Monday, October 3, 2011

The Dead Begin to Speak Up in India

The Dead Begin to Speak Up in India

 

By Arundhati Roy

 

The Guardian (UK) October 2, 2011

 

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 Delhi airport, the US radio-journalist

David Barsamian was deported. This dangerous man, who

produces independent, free-to-air programmes for public

radio, has been visiting India for 40 years, doing such

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 India he has done a series

of radio interviews with activists, academics, film-

makers, journalists and writers (including me).

Barsamian's work has taken him to Turkey, Iran, Syria,

Lebanon and Pakistan. He has never been deported from

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 Kashmir. I've done work on Jharkhand,

Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Narmada dams, farmer

suicides, the Gujarat pogrom, and the Binayak Sen case.

But it's Kashmir that is at the heart of the Indian

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 India are an interesting peep-hole into the

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 India to buy a mine

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

Jammu and Kashmir during his last visit to India and

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 US or Europe and write about the people I

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 Kashmir's elections, instead of about daily

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

Kashmir. Professor Richard Shapiro, an anthropologist

from San Francisco, was deported from Delhi airport in

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 Kashmir.

 

In September 2011, May Aquino, from the Asian

Federation against Involuntary Disappearances (Afad),

Manila, was deported from Delhi airport. Earlier this

year, on 28 May, the outspoken Indian democratic rights

activist, Gautam Navlakha, was deported to Delhi from

Srinagar airport. Farook Abdullah, the former chief

minister of Kashmir, justified the deportation, saying

that writers like Navlakha and myself had no business

entering Kashmir because "Kashmir is not for burning".

 

Kashmir is in the process of being isolated, cut off

from the outside world by two concentric rings of

border patrols - in Delhi as well as Srinagar - as

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 Kashmir just

when the state human rights commission was finally

shamed into officially acknowledging the existence of

2,700 unmarked graves from three districts in Kashmir.

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 India

just when India's record is due for review before the

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 India (Maoist). His aunt Soni Sori

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 India

from which no news must come.

 

Having signed over vast tracts of indigenous tribal

homelands in central India to multinational mining and

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 Kashmir they are

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

Delhi where friends and well-wishers got him admission

into a journalism school. In April 2010 he travelled to

Dantewada and escorted villagers to Delhi to give

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 India

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

India is becoming the dream destination of literary

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 Srinagar (postponed for

the moment) was slated to be the newest, most exciting

literary festival in India - "As the autumn leaves

change colour the valley of Kashmir will resonate with

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 Srinagar and Delhi? Will they need

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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