The Importance of Saving Binayak Sen
    By J. Sri Raman
    t r u t h o u t | Columnist

    Sunday 03 June 2007

    In January 1999, Australian missionary Graham Steines was burnt alive, along with his sons Timothy, 7, and Philip, 9, while sleeping in an open jeep in a tribal village in India's eastern, and probably the poorest, state of Orissa. Graham (and his wife Gladys) had been tending to lepers in the area for over three decades. The murder most foul hit the world headlines and caused a great outrage among governments and countries across the globe.

    On May 14, 2007, an Indian doctor, a medical missionary of no religious denomination, was taken away by police from his home in a tribal district in the central state of Chhattisgarh. No one has heard from him since then. Binayak Sen had been a heaven-sent healer for the poor of the place for the past 17 years, yet the arrest has not led to protests of the kind that can move powers-that-be.

    The Steines murder, of course, was the more savage crime. But that is not why the Binayak case is causing barely any concern, even inside India. The fact is that, while the Orissa murder was the more terrible expression of its politics, Binayak's arrest marks a bigger tactical victory for India's far right.

    In 1999, former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the Bharatiya Janata Party was forced, in the face of international opinion, to affect a flush and say that the crime had made the country "hang its head in the comity of nations."

    In 2007, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Congress Party, heading the central government in New Delhi, have remained totally silent in response to the feeble outcry over the happenings in Chhattisgarh under the BJP government of Chief Minister Raman Singh.

    The far right defended, and indeed glorified, the grisly Steines killings as part of a campaign against religious conversions. This made it comparatively easier for the Congress and the left to mobilize public opinion against the religious-communal crime associated with the rabid politics that split the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947 and have made South Asia a strife-torn region ever since.

    The far right has, this time round, scored a tactical gain by associating Binayak's arrest with an "antiterrorist" campaign. The doctor is being projected as an associate and accomplice of Maoist desperados active in the tribal tracts of semi-feudal Chhattisgarh (named after the 'Thirtysix Forts' dotting the inhospitable terrain). The "terrorist" tag was pinned upon him soon after he took up, as a human rights activist and leader of the People's Union for Civil Liberties, the case against a state-sponsored outfit called Salwa Judum.

    The name means Peace Mission or Peace Festival in the tribal Gondi language. Floated by the landowners and forest contractors, and funded as well as armed by the Raman Singh regime, the Salwa Judum has, in fact, pitted tribesmen against tribesmen, village against village, and engaged in a wide range of crimes, including extortions, looting and much worse.

    A 14-member team of five human rights organizations, including the PUCL, conducted an investigation between November 28 and December 1, 2005, in certain Judum-infested areas and came out with three major findings. It found, in the first place, that Salwa Judum was "not a spontaneous people's movement, but a state-organized, anti-insurgency campaign." Secondly, the team rejected the official claim that the villagers were "caught between the Maoists and the military." In most cases, to the team, the Maoists seemed to enjoy popular support. The team also found that the Peace Mission, ironically, had led to an escalation of violence and an increase in human rights violations, especially by the establishment's "antiterrorist" army.

    The tribal women were among the worst sufferers. A survey by a Committee Against Violence on Women found that, over the recent period, 21 women had been killed (three after mutilation of breasts and genitals) and 37 raped (23 of them gang-raped). The criminals were members of the allegedly "antiterror" Judum.

    Opposition to the Judum is not something that the rulers in New Delhi can readily support. Not after Prime Minister Singh's description of the Maoist insurgency in parts of India as the most serious terrorist threat before the country. Not after the dispatch of paramilitary forces under the Singh government's control for anti-Maoist operations in Chhattisgarh.

    The left, for its part, does not share the far right's "antiterrorist" fervor. But the mainstream left parties can make no common cause with the Maoists either. They have even less sympathy for the extreme left in India, engaged in what may at best be described as an experiment in armed struggle, after the Maoists in neighboring Nepal opted for mainstream democratic politics. Hopes that the Nepalese example would find extreme-left emulation here have been belied. The Indian Maoists, in fact, have denounced their Nepalese counterparts for their alleged display of "opportunism."

    All this, unfortunately, has given the far right a new weapon, which they have grasped with alacrity. "Antiterrorism" had thus far only provided the BJP and the Parivar (the far-right family) with anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan ammunition. They can now employ it against their adversaries, and even expect to enlarge the area of support for themselves.

    The Chhatisgarh police now claim to have found "incriminating evidence" against Binayak and, say some reports, even his wife Ilina Sen of India's Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP). Considering the couple's involvement in the anti-nuclear weapons cause, the time may come when the far right cites an expression of opposition to atomic militarism as firm evidence of "terrorism."