Walking with Comrades

by Arundhati Roy

In Dantewada the police wear plain clothes and the rebels wear uniforms. The jail superintendent is in jail. The prisoners are free (three hundred of them escaped from the old town jail two years ago). Women who have been raped are in police custody. The rapists give speeches in the bazaar.

In exchange for the right to vote it snatched away their right to livelihood and dignity.

For example, according to the recent Lokayukta Report for Karnataka, for every tonne of iron ore mined by a private company the government gets a royalty of 27 and the mining company makes 5000.

The problem with these tribals is they don’t understand greed. Unless they become greedy there’s no hope for us. I have told my boss, remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out.’

The forest floor was a carpet of gold.

But from the way she hugs me I can tell she’s a reader.

As far as consumption goes, it’s more gandhian than any gandhian, and has a lighter carbon footprint than any climate change evangelist.

Breaking up a troublesome people into separate administrative units is an old trick.

Breaking of Tirunelveli & Tuticorin districts.

They have different maps in their heads and, like other creatures of the forest, they have their own paths. For them, roads are not meant for walking on. They’re meant only to be crossed or, as is increasingly becoming the case, ambushed.

But this counterfeit Hinduism is considered good enough for tribal people, just like the counterfeit brands of everything else—biscuits, soap, matches, oil—that are sold in village markets.

But the politics of tendu, bamboo and other forest produce was seasonal. The perennial problem, the real bane of people’s lives, was the biggest landlord of all, the Forest Department.

Every morning forest officials, even the most junior of them, would appear in villages like a bad dream, preventing people from ploughing their fields, grazing their cattle, collecting firewood, plucking leaves, picking fruit—from living. They brought elephants to overrun fields and scattered babool seeds to destroy the soil as they passed by. People would be beaten, arrested, humiliated, their crops destroyed. Of course, from the Forest Department’s point of view, these were illegal people engaged in unconstitutional activity, and the department was only implementing the Rule of Law.

In 1986 it announced a National Park in Bijapur, which meant the eviction of sixty villages. More than half of them had already been moved out and construction of National Park infrastructure had begun when the Party moved in.

And what Chairman Mao said about the guerrillas being the fish, and people being the water they swim in, is, at this moment, literally true.

There was a time when believing that Big Dams were the ‘temples of Modern India’ was misguided, but perhaps understandable. But today, after all that has happened, and when we know all that we do, it has to be said that Big Dams are a crime against humanity.