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On 5/18/08, C.K. Vishwanath <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
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> India: States of resistance
> VANDANA SHIVA Is an internationally renowned voice for
> sustainable development and social justice. A
> Renaissance woman, she's a physicist, scholar, social
> activist, and feminist. She is director of the
> Research Foundation for Science, Technology and
> Natural Resource Policy in New Delhi. She's also the
> recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, the
> alternative Nobel Prize. Author of many books, her
> latest are India Divided and Earth Democracy. DAVID
> BARSAMIAN interviewed her in New Delhi on December 29,
> 2007. David Barsamian is the producer of Alternative
> Radio, based in Boulder, Colorado.
>
> TALK ABOUT the different resistance movements in the
> country in terms of fighting the depredations of the
> Indian state as well as what you call the "corporate
> globalizers." Maybe a good place to start would be
> with the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the NBA, which was a
> rather large people's movement in central India to
> resist the building of big dams. How successful or
> unsuccessful has the NBA been?
>
> WHEN MOVEMENTS start for justice and sustainability
> and equity, success is not counted in terms of whether
> they get a dam stopped or if they stop a highway or if
> they stop corporate agriculture from taking over.
> Success is counted in terms of how they define the
> issues of the time. The Narmada Bachhao Andolan was
> very successful in defining displacement as a key
> political issue of our time.
>
> Nothing is more important in India right now than
> movements resisting not just displacement but what I
> call uprooting, literally taking hundreds of millions
> of people, removing them from their homes, combining
> the most obsolete of laws, like the 1894 Land
> Acquisition Act, with a free market. Surely a forced
> acquisition and the free market should not go
> together. But the free market is not free: It uses the
> most brutal instruments of the state in order to equip
> those who control the market with more and more of the
> people's resources. And Narmada Bachhao Andolan might
> not have stopped the dams, but the movement for
> displacement is now the number one issue in the
> country.
>
> How does that connect with the growth of SEZs, Special
> Economic Zones?
>
> 2007 HAS clearly seen land emerge as the most
> important economic and political issue in the country.
> India was a land of small farmers. Our policies were,
> in short, that with a quarter acre you could make a
> living. Those policies included land reforms, zamindar
> abolition; they included paying farmers a just price.
> All that held together 60 percent to 70 percent of
> people's livelihoods on the land.
>
> What globalization has meant is, first and foremost,
> global capital flight. All the money that cannot make
> huge returns after the subprime collapse in the real
> estate market in the United States is landing in
> India. This is where, by all kinds of deceitful means
> and all kinds of legal means, they are trying to take
> over the lands of the poorest of peasants in the
> world. And Special Economic Zoneshave become the
> instrument. Hundreds of Special Economic Zones have
> been approved. Again, it's a combination of the Land
> Acquisition Act used by force. The most fertile
> lands—we've done a mapping of this, we have a fat
> 400-page report on the corporate land grab, as we call
> it. [The] most fertile lands and lands close to
> cities, where the speculative factor has the highest
> return, this is converting the most fertile of India's
> lands that provide livelihoods and food security for
> the country into a real estate casino for global
> capital.
>
> IN WEST Bengal, which has had for a number of years a
> so-called Marxist-communist government, Special
> Economic Zonessparked a revolt and repression from the
> government.
>
> ONE OF the most controversial Special Economic
> Zoneswas a zone allocated—because these are allocated,
> it's a design of just sitting with paper and saying
> this piece will be mine—to Salim, the biggest
> businessman of Indonesia, who financed the dictator
> Suharto, and was seeking this land as a chemical hub
> for exports. But behind Salim were the Dows and the
> DuPonts of the world. And, of course, this is right at
> the mouth of the Ganga, the Ganges River. Port
> facilities are available right there. Location was the
> reason for identifying this zone, except that they
> forgot that these peasants have had a history of
> fighting for land, first against the British, then in
> the Operation Bargar, which distributed land in Bengal
> to the tillers.
>
> Therefore, in January 2007 there was the first
> uprising. Every village has the community organized in
> what are called Bhumi Uchhed committees, committees
> against the appropriation of land. It's the most
> democratic movement I have seen. By March, the police,
> I believe financed with Salim's money and CPM
> (Communist Party Marxist) activists, attacked. More
> than twenty-five people were killed. After that, there
> has been no peace in Nandigram. But the special
> economic zone in Nandigram has been stopped. They're
> now trying to take it over to an island called
> Nayachar in the Bay of Bengal. I've just been talking
> to the fishing community of India to see how we could
> build solidarity between farmers and fishermen now to
> defend that land.
>
> But today Nandigram has become a word that signifies
> the violent economy, which is a partnership between a
> police state and corporate greed. They think people
> have no rights; democracy doesn't count. Three years
> ago, Mayawati, the Uttar Pradesh chief minister, who
> won her elections because she supported the movements
> that were fighting the land grab under the past chief
> minister in Dadri, just outside Delhi—again another
> very violent episode—came to power saying "I will be
> with you in your fight for defense of your land
> rights." [She] has announced something called a Ganga
> Expressway, nearly 100,000 acres to be appropriated,
> the biggest names in the business bidding for it. An
> expressway from nowhere to nowhere, just to grab the
> peasant land. Of course, the Ganga has the best soils.
> This land is the most fertile in the world, and
> everyone is now saying another Nandigram is in the
> making.
>
> EARLIER YOU mentioned the term zamindar. This would be
> large landowners.
>
> WHEN THE British East India Company came here, first,
> they didn't know the country. They didn't realize that
> you didn't really have owners of land, you had users
> of land. The phrase used to be: The land belongs to
> the creator. All you can do is use it. In addition,
> they wanted to collect revenues, which is why they
> were grabbing territories around the world. To
> maximize their revenue collection, they appointed
> zamindars, whom they turned into landowners, not just
> into tax collectors, as a result of which the original
> cultivator owners were turned into landless peasants.
> Some of the worst of this phenomenon happened in
> Bengal, where [Robert] Clive started the rule for the
> East India Company. Zamindar abolition, getting rid of
> these very large land ownerships and putting land into
> small holdings to make India a land of small farmers
> was a very important part of our independence.
>
> I WAS in Karachi, one of the largest cities in South
> Asia, and there is a lack of drinking water.
> Nevertheless, two large islands right off the land
> mass of the city have been sold to Emaar, a huge
> Dubai-based corporation. They're going to build
> five-star hotels and apartment houses. And the fisher
> folk that you mentioned earlier are being impacted in
> Pakistan as well. So it's not just an India-only
> issue.
>
> NO, GLOBALIZATION has, in fact, made sure this is a
> global issue. Africa is seeing its own share of land
> grab, Latin America is seeing its own share of land
> grab. The whole excuse of making industrial biofuels
> to substitute fossil fuels has become a major
> land-grab issue. We've just finished a study on the
> takeover of common lands in India for planting
> jatropha [a tropical plant] by industry to run cars
> while people starve and cattle die.
>
> TALK ABOUT what happened with Coca-Cola in Kerala.
>
> PLACHIMADA, A little hamlet in the district of
> Palghat, is as scenic and beautiful as any other part
> of Kerala, which is also called "God's own country." I
> was invited down there in 2002 to celebrate one year
> of resistance against a Coca-Cola plant. I went in
> solidarity. I had absolutely no idea that those
> horrible bottles of Coke or their drinking water,
> called Kinley, which they pretend to manufacture, was
> just literally stolen from local communities.
>
> After that visit, I threw all my weight in with the
> local movement, which had been started by a beautiful
> 60-year-old tribal woman called Mylamma, whom,
> unfortunately, we lost a year ago. But before she
> died, she and the local community had managed to shut
> down the Coca-Cola plant. This is the first time
> anywhere in the world that one of the biggest
> corporate giants was closed by a handful of determined
> villagers, especially women.
>
> And this is because the Coke plant was depleting the
> aquifer in order to produce soda? There are two
> problems with Coke plants, wherever they come up. The
> first is they mine, literally mine, 1.5 to 2 million
> liters of water per day. Because of the scale of
> operations of these companies, they are very, very
> thirsty. And that meant the groundwater level kept
> dropping. But it isn't just that they're taking out
> water, but they also put in pollution. And because
> it's all a trade secret, nobody really knows where the
> pollution comes from. But we have done studies on six
> plants, and every study shows that the same heavy
> metals start to appear in the water around Coca-Cola
> plants. The normal water around that area does not
> have these heavy metals of cadmium and lead, but
> around Coca-Cola plants heavy metals come. So the
> water becomes undrinkable. First it goes down, and
> then it's undrinkable, which meant that the women were
> walking ten miles to collect clean drinking water. And
> that's when they said, "How much further can we walk?"
> and they said, "The plant must shut," which led to a
> massive national movement, which is continuing. I keep
> getting information from local grassroots movements
> because we help the different movements come together.
> I've just had information that in eastern India in a
> place called Ballia the Coca-Cola plant is going to be
> shut down, again by local resistance.
>
> WHAT YOU described as the prominence of women
> activists in Kerala, is that limited to Kerala or is
> it countrywide?
>
> THE PROMINENCE of women is countrywide.
>
> WHAT ACCOUNTS for that?
>
> THERE ARE two things that account for the
> disproportionate participation by women in any
> movement related to natural resources, related to life
> and death. The first is, women have been left, through
> the social division of labor, to look after basic
> needs. They're the ones who fetch the fuel, they're
> the ones who fetch the water. That's why when water
> disappears or gets polluted, they're the ones who get
> hurt and they're the ones who organize to say "No
> more." The second reason is that women, because they
> are looking after life issues, realize much more
> intimately when collapse of living systems starts to
> take place. I call them the canaries of human society.
> Just like we used to send canaries down in mines,
> women are the canaries of human society. They rise up
> one step faster.
>
> WHAT ABOUT availability of fresh drinking water around
> the country?
>
> ONE OF the biggest problems in years facing us is the
> disappearance of clean, fresh drinking water. India,
> after all, has been endowed with some of the best
> rain. We get the monsoon like you can't see anywhere
> in the world. I live in a valley where we get 4,000
> millimeters of rain. You can't even imagine that kind
> of water. We have some of the most magnificent rivers,
> the Ganga, the Yamuna, the Brahmaputra, the Krishna,
> the Kaveri. Until fifteen years ago, this country did
> not know water scarcity. It did not know water
> scarcity because we were well endowed with water. And
> even where the rain was not heavy, as in Rajasthan,
> the culture of water conservation ensured that there
> was never water scarcity. There were amazing systems
> of water harvesting that have been documented in a
> brilliant book, which we have translated by Anupam
> Mishra called The Radiant Raindrops of Rajasthan of
> the culture of water harvests, ensuring that in an
> area with one-inch rainfall, you can still have enough
> drinking water, you can still have enough water for
> your cattle, and you can even grow crops.
>
> The two reasons the water scarcity and the water
> crisis have grown tremendously is, first and foremost,
> World Bank lending. The World Bank gave money and
> said, "Mine the water. Don't just have shallow wells.
> It's primitive technology to only go 10 feet deep. Go
> 100 feet deep. We will give you the money to give
> subsidies to farmers to energize all their wells."
> Which meant that groundwater started to disappear,
> which is the freshest and cleanest of water.
>
> The second is the fact that India has become the
> dumping ground for all polluting industry. I have
> called it the outsourcing of pollution. Globalization
> is not just the outsourcing of the information
> technology industry that we see in Bangalore. It is
> also the outsourcing of the most polluting chemical
> industry, aluminum industry, steel industry. All of
> this is very water-intensive and very water-polluting.
> River after river is being used as a dumping yard. The
> only places where rivers flow clean are where there is
> no industry. Here in Delhi, 22 kilometers of the
> Yamuna carry 70 percent of the pollution load of the
> entire river, because the industry set up here is just
> dumping toxic waste. The entire sewage of the city is
> being dumped. You cannot make Delhi grow fivefold
> bigger overnight without turning the river into a
> sewer, which is why we have this huge movement to
> defend the Yamuna.
>
> But there is a new problem on water scarcity, which is
> going to make the water crisis deeper in India. And,
> in fact, on the 11th of January, with His Holiness,
> the Dalai Lama's Foundation for Universal
> Responsibility and the Waterkeepers movement of the
> U.S., Bobby Kennedy's movement, we in Navdanya are
> organizing a conference to look ahead to say, if half
> of India lives on the water that comes from the
> Himalayas and the glaciers are melting because of
> global warming, 50 years down the line what will the
> scenario look like, and prepare for it before
> disasters start to happen. How do we have to shift
> agriculture? We can't afford to grow sugarcane in the
> Ganges Basin. How will we ensure that people's
> survival needs are looked after and the scarce water
> is not diverted by China up northwards toward Beijing
> and its other industrial booming towns and in India
> southward to its industry?
>
> DO YOU see a rising consciousness and environmental
> awareness in the country?
>
> IN INDIA there is a very high level of consciousness
> related to natural resources. The consciousness is
> much higher because people's lives depend on it. It is
> not necessarily an ecological perspective, but it is
> definitely an issue of natural resources, whether it
> is the issue of land, sovereignty, the movement we are
> building against the SEZs, or it is an issue of water
> democracy, the movement we built against large dams,
> large diversions, and privatization. We were
> successful in preventing the World Bank from
> privatizing Delhi's water two years ago. Paul
> Wolfowitz's first visit to this country saw the women
> and unions of the city bombard the World Bank
> headquarters. And then I went to meet him, and he was
> such a nervous man, shaking my hand 30 times over. We
> gave him a memorandum, and then I gave him a tiny
> little pot of Ganges water to say, "You might not know
> this, but in this country we hold water as sacred.
> Stop messing up with our water."
>
> SO THAT was a successful—
>
> WE WERE very successful in [fighting against] the
> water privatization, yes.
>
> YOU MIGHT recall—in fact, I may have heard it first
> from you—that World Bank official Ismael Serageldin
> said that the wars and conflicts of the twenty-first
> century will be around water. Do you still see that as
> holding true?
>
> YES, BUT I don't think they will be the only wars. In
> India, we are seeing wars around land. 2007 has seen,
> if I were to do a rough calculation, at least a
> hundred people killed over land issues. Add to it the
> fact that in tribal areas the land is being
> appropriated for mines, for steel plants. The world
> steel manufacturing has descended on India, and all of
> it is being set up in tribal areas. In Kalinagar,
> twelve tribals were shot dead when they were
> resisting. Tribals have been shot dead in Bastar and
> Chhattisgarh when they are not listened to, and they
> continue to fight. What else can they do but resort to
> protection through a gun? Which is why you are seeing
> the rise of what is called Naxalism in a large part of
> India. And the more these land wars will grow, the
> more this violent response will grow.
>
> I have always said, and I said it in my book Earth
> Democracy, democracy is not just casting a ballot once
> in five years. That's not freedom, that's not
> democracy. Democracy is the defense of people's rights
> and the ability to shape the economies and political
> systems in which they live. If you can get a handful
> of corporations and a handful of politicians to ride
> roughshod over 80 percent of India, you're not going
> to have democracy. And the end of democracy means for
> the state fascism, for the people violent uprising.
>
> THOSE UPRISINGS are not only in Chhattisgarh, as you
> mentioned, but also in Jharkhand, Bihar, and other
> parts of the country. New Delhi just describes these
> people as Maoists, terrorists and revives the old name
> of Naxalbari, a town in West Bengal, which had
> uprisings in the 1960s.
>
> I THINK there are very, very dangerous signals,
> because Naxalbari was a 1960s and '70s phenomenon.
> None of the people fighting for their land today have
> anything to do with Charu Mazumdar.1 They don't even
> know who he was. They don't even know there was a
> village called Naxalbari. They are merely saying, "If
> you won't listen to us peacefully, we will have to
> defend our lives with weapons."
>
> One-third of India is supposed to be now under the
> control of armed struggles. One-third of India is out
> of the government's control. How does the government
> respond? With more militarization. In Chhattisgarh
> they have created a very ugly phenomenon, and I am
> absolutely sure the American administration has had a
> role in advising them, because it looks like the
> Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s. Tribals have been
> equipped with arms to fight their own tribal brothers
> and sisters. The movement that the government is
> sponsoring—which is not a movement—is called Salva
> Judum. I call it the Indian Contras. This is leading
> to such abuse of human rights. Dr. Binayak Sen is the
> secretary of the People's Union of Civil Liberties. He
> is also a very dear friend of mine and my sister's. He
> is an eminent medical doctor and is known around the
> country for his contributions to community health and
> public health. He did a report on the atrocities
> taking place in Chhattisgarh. What was the result? He
> has been thrown into jail as a Naxalite. He's like me.
> If it can happen to him, it can happen to any of us.
>
> This started really, I believe, after the collapse of
> the World Trade Organization talks in Seattle. Robert
> Zoellick, the U.S. trade representative at that time,
> used the word "terrorist" for those of us who were on
> the streets of Seattle. Then they had 9/11, and they
> expanded the spectrum of terrorism to make no
> distinction between al-Qaeda and civil-liberties
> activists, no difference between tribals fighting for
> their homelands where they have lived through
> centuries and an assassin who has killed Benazir
> Bhutto. They wiped out all differentiation. And if the
> processes continue in the direction in which they are,
> where no one is making these decisions anymore but the
> gangsterism of global capital—it has really become a
> Mafia rule—we are going to see absolute annihilation
> of any form of freedom and democracy in society
> everywhere.
>
> WHAT KIND of connections and outreach is being made
> from, say, well-educated urban dwellers to rural
> farmers, who are in some instances Dalits or Adivasis,
> tribals?
>
> THE MOVEMENTS we have built in the last two decades,
> the movement on seed for example, is one in which
> people like me, who are scientists, who reach out to
> the remotest part of the country to rescue seed
> freedom. The area of central India called
> Vidarbha—which is the home of cotton (that's where
> cotton got domesticated), and is also the home of
> Gandhi's ashram in Sevagram, where he spun cotton to
> get freedom—is the capital of farmer suicides. We've
> lost 200,000 farmers in suicides with a combination of
> high cost of the production because of Monsanto's
> monopoly on seed and falling prices of cotton because
> of global trade and the $4 billion cotton subsidies
> that the U.S. gives to its corporations. The result of
> it has been farmers being locked into a negative
> economy, where they're spending more than they're
> earning, and a very high rate of suicides.
>
> Last year I decided we cannot just keep watching, we
> cannot just keep counting how many farmers die, we
> have to do something about it. So I went into this
> heartland of Monsanto's control and started working
> with villagers to say, "Why are you going down this
> path? We will bring you seeds. Break free of
> Monsanto's dictatorship." Five villages broke free.
> They're now GMO-free, Monsanto-free. They've gone
> organic. We're going to be celebrating their first
> harvest on the 26th of January, which is our republic
> day, and say, "From a republic of suicides we need to
> become a republic of hope and a republic of freedom."
>
> Even on land issues, in February last year the former
> prime minister, V. P. Singh, the former ambassador to
> GAAT, and a former member of the Planning Commission,
> S. P. Shukla, me, and about 50 others who are from the
> privileged parts of this country joined hands with
> every movement fighting land grab—the movement in
> Orissa, the movements in Nandigram, the movements in
> Raigad, outside Bombay, the movements in Gurgaon and
> Jhajjar, just outside Delhi, the movements in
> Punjab—and created a very broad new alliance on land
> sovereignty.
>
> We've just completed a new study to show that when
> land is appropriated, the people who get hurt most are
> the landless, because they don't even get
> compensation, and the women and the children. And the
> consequences for livelihoods and hunger on this land
> grab are huge.
>
> EXPLAIN HOW subsidies of cotton, which you mentioned,
> impact farmers in India. The U.S. subsidizes large
> agribusinesses to export cotton to India. The cotton
> arrives here. Is it more expensive than locally
> produced cotton or less expensive?
>
> BEFORE THE WTO, India had its own economy—it was a
> rupee economy—and the U.S. had its economy in
> agriculture. The WTO became an instrument for U.S.
> agribusiness to dismantle our import barriers. What
> does that mean for cotton? When cotton prices can be
> lowered with subsidies in the U.S. to half the market
> price and then, because of import restrictions, which
> are called QRs, quantity restrictions in the WTO
> language, are removed, that artificially cheap,
> subsidized cotton gets dumped on the Indian market. It
> drives down the Indian price. Indian cotton prices
> have dropped to one-third of what they used to be.
> Meantime, the costs of production have gone up tenfold
> because from the same farmers Monsanto is trying to
> squeeze out 3,600 rupees per kilogram for cotton
> seeds. So you've got a squeeze from corporations on
> both sides, from the seed end and the trade end.
>
> I'll give you another example how these subsidies
> hurt. Soybean oil was never eaten in India. It was
> never eaten anywhere in the world. U.S. agribusiness,
> having used soya for cattle feed, then realized that
> the oil that comes out they could use as a product.
> Agribusiness is so well organized—it's Cargill,
> ConAgra, ADM—they manufactured a crisis in India and
> got the Indian oil, domestic oil, banned, and flooded
> the Indian market with soya oil, later palm oil. Then
> Cargill sells both the palm oil from Indonesia and the
> soya from the U.S., from the Amazon, from Argentina,
> the soya price in 1998 was $150 a ton, but behind it
> was a subsidy of $191 a ton, which means the soya
> price would have been double that of domestic edible
> oils. But once it was lowered artificially with
> subsidies, brought into the country, the mustard
> farmers could not sell their mustard. The price had
> dropped to a third. The coconut farmers could not sell
> their coconut. A coconut used to cost 10 rupees in
> 1998. It dropped to 2 rupees. You can't maintain a
> coconut plantation with 2 rupees' return.
>
> YOU'VE WRITTEN about how "giant corporations such as
> Cargill and Wal-Mart carry major responsibility in
> destroying local, sustainable economies and pushing
> society after society into dependence on an
> ecologically destructive global economy." Give
> examples of what Cargill and Wal-Mart are doing in
> India.
>
> CARGILL, OF course, has emerged as a very big player
> in generating food insecurity in this country. The
> first level at which food insecurity is generated is
> when a farmer who was selling their produce and making
> a living can no longer sell their produce at an
> adequate price and commits suicide. How much worse can
> insecurity be?
>
> In addition, by influencing laws and policies
> domestically also, Cargill and other giant
> corporations have dismantled our food security system.
> We had a system by which the state bought produce from
> the farmers at a regulated price and then made sure
> that affordable food was available to all people
> through a public distribution system. The World Bank
> was used to dismantle this public distribution system.
> But there are enough hungry and poor people who still
> need affordable, subsidized food in the country, [so]
> the government must continue to buy. Cargill coming
> into the market has meant that they buy up in
> speculation large quantities of wheat and rice, and
> then they are driving the prices up. So for the
> farmers the prices are going down but for the consumer
> the prices are going up. The wheat price has doubled
> in the last year on wheat speculation.
>
> The next election in this country will be fought
> around high food prices. They are taking food out of
> the reach of the ordinary person. This process has
> made India emerge as the capital of hunger. It's not
> sub-Saharan Africa anymore. India has the largest
> number of hungry people. Two-thirds of Indian children
> are today malnourished.
>
> As far as Wal-Mart is concerned, Wal-Mart trotted in
> after our prime minister and President Bush signed a
> series of agreements. One of which was the nuclear
> agreement, over which there have been huge protests.
> The government nearly fell because it was not
> democratically decided. The Damocles sword of the
> nuclear deal is hanging over the elections and the
> Congress [Party] is partly losing because they've been
> seen as selling out the national interest.
>
> But there was a lesser-known agreement signed on the
> same day. It was called the U.S.-Indian Knowledge
> Initiative in Agriculture. It had nothing to do with
> knowledge. It was about grabbing India's seed sector,
> trade sector, and retail sector. On the board of this
> agreement sit Wal-Mart, Monsanto, Cargill, ConAgra.
> Immediately after the agreement was signed, the
> Wal-Mart chiefs started to arrive. Laws were changed.
> We fought very hard to prevent 100 percent foreign
> direct investment. They got partial rights but not 100
> percent rights. So they have to come with a partner in
> India. Their present partner in India is Bharti, the
> company that sells mobile phones and is a service
> provider. We were very successful in building a strong
> movement. We called it the Movement for Retail
> Democracy. The reason I named it the Movement for
> Retail Democracy was it was being made to look like
> India, with 40 million people involved in small
> retail, doesn't know how to sell things, that we have
> to be taught retail by Wal-Mart, that we are primitive
> in retail, and somehow if you put cheap goods into one
> giant box store, suddenly that is retail.
>
> The language being used was organized versus
> unorganized retail. We say, our system is hugely
> organized. To have a vegetable vendor pick up
> vegetables in the wholesale market in the morning,
> bring it to our doorstep and he's my alarm bell,
> "Tomatoes, potatoes," to me it's the most soothing
> sound when street to street our vendors go up and
> down. And what could be more convenient? How can
> driving 20 miles out to a Wal-Mart through traffic
> jams be more convenient shopping than having a
> vegetable vendor generate a livelihood for a family
> and bring you fresh vegetables on your doorstep? Super
> sophisticated, super organized. So we said, "The
> difference is not organized versus unorganized; it is
> retail dictatorship versus retail democracy."
>
> In six states, as a result of this movement,
> governments have been forced to say, "We will not
> allow giant corporations in." Of course, seeing
> Wal-Mart, Indian companies like Reliance, try to jump
> on the retail bandwagon. And we've had wonderful
> statements, with people saying, "Let the giants do the
> big things. Selling potatoes and cauliflower is a
> small person's job. Let it stay as a livelihood option
> for the small person." So the retail issue will not go
> away.
>
> WHAT ELEMENTS in the Indian state are enabling these
> kinds of agreements to go forward with the United
> States and other Western countries?
>
> WE CAN identify four market fundamentalists who are in
> huge power in the country today. Our prime minister,
> Manmohan Singh, was the one who introduced neoliberal
> reforms to India in 1991 after Rajiv Gandhi was
> assassinated and he was made the finance minister. The
> interesting thing is Le Monde had an article then to
> say, "Well, Rajiv Gandhi is dead. We don't know who
> will be the prime minister." But the U.S. was already
> announcing that the finance minister would be Manmohan
> Singh, a non-politician, not elected, but already
> announced as the man who would make financial
> decisions. Our chief of the Planning Commission,
> Montek Singh Ahluwalia, spends some time in India, and
> when he loses out in power goes right back to
> Washington and sits in the IMF. These are people
> delegated to India from Washington. They haven't grown
> out of the soil of this country in terms of struggling
> through a political system and a democratic system.
> Our finance minister, Chidambaram, our commerce
> minister, Kamal Nath. These are the four players who
> are making undemocratic agreements behind the people's
> back, behind the backs of parliament, constantly
> getting into trouble with parliament and the people of
> this country, and yet feeling a billion Indians don't
> matter, masters in Washington are more important.
>
> SO THEY'RE able to concentrate power and act
> unilaterally despite the displeasure of, it seems, a
> large number of the people in this country.
>
> THE NUCLEAR deal is a very good example of this. The
> point is, when we made our constitution, we could not
> even imagine the level of power global capital could
> have. And therefore, the precautions that needed to be
> built into the constitution to rein in the executive
> from excessive commitments to corporations, to the
> U.S. military, these were not even imaginable, and
> therefore the precautions aren't built in. The
> executive in India has an absolute right to negotiate
> internationally, and therefore it bypasses parliament.
> But eventually parliament calls them up and says, "You
> cannot sell off our sovereignty, you cannot destroy
> livelihoods." The conflict between democracy and
> corporate globalization is very intense. And in this
> conflict four of five people from the Indian state
> machinery acting unilaterally are pitted against the
> entire Indian public and against most of parliament.
>
> I WAS recently in Bombay, and opposite the Hyatt hotel
> in Santa Cruz there were indescribably poor hovels. So
> there is that incredible paradox that is always
> present. Yet in the West, in the United States, India
> is seen as this great growth area, it's producing more
> billionaires than any country in the world today. So
> it's all positive and upbeat.
>
> The international media, especially the Western media,
> have deliberately exaggerated the shining India, India
> arriving. You just have to see the nonsensical book
> titles that are coming out. There are two issues
> behind this.
>
> The first is, every other shining example of the
> neoliberal philosophy has failed, so they have to grab
> India as the last, literally, straw. They said the
> Asian Tigers were going to rise. And what happened to
> the tigers? Look at what happened to Indonesia. The
> reason India hasn't gone down that way is because our
> past insurances are protecting us, the fact that we
> don't have 100 percent capital conversion so far.
> That's protecting us. Otherwise the subprime crisis
> would have translated into a huge crisis in India.
>
> The second issue is, by saying that India is now a
> land of millionaires and 9 percent growth, they hide
> the foundations on which this growth is based, they
> hide the basis on which these millionaires get
> created. I'll give you just two examples. The richest
> man on earth now is Mukesh Ambani, and he grew rich
> partly because of resource grab and partly because of
> the stock market, which can inflate your worth hugely.
> Over the last two decades, as a result of corporate
> globalization and influences that are leading to
> privatization, the oil and gas sector of this country,
> which used to be a public sector—the Oil and Natural
> Gas Commission of India has done all explorations—all
> of these explorations have been handed over on a
> platter to Ambani. Obviously, he will be a
> billionaire. But whose wealth has he taken? He hasn't
> created it. He has appropriated it from the public
> system.
>
> In terms of the Special Economic Zonesand land grab,
> the biggest land grabber is Mukesh Ambani. The Special
> Economic Zonesaround Mumbai, the Special Economic
> Zonesoutside Delhi are all Ambani economic zones. He
> is not developing these zones. He is taking land at
> 200,000 rupees, when the market value is 220 million
> rupees, and then he's selling it onward for a billion.
> He is in this for land speculation, building new
> luxury townships, renting it out to corporations.
>
> India is being carved out as a haven for corporate
> investment. In the process, the [people who run]
> Indian corporations that are playing a role in this
> are emerging as billionaires, but those hovels across
> the street from the Hyatt are the people displaced.
> And we will see a growing polarization between those
> who are dispossessed and those who have taken
> possession—it's no longer a difference between the
> rich and the poor. It has gone way beyond that. It is
> now the difference between those who are not being
> given an option to live and those who are
> appropriating every resource of this country. Every
> time I have joined movements on land issues, people
> have said, "If we don't have this land, what else is
> left to us but crime?" So we will see more
> instability. And what we are seeing today in Pakistan
> will tomorrow happen in India if we are not able to
> control this governance through greed that's taking
> place and the celebration of greed and corruption on a
> global level by the media.
>
> I WAS interested in the figure you used, one-third of
> the land mass is effectively not under government
> control.
>
> ONE-THIRD of the land mass, stretching all the way
> from Nepal through parts of Bihar, into Jharkhand,
> into parts of Orissa, into parts of Chhattisgarh, bits
> of Madhya Pradesh, into large parts of Maharashtra,
> the tribal belt, all the way into Andhra Pradesh. That
> stretch, which is the mineral-rich, forest-rich tribal
> area of India, is in uprising.
>
> WHAT ABOUT the northeast quadrant of the country?
>
> THE NORTHEAST is beyond government control on many
> levels. The issue there is also one of resources. The
> issue there is also the fact that the center, the
> federal government, is there to appropriate the
> resources but is not present in a full way to include
> the tribes of the northeast in the mainstream of
> India.
>
> HOW MANY people are forced off their farms, leave
> their land, and migrate to the cities?
>
> WE KNOW the numbers. Sixty-five percent of this
> country lives on the land. And no matter how much they
> make the cities grow, at best it will go to 55
> percent. The rest will have to live on the land
> without the land. As far as the displaced people and
> the refugee crisis into cities is concerned, it is not
> that people leaving villages can today come to the
> city, live in a slum, somehow make a living, because
> the assault on land is in urban areas and rural areas.
> All financial dailies are reporting at the end of the
> year the fattest revenues and profits are to be made
> in real estate. India's real estate has become the
> place where everyone is making money. All the
> international hedge funds, all the international banks
> are making money out of India's real estate. But what
> is that real estate? It is the land of the poor.
>
> So in the city of Delhi all the slums have been
> violently erased. They won't go back to the villages.
> They're sitting somewhere, hanging around. Not only
> did the slums get cleared but you had, linked to the
> Wal-Mart, supermarket culture, an attempt to shut down
> businesses inside the city. A very artificial issue
> was created. Suddenly it was argued that residential
> areas should have no businesses, even though India is
> a culture of mixed land use and every good city has
> had to have business and residents together. It
> creates security, it creates livelihoods, it's
> vibrant.
>
> A sealing operation of the most horrendous kind took
> place. And sealing was really sealing. They would walk
> right into your place and put a lock on your door.
> Hundreds and thousands of businesses were shut down.
> Eventually it was exposed that the judge who had given
> this ruling had his sons involved in the supermarket
> investments, and he was flushing out businesses from
> the town to push them to the outskirts of the city,
> very much like suburban supermarkets in the U.S.A. But
> India is a crowded land; India is a land of a billion
> people. You can't uproot the farmers and say, "You
> can't even come to slums." You can't shut down small
> businesses and say, "Go shop in Wal-Mart." It won't
> work. It's an unworkable dream.
>
> Unfortunately, big business is so myopic, they're not
> looking at the fact that when they take that island
> outside Karachi it's going to go when sea levels rise.
> They don't realize that—when they change the coastal
> regulation zone, which has been such an important
> protection in this country. We shut down the shrimp
> farms using this law. Hotels and resorts, which were
> totally destructive of beaches, were closed. And now
> we've got my favorite, Dr. M. S. Swaminathan of the
> Green Revolution, recommending to government that the
> coasts are unsafe for the fishermen and they should be
> moved out one kilometer, but all of the coasts should
> be opened up for industry, nuclear power plants,
> ports. So you're getting this amazing greed with the
> idea that you can dispossess 80 percent of India and
> everything will be fine, you can create huge
> ecological vulnerability and everything will be fine.
> They're not looking at the social or ecological
> consequences of their actions.
>
> SO IN effect what you're describing is class warfare:
> privileged groups conducting business over the bodies
> of people who are not privileged.
>
> I WOULD go further. I would say it's beyond class
> warfare. It's genocide.
>
> CAN YOU explain?
>
> THE TECHNICAL definition of genocide is any deliberate
> harming of a group by another group, physical harm,
> economic harm. When we see 200,000 farmers commit
> suicide, it's a design. It hasn't happened
> accidentally; it's a consequence of rules of trade
> liberalization. When millions of farmers are getting
> uprooted and many of them are being shot dead, it's
> immediate killing, but in the long run it is targeting
> rural livelihoods by design and saying, "You have no
> business to exist in the future."
>
> I have written a piece called "India Needs Its Small
> Farmers," because from Manmohan Singh to Buddhadeb
> Bhattacharjee, the chief minister of West Bengal,
> they're repeatedly saying, "The small farmer of India
> is unviable. Therefore, they must go." Where will they
> go, they don't answer. They must go and they want to
> clear the way for the Ambanis and Tatas, and, of
> course, the Dows and the DuPonts, who work with these
> people. This is physically harming by design. It is
> extermination of a very large part of India.
>
> DO YOU see civil society rising in response to this?
>
> CIVIL SOCIETY is rising in response. That is why for
> me the issue of democracy is at the heart of it.
> Either we will be able to reclaim democracy, open up
> spaces, control the Ambanis, the Montek Singh
> Ahluwalias, bring them to social discipline,
> democratic discipline, or they will define a
> short-term grab of the resources of this country with
> a total collapse twenty years down the line.
>
> INDIA HAS a large and growing military establishment.
> I just spent some time in Kashmir, by the way. There
> are hundreds of thousands of troops in Kashmir—I think
> the number is 600,000—which makes Kashmir the most
> densely occupied area in the world. What about
> militarization and the alliances with the United
> States and Israeli military?
>
> THE ISSUE of the increasing militarization and the
> intimacy with the Israeli military and the U.S.
> military have sparked huge protests in this country,
> both because we would prefer the peaceful way and
> definitely, if we have to have a military, we want it
> to be sovereign, independent, and nonaligned.
>
> The issue of militarization has more facets than the
> military, because the largest chunk of militarization
> is taking place through what I call paramilitary
> operations. These are not police and they are not the
> army, but they are meant to handle civic issues. There
> is more military action taking place against the
> Indian people than against any foreign enemy right
> now. The whole Naxalite issue. Battalion after
> battalion is being deployed. We've just had huge
> communal conflicts in Orissa, again linked to this
> displacement issue, because, as I have said in my
> books, if you appropriate resources and destroy
> livelihoods and leave fewer opportunities for people,
> people will get polarized along lines of religion,
> caste, ethnicity.
>
> The rise of ethnic conflict and fundamentalist
> religion goes hand in hand with the rise of corporate
> globalization has a very, very important connection.
> So when people lose the stability of their lives and
> are living on nothing, A) they become vulnerable and
> prey to those who would organize society around
> fundamentalist religions along caste lines, but, B)
> people themselves in their insecurity get together
> along those identities when the economic identity of
> production and making things disappears. So we are
> seeing more and more of the paramilitary used. As I
> was saying earlier, as more and more land gets
> appropriated and more and more instability comes into
> society, more and more militarization is an inevitable
> consequence.
>
> IN EARLY December, a United Nations–sponsored
> conference was held in Bali on climate change. Its
> purpose is to replace the Kyoto Protocol. You say that
> whatever evolves must include ecological agriculture
> as a climate solution. What do you mean by that?
>
> ACTUALLY, MY next book is on climate change and
> energy. On the basis of the twenty years of work we
> have done in Navdanya and, more recently, two years of
> very intensive research we've been doing on it, what
> we are finding is that ecological agriculture is both
> a mitigation and an adaption strategy. Mitigation in
> the sense that it gets rid of use of fossil fuels.
> Fossil fuels are used in industrial agriculture
> through mechanization. The large machinery is driven
> by fossil fuels. Nitrogen fertilizers come from fossil
> fuels. They are very intensive in energy. They also
> emit large amounts of nitrogen oxides, which go to
> create greenhouse gases, which also add to climate
> change. So industrial agriculture is a recipe for
> emitting greenhouse gases. Ecological agriculture has
> none of these emissions.
>
> In addition, when climate does change, because it is
> changing, you will have more intense drought. When you
> have more intense drought, your soils that have used
> chemical fertilizers will have higher rates of crop
> failure. Soils in which we have returned organic
> matter will have higher capacity to retain moisture
> and will therefore not merely help you mitigate but
> also adapt.
>
> But the most important point, we are finding, is,
> good, rich biologically diverse agriculture, which
> keeps putting more and more biological matter into the
> soil, is not just helping you with food security, it's
> not just helping you get rid of toxics, it is, more
> importantly, turning your soil to a very important
> sink to absorb carbon.
>
> YOU WRITE in a recent article that global corporations
> are transferring their pollution burden to the poor of
> the South. Talk about that and what you call "the
> socialization of pollution."
>
> THIS REALLY comes out of the debate taking place
> around climate change, where you have the
> privatization of wealth and the consolidation of
> wealth in huge monopolies, shameless levels of
> concentration. And then at the end of it we are told
> the Third World is too poor to have to do anything
> about it. But between 1992, when we had the Earth
> Summit when the United Nations framework convention
> was signed for climate change, and 1995, when the WTO
> was released, a whole new world structure came to be.
> So you have basically a globalization of the economy,
> with most of the polluting, resource-intensive
> industry moving to countries like India. Look at the
> aluminum smelters that have got set up in India while
> aluminum plants have got shut down in Japan. Look at
> the steel plants coming up in India while steel
> businesses are shutting down in the United States and
> England and Germany. They're not relocating for
> generosity to India. They're relocating to save costs,
> to save in environmental responsibility. And they are
> part of this chorus—and interestingly, one of the
> steel plants that was acquired by Tata is called
> Chorus—that is saying the Third World cannot have
> emissions regulation.
>
> What I'm saying is, since you have stopped treating
> countries as an economic and social unit, you have
> stopped running welfare economies, where the last
> person is looked after, you have turned everything
> into a corporate calculus, then the corporate calculus
> must be the discipline for emissions limits. We cannot
> have countries with no powers to decide how the
> economy will be run and corporations making all the
> decisions, and yet governments having the burden of
> [dealing with the fact that] India pollutes this much,
> China pollutes this much.
>
> You cannot have a socialization of pollution with
> privatization of wealth. You've got to have pollution
> go with the polluter. The polluter must pay. And the
> limits have to be set not with countries as a unit,
> because the negotiations in the UN are only around
> countries. What I'm saying is that if the WTO has
> given so much power to corporations, now it's time for
> the United Nations to say the steel industry will have
> these limits of emissions, the automobile industry
> will have these limits of emissions, the power plants
> will have these limits of emissions. And unless it's
> done by economic sector and corporate responsibility
> is brought into play, we're going to constantly have
> this dance between private wealth and social
> pollution.
>
> THERE IS a notion circulating among some progressives
> in the United States that there is something called
> natural capitalism. What do you think of that?
>
> I'VE BEEN a physicist, and I like to look at things as
> they are. Unfortunately, as they are, global capital
> is raping the planet. There is nothing natural about
> it.
>
> AND AN alternative?
>
> The alternative is small communities having resource
> sovereignty. I have worked in terms of the movements
> we've built—in terms of seed sovereignty, beej swaraj,
> food sovereignty, anna swaraj, water democracy, jal
> swaraj, land sovereignty, bhoo swaraj. These
> sovereignties and freedoms are the bases of an economy
> that protects nature and is a genuinely natural
> economy living in the scale on which nature operates
> and is able to meet the needs of all, including the
> fulfillment of human creativity.
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> 1 Charu Mazumdar (1918–1972) was Maoist leader of a
> peasant uprising in Naxalbari in northern Bengal.
> Secretary of the Communist Party of India
> (Marxist-Leninist), which was founded in 1969, he died
> in police custody in 1972.
>
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>
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>
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