Bribes and bullets all the way

Bribes and bullets all the way
Nandini Sundar

While the fallout of the Tehelka tapes has pushed aside questions regarding the pro-rich thrust of the budget and the government's disinvestment policies, these are unlikely to disappear altogether. For what the Tehelka tapes highlight is the fact that under the current system of party funding and lack of accountability, governments will inevitably be more responsive to the concerns of large industrialists and lobbyists like arms dealers than to the constituencies from whom they get their votes.

Such kickbacks inevitably increase the price of defence procurement, and there is no reason whatsoever why taxpayers should thus indirectly fund parties they may not otherwise support. But this apart, surely it is more than obvious that middlemen or industrialists do not fund parties out of pure philanthropy. Since ordinary soldiers, workers and peasants have no money for slush funds, it is unsurprising that governments feel they can ignore this vast majority of India's population.

Two relatively recent incidents highlight the growing contempt that governments feel for ordinary citizens. The police firings in Maikanch village in Rayagada district, Orissa, and at Tapkara in Ranchi district, Jharkhand, share more than just the fact that they were targeted at unarmed Adivasis. In both cases, groups investigating the incidents have discovered that the firing was entirely unprovoked. In both cases, in what is evidently the latest ruse for shifting culpability to the protestors, the police burnt their own jeeps. Three people were killed in Maikanch, nine in Tapkara.

Even in a society inured to deaths, these numbers -- and the media indifference about them -- are startling. No action has been taken against the police so far. Aware of the potential displacement and ecological devastation that would result from bauxite mining in Rayagada, Adivasis there have been opposing Utkal Aluminum International Ltd (UAIL), a joint venture between Hindalco and a Norwegian company, Hydro Alumina. As happens in every Adivasi area, immigrant traders, contractors and petty politicians have supported the plant, floated their own NGOs and attempted to play upon differences between Adivasis and Dalits. On December 16, 2000, two police platoons arrived in Maikanch village, a day after villagers drove away a pro-mining group, led by the BJD district president, which misbehaved with local women. The men escaped into the surrounding hills to avoid confrontation, but came down when the police beat a middle-aged woman unconscious, and were shot while descending.

On February 1, a police patrol, ostensibly in search of Naxalites, broke down a small gate which villagers had erected in 1985 in Derang village in Ranchi district, as part of their 26-year-old struggle against the Koel Karo dam. The gate was intended to make visitors used to surveying whatever they wanted without informing the locals, explain their intentions. When ex-soldier Amrit Guria, who saw the gate being broken, remonstrated with the police, they beat him up severely. The next day, around 4,000 unarmed people gathered outside Tapkara police outpost to demand that the gate be restored, and that Guria be compensated. Even as their representatives were negotiating, the police started firing.

Despite all their rhetoric on `participatory development', governments and institutions like the World Bank turn curiously blind when people try to determine their own development. Even the limited `consultation' on land acquisition that the Panchayat Act for Scheduled Areas provides to Adivasis, has been studiously avoided. UAIL, like BALCO under Sterlite, is also in contempt of the Supreme Court's decision in the Samatha case, which prohibits mining by private companies in Adivasi areas. So what do we have then, 54 years after independence? Bullets for voters, bribes for politicians and profits for multinationals. The Vajpayee government is going to great lengths to argue that its innocence will be proved on the floor of the House. But, perhaps, more than anything else what the Tehelka episode shows is the inability of the current political system to genuinely represent the people.

The writer is a Reader in Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi.