Autumn 2010

Gandhi's Invisible Hands

by Ian Desai

Behind the rise of Mahatma Gandhi was a little-recognized team of followers he carefully recruited including his secretary, Mahadev Desai, pictured at his desk in 1940.

On September 4, 1915, in the sticky heat of late summer, Mahadev Desai and Narahari Parikh walked without speaking along the Sabarmati River, on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, a city in northwestern India. Desai and Parikh were best friends who shared everything, so the silence between them was uncharacteristic. Their day, however, had been highly unusual, and they were both lost in reflection on what had transpired. When they reached the Ellis Bridge, which spanned the surging waters of the Sabarmati and supported a steady flow of carriage, mule, foot, and, occasionally, car traffic from the bustling city, they stopped and faced each other. They were both thinking about a meeting they had had a few hours earlier with a 46-year-old lawyer who had recently returned to India after living for two decades in South Africa.

Desai finally broke their prolonged silence: “Narahari, I have half a mind to go and sit at the feet of this man.” This statement, in which Desai contemplated abandoning his nascent legal career in order to devote himself to the service of someone he had met for the first time that day, changed the course of his life. It also helped change the course of history for a colonized nation seeking freedom and its entrenched imperial rulers. With these words, the 23-year-old Desai began a journey that would produce one of the most important partnerships the modern world has known. The lawyer they had met had extraordinary ambitions that were growing by the day, and he had started to assemble a team of gifted individuals to help him achieve his visions. That lawyer’s name was Mohandas Gandhi, and in Mahadev Desai the future Mahatma had found a crucial partner for his historic cause.

In March 2005 I was in Ahmedabad, now a major industrial metropolis. It had not rained for nine months, and the temperature hovered above 100 degrees. Although the room I was in felt like an oven, it happened to be a library housed in a museum on the site of Gandhi’s former residence, the Satyagraha Ashram. Wiping my hands clean, I reached for a book from the rusting metal case in front of me. Gently brushing off dust, cobwebs, and an insect from the surface of the volume, I opened it and examined the elegant signature on the inside cover identifying its owner as “Mahadev Desai.” What the signature didn’t tell me was that this book, along with several thousand others, was read, used, and shared jointly by Desai (no relation to me) and his boss, Mahatma Gandhi.

As I explored the old, dust-caked books in this startling collection over the following weeks, months, and years, a story of Gandhi’s life and work unfolded before me that diverged from the accounts I knew. The very presence of such a substantial collection of books in proximity to Gandhi—who famously espoused a philosophy of non-possession—suggested that the image of simplicity and detachment long associated with the Mahatma, or “Great Soul,” was misleading: There was clearly a hidden degree of complexity to Gandhi’s life.

From the heart of this library, I began to learn that the common conception of Gandhi as a solitary, saintly hero who stood up to the British Empire and led India toward independence was incomplete. Gandhi was actually an energetic and effective director of one of the 20th century’s most innovative social enterprises. He was, in essence, an exceptional entrepreneur who relied on a tight-knit community of coworkers—and an extensive store of intellectual resources—to support him and his work.

The origins of Gandhi’s enterprise stretch back into the 19th century, well before he became known as the Mahatma. Gandhi was born in 1869 in Porbandar, a city on the Kathiawar Peninsula in Gujarat Province, facing the Arabian Sea, 250 miles west of Ahmedabad. The youngest child of a successful political administrator, Gandhi grew up in a part of India shaped by a rich tradition of cross-cultural exchange. Despite being a shy and diffident student, the young Gandhi made a dramatic decision to leave his homeland and seek his future abroad by enrolling in a law program in London in 1888. Almost immediately following his return to India three years later, he accepted a job as a lawyer for a Gujarati trading firm in South Africa.

At the turn of the 20th century, South Africa was home to a sizable population of Indian immigrants, primarily indentured laborers, who were often treated as second-class citizens. Accustomed to respectful race relations from his time in London, Gandhi was startled and outraged by the racial discrimination he experienced and witnessed while living in South Africa. He resolved to fight the racial injustices around him, and by the time he finally moved back to India in 1915, two decades later, he had transformed himself from a relatively unknown provincial barrister into a political powerhouse and social reformer with an international reputation.

It was during a campaign for the rights of the Indian community in South Africa that Gandhi first came to rely on the support of a cohort of eccentric and talented men and women. Most of these collaborators—who were of both Indian and European backgrounds—were volunteers, and were housed at Gandhi’s two experimental communities in South Africa, the Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm. These institutions, loosely based on ancient Indian religious communities called ashrams, became the headquarters for Gandhi’s activism, which was based on his philosophy of Satyagraha, or “truth force,” and its attendant practice of civil disobedience.

Gandhi’s collaborators not only assisted him with the practical elements of his political campaigns and residential communities; they also served as his intellectual companions and introduced him to the writings of a variety of authors. Although he was busy juggling his legal career and increasingly high-profile political work, Gandhi took advantage of his frequent travels around South Africa to immerse himself in books on religious history, literature, politics, and other subjects of interest to him.

Though philosophically he disavowed material possessions, Gandhi became a savvy and serial collector of books and people. When he returned to India, he brought a number of his coworkers from South Africa with him as well as almost 10,000 books and pamphlets. Once in India, he chose a secluded spot outside Ahmedabad on the banks of the Sabarmati River as the site of a new ashram. The Satyagraha Ashram quickly became the focal point of Gandhi’s social and political endeavors around India and a hub for his burgeoning community of coworkers.

Gandhi’s nephew Maganlal had been a linchpin of his communities in South Africa, and he continued to serve as a foreman of sorts for Gandhi in India, leading his experiments in agriculture and other fields involving physical work that were key components of his ideal of self-sufficient living. Yet Gandhi still needed someone who could match his tremendous intellectual, social, and spiritual capacities, who would work for him and sustain his causes. He found such a person later that year, when he met Desai. Despite the rapport immediately felt on both sides, Gandhi instructed the young man to wait a year before joining his movement: The work he was about to start would be all-consuming.

Desai officially joined Gandhi in 1917, fulfilling the vision of his future he had first shared with Narahari Parikh on their walk by the Sabarmati River. From the outset, Desai’s daily routine was grueling. He woke before Gandhi arose at 4 am in order to work on the Mahatma’s schedule and make other preparations. He was by Gandhi’s side throughout the day, taking notes on his meetings and various activities and helping him draft correspondence and articles. (Desai’s son Narayan, who grew up working with Gandhi and his father, recalled a number of occasions when Gandhi had only one change to make to Desai’s articles: He replaced Desai’s authorial initials, M.D., with his own, M.K.G.) Finally, after Gandhi had retired, Desai wrote a diary account of the Mahatma’s day so that no important detail went unrecorded.

In addition to Desai, who performed his role under the title of personal secretary, and Gandhi’s family members—especially his wife, Kasturbai—the Mahatma’s inner circle in India came to include a second secretary named Pyarelal; an English admiral’s daughter who abandoned life in Britain to live in the austere environment of Gandhi’s community after reading a biography of the Mahatma; and Columbia University–trained economist J. C. Kumarappa, among others. As many as 200 people lived with Gandhi at the Satyagraha Ashram at the institution’s zenith.

Ever since reading Unto This Last, John Ruskin’s 1877 paean to the dignity of manual labor, in South Africa, Gandhi had had a credo to match his Victorian attitude of industriousness. Accordingly, he transformed his ashram into a workshop where each member engaged in substantial amounts of communal service, from working in the community’s kitchen to teaching in the ashram school to cleaning the shared latrines. The latter task was one of Gandhi’s favorite chores, both to do himself and to assign to others. He saw a person’s readiness to clean latrines, a major taboo in India, as an indication of a willingness to transgress deeply embedded social values in service of his movement’s larger ideals.

This regimen underscored Gandhi’s central philosophical tenet: For India to achieve true independence, it needed a widespread ethos of service. More than political freedom from the British, independence to Gandhi implied the ability of a society’s system of self-governance to serve the interest of its citizens completely and without corruption. Gandhi was determined to show India (and the British) exactly what he meant by such service. A demonstration of selflessness and self-sufficiency, then, was the first crucial responsibility of Gandhi’s enterprise. However, given the nature of his social and political campaigns, it was by no means the only one.

Of all the political events in Gandhi’s life, perhaps none is more famous than the Salt March of 1930. That theatrical act of defiance—in protest of the heavy tax on salt imposed by the British in India—catapulted Gandhi to new heights in his political career, as the image of this frail individual challenging a mighty empire captured the hearts and imaginations of millions of people around the world.

Yet like many popular conceptions of Gandhi, this image is incomplete. Absent are the 78 members of the Satyagraha Ashram who accompanied him on his march, as well as numerous aides, lieutenants, and volunteers who worked behind the scenes to stage the historic event. There would have been no Salt March, no iconic Gandhi images, without them.

A month before the march, Gandhi’s colleague Vallabhbhai Patel led a team that canvassed arid Gujarat Province to determine the best route. Chief among their considerations were the route’s proximity to salt deposits and to towns where local government officials would be likely to resign their posts on Gandhi’s arrival in support of the protest, as well as easy access for the news media so that it could report on the march’s progress. Gandhi had become a master of employing media coverage to make his efforts successful, and he and his team orchestrated the march so that it would be a sustained media event. They plotted a trail for a three-week trek from Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad south toward the Arabian Sea, paralleling the railway line, which would be the primary means for maintaining communication—by both post and messengers—between the marchers and the ashram headquarters, as well as the conduit for the media covering the march.

Meanwhile, at the Satyagraha Ashram, Gandhi’s secretariat was busy marshaling evidence demonstrating the link between the salt tax and the degradation of Indian society, and publishing it in Gandhi’s weekly journals Young India and Navajivan, where the arguments could be picked up by mainstream media outlets. Parikh and Desai scoured the vast print resources in the ashram—not only Desai’s personal library, but the main library, which housed the thousands of books that Gandhi had brought back from South Africa—for statistics about salt and the Salt Act. Desai used these figures in articles in Young India as well as in Gandhi’s communications with the imperial government and the speeches he helped Gandhi draft. Gandhi himself contributed to the information-gathering efforts, urging associates to send him publications and other sources of information on salt and related subjects.

Gandhi’s personal accounts and other articles from the Salt March and Desai’s pieces in Young India and Navajivan detailing the narrative drama of the march, along with reports and photographs in the mainstream news media,put the Mahatma and his cause before a growing audience in India and around the world. Yet the organizational sophistication behind Gandhi’s dramatic march never got a mention in the headlines the enterprise worked so hard to produce. Its invisibility was partly by design: By effacing their own efforts, Gandhi’s associates reinforced his image as a simple and self-reliant crusader.

While most traces of Gandhi’s enterprise were indeed erased from the historical record, Mahadev Desai’s library is a notable exception. Gandhi’s team compiled and utilized an extensive variety of intellectual resources to support the Mahatma’s mission. Desai was the heart of this intellectual operation, helping Gandhi refine his philosophy over the course of his career and providing him with concrete information to use in his ideological struggle with British imperialism.

As I studied Desai’s library, it became clear to me why these books were important to Gandhi: If you were living in the first part of the 20th century and your goal was to oust the Raj from India and establish swaraj, or self-rule, on a national scale, these would be the books you would want on your shelves.

Desai’s library covers almost the full spectrum of human topics, and the books in it were used as general references on particular subjects as well as sources for specific facts. First are books that represent the collective knowledge the British had amassed about India since the beginning of their engagement with the subcontinent in the 17th century. The second category of material comprises volumes that convey Britons’ knowledge about their own society and history. Understanding how the British understood India as well as how the British understood themselves was a vital component of Gandhi’s strategy. A third category within Desai’s library embraces thousands of works that might come under the heading of “indigenous knowledge”: by Indians, for Indians, and about India. These books were especially relevant to Gandhi’s mission of building a self-sustaining and self-governing Indian nation in the wake of imperial rule.

Rounding out the collection is a dizzying assortment of books on subjects close to the heart of Gandhi’s work: imperialism and counter-imperialism, health and nutrition, education, religion, literature, philosophy, economics, and world history. Scanning the shelves of Desai’s library, I picked out works as diverse as the writings of Winston Churchill, the plays of William Shakespeare (in a beautiful miniature vellum set), the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vincent Smith’s History of India (1907), Reynold Nicholson’s Mystics of Islam (1914), and William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1911) alongside titles such as R. D. Ranade’s A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy: Being a Systematic Introduction to Indian Metaphysics (1926), Tulsidas’s version of The Ramayana (in an edition published in 1922), and S. R. Narayana Ayyar’s Experiments in Bee-Culture (1938).

Once I grasped the scope of the collection before me, I was puzzled by two questions: When did Desai and Gandhi have time to read all of these books, and how did they get them in the first place?

The answers to both questions were, in fact, inside the books themselves. A variety of dedications from friends and admirers in India and around the world, stamps of Indian and British booksellers, and other notations revealed a staggering number of sources. These books were the fruits of the transnational intellectual network in which Gandhi and company were active participants.

Still, what good is a great library if its contents are never consulted? Given how little free time Desai and Gandhi had, it is hard to imagine when they found the opportunity to read in this vast collection.

Two important types of evidence shed light on not only when but how these books were read. On the inside covers of hundreds of the volumes are small indigo stamps surrounded by a series of dates and signatures. These are Indian prison stamps, recording when each volume entered and exited the penitentiary. Here was the missing time needed to read so many books: when Gandhi, Desai, and their coworkers were locked in jail for acts of civil disobedience. As Gandhi himself noted, “In this world good books make up for the absence of good companions, so that all Indians, if they want to live happily in jail, should accustom themselves to reading good books.”

Because Desai, in particular, was an active reader, we can follow his progress through many of the books in his library and see how he mined these intellectual resources for material useful to Gandhi’s movement. Furthermore, writing in the margins and other parts of the books indicates that many of them were read by more than one person within Gandhi’s circle, including the Mahatma himself. Indeed, Gandhi’s political colleagues, including Vallabhbhai Patel (who became independent India’s first home minister) and Jawaharlal Nehru (India’s first prime minister), sent books to Desai while he was in one prison and they were each in another. Far from stymieing the work of Gandhi’s enterprise, by repeatedly arresting Gandhi and his coworkers the British unwittingly supported it.

In his lifetime, Gandhi was arrested 14 times on two continents. By the time of his final incarceration, in August 1942, at the start of the Quit India movement to force the British out of the subcontinent once and for all, his enterprise and stature had grown to such an extent that the British had to take special care to keep him and his assistants confined without further agitating the public. Gandhi was imprisoned along with his wife, Mahadev Desai, and several other aides in the Aga Khan Palace in the city of Pune.

The strain of organizing Quit India agitation had taken a toll on the entire group, as the demand for complete and immediate independence had brought a swift and heavy response from the British around India. Desai particularly worked himself into a frenzy of concern about the 73-year-old Gandhi’s fragile health. Nevertheless, after settling into the palace prison, Desai and Gandhi got back to their regular work routine of reading and writing. Eight days after their arrest, following a morning spent taking Gandhi’s dictation, Desai began to feel lightheaded. Within minutes he suffered a massive heart attack, and died shortly thereafter in Gandhi’s arms. Just 50 years old, he had spent half of his life serving Gandhi and his mission.

By the time Gandhi was released, in 1944, Kasturbai—his life partner and wife of 64 years—had also died. Without Kasturbai and Desai, Gandhi’s enterprise lost its twin engines, and sputtered as it tried to support the Mahatma during the dramatic run-up to independence in 1947 and the accompanying chaotic partition of the subcontinent into two countries, India and Pakistan. As tensions increased over the issue of dividing the subcontinent, Gandhi assumed the responsibility of mediating between the vying political factions while also trying to calm an increasingly anxious and aggravated citizenry. While the first part of Gandhi’s vision of swaraj was fulfilled with the peaceful transfer of power and the departure of the British, India’s political freedom did not free it from religious strife. Violent episodes of communal antagonism erupted as millions of people migrated in both directions across the new borders separating the eastern and western halves of the Muslim state of Pakistan from Hindu-majority India.

Gandhi spent most of the last part of his life—both before and after independence—traveling from one fractious part of India to the next, attempting to halt outbreaks of violence, particularly between Hindus and Muslims (and often succeeding, in ways the government could not, leading the last viceroy of British India, Lord Louis Mountbatten, to call him a “one-man boundary force”). As he walked through devastated villages, he was often physically assisted by his two grandnieces, who supported him on either side and whom he called his “two walking sticks.” Although they helped him stand until the end, his grandnieces and the other remaining members of his entourage could not replace the likes of Kasturbai and Desai, and the Mahatma’s power was accordingly diminished. The girls, Abha and Manu, were at his side when he was shot and killed in New Delhi in 1948 by a Hindu extremist who believed that Gandhi was being too conciliatory toward Muslims.

Despite the contributions of Gandhi’s enterprise to his life and work, it continues to be overlooked in both popular and academic studies of the Mahatma. Consequently, we often draw the wrong lessons from Gandhi’s story. The real magic of the Mahatma was not a trick of popular charisma, but in fact a deft ability to recruit, manage, and inspire a team of talented individuals who worked tirelessly in his service. Gandhi himself was one of the few people to recognize how this phenomenon worked. “With each day I realize more and more that my mahatmaship, which is a mere adornment, depends on others. I have shone with the glory borrowed from my innumerable co-workers,” he wrote in 1928 in Navajivan.

Recognizing this fact does not diminish the rare and valuable qualities Gandhi himself possessed. Rather, it acknowledges that great work is the product of collaborative processes, and that many hands working together toward a common purpose can achieve monumental results. In Gandhi’s case, it was the relationship between a visionary leader and the team supporting him—and their collective use of the right resources, such as the books in Mahadev Desai’s library—that paved the way for extraordinary and lasting accomplishments.

• Ian Desai is a postdoctoral associate and lecturer in South Asian studies and history at Yale. He received his doctorate from Oxford, where he studied on a Rhodes scholarship.

Conspiracy of the State

A macabre drama is unfolding in the poverty-stricken Indian state of Orissa where a democratically-elected government has begun to crush over a dozen people’s peaceful resistance movements against their forceful eviction from their forest, farm, water bodies and source of livelihood to help giant multi-national corporations usurp mineral-rich forest and fertile agricultural land.

The recent police atrocities on the people of Kalinganagar and Jagatsinghpur may turn out to be a turning point in the state's people's non-violent agitations which have a long and distinguished history of successfully thwarting two nationally important mega projects - the national missile testing range of the defense ministry at Baliapal and the bauxite mining from the Gandhamardan hill by the public sector National Aluminum Corporation (NALCO).

People of Kalinganagar, touted as the steel hub of India, and Jagatsinghpur have been carrying out a non-violent agitation against their displacement to make way for Tata's six-million-ton integrated steel plant and Korean giant Posco's 12-million-ton steel plant respectively. In both the places, the Orissa government, with active collusion of armed goons hired by companies, has launched massive attacks indulging in firing, baton-charge and arson. The government had tried to forcibly evict the people from their villages in 2006 and 2007 too resulting in the death of 14 tribals in Kalinganagar and injuries to many in Jagatsinghpur.

In both Kalinganagar and Jagatsingpur, the government and the companies used agent provocateurs to give a violent-twist to the peaceful sit-in dharnas by the people so as to portray the police action as ‘legitimate’. Stories were planted by the government in a section of the media describing the police action as an inevitable measure to put down violence initiated by the non-violent satyagrahis.

In Kalinganagar, where the police and the hired goons of the company had opened fire injuring over 10 people, including women and, subsequently plundered the houses of non-violent resisters, the government put up a poster purportedly issued by Maoists in support of the people’s movement, a day before the police action on March 30.

The attempt to dub the non-violent resistance movement in Kalinganagar as ‘Maoist inspired’ is a sinister design of the government which follows the popular dictum – ‘To kill the dog, give it a bad name first.’

The government’s exasperation is understandable because the people of Orissa have so far succeeded in stalling not just Tata’s and Posco’s attempt to take possession of the allotted to them for setting up massive steel plants, but have also thwarted London-based Vedanta Resources Plc from carrying out mining from the Niyamgiri hills at Lanjigarh in Kalahandi district.

The 8,000-strong Dongaria tribe residing in the foothills of the Niyamgiri hill in Kalahandi district have been carrying out a resistance movement against the mining of bauxite from the hill top on the ground that their tribal diety Niyamraja resides there and any mining activities would destroy the ecology of the region and deprive them of the their main source of livelihood, which is the forest. The ministry of environment is yet to give its clearance to Orissa Mining Corporation for carrying out mining of bauxite from the hill top. This has adversely impacted the alumina refinery of Vedanta at Lanjigarh.

Vedanta is also facing stiff resistance from the villagers to their proposed ‘world-class’ university on the Konarka-Puri coast on a massive 6,000 acres of land allotted to the company by the state government. The protesting villagers have not allowed Vedanta to take possession of the land. Lok Pal has ordered an inquiry into the alleged corruption in allocation of land from out of the land owned by the Jagannath Temple trust.

Arcelor Mittal’s proposed steel plant in Keonjhar district too has not been able to take off due to stiff opposition from the people who are likely to be displaced by the project. Though the Orissa government had committed to 8,000 acres in Keonjhar district for the proposed Arcelor Mittal steel plant at the time of signing the MoU in 2006, it has not yet been able to provide any land. The process has been delayed due to agitation by displaced families under the banner of Mittal Pratirodh Manch as most of the land is fertile agricultural land.

Agitations have also stalled allotment of land for setting up of a couple of thermal power plants, not on the grounds of displacement, but because these power plants would consume great amount of water at the cost of irrigation to cultivable land.

Police Atrocity Against Villagers In Orissa

Countercurrents.org

By Nachiketa Desai

In a massive armed assault using crude bombs, bullets and batons, the Orissa police cracked down on over 1,500 villagers staging a peaceful sit-in dharna since January last against their imminent displacement to make way for South Korean mega corp Posco’s 12 million ton Greenfield steel plant in the coastal district of Jagatsinghpur, Orissa state, India.

More than 100 people, five of them seriously, including women and children were injured in police action which began since the crack of the dawn on Saturday (May 15) with the arrest of CPI MP from Jagatsinghpur Bibhu Prasad Tarai while he was on his way to the core area of the proposed steel plant site to express solidarity with the agitating people of six villages whose 4004 acres of land has been acquired by the government for the Korean steel major.

Tension in the area has been mounting since yesterday with the arrival of 25 platoons of armed police to Balitutha, the entrance point to these villages where over 1500 villagers had set up a blockade and were on a sit-in dharna. That the police had arrived to launch an offensive was anticipated by all because only two days ago it had opened fire in Kalinganagar, killing one person and injuring many, to evacuate agitating villagers for Tata’s proposed steel plant there.

In both Kalinganagar and Jagatsinghpur, the villagers have been carrying out peaceful agitation against their displacement for the last five years. In order to create a division among the agitating people, the government and the companies had bought over a section of the local population to their side and shifted them to rehabilitation colonies.

It was with the help of these pro-project villagers that the police had carried out a raid in Kalinganagar on March 30 last, pillaging houses and burning stocks of foodgrain. Using a similar tactic, the police made the pro-Posco villagers to lob crude bombs made of kerosene and petrol to create panic and use it as a ruse to launch a massive offensive against the protesters sitting on dharna.

People of six villages, who have organized under the banner of Posco Pratirodh Sangram Samiti, had blocked the road at Balitutha, the key entrance point to these villages since January. On Saturday morning the district magistrate of Jagatsinghpur started issuing warning from a hand-held loudspeaker that the police would use force if the villagers did not lift the blockade and disperse.

According to the leaders of the Posco Pratiodh Sangram Samiti, police first fired teargas shells and set on fire the tent under which the protestors were sitting on dharna and then chased the people away from the dharna site at Balitutha. “More than 100 villagers were injured by the police who used batons fired rubber bullets. We shall continue our democratic mass resistance, come what may,” said Prasahant Paikray, spokesperson of PPSS.

The district administration has imposed prohibitory orders under Section 144 of CrPC to facilitate the government undertake survey of the land in these villages with a view to finally handing over these to the Posco. Police has also arrested Congress leaders Umesh Swain and Jayanta Biswal along with the CPI MP Bibhu Prasad Tarai. CPI has planned a protest rally to be addressed by senior party leader A B Bardhan on May 19.

Lessons from Chhattisgarh Peace March

A bunch of hooligans belonging to Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress representing the traders and contractors of Bastar succeeded in creating confusion among the newspaper reading, TV- watching urban middle class about a unique initiative of over 50 concerned citizens who took out a three-day peace march from Raipur to Dantewada in Chhattisgarh from May 6 to 8.

The peace march, whose participants included leading scientist Yash Pal, veteran Gandhian Narayan Desai, social activist Swami Agnivesh and academics Banwarilal Sharma and Ramji Singh, besides scores of social activists and independent journalists, was meant to convey the

message to the nation that 'dialogue and not gun' was needed to defuse the crisis caused by the civil war between the state and the Maoists in the mineral-rich forest areas of the tribal-dominated region of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra.

Despite elaborate explanation by Prof Yash Pal, Agnivesh and other eminent citizens about the purpose of their peace march, the Raman Singh government of Chhattisgarh and Union home minister P Chidambaram managed to propagate through the media that the peace march was meant to thwart the 'Green Hunt' and to buy time for the Maoists to regroup themselves.

The media, controlled by the corporate world and the government through their patronage and threat, did their bit by conveying an impression that the peace march met with stiff opposition from the people of chhattisgarh though the vulgar and orchestrated demonstration against the march was only by a handful of hooligans who were seen back-slapping the state police officials.

Unwittingly, the peace marchers too fell into the trap laid by the government and the protesters by confining themselves to addressing a series of press conferences instead of holding one-to-one talk with the people of the towns they passed through. There was also a lack of preparation for the march which should have got placards, banners and pamphlets printed to convey the message of the marchers.

"It was futile to take out the peace march through cities and towns which fall into the 'black-market corridor'. The marchers should have crossed over to the 'red corridor' to establish communication with the adivasis who are caught in the crossfire between the state forces and the Maoists," says Rabi Das, a founder member of the CPI-ML. "The marchers would not have faced any violence, not even a whimper of protest from the Maoists and the adivasis in the 'red corridor' on the other side of the Indravati river," he adds.

Incidentally, Rabi Das and his comrade Nagbhushan Patnaik had renounced violence in the late 1970s after they had come in contact with Gandhian social worker, Malatidevi Choudhury and her husband Nabakrushna Choudhury, the former chief minister of Orissa. Rabi Das has been working in the starvation-prone Kalahandi district of Orissa for over two decades now.

Having met with nasty protest from traders of Jagdalpur and Dantewada, the peace marchers held a review meeting in which several participants stressed the need for crossing the Indravati river into the 'Red Corridor' to express solidarity with the Maoists' cause of giving the ownership rights to the adivasis over land, forest and water bodies, with the rider that taking up guns was not the solution.

Prominent among the peace marchers such as Prof Yash Pal, Thomas Kochery, Dr. Banwarilal Sharma had made it amply clear during their interaction with the press that the faulty development paradigm of the country was responsible for the widening schism between the rich and the poor and that the government was hand-in-glove with the mega corporations and multinational corporations in the plunder of the country's natural resources to the peril of the poor adivasis and the environment.

Given such a stand, the peace marchers could have easily established rapport with the adivasis in the 'Red Corridor' as well as the Maoists fighting for their rights. They could have also tried to convince the Maoists of the efficacy of non-violent direct action by pointing out the success of the people's movements in Baliapal and Gadhamardan in Orissa which were able to stop the proposed national missile testing range and the bauxite mining respectively.

In fact, it is because the people's movement in Orissa has remained peaceful and non-violent that it has been difficult for the government and the mega corporation to push ahead several mega projects in the state. Local villagers in Orissa have been resisting setting up of mega steel plants by the Tatas and the Korean gian Posco for more than five years now as a result of which these companies have not been able to take possession of the land.

The government and the companies, on the other hand, have tried many times to provoke the people by resorting to violence as in Kalinganagar. There have also been attempts by the government to brand these peaceful movements as Naxalite movements so that the state repression can be justified.

Battle for Bastar

Bastar (Chhattisgarh): A fierce battle is raging along the Indrawati river in Central India. On one side of the river are deployed the para military forces of the Indian state. On the other side, in dense forest, are the Maoist guerrillas.

The Indian militia calls the battle, operation ‘Green Hunt’, which is aimed at flushing out the Maoists from the mineral rich forest land so that Indian and multinational corporations can fatten their bottom line by exploiting iron ore, coal and bauxite. The Maoists are fighting to protect the 40,000 square kilometers of dense forest land known as Dandakaranya from these marauding companies.

The Indian militia has deployed at the front a private army of teenaged adivasis raised under the banner of ‘Salwa Judum’ to provide local support to the Central Reserve Police force (CRPF). The police of Chhattisgarh operate from the safety of police stations, far away from the battle field. In the battle for the control of Dandakaranya, mostly the adivasis and the CRPF men drawn largely from the poor and socially backward class families from across the country die. Rarely do the senior officers of the police, the bureaucracy or the top executives of the MNCs get killed.

Maoists have ‘liberated’ the mineral-rich region where governments have existed only in the form of greedy contractors and corrupt policemen and forest officials, leaving the mass of tribals to suffer in poverty, disease and illiteracy while outsiders strip away Bastar's minerals.

“The country is on a boil. In the last 60 years, we have made the rich more rich and the poor more poor. The condition of over 60 crore people of our country is deteriorating day by day. If such a scenario continues, there would be great trouble, what kind of trouble is unpredictable,” says Professor Yash Pal, leading space scientist and former chairman of University Grants commission.

“Today, millions of people, mostly tribals, are migrating from their ancestral land to far off places like Mumbai, Delhi, Punjab and Gujarat to toil as labourers. There must be something terribly wrong with our development policy which is making this happen,” points out Prof. Yash Pal. “In the name of development, we are mining for minerals which we export to China, Japan and other countries. We dig land, we dig forest, we uproot people living in this land for the so-called development and progress,” he adds.

“Having uprooted the adivasis, we set up highly polluting industries and destroy the most-beautiful and green forest land of our country. We are destroying the soil of India, we are destroying the people of India.”

Prof. Yash Pal was addressing a press conference in Raipur, the state capital of Chhattisgarh, on the eve of a peace march to Dantewada calling for talks and national debate to find an end to the civil war in the tribal-dominated mineral-rich forest-covered areas of Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra.

Prof. Yash Pal was among the group of over 50 concerned citizens who participated in the peace march from Raipur to Dantewada from May 6 to 8. Among the other participants were Swami Agnivesh of Bandhua Mazdoor Mukti Sangathan, Prof. Banwarilal Sharma of Azadi Bachao Andolan, veteran Gandhian Narayan Desai, chancellor of Gujarat Vidyapith, Thomas Kochery of World Fisherfolk Forum and Radha Bhatt, chairperson of Gandhi Peace Foundation.

There was a consensus among the participants of the peace march that faulty development model of the country, which marginalized the vast majority of rural poor, the indigenous dwellers of the forest, was responsible for the civil war-like situation in not just the forested areas of central India but also in the North-eastern states and Kashmir.

There was also a consensus among them over the means of restoring peace in the country. “Gun versus gun is not the solution. Violence only would breed more violence. If the government thinks that it would be able to eliminate the Maoists by bullets, it is greatly mistaken. Look, what happened in Vietnam,” points out Prof Yash Pal.

“Are we going to annihilate the entire population of Adivasis, just like the Americans did with the Red Indians, to push forward development and progress?” asked Radha Bhatt of the Gandhi Peace Foundation.

“In the name of dam construction and mining, millions of people are getting displaced,” points out Thomas Kochery. “They are getting displaced from their land, forest and water”, he adds. This is the first kind of violence the poor people are facing, this is the first form of terrorism in the country.
“The second form of violence is by Naxalites who take up arms to retaliate the first form of violence. And the third form of violence is when the army and the para military forces use guns to put down the second form of violence,” he points out. “We are here to say that peace can be achieved by removing all the three kinds of violence from the country.”

“A long-lasting peace can be achieved only by holding talks amongst all concerned to find out a sustainable people-centric development paradigm,” says veteran Gandhian Narayan Desai.

Despite having spelled out the objective of their peace march from Raipur to Dantewada, the marchers faced ugly demonstration from a handful of supporters of both the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the opposition Congress as well as from some representatives of trade, commerce and industry bodies.

The first to react was Chhattisgarh chief minister Raman Singh who ridiculed the peace initiative by mocking at them and obliquely referring to them as the sympathizers of the Maoists. “Why do these intellectuals wake up only when the government starts operations against the Maoists and keep quiet when the members of our security forces get killed,” he said.

Taking a cue from the chief minister’s statement, a handful of workers of the BJP, the Congress and the local chamber of commerce and industry held demonstrations in Raipur, Jagdalpur and Dantewada, shouting, “Naxal supporters go back, go back.”

None of these demonstrators was local adivasi and only represented the trading community of the district towns of Jagdalpur and Dantewada which has been exploiting the adivasis over the last several centuries and which thrives on the ongoing war against the Maoists.

“The traders of Jagdalpur and Dantewada are the main suppliers of foodgrain, grocery and other essential commodities to the security forces. Their total turnover of supplies to the security forces is in the range of Rs2000 crore yearly,” points out a resident of Jagdalpur who was a student union leader of the local college about a decade ago.

The state government and members of both the ruling BJP and the opposition Congress, with active participation of the police and local goons have been preventing independent journalists, lawyers and human rights activists from visiting Dantewada by organizing violent attacks against them.

Anyone trying to find out what is happening in Bastar on both sides of the Indrawati river is promptly branded by the Establishment as ‘Supporter of Maoists’.

A Gandhian worker, Himanshu Kumar, who has been running ‘Vanvasi Chetana Ashram’ for the last 17 years, was dubbed as ‘Maoist sympathiser’ and his Ashram razed to the ground by the authorities after he raised the issue of mindless killing of innocent adivasis by the police-backed Salwa Judum private militia.

A couple of journalists have been detained by the police after they tried to cross the Indrawati river to find out what was happing in the deep forest.

Fascism in Bastar

A mob of about 100 slogan shouting supporters of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party barged into the public meeting of eminent citizens, including space scientist Yash Pal, veteran Gandhian Narayan Desai and former UGC chairman Ramji Singh, a day before they embarked upon a peace march from Raipur to Dantewada in Chhattisgarh.

A group of over 50 leading citizens had converged in Raipur on May 5 to take out what they call 'March for dialogue on peace and justice', calling for end to a civil-war like situation in the predominantly tribal state of Chhattisgarh. These citizens comprising academics, scientists, social activists and Gandhian workers, want a 'ceasefire' between the state forces and Maoists to begin a nation-wide discussion on model of development that the country should follow to ensure a sustainable, just and people-oriented economy and polity.

At a press conference, held before the public meeting, Prof Yash Pal said he was greatly pained at the plight of the tribals, farmers and the indigenous people in the last 60 years of Independence for which the powers that be and the middle-class in general were responsible. "Do we want to annihilate the entire race of aboriginal people, like America had done in the name of development?" he asked.

Interestingly, the Press Club of Raipur allowed to hold the press conference of the leading citizens as an exception to their earlier resolution not to allow any press conference of human rights activists. The press conference lasted for more than an hour during which journalists asked leading questions like 'How can you advocate ceasefire when Naxalites are out to wage a war against the constitutionally-formed government?"

Swami Agnivesh, Prof Yash Pal and Narayan Desai explained the limited scope of the peace march saying the foremost thing was to stop violence from both the sides - from the state and the Left extremists - to facilitate a nation-wide dialogue on ways and means to have a sustainable and just development of the country in which people were at the centre.

Later, while the marchers held a public meeting at the town hall, near the district collector's office, a mob of over 100 people, stormed into the hall shouting slogans, "Naxal sympathisers go back", "Naxal sympathisers, shame, shame." The trouble-makers disrupted the meeting several times during which the speakers stopped addressing the gathering.

State director general of police Vishwa Ranjan said the trouble-makers belonged to both the BJP and the Congress party. "Tempers are running high in Chhattisgarh over the wanton killings of tribals by the Maoists. Anyone advocating dialogue with them is perceived as the sympathiser of the Maoists," he added. The top cop directed concerned police offers of Jagdalpur and Dantewada to provide adequate security to the peace marchers.

Trouble Spots

Two major steel projects envisaging combined capacity of 18 million tons of steel production a year have not been able to make any progress for the last five years because of serious problems related to land acquisition from tribals and farmers. These are Korean steel major Posco’s 12 MTPA integrated steel plant and Tata Steel’s 6 MTPA plant.

Posco’s was the first major foreign direct investment proposal after the Orissa government invited big industrial groups to set up the state’s second steel plant after the public sector Rourkela steel plant. Though the state government earmarked 4004 acres of land, of which 2900 acres was forest land, Posco has not yet got the possession of the land. This, despite the fact that the Union ministry of environment and forest has given final clearance for acquiring forest land in Orissa for its steel plant project and the company has already deposited Rs 105 crore with the state government towards compensatory afforestation.

Posco has sought the state government’s help in acquiring land from the villagers after the people cultivating the land for betel leaf and prawns rejected a rehabilitation package announced by the company. The company has announced a compensation of Rs.75,000 per acre for the loss of land meant for betel vines, Rs.1 lakh per acre for prawn farms and Rs.75,000 per acre for cultivable land. But the package has failed to enthuse the locals.

“It is a dream compensation package. Yet, the villagers are adamant to vacate the land. This is nothing but bargaining for more compensation,” says Priyabrata Patnaik, the chairman and managing director of Industrial and Investment Development Corporation (IDCO), the nodal agency empowered to acquire land in the state.

A Posco spokesman, expressing concern at the delay in getting the possession of the land, said, “The company has already made substantial investment on the project in the last five years since the signing of the memorandum of understanding with the government; how long can we afford to wait for the land.”

The other project, which has still failed to take off is that of the Tata Steel which has proposed to set up a 6 MTPA integrated steel plant in Kalinganagar, an industrial estate being described by the state government as the ‘Steel Hub of India’, about 150 km from the state capital in Jajpur district.

The government has agreed to provide 3,471 acres of land, which it had acquired in 1992, to Tata Steel for setting up the plant. Of the allotted land, private ownership accounted for 2,755 acres impacting 562 core families which comprise of 1,195 nuclear families belonging to six revenue villages. While compensation under the land acquisition act was paid to them in 1992, the villagers were allowed to retain the possession and continue cultivation of land.

While as many as 791 families out of 1,195 families have relocated voluntarily, the remaining 404 families have refused to move out of the core area. It is these 404 families who have been opposing the project demanding land for land as part of the compensation, rather than the cash component. There have been violent clashes between anti and pro project as also between the protesting villagers and the police.

The proposed ‘world-class’ university of Vedanta on the Konarka-Puri coast is also facing protest from the villagers around the 6,000 acres of land allotted to Vedanta by the state government. The protesting villagers have not allowed Vedanta to take possession of the land. In the meantime, Lok Ayukta has ordered an inquiry into the alleged corruption in allocation of land from out of the land owned by the Jagannath Temple trust.

The 8,000-strong Dongaria tribe residing in the foothills of the Niyamgiri hill in Kalahandi district too have been carrying out a resistance movement against the mining of bauxite from the hill top on the ground that their tribal diety Niyamraja resides there and any mining activities would destroy the ecology of the region and deprive them of the their main source of livelihood, which is the forest. The ministry of environment is yet to give its clearance to Orissa Mining Corporation for carrying out mining of bauxite from the hill top. This has adversely impacted the alumina refinery of Vedanta at Lanjigarh.

Arcelor Mittal’s proposed steel plant in Keonjhar district too has not been able to take off due to stiff opposition from the people who are likely to displaced by the project. Though the Orissa government had committed to 8,000 acres in Keonjhar district for the proposed Arcelor Mittal steel plant at the time of signing the MoU in 2006, it has not yet been able to provide any land. The process has been delayed due to agitation by displaced families under the banner of Mittal Pratirodh Manch as most of the land is fertile agricultural land.

Agitations have also stalled allotment of land for setting up of a couple of thermal power plants, not on the grounds of displacement, but because these power plants would consume great amount of water at the cost of irrigation to cultivable land.

Orissa : Miners' Paradise

Miners’ Paradise

Orissa is experiencing the pangs of an unfolding industrial revolution that seeks to transform this poorest of the states of India into a power house of electricity, steel and aluminum

The slogan - ‘Mining Happiness’ - on the giant-sized bill board greets the alighting passengers at the Biju Patnaik Airport of Bhubaneswar. The same slogan, below the smiling faces of tribal children, runs on the signages posted on the electric poles that stand at regular intervals along the divider of the main four-lane road from the airport to the state secretariat and beyond to the swanky info city.

‘Mining Happiness’ is the catch-line of the recent multi-million-rupee multi-media advertisement campaign of the Vedanta Aluminum Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the London Stock Exchange listed mining giant Vedanta Resources PLC. Vedanta’s advertisement campaign claims the company’s one million ton alumina refinery to be scaled up to five million tons at Lanjigarh in the state’s Kalahandi district, ill-famed for recurring droughts and starvation deaths, will wipe off poverty and bring about all-round development of the region.

Vedanta’s chief operating officer Mukesh Kumar says the refinery at Lanjigarh and the aluminum smelter at Jharsugda together would provide employment to over 20,000 people. Vedanta also plans to set up a university on 6,000 acres of land along the Konarka-Puri sea shore at an investment of Rs.15,000 crore. “We have committed to invest over Rs.60,000 crore in Orissa of which we have so far spent Rs.30,000 crore,” he adds.

The other eye-catching advertisement bill boards in the state capital are those of Tata Steel. These too are on similar lines, carrying the photographs of some tribal boys and girls who, the company says, are the future engineers, doctors and IT professionals, a dream that would be fulfilled once the company’s proposed 6 million ton integrated steel plant comes up in Kalinganagar of Jajpur district, 120 kms North-East of the state capital.

“Global as well as domestic companies started making a beeline to Orissa after 2003, evincing keen interest in setting up heavy industries in the field of steel, aluminum and thermal power all of which need minerals which are found in abundance in the state,” says Priyabrata Patnaik, chairman and managing director of Industrial Investment Development Corporation of Orissa (IDCO).


After the Naveen Patnaik government passed the Orissa Industries Facilitation Act of 2004 which envisaged a single window system for investors wishing to set up industries in the state, there was a rush of companies, both multi-national as well as domestic, for signing memorandum of understanding (MoUs) with the state government.

“Till 2003, there were only small-scale units for making pig iron, sponge iron and steel to the tune of 250,000 tons besides the 50-year-old public sector Rourkela Steel Plant. The new industrial policy brought about a drastic change. Today, as many as 49 companies have expressed their intent of setting up plants in Orissa, envisaging an investment of Rs. 198,149.40 crore to produce 75.66 million tons of steel per year,” says the IDCO CMD.

Korean steel giant POSCO, with a proposed investment of USD 12 billion (Rs 52,000 crore), was among the first major players with plans to construct a world-class, fully integrated steel plant in Orissa with annual production capacity of 12 million tons. Among the domestic players, Tata Steel signed an MoU with the state government in 2004 to set up a 6 MTPA plant.

“By 2015, Orissa would become an industrial power house, producing over 35-40 million tons of steel, 3 million tons of alumina and 1 million tons of aluminum annually while also generating over 30,000 MW of electricity through coal-based thermal power plants,” says Ashok Dalvai, state’s steel and mines secretary. “Of the 49 steel projects for which MoUs have been signed, five are operating fully while 24 have become partially operational,” he adds.

Besides sectors like steel, power, cement and aluminum, investment has also been proposed on ports, universities, hospitals and several SEZs. While Rs.20,000 crore of investment is planned for creating SEZs in 1,077 hectares, Rs. 15,000 is proposed to be invested in setting up the Vedanta university along the Konarka-Puri coast.

Several private ports are proposed to be set up along the state’s 480-km-long coast. The state government has identified as many as 14 sites where ports can be developed. Already, several companies have expressed interest in developing some of these ports. These include Gujarat’s Adani group near the Paradip port, Aditya Birla group’s S.L. Mining at the Chudamani port in Bhadrak district, Navajuga engineering of Hyderabad at Astaranga port in Puri district, Puri Ports Limited at Baliharchandi port also in Puri district and Good earth maritime of Madras at Bahuda muhana in Ganjam district. Already work on three private ports has started. These include the Gopalpur port by the Orissa Stevedores, Dhamra port jointly by TISCO and L&T and Jatadhari port by POSCO.

“The government, through IDCO has already acquired 121,000 acres of land and is in process of acquiring almost equal acreage more for the setting up of these industrial projects,” says the IDCO CMD. IDCO is the nodal agency for identifying and acquiring land both from the government and private parties at strategic locations. The acquired land is then allotted for setting up industries. IDCO extends help in identification of project site and collection of plan and schedule of land from the revenue authorities.

Despite a single-window system in place for getting clearance from revenue, forest, environment, water and electricity supply departments, and IDCO having been empowered for land acquisition, some of the major industrial projects including the proposed steel plants of the POSCO, the 12 – million-ton greenfield steel plant of Arcelor Mittal and Tata Steel and Vedanta’s existing alumina and aluminum plants and proposed world-class university are facing stiff resistance from the local residents, environmentalists and social activists.

As a result, Posco and Tata Steel have not been able to start work on their integrated steel plants, which together would have produced 18 MTPA. Both these steel giants had signed MoUs in 2004 and planned to start production by 2010. The civil construction of the Rs 5000-crore 1.5 million ton alumina refinery project of Utkal Alumina International Limited (UAIL), a subsidiary of the Aditya Birla Group (ABG), near Kasipur in Rayagada district too is facing opposition from the displaced and affected people of the project.

Though the Orissa government had committed to 8,000 acres in Keonjhar district for the proposed Arcelor Mittal steel plant at the time of signing the MoU in 2006, it has not yet been able to provide any land. The process has been delayed due to agitation by displaced families under the banner of Mittal Pratirodh Manch as most of the land is fertile agricultural land.

Though private companies have the option to negotiate land price directly with the farmers and buy it, the process is not always feasible because in most cases where the industries want to set up their units the land owners belong to the scheduled tribe or scheduled caste from whom land cannot be bought. So, the prospective investor has to be dependent on the state government which acquires land and then gives it out on lease to the industry.

This is in sharp contrast to the process of land acquisition in Gujarat where the prospective investors by land from the farmers directly while the state government’s role is that of only a facilitator. Private industries are also allotted land in the industrial estates already created by the Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation, the equivalent of Orissa’s IDCO.

It is the inability of IDCO to get the acquired land vacated by the occupant farmers which is proving to be the main stumbling block in the way of starting work on the proposed industrial projects. “We have been awaiting possession of the 4004 acres of land for more than five years now without any progress. The government has been telling us that an amicable solution to the impasse created because of people’s refusal to vacate the land would be found out soon. However, till date there is no sign of any solution,” says Simanta Mohanty, general manager, external relations, Posco.

“The protests by people against displacement are a part of democratic process. People are resorting to agitation and protests to extract as much compensation from the government and the industry as possible. Another reason behind these agitations is the prevailing inertia among the people who do not want any change in their lifestyle,” says mines and steel secretary Dalvai.

This reason may hold true for the farmers, fisher folk, weavers and other artisans engaged in various kinds of handicraft who perceive heavy industries as being the main cause of deprivation of their means of livelihood. The only industrial activity of the state so far has been related to mining of minerals. The employment in the mining sector, however, has been declining over the years due to mechanization. While there were 52,937 workers employed in the mining sector in 2000-01, their number declined to 49,176 by 2008, points out the State’s Economic Surveys presented to the Orissa Legislative Assembly.

Widening rich-poor divide

However, for the educated urban middle class the process of industrialization in the state has ushered in a new era of prosperity and ever increasing opportunities. The mushrooming of engineering colleges, numbering 53 in the state capital Bhubaneswar, and 50 in other main towns of the state, enrolling 52,000 students every year, is a pointer to the growing aspiration of the educated youth to make it to a comfortable career path. Private business schools and medical colleges, as well as institutions imparting other professional education too have come up in large number.

The schism between the urban rich and the rural poor has widened sharply in Orissa. According the Planning Commission, 46.60% of Orissa’s people lived below the poverty line in 2004-05, much higher than Bihar (32.50%), Madhya Pradesh (32.40%) and Uttar Pradesh (25.50%).
Millions of marginal farmers, landless labourers and craftsmen from the poverty-stricken districts of Ganjam, Bolangir, Koraput and Kalahandi of Western Orissa, bordering Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh migrate as far as to Mumbai, Surat, Ahmedabad, Delhi and Punjab every year in search of employment. Reports of starvation deaths, suicides of weavers and farmers and selling of children as bonded labourers appear at regular intervals in regional and national newspapers.

Farmers of Jharsuguda, Bolangir, Angul, Dhenkanal and Kendrapada districts have been carrying on prolonged agitations against the state government’s decision to prioritize allocation of water to industries from major irrigation dams on the rivers Mahanadi and Brahmani.

“The Hirakud dam over river Mahanadi, one of independent India’s early multipurpose river valley projects, used to prevent floods in the coastal areas, provide electricity to factories and homes and supplied ample water in the canals to grow a second crop every year. Not anymore,” says Professor Rajkishor Meher of Nabakrushna Choudhury Centre for Development Studies in Bhubaneswar. “The dam has almost lost its principal objective of irrigation promotion and agricultural development in the region,” Meher says.

Quoting government records, he points out that as many as 3,509 farmers committed suicide in Orissa in the last 11 years. The opposition Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party have alleged that at least 53 farmers committed suicide in the state in the past one year. “The multipurpose dam now hardly generates 30 per cent of its installed hydro power capacity because of lack of adequate storage of water in the reservoir, obsolete technology and worn out machinery,” he adds.

Due to silting of the reservoir and canals the tail end areas do not get adequate irrigation water for the second crop. The area deprived of a second crop is almost one-third of the created irrigated potential in the command area. Availability of water for agriculture shall be reduced in future, as the area surrounding the reservoir is now witnessing fast industrial growth and mining of coal. Meher points out that before 1997 the total allocation of water to the industries of the region from the reservoir was 3,191,200 gallons per year. This has increased by 27 times in the past nine years and this is obviously at the cost of water for irrigation.

While farmers of villages in the command area of the Hirakud dam are facing acute shortage of water, in Bhubaneswar and elsewhere in the state, consumption of liquor and ganja (hemp) has increased manifold. State’s excise department figures reveal a three-fold jump in revenue from the sale Indian Made Foreign Liquor and country liquor between 2001-02 (Rs. 197.35 crore) and 2007-08 (Rs.524.83 crore). There were 1021 IMFL shops, 13 clubs and 37 beer bars and 152 shops selling country liquor in 2008.

In a situation reminiscent of the popular anti-liquor movement of the 1990s in Andhra Pradesh, women in several villages of Orissa have launched agitation against the opening of liquor shops in their area. The left-extremist Maoists too have made liquor shops their target in the pre-dominantly tribal districts of Kandhamal, Gajapati and Koraput, Balangir, and Kalahandi.

Drug and illegal mining

Along with increase in the consumption of liquor, the state has also witnessed an alarming rise in the cultivation of illegal ganja (hemp). In raids conducted by the excise department in 13 districts of Orissa during 2007-08, 3.12 million hemp plants worth over Rs. 312 crore were detected and destroyed.

A commission of inquiring headed by Justice P K Mohanty found the involvement of Maoists in the multi-crore-rupee ganja cultivation in Orissa specially in the hilly and inaccessible areas of the state. In March this year, Dambaru Bagha, the district president of the youth wing of the ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD) of Maoist-bastion Malkangiri, was arrested from Lucknow with 3,000 kg of ganja in a truck. This was just the tip of the illegal drugs ice-berg.

Equally nefarious racket, which came to light recently, is that of illegal mining of iron, chromite and manganese ores running into over Rs.14,000 crore. The racket came to light following sinking of an iron-ore laden ship from Mongolia named ‘Black Rose’ off the Paradip port. It was laden with 23,847 tons of iron ore. The ship had forged documents of another ship named ‘Toros Pearl’. The owner of the ship operated two ships under the name of ‘Black Rose’ for shipping out iron ore from Orissa illegally.

Investigations by the state vigilance department and documents brought under the RTI Act showed that over last 6-7 years more than half a dozen leading mining and steel companies dug out iron, chromite and manganese ores than the amount they were allowed thanks to lax supervision of officials of the Orissa Pollution Control Board, Indian Bureau of Mines, state mines department, forest department, district collector and Ministry of Environment and Forests.

Documents obtained from the Orissa Pollution Control Board show that the biggest violator could be one of the country’s leading industrial group. The company mined 206 lakh tons of iron ore in excess of its permitted limit of 25.86 lakh ton from two mines (Kasia and Jiling-Longalata) of Keonjhar district between 2001-02 and 2005-06. By conservative estimates, the total market value of the excess iron ore mined was Rs 4269 crores. The permissible limit for mining of minerals in a year varies from mine to mine, based on the reserves it has, and is fixed by the Indian Bureau of Mines.

“Illegal mining is rampant in Orissa. Of the 595 mining lease issued by the state government, only 245 are valid, the rest 351 are continuing to carry out mining even after their lease period has expired. They are doing so in collusion with the concerned officials,” alleges Rabi Das, president of Orissa Jana Sammilani (Orissa People’s Conference), who has filed a public interest petition in the Supreme Court demanding a CBI probe into the illegal mining scam. “The delay in renewing the mining leases by the state officials is the standard tactic adopted by them to extract grease money from the lessee companies,” alleges Das.

City of neo rich

The staggering amount of slush money in the hands of government officials, politicians and touts collected from private miners is getting reflected in their ostentatious spending on such luxury goods as jewelry, real estate and automobiles. Jewelry shops are doing roaring business in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack. Imported luxury cars on the roads are a common sight in the state capital.

The state capital, which did not even have a three-star hotel a decade ago, today boasts of five five-star hotels and over a dozen four-star hotels. The city also has a 9-hole golf course spread across 33 acres of land leased out to the club by IDCO. “The golf club has over 500 members of which about 80 participate in the game regularly”, says Srimoy Kar, an active golfer.

“The land prices in Bhubaneswar have sky rocketed in the last ten years, competing with the prices of prime property in metros like Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bangalore. I had sold an apartment in Bhubaneswar at Rs. 1.50 lakh when I started my business here 20 years ago. Recently, I concluded a deal of a luxury apartment at Rs. 1.15 crore at Rs4,000 a square feet,” says Subhash Bhura, the Orissa chapter president of the Confederation of Real Estate Developers’ Associations of India (CREDAI), who is the managing director of Utkal Builders.

Most land in Bhubaneswar belong to the government as the city was planned and developed as the capital city of Orissa only after the formation of the state in 1948. “The government’s near total monopoly over the land and absence of any town planning has resulted in scarcity of land for the middle class and the poor. Nearly one-fourth of the city’s population lives in 108 slums,” points out Bhura.

With new building bylaws enacted a few months ago, the skyline of the city is expected to change within a few years as several multi-storeyed buildings have been proposed. Real estate developers from outside Orissa such as DLF, Cosmopolis and Vipul have proposed mega housing projects in the state capital.

Recent times have seen large scale retail chains such as Reliance, Vishal Mega Mart, Big Bazaar, Pantaloon, Spencer's opening their outlets in Bhubaneswar. Large corporations like DLF Universal and Reliance Industries have entered the real estate market in the city. DLF Limited is developing an Infopark spread over an area of 54 acres in the city. Expanding its business portfolio, the Kolkata-based Saraf Group, promoters of Forum Mart shopping malls is constructing another Shopping mall named Forum Lifestyle mall on a 550,000-sq ft plot of land in Bhubaneswar with 1,200 car parks.

IT and education hub

Bhubaneswar is home to several educational and research institutions of state and national importance including the Utkal University , Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar, the Institute of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology, National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER), Institute of Mathematics and Applications (IMA), as well as over 30 other private colleges geared towards engineering, biotechnology, information technology and management.

Mining major Vedanta too has proposed to set up a ‘world-class’ University on a staggering 6,000 acres of land along the Konarka-Puri sea shore. The university got mired in controversy after the Lok Ayukta ordered an inquiry into the legality of allotment of a part of the land belonging to the Jagannath temple trust. People of neighbouring villages too have been protesting against the proposed university.

Bhubaneswar is emerging as a national education hub that is also being promoted as an Information Technology Investment Region (ITIR) by the government. A total of 40 square kilometer of land has been allocated for the purpose, out of which about 60% will be devoted to research and development. Two institutions of national importance, the IIT and NISER, Bhubaneswar will be located within this investment region.

The Info City was conceived as a five star park, under the Export Promotion Industrial Parks (EPIP) Scheme to create high quality infrastructure facilities for setting up Information Technology related industries. Infosys and Satyam Computer Services Ltd. have been present in Bhubaneswar since 1996-97. Its current head count stands at around 6000.

Infosys is a planning a second IT park near Khandagiri which will accommodate another 5000 IT professionals. Wipro's software development centre started operation in the city during February 2008. The Finland telecommunication company, Nethawk, has its India R&D center at Bhubaneswar. The Canadian giant, Gennum Corporation too has its India development centre at Bhubaneswar.

The new STP, christened as JSS software Technology park is located at Infocity to provide incubation and infrastructure facilities to new and young entrepreneurs in the MSME sector. The intelligent building of the JSS STP is spread across three acres and houses state-of-art technology to fulfill the growing demands of IT professionals. Infocity is considered as the biggest IT park in eastern India spread over an area of 350 acres.

Critique’s views

Leading academics, economists, environmentalists, wildlife experts, social activists and leaders of political parties – the opposition as well as a few dissidents of the ruling Biju Janata Dal – have expressed grave concern at what they describe as ‘lopsided’ and ‘skewed’ development of the poverty-stricken Orissa.

“Orissa’s mineral reserves may exhaust too soon due to fast exploitation. Orissa is exploiting bauxite at a much faster rate than it should be doing. The focus of policy makers has been on maximizing the revenues in the short run than maximizing the present value of all expected future revenues,” avers Banikant Mishra, professor of finance at the Xavier’s Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar.

“The widening gap between the urban rich and the rural poor, lack of development activities in poverty-stricken regions of Western and Northern Orissa leading to large-scale migration of marginal farmers and farm labourers to other states, starvation deaths, displacement of tribals from their homestead and land on account of land acquisition for heavy industries and depriving them of their means of livelihood, state violence against people protesting peacefully against their displacement are all contributing to the rising influence of left-extremist Maoists in the state,” Mishra warns.

“Inspite of abundant stock of natural and human resources, the state portrays a hopeless image of stark poverty - child sale and starvation deaths hitting the national headlines regularly. This is mainly because of the state’s lopsided policies. Though there has been a growth in the number of factories operating in the state, employment had registered a steady decline,” points out Biswajit Mohanty, a chartered accountant who heads the Wildlife Society of Orissa.

“Orissa has missed the opportunity of taking advantage of its rich mineral resources. Instead of giving out mining leases indiscriminately, the state should have first come out with a mining policy. The government should have constituted an expert committee comprising geologists, metallurgists, industry experts and elected representatives of people of the mineral rich areas which would have recommended a judicious strategy for the exploitation of minerals,” says former Union Steel and Mines minister Brajkishore Tripathy.

“I won’t be surprised if the industrial houses which have signed MoUs over the last 10 years to set up industries in the state start legal proceedings against the state government for not having been able to fulfill its promise of land, water and power to them,” he said, pointing out that the total requirement of power and water for these industries far exceeds the supply.

“The Naveen Patnaik government has traded with the industries, ignoring the law of the land and ignoring the problems of the people. Even in a single-window system, the government should have ensured that the proposed projects get all the required statutory clearances from the revenue, forest, environment, water supply and electricity departments,” says Bhakta Charan Das, the Congress Member of Parliament from the Kalahandi Lok Sabha constituency.

“The government should have also made mandatory for the investor companies to give guarantee for the inclusive growth of the region in which they set up their industries. Since the government has allowed heavy industries to draw water and electricity at the cost of the needs of the local population, people are up in arms against industrialization,” he says.

Labour pains

“These are just the normal pangs of industrialization which is yet to take off fully. The fruits of industrialization are yet to bear. Let the heavy industries in the areas of steel, aluminum and electricity be established first, downstream industries would follow automatically. Only then will the people of Orissa start benefitting from an industrially sound economy,” says Ashok Dalvai, the steel and mine secretary.

True, Orissa is witnessing the pangs of industrialization. For the first time after Independence, the poorest of the country’s state is experiencing the trials and tribulations of an agrarian economy moving on the fast track of industrial growth.

Malatidevi Choudhury: My Grandmother

Malati Choudhury (née Sen) was born in 1904 in an aristocratic Brahmo family. She had lost her father, Barrister Kumud Nath Sen, when she was only two and a half years old, and was brought up by her mother Snehalata Sen.

Malati’s family originally belonged to Kamarakhanda in Bikrampur, Dhaka, (now in Bangladesh), but her family members had settled in Simultala, Bihar. Snehalata Sen’s father was Beharilal Gupta, ICS. Ranjit Gupta, ICS, former Chief Secretary of West Bengal was Malati’s first cousin. His brother, the famous parliamentarian and former Home Minister, Indrajit Gupta is also her first cousin. Malati’s eldest brother, P. K. Sen Gupta,former Income Tax Commissioner, belonged to the Indian Revenue Service, and another brother, K. P. Sen, former Postmaster General, was from the Indian Postal Service.

(Photo on the left: On the cover of The Illustratred Weekly of India)

Being the youngest child of her parents, she was a darling of all her brothers and sister. Her mother Snehalata was a writer in her own right, and had translated some works of Tagore, as is seen from her book Jugalanjali. It is hard to believe that coming from a highly westernized and aristocratic family, Malati Choudhury could adopt a completely different life style.

(L-R P K Sen Gupta (her brother), Nabakrushna Choudhury, Surekha Sen Gupta nee Tagore (her sister-in-law and grand niece of Rabindranath Tagore), and Malatidevi Choudhury)

In an article entitled ‘Reminiscences of Santiniketan’, her mother had written: “Malati was very happy and benefited much from her residence at Viswa-Bharati as a student. The personal influence of Gurudev and his teachings, his patriotism and idealism, have influenced and guided Malati throughout her life.”

She had been fortunate enough to have been deeply influenced by both Tagore and Gandhi. It was the former at whose feet she learnt and acquired some rare values and principles of education, development, art and culture, which had been the guiding principles in her life; and it was the latter who had a magic spell on her and at whose instance she plunged herself in the freedom struggle. Malati came to Santiniketan in 1921, when she was sixteen, and lived there for a little more than six years. In those days Santiniketan was small and beautiful.

There were nine girls of her age living in the hostel called Notun Bari (new house) – Manjushree, Surekha (who later on became her sister-in-law), Eva, Satyabati, Latika, Saraju, Tapasi, Amita (mother of Professor Amartya Sen) and herself. They were attending classes in the open under the trees, learning embroidery, handicrafts, music, dancing, painting and gardening. Leonard Knight Elmhirst, an Englishman, was in charge of the Agricultural Institute at Surul in Sriniketan, and he used to encourage them in gardening.

Mr. Pearson, another Englishman, was also teaching them. It was from him that Malati got the inspiration to work for the tribals. Gurudev used to take classes on Balaka, when he was reading his poems from his book ‘Balaka’, and was explaining the same to them. Miss Stella Kramisch, who came to India at Gurudev’s invitation, taught them the principles of Indian Art and dancing. They were really happy in those days at Santiniketan.

During her stay at Santiniketan as a student, a young man from a well known family of Orissa, Nabakrushna Choudhuri, came there as a student. He came from Sabarmati Ashram at the instance of Gandhiji, to study at Santiniketan. There was also G. Ramachandran, B. Gopala Reddy, and Syed Mujtaba Ali. They are no more.

She got engaged to be married to Nabakrushna Choudhuri, and left Santiniketan in 1927. This was a turning point in her life. After her marriage, Orissa became her home and her area of activities. They settled in a small village named Anakhia, now in the Jagatsinghpur District of Orissa, where her husband started improved sugarcane cultivation. Apart from agriculture, establishing rapport with the surrounding villages was their main concern. In their concept and scheme of rural reconstruction, it is the people who were at the center of activities. Their development depended on their empowerment, which was again the result of education. They had started adult education work in the neighbouring villages.

Soon came the Salt Satyagraha, and they jumped at that. It was the greatest movement of mobilization and motivation, which were the dynamic components of adult education. During the freedom struggle they were activists using the principles of education and communication in creating a conducive environment for Satyagraha. Even as prisoners in the respective jails, they continued the educational activities like teaching fellow prisoners, organizing choral singing and disseminating Gandhiji’s teachings.

(House that Nabakrushna's father Gokulanand Choudhury built in Cuttack on the bank of Kathjodi river)

Malati Choudhury and Nabakrushna Choudhuri, in February 1933, organized the Utkal Congress Samajvadi Karmi Sangh, which later became the Orissa Provincial Branch of the All India Congress Socialist Party. After independence, Malati Choudhury got opportunities of translating her ideas into practice. As a member of the Constituent Assembly of India, and as the President of the Utkal Pradesh Congress Committee, she tried her best to emphasize the role of education and adult education in rural reconstruction.

When Nabakrushna Choudhuri became the Chief Minister of Orissa in 1951, she was assertive enough to focus the plight of the have-nots, particularly those belonging to the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. Eventually she decided not to join politics, because Gandhiji had advised that all Congress activists need not join politics, but should work for and with the people with service as their goal.

(Chief minister Nabakrushna Choudhury with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru)

Gandhiji used to call her \"Tofanee\" She was Tagore's favourite \"Minu\" As a young student at Santiniketan, she was quite famous for her outgoing personality, taking active part in Gurudev’s dance dramas and music sessions, as well as initiating innocent mischiefs in the community. Proverbial courage, sheer dynamism and a strong zeal to fight for the rights of the oppressed and have-nots were the dominant features of her character. She was frank and outspoken, and was never afraid of calling a spade a spade.

In 1934, she had accompanied Gandhiji in his “padayatra” in Orissa. After a daylong walk, he was obviously too tired to visit a Harijan village which was in his itinerary. The villagers, who had waited long, were disappointed, but were prepared to forgive Gandhiji for the minor lapse. Malati Choudhury did not spare Gandhiji, and told him point blank, “Bapu, you have not done the right thing.” Gandhiji apologized, and cooled her down with his disarming smile.

Even before Independence, she had established the Bajiraut Chhatravas at Angul in Orissa in 1946, and the Utkal Navajeevan Mandal, also at Angul, in 1948. The Bajiraut Chhatravas had its genesis in the Prajamandal Movement ( the resistance movement organized and sustained by the people ) and its initial activities were geared towards providing residential facilities and educational opportuinities to the children of Freedom Fighters.

(Malatidevi with Mahatma Gandhi in Noakhali, East Bengal)

Over the passage of time, there was a societal demand on the Bajiraut Chhatravas to provide educational facilities to the children belonging to scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, other backward classes and under-privileged sections of society coming from all over Orissa. Established in the memory of the twelve-year old boy Bajiraut, who sacrificed his life by disallowing the British forces to cross the river Brahmani by boat, the Bajiraut Chhatravas has become an institution of national importance. The Utkal Navajeevan Mandal is a voluntary organization of repute, engaged in rural development and tribal welfare in the rural and tribal areas of Orissa.

The State Resource Centre for Adult Education, which was established by the Government of India, under the auspices of the Utkal Navajeevan Mandal, at Angul in 1978, had done pioneering work in Adult Education.

Honours and Awards came to Malati Choudhury in quick succession: National Award for Child Welfare (1987), Jamnalal Bajaj Award (1988), Utkal Seva Sammaan (1994), Tagore

Literacy Award (1995), Honour by the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the first sitting of the Constituent Assembly (1997), Honour by the State Social Welfare Advisory Board (1997), Honour by the Rajya Mahila Commission (1997), and last but not the least, the ‘Deshikottama (D.Litt. Honoris Causa) from her Alma Mater, Viswa-Bharati.

(Malatidevi's home in the campus of Bajiraut Chhatravas, Angul)

In 1988, she refused to receive the prestigious Jamnalal Bajaj Award from the hands of the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, because, according to her, Rajiv Gandhi had not done anything to promote Gandhian values.

On receiving the Tagore Literacy Award given by the Indian Adult Education Association, she had said: “I feel doubly honoured to receive the Award, which is named after Kabiguru Rabindranath Tagore, to commemorate his memorable achievements in bringing a synthesis among culture, music and aesthetics in evolving and practising his unique philosophy and principles of education. Like Rousseau, Gurudev did not want purposefulness, belonging to the adult mind, to be forced upon the children in school. He believed that once purposefulness was introduced, it brought torture to the child, as it went against the purpose of nature.

"According to Tagore, nature was the greatest of all teachers for the child. He had tremendous faith in the educational value of natural objects. Natural events like the beautiful sunrise and sunset, blossoming of flowers and singing of birds are the learning resources for children possessing the natural gift of learning things very easily."

"He had a great faith in the children’s natural way of learning. He did not insist on forced mental feeding as a result of which lessons become a form of torture. Gurudev considered artificial feeding of the mind to be of man’s most cruel and wasteful mistakes. According to him, the greatest possible gift for children was their own freedom to grow. Tagore also wanted the children to have another kind of freedom – the freedom of sympathy with all humanity, a freedom from all national and racial prejudices. Thus, his philosophy ofeducation is based on the ideal of the spiritual unity of all races.”

She had also said, “ Rabindranath was always following the ideal to realize, in and through education, the essential unity of man. The way in which he achieved that unity gave him a deep insight into the object of education and its problems.”

Malati Choudhury had organized the ‘Krusaka Andolana’ (Farmers Movement) as a part of the freedom struggle against the Zamindars, Landowners and Moneylenders, who were exploiting the poor. She had seen and experienced the untold sufferings of the people while walking through many villages in Orissa. She had also realized that women were victims of many superstitious beliefs, and they alone were to fight against the same for their own empowerment.

As a member of the Constituent Assembly of India, she used to feel restless, because she was not in tune with the wavelength of other members; and when Gandhiji’s famous Noakhali yatra began, she joined the same at the instance of Thakkarbappa. A dynamic person like her did not slow down her efforts after the Bajiraut Chhatravas, Utkal Navajeevan Mandal and the Postbasic School at Champatimunda, near Angul, were established. She had joined the Bhoodan Movement of Acharya Vinoba Bhave.

During the Emergency she raised her voice against the anti-people policy and oppressive measures adopted by the Government and was imprisoned. Malati Choudhury was a legendary figure. She had lived an eventful life of ninety-three years.

(Malatidevi with Naxalite leader Nagabhushan Patnaik whose death sentence she got commuted by President N Sanjeeva Reddy, who had served as office secretary of Orissa Congress when she was the state party president)