration and police. Several of them are located in southern Chhattisgarh, and have turned policing laws into lawless ones to curb criticism. Three journalists are today jailed on the slimmest of evidence; one hounded out; a well-known human rights activist threatened by an organization associated with the region’s top policeman.

More on such men, their methods—and madness as usual—next week.

Sudeep Chakravarti’s books include Clear.Hold.Build: Hard Lessons of Business and Human Rights in India, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country and Highway 39: Journeys through a Fractured Land. This column, which focuses on conflict situations in South Asia that directly affect business, runs on Fridays.

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LiveMint - April 08 2016

Why businesses love Chhattisgarh

Profit trumps the prudence of staying away from a conflict zone till such conflict is ended

Sudeep Chakravarti

For businesses, it is as if the war with the Maoists doesn’t exist. As if half of Chhattisgarh isn’t a walking, talking, shooting match that ought to keep away businesses with the fear of aiding and abetting conflict. Being made liable for such action by ethics watchdogs and outraged investors. For being at the forefront of corporate social irresponsibility.

But perhaps there is little to fear when the state government preaches fearlessness and offers impunity alongside a warming climate of investment. (Read the first part of this series) Here, profit trumps the prudence of staying away from a conflict zone till such conflict is ended. It is easy to see why.

In a sprawling radius of conflict of less than a 100km, with the hub of Dantewada in southern Chhattisgarh at its centre, is prime real estate. A map of Chhattisgarh’s directorate of geology and mining marks active and potential deposits of iron ore, gold, base metals like zinc, lead and copper, limestone, quartzite (used by the construction industry), tin and corundum (among other things, parent to ruby and sapphire). A former chief secretary of Chhattisgarh rightfully boasted how the “A to Z of minerals, alexandrite to zircon†, can be found in the state.

India has a shameful record of governments helping businesses acquire land by using police and administration to put pressure on citizens, and obtain the consent of village councils even in areas where there is no internal security “situation†. Imagine then the process in Chhattisgarh, which has an ongoing war to boost the mechanisms of fear and favour in which governments act as an extension of corporate will—with the firm imprimatur of chief minister Raman Singh. Take just one example.

During the heyday of the human rights nightmare of the Salwa Judum vigilante movement, in 2006, a land acquisition for an Essar Steel plant went thus. According to the environmental journal Down to Earth, no discussion was permitted. “Two constables were posted at each house. No outsider was allowed at the meeting place. People were not allowed to leave their homes or to talk to each other. According to villagers, at 9 am, they were forced into vehicles, and taken to the meeting. They were taken to a room in twos, and pistols were placed at their temples to make them sign. They were told not to step out of the village,†the journal reported.

The company denied any wrongdoing for this how-not-to of free, prior and informed consent. It could, because the government actually did so on its behalf with full connivance of the senior administrator of Dantewada and the local chief of police. (Tata Steel had begun land acquisition in neighbouring, conflict-affected Bastar district, but stalled it.)

In any case, Essar paid a price for muscling into conflict-ridden Dantewada. In 2009, Maoist rebels blew up an Essar pipeline to carry iron ore slurry from Dantewada to a pellet plant in Visakhapatnam. In late 2011, a contractor for Essar would be arrested by the Chhattisgarh police while carrying more than Rs.10 lakh in cash which, he claimed, he was carrying to the Maoists on behalf of Essar. Within days, a general manager with Essar, D.V.C.S. Verma, was arrested on various charges, including that of sedition.

Essar put out an official denial with key phrases like “vehemently rejects†and “baseless allegations†. These would be somewhat punctured by a WikiLeaks post of a January 2011 cable between officials of the US department of state: “A senior representative from Essar, a major industrial company with large mining and steel-related facilities in Chhattisgarh, told Congenoff (consul general’s office) that the company pays the Maoists ‘a significant amount’ not to harm their operations.â€

The can-do government of Chhattisgarh has, remarkably, shifted an elephant corridor to facilitate mining of coal. In January, it did away with the need to obtain the consent of the gram sabha, or village council, to facilitate a coal-mining project in northern Chhattisgarh in which Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Ltd, and a subsidiary of Adani Enterprises, have interests.

Chief minister Singh has consistently won praise for his pro-business attitude. “Everyone who knows him will say he’s a kind man, a thorough gentleman..,†I heard Jindal Steel and Power chairman Naveen Jindal say at a global investors’ meet in Raipur, the state capital. Thoughtfulness extended to Singh’s hospitality for the investors—several dozen CEOs—attending the event. “Airport mein Mercedes gaadi bheji, ek officer depute kiya…â€

You could say it adds up.

Sudeep Chakravarti’s books include Clear. Hold. Build: Hard Lessons of Business and Human Rights in India, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country and Highway 39: Journeys Through a Fractured Land. This column, which focuses on conflict situations in South Asia that directly affect business, runs on Fridays.

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[SEE OTHER RELEVANT MATERIAL HERE:

What does India’s fiscal deficit have to do with the war in Chhattisgarh? by Supriya Sharma http://scroll.in/article/806105/what-does-indias-fiscal-deficit-have-to-do-with-the-war-in-chhattisgarh

Repression of media and civil society in Chhattisgarh - Press release by Amnesty International India http://www.sacw.net/article12611.html