The Dead Begin to Speak Up in
By Arundhati Roy
The Guardian (
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2011/sep/30/kashmir-india-unmarked-graves
At about 3am, on 23 September, within hours of his
arrival at the
David Barsamian was deported. This dangerous man, who
produces independent, free-to-air programmes for public
radio, has been visiting
dangerous things as learning Urdu and playing the sitar.
Barsamian has published book-length interviews with
public intellectuals such as Edward Said, Noam Chomsky,
Howard Zinn, Ejaz Ahmed and Tariq Ali (he even makes an
appearance as a young, bell-bottom-wearing interviewer
in Peter Wintonick's documentary film on Chomsky and
Edward Herman's book Manufacturing Consent).
On his more recent trips to
of radio interviews with activists, academics, film-
makers, journalists and writers (including me).
Barsamian's work has taken him to Turkey, Iran, Syria,
any of these countries. So why does the world's largest
democracy feel so threatened by this lone, sitar-
playing, Urdu-speaking, left-leaning, radio producer?
Here is how Barsamian himself explains it:
"It's all about
Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Narmada dams, farmer
suicides, the
But it's
state's concerns. The official narrative must not be contested."
News reports about his deportation quoted official
"sources" as saying that Barsamian had "violated his
visa norms during his visit in 2009-10 by indulging in
professional work while holding a tourist visa". Visa
norms in
government's concerns and predilections. Using the
tattered old banner of the "war on terror", the home
ministry has decreed that scholars and academics
invited for conferences and seminars require security
clearance before they will be given visas. Corporate
executives and businessmen do not.
So somebody who wants to invest in a dam, or build a
steel plant or a buy a bauxite mine is not considered a
security hazard, whereas a scholar who might wish to
participate in a seminar about, say, displacement or
communalism or rising malnutrition in a globalised
economy, is. Terrorists with bad intentions have
probably guessed that they are better off wearing Prada
suits and pretending they want to buy a mine than
admitting that they want to attend a seminar.
David Barsamian did not travel to
or to attend a conference. He just came to talk to
people. The complaint against him, according to
"official sources" is that he had reported on events in
that these reports were "not based on facts". Remember
Barsamian is not a reporter, he's a man who has
conversations with people, mostly dissidents, about the
societies in which they live.
Is it illegal for tourists to talk to people in the
countries they visit? Would it be illegal for me to
travel to the
met, even if my writing was "not based on facts"? Who
decides which "facts" are correct and which are not?
Would Barsamian have been deported if the conversations
he recorded had been in praise of the impressive
turnouts in
life in the densest military occupation in the world
(an estimated 600,000 actively deployed armed personnel
for a population of 10 million people)?
David Barsamian is not the first person to be deported
over the Indian government's sensitivities over
from
November 2010 without being given any reason. It was
probably a way of punishing his partner, Angana
Chatterji, who is a co-convenor of the international
peoples' tribunal on human rights and justice which
first chronicled the existence of unmarked mass graves
in
In September 2011, May Aquino, from the Asian
Federation against Involuntary Disappearances (Afad),
year, on 28 May, the outspoken Indian democratic rights
activist, Gautam Navlakha, was deported to
minister of
that writers like Navlakha and myself had no business
entering Kashmir because "
from the outside world by two concentric rings of
border patrols - in
though it's already a free country with its own visa
regime. Within its borders of course, it's open season
for the government and the army. The art of controlling
Kashmiri journalists and ordinary people with a deadly
combination of bribes, threats, blackmail and a whole
spectrum of unutterable cruelty has evolved into a
twisted art form.
While the government goes about trying to silence the
living, the dead have begun to speak up. Perhaps it was
insensitive of Barsamian to plan a trip to
when the state human rights commission was finally
shamed into officially acknowledging the existence of
2,700 unmarked graves from three districts in
Reports of thousands of other graves are pouring in
from other districts. Perhaps it is insensitive of the
unmarked graves to embarrass the government of
just when
UN human rights council.
Apart from Dangerous David, who else is the world's
largest democracy afraid of? There's young Lingaram
Kodopi an adivasi from Dantewada in the state of
Chhattisgarh, who was arrested on 9 September. The
police say they caught him red-handed in a market
place, while he was handing over protection money from
Essar, an iron-ore mining company, to the banned
Communist party of
says that he was picked up by plainclothes policemen in
a white Bolero car from his grandfather's house in
Palnar village.
Interestingly, even by their own account, the police
arrested Lingaram but allowed the Maoists to escape.
This is only the latest in a series of bizarre, almost
hallucinatory accusations they have made against
Lingaram and then withdrawn. His real crime is that he
is the only journalist who speaks Gondi, the local
language, and who knows how to negotiate the remote
forest paths in Dantewada the other war zone in
from which no news must come.
Having signed over vast tracts of indigenous tribal
homelands in central
infrastructure corporations in a series of secret
memorandums of understanding, the government has begun
to flood the forests with hundreds of thousands of
security forces. All resistance, armed as well as
unarmed has been branded "Maoist" (In
all "jihadi elements").
As the civil war grows deadlier, hundreds of villages
have been burnt to the ground. Thousands of adivasis
have fled as refugees into neighbouring states.
Hundreds of thousands are living terrified lives hiding
in the forests. Paramilitary forces have laid siege to
the forest, making trips to the markets for essential
provisions and medicines a nightmare for villagers.
Untold numbers of nameless people are in jail, charged
with sedition and waging war on the state, with no
lawyers to defend them. Very little news comes out of
those forests, and there are no body counts.
So it's not hard to see why young Lingaram Kodopi poses
such a threat. Before he trained to become a
journalist, he was a driver in Dantewada. In 2009 the
police arrested him and confiscated his Jeep. He was
locked up in a small toilet for 40 days where he was
pressurised to become a special police officer (SPO) in
the Salwa Judum, the government-sponsored vigilante
army that was at the time tasked with forcing people to
flee from their villages (the Salwa Judum has since
been declared unconstitutional by the supreme court).
The police released Lingaram after the Gandhian
activist Himanshu Kumar filed a habeas corpus petition
in court. But then the police arrested Lingaram's old
father and five other members of his family. They
attacked his village and threatened the villagers if
they sheltered him. Eventually Lingaram escaped to
into a journalism school. In April 2010 he travelled to
Dantewada and escorted villagers to
testimony at the independent peoples' tribunal about
the barbarity of the Salwa Judum and the police and
paramilitary forces. In his own testimony, Lingaram was
sharply critical of the Maoists as well.
That did not deter the Chhattisgarh police. On 2 July
2010, the senior Maoist leader, Comrade Azad, the
official spokesperson for the Maoist party, was
captured and executed by the Andhra Pradesh police.
Deputy Inspector General Kalluri of the Chhattisgarh
police announced at a press conference that Lingaram
Kodopi had been elected by the Maoist party to take
over Comrade Azad's role (it was like accusing a young
school child in 1936 Yan'an of being Zhou Enlai). The
charge was met with such derision that the police had
to withdraw it. Soon after they accused Lingaram of
being the mastermind of a Maoist attack on a congress
legislator in Dantewada. But oddly enough, they made no
move to arrest him.
Lingaram remained in Delhi, completed his course and
received his diploma in journalism. In March 2011,
paramilitary forces burned down three villages in
Dantewada - Tadmetla, Timmapuram and Morapalli. The
Chhattisgarh government blamed the Maoists. The supreme
court assigned the investigation to the Central Bureau
of Investigation. Lingaram returned to Dantewada with a
video camera and trekked from village to village
documenting first-hand testimonies of the villagers who
indicted the police. By doing this he made himself one
of the most wanted men in Dantewada. On 9 September the
police finally got to him.
Lingaram has joined an impressive line-up of
troublesome news gatherers and disseminators in
Chhattisgarh. Among the earliest to be silenced was the
celebrated doctor Binayak Sen, who first raised the
alarm about the crimes of the Salwa Judum as far back
as 2005. He was arrested in 2007, accused of being a
Maoist and sentenced to life imprisonment. After years
in prison, he is out on bail now.
Kopa Kunjam was my first guide into the forest villages
of Dantewada. At the time he worked with Himanshu
Kumar's Vanvasi Chetna ashram, doing exactly what
Lingaram tried to do much later - travelling to remote
villages, bringing out the news, and carefully
documenting the horror that was unfolding. In May 2009
the ashram, the last neutral shelter for journalists,
writers and academics who were travelling to Dantewada,
was demolished by the Chhattisgarh government.
Kopa was arrested on human rights day in September
2009. He was accused of colluding with the Maoists in
the murder of one man and the kidnapping of another.
The case against Kopa has begun to fall apart as the
police witnesses, including the man who was kidnapped,
have disowned the statements they purportedly made to
the police. It doesn't really matter, because in
the process is the punishment.
It could take years for Kopa to establish his
innocence. Many of those who were emboldened by Kopa to
file complaints against the police have been arrested
too. That includes women who committed the crime of
being raped. Soon after Kopa's arrest Himanshu Kumar
was hounded out of Dantewada.
Eventually, here too the dead will begin to speak. And
it will not just be dead human beings, it will be the
dead land, dead rivers, dead mountains and dead
creatures in dead forests that will insist on a
hearing.
In this age of surveillance, internet policing and
phone-tapping, as the clampdown on those who speak up
becomes grimmer with every passing day, it's odd how
festivals. Many of these festivals are funded by the
very corporations on whose behalf the police have
unleashed their regime of terror.
The Harud literary festival in
the moment) was slated to be the newest, most exciting
literary festival in
change colour the
the sound of poetry, literary dialogue, debate and
discussions ."
Its organisers advertised it as an "apolitical" event,
but did not say how either the rulers or the subjects
of a brutal military occupation that has claimed tens
of thousands of lives could be "apolitical". I wonder -
will the guests come on tourist visas? Will there be
separate ones for
security clearance?
The festive din of all this spurious freedom helps to
muffle the sound of footsteps in airport corridors as
the deported are frog-marched on to departing planes,
to mute the click of handcuffs locking around strong,
warm wrists and the cold metallic clang of prison
doors.
Our lungs are gradually being depleted of oxygen.
Perhaps it's time use whatever breath remains in our
bodies to say: "Open the bloody gates."
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