ON INVISIBLE HANDS AND MAILED FISTS

Over the past few weeks, there has been little movement in Dada's case. Dada was meant to be produced in court today to begin the first hearings in his trial in the district court. Instead the "trial" began in the form of a videoconference between the magistrate and the lawyers in court, and Dada in jail. The brazen impunity of the Indian state in abridging the ordinary rights of citizens - like conferring with one's lawyers at a trial - while continuing to polish its international image as a centre of high technlogy grows apace. Whom was this videoconference supposed to impress, I wonder? Anyway, nothing happened at the court, because the time was spent in recording Dada's protests at being denied his right to speak to his lawyers during the session.

On the other hand, there has been quite a lot of writing about the context of his arrest. Last week, Frontline, the news magazine from The Hindu stable, devoted an entire issue to the Maoist insurrection in several states in India, and to Salwa Judum, the vigilante movement armed and financed by the Chhattisgarh state ostensibly to counter the Maoists. The founder of the movement, Mahendra Karma, is a Congress Party leader, and the leader of the oppostion in Chhattisgarh, which suggests a certain bipartisan unity on ways to tackle Maoism.

The problem of Maoist violence is related to the disruption and disenfranchisement that seems to be an invariable concomitant of the development model that has been almost universally adopted in India. In its public statements, the government recognizes that any kind of sustainable development needs to benefit the weakest sections of society, and provide a stake in it for the people living in the area. In practice the government seems keen to promote a rapacious and predatory model of development where the winners are corporations, contractors and landowners, with the bureaucracy drawing its rent from the intermediary and facilitating role in the process of expropriation of resources from the losers - small peasants, tribals, and dalits. Aman Sethi's article in the Frontline issue clearly reveals the nexus between the "winners" and the state in Chhattisgarh. The Maoist violence - ugly and tragic as it is - is a response of resistance to this predation and disruption that is occurring in many parts of India out of sight of the comfortable classes. The Frontline issue also contains a summary showing the gap between the government's proclamations and the realities. In an interview, D. Bandopadhyay, who chaired a government-appointed committee to inquire into the causes of extremism in India, makes the same point to explain Maoist violence in India:

It is not a question of development, but of rights, which have been denied. Development is peanuts. Forget it. If you look at Central India, you have the largest mining projects, very big dams, very big industrial projects; these are the areas predominantly inhabited by the Scheduled Tribes. There is no official figure estimating the number of displaced people due to coercive acquisition of land for development purposes. Scholars’ estimates vary. One scholar, Walter Fernandes, has estimated that between 1951 and 2005, roughly 5.5 crores of the Indian population have been so displaced. Of these, only 28 to 30 per cent has been properly resettled and rehabilitated. In the case of tribal people, it is estimated that only 18 to 20 per cent of them have been properly rehabilitated. Thus, a vast number of displaced, homeless, landless, jobless tribal people are roaming about as flotsam and jetsam of our development process.

To see why the Maoist violence is particularly virulent in Chhattisgarh, read this report by Praful Bidwai, showing how the bipartisan Congress-BJP consensus on the Naxalites works in practice. The report also furnishes an account of Dada's contribution to improving the public health facilities in some of the districts of Chhattisgarh, and, along with Sethi's article in Frontline referred to above, explains why the state wants to stop him from further exposing the savagery of the state-sponsored Salwa Judum terror.

Anoop Saha has neatly juxtaposed some of the myths being sedulously disseminated by the government against the realities in this report
Many of these realities are also revealed (not for the first time) in Tehelka 's report, while another Tehelka report also reveals how dissent similar to Dada's is being suppressed in Orissa, neighbouring Chhattisgarh where Dada is held.

Transparency, rule of law, level playing fields, good governance, sustainable development - these are the anodyne phrases in which the acolytes of the neoliberal "free markets" paradigm present their ideas to people in India. In practice, the invisible hand of the markets needs the mailed fist of the state to "acquire" the resources needed for development. In a rare epiphanic moment, this was admitted even by the purblind Thomas Friedman in an early paean to globalization. Yet the idea that economic liberalism is compatible with political democracy remains firmly entrenched in the seminar rooms and corridors of power.