Selling India by the Pound The Hidden Story of Operation Green Hunt Operation Green Hunt (OGH), launched in the second half of 2009, is yet another military manifestation of large scale social, political and economic inequalities and repressions that have prevailed in India for decades. Under OGH there has been massive troop deployment in large parts of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh and Bengal. More than one lakh military and paramilitary troops, along with air support, have been deployed in these areas. Additionally, bands of private, mercenary and vigilante forces are also actively involved in OGH. Such massive deployment of troops in civilian areas by creating the hysteria of internal threat is completely unjustified. Military solutions to problems that are economic and political in nature always fail. The North-eastern states of India – Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura – have suffered continuous troop deployment in civilian areas since the late 1940's. When the military, empowered with the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1958), was deployed in this region against civilians, under the pretext that they were ‘disloyal’, there was only one movement (the Naga National Council) that operated in the Naga inhabited areas. Now after more than sixty years of troop deployment there is a proliferation of armed groups covering almost every state of the North-east, precisely because the armed forces destroyed all available sites of public political articulation, leaving armed movement as the only available option. Striking parallels with this are evident from the history of the Kashmiri struggle, as well as in the ongoing Operation Green Hunt. Military ‘solutions’ are failed and discredited, and yet our government seems determined to apply them indiscriminately and without restraints. Under OGH, it has launched an unprecedented offensive in civilian areas, targeting armed and unarmed movements, of Marxist or Gandhian persuasions, as well as civil liberties and democratic rights groups, and alarmingly, even villagers and adivasis. More than 641 villages were destroyed in Chattisgarh alone after OGH began; in Lalgarh, following an attack on the Chief Minister’s convoy, police atrocities, already widespread, escalated into a reign of terror on the adivasis. Security forces attacked and destroyed the Vanvasi Chetna Ashram, a Gandhian organisation in Chattisgarh. In Orissa people's movements to secure their rights to land and forest, from corporates – such as those in Kalinganagar, Niyamgiri, Jagatsinghpur, Narayanpatna, etc. – are facing severe repression. In Punjab, between 23rd and 25th March 2010 alone, hundreds of peasant activists and leaders were picked up in preventive detention. Even legal and non-violent civil liberties and democratic rights organisations and individuals have not been spared. Dr. Binayak Sen, a paediatrician and an activist of the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), whose services towards deprived sections of the society has received commendations, was incarcerated on trumped up charges. More recently, reputed democratic rights organisations and activists were referred to as Maoist sympathisers in the charge sheet of arrested Maoist leader Mr. Kobad Ghandy. The Supreme Court, in an ongoing case involving missing adivasis in Chattisgarh, sharply told the police to refrain from using ‘Maoist sympathiser’ as an 'innuendo'. It is of particular significance that state-sponsored, organised violence – such as took place in Delhi in 1984, Gujarat in 2002, or Kandamal in 2008 – which destroyed the lives of entire generations, has always been condoned; whereas resistance coming from the poorest of the poor, and the marginalised, has been sought to be ruthlessly and comprehensively crushed, as in OGH. This repetition of a failed policy is a result of a subordinate insertion of the Indian state into the regime of globalisation. This is directly evident in the fact that American and Israeli forces are training Indian military and paramilitary personnel on Indian soil, as part of OGH. It is also evident in the retreat of the state from the social sector and its reduction into a means for big business to open up and access labour, intellectual and natural resources. Circumvention of labour laws through SEZ and police repression is routine. The food security of the country is being deliberately undermined through the imposition of 'New Agriculture” – floriculture, genetically modified crops, cultivation of exotic food items, new contractual farming with food packaging corporates – and transformations in agrarian subsidies and trading policies. A direct consequence of this has been the more than two lakh farmers’ suicides over the past few years. The enormous budgetary outlay involved in implementing OGH is thus simultaneous with and related to the reduction of subsidies in agriculture, education, health, and the maintenance of the Public Distribution System. Operation Green Hunt seeks to open up mineral resources for appropriation and plunder. As
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