The dead begin to speak up in India
Kashmir is one of two war zones in India from which no news must come. But
those in unmarked graves will not be silenced
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- Arundhati Roy <http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/arundhati-roy>
- guardian.co.uk <http://www.guardian.co.uk/>, Friday 30 September
2011 00.01 BST
- Article
history<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2011/sep/30/kashmir-india-unmarked-graves#history-link-box>
[image: Kashmir unmarked graves]
A Kashmiri farmer walks past unmarked graves in Bimyar, west of Srinagar,
in 2009. Photograph: Mukhtar Khan/AP
At about 3am, on 23 September, within hours of his arrival at the Delhi
airport, the US radio-journalist David Barsamian was
deported<http://truthdive.com/2011/09/25/us-broadcaster-deported-from-india.html>.
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
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FKdU_xL4O8>on Chomsky and Edward
Herman's book Manufacturing
Consent<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_The_Political_Economy_of_the_Mass_Media>
).
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<http://www.amnesty.org/en/for-media/press-releases/india-government-must-stop-bauxite-mine-and-refinery-expansion-until-hum>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 <http://www.economist.com/node/8960457> 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<http://www.indianexpress.com/news/us-professor-deported-for-political-activis/706855/>,
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<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angana_P._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<http://blog.thekashmirwalla.com/2011/05/gautam-navlakha-denied-entry-deported-from-srinagar-airport-press-note-from-iptk/>,
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<http://www.voanews.com/english/news/asia/Indian-Kashmir-to-ID-Bodies-from-Unmarked-Graves-130632003.html>.
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<http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/column_javed-iqbal-the-curious-case-of-lingaram-kodopi_1591574>an
adivasi <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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<http://conference.aidindia.org/?q=node/28>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 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan%27an> of being Zhou
Enlai<http:///>).
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 <http://www.sacw.net/article2269.html> 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<http://www.binayaksen.net/2009/05/vca-demolished/>
.
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."
--
Adv Kamayani Bali Mahabal
+919820749204
skype-lawyercumactivist
*
*
*The UID project i**s going to do almost exactly the same thing which the
predecessors of Hitler did, else how is it that Germany always had the lists
of Jewish names even prior to the arrival of the Nazis? The Nazis got these
lists with the help of IBM which was in the 'census' business that included
racial census that entailed not only count the Jews but also identifying
them. At the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, there is an
exhibit of an IBM Hollerith D-11 card sorting machine that was responsible
for organising the census of 1933 that first identified the Jews.*
*
*
*http://saynotoaadhaar.blogspot.com/*
*http://aadhararticles.blogspot.com/*
*http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_162987527061902&ap=1*<
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_162987527061902&ap=1>
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