North East India Diary

India’s hegemony unmasked: The case of Northeast India

2008-08-31T09:56:00.002+05:30

India’s hegemony unmasked: The case of Northeast India
(To be published in the International Socialist Review at the end of 2008)

Sriram Ananthanarayanan (sriram.inqilab@gmail.com)

The Indian state with all its attempts at portraying itself to be a peace-loving democracy, whose economy valiantly rockets upwards, foreign company takeovers and all, pushing the country into one of the elite league of superpowers in the 21st century often finds acceptance with mainstream international media houses. However the seemingly benign nature of the Indian establishment would nevertheless find it hard to cover up its sub-imperialist hegemonic nature within South Asia and sometimes parts of Southeast Asia. A parallel drawn to Israeli militarism in West Asia is certainly not unwarranted, and indeed the historic proximity of one and the new bonhomie of the other towards the US and its own imperialist program are not altogether coincidental.

Contrary to its own self-perception and the one attempted to be broadcast internationally, a mainstream viewpoint of India found in all other countries in South Asia, including ones with huge militaries themselves like Pakistan, is one of a regional bully. Bangladesh often finds itself on the receiving end of Indian development projects utilizing the numerous rivers that flow through the country apart from the constructing of Indian fences along the Bangladeshi border to placate Indian xenophobia resulting in ruined commerce interactions and livelihood for villagers on either side of the border. Sri Lankans, both Sinhalese and Tamils, have for long spoken of Indian imperialism, alternatively supporting both the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan military, including the brutal Indian Peace Keeping Force sent to the tiny island nation in the 1980s. Indian monopoly capital has made huge inroads into all neighbouring countries in South Asia, resulting in immense resource usurpation. Tinier nations like Nepal, Maldives and Bhutan are essentially forced to act as Indian client states with the Indian military expanding and conducting operations in them as they please. Pakistan has often complained of Indian arm-twisting in international forums on the much-debated Kashmir issue, and this regional hegemony has resulted in even huge imperialist states like the US and UK lavishly courting India, while giving the cold shoulder to Pakistan, a country which has been greatly exploited by Western imperialists in their farcical “war on terror”.

While the Indian military presence and ensuing human rights abuses in Kashmir is well known, primarily due to claims on the region by Pakistan, one of the foremost examples of India’s regional hegemony is its oppressive military presence in Northeast India, a region not very well known outside of South Asia, and a hotbed of state militarism and numerous armed insurgencies.

Northeast India and its history of oppression: Northeast India comprises eight small states (Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura) in the northeast part of the country and is particularly well known for its raw greenery and multiple tribal cultures, often of a historically egalitarian nature. The region itself is tiny, comprising barely 7.5% of India’s landmass and 3.5% of India’s population, but extremely diverse, and home to more than 70 major population groups speaking nearly 400 different languages and dialects. Most native people of the region have strong cultural and social similarities with the people of East and Southeast Asia. The term “Northeast India” itself is very much a post-colonial construct, coming into existence only after Indian Independence in 1947, and the region has suffered for a long time under extremely oppressive Indian state hegemony as well as spatial discrimination in comparison to the rest of India. While the region is extremely rich in terms of mineral and natural resources, including tea, oil, limestone, coal as well as bamboo for papermaking, much of this has been usurped by national and private capital without any benefit to the local population. Development in the region is often never accorded the priority it merits and the Indian government maintains an extremely oppressive hold over the entire region. Indeed while education levels and other Human Development Indices are on par with the far better developed South Indian States, economic development levels languish at levels comparable to poorer Central and North Indian states. The hegemonic treatment meted out to the region has resulted in numerous armed nationalist and sub-nationalist insurgent movements, causing multiple conflicts with the Indian state as well as internecine battles with each other. This has resulted in harsh material conditions for the people, including human rights abuses, insecure livelihood, difficult working conditions as well as exploitation of the conflict by capital.

There is of course a history to the oppressive circumstances faced by the people of the region, and while impossible to cover in a couple of paragraphs, still merits a brief examination. As mentioned earlier, Northeast India was a political part of the Indian state only over the last 60 years or so, post-independence, and previously consisted of numerous tribal kingdoms, fairly self-sufficient and generally of little interest to the colonizers. Assam (which at that time included present-day Nagaland, Mizoram and Meghalaya) slowly found its place in the colonial state from the 1820s onwards, with the British usurping the territory due to it’s potential for producing tea and breaking Chinese monopoly on the trade (indeed Assam is now the largest tea-producing region in the world). And while Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim weren’t even within the boundaries of British colonial India, Tripura and Manipur were princely states within the territory, but of hardly any political significance. However, what did happen under the British was an effective severing of the region from it’s traditional trading partners, including Burma and other parts of Indo-China, and it was the British who came up with the geographical and political term “Northeast Frontier” to act as a buffer between their Indian dominion and what is now known as Southeast Asia. The region played a particularly vital role in the victory of the Allied Forces during World War II, especially in the numerous battle theatres of Indo-China.

Thus under British colonialism, Northeast India was, in a sense, largely isolated from the rest of colonial India and from their traditional Southeast Asian trading partners.

After Indian Independence in 1947, the region effectively became landlocked, sharing borders with Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma and China, further increasing its isolation and resulting in increased spatial discrimination at the hands of the newly formed Indian state. It was natural for the numerous tribes within the region to ponder their own future in the face of Indian Independence and the bloody partition of the land. The discrimination meted out by the Indian state also spawned massive cultural hegemony, and soon many movements, mostly of a cultural-nationalist nature, sprung up in order to counter Indian state-hegemony, as well as to ensure their own rights towards effective self-determination.

While initially non-violent in the 1940s and 50s, from the 1960s onwards many of these movements soon went on to becoming full-blown armed insurgencies, the most prominent ones being ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam), Manipur Peoples Liberation Army (PLA), NSCN (National Socialist Council of Nagalim) and many others. The region counts around 30 major insurgent outfits along with numerous smaller ones. This has resulted in the longstanding, massive and extremely oppressive presence of the Indian military, in the name of curtailing numerous armed nationalist movements either fighting for independence or greater autonomy. The history of Indian hegemony over the last 50 years or so in the region might not be one of classical occupation compared to say, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, but the effects towards the people as well as exploitation of the situation by capital and the ensuing arm-twisting of neighbouring countries remains the same. A brief examination of each of these fallouts is done below.

Atrocities on the People: As can be expected in most situations of occupation or state hegemony, the brunt is borne by the working poor. Stories of disappearances, custody killings, encounter killings all conducted by the security forces as well as people caught in the midst of the conflict are all too easy to find.

Huge chunks of the region come under draconian laws like the Armed Forces Special Protection Act or the Disturbed Areas Act, which have been in place in Manipur, Nagaland and many parts of Assam, thereby covering a significant geographical chunk of Northeast India for more than two decades. These Acts essentially give the security forces a free hand in doing what they please as long as it’s under the guise of “fighting terror”. Needless to say that this has resulted in numerous human rights violations and atrocities on many sections of the population for decades. One of the most famous cases of these atrocities that shot to the national limelight in 2004 and forced a vigorous debate by the Indian establishment with respect to these laws was that of the custodial death of Thangjam Manorama in Manipur, where the AFSPA had been enforced for over 25 years. Witnesses say Manorama was picked up on July 11th 2004 by soldiers of the paramilitary Assam Rifles from her home on alleged charges of links with separatist rebels. The next day, her dead body was reportedly found four kilometres away from her home in the state capital Imphal, with multiple bullet wounds and signs of torture. The entire state came to a standstill under the backlash of huge protests following the brutal and tragic death.

Cases like Manorama are certainly not hard to find. Indeed while research was being done for this article, this author ran across numerous accounts of such atrocities…someone’s uncle being held and tortured under false pretexts, a cousin who had been in jail without trial for over 6 years or a brother who had been shot in the leg by security forces.

One of the most moving stories was of a man, Nilikesh Gogoi, who was not associated with any insurgent movement, but simply a very kind man, who was, in the words of his friend “a coal trader, a poet, a farmer, a collectivist, an oral historian and a man who resolved conflicts that arose between hill people and authorities”. Nilikesh and two of his business associates were returning from a trip to the hills in Upper Assam on Jan 23rd 2007. Enroute, they overtook a slow-moving jeep of the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), which is not even a counter-insurgency force but merely meant to protect industrial outlets. Just when they were about to clear the vehicle in front on them, they were shot at, without rhyme or reason, killing Nilikesh and one other friend, while critically injuring the other. The fact that the CISF troops felt empowered enough to take these lives in this manner, and expected to get away with it, is testament to the hegemonic and oppressive circumstances that much of Northeast India’s rural and working poor deal with on a daily basis.

Tragic as they are, cold-blooded atrocities like those faced by Manorama and Nilikesh still do not encompass in totality the real harsh conditions imposed upon the people of Northeast India. State hegemony has resulted in extreme hard material conditions for workers and those reliant on rural pre-capitalist livelihoods.

Exploitation by Capital, Labour Deregulation and Effects on Rural Livelihood: It is amply evident that post-liberalisation in India, labour has taken a real beating with the state often kowtowing to capital’s demands for further deregulation. Due to this free hand being given to private capital by the state, many senior union leaders in the area point to a dangerous trend developing over the last few years in conflict-ridden regions like Northeast India. Often large private companies demand further deregulation or cheaper land prices citing the supposed violent scenario in the region as a cause for making the place more attractive for private investment. Threats are then carried out of taking investment elsewhere or pulling out existing investment which gets the state governments to meekly capitulate, wilfully overlooking harsh labour violations.

Discussions with progressive union activists and labour department officials also reveal the oppressive network of lumpen elements (usually surrendered insurgents), ruling-class party folk and traders who run the businesses like their own personal fiefdoms without any concern for labour rights or workers welfare. The exploitation is harsh with extremely hazardous working conditions, especially in highly deregulated sectors like stone quarries and extraction industries, comprising of the most informal and unorganised labour. The dangerous network ensures that the oppressive web remains firmly in place with any attempts at unionising viciously thwarted down. Furthermore, a corrupt nexus between state officials and business owners was mentioned by numerous labour activists as one of the critical issues contributing to harsh labour conditions. And while these are not necessarily directly related to militaristic state hegemony, the environment of state-led violence in Northeast India (unlike many other parts of India) has caused immense labour deregulation, and exploitation by capital making it very difficult for workers and activists to struggle for their rights. This has resulted in the extraction of enormous surplus labour by managers and owners through the harsh system, the complete lack of workers benefits, and extremely informal, unorganised nature of work forcing all members of a typical poor family to toil simply in order to survive.

Outside of formal and informal labour that is some way or the other connected to the market, Indian state hegemony in the region has a hugely deleterious effect on rural livelihoods and sustenance that are not connected to the larger national or global market. One of the most widespread modes of sustenance is the practice of shifting cultivation, usually along hill slopes, which ensures that there is enough grains and vegetables for the entire year. Along the lines of the egalitarian functioning of most tribes in Northeast India, this form of cultivation has men and women playing equally large roles.

Now, anyone who has ever done some real hiking would confirm that trekking up a steep hill slope, even for fairly fit individuals, is hard work. Then, imagine chopping firewood along a tract of hill-land, clearing that tract through controlled fires for cultivation, cultivating on the land as per a tight seasonal schedule, and then carrying large bundles of firewood (uphill) back to your village in the evening for cooking fire. This gives an idea of how, by sheer dint of hard labour, the rural poor find sustenance in the region. The produce is harvested at the end of the season, and the practice is done along one tract of land for no more than 3 or 4 years, allowing the soil to regenerate as people move on and cultivate another tract. Locals and friends familiar with the process mentioned that this form of cultivation is a cooperative system of production with a village or many villages cultivating one tract of land and then sharing the produce at the end of the harvest, completely devoid of feudal fetters. It however is starting to get brutally affected in many parts of the region due to the presence of the Indian army and the resulting conflict, which causes disruption in the cultivation cycle resulting in harsh insecurities for people depending on the produce to feed themselves.

Thus the hegemony of the Indian state in the region does not just have implications along the lines of direct violence and human rights abuses, but also extremely harsh material conditions for the labouring masses as well as the rural poor.

Arm-twisting neighbouring countries: The conflict in Northeast India has some significant trans-national fallouts as well, since the region borders so many states. Many insurgent outfits have had or continue to have training camps or bases in neighbouring countries like Bhutan, Burma, Bangladesh and Nepal.

India has continuously arm-twisted these nations into providing space and support for the Indian military to enter and conduct operations in flushing out insurgents without any concern for local people within those neighbouring countries. Numerous joint military operations have been conducted on India’s behest in each of the nations mentioned, including particularly brutal ones launched in Burmese and Bhutanese territory to kill ULFA militants that also resulted in massive displacement and human rights abuses upon locals in the two countries. This has resulted in not just oppression within political boundaries but the wilful subjugation of people outside Indian territory, adding to their discontent and giving India the afore-mentioned moniker of “regional bully”.

It is neither wise to have this many disgruntled neighbours within the sub-continent, nor is it within the ambit of a supposedly peace-loving democracy. While colonial nation-states of the West conducted and continue to conduct mass human rights violations outside of their borders, the Indian government and elite is gleefully following suit within its own backyard and region of South Asia, while further pushing its agenda forward in other regions of the Global South like Africa, Southeast Asia and Central Asia. India can build for itself, a reputation as a large and important member of the Global South and typically one that can carry cudgels in solidarity with smaller nations facing the brute end of imperialism. Instead it chooses to replicate the very imperialistic behaviour it once so eloquently raged against rather than address righteous grievances in an egalitarian manner that takes into account historical oppression as well as fundamental human rights including that of self-determination. Foaming discontent with alarming brutality within and outside of ones borders has never resulted in anything other than mass upheaval, and if that’s the path that the Indian establishment chooses to trod on, then the ruling elite best be prepared at some time or the other for a conflagration that will take them down.

Jhum (Slash and Burn Shifting Cultivation)

2008-06-05T04:10:00.003+05:30

Jhum: Rural Sustenance under Conflict in Northeast India

2008-06-05T04:07:00.001+05:30

[To be published in India Together http://www.indiatogether.org/ in June 2008]

Due to its intimate integration with rural society in Northeast India, it is important to understand jhum, a form of slash-and-burn shifting cultivation, as well as the salient issues surrounding this practice. It is primarily a pre-capitalist livelihood generation activity for food sustenance, and constitutes a large chunk of the labour performed by rural folk in the hilly regions of Northeast India. The system has also been affected by the numerous ongoing conflicts between the Indian state and various insurgencies in the region, causing immense hardship to those people dependent on it. In addition there are certain negative viewpoints on the impacts of the practice on the local ecology, which need a brief examination as the vested interests behind some of those arguments need to be exposed.

Introduction: Unlike many other parts of India, where even villages are in some way or the other connected to the capital market, albeit through informal means, people in the rural hills of Northeast India for the most part engage in pre-capitalist sustenance activities, with surplus produce sold in nearby bazaars. The most important and widespread activity is shifting cultivation, of primarily the slash-and-burn variety along the hill slopes. This practice usually ensures enough grains and vegetables for the entire year. Along the lines of the egalitarian functioning of most tribes in the region, this form of cultivation has men and women playing equally large roles, with women often even playing a dominant role especially in deciding the distribution of the produce and the selling of the surplus.

Now, anyone who has ever done some real hiking would confirm that trekking up a steep hill slope, even for fairly fit individuals, is tough work. Jhum requires far more hardiness and consists of chopping firewood along a tract of hill-land, clearing that tract through controlled fires for cultivation, cultivating on the land as per a tight seasonal schedule, and then carrying large bundles of firewood (often uphill) back to ones village in the evening for cooking fire. This gives an idea of how, by sheer dint of hard physical labour, the rural poor find sustenance in the region. It’s a cooperative system of production with a village or many villages cultivating one tract of land and then sharing the produce at the end of the harvest, completely devoid of feudal fetters.

The timeframe for jhum is fairly strict, especially keeping in mind the heavy rainfall in the area, requiring the land to be cleared and seeds sowed in time for the monsoons. The forest land is usually cleared in December and January by slashing at shrubs, and cutting trees, while leaving tree stumps and roots. The slashed vegetation is then allowed to dry for a month or two before burning the tract of land in March. In addition to clearing the land, the burning of the leftover vegetation returns nutrients to the soil through ash and the killing of microbes allowing relatively higher yields. Seeds are then sowed, which mainly consist of cereals, vegetables and oil seeds.

The practice is usually driven by sustainability and the village or group of villages practicing jhum on one particular tract of land continue until the soil is depleted of nutrients and then move on to another allowing the former tract of land to regenerate. In earlier times, with lower population numbers, the land would be cultivated on for 10-20 years, but now it rarely goes beyond 3-5 years, due to greater pressures on the land for food. The acute time-sensitivity of the cycle is important to note as it’s the feature of the practice that is most affected by the various ongoing conflicts in the region.

Effects of the Conflict: Large sections of rural Northeast India, and their modes of commerce, now function under the sway of Indian military cantonments, which have usurped expansive tracts of land and harshly affected rural livelihood activities. Furthermore the villagers often find themselves caught in between the military and the insurgencies. Thus the practice of jhum has started getting badly affected in many parts of the region due to the presence of the Indian army and the resulting conflict, which causes disruption in the cultivation cycle resulting in harsh insecurities for people depending on the produce to feed themselves.

Mokokchung in Nagaland is a classic example of military cantonments taking over prime land across Northeast India. Traveling with a senior academic and Naga human rights activist in the town, one witnessed the overwhelming presence of the Indian military. Central Reserve Police Force barracks built over beautiful forestland, and vast army campuses sprawled over the landscape were everywhere, cordoned off from the rest of the population. My friend spoke of a huge green commons where he and his buddies used to play in when they were children. Now all that remains is a tiny gazebo-like structure, where young couples come and stargaze, surrounded by military buildings and soldiers. Youngsters, especially young men, are often harassed and detained by the military, and last year the entire town went off the boil upon learning that a young woman was sexually harassed by a soldier.

Many old structures in Mokokchung were torn down and now serve as official military offices. Vast tracts of hilly forestland that villagers would practice jhum on are now completely off limits…taken over, rather occupied, by the armed Indian state. Army-men, obviously from outside the region can be spotted everywhere, either armed and on patrol or unarmed and walking around in civvies.

Indian state hegemony hampering rural modes of sustenance can also be witnessed in numerous rural areas in Manipur, Upper Assam as well as regions like the Garo and Khasi Hills of Meghalaya. Rural areas in these states also often face the brunt of the extraction industry which, again, usurps or completely destroys land previously used for sustainable cultivation systems like jhum.

Intellectuals and activists in the region point out that one of the primary reasons for such a huge Indian military presence in Nagaland and other states in the Northeast is the usurpation of forest resources, of which the region is very rich in. Furthermore, with the Indian Government’s new “Look East” policy with respect to trade and commerce, states like Nagaland, Assam and Meghalaya, become critical as gateways to expanding trade-relations with Southeast and East Asian countries. But as a result local modes of sustenance such as jhum get affected in a very negative manner.

Interestingly, the present disruption of rural modes of production in Northeast India has just been a continuation of pre-independence British policies. This form of agricultural production and organic rural commerce has faced a history of upheaval from colonial times onwards, when British colonisers effectively severed the region from its traditional trading partners, including present-day Burma and other parts of Indo-China. With the creation of the Northeast Frontier by the British in order to protect their Indian dominion, it effectively cleaved what was once an organic commercial pre-capitalist trading region, resulting in the loss of a bazaar-type commerce, and hampering cultivation practices; something which has continued till date under Indian state-hegemony.

Impact on ecology and differing viewpoints: Ecologically, the practice of jhum has had certain experts convinced that it has a deleterious effect on the local environment, while others have often thwarted those arguments and proved that jhum in fact is a sustainable form of agricultural production best suited for the specific ecology of the hill regions.

The negative arguments against jhum have included projecting it as an unsustainable practice that depletes the soil of nutrients, reducing the forest cover, causing landslides etc. They’ve tended to come from a few specific parties, which also showcase a clear vested interest. Arguments against jhum have come from state forestry departments, development ministries like DONER (Development Of North East Region) or trade promoting entities like the NEC or the World Bank who would like to usurp forest resources of the region for the benefit of national and private capital. In addition, private entities wishing to utilise the land for specific profit-making ventures, like extraction industries, utilise these arguments to push the state to wean away local villagers from practicing jhum in order to lease the land. This has happened in the hill regions of Meghalaya and Assam where corrupt or gullible village councils leased out land to private and national corporations for extraction industries including coal, limestone, and uranium in the future. In addition, the paper industry has pushed for the growth of bamboo by villagers as a cash crop replacing an egalitarian cultivation system with one that has created a small mercantilist class controlling all bamboo production.

Apart from the obvious vested interests at play, these arguments have further been thwarted by many scientists, including studies by organisations like the Indian Institute of Science, Tata Energy Research Institute and UNESCO who have proved in different ways that jhum is indeed a sustainable form of agriculture best suited to the rainy hill regions of Northeast India, over other forms of agriculture such as valley or terrace cultivation. Studies have further proved that, contrary to arguments of soil infertility, the practice of jhum ensures that fallowness in the soil is not compromised on, and often rapid regeneration of the vegetation takes place once a tract of land is abandoned after cultivation. The connection between forest loss and jhum is tenuous at best as there are numerous other factors at play including areas where jhum is practiced, the type of vegetation regrowth and fallowness of the land. The soil erosion argument too has been disproved as soil erosion would happen with any cultivation along hill tracts, and if anything is minimised with jhum due to the retention of strong roots when the land is cleared.

This is not to completely discount the actual arguments being made against jhum. There has indeed been a small reduction in the forest cover, and certainly the food pressures have increased in the region due to greater population. However it is the source of these arguments, their vested interests and the lack of viable alternatives provided that cause eyebrows to be raised. There is no guarantee that if jhum were to be stopped, there would be an increase in forest cover and soil fertility or a decrease in soil erosion. If anything, all these problems are likely to continue with even more intensity along with the added food insecurity of the local population due to the wrenching away of their primary mode of sustenance. The arguments are all the more problematic because the region still continues to have one of the highest per-capita forest covers in the world, and its people are for the most part not found wanting for food, primarily due to practices like jhum.

If the arguments are being made mainly for legitimising the usurpation forest land for national and private capital, then those arguments need to be seriously questioned. Furthermore, it would be prudent to ensure the continuance of the basic level of food sustenance that the people in these regions have created for themselves through cooperative cultivation without any feudal fetters, rather than force the capital market upon them via land leases and cash crops, placing them in the precarious position many farmers in other parts of India often find themselves in.

Looking Ahead: As mentioned before, the practice of jhum is intimately integrated with the socioeconomic fabric of rural society in Northeast India. It’s sustainable and generally accepted as a rather egalitarian mode of production, with women playing an important economic role, and almost completely lacking in feudal fetters (unlike many other pre-capitalist modes of production). The practice plays a central role in uniting villages and clans, as well as integrating the people with local modes of commerce. Furthermore it provides food sustenance for the people, and prevents them from being subject to the whims of the larger capital market.

Ideally the state would need to work with local populations on jhum to mitigate the potential deleterious effects to the ecology rather than prevent shifting cultivation per say. This seems to be the increasingly accepted viewpoint by state governments in Northeast India and other countries where the practice is widespread, and is certainly a positive trend. The Shillong Declaration on shifting agriculture in 2004 was extensive in its coverage of jhum agriculture and several governments in the participating countries placed it on their agenda then. The governments of Nagaland, Meghalaya, Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh and Assam have indicated at different levels that they would not like to suppress shifting cultivation, but rather work on ways in which it can be integrated with ecological and conservation concerns. Among the more prominent of these initiatives has been the government of Nagaland pursuing a policy from 2006 onwards of procuring horticulture produce from people practicing jhum and training government extension staff in participatory mapping, the Meghalaya government stating in 2004 that it would examine ways in which jhum can be integrated with soil and water conservation measures, and the Tripura government initiating shifting cultivation development projects from 2007 onwards. Even the central Ministry of Environment and Forests set up a task force on “Rehabilitation of Shifting Cultivation (Jhum) Fallows”.

These are positive trends, and need to continue considering the importance of jhum to rural populations in Northeast India, as well as the central role it plays in ensuring food sustenance through an egalitarian cooperative mode of agricultural production.

Revisiting Palestine in Mokokchung and Understanding the Naga Struggle

2008-05-07T13:18:00.002+05:30

I had been to Palestine in 2005 as part of a solidarity delegation, and saw life under occupation for the first time. The Israeli military state, occupying the whole of historic Palestine since 1948, could be witnessed taking over the best land in many cities in the West Bank and Gaza, subjecting the local people to humiliating checkpoints and blockades, denying them access to grow olives on soil, which they had been cultivating on for centuries, usurping resources and sovereignty, and of course, brutally suppressing any resistance.

I never realised that I would see much of the same in a region that’s not too far away from my own homeland in South India.

Militarism in Mokokchung: Mokokchung is in the Naga Nation, as a friend told me, and it must strenuously be clarified that the Naga Nation is different from Nagaland, a state within the federal union of India...part of India’s Northeast region. The Naga Nation doesn’t have any sovereignty or realisation of an honest national aspiration…a struggle that many intellectuals and activists call the longest standing international conflict of modern times. The Indian state has ensured the complete oppression of the Naga people through what can only be termed as an occupationary presence.

Traveling with a senior academic and Naga human rights activist in Mokokchung, one witnessed the overwhelming presence of the Indian military. Central Reserve Police Force barracks built over beautiful forestland, and vast army campuses sprawled over the landscape were everywhere, cordoned off from the rest of the population. My friend spoke of a huge green commons where he and his buddies used to play in when they were children. Now all that remains of the park is a tiny gazebo-like structure, where young couples come and stargaze, surrounded by military buildings and soldiers. Youngsters, especially young men, are often harassed and detained by the military, and last year the entire town went off the boil upon learning that a young woman was sexually harassed by a soldier.

Many old structures in Mokokchung were torn down and now serve as official military offices. Vast tracts of hilly forestland that villagers would often practice cultivation on for their sustenance, are now completely off limits…taken over, rather occupied, by the armed Indian state. Army-men, obviously from outside the region can be spotted everywhere, either armed and on patrol or unarmed and walking around in civvies.

My friend said that one of the primary reasons for such a huge Indian military presence in Nagaland was the usurpation of forest resources, of which the region is very rich in. Furthermore, with the Indian Government’s new “Look East” policy with respect to trade and commerce, Nagaland, especially the frontier town of Dimapur, becomes critical as a gateway to expanding trade-relations with Southeast and East Asian countries. Indeed in Northeast India, the region’s first two Special Economic Zones (which are separate deregulated enclaves started by the Indian Government for promoting private company-led exports) have come up in Dimapur. Thus there are strong economic and commercial overtones to the occupationary presence of the Indian state.

Mokokchung itself is a classic example of military cantonments taking over prime land across Northeast India. My friend said that last year, locals in Mokokchung agitated for land usurped by the Assam Rifles to be given back to the civic administration of Nagaland. A sympathetic and well-liked Indian Civil Service officer, Abhishek Singh, who was the District Commissioner at that time, was apparently very supportive of the cause and even went lengths to prevent further land acquisition.

He was transferred out of the region soon after.

The sights in Mokokchung gave me a strong feeling of déjà vu with my trip to Palestine in 2005. Replace the Indian military with the Israeli one, and Nagas with Palestinians; add in some desert land with olive trees, and I could well have been in Bethlehem or Hebron. The historical similarities between the Naga struggle and the occupation of Palestine are also eerily analogous, with British colonisers playing an instrumental role in the subjugation of both populations, laying the groundwork for the oppression to continue under the newly formed nation-states of India and Israel, who now play the role of regional imperialists.

Mokokchung is however, but a small manifestation of the larger Naga struggle and their quest for realising a national identity.

The Naga Struggle: The Naga Nation has been in a perennial state of war ever since the early part of the 19th century when the Nagas valorously fought and lost against the infinitely better-armed British who then soon created the North East Frontier to protect their Indian dominion. This effectively cleaved the Naga Nation in two with the creation of an artificial boundary between Burma and then colonial India. This state of war continued into the 20th century, and was particularly acute during World War II, where the region became a critical battle theatre for Allied success in the Indo-China region, with the Nagas placed at the center of the Japanese invasion.

Following the Nagas’ uprising against the British and their soldiering in someone else’s war, they continued to engage in the national struggle with the formation of the Naga National Council by the legendary AZ Phizo, and declared independence on August 14th 1947, a day before India did, with the declaration sent to Delhi, London and the UNO.

Niketu Iralu, convener of the Naga Hoho (Assembly) Coordination Committee, the apex body of the Naga peoples' struggle, in a finely written article states that:

India was about to celebrate her historic achievement of freedom the next day, in addition to being preoccupied with the trauma of the partition and the massive bloodshed that followed. It was not surprising that Delhi was not aware of what the Nagas had declared. But to the Nagas, the legal, historical and political validity of their case stands on the fact that they had clearly made known their position before India became independent. They have fought with heroism to defend their position with a free conscience, not hampered by any sense of being treasonous towards India, because theirs is not a secessionist, separatist or anti-India movement. Nagas maintain that they are not trying to secede or separate themselves from a union they had given their consent to earlier. They are clear that they are not anti-India. This is at the heart of the Naga problem. Nagas cannot be expected to just give up all that they have sacrificed and achieved, small as it may seem in real terms, for a settlement that will not recognize the facts of their history and the honour and dignity of their struggle. Yet we too know that India is not in a position to recognize Naga independence and leave Nagaland.

In an indication of the then Indian nationalists’ willingness to validate the Naga national cause, Iralu further goes on to state:

Here the story of the memorable meeting between Mahatma Gandhi and some Naga leaders should be added. A delegation of the NNC called on Gandhi at his Bhangi colony ashram a few weeks before India’s independence day. When the Nagas said that they had come to get India to recognize their freedom and independence, Gandhi said, "You must become free. I became free long ago." To their point that the British were still ruling in Delhi, he said, "My freedom has nothing to do with whether the British are in Delhi or London." He said he envisioned the new India to be like the garden outside his ashram with flowers, where diversity gave attractiveness and strength, instead of producing division and harm. He said that he considered the Nagas to be a part of the Indian household. But if they thought they were not, India would be the good neighbour the Nagas could depend on. When he was told that the Governor of Assam had threatened to use military force to control the Nagas if they refused to fall in line, Gandhi, according to the report the Nagas brought back, replied with passion that he would come all the way and be the first to be killed before any Indian bullet killed the Nagas. Our leaders returned and told our people that under Gandhi’s leadership our problems could be solved satisfactorily. Soon after their meeting with him, Gandhi was assassinated. Gandhi knew how to talk to the Nagas. He made a bid to stretch their thinking beyond political freedom with sensitivity.

Further validating this, Adinho Phizo, president of a much weakened present-day NNC, in an interview with the Sangai Express, said:

The Naga leader AZ Phizo led numerous Naga delegations to meet with emerging independent Indian leaders for bilateral talks with the aim of establishing mutual understanding and respect between the two peoples. In none of the many talks with the Indian leaders, Mahatma Gandhi, C Rajagopalachari, Ali Jinah, Gopinath Bordoloi etc. was there any suggestion of Indian political ambition to deny Nagaland independence.

It thus becomes of paramount importance to view the Naga struggle from a historic lens going beyond the post-colonial construct of the Indian nation-state. The Naga people continue to be subjected to Indian state hegemony with its obdurate constructs of nationhood and boundaries. With an even more repressive military regime in Burma, the historic oppression of the Nagas has spanned the colonial era and continues to exist in the post-colonial environment of the South Asian region. India continues to insist on nationalising space, sometimes brutally, without even considering slightly more progressive forms of federalism.

The National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isaak-Muivah), the most comprehensive Naga Nationalist movement at present, gave a proposal to the Indian state that included genuinely progressive alternatives to the present standoff. This included suggestions of shared sovereignty, and the sharing of defense with India, while still maintaining India’s political boundaries and national space in international forums like the United Nations. Such initiatives, were they to be met with less pig-headedness by the Indian state, would be historic leaps in the idea of nation building along egalitarian lines. More than any other party, it is the Indian state that stands to gain, both politically as well as in socioeconomic terms. India and the Naga people would be path breakers in developing potential solutions to other conflicts of occupation and hegemony such as that of the Tamils in Sri Lanka or the Basque people in Spain. It is difficult for an oppressed people to take further strides in attempting to meet a hegemonic state mid-way, and it is important that the Indian state makes efforts along the same lines, else the current conflict stands to only serve the deleterious purpose of naked hegemony. Hegemony has never won and foaming discontent with alarming brutality without stepping back and understanding historical oppressions has never resulted in anything other than mass upheaval, and if that’s the path that the Indian establishment chooses to trod on, then the ruling elite best be prepared at some time or the other for another conflagration, one that might go greater lengths in taking them down.

Quarry Workers in Assam

2008-04-23T17:12:00.005+05:30

The quarries in Assam represent possibly the most exploitative sector in the state, with hazardous labour conditions and complete lack of unionisation to fight for greater benefits. In addition there is rampant use of child labour, paltry wages and no facilities for drinking water, creches, sanitation or shelter. Harsh material conditions force villagers to come to work in the quarries.

Please read article below for further details.

Exploitation in the Stone Quarries of Assam

2008-04-23T17:05:00.000+05:30

[To be published in Himal South Asian in June 2008]

The idyllic and verdant hills of Nagaon district in Middle Assam mask a veritable web of labour exploitation in the various stone quarries across the region. Of vital use for road and other construction projects, the stones are derived through hard labour in extremely harsh conditions. The quarries mainly consist of manual crushers with some having machine crushers and Nagaon is the main centre for stone quarries in the state of Assam, providing stones for construction to many major cities, towns and road-building projects in the state.

The exploitation is harsh with extremely hazardous working conditions comprised of the most informal and unorganised labour. Furthermore a dangerous network of owners and managers including Surrendered ULFA (SULFA) folk, relatives of ruling-class political parties like the Congress and AGP, as well as members of the mercantilist class ensure that the oppressive web remains firmly in place with any attempts at unionising viciously thwarted down.

Unending Exploitation: Visits to quarries reveal the harshness of the working conditions on sight. In the blazing mid-day heat workers clear the ground of trees and bushes for digging, dig out boulders, manually crush them into smaller stones, and fill large boxes with them. The quarries don’t have any shady areas for rest or shelter, and even the natural shade of trees is gone because the foliage has been cleared away to dig for stones. Infants and toddlers, due to lack of facilities for crèches, are left on the ground or on the rocks without any care, while slightly older children work along with the adults. With no facilities for drinking water or a canteen, workers bring their own lunch and water, walking anywhere between 2-5 km early in the morning up rather steep hills in order to reach the quarries so that they might have enough time to fill boxes with stones.

The box is the unit of measurement for their daily wages, and workers receive around Rs 40 to 45 per box. Usually a single adult fills about one box a day on average, which results in workers receiving daily wages far lesser than the prescribed daily minimum wage of around Rs. 75. The wage payment is not only dangerously low in amount but also illegal in method. When workers spend their time clearing the area of foliage and digging for boulders, they get even lesser pay since they don’t have filled boxes to show. The boxes themselves are large, with a length of 6 feet, breadth of 3 feet and depth of 1 foot and with no real government standard for this industry, managers can exert further surplus labour value by trying to enlarge boxes. Payment is not given for half-filled boxes, so workers often end up working much longer than the prescribed 8-hour working day, often 11-12 hours or more, in order to fill up as many boxes as they can in a week.

A particular sign of criminality in the sector is the expansive usage of child-labour that one can witness in every quarry visited. Children as young as 8 end up crushing stones and filling boxes. Since it’s a matter of survival for families, quarry work ends up being a family-affair, as the more hands there are filling the boxes with rocks, the more income the family derives from the paltry piece-rate wages. The extraction of enormous surplus labour by managers and owners through the harsh piece-rate system, the complete lack of workers benefits, and extremely informal, unorganised nature of work has all members of the family working simply in order to survive.

The workers mainly hail from the Adivasi, Tiwa, Muslim and Karbi communities who reside in the various villages around the quarries. Labour is brought in through an abusive contractual network, each village having a contractor that the managers hire in order to recruit labour. Harsh material conditions and lack of choice, apart from a failure on the part of the state in properly implementing schemes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) result in workers being forced to work in the quarries.

Dangerous Nexus and Exploitative Tactics used: The workers showcased a genuine fear in trying to resist or demand higher wages, due to the presence of SULFA folk as managers, and who essentially function as a set of lumpen thugs in maintaining this exploitative environment. While being interviewed, they didn’t even want to reveal their names or the names of the quarries they worked in for this reason. In case a worker gets critically injured or dies, owners give Rs 2000 or 3000 for a small, traditional funeral and no compensation for the victim’s family. One of the quarries had a startling case of such criminality, where a worker had to have his legs amputated after a boulder fell on him. Soon after the operation, due to continued medical complications and lack of any medical aid or insurance, the worker died. The manager of the quarry paid Rs 2000 to the family and the rest of the medical expenses as well as costs relating to reclaiming the body and arranging for the funeral had to be borne by the family, a bill which ran up to Rs. 20,000. Such a disaster can be completely devastating for poor, rural family.

Discussions with progressive union activists and labour department officials also reveal the oppressive network of SULFA, ruling-class party folk and traders who run the quarries. On the other side of this dangerous situation are the various insurgent groups who extract “taxes” from the quarry owners. Indeed, while research was being done for this article along with a local labour activist, I was told to leave my backpack behind lest the two of us be confused as insurgents coming on an extortion spree since we were travelling by motorbike to the quarries.

A senior labour department official in Assam, who has witnessed numerous violations during his many inspections (and who would like to remain anonymous until his retirement) believes that what is happening in the quarries consists of the grossest and most criminal labour violations. He revealed that in reality workers are supposed to get around Rs. 75 per day, and that one of the main reasons owners feel emboldened to neglect labour welfare as per law is that even if prosecuted a case can drag on for years in courts, hardly easy for the working poor to deal with. And in the off chance that a verdict favouring labour is given, the punishment meted out for violations of the act is far too mild, usually a nominal fine that is hardly a financial hit for the owners.

Arup Mahanto, leader of the Grameen Shramik Sanstha, a progressive rural workers union in Assam which has been trying to organise the workers in the quarries as well, said that the maximum labour violations occurred in the stone quarries, even more than the oppressive tea industry. With no water, crèches, first-aid facilities, sanitation facilities for women (who form the majority of the workforce), and a complete lack of protective equipment, the owners find every means to extract the maximum amount of profit from the labourers. In striking similarity to the tea industry in Assam, Mahanto further added that managers prefer women workers primarily because they can be exploited more, noting that any events of verbal, physical or sexual abuse are completely buried because of the oppressive environment and tight hold that the owners have over the quarries.

Buddheswar Timung, a local rural activist in Bamuni Karbi village, which is close to many quarries, said that the lack of unionisation was a huge problem. Any attempts at organising the workers have met with either violence or threats of dismissal. Help is not derived from any of the identity-based insurgent movements in the area as they were only interested in extorting money from the owners, rather than fighting for labour rights. He also pointed to the corrupt network that owners and businesses have with political parties as well as bureaucrats as another critical reason for the continuing exploitation.

The corrupt nexus between state officials and business owners was mentioned by numerous people as one of the critical issues. The same labour department official I interview mentioned numerous cases of high ranking bureaucrats, including former Assistant Labour Commissioners, as well as many judges completely in the pockets of the business owners. He said that some of the maximum corruption occurs with respect to the Workman’s Compensation Act that guarantees compensation for workers in case of injury or death. The owner, in what is nothing short of cold criminality, just figures out that it’s cheaper to bribe both, the labour department official and the judge rather than pay the worker his due compensation. And in case there are honest men at the bureaucracy or judiciary, like the labour official I interviewed, then there is always the fallback option for the business owners of going to the biggest bastion of corruption to solve their problems and that’s the political bigwigs whose campaigns are funded by these very big businesses.

Finding a way out: The key problems contributing to this labour exploitation are not altogether impossible to solve. The wilful dereliction on the part of the state needs to be corrected. Serious measures need to be taken by cracking down on businesses that are guilty of these labour abuses as well as corrupt state officials, and more power needs to be given to the labour department to seriously bring these businesses to book.

Another critical gap that needs to be filled by the state is the proper implementation of the NREGA, which guarantees work to one member of all rural families at prescribed minimum wage rates. One of the main reasons that families end up in the exploitative quarry industry is lack of a viable alternative. If rural families had a viable option of being employed under NREGA, then not only would they be guaranteed minimum wage and certain workers benefits, but there would not be a glut of labour enabling quarry owners to exploit and extract surplus labour value. Furthermore, proper implementation of the NREGA would result in an increase of the crude market rate for wages, as unless workers get better wages than what they get under NREGA they would have no incentive to work in the quarries or any other informal sector for that matter. This was amply evident in Tamil Nadu, which was fairly successful in implementing the NREGA scheme in many districts in 2006, which then resulted in an increase of wage rates across the board in the informal sector in certain districts with employers competing with the well-regulated NREGA for labour. It also becomes easier for workers under NREGA to organise themselves into unions and other formations, thereby building class-alliances with workers in the informal sector as well.

There is always the hope that things can change. One of the foremost needs of the hour is in unionising the workers into a progressive, fighting labour formation that can not only struggle for better working conditions and higher wages but also launch campaigns that can break the corrupt nexus between state officials and business owners. This is where groups like the Grameen Shramik Sanstha as well as activists like Mahanto and Timung play a particularly important role. Indeed, even as workers were being interviewed for this article, Mahanto and Timung, who accompanied me to one of the quarries spoke to workers and set up a meeting with them to start a local union in the quarry. While displaying some hesitancy initially, the workers soon enthusiastically agreed to the meeting upon realising the possibilities of bettering their situation through unionising. It of course, remains to be seen whether it will go forward and how. Unionising the workers in the stone quarries of Assam is not going to be any easy task, and would require grit and courage. It is a hopeful sign that groups like the Grameen Shramik Sanstha display both in what is going to be a long road towards struggling against labour exploitation in this sector.

Assam Sangrami Cha Shramik Sangathan (ASCSS) Members

2008-04-18T15:19:00.005+05:30

Members and activists of the Assam Sangrami Cha Shramik Sangathan (ASCSS), a small but militant leftist union, which is trying to break the hegemony of the pro-management, Congress-backed Assam Cha Mazdoor Sangh (ACMS). Please read the article below on Struggles of Tea Garden Workers in Assam for more details.

Struggles of Tea Garden Workers in Assam

2008-04-18T15:18:00.000+05:30

Struggles of tea garden workers in Assam

Sipped with lime and honey in expensive china by manor dwellers and savoured in tiny chipped glasses with milk and sugar by commuters in Indian railway stations, Assam tea is a household name for most lovers of the brew. However the story behind the cultivation, plucking and processing of tea leaves in the plantations is one of exploitation and untold hardships for the toiling workers who are the singular reason that this industry is one of the pillars of the Assam economy, and in making the entire Northeast Indian region the largest tea-growing region in the world. Assam alone produces more than 50% of India's total tea, and the Assam economy is deeply reliant on tea-exports of around 150,000 tonnes yearly, both within India and internationally, fetching over Rs. 400 crores in foreign exchange every year and resulting in an industry turnover of over Rs. 3000 crore per annum.

Across the many plantations in Assam, most of which are situated in the upper parts of the state, the condition of the tea garden workers is nothing short of abysmal. Adivasis brought in as indentured slave-labour from Central India by the British form the vast majority of the workers, with the rest consisting of other local tribal communities, as well as Nepalis, Bengalis, Oriyas and so on. During the initial decades from the 1850s till the 1920s under the British, the working conditions were akin to harsh slavery, with flogging, rape, torture and even the throwing of dead workers in rivers. While certainly not comparable to earlier times, the working conditions today are still far from being the well-regulated environment that functions according to the Plantation Labour Act brought out in 1951 to protect the interests of workers in plantations, who form the single largest organised sector workforce in Assam and the entire Northeast region numbering anywhere between 8 to 10 lakhs depending on the season.

The North Eastern Social Research Centre based in Guwahati conducted a comprehensive study in 2004 across 172 tea gardens in Assam along with numerous interviews and group discussions with workers and families. The study brought to light numerous violations of the Act, including inadequate or completely non-existent provisions for drinking water, crèches, schools, proper health facilities, sanitation for women workers and shelter. Even a cursory observation of the plantations today confirms these findings. Upon further investigation and discussions with workers, one learns that wages paid are much lower than prescribed minimum wage rates, no over-time payment is made, and occasional physical abuse occurs.

Babloo, Signus and Ranjit (last names withheld upon request), all workers in Mornia Tea Estate in Lower Assam, complained that they had to drink bitter-tasting, hard water from pre-existing wells, when in fact they're supposed to receive drinking water either through taps or tankers from a public water source. Late wage payments were another huge problem, with some workers receiving their wages as late as 3 to 4 months after the due date. Garden workers received around Rs. 1400 per month on paper, but portions were cut from that for shelter repair (which hadn't been conducted in over 10 years), canteen facilities (non-existent), and educational facilities (again non-existent). This translated to a real wage of about Rs. 45 per day, far lesser than the prescribed daily minimum wage of around Rs. 54. They further said that Provident Fund had been cut on a monthly basis from their salaries, yet since 2000 no retired worker had received gratuity from PF. When asked about this, management simply shifted the blame to their predecessors. The school was in a decrepit condition and the only education the children received, when they weren't working, was from the local church.

Further up north in Nagaon, this author was privileged to attend a few wide-ranging discussions with workers in various tea gardens in the area (whose identities have been protected due to their worker-mobilising activities) as well as with Arup Mahanto, a rural workers movement leader. All the workers said that the little benefits they did receive in earlier times were rapidly getting eroded over the years. This included rations, free medicines at the hospital in Kandoli Tea Estate (which has now been downgraded to a dispensary), money for firewood at Sagubhai Gardens and many others, all of which have disappeared with further and further deregulation measures in favour of capital in the post-liberalisation era. Mahanto further pointed to the nexus between management, police and corrupt union leaders as one of the crucial reasons for the deteriorating situation. Indeed, 4 of the 5 workers interviewed had been suspended and dismissed due to their attempts at mobilising workers, and all 4 now try to eke out livelihoods by working in the even more exploitative stone-quarry industry or selling firewood, while trying to fight a legal battle to get reinstated.

Women, who are the backbone of the tea industry and the large majority of the workforce, face even harsher working conditions. In all the tea estates visited, one couldn't spot a single crèche for infants and toddlers. Sanitation facilities were either inadequate or completely non-existent. And while nothing explicitly was mentioned, there have been many instances of verbal, physical and even sexual abuse. Women are in fact preferred as labour because most managers feel that they are particularly suited for garden work and easier to exploit. Thus, while women labourers for the most part get the same as their male counterparts, not a single woman can be spotted in the plantation factories where the wages for workers are marginally higher than their garden counterparts.

It must also be added that tea garden workers are caught between the proverbial rock and hard place, and forced to accept increasing labour exploitation due to harsh material conditions and lack of choice. Some who have access to cultivable land tend to be better off and more self-sufficient, at times working in the gardens only for short durations of time out of temporary necessity. Those possessing no or uncultivable land, and who leave the gardens, often end up as informal labour in nearby towns and cities. Education levels, health indicators and poverty levels for the workers are among the lowest in Assam. Many families find it difficult to get their children into educational institutions and later on in finding proper employment. Thus the oppressive environment of the tea garden is often the only recourse for many of these families.

An examination of the reasons for this harsh predicament of tea garden labourers is particularly warranted. Discussions with progressive labour activists, tea garden workers and even upstanding labour department officials reveal three crucial factors contributing to this situation.

One is the present neoliberal environment grossly favouring capital and business. It is amply evident that post-liberalisation, labour has taken a real beating with the state often kowtowing to capital's demands for further deregulation. Now, while most of the legislation protecting labour is still intact, the present neoliberal environment has resulted in the state wantonly neglecting the various labour protection acts and even coming up with schemes like Special Economic Zones to bypass labour regulation as a result of genuflecting to private capital. Even the various levels of the judiciary, where prior to liberalisation would see more pro-labour verdicts, have become far more pro-business.

Furthermore the tea industry has been passing through a crisis with the free import of low priced tea and reduced exports being among its main reasons. This has again affected labour in a harsh manner, with managers increasingly using contract labour, thus reducing benefits, in order to ensure continued profits. Even progressive steps taken by state governments like the recent proposal by the Tamil Nadu Government to increase the minimum daily wage to Rs. 101.5 was met with derision and vigorous protests by plantations owners associations like the United Planters Association of Southern India. Plantation owners across India have refused to accept responsibility for social costs citing the crisis in the tea industry while labourers are almost fully dependent on the plantation system for their sustenance due to lack of viable, alternate livelihoods.

A senior labour department official in Assam, who has witnessed numerous violations of the Plantation Labour Act in the tea gardens he has inspected (and who would like to remain anonymous until his retirement) believes that one of the main reasons owners feel emboldened to neglect labour welfare as per law is that even if prosecuted a case can drag on for years in courts, hardly easy for the working poor to deal with. And in the off chance that a verdict favouring labour is given, the punishment meted out for violations of the act is far too mild, usually a nominal fine that is hardly a financial hit for the owner of a tea plantation.

In addition, due to this free hand being given to private capital by the state, many senior union leaders also point to a dangerous trend developing over the last few years in conflict-ridden states like Assam. Often large private companies demand further deregulation or cheaper land prices citing the supposed violent scenario in the region as a cause for making the place more attractive for private investment. Threats are then carried out of taking investment elsewhere or pulling out existing investment which gets the state governments to meekly capitulate, wilfully overlooking harsh labour violations.

The second contributing factor playing out in the oppressive conditions of the tea garden workers follows very closely on the heels of the present neoliberal environment, which is the developing corrupt nexus between tea garden owners and state officials. The same labour department official mentioned numerous cases of high ranking bureaucrats, including former Assistant Labour Commissioners, as well as many judges completely in the pockets of the tea garden owners. He said that some of the maximum corruption occurs with respect to the Workman's Compensation Act that guarantees compensation for workers in case of injury or death. The tea garden owner, in what is nothing short of cold criminality, just figures out that it's cheaper to bribe both, the labour department official and the judge rather than pay the worker his due compensation. And in case there are honest men at the bureaucracy or judiciary, like the labour official I interviewed, then there is always the fallback option for the business owners of going to the biggest bastion of corruption to solve their problems and that's the political bigwigs whose campaigns are funded by these very big businesses.

The third and possibly most changeable factor contributing to the exploitation of tea garden workers is the corruption and complete pro-management functioning of the Assam Cha Mazdoor Sangh (ACMS) affiliated to the Congress-backed INTUC federation. ACMS has a complete hegemony over the labour scenario in the tea gardens of Assam, and essentially run as the on-the-ground labour controlling wing of the garden owners.

Indeed the ACMS units I met across Assam seemed anything but aware or concerned about labour rights. In the Mornai Tea Estate, the president and general secretary of the local union didn't even know about the Plantation Labour Act 1951, which covers the very workers they represent! While in Kandoli Tea Estate, the ACMS unit was instrumental in teaming up with managers as well as the police and orchestrating the dismissal of numerous workers who were struggling to get compensation for the family of one of their dead fellow-workers in addition to fighting for better medical benefits.

However a small ray of hope can be found in some fledgling attempts at more progressive labour organising. In direct contrast to the ACMS is the much smaller and infinitely more valiant Assam Sangrami Cha Shramik Sangh (ASCSS) which has led numerous struggles and won some important victories in the few tea gardens that it has a base in. And while one didn't see a single woman in any of the meetings with ACMS unions, all the ASCSS meetings had at least a third of the participants being women. In addition, all of the ASCSS unit leaders had a good understanding of labour rights as well as the need to tackle issues of self-exploitation among workers such as patriarchy, alcoholism, and sectarianism.

Subhash Sen, veteran trade union leader in Assam and leader of the ASCSS pointed to numerous occasions when ACMS had been instrumental in sabotaging struggles to gain greater benefits for workers, and also indicated the longstanding tie-up between ACMS and tea garden owners in ensuring that more progressive and militant unions were prevented from fighting for workers rights. He pointed out to a particular event that showcased the abominable lack of concern that ACMS leaders had regarding workers. It was under the tenure of former Deputy Health Minister, Pawan Singh Gatwar, a former Vice President of INTUC and leader of ACMS, that hundreds of tea garden workers died of gastroenteritis and malaria, with nothing being done by the ministry. Sen further outlined the need and plans of the ASCSS in trying to break this hegemony of the ACMS and build a genuinely progressive movement that yields positive results for workers in the long-run.

Progressive groups like the ASCSS have a long way to go in this endeavour, as Sen himself pointed out that their membership of 50,000 was a mere drop in the ocean of tea garden workers, compared to the ACMS membership of around 7 lakhs. However launching a struggle in the tea gardens of Assam that can break the state-owner nexus as well as the hegemony of a corrupt, derelict union is no easy task. The courageous militancy shown by the members and leaders of the ASCSS in many struggles is a step forward, one of many that needs to be taken, but a hopeful sign nevertheless

Travel Log (14/4/08)

2008-04-18T15:10:00.000+05:30

Dispatch 3 from Northeast India (14/4/08)

Identity and hegemony: Identity, with all of its philosophical and political complexities, is something that I have come face to face with numerous times in the short while I've been here. Whether it be the awe-inspiring struggles of oppressed identities in resisting both military and cultural hegemony or its degeneration into sectarianism and xenophobia, one is made to constantly think about where one is from, and its historical placing. Adivasi, Boro, Assamese, Naga, Khasi, Bangladeshi Muslim, Bengali, Bihari...often all other identities based on class, gender etc get subsumed under broad-based cultural-nationalist or sub-nationalist ones. In the Northeast, multiple identity-based struggles, positive or negative, and the acute nature of these struggles can more often than not be directly seen as a result of a very heavily armed occupationary presence.

Even sectarian battles, not obviously against the Indian state, have strong elements of Indian hegemony. In Gossaigaon, I found out that the Indian government supported, either covertly or openly, both the Bodo Liberation Tigers and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland at different times, which not only resulted in internecine battles between the two groups, but also the massacre of Adivasis and Muslims at different times by both Bodo groups. A friend who was doing field work in Manipur investigating clashes between different armed insurgencies such as Kuki and Naga groups found that the Indian government had funded and supported numerous of these groups at different times, playing them upon each other so as to dilute any resistance to the Indian state or even suppress any popular, democratic assertions. She also added that since the region she was examining bordered Burma, there was added cooperation between the Burmese and Indian militaries in planning operations together.

And this takes on other more sinister proportions. Another friend made an interesting point that while usually soldiers from the Indian heartland in the North and Central regions are used to suppress identity-based movements in the Northeast, soldiers from the Northeast are used to suppress the armed radical-left Naxalite movement in Central India, which has its base among the tribal communities of that region. Again further proving the designs of the Indian state that pits poor working class people with similar material conditions against each other.

Mongrel South Indian from Bangalore: I must say that, with all this talk on identity, I am of course finding previously dormant elements of my own. Now I have to strenuously say that it has been nothing but pleasant for me. The moment I say I'm from South India and live in Bangalore, I am greeted with the utmost affection. Multiple friends have told me about the great love that folks here in the Northeast have for South India and South Indians. Thus far, they have been proved absolutely right. Whether it's workers, intellectuals, peers, shopkeepers, or bus passengers, I have faced nothing but wide smiles and friendliness when I tell them about my roots in Kerala/Tamil Nadu and particularly when I tell them of the city I grew up in. Bangalore seems to have really built up it's brand value (for lack of a better phrase) across the region. Everyone tells me about a sister, cousin, uncle or grandchild working in Bangalore as a doctor, call-centre employee or a waiter in one of Bangalore's umpteen "Chinese" restaurants (come on, we all know Indian masalas are used there...which only makes the food that much more enjoyable). South India and South Indians seem to be viewed with a lot of affection, and I think this has to do also with the large number of people from the Northeast region who have gone their for work and many who have ended up settling down there.

One of the most interesting aspects of this treatment I have received is that, even among those opposing the Indian state, I have not been viewed as necessarily a denizen of the occupying state. I am not too sure why, because the upper-caste Hindu community I was born into is right at the top of the beneficiaries of any expansionist designs or resource-usurpation on the part of the Indian state. I think partly this might do with viewing the hegemony here as essentially one emanating out of the power-corridors in Delhi and thus North India rather than Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore or even Mumbai and Calcutta. It seems that the cultural character of the hegemony is obviously viewed as a Hindi one, which almost completely separates it from any South Indian connection, the numerous regions of which itself would have strong anti-Hindi streaks.

Shillong, a cursory look: Finally managed a very short trip to the very-famous city of Shillong in Meghalaya state. The trip itself was rather trying. 12 adults and 2 children were squeezed into a Sumo taxi, which is pretty much the only way to get to Shillong from Guwahati (the famous Indian rail-connectivity is missing in most of the Northeast barring Assam). There was probably a little irritation directed at slightly larger people like myself, and possibly quite understandably at that. After all we were all paying the same, yet I was occupying much more space then some of my smaller co-passengers. Offers to buy tea at the rest stop and small-talk of course cleared the air (and I always had Bangalore to fall back on as an ice-breaker!). But the cramped traveling was not the problem, I had traveled in much more tightly squeezed situations and through distinctly less beautiful scenery. The biggest problem was that the trucks along the road from Guwahati to Shillong and back are among the most polluting, black-smoke-spewing monstrosities this side of the continent. And we had to travel with the windows down lest we suffocate from lack of air. Also the windows had to be down because invariably somebody pukes during the drive through curving, hill roads (as did indeed happen with one of the tykes in our taxi). So the lowered windows and polluting trucks essentially resulted in the entire vehicle being filled with smoke each time we overtook a truck or one passed us, which happened approximately 50 times. It was 14 coughing souls who finally emerged out of the vehicle at our final port of call.

Shillong itself is beautiful. On first sight it reminded me of Bangalore many years back, before the city went mad with capitalism and started adding 200 vehicles a day onto its roads. Old Bangalore on sloping hills that is. Shillong is also, funnily enough, the first place I've gone to where I heard a lot of Hindi being spoken, probably because of the high influx of tourists. The leads I had to do a couple of articles on the exploitative mining industry didn't pan out, and I had to postpone it to another trip in May, so I decided to explore the place anyway.

Police Bazaar, which from what I hear is the heart of the city, is like any other mid-sized or big city commercial centre in India with large ad-hoardings, restaurants, bars, shops, crowds milling about and of course the street market. There is also an obviously wannabe-hip culture among the city's youth, with many sporting gelled-up hairdos, earrings, and t-shirts with old heavy metal bands on the front. The love for heavy-metal and hard-rock music is quite obvious here. Even garages and small shops on the way to as well as in Shillong had Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and PInk Floyd emanating from them. The interesting aspect is that for all its commercial activity, the place pretty much closes down by around 9/9.30pm, which is when things are just about starting to heat up in places like Mumbai!

It was quite sad that I had to cut my trip short, because Meghalaya itself has so much to be seen and examined, especially around mining. Uranium mining by the Public Sector Undertaking UCIL is being planned in the state on a fairly large scale, part of India's ambitious nuclear plans, and supposedly Meghalaya has the largest deposit of uranium in India. The effects on the local villagers can only be imagined. Limestone and coal are some other continuing mining initiatives, mostly by private companies protected by the Indian state as well as some public sector companies. The state and indeed the entire Northeast is being opened up to capital with quite a vengeance, and it remains to be seen how resistance is mounted against it.

Adivasi Struggles in Assam

2008-04-05T11:51:00.003+05:30

Adivasis in Assam: from the tea gardens to the struggle for ST status

(To be published in India Together - www.indiatogether.org - in April 2008)

Across India, Adivasis (also known as indigenous peoples or "first peoples") were and continue to be primarily agriculturists and that too subsistence cultivators who live off the land in tightly knit villages and communities, with a history, fraught with oppression, that can be traced back many centuries. In Assam the history of the Adivasis really starts from the 1850s onwards and is directly connected to the highly exploitive tea industry. It's a tragic history with longstanding implications of acute relevance till date. This article briefly examines that history, the longstanding disenfranchisement of the Adivasis in Assam and their struggle to gain Scheduled Tribe (ST) status in the state while highlighting its limitations.

The bloody brew: The British "discovered" tea in the early 1820s when the native tea leaf in Assam, long brewed by the Singpho tribe, was presented to a certain military man by the name of Bruce. The British East India Company (maybe realising the possibility of regaining monopoly from China in tea production) took over Assam in 1826 from the Ahom kings through the Yandaboo Treaty. Soon in 1837, the first tea garden was established at Chabua in Dibrugarh District of Upper Assam, and in 1840 the Assam Tea Company started the production of tea on a commercial basis. The tea industry started expanding rapidly from the 1850s onwards. Vast tracts of land needed were cleared for the establishing of new tea plantations, and soon by the turn of the century, Assam became the leading tea producing region in the world.

Of course, the rapid expansion of the industry and its highly labour-intensive nature meant that a large source of labourers were required. The locals generally preferred cultivation and, if at all, would work in the tea gardens out of temporary necessity. Furthermore the locals had a rather self-sufficient pre-capitalist economy and even considered tea garden work as derogatory.

Thus, there was no landless labour class in the region to exploit. The British tried abolishing certain local agricultural means of production and imposed heavy taxes on the subsistence farming of local peasants, but it was ultimately felt that uprooted labour would be far easier to control and exploit. This is where the import of labour began in the 1840s primarily from the Adivasi regions of Central and Eastern India. The process was of course extremely violent and hazardous, obvious from the fact that the first batch of labourers in 1841, from the Chotanagpur area, all died en-route due to malnutrition and illness. Recruitment was carried on through highly abusive contractual networks. Numerous episodes of fraud, forcible recruitment, kidnapping, and torture have been recorded as frequently occurring during the recruitment process. There is even the rumour that the British orchestrated a famine in the Chotanagpur Santhal Paragana areas by stopping food supplies from reaching there so that the Adivasis would presumably jump at the opportunity to work in the tea gardens of Assam.

All the Adivasis in Assam trace their immediate history through this torturous route of indentured, immigrant labour brought in to work in the tea gardens. The socioeconomic and political disenfranchisement that they faced then continues in large part today.

Continued disenfranchisement: In Assam, the Adivasis today can broadly be divided into two communities, the tea garden workers and those who came out of the tea gardens at the end of their contracts and settled in and around the area after procuring a little land mostly through government schemes.

The condition of the tea garden workers continues to be abysmal. While Adivasis form the vast majority of the workers, there are also small percentages of other tribal communities, as well as Nepalis, Bengalis, Oriyas and so on. During the initial decades from the 1850s till the 1920s under the British, the working conditions were akin to slave labour, with flogging, rape, torture and even the throwing of dead workers in rivers. While certainly not comparable to earlier times, the working conditions today are still far from being the well-regulated environment that functions according to the Plantation Labour Act brought out in 1951 to protect the interests of workers in plantations. Even a cursory observation of the plantations today brings to light numerous violations of the Act, including inadequate or completely non-existent provisions for drinking water, crèches, schools, proper health facilities, sanitation for women workers (who form the majority of tea industry labour) and shelter. In addition one notices the expanded usage of child labour. Upon further investigation and discussions with workers, one learns that wages paid are much lower than prescribed minimum wages, no over-time payment is made, and occasional physical abuse occurs.

The conditions of the Adivasis who came out of the tea plantations and settled as cultivators around the gardens, is certainly better but not by much. Those who have land tend to be better off and more self-sufficient, while the those possessing no or uncultivable land often end up as informal labour in nearby towns and cities. Education levels, health indicators and poverty levels for Adivasis are among the worst among all communities in Assam. Many Adivasi families find it difficult to get their children into educational institutions and later on in finding proper employment. Furthermore, while Adivasis, both tea garden and ex-tea garden communities form nearly 20% of the population, their representation in the legislative assembly is markedly lesser.

Some of the more prominent Adivasi organisations like the All Adivasi Students Association of Assam (AASAA) as well as groups active with tea garden workers like the Assam Tea Tribes Students Association (ATTSA) point to a particular policy feature that is historically missing here in Assam, which is the granting of Scheduled Tribe (ST) status to the Adivasis. The granting of this status is something these groups feel would go great lengths in ameliorating the historically oppressed condition of the Adivasis in Assam, and it is often the central, if not only, point of many of their campaigns.

ST Status and its limited scope: The struggle for ST status by the Adivasis in Assam warrants an examination as it is the only state in India to deny them this basic right by taking away their tribal status after Independence and instead classifying them as OBC (Other Backward Classes).

With Adivasis having borne enormous historical oppression and exploitation, the Government of India made special safeguards to protect them from exploitation and ensure social justice since the inception of Planning in 1951. This policy of "protective discrimination" for oppressed communities includes reservation of posts in public services, guaranteed political representation, and seats in educational institutions. And while far from perfect, this policy has certainly seen positive signs over the decades for a lot of communities like, for example, the Dalits (falling under Schedule Caste status) whose education levels, human development indices and levels of franchise have steadily risen across the country, and particularly in states like Tamil Nadu, which has historically been far ahead of most other states in India when it comes to safeguarding the interests of oppressed communities through a consistent policy of protective policy-making.

For Adivasis too, ST status in many other states of India has given them greater political representation and resulted in increasing presence in educational institutions and government jobs. This has resulted in some positives for the community with some sections slowly climbing up the socioeconomic ladder. However, despite this improvement, human development indicators still show Adivasis languishing at the bottom among all communities in India. It can be safely argued that, while hardly the only solution, protection through ST status for Adivasis needs to necessarily continue.

It is under this paradigm that the struggle for ST status by the Adivasis in Assam gains particular legitimacy. This struggle has faced a brick wall in the form of either the Assam government or opposition from other identity-based movements. Among the arguments against the granting of this status to Adivasis include pointing to the historic migration of the Adivasis into the state thereby arguing that they're not tribals of the region per say. However this is a rather flawed argument to make as every community in India has a migratory history behind them, whether it's the various Dravidian communities in South India, the numerous tribes in Northeast India, or any other community. Furthermore the migration was as indentured labour, of a very abusive and forced nature, and the Adivasis continue to carry the burden of their historical disenfranchisement even in Assam. Thus to deny the community what has been deemed as a fundamental right by the Indian Constitution is indeed a continuation of that historical injustice.

It must be strenuously added however that ST status alone, while important, will not be some kind of quick-fix panacea to cure all ills. This is evident in other parts of India, where political power via reservation often ends up in the hands of the political elite of that section of society, groups like AASAA, who themselves sometimes form an oppressive ruling class within the community. There are numerous other issues that the Adivasis face such as lack of economic franchise, serious labour exploitation and social problems such as alcoholism that will require strenuous social movements to tackle.

Without serious examination of the vast gamut of issues that form the oppressive existence that the Adivasis have to contend with, mere political representation will not wish them away. A worrying feature of a group like AASAA is the single-point nature of their campaigns, without vigorously examining deeper issues such as the conditions of Adivasi workers and women, as well as struggling against internal exploitation. A far clearer analysis of labour and gender by the numerous Adivasi organisations, looking beyond just identity, and the building of movements based on that analysis would serve the community tremendously. The Adivasis have a long history of valiant struggle behind them, with one of the first rebellions against the British Empire being the Santhal Rebellion of 1855 as well as a history of egalitarian living. This legacy of struggle and egalitarianism can certainly be a guiding force in taking on the oppression that the Adivasis face today in a truly fruitful manner.

Travel Log (23/3/08 to 3/4/08)

2008-04-05T11:47:00.005+05:30

Northeast India Diary 2 (23/3/08 - 3/4/08)

Jhum and the markets of Tuenzang in Nagaland:

I'm going to continue to write a little bit about hardened working class women and so it would be a travesty to not mention the hard labour of women in Nagaland.

I had the opportunity to join a couple of friends on a project they were conducting on Art and Conflict, which gave me the chance to learn a little more about work and livelihood in Nagaland. Driving along the undulating hill roads of the region, my eyes were greeted with what can only be described as a riot of green starting with the tea gardens in Upper Assam that border Nagaland to a verdant explosion once we entered the tribal state. Now, my roots are in Kerala, which I chauvinistically believed to be the greenest region on the planet but I'm now forced to beat a timid retreat from that position, particularly as I was told that it was one of the driest times of the year! However the lush and dense foliage covering the steep hills pose a particular problem with respect to cultivation for the local population…a problem overcome only by dint of hard labour. And that is where once again, I came to witness the awesome strength of the local population, particularly women.

The cultivation practised in Nagaland and in many other parts of Northeast India is called jhum and is essentially cultivation along hill slopes. Anyone who has ever done some real hiking would confirm that trekking up a steep hill slope, even for fairly fit individuals, is hard work. Now imagine chopping firewood along a tract of hill-land, clearing that tract through controlled fires for cultivation, cultivating on the land as per a tight seasonal schedule, and then carrying large bundles of firewood (uphill) back to your village in the evening for cooking fire. Add to this, household chores, preparation of meals in the morning and evening, tending to livestock as well as rearing children and you've pretty much got a vague picture of the sheer volume of hard labour that rural women here (and all over the world for that matter) are immersed in. I'm not going to fall for the liberal middle-class trap of romanticising the idyllic village life while hardly being able to function without a computer, cell phone and a grocery store round the corner. What I saw with the women in Nagaland was hard work, the hardest there is, and it required not just strength of character but actual physical strength as well (both abominably lacking among upper-class city folk).

I was also told by locals and friends familiar with the area that jhum is usually a cooperative system of production with a village or many villages cultivating one tract of land and then sharing the produce at the end of the harvest. The practice of jhum is however sadly affected in certain parts of the region due to the presence of the Indian army and the resulting conflict, which causes disruption in the cultivation cycle resulting in harsh insecurities for people depending on the produce to feed themselves.

Cut to the main market in Tuenzang town, and one can see that out here almost every element of public commerce has women pretty much running the show. About 90% of the vendors were women, many clad in jeans and t-shirts, and wearing makeup. They were selling anything from vegetables and tubers to snails and frogs. To those of you whose quasi-brahminical sensibilities are a little pricked, I would like to add that in many European and Asian countries snails and frogs are delicacies in some high flung restaurants (they just have some hoity-toity name for it that make it sound all exotic when some upper-class twit eats them with a small silver fork).

Mothers, daughters, relatives, and friends ran small stands together, many with babies on their laps. Older children would sometimes take the young infants on their backs and care for them while the women worked at the stands. Unloading boxes, setting up the stands, arguing with shoppers on prices…all women, all the time, at the Tuenzang market.

I hope and pray that the strength and public presence of women in this region continues to grow and show others how, even poor societies functioning under tremendous pressures from outside forces can function with remarkably lesser patriarchy and macho male oppression.

Anti-immigrant sentiments against those who toil:

Thus far I have been quite struck by many aspects of the region...it's raw beauty outside the cities, extremely hardworking people in the face of numerous obstacles, strength of women and amazing diversity. However I feel compelled to write a little bit about some very stark anti-immigrant, xenophobic sentiments (especially in Assam) that I am continually coming to face to face with, which is starting to feel a little disturbing in a place I'm fast falling head over heels in love with.

Right at the beginning of my travels here, on the train to Guwahati from Bangalore, I chatted with an obviously middle-class woman (we spoke in English), who was returning to Assam after working for a couple of years in Bangalore. As the conversation started veering towards the issues that the people face, she seemed to feel that all the problems were singularly because of Bangladehsi Muslims, whom she felt were taking over the state with their continued migration as well as the Biharis, whom she felt were corrupting the purity of Assamese culture.

I dismissed it as a one-off incident incident, but again and again, speaking with workers at the Guwahati Oil Refinery, a very intelligent, proud Assamese intellectual as well as shop keepers and traders in Uzaan Bazaar, the anti-immigrant (read Bihari and Bangladeshi) sentiment, at times virulent, hit me hard. Of course none of the people mentioned had any problems at all with me, being an outsider myself, rather they were extremely friendly and helpful to me. My head rang out "CLASS"

Let me elaborate...two extremely brutal incidents (among many) came to my mind regarding this. One happened very recently, when about 60-70 Bihari migrant labourers were gunned down. The other occured in 1983, and is now known and as the infamous Nelli massacre when hundreds of Bangladeshis were killed in a riot. Now I'm not going to speculate who perpetrated these crimes, as I've been getting different accounts from different people. But what is clear is that this is a particularly bloody manifestation of the xenophobic sentiments in Assam, that I can now only assume to be a fairly mainstream one.

I earlier mentioned the class factor...because in both incidents, it was poor, working-class people who were killed. The softest targets. They weren't the occupationary forces, they weren't the armed police state...they were toiling workers. Many

An Assamese friend told me that if the Bangladeshis were to leave, then the entire vegetable supply and a good amount of the grain supply to Guwahati would come to a halt as they are the ones who cultivate on the chars (little island-like tracts of land along the Brahmputra river). In all the building and road construction sites that I have had a chance to speak to workers, a huge chunk of the contract/daily-wage labourers come from Bihar often working for private companies based in Guwahati.

These are the vegetables and grains eaten by the very people who feel that Bangladeshis are taking over the country, the roads and buildings used by the same people who say that these uncivilised Biharis should be thrown out.

The paradigm, lacking in any rationalism or political sensibilities, is astonishingly similar to the one in the USA with strong streams of xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiments, particularly against migrant Mexicans and other Latin Americans who work in all the crappiest jobs for even crappier wages building the roads, manning the stores, repairing the cars and pruning the gardens used by well-off white folk.

It is sad that in a region like Assam, which boasts of such a proud and diverse histroy of peoples struggle, one finds a mainstream sentiment akin to what is found in an imperialist rogue state.

Of course this sentiment is not even minutely unique to Assam. As recently as a couple of months back, a few North Indians were attacked by goons of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. Even a few days back, in my own neck of the woods, the longstanding conflict between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu over Cauvery Water threatened to flare up again. All over India, there is xenophobia and often the degeneration of positive identity-based movements into hatred for the other.

Northeast India which has been facing the brute end of the armed Indian state, has a host of rather wonderful identity-based sentiments, and it's sad to see a few of them go down the route of sectarianism and xenophobia, but one is hopeful that this is not a trend that will engulf the region.

Two Unions for Two Classes of workers: Guwahati Refinery (Revised Article Published in India Together)

2008-03-27T12:19:00.001+05:30

http://www.indiatogether.org/2008/mar/eco-iocunions.htm

In an era where workers across the world have been facing an unprecedented assault at the hands of capital, there is some merit in examining the labour struggles at the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) Refinery in Guwahati, the largest city in the state of Assam and the entire Northeastern region of India.

Assam and indeed the rest of Northeast India, because of numerous movements with nationalist and sub-nationalist aspirations, continue to have much of its small town and rural population face the brunt of a heavily armed, hegemonic Indian state. One cannot travel to a single sub-district or district without seeing even the lowest ranking police constable carrying a rather deadly INSAS assault rifle (compared to other parts of India where he might, with luck, carry a baton to imperiously whack a poor pickpocket’s rear end). And while workers in an urban centre like Guwahati might face marginally less violence at the hands of armed security forces, they face the assault of resource usurpation, low development priorities and the overall oppressive treatment meted out to the region by the central Government of India. This obviously results in harsher material conditions for the working poor, even in the formal, more organised sectors.

IOC is a public sector undertaking meant for refining the oil that’s been discovered and extracted by other undertakings such as Oil India and ONGC. Workers here would naturally fall under the highly organised sector. At a larger level, oil represents one of the key resources that fall under the afore mentioned issue of resource usurpation that the region faces at the hands of the Indian state, but this article will focus more on the labour struggles at the plant-level.

The labour stratification here presents an interesting, albeit hardly uncommon, picture of workers division. As is the case with the majority of the plants across India cutting across industrial sectors and public-private lines, workers are divided into permanent employees and non-permanent workers, who are further divided into contract workers and daily-wage labourers. Naturally the demands for each group hardly overlap and might sometimes even clash. In addition there are social and cultural divisions that result from the creation of a labour aristocracy side by side with a working poor, all in one plant. Needless to say that this is hardly fertile ground for fostering strong workers unity and thereby launching union struggles that can successfully press for rights and demands.

Furthermore in the IOC Refinery (again as is the case in most other industries) there are two unions for the two classes of workers. It is important, from the standpoint of understanding labour rights, to examine how trade unions handle such complex and difficult situations thrust upon them by capital…whether with ingenuity and honesty, or just mere capitulation to management and the forces of capital. The IOC Refinery unions offer one such case in point

At the refinery, there is the Refinery Workers Union (RWU), for permanent workers, who for the most part consist of English-educated IOC staff members below the rank of officers or managers. They seem to be very much part of India’s growing and increasingly prosperous middle class, conceivably with generational aspirations to move up the socioeconomic ladder, and quite possibly possessing every opportunity to do so. Indeed, one of the union members I spoke with, upon knowing that I was from Bangalore, proceeded to ask me numerous questions about South India, as he and his family were planning an extended holiday touring the region. The conversation covered hotels, beaches and tourist hotspots, hardly things that India’s labouring masses get a chance to even dream about. The union office itself is an impressive two-floor building, with a drama hall, couple of offices, kitchen, a children’s park outside, some sports facilities, and a guest room where they were kind enough to allow me to spend a couple of nights in.

Barely hundred metres away is the dusty, one-room office of the United Workmen’s Union (UWU), which is the union for all contract workers and daily-wage labourers. Affiliated to the leftist All India Central Council of Trade Unions (AICCTU), its membership includes workers who can barely make ends meet, if at all, on paltry wages with insecure work in often hazardous conditions. The union has seen multiple struggles on numerous issues including fighting for higher wages, timely payment, compensation for victims of injury or death, better health benefits and numerous others. For entertainment, there is a single carom board usually played on a by-turn basis by large numbers of members, who crowd around it in the evenings after work.

Thus the socioeconomic differences between the two classes of workers, and indeed the infrastructure levels of the two unions are stark and plainly visible. However an interesting feature is the manner in which the unions themselves have dealt with the situation of workers division.

Talking to members and leaders alike from both unions, there was the common feeling that unity among the two unions and mutual support for each others struggles was important. Instances were even mentioned of one union joining in the struggles of the other, despite not having any vested demands. Strong communication links also seemed to be maintained between the two. One of the crucial reasons for this mutual support seems to be the fact that there is an overlap of leadership, and even the constitutions of both don’t bar cross-membership. While the UWU for the contract/daily-wage workers is affiliated to the AICCTU, the RWU has AICCTU leaders in central roles, despite not officially affiliating. In speaking with both unions, one heard fairly honest and forthright descriptions of successes and, more importantly, failures. It would seem obvious that unions representing workers from the same plant should naturally support each other, but this is often hardly the case, with multiple plant-level unions fighting with each other to gain the support of the workers, thereby severely reducing the militancy of the working class movement. In addition, there are many sectors and plants where unions for contract and daily-wage workers barely even exist. Significant examples of this can be found in the numerous automobile industry plants in Gurgaon (Haryana), where for the most part only permanent workers have any form of representation or space for collective bargaining, while the contract and daily-wage workers are left to languish without any real association.

Biren Kalita and Janik Barman, both AICCTU leaders and central guiding forces of the two unions at the IOC Refinery spoke candidly about the existing contradictions among the workforce and the unions representing them. Barman said that the main focus was directed more towards the rights and demands of the contract and daily-wage workers as their situation was far more precarious and their needs greater, but still required some time also to be directed towards the permanent workers union as there was the need to build workers solidarity and two-way support. He further mentioned that not enough had been done by them with respect to daily-wage workers in the UWU and women workers in both unions, specifying that patriarchy in the membership of both unions was a huge hindrance in this.

Keshav Goswami, Secretary of the UWU, spoke at length about past struggles to bring contract and daily-wage workers onto a unified platform. He mentioned that in previous years there were as many as nine different unions for all the contract and daily-wage workers, with the AICCTU-affiliate being the biggest. This caused serious dilution in negotiations and overall collective bargaining measures with management. After much perseverance, three to four of the more progressive unions formed a collective platform which soon resulted in all the workers coming under it, followed by a democratic process to decide the federation that the workers wished to affiliate with. Goswami also mentioned the mutual support among the two unions, and spoke about future plans in the struggle for workers rights including, canteen facilities, Provident Fund for contract/daily-wage workers, skill development and better infrastructure for the union. He mentioned the need to promote women’s leadership as well as conduct workshops on workers rights and contract labour law.

While overall, the mutual support between the two unions is heartening to see, and certainly a creative way to thwart capital’s attempt at workers division, there are many visible problems as well. For instance, much of this unity seems to be maintained by the common AICCTU leadership, progressive leftist leaders like Kalita and Barman, and it remains to be seen how it will continue should it pass on to future hands through elections or any fissure in either of the unions.

Another extremely bad indicator seems to be the abominable lack of women in leadership positions. While research was being done for this write-up, one didn’t come across a single female leader, office-bearer, committee-member or even just a member in either union that I could speak to. Women seem to form around 20-25% of the contract/daily-wage workers (depending on the season), and I was told that there were some women members in the UWU committee, but I didn’t see any in all the visits I made to the office. The RWU has a women’s organisation that primarily comprises of the wives of permanent staff members, and one does see them occasionally in the RWU office. However this seems to be primarily a socio-cultural group and not a political one with a clear goal of combating patriarchy within the unions. The expressed need to combat patriarchy by some of the leaders does not seem to have percolated down to the membership based on conversations with members and workers.

Furthermore, one could notice that the progressive thinking imaginably coming from a leftist federation like the AICCTU, had not had as much of a political effect on the members as I’m sure the AICCTU themselves would like to see happen. Most of the members I spoke with were avowed supporters of the Asom Gana Parishad, a party which is hardly a bastion for progressive thinking. Some were also quite open in their dislike for Bangladeshi Muslims and Biharis whom they felt were taking over Assam through their continued migration, mostly as poor labourers, into the state.

No doubt combating patriarchy, politicisation of the membership and maintaining unity are problems that numerous unions across India face. And while some of these problems might not be as directly connected to the day-to-day travails of traditional unionism that focuses on acquiring higher wages, better benefits, safer work environments, and good health care, they still merit serious examination as they point directly to the manner in which unions can play a significant role in positive societal (and political) change. However, one does get the feeling that the overall direction that the IOC Refinery unions in Guwahati are heading in is positive and, hopefully, slowly inching towards building a genuinely progressive workers movement.

Travel Log 10/3 - 20/3/08

2008-03-27T12:17:00.001+05:30

After about 10 days of exploration and travel in Assam, mainly in and around Guwahati and Gossaigaon, my head swirls with all that I’ve learnt and observed. First of all I feel compelled to briefly touch upon the numerous, rather offensive stereotypes that folks from other parts of India have about this region. Stuff I’ve heard since I was a kid. While they sounded offensive even before I ever came to the region, now they feel particularly repulsive. And while hardly deserving attention, they still merit a couple of minutes of censure. Of the top of my head, some of the garbage I’ve heard either first-hand or second-hand include: “Do they have schools there?” “What about roads?” “And eating habits, don’t they eat just about anything?” “Don’t they all hate other Indians?” “I’ve heard that it’s filled with jungles” “Literacy and education levels must be so low”

Let me be really brief in retorts to each of the above respectively in the order that they’re shown…

Yes and very good ones;

Yes, as bad or good as you’d find elsewhere in India;

No, what is eaten is called food;

No, and please, it’s not like folks in other regions are oh so loving to their fellow-humans…need we be reminded of the violence against Muslims in 1992 Mumbai and 2002 Gujarat or the savagery towards Dalits and Tribals in most parts of India;

No, although the countryside is much prettier and greener than what you would find in most other parts of India;

No, actually literacy levels across most of the region are comparable to Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which have the highest literacy/education levels in India. In fact Mizoram is the second most literate state in India after Kerala. Furthermore the per-capita college-going rate is the highest or second-highest in all of India

Ok, now that this painful exercise is out of the way, I would like to share some general observations that I found interesting in the few days that I’ve been here

Guwahati bus service – I know that this would seem quite amazing to believe, but the Guwahati bus service has been the best I’ve been on so far. Compared to some of the metros, it’s comparable to Mumbai, marginally better than Chennai, significantly better than Calcutta, and simply streets ahead of both Bangalore and Delhi. I have never had to wait more than 5 minutes at a bus stop thus far, and have almost always found a seat. There are times when I’ve had to wait nearly an hour in other cities and find my rather large self standing cramped in the midst of sweat and irritability. The conductors have also been helpful once I tell them that I’m new to the city and ensure that I get of at the right stop. The experience has also been far more tolerable than what one faces in other cities. One doesn’t have to deal with the annoying tardiness in Bangalore, the occasionally bizarre speeds in Chennai or the macho molesting madness in Delhi (where one can see, as clear as day, women being leered at and groped)

Strong presence of Women – The last sentence on bus services directly connects to a particularly heartening sight in Assam, and from what I’ve heard, all over the Northeast. While economic development levels in the region (due primarily to resource usurpation by the Indian state) are comparable to some of the poorer North and Central Indian regions, both visually and from data corroboration, what is astonishingly different about the Northeast when compared to North India is the significant public presence of women, cutting across age, class and community. On every bus ride that I’ve taken within Guwahati and when I travelled to Gossaigaon, almost always at least 40-60% of the commuters were women, even at night times (almost impossible to see in Delhi). It was similar to what I’ve seen in Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai. There was also a discipline shown by men on buses getting up from women’s reserved seating when women came in, again something missing in some other cities. Even on the streets, one sees many women, students, workers, vendors, housewives mulling around the crowd and travelling on public transportation without any hesitancy or fear.

Another noticeable feature, of course due to this large public presence of women, is the markedly lesser leering and harassment that women face here, again in comparison to what I’ve seen in Delhi and even Chennai. Now I’ve no doubt in my mind that cat-calls, groping and harassment of women very much exist in Assam and the rest of Northeast India, but so far, each and every woman I’ve spoken to, who has also been to Delhi, said they feel much safer here than they ever did in Delhi. Even many of the men I spoke to highlighted the huge amounts of sexual harassment that their female friends from the region face in Delhi, when studying or working there, facing the oppressive brunt of it as much because of their gender as their place of origin. There’s something in this place that a lot of the other cities and towns in India can learn from.

Spunk and paan-stained teeth – A particular incident stands out in my mind with respect to the public presence of women that again was uplifting to witness. On a cramped overnight train ride from Gossaigaon back to Guwahati, the compartment I was precariously standing in was overflowing with large gunny sacks filled with vegetables. They belonged to a group of about 6 middle-aged women, all with weathered feet, strong arms, red paan-stained teeth and wearing worn-out, tattered saris. They sat with the poise and strength of daily struggle. I asked one of them (who looked like the leader of the group), where they were heading and through a paan-filled gurgle, she said that they were going to sell vegetables at the weekly Sunday markets in Kokhrajar town and Guwahati. They bought veggies from across state lines in West Bengal (where there’s always a surplus and thus much lower prices) and sold them at the weekly markets for a small profit. Upon reaching the first station, Kokhrajar, they proceeded to unload these monstrous sacks, all the while barking at the men in the train to move aside. The word that comes to mind is spunk.

Of course my heart took a little dive when I saw the local Sub-Inspector of the Assam Police at the station receive his weekly bribe as they were unloading the sacks, but even here the women’s chutzpah was evident. She handed him a twenty-rupee note, and when he asked for more, she completely brushed him off. I’m not sure what she said, but she seemed to indicate the exact bodily orifice that he could shove his baton in or something along those lines. The khaki-clad lout slunk away, muttering something to himself, probably looking for the next handout. I believe this weekly exercise is because it’s illegal to transport produce on passenger trains, and that too across state lines…but then again this is India and indeed, South Asia…the people always find a way to survive. Three women got off with half the veggies as the train trundled on, and the same cycle of events repeated itself when we reached Guwahati in the wee hours of the morning. I don’t know what it was that lifted my spirits, whether it was their spunk, their attitude, their powerful forearms that heaved sacks I would find myself struggling with or their entrepreneurial spirit in the face of obvious hardship. Maybe it was a bit of each or just the picture of the hardened working-class woman, tougher than anyone else.

Adivasis in Lower Assam: Struggle and strife – While in Gossaigoan I had the opportunity to interact quite intimately with an Adivasi student organisation (All Adivasi Students Association of Assam or AASAA) that campaigned on behalf of the Adivasi community across the state. Here, as in the rest of India, the term “student organization” is quite a stretch, with many of the members and leaders married with children. Student organizations for the most part are political fronts, not especially concerned with students per say, but more as power-garnering machines before they go on to contest elections as part of some political party or the other.

I did learn a lot about the Adivasis in Assam though, who mainly came in the mid-1840s till the 1920s as indentured labour to work for the British in Assam’s numerous tea gardens. Many continue to work in the gardens till date, while others left and started cultivating their own land. The connection of the Adivasis with the tea gardens is very strong, and there is another organization called the Assam Tea Tribes Students Association (ATTSA) active specifically with those working in the tea gardens, however I haven’t able to meet any members or leaders as yet. The Adivasis do face it from various angles here, whether it’s political disenfranchisement, socioeconomic hardships or sectarian violence. And even the little franchise they are able to access through reservation in educational, job-related and political seats in other parts of India as a result of their Scheduled Tribe (ST) status is missing in Assam, as it’s the only state in India to deny them ST status. In fact ST status remains the central (and often only) campaign demand for all the Adivasi groups in the state.

The situation of the Adivasis in Assam, as well as the sectarianism and violence existing between them and the other communities like Bodos and Muslims, is of course an issue that cannot fit into a paragraph in a field notes dispatch, however I’d still like to touch upon a couple of issues that really stood out for me.

Strong local knowledge and Sectarianism – AASAA did request me to work on a memorandum with regards to their campaign to get ST status, and two things stood out as I was discussing the same with them.

One was their acute knowledge of local happenings and goings-on, and this is true with activists in other communities I met as well. They knew almost every Member of Parliament (MP) and Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) from Assam, and particularly about those who directly represented their district or sub-district. I have no clue as to who my MP or MLA back home in Bangalore is. And with Karnataka politics going down the present path, I would be hard-pressed to name the Chief Minister at any point in time. However they not only knew names, but their political orientation with respect to the Adivasi cause, honesty-levels, inside secrets and so on, mainly I guess because their campaign demanded such intimate knowledge. It was of course in complete disproportion to their knowledge of national or international affairs, even with respect to their own cause. For instance they didn’t know that an All-India Federation of ST organisations existed whom they could potentially ally with.

The second aspect of that discussion that stood out was their intense sectarianism. They didn’t feel like even traditionally sympathetic movements such as the Left or Civil Liberties ones could be trusted as allies or supporters. Partly, I suppose this sectarianism is forced upon, not just them, but other communities as well, by the divide and conquer tactics of the Indian state. However another reason I feel it exists is because, the leaders within the communities want to maintain a hold over their personal sense of power and not have it diluted in any way through coalescing with other groups. The sectarianism can also be internecine. While I was their meeting with various people, 3 Bodos were killed in fighting between rival Bodo militant groups in a clash for power in the Bodoland Territorial Council.

Hegemonic presence of the Armed Indian State – Thus far I have seen gun-toting Central security forces in every place I have visited or stayed at. Whether they’re military, paramilitary or state police forces, their presence is visible and one of absolute power. Even the lowliest police constable is armed with an Indian-made INSAS Assault Rifle (apparently as deadly as an AK-47 or M-16) or at the very least a rapid-fire sten gun. This, when in many other parts of India, cops barely have a baton when they’re on patrol. One doesn’t normally get the feeling that the Indian state is a particularly hegemonic one in many parts of India (mainly because of its bumbling incompetence), but one can really sense its power here.

I’m tempted to draw comparisons with what I saw of the Israeli occupation in Palestine. It’s a lot more cut-and-dry over there, while over here there are multiple layers of occupation as well as complexities arising out of nationalist movements fighting both with the Indian state and sometimes with each other as well as a shaky engagement with the federalist experiment. However one commonality is the hegemonic strength of the military in both operations, and the horrendous atrocities inflicted upon the occupied peoples in both Palestine and Northeast India.

And one really doesn’t have to dig deep to find evidence of these atrocities. As in Palestine, nearly everyone has some connection or the other to the bloody treatment meted out by occupying security forces...a friend tortured to death, an uncle maimed, a cousin jailed on false charges, an aunt shot in the legs…and I’ve been here all of 10 days. There are also those caught between the armed insurgencies and the military, facing the brunt of both groups, and risking the wrath of one or the other.

Workers killing workers – During an Adivasi bandh or shutdown in Gossaigaon, I had the opportunity to interact with a Central Reserve Police Force squad who were breaking for their lunch. Usually during bandhs put forward by any community, the entire town shuts down, but this tea shop was made to open temporarily to accommodate the CRPF soldiers. Famished after trekking through nearby villages, I took the opportunity to have my regular tea and bun meal and proceeded to chat with the soldiers.

Among the ones I spoke with, I found out that one of them was the son of a Public Works Department labourer in Hyderabad, another belonged to a tribal community from Central India, while the subedar (sergeant) came from a small farming family in Rajasthan. All mentioned the bad pay and work conditions, stating that they had barely enough to make ends meet. Once they found out that I was examining labour conditions in the region, the chap from Hyderabad immediately said that a union in the CRPF would be useful but was not permitted

It is a particularly Machiavellian work of art by the Indian state that puts the working class in a uniform, arms him with a deadly weapon and makes him kill and maim other poor working class people. In terms of their material conditions, these soldiers have more in common with the people they’re killing than the political fat cats and money bags whose murderous bidding they follow.

Cricket on uneven ground – After meeting the CRPF squad I roamed around some more and soon spotted a cricket match ensuing on the banks of a stream on the outskirts of Gossaigaon. The “ground”, if that is what it can be called, was basically a patch of bumpy grass mounds with scattered rocks and a few cows grazing on the side. Nevertheless the game was being played with gusto. Due to the shutdown, all the kids and youth had no school or work to go to, so it looked like cricket was going to be the day’s entertainment.

What struck me was the fielding skill of the players. On such a horrendous surface, they were judging irregular bounce and speeds with amazing alacrity. It further baffles me to think of the rather appalling fielding standards of the Indian national cricket team. Now the team is probably the second-best in the world after Australia, but is seriously hampered when it comes to the fielding department. I wondered how it was that in a country where the foundation of young cricketers was built on such uneven, rocky surfaces (even on full fledged cricket fields in the big cities) could there be such an appalling paucity of high-quality fielders in the national team.

On a lighter side – I think I will end this dispatch with a couple of interesting hoardings and posters I saw. I have always felt that my own place of origin in India and the entire South Asian region is a land and people of delicious insanity, and this just further proves my point.

At 3 establishments near the Paltan Bazaar bus stop in Guwahati I saw the following next to each other:

“Only Lodging”

“Only Fooding”

“Lodging and Fooding available”

At the tea shop in Gossaigaon, I saw this poster advertising for spoken English classes. I’m reproducing verbatim:

“Good News! Are you week in English? Want to develope your speaking power? Are you 10+? No Problem! Join SPOKEN ENGLISH. Learn to speak English in the easiest way and develope your personality. Admission stars from: 25th Jan 2008”

And finally, trust our national icon, Bollywood to come up with a lovely truism of a caption for one of it’s films starring huge stars like Saif Ali Khan and Bipasha Basu. The films name is Race:

RACE
Two Brothers…One will Play to Win…One will Play to Defeat

Introduction to the North East India Diary

2008-03-27T12:13:00.000+05:30

Am starting this blog in order to disseminate more information on North East India, especially on issues surrounding labour, gender and socioeconomic disenfranchisement. It will consist of writeups that I post, as well as (hopefully) pieces that others might want to contribute. In addition I hope to keep a fairly steady stream of relevant articles from the mainstream media coming in.