Our African themed blog has documented how Indian capitalism is engaged in a land-grab in Ethiopia. They are, however, involved in another land-grab in India itself
The political activist, Arundhati Roy makes clear that the land and everything inside it, is now owned “by the corporations, every mountain, every river, every forest, every dam, every water supply system”.
Land nurtured by Adivasi (India’s indigenous peoples) families for generations is being violently taken from them in what Arundhati Roy describes as “the biggest land grab since Christopher Columbus”. In varying degrees of intensity, conflict and resistance is taking place throughout the areas affected by the land appropriation, although Roy suggests the violence is even more widespread, “all across India there is insurrection, there is a bandwidth of resistance” – made up of various marginalized groups. They are relentlessly victimized, targeted, Roy states, “in the name of development”: A perverse idea of development that whilst feeding corporate coffers, is destroying the lives of millions of indigenous people and causing devastation to the natural environment. As Arundhati Roy, speaking on BBC Newsnight put it “the middle and upper classes in India have ascended into outer space from where they look down on the (rural) poor and ask, what’s our bauxite doing in your mountains, what’s our water doing in your rivers?”
Massive numbers are being displaced, villages destroyed, women raped, hundreds, as Human Rights Watch (HRW) state, “have been arbitrarily arrested, and imprisoned tortured, and charged with politically motivated offenses that include murder, conspiracy, and sedition”. fplace throughout the areas affected by the land appropriation, although Roy suggests the violence is even more widespread, “all across India there is insurrection, there is a bandwidth of resistance” – made up of various marginalized groups. Massive numbers are being displaced, villages destroyed, women raped, hundreds, as Human Rights Watch (HRW) state, “have been arbitrarily arrested, and imprisoned tortured, and charged with politically motivated offenses that include murder, conspiracy, and sedition”.
Mira Kamdar, Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute says, the nations oldest and most marginalised people are “completely cut off from the economically vibrant, rapidly growing India of the country’s major cities”, and, due to the industrialisation of the environment are facing a major threat to their livelihood. They are sidelined, intimidated and, labeled “Maoist (or Naxalite) terrorists” by the government.
A huge area incorporating large tracks of ancestral land, where Adivasi who number around 150 million and Dalit (Untouchables) groups have lived for millennia is rich in bauxite, iron ore and uranium. The area is an Aladdin’s cave of minerals, which India’s corporations, and the 1% beneficiaries of India’s decade of economic growth, see as theirs by right. To facilitate easy access to “their bauxite”, corporations need the land to be cleared of obstacles – indigenous people and their homes. According to Ashish Kothari, author of Churning The Earth, “In recent years the country has seen a massive transfer of land and natural resources from the rural poor to the wealthy. Around 60 million people have been displaced (although some put the figure much higher) in India by large-scale industrial developments”. The millions of mainly Dalits and Adivasi, made homeless and destitute, forced to ‘re-locate’ to the slums and shanty colonies of small towns and mega cities, where they are also unwelcome.
Capitalism condemns hundred of millions to extreme poverty whilst concentrating more wealth and power with the wealthy and powerful. Growth and development are pseudonyms for profit and more profit. Capitalism is a model that promotes division and inequality, which seeks to reduce mankind to think in limited and limiting material terms, and sees everything and everybody as a commodity to be exploited until utterly spent. Every corner of every city, town and village viewed as a market, everyone a consumer.
Arundhati Roy may not be a socialist as the World Socialist Movement defines it but speaking on Democracy Now she makes clear, “People have to begin to formulate some kind of vision and that vision has to be the dismantling of this particular model, in which a few people can be allowed to have an unlimited amount of wealth and power, both political and corporate. That has to be dismantled” and she calls for “a new imagination” to be explored beyond restricting ideologies, “neither communist nor capitalist”. Her “communism” is of course the state-capitalist economics of the Communist Party of India but SOYMB can sympathise with her message. The way the ruling class stay in power is not merely by just controlling the means of production – the money, or dominating the political process - parliament, but by also manipulating the way we think.
Adapted from here
The political activist, Arundhati Roy makes clear that the land and everything inside it, is now owned “by the corporations, every mountain, every river, every forest, every dam, every water supply system”.
Land nurtured by Adivasi (India’s indigenous peoples) families for generations is being violently taken from them in what Arundhati Roy describes as “the biggest land grab since Christopher Columbus”. In varying degrees of intensity, conflict and resistance is taking place throughout the areas affected by the land appropriation, although Roy suggests the violence is even more widespread, “all across India there is insurrection, there is a bandwidth of resistance” – made up of various marginalized groups. They are relentlessly victimized, targeted, Roy states, “in the name of development”: A perverse idea of development that whilst feeding corporate coffers, is destroying the lives of millions of indigenous people and causing devastation to the natural environment. As Arundhati Roy, speaking on BBC Newsnight put it “the middle and upper classes in India have ascended into outer space from where they look down on the (rural) poor and ask, what’s our bauxite doing in your mountains, what’s our water doing in your rivers?”
Massive numbers are being displaced, villages destroyed, women raped, hundreds, as Human Rights Watch (HRW) state, “have been arbitrarily arrested, and imprisoned tortured, and charged with politically motivated offenses that include murder, conspiracy, and sedition”. fplace throughout the areas affected by the land appropriation, although Roy suggests the violence is even more widespread, “all across India there is insurrection, there is a bandwidth of resistance” – made up of various marginalized groups. Massive numbers are being displaced, villages destroyed, women raped, hundreds, as Human Rights Watch (HRW) state, “have been arbitrarily arrested, and imprisoned tortured, and charged with politically motivated offenses that include murder, conspiracy, and sedition”.
Mira Kamdar, Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute says, the nations oldest and most marginalised people are “completely cut off from the economically vibrant, rapidly growing India of the country’s major cities”, and, due to the industrialisation of the environment are facing a major threat to their livelihood. They are sidelined, intimidated and, labeled “Maoist (or Naxalite) terrorists” by the government.
A huge area incorporating large tracks of ancestral land, where Adivasi who number around 150 million and Dalit (Untouchables) groups have lived for millennia is rich in bauxite, iron ore and uranium. The area is an Aladdin’s cave of minerals, which India’s corporations, and the 1% beneficiaries of India’s decade of economic growth, see as theirs by right. To facilitate easy access to “their bauxite”, corporations need the land to be cleared of obstacles – indigenous people and their homes. According to Ashish Kothari, author of Churning The Earth, “In recent years the country has seen a massive transfer of land and natural resources from the rural poor to the wealthy. Around 60 million people have been displaced (although some put the figure much higher) in India by large-scale industrial developments”. The millions of mainly Dalits and Adivasi, made homeless and destitute, forced to ‘re-locate’ to the slums and shanty colonies of small towns and mega cities, where they are also unwelcome.
Capitalism condemns hundred of millions to extreme poverty whilst concentrating more wealth and power with the wealthy and powerful. Growth and development are pseudonyms for profit and more profit. Capitalism is a model that promotes division and inequality, which seeks to reduce mankind to think in limited and limiting material terms, and sees everything and everybody as a commodity to be exploited until utterly spent. Every corner of every city, town and village viewed as a market, everyone a consumer.
Arundhati Roy may not be a socialist as the World Socialist Movement defines it but speaking on Democracy Now she makes clear, “People have to begin to formulate some kind of vision and that vision has to be the dismantling of this particular model, in which a few people can be allowed to have an unlimited amount of wealth and power, both political and corporate. That has to be dismantled” and she calls for “a new imagination” to be explored beyond restricting ideologies, “neither communist nor capitalist”. Her “communism” is of course the state-capitalist economics of the Communist Party of India but SOYMB can sympathise with her message. The way the ruling class stay in power is not merely by just controlling the means of production – the money, or dominating the political process - parliament, but by also manipulating the way we think.
Adapted from here
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