for a new democracy jul sept 2009

8/8/2019 For a New Democracy Jul Sept 2009

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For a New Democracy July-September 2009/1

E D I T O R I A L

The Situation after the Lok Sabha Elections

The corporate press is beside itself in its celebration of the Congress victory.With Biman Basu and other CPI(M) stalwarts playing the drone to hide theirown dismal performance, the corporate press has played the sweet melody of aCongress wave. Having established the melodic line, the modulations begin. Itis a vote for more so-called reforms, i.e., more capitalism by dispossession,

more cuts in welfare spending and a general withdrawal of social safety netsand more of the rest of the prescription from the IMF, the World Bank and theWTO. It is also a vote, the media tell us, that stabilizes the launching pad forIndia to become the local gendarme of the US imperialists.

Was there a Congress wave? There was no doubt an increase of 2 percent inthis partys vote share nationally. Compared to Indira Gandhis triumph afterthe Bangladesh war or her ignominious defeat ve years later, 2 percent is notsomething to crow about. The vagaries of the rst past the post election system

has allowed the Congress to win a greater percentage of seats than their man-date of less than 29 percent of votes polled. Consider the Andhra Pradesh re-sults. The vote share of the Congress there actually declined by 2.6 percent butits share of the seats went up from 28 in 2004 to 33. It is that familiar story of adversial vote division, thanks largely to the rise of another thespian on theSouthern parliamentary rmament. Among major States, Congress gained invote share signicantly in the so-called BIMARU (4) States and Punjab, whileshedding vote share in Orissa, Chhatishgarh and Jharkhand, along with AndhraPradesh. Without going into the details of vote divisions and causes that ac-count for the Congress vote, it is safe to say that the results show a mixed bagfor the Congress and it is certainly not a wave of any kind.

This notion of the wave brings the corporate media to another fond ideapushed by their mentors in Washington and Tel Aviv: the result of the generalelection shows that the country is on the edge of a bipolar electorate, with theCongress and the BJP at the two poles. Two neo-liberal parties ruling Indiaalternatively from a strong national integrationist (read soft and hardHindutva) centre and serving the US imperialists single-mindedly must bethe panacea favoured by the captains of industry and commerce to quell themillions of insurgencies engulng India today. But is the idea true when weknow that the BJP has dug itself into a hole and the combined vote share of the two big parties has declined in this election? In spite of a strategic weakening


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The corrosive uids of our mass poverty and our inhuman deprivationstook the shine off the BJPs Shining India ve years ago. The shine was in themalls, the superhighways and the vicious ideology of individual selshnesspropagated as the trickle down theory whereby the poor will also get to play inthe long run, but right now let the Ambanis present their spouses with fty-oor town houses. The BJP has not recovered from that debacle. It did not putup any serious economic issues because it was unsure about its own roots inthe ruling classes. Its top leaders knew that shrill Hindutva had become coun-ter-productive, although well into the campaign some of its leaders, apprehen-sive about the outcome, tried to revive it through the vicious and vulgar VarunGandhi and his mother. Without a sharp edge to policies and barely concealedin-ghting for leadership, the BJP did perhaps better than expected. Now the

daggers are out and it is not certain that these saffronites will not ght eachother until a return back to the insignicance of the Jan Sangh days is assured.

The electoral fate of the CPI(M)-led Left Front has surprised many people.In Tripura its vote share has gone down very signicantly. In Kerala it was near-ly decimated. And in West Bengal it has received a body blow from which it willnot recover very soon, if ever.

The causes for the loss of vote share in Tripura and West Bengal were sim-ilar. The Tripura bhadraloks followed their West Bengal kin in corruption, ar-

rogance and the use or threat of violence against all civil society assertions inorder to establish a monolithic party raj. Opposed to this party raj, the peopleof Tripura, especially the tribals who are drifting away from unproductive ter-rorism and rising in mass movements, are now ready to follow in the wake of the anti-CPI(M) tsunami in West Bengal. That mass movement has to developmuch further before a debacle overtakes the Tripura CPI(M). We carry on an-other page an analysis of the West Bengal elections.

In Kerala, the party would appear to be vertically split with many elements,pro- and anti-people, leaving the party. The violence there is a little mutedcompared to West Bengal and Tripura, but the corruption is rampant.Nevertheless it would appear that, unlike West Bengal, there are in Kerala sub-stantial groups of people in the CPI(M) who have not totally jettisoned com-munist ways among the people in their struggles. The immediate causes of theKerala debacle is the corruption case against the state secretary and the ensuingfaction ghts, his pursuit of anti-people neoliberal policies and, radiating outof the partys factionalism, mistreatment of allies. Those who left the party alsocontributed to heavy losses in areas where the party establishment was alwaysstrong. Parliamentary cretins that they are, powerful sections of the CPI(M)sleadership wish to put down their debacle to the withdrawal of support fromthe UPA over a perfectly legitimate, anti-imperialist issue. They say that they could not explain the nuclear power issue, so Karat is to be blamed. Why


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Lok Sabha Election 2009The West Bengal Verdict

Santosh Rana

The people of West Bengal have given their verdict against party-dictatorshipand the terror of the CPI(M).

At last, the people of West Bengal, both urban and rural, both Hindus andMuslims, and both low and high caste, voted against the Left Front, particu-larly the CPI(M). In 1977, the people had voted against the dictatorial regime

of the Congress. After 32 years, the people almost repeated that performance. Itwas a historic victory of the people.

In 1977, the people had brought the Left Front to power. A massive move-ment of the workers and peasants unleashed itself. The peasants occupied many vested lands, the share-croppers recorded the plots in their names and therewas an uprising against semi-feudal landlords and other vested interests. Therevisionist CPI(M) leadership did not want this movement to advance furtherto overcome the limits of bourgeois democracy, i.e., the class dictatorship of

the bourgeoisie. In the name of controlling disorder, they concentrated allpower in the hands of their party committees. They formulated a line to deci-mate all opposition parties in both rural and urban areas. If some peasant didnot support the CPI(M), then he would not get any vested land, a BPL card ora house under the Indira Awas Yojana. Starting from primary schools to theuniversities, all appointments were controlled by the party.

After Buddhadeb Bhattacharya became the Chief Minister, the bureaucrat-ic set-up formed during the previous 25 years engaged itself to start a process

of rapid industrialization. Being Marxists, they knew very well that under aneo-liberal regime, industrialization would destroy more jobs than it couldcreate. Still, they jumped on to that path. In this venture, they had to grab landfrom peasants as demanded by the corporate sector and they started doing it.They had to go against the interests of the small retail traders. They invited theSalim group of Indonesia to build a highway from Barasat to Raichak, a pleas-ure cum health-tourism city at Bhangar near the airport and a chemical SEZ atNandigram. They also planned to acquire vast lands in Singur for the Tatas inHowrah and other districts for the corporate sector. They tried to convince thepeople of West Bengal that industrialization would create jobs for the joblessbut the people were not convinced. Protest movements started in Bhangar andthen in Singur, Nandigram and other areas. The valiant peasants built massiveresistance struggles in the face of which the government had to withdraw, but


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6/July-September 2009 For a New Democracy

not before committing mass murder in Nandigram. The people tasted victory for the rst time in their struggle against the bureaucracy, party-dictatorshipand the pro-imperialist policies followed by the CPI(M).

In the Panchayat election of 2008, the people got a chance and they utilizedit to defeat the CPI(M) in vast areas of South and North Bengal. In the LokSabha election, the people who were eager to get rid of the CPI(M) misrulewanted an anti-CPI(M) alliance. With Congress, Trinamul and SUCI joininghands this unity was partly achieved. Some M-L parties were outside this alli-ance. So were the PDS (Party for Democratic Socialism) a breakaway groupof the CPI(M) and the PDCI (Peoples Democratic Conference of India) a party promoted by the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind of West Bengal. But thepeople were eager to defeat the CPI(M) and they considered the Congress-

Trinamul alliance as a viable alternative to the CPI(M). There was a strongpolarization of votes and with nearly 7 percent swing away from the Left Front,it managed to win 15 seats out of 42, compared to the 35 it won in 2004.Considering the Assembly segments, the Left Front lost in as many as 193 outof a total of 293 seats. If the present trends continue, 2011 is going to witnessthe end of three decades of Left rule in West Bengal.

The Sachar ReportApart from the party dictatorship and the bureaucracy of the CPI(M), the dis-content among the Muslims played a signicant role in the Lok Sabha results.Muslims constitute nearly a quarter of the states population but their presencein the government and semi-government services is negligible. This is a resultof severe discrimination against the Muslims observed in all other spheres of life. The Muslims themselves were quite aware of this discrimination but thepublication of the Sachar Report gave them an opportunity to vent their griev-ances.

A Wave for the Congress?The CPI(M) leadership was shocked by the election results. They had appre-hended a loss of few seats but could not imagine such a devastating result. Butthey are not ready for a self-examination. Instead of critically examining theirpolicies, particularly those followed over the last few years, they tried to explaintheir defeat by a Congress Wave. Their Bengal leadership went so far as tocriticize one of the few correct decisions which their Central Committee hadtaken, i.e., the decision to oppose the Indo-US nuclear deal, as having causedthe debacle. But where was the Congress Wave? The Congress got 2 percentmore votes than what they got in 2004. This was certainly no wave. There was


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a real sympathy wave for Congress in 1984 after the death of Mrs. Gandhi. Eventhen, the Congress could not win more than 16 seats in WB. This time the LeftFront lost because they had abandoned the Left positions and had joined thebattle for the rich, the Nano, the Tatas, the Salims and other multinationals.

But the Rightists Took AdvantageIt is true that the Congress-TMC alliance took advantage of the situation andincreased their seats. But it is also true that they had to pay a price to get thatadvantage. In West Bengal, the TMC opposed the SEZ, opposed the eviction of hawkers and retail traders and opposed land grabbing in Bhangar, Singur,Nandigram and many other places. The people got some immediate respite

which they longed for.Now, what will the UPA government do? Will it reverse the pro-imperialist

and pro-rich policies followed during 2004-09? Certainly not. It may be that itwill go slow on certain reforms like privatisation of banking, insurance andpension schemes and disinvestments in prot-making PSUs. Till the Assembly election in West Bengal, the Central Government may be pressurized by itsTrinamul partner to go slow on SEZs and other projects affecting the people of WB and even sanction some more trains or a factory to show a pro-Bengal im-

age. Their target is to capture power in WB. Their real face will be seen only after that.The people of West Bengal have witnessed how the powerful mass move-

ment of the 1970s and the 1980s was destroyed. The route was through a bu-reaucratic set-up that substituted for the mass movement, suppressed the op-position and democratic rights, and set up a one-party dictatorship. TheTrinamul Congress is getting ready to take the same route. Once they captureWriters Buildings, they will probably suppress all opposition in urban andrural areas as the Congress did in the seventies. Even before capturing WritersBuildings, they have started doing it in some parts of East Midnapur. They want to replace a CPI(M)-led bureaucratic structure by a Trinamul-led struc-ture. It is only after that they will advance to implement the neo-liberal policiesdictated by Manmohan Singh.

But it will not be easy for them. It took 32 years for the people of WestBengal to realize the true nature of the CPI(M) and gather courage to rise inrevolt against it. For the Congress-Trinamul combine, it will be less than ve years. This time, the peoples struggles will advance to a higher stage, providedthe genuine Left forces chalk out a programme of revolutionary democracy and persistently work to isolate both the CPI(M) and the Rightist forces.


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Nepal after Prachandas ResignationVaskar Nandy

Prime Minister Pushpa Kumar Dahal (Prachanda)s resignation was followedby the formation of a ministry headed by Madhav Kumar Nepal of theCommunist Party of Nepal (UML) in collusion with the comprador-feudalNepali Congress whose main leadership is tied up with the Indian Congressparty and powerful sections of the Indian ruling classes by numerous strings.Since then, more than months have passed. Many parties, including the

Madhesh Forum, the fourth largest party in the Constituent Assembly (CA),has either supported or joined the ministry of Madhav Nepal. There is now aclear majority for the ministry, but the two-third majority required to promul-gate the constitution will remain elusive unless Prachandas Unied CommunistParty of Nepal (Maoist) is accommodated within a grand alliance.

Right now, the immediate question is why the cabinet formation processseems to have become unending, with no clear conclusion in sight. This ques-tion should be viewed from the vantage point of Comrade Prachandas resig-

nation.That resignation hinges on the two most important questions presently before the Nepal revolution. Will the present standing army subordinate itself to the authority of the CA and the Prime Minister? And will it stop new recruit-ment and make way for the merger of the Maoist ghters with itself? Accordingto the terms agreed upon by all major parties (upon which agreement standsthe present, temporary republican dispensation) the answer to both questionsmust be in the afrmative. But the chief of the Nepal Army has not only deedthe Prime Minister and the Home minister by recruiting soldiers and refusedto stand dismissed when so ordered by the PM.

The chief of the Nepal Army, a man brought up in the palace and a royalist,is now courted assiduously by both the Indian expansionists and the US impe-rialists. The Nepali Congress, the army chief and these interfering foreign pow-ers have formed a solid, reactionary team to unhinge the major plank of policy regarding the future army and, therefore, the future state and government. Thedeposed King is said to be active on the management. The Supreme Court,which remains basically unchanged since the days of the King and as such suf-fers from a decit of legitimacy, duly obliged the army chief by approving hisrecruitment of soldiers on the plea that he was merely lling up vacancies, for-getting that it is the Defence Minister and the Prime Minister who decidewhether there are vacancies and when to ll them, if at all. The Court annulled


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the dismissal of the army chief by the Prime Minister. With such backing, it wasno surprise that the army chief held press conferences denouncing the govern-ment and got away with it.

The most crucial political role at this juncture was played by sections of theCPN (UML), already close to the Congress leadership and just as vehemently opposed to the Maoists as the latter. They rallied a section of the leadershipwith the lure of the loaves and shes of ofce and installed Madhav KumarNepal as the UML Prime Minister, backed by the Nepali Congress. At rst, theNepal ministry could not commandeer the required numbers for a simple majority. Once that was achieved, ministry formation should have come to an end.But months have passed, but there is no end in sight.

The inherent lack of stability in the process is manifest in different ways.

The Congress leaders often make claims to form a ministry headed by them.But that is probably nothing more than their attempt to convince the ock thatthey are alive and as bad as they always have been even after the severe drub-bing they received during the elections. Nevertheless this is not a good omenfor the Nepal ministry. But far more serious is the growing preponderance of factions in nearly all the parties, especially the UML and the Madhesh Forum,who are increasingly critical and vocal about the role of their parties in thearmy chief affair and who favour a ministry headed by the U C P N (Maoist) as

the only way to end the crisis and draft a republican constitution. More thanthat, each party has to counter the general perception of all the oppressed na-tionalities and ethnic groups who constitute the overwhelming majority thatthe only reliable ally they have to gain self-determination are the Maoists.

The Maoists are logical, principled and rm. Their position is that the CAmust categorically declare the subordination of the armed forces to the civilianauthority even if the present prevarications on the issue see the army chief retireas scheduled in October. On that condition they are willing to lead an all-party ministry or even support one, with or without direct participation. They are con-dent that their growing support within the CA and their massive power on thestreet will continue to ensure that the reactionary forces will remain fragile andunstable until they are forced to submit to the just demands of the Maoists.

The real question, one that we are sure the Maoists have seriously consid-ered, is whether the frustrated reactionaries and their foreign mentors will soonconsider a military option such as a coup dtat by the generals. The episode of the deant army chief would indicate that the Generals are more than willing.Anything of course can emerge from desperation, but the Maoist supportamong the masses, which would appear to have grown signicantly since theirelectoral triumph, their mastery of insurrection and guerrilla tactics and theircombination of exibility and bold resolve will make the expansionists andtheir mentors in Washington pause.


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LalgarhA Peoples Uprising Subverted by the Ultra-L

Santosh Rana

Lalgarh is in the Jhargram sub-division of West Midnapore district in WestBengal (WB). It is part of the Paschimanchal (western zone) of the State, beingan extension of the Chhotanagpur plateau which lies mostly in Jharkhand.

With its laterite soil of low water-retention capacity and Sal-Mahua forests,the area differs from the Bengal plains both geographically and culturally. It is

actually part of the Jharkhand cultural region. Nearly 30 percent of the popula-tion are Scheduled Tribes (ST), 20 percent Scheduled Castes (SC) and the restare communities like Kudmi-Mahatos, Telis, Kumbhars, Bagals, Rajus, Tambulis,Khandaits and others. The Kudmi-Mahatos are the biggest among the rest.They had been treated as tribals till 1935 when they were de-scheduled. TheMahatos, Bagals and some other communities are actually semi-tribals whohave been partly Sanskritized but still retain their tribal characteristics. Nowthey are treated as Other Backward Classes (OBC). There are other OBC com-

munities like Kumbhar, Tanti, Teli and others. But in West Bengal, benets forOBCs started late. Even now, there is very little reservation for OBCs in WestBengal. It is only 7 percent, and, that too, in government jobs. There is no res-ervation for the OBCs in higher education in WB. The SC communities livingin the region (Bagdi, Dom, Jele, Mal, Bauri, etc,) are so backward that they areunable to get government or semi-government jobs through reservations. Thetribals are 30 percent of the population locally, but in local jobs, they get only the 6 percent reservation that is the State average for the STs. As a consequence

of all these factors, the people of this region have very little participation ingovernment and semi-government jobs or in the administration.This has many devastating effects, especially in the eld of education.

Among the primary school teachers, there are only 6 percent STs though theSTs are 30 percent of the population. So there are many primary schools wherethe students are Santhals and Mundas but the teachers are non-tribals who donot understand the language of the students. This creates a language barrierbetween the teachers and the students. Apart from poverty, this is one of thereasons for the large drop-out rates among the tribals. Those tribal boys andgirls who manage to reach the portals of higher, especially scientic and techni-cal, learning are systematically excluded by defying the laws regarding positivediscrimination. For example, the STs are deprived of their admission quotas inmedical and engineering colleges by the West Bengal government. Since 2001,


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the rules of admission have been manipulated in such a way that 90 percent of the ST quotas remain unfullled in medical education.

Due to the laterite soil and lack of irrigation, agriculture is poor and uncer-tain. Forests provided some means of livelihood traditionally but the colonialforest policy deprived the people of this source. Those policies were continuedeven after independence. Unemployment, poverty, illiteracy and hunger are eve-ryday companions of the people. This zone has a high concentration of agricul-tural labourers. In West Bengal as a whole, agricultural labourers are 25 percentof the main workers but in this region, they are 50 percent. Concentration of agricultural labourers and lack of employment is the cause of seasonal migration,known as going Namal (low lands of the Gangetic plains). There are also casesof migration to far-off places like Gujarat, Maharastra and Madhya Pradesh.

The UprisingOn the rst week of November 2008, the Chief Minister of WB had gone toSalboni to inaugurate a steel plant of the Jindals under the SEZ scheme. TheMaoist squads operating in the area blasted a land-mine on his return route. Itmissed the target but the State government ordered night-raids in the villagesof the Lalgarh block. Since the colonial days, night-raids on tribal villages by

police take the form of inhuman attacks on the people, unrestricted by any law.The police repression ignited a massive uprising of the masses. The Santhalswere the main force in the uprising but other communities like the Mundasand the Mahatos also joined the struggle. The Bharat Jakat Majhi (traditionalheadmen) Marwah Association of Majhis was at the forefront of thestruggle at the initial phase. Different factions of Jharkhand Party and theCPI(ML) also joined the movement and it spread to adjoining areas in Jhargram,Bankura and Purulia. It took the form of a blockade of the highways and someother roads. For nearly a week, the entire region was blocked. At this stage, theleadership of the Majhi Marwah entered into negotiations with the administra-tion. The administration conceded some of their demands and they decided towithdraw the blockade. However, the younger sections refused to withdraw theblockade at this stage. A Peoples Committee Against Police Atrocities (PCPA)was constituted and the blockade continued. At the time of its formation, therewere people of different political opinions in this committee though it wasdominated by Maoist cadres and sympathizers. In the rst week of December,the PCPA entered into negotiations with the government and withdrew theblockade. The terms of agreement were more or less the same as those negoti-ated by the Majhi Marwah. The movement was so strong that the administra-tion had to withdraw eight police camps from the sensitive areas by the middleof November. It was a great victory of the people.


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Opportunities LostAfter the withdrawal of police camps, the people were in a victorious moodand the movement was spreading to new areas. An opportunity was found

where the awakened masses could be mobilized to establish organs of self-ruleon the basis of democratic principles. Just six months previously the Panchayatelection was held in the area. The CPI(M) had lost Lalgarh Panchayat Samiti(block Panchayat) and most of the Gram-Panchayats in Lalgarh. Different fac-tions of the Jharkhand Party had own. Now, there was an opportunity to acti-vate the Panchayats and to exercise control over them through the Gram-Sansads (a statutory body where every voter is a member) and to demand morenancial and administrative powers in the hands of the Panchayats (like some

power of control over the police and the administration of forests, village-level planning and their execution, the running of the NREGA, authority toissue BPL cards, etc.). Such measures would strengthen democracy at the vil-lage-level and prepare the ground for the masses to demand self-rule and au-tonomy.

But the Maoists operating in the area had a different plan. They wanted toutilize the uprising to create an area where the rule of the Maoist Party andtheir squads would be established, an area where there would be no opposition,not even any differing voice. So they tried to abolish all other parties and socialorganizations from the Belpahari and the Lalgarh blocks. The differences withthe Majhi Marwah was objectively not such as could not be resolved within ademocratic framework. This association of Majhis had no landlords or evenrich peasants among them. When the CPI(M) had tried to impose its one-party rule in nearby Jamboni few years back, the Majhis played an importantrole in mobilizing the masses in their ght for democracy. But the Maoistswanted to abolish all social and political organizations which would not abideby their dictates.

The PCPA led by the Maoists issued a leaet announcing the trial of Nityananda Hembrom, the head of the Majhi Marwa in a peoples court.They did not stop at that. They issued orders that everybody living in the areaof inuence of the Majhi Marwah would have to join processions called by them. Some people under the inuence of Majhi Marwah deed this order.Many of them were beaten and some were killed. The murder of Sudhir Mandiin the last week of November by the Maoists created a major split among themasses. Sri Sudhir Mandi was the Chairman of Belpahari Panchayat Samiti in2003-08. He belonged to the Jharkhand Party. He was a poor peasant havingone acre of Dahi (infertile highland). Even after remaining Chairman of Panchayat Samiti for ve years, he lived in his traditional mud-house withthatched roof. On the day of his murder, he had gone to the market to sell Sabui


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grass, a grass used for rope making and gathered only by the very poor. But tothe Maoists, he was a class-enemy. A poor tribal is a class-enemy simply be-cause he refused to carry out their order.

The Panchayat election was held in June 2008. Earlier Panchayats had failedbecause they functioned bureaucratically. A democratic functioning of thePanchayats was possible now with the supervision of the awakened masses. Butthe Maoists have no respect for democratic processes or democratically electedPanchayats. They beat up the Panchayat members and stopped them fromfunctioning according to their mandate, They set up peoples committeeswith people loyal to them. In many villages, this loyalty was extracted by coer-cion. To them, these peoples committees were the organs of peoples rule inthe area and had been given the power to impose any amount of tax and pun-

ishment through beatings or murder. The accused had nowhere to go for ahearing or an appeal. An Anganwadi worker earning Rs.1,500 per month hadto pay a tax of Rs.500, a schoolteacher had to pay Rs.5,000, a small brick-kilnowner Rs.25,000, etc.

For seven months, there was no police in the area. During the period be-fore the Lok Sabha election, the CPI(M) government was so frightened by thememories of Nandigram that they withdrew all administration in the area andleft it to the PCPA. After the withdrawal of the state, the armed squads of the

Maoists were the only armed forces in the area. Of course, there were CPI(M)squads in nearby areas. During the Lok Sabha election, the people in theCPI(M)-dominated areas were forced to vote for the CPI(M) while in theMaoist-dominated areas the people were not allowed to come to the pollingbooths. Thus there was vote boycott in nearly 75 booths with approximately 50,000 voters. The CPI(M) won the Jhargram Lok Sabha seat with a margin of nearly three lakh votes, the highest margin in the State. In the State as a whole,the CPI(M) lost heavily to the Congress-Trinamul combine and was totally inthe doldrums. In many areas, the people living under the rule of CPI(M) thugsavailed of this opportunity and raised the banner of revolt. It happened inKhejuri and many other areas in East Midnapur.

In the Lalgarh block, Dharampur Gram Panchayat was under the controlof the CPI(M). During the Panchayat election, no other political party was al-lowed to set up a candidate. Even after the November uprising, this area wasunder the control of the CPI(M). The CPI(M) was actually using Dharampuras a base to attack peoples movements. Anuj Pandey, the notorious leader of the CPI(M) in Dharampur enjoyed the protection of his armed squads and thestate police. After the Lok Sabha election, there was a popular revolt inDharampur which was aided by the Maoist squads. Anuj Pandey ed toMidnapur town and his house was burnt and smashed. After this success, theMaoists openly held public meetings and press conferences in Lalgarh


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announcing the area as a liberated zone. Making the PCPA irrelevant, they an-nounced that they were leading the whole movement. They would mobilizethousands of tribal men and women to resist the police, they announced.

The Indian state was waiting for this opportunity. Buddhadeb Bhattacharya,the Chief Minister of West Bengal, abandoned all his federalist and Left preten-sions and prayed to Chidambaram to send central forces. The Indian statereadily agreed with the condition that the Maoist Party would be banned. TheChief Minister of West Bengal accepted the condition (though some Left Frontpartners objected) and Centre-State joint operations started in Lalgarh.

In the face of this joint operation, the Maoists tried their best to mobilizethe people for a mass resistance. It was expected by many well-wishers that thetribal men and women with their traditional bows and arrows would resist the

police. It was being claimed that the paramilitary forces would have to proceedto Lalgarh over mountains of corpses. But nothing like that happened. On therst day, the Maoists mobilized some people for a mass resistance. The policered some tear-gas shells and lathicharged them to remove the blockade.Subsequently, the police and paramilitary forces reached Kantapahari, the cap-ital of Maoist rule in Lalgarh for six months, without any mass resistance. Thesquads placed some landmines here and there but they were in no way an effec-tive deterrent to the paramilitary forces.

Now the paramilitary forces are setting up camps in Lalgarh and Belpahari.The State government is sending high-level committees to promote the devel-opment of Lalgarh. How far the paramilitary forces will succeed in sanitiz-ing the area or the government succeed in promoting development is to beseen. But one thing is certain. The uprising has been suppressed. The state hadto withdraw in November 2008. In June 2009, it reasserted itself. This is a defeatfor the uprising.

Whether the defeat is temporary and how and when the people will riseagain in mass movements depends on many factors. But people interested inthe revolutionary transformation of our society must analyze the movementand draw proper lessons.

The movement was powerful enough to force the state to withdraw inNovember 2008 because (i) all the democratic forces in the region participatedin the movement and a very strong peoples unity was forged, and (ii) there wasdivision in the enemy camp with the contradictions between the Centre andState and between the Trinamul and the CPI(M) playing their role.

By March 2009, the situation was fast changing. The coercion on the peo-ple for collection and forcible participation in processions, suppression of allopposition by beatings, garlanding with shoes and killings were destroying thedemocratic content of the movement. The uprising was losing its internalstrength. Then the squads resorted to more coercion and terror to show their


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support to the outside world. It reached its peak during the Lok Sabha elec-tion when the squads with guns went from village to village telling the peoplethat they would be punished if they would go to the polling booths to vote. Onthe polling day, a landmine was blasted to kill some polling personnel. All theseactivities further alienated the masses.

When the joint armed forces started their campaign, only the advancedsections and cadres were ready for some resistance with landmines. The peopledecided to ee their villages and take shelter in the surrounding villages inJhargram and Bankura. While the peoples democratic unity was disrupted, theruling classes bridged some of their differences. The Central government of-fered all help to the State government in its ght against the Maoists.

Apart from tactical mistakes and mistakes on the question of united front,

the Maoists hold a grossly wrong understanding of the nature of peoples pow-er. They hold that absolute power in the hands of their party is equivalent topeoples power. They want a system where there will be no election on the basisof universal suffrage and no opposition party. Peoples Committees would beformed with people loyal to them and they would decide everything. They triedto use the favourable situation in Lalgarh to start an experiment in politicalpower on a miniature scale. So they imposed their 144 against all other po-litical and social organizations in the area of their control. They did not allow

a campaign car of the CPI(ML)-New Democracy, with a red ag hoisted on it,to pass through the area. The car was allowed to leave only after the red ag waspulled down. Same was the fate of a vehicle carrying a ag of the JharkhandParty (Aditya).

In Lalgarh, the peoples uprising combined with the isolation of the CPI(M)forced the state to withdraw for some six months and the Maoists got an op-portunity to practice what they understand as peoples rule. It is to be notedthat they did not raise any class-issue or the issue of the peoples rights over theforests. They simply identied activists and supporters of other political partiesas class enemies and killed them. These are the basic reasons for the failure of the movement.

The people of Lalgarh and the whole of Paschimanchal will certainly learnfrom the experiences of the uprising and rebuild their struggle for Self Rule, anaspiration which expressed itself during the Jharkhand movement and moreexplicitly during the November uprising. This will be a self rule where organs of political power will be elected by the people on the basis of universal suffrageand where these organs will seize all economic and political powers. They willcertainly smash the limitations imposed by bourgeois dictatorship on the dem-ocratic aspirations of the people. But neither the people of Lalgarh nor the peo-ple of India will ever accept the one-party rule of any political party.


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The BPL QuestionVaskar Nandy

The Below Poverty Line (BPL) lists are to be revised again. It is time thereforethat the people looked closely at what is involved. For a family to be listed asBPL promises to ensure relatively affordable food, free medical care and vari-ous other facilities. It is therefore a vital marker for the nearly 80 percent of ourrural population and the similar but slightly lesser numbers in the urban areaswho do not get two square meals a day throughout the year. It is therefore notsurprising that BPL listings have become the focus of spontaneous class strug-

gles throughout India. A brief review of the question is therefore necessary atthe present juncture.

The World Bank has been and is terribly worried by world poverty. Nowthen, I didnt really want to start with a joke, but that sentence sounds like a bitof black humour. Along with its Breton Woods twin, the IMF, it has imposedeconomic and scal policies designed precisely to create the most abysmal pov-erty in all countries of the world, including such metropolitan centres as theUSA and Europe where discriminated ethno-racial groups, female-headed

households, workers in the informal sectors and others such as the unemployedmillions know well the kind of poverty we suffer from in South. All this in arelentless pursuit of the interests of their masters, what Samir Amin calls theTriad consisting of the three major imperialist formations, the US, Japan andthe EU,

Huge and increasing poverty on a world scale has lately become exacer-bated by the current economic meltdown. Naturally, the masters are worriedand have been very worried over the last decade or so. They know that theirmonetarist, neo-liberal policies are designed to strangulate all social sectorspending by the state or community such as on healthcare, subsidised foodand transport, education, old age care, insurance, etc. Those policies are thevery source of increasing poverty and consequent hunger, malnutrition anddeath. And yet the deep systemic crisis of capitalism, not just a nancial melt-down, leaves the imperialist ruling classes no other serious policy choices evenif that means a massive destruction of the productive forces of capitalism.Within that destructive process and after it, socialism will not appear as in-evitable unless the class struggle is ideologically oriented towards it. Withoutthis kind of class struggle, capitalism will emerge from the debris with a newregime of accumulation. But then no one wants to become debris especially when (if the socialist alternative can be averted) new regimes of accumulationhave the bad habit of shifting their centre or centres geographically, as is being


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openly talked about with regard to China and some other countries, includingIndia.

The current crisis has made the question of acute poverty most urgent forthe ruling classes throughout the world. They have to do something and beseen to be doing something. But so massive and extreme is poverty in the worldtoday that to attempt to alleviate it ever so slightly would totally disrupt thepresent economic regime. So it is better to be seen to be doing something thanactually doing it while actually doing the opposite. Hence we see the reprehensi-ble chicanery accompanying the whole question on who is poor.

Lets look at our own experience in India where the gnomes who run thisparticular show from Delhis Planning Commission are not just passive follow-ers of the World Bank but are a part of that banks intellectual climate of thought

on poverty. The game is to show that poverty is low and reducing rapidly.In 1979, a bunch of experts put together by the Planning Commission rec-

ommended that the minimum nutritional need (food) in India was 2400 calo-ries in rural areas and 2100 in urban areas. This show of expensive research wasa ploy to reduce the earlier gures recommended by Ackroyd and immediately reduce the numbers below the poverty line.

On the basis of this reduced caloric requirement, it was then decided thatthe minimum per capita expenditure ought to be Rs 49 in rural areas and Rs 57

in urban areas, taking 197374 as the base year. The assortment of goods cho-sen and their respective prices for the base year should come under strict scru-tiny now that we know that the intentions of the Planning Commission andsuccessive governments of India are less than honourable. But let us acceptthose gures, as so many have done so far. For subsequent years, the procedureshould have been to take the same assortment of goods (to ensure comparabil-ity), determine their current prices and arrive at the required minimum ex-penditure required to satisfy nutritional needs. But that is precisely what thePlanning Commission was not prepared to do. What it did was to adjust themonetary values obtained for 197374 by indexed ination. With this arith-metical sleight of hand, the Planning Commission immediately reduced pov-erty as a lasting tribute to its planning.

Deaton and Dreze have shown what this price updating actually means. In19992000, the Planning Commission arrived at the poverty line of Rs 328 forthe rural and Rs 454 for the urban, whereas it should have been Rs 565 andRs 625 respectively to satisfy the caloric norms. That meant that millions wereshown to be above the poverty line when they were not and the governmentcould crow about the rapid decline in poverty due to its policies.

The Ministry of Rural Development has over the years conducted severalsurveys. All of them have been found to be faulty by the ministry itself. Thereis now another expert group of that ministry that proposes a new methodology


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that has been on the internet as a draft. If adopted, it will surely meet the samefate as the previous ones because it is unnecessarily complicated, mystifying inmany aspects especially in those where it means well and too unwieldy for theuntrained (and mostly predatory about the poor) government ofcials at thegrass root level. But even if it is conceded that this methodology will give us afairly good picture of poverty in the country, there will still remain the gnomesin the Planning Commission to contend with. Before the last survey, theCommission arrived at the gure of 28.3 percent of people below the poverty line, defying NSSO and other results. But it ordered all concerned to not ndanything above that gure. Only Montek Singh Ahluwalia and PM who certi-ed that we all loved Bush, the puppets from the Bank, could order such won-derful sociology.

The situation is such that it has been truly said (2005) by Dr Pronab Sen,Chief Statistician and Secretary, Department of Statistics and ProgrammeImplementation, Government of India, that

it is indubitably true that the per capita calorie intake of the poverty lineclasses practically all over the country has declined signicantly between197273 and 19992000 The current value of the poverty line does not per-mit the poverty line class to consume the caloric norm, and the periodic pricecorrections that have been carried out to update the poverty lines are inade-

quate and indeed may be even inappropriate. Consequently, the poverty esti-mates made in the years after 197374 understate the true incidence of pov-erty in the country.

The 61st Round of the NSSO (200405) clearly shows that in rural andurban India less than 19 and less than 13 percent of the population respec-tively access the caloric norm. What is more staggering is that millions, nearly 30 percent of the population, cannot access even half of that norm. What isthe need then to have more elaborate and better surveys? The case for auniversal public distribution system (PDS), free and universal healthcare, freeeducation, etc. is overwhelming when more than 80 percent of the populationdo not have enough to eat, let alone satisfy other vital needs. There is no needto fret over much about resource leakage to those who are not poor becausethe consumption of cereals by the non-poor 15 percent or so of the popula-tion is far less than that of the others and decreasing. Not only that, these non-poor would rarely access the coarse cereals dished out at the ration shops aswas evident when there was universal PDS. The same sort of thing can be saidabout public sector healthcare and education, except that in the case of thelatter, the high quality specialist education in government-run institutionssuch as medical colleges, technical institutes, etc. where the non-poor tend tocrowd out the poor.


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The Indian ruling classes have become very uneasy about their own pov-erty games owing to two factors. First and foremost, the continuous revolt of the poor on this question which is already spilling into intermittent violenceagainst ofcials and the police. In these numerous instances of revolt, two is-sues come to the forefront. First, most of the poor have been left out. This isperceived as corruption by local ofcials. This perception has to change and thepeople must understand the role of the World Bank and the PlanningCommission. But there is indeed massive corruption at the local levels of course. That comes out in the fact that many rich and super-rich householdshave gotten on the BPL lists through bribery and or political clout. This there-fore becomes the second issue.

The second factor is the growing division among the ruling classes regard-

ing what to do about export-led growth when the US and the EU consumer istightening the belt on account of the current meltdown. No one is yet propos-ing a shift out of that policy for growth, but some it would appear to be rootingfor drastic modications through creating a modest home market a la theBeijing thugs. This contradiction could be read into the current budget and thevarious reactions to it from the ruling classes. Be that as it may, a modest homemarket is inconceivable, after the top 10 percent of our population having al-ready satiated itself with all the white goods and the electronic goo-ga and al-

ready apprehensive about a meltdown at home making it a little shy of shop-ping sprees, unless something is done about the bottom of the pile. That pileneeds to be fed and then given something to do that creates assets for bottomup capitalist development.

Fear of a mass revolt and policy ux within the ruling classes is a very goodtime for the people to rise up for their various rights, foremost of which is theright to food.

We must therefore all organise, organise and organise immediately on thefollowing demands:

We Want a Universal Public Distribution System!No More of this APL/BPL Farce!We Want Universal Healthcare & Free Education!Down with Police Repression Against the Hungry!


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A Few Attempts at Destabilizing IranVaskar Nandy

The US imperialists are desperate. They want Iran to be another nice miniaturepoodle for their laps like the despicable Jordanian royals or the even more des-picable Saudi royals. Without the Iranians submitting to their hegemonic in-terests, the US imperialists cannot wholly subdue the myriad insurgencies en-gulng and threatening to engulf west Asia, especially the ones led by Hamas inPalestine and the Hezbolla in Lebanon. Indeed, in Iraq itself, the Shiite major-

ity could easily come to be led by the young Imam from Sadr City who is very close to the Iranian clerics.

So Iran has to be destabilized, possibly dismembered. There is no quarrelwith the Islamic ethos and polity there, only those should be in the service of US hegemony, much like the situation that obtains in the Islamic theocracy that is Saudi Arabia. Dual tactics requiring armed and non-armed interventionare already in full view. Only, the Indian media dont refer to them.

First, the rabid fascists Netanyahu and Lieberman have been manoeuvred

into power in Israel and there is now frequent, very inammatory talk aboutbombing Iran ostensively to take out the Iranian nuclear project. This from acountry that has a very large stockpile of secret nuclear weapons! But sincethe US imperialists who have given the Israelis the technology and much else tobuild that stockpile pretend that they know nothing about it, therefore thoseweapons do not exist and there are no crippling sanctions on Israel such asthose imposed on Iran and North Korea or even akin to the much softer sanc-tions imposed on India before its leaders began to shake their turbans to theEmpire in the West. But Israel could not and would not dare to bomb Iranwithout the explicit consent of the US warmongers. The threat of Israeli bom-bardment is the sword hanging over Iran and it is not the sword of that ancientrufan Damocles but of the modern smooth talking head of the US adminis-tration. So the threat of Israeli bombardment of Iran is kept alive till the timefor it arrives.

Second, armed intervention is no longer conned to mere threats. It is nowactual. For more than six months now, two terrorist groups based in PakistansBaluchisthan have been raiding the Iranian province of Zahedan and commit-ting atrocities such as bombing mosques, various other public places, assassi-nations, etc. This whole operation is backed by none other than the US impe-rialists, perhaps the CIA. These raids may be the beginning of further armedexplorations in a country which is multi-ethnic and multi-religious where no


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one group is big enough to be dominant. The Azeris are the second largestethno-linguistic group in Iran. The pro-West Moussavi, the main losing candi-date in the latest Presidential election, is an Azeri and he went very far indeedto try and consolidate the Azeri vote in a divisive way. Given the CIAs massivepresence in neighbouring Azerbaijan, the Iranian Azeris may start witnessingatrocities such as in Baluchisthan. There are of many other ethno-linguisticgroups in Iran which may come to the attention of the US imperialists.

Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under PresidentReagan, in surprisingly candid revelations, has written that there have beennumerous news reports that the US government has implemented a pro-gramme to destabilize Iran. There have been reports that the US governmenthas nanced bombings and assassinations in Iran How closer to the horses

mouth can you get?Third and most important is the attempted colour or velvet revolution

focusing on the Presidential election in Iran. There is now massive evidenceabout the mechanics of these so-called revolutions in eastern Europe by whichpro-Western governments were installed. Everything kicks off with loud andcontinuous black propaganda by the media controlled by the US and otherimperialists. Right wing think tanks do the required research to pinpoint thevulnerability of those to be toppled and develop black propaganda material

that is terse and effective. Several organisations are then deployed to train, bothinside and outside the country to be subverted, whole groups from the middleclasses that have bought into the neo-liberal ideology. The training consists of creating crisis-inducing events as and when required by the foreign handlersand learning the skills for massive computer networking and cell phone mes-saging that spread the terse, black propaganda. All organisations and individu-als participating in these operations are ooded with millions of dollars fromthe CIA and many foundations, such as the one run by George Soros. Accordingto Mr Roberts, the US government alone has spent 400 million dollars to sub-vert the electoral process in Iran. Going by the evidence from eastern Europe,direct governmental expenditure is only a small part of the money thrown atsuch operations. The main funding comes routed through various founda-tions, endowments, etc. The massive scale and the swiftness of the operation issuch that the adversaries, like President Shevardnadze of Georgia who was re-placed by US-trained puppet President, get ousted even before they fully com-prehend what is happening.

But in Iran the script for the colour revolution did not quite work out.Now the attempt is to give the script the colour of blood. But we will come tothat presently.

Was there massive fraud in the Iran elections? No one has come out withan iota of credible evidence that this was so. The latest evidence is a forged


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letter purportedly written by the interior minister to the head Ayatollah of theGuardians Council. But there is evidence in the opposite direction. A poll car-ried out by US psephologists three weeks before the polling reects the resultsrather uncannily. These poll results require extensive treatment.

The two pollsters were American: Ken Ballen of the Centre for PublicOpinion and Patrick Doherty of the New America Foundation. The pollingwas funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. It was conducted in Farsi by apolling company whose work in the region for ABC News [a big corporatechannel reecting US ruling class opinion] and the BBC [a government-fund-ed British ruling class mouthpiece with a deceptive veneer of objectivity] re-ceived an Emmy award [considered to be of very high value in the profession].A very up-front arrangement this, without any trace of Islamic fundamentalist

bias unless of course the black propaganda department of the CIA discoversthat the Rockefellers were closet Muslims.

After the big hue and cry started about a stolen election, the pollsters whohad conducted the polls three weeks before the polling day, sent an article tothe Washington Post , a leading US newspaper, which published it on 15 June asa major piece for the day. Now, let us hear what these psephologists have tosay.

Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent PresidentAhmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide sur-vey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by more than 2 to 1 margin greater than in actual apparent margin of victory in Fridays election.

While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the vot-ing [the slog overs in the black propaganda game] portrayed an Iranian publicenthusiastic about Ahamadinejads opponent, Mir Hossein Moussavi, our sci-entic sampling from across all 30 of Irans provinces showed Ahmadinejad

well ahead.The breadth of Ahmadinejads support was apparent in our pre-election

survey. During the campaign, for instance, Moussavi emphasised his identity asan Azeri, the second largest ethnic group in Iran after the Persians, to woo Azerivoters. Our survey indicated, though, that Azeris favoured Ahmadinejad by 2 to1 over Moussavi.

Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as har-binger of change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of Iranianshave access to the Internet, while 18-24 year-olds comprised the strongest vot-ing bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.

The only demographic group in which our survey found Moussavi leadingor competitive with Ahamadinejad were university students and graduates, andthe highest-income Iranians. When our poll was taken, almost a third of


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Iranians were also still undecided. Yet the baseline distributions we found themmirror the results reported by the Iranian authorities.

We have quoted the pollsters quite extensively from the Washington Post.

But how many people know about this poll and its direct bearing on the resultsannounced? The devaluation of the poll begins in the very same issue of theWashington Post. The paper carries a leading article on the very same day which does not even refer to the article of the pollsters on the front page andtrots out threats against the Iranian authorities for stealing the election. Ourown newspapers just follow the lead of the imperialist media. So, when they report a massive rally of Moussavi supporters, they just happen to forget or notnotice a simultaneous rally of the Presidents supporters in the poor quarters of

Tehran which was at least double the size of the other one. This kind of report-ing helps build up the false picture that the people of Iran are with Moussavi.The imperialist charge against Ahmadinejad, as also of the Moussavi, boils

down to two main points: he provokes the famous international communitywith his nuclear programme, a programme which interestingly was started by Moussavi when he was the Prime Minister (a post that has vanished), and hissupport for Hezbolla and Hamas; and, he wastes Irans great oil wealth by squandering it all on welfare programmes for the urban slums and the poorvillages against all economic wisdom. I think all democratic and anti-imperi-alist forces of the world who do not have economic wisdom should rally insupport of President Ahmadinejad in this crucial hour when a massive imperi-alist (primarily US and British) attempt at destabilising Iran.


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DO C U M E N T S

Press Release

We have seen in newspapers and on television that Kundan Lal Tamta, IG inNorth Bengal, has said that the two organisations that I belong to are Maoistoutts and that he would not inch from arresting me.

The two organisations he has named are Swadhikar and the PCC-CPI(ML). Swadhikar is a registered voluntary society of which I am the President

and the other is a political party of which I am a Polit Bureau member.Tamtas statement shows his practised and familiar ignorance. Swadhikar

does not have any political activity, although its volunteers and staff belong tovarious political parties such as Trinamul, the Congress, the CPI(M), the CPI(ML) and others. This is their democratic right and Tamta or anybody else can-not take away that right.

The PCC-CPI (ML) has been criticising the CPI (Maoist) for a long time.We support the Adivasi movement in Lalgarh, but we do not support the ac-

tivities of the Maoists there. We believe that the Maoists import an adventur-ism and extremism into mass movements that hamper the latter.Because of our opposition to them, the Maoists have recently criticised us

in an open letter and we have replied to them in kind.It sometimes happens that during legitimate peoples movements in which

we are, the Maoists join them without stating their afliation. Take for examplethe case of the movement for the release of Dr Vinayak Sen. We were in it alongwith such democrats as Arundhuti Roy. Medha Patekar, Mahasweta Devi andothers, but the Maoist were also there without announcing their identity. Doesthat make the famous democrats some sort of Maoists? And if they are notMaoists so we are not also.

Tamta has issued a fatwa that no voluntary society may lead movements of the poor for their rights and problems. This is undemocratic and cannot beacquiesced in.

Where the ICDS increases rather than decrease child malnutrition, wherethere is hardly any work in the NREGS, where Tamtas police and other admin-istrators are sunk deep into corruption and arbitrary behaviour, where, as inJalpaiguri, the government knows from its own survey that in this district morethan one lakh people do not access one square meal throughout the year, whereany and all protest faces police an d cadre violence, the poor have no recourseexcept democratic movement.


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Tamta or his political bosses cannot stop this democratic movement spear-headed by the PCC and Swadhikar by cancelling the registration of Swadhikaror by arresting me.

Vaskar NandyMember Polit Bureau, PCC-CPI(M-L


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DO C U M E N T S

Letter to the Chief Minister

ToThe Rt. Honourable Chief Minister of West BengalShri Buddhadeb Bhattacharya

Through

The Divisional CommissionerJalpaiguri DivisionJalpaiguri

Sir,It has come to our notice that North Bengals Inspector General of Police,Kundan Lal Tamta, has been threatening a registered voluntary association,Swadhikar, with the cancellation of its registration and its well known President,

Shri Vaskar Nandy, with arrest for Maoist activities.It could well be that the IG has information that we are not privy to whichshows that the Maoist label in this case is appropriate. The West Bengal govern-ment has already arrested many alleged Maoists under the all-India ban im-posed by the central government. Tamta is free to add a few more numbersfrom his own watch. Why doesnt he do that? That would be a good test for hisallegations before the courts and within civil society.

But it is intolerable that in a situation where such crucial matters as indi-vidual liberty and the right of association are at stake the IG resorts to threatsinstead of the high degree of rectitude expected of a police ofcer of high rank.The matter becomes even more worrisome when the IG implies that this or-ganisation has to stop anti-government activities by inciting those among thepoor with grievances against the government. This is strange because in a de-mocracy anti-government activity is always desirable if there are serious viola-tions by Government of such constitutional and legal rights such as the Rightto Food, Right to Work, Right to Life, Right to Due Process, etc. as long as suchactivity is not accompanied by terrorist violence or incitement to it. The IG hasto mind his own business by enforcing the criminal law and laws protecting thesecurity of the state, but he has no business acting as the gatekeeper againstanti-government activities as such. If the police start to behave in this way, thena free and democratic society will cease to exist.


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We, the undersigned, have known Swadhikar and Shri Nandy for many years. We are conversant with the activities of this organisation and all of ushave participated in and cooperated with those activities at some time or theother. This organisation has steadfastly worked to oppose the violations of human and civil rights and it is ironic that a police ofcer is now threateningits own civil and human rights. If the government doesnt like such opposition,surely the political leadership can have its say, but what is not permissible is toset the police on such opposition without any evidence of criminal violationsof the law.

We record our protest against Tamtas activities with regard to this matterand urge you to reprimand him or otherwise restrain and discipline him sothat democratic norms are adhered to in the future.

Yours sincerely,

Signed by leading academics, lawyers and activists of North


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for a new democracy jul sept 2009

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