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RNI: MAHENG/2014/596611-15 Oct 2015, Pages : 8

Thousands of women gathered in front of the Kannan Devan Hills Plantations Com-pany (P) Ltd (KDHP) office in Munnar are shouting this slogan in a dialect which is a mixture of Tamil and Malayalam in a low, slow rhythm. One woman sitting in the gathering of about 5,000 workers holds a placard which reads, “Green Blood Revolution, Strike Of the People, For the People, By the People.”

Munnar is a tea country, said to be the Queen of hills of Kerala. Waves after waves of rolling mountains and hills covered with carpeted tea gardens are a beholders de-light. Millions of tourists both domestic and foreign flock to this hill resort to enjoy this sight, the cool weather and breathe ‘fresh’ air. Very few realize that behind all this natural beauty there lies tears and tyranny, trauma and helplessness of workers who toil in these gardens from dawn to dusk.

On 2nd September, 2015, these tears turned into a flood of anger and that shook the very foundation of political structure of Kerala state, India. In Kerala, which boasts that it elected through the ballot, for the first time in the world, a communist party government to power, where everything from birth to death are unionized, emerges a workers’ movement, that too led by thousands of women, literally driving away trade union leaders, as they term it, “A Green Blood Revolution”. What is happen-ing? Why this unique political movement?

Apparently, All they are asking for is Rs 500 ( $8) daily wages and 20 % annual bo-nus, which even if they get it will be around Rs 8000 ($140) only. But their grievanc-es go beyond that. It is the story of the “Green Blood” flowing through the rivulets of these green plantations.

The KDHP general body held on 26th August announced that this year’s bonus will be 10 %. From then onwards, resentment was simmering. Women workers, who are predominant in the 10,000 odd work force of the estates, started a whispering cam-paign through mobile phones. On 5th September, some 50 women workers gath-ered in front of the KDH office and started the strike. Soon the word, spread around the hills and women workers gathered in hordes around the office. Soon they were in thousands. Men were kept away. When we went to Munnar on 12th September, it was day 8th of the strike. I could see about five thousand women sitting quietly in front of the KDH office. Occasionally there would be a burst of sloganeering. Then silence. There were hundreds of policemen surrounding the gathering. The police men, as is usual in protest and strikes, were not to threaten and disperse the crowd. They seemed, silently to support the strike. One police officer, even came forward to say that workers’ demands are genuine and should be widely reported.

It seemed that the whole of Munnar is in support of the strike. One shop owner where we had tea was eloquent in his support of the strike. Meals and tea are pro-vided to the striking women by collecting funds from the shop owners, taxi drivers of Munnar. On the day of our arrival a temple committee provided free food for the striking women. One trader said, “If they earn Rs 1000 they spend it here in our shops for their basic needs. It is our duty to support them in their hour of need.”

Why is there so much support for these women, who are defying the trade unions who are supposed to protect their interest? The public feel that their grievances are genuine and they were betrayed by the trade unions.

--continued in page 4

A Green Blood Women’s Revolution in Munnar -Binu Mathew

Editor: Countercurrents.org

“We pluck the tea leaves, You pluck our lives”

It was 70 years ago that on the behalf of their peoples the member states of this organisation signed this charter. We pledged ourselves to preserve the future generation from war and build new type of relationships guided by set of principles and purposes that should bring about an era of peace and justice and develop-ment for all of humanity.

However, as from that moment there have con-stantly been wars of agression and interference in the internal affairs of the states.We have witnessed ousting of sovreign government by force and recolonisation of territories. And all of these upgraded with new ingenious action, employing new technologies and on to the pre-text of alleged human right violation.

The militarisation of cyber space and the co-vert and illegal use of information and commu-nication technologies to attack other nation is unacceptable and so do the distortion of the advancement and protection of human rights used with the selected and discriminatory ap-proach to validate and impose political deci-sons.

Despite the fact that the charter calls us to re-affirm faith in fundamental, the human rights and dignity of people, to millions of people the fulfillment of himan rights remains utopia. Hu-manity is denied the right to live in peace and the right to development. It is actually poverty and inequality that are cause of conflict that should be sorted out.

The commitment made in 1945 to promote

social progress and better standards of life for the people along with their economic and so-cial development remain an illusion when 795 million people go hungry, 781 million adults are illiterate and 17 thousand children perish ev-eryday from curable diseases. In the meantime annual military expenses worldwide amount to more than 1.78 trillion dollars. Barely a fraction of that figure could actually resolve the most pressing problem of humanity.

Even in industrial nation, the welfare society which was usually presented as the moral to imitate has practically disappearaed. The elec-tion system and traditional parties that rely on advertisemnt and money and publicity are growing increasingly detached from its people.

Climate change is threatening the very exis-tence of human existence. State should assume common but differentiated responsibility for this reality. Not every country is equally re-sponsible for irrational and unsustainable con-sumerism. The consequences of climate change have devastated effect particularly on small is-land nation and they bring additional tension to their fragile economies and same is happen-ing in africa with relentless advancement of desertification. We stand in solidarity with our carribean brothers also with african countries., in their demand of transfer of technologies and financial resources, and repariation for the slave trade.

We are against the destabilisation script en-forced against on the progressive government in Latin American and express solidarity with

them.We reaffirm our rejection to the inten-tion to expand the prsence of NATO upto the Russian borders as well as unilateral sanctions imposed. We welcome the nuclear agreement with Islamic republic of Iran which proves en-gagement and negotiation are effective tool.

With the past few weeks we have been moved by the images of waves of immigrant. This is direct result on the detsabilization actions promoted and executed by NATO in the mid-dle east and africa as well as the poverty and under-development prevailing in african conti-nent. The european union should take up full and immediate responsibility of the human cri-sis that it helped to generate.

We acknowledge the effforts have been made throughout these years but not enough is done The UN should be saved from the unilateral-ism and deeply reformed to democratise it and bring it to closer to people .

As comrade Fidel Castro said:The fundamental objective of UN in present century is to save the world from not only war but underdevelopment, hunger, poverty, dis-eases and the destruction to natural resources which is indispensable to human, and it should do it soon before it is too late.

The world can always look at Cuba to raise its honest voice against injustice, inequality, dis-crimination and manipulation and establish-ment of world which focusses on human being dignity and well being.

RaulCastroCuban

Presidentat

70th

UNGeneral

Assembly

www.thesabha.org 2 EDIT 1-15 Oct 2015

Digital Spectacles : Tampon of Dams & Wars “ek samay tha jab jahan highway banta tha wa-han sehar banne lage, aur ab wo smay aa gaya hai, jahan optical fibre rahega wahan shehar banenge”There was a time when city were built where roads passed, now today the time has come where, it will come up where the optical fibre passes through.- PM Modi at FB in USA.There are spectacles and some associated memories. But the power of collective does sediment in our being.

It is also the collective which is shown and transmitted across, an image, a video, a satire or words. The people who control these transmission creates memories of their way of belonging and in the same way hatred. The hatred which breeds violence.

The imagination of mob justice, wars and dams all have their own residual images, with violence at its centre, for food, water and power. From power of watt to power over land to daily life of eating habits.

You never know who is getting upset to remain in pow-er. It can be a lynching mob in Dadri or North-east, an upper caste neighbourhood who controls the menu, or ranbir sena, or corporates who have bought state and media in different layers. But the power must be shown and shall remain.

The classic example is of the refugee crisis in Europe.Europe gets upset when it is about itself. And so does their racist media which triggers the world reactions.

While it remained silent during the poverty and in-equality which it breeded along with NATO forces in north africa, causing displacement.

In India, there are deaths after deaths in this malnour-ished, displaced land of economic refuge, with no me-dia outcry. The econocide leading and paving way to farmer’s suicide and digital growth. If only every bytes of free wi-fi signals can be quantified into drops of blood!! It is not digital death yet. Of media it is, on the road to Digital India, with the charismatic air of royalty of the trips of Prime Minister away from the work of its cabinet minister.

Wars are waged not with another country here, but its own citizen. And one of them is through constructing Big Dams.

The displaced idea of big dams are similar to wars. Millions are displaced. Historically, dams have seen violence equivalent to forced regime change by aerial bombing which leads to chaos in the ground like in Yemen, Gaza and Syria for the sake of democratic gov-ernment. Both of them do not have responsibility to protect civilians but use external forces. The original sin remains : External force to change the course of the state and the river. The river could be brutal like Teesta flowing through Sikkim or a state like Assad’s. It is about power.The power over fertility of acres of land into digital economic growth for the bears can be also witnessed

in the rapid urbanisation of Gujrat leading to protests of landlords like Pattidars.

Even in social movements against dams one could find landlords like Pattidars and Bhumihars owning more than 20 acres of land. They are fighting against the capital interest of big dams and also for their own so-cial interest, where they have power over dalits and adviasis in their village. Land holdings, caste structure remains with one power over another.

Big dams and wars are not the answer to provide pow-er to citizens, neither social movements if they do not question status quo. Recent experiences of enforced political decisions in building a dam or regime change to democratise for greater good has only backfired.

All displaced are grained in food and blood colored wa-ter. Be it Syria or fertile lands of Narmada or Drought prone Marathwada.

Like fertility of ova is regulated naturally by the men-sturation cycle, of the earth is by the flow of river. The blood has flown. Of citizens to claim their rights to be one. The tampon of dam and war cannot soak more. The red fertility. It is beyond digital spectacles of growth.

(While Europe is becoming graveyard for the GMOs, Indian government has cleared 60 GM field trials. Hopefully, the tampon cotton is not heavily pesticide grown Bt.)

Indigenous Buddhist tribes in northeast India are pro-testing government plans to build fifteen new hydro-electric sites along their settlement region. The Monpa tribe, which lives along the Tawang river basin in over 234 scattered settlements in Arunachal Pradesh, fears that the hydroelectric projects will affect their religious sites and monasteries, as well as the region’s springs, and biological diversity, which carry large cultural sig-nificance for the tribe. The region is also at risk of Gla-cial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs), which could have hazardous impacts on hydroelectric projects.

The government is proceeding with the construction of one particularly contentious hydroelectric site: a 780MW station along the Nyamjang Chhu river that threatens a cultural and religiously significant migra-tion site of endangered black-necked cranes. This site will occupy the middle of a 3-km stretch of the Nyam-jang Chhu river, which is partially fed by the region’s glaciers and along which eight black-necked cranes re-side during their winter migration. The Monpa eagerly await the birds’ arrival, and revere their species as the reincarnation of the sixth Dalai Lama.

In late July of 2015, the Save Mon Region Federation sent a letter to the Expert Appraisal Committee of the ministry, accusing NJC Hydropower, the independent company building the Nyanjan Chhu hydroelectric site, of purposely concealing information about the black-necked cranes’ wintering site. Allegedly, the company didn’t cooperate with the study’s researchers until the end of winter, when the black-necked cranes had left their wintering site.

“The hydroelectric projects will totally destroy natural habitats in the region,” Asad Rahmani, scientific ad-viser of the Bombay Natural History Society, told the Guardian. “When planning such projects, we’re not

paying attention to their impact on local culture. The electricity is for people like us in the cities, but all the damage is suffered by the local people.”

In addition to going ahead with the highly disputed site placement, the Dehli government has plans for another fourteen proposed hydroelectric projects in the Tawang region. These projects are part of major government efforts to bring power to the 300 million people living without electricity by 2022. The govern-ment will also increase solar, wind and coal generation in the next seven years.

“We don’t need so many hydel projects to meet the electricity demand of our people,” Save Mon Region Federation’s general secretary, Lobsang Gyatso, told the Times of India. “Small hydro-projects would suf-fice. All these large dams are meant to generate elec-tricity to be sold outside, at the cost of our livelihoods and ecology.”

To express concerns about the new hydroelectric plans, villagers in the Tawang region organized a large rally in December of 2012. The protesters alleged that the government had developed hydroelectric projects with private utility developers without proper consent from the residents in the region. The region currently maintains a ban against public gathering.

In addition, the relatively unexplored, mountainous re-gion in the Eastern Himalayas is especially prone to the risk of Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs), as are most regions of this type, which poses risky problems to hydroelectric development.GLOFs are one of the major hazards of mountainous, glacial regions, especially those susceptible to climate change. Tawang’s lakes and rivers are mainly supplied by snowmelt and the melting glaciers of the Himala-

yas. The lakes, while usually dammed by end-moraines, have a tendency to flash flood, which induces large vol-umes of flowing water, large quantities of sediment runoff, as well as potential flowing boulders and the risk of washing away mountain valleys. GLOFs are of-ten responsible for catastrophic flooding, large losses of property, and human life.

While the region’s dams have a combined capacity of about 2800 MW of power, a recent study stated that GLOFs and their associated risk are likely to have a “di-rect impact” on the commissioned hydropower proj-ects in the region, as well as on the Monpa population living downstream of the glacial lakes and hydroelec-tric projects.

The study aimed to detect potential dangerous lakes to proposed hydroelectric sites, as well as to quantify the volume of water discharge and to predict the hydro-graph, or rate of flow versus time, at the lake sites at risk of GLOFs. The researchers estimated that at peak flow, flooding at one particular dammed lake likely of flooding would take as little as an hour and ten min-utes to reach a downstream hydroelectric site, posing great risk to the site. Despite promises from the gov-ernmental parliament, no public consultation on the Tawang river basin study report has yet been held.

The Monpa protestors remain focused on the threats the hydroelectric sites pose to their cultural and reli-gious traditions. Each of the 234 Tawang settlements along the river will be affected by at least one hydro-power plant, and construction for the sites will de-molish roughly 615 acres of forest. Monpa residents also fear the disruption of sacred pilgrimage sites and springs.(writer is Reserach Assistant at Sabin centre for climate change law, NY, USA.)

Dam threatens Arunachal’s Monpa tribeSIMON HILL

Op-ed

UNIVERSITY www.thesabha.org 3

1-15 Oct 2015

(On the first anniversary of the start of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests, stu-dent organizer Tommy Cheung, a 21 year-old studying at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, reflects on the remarkable events of last year, the role young people played and what the future holds for Hong Kong.) One year on from Occupy HK, it is still hard for me to go back to the protest area in downtown Hong Kong. Our memories, our history are there. But the trajectory of democrat-ic movements elsewhere tells us victory is rarely won in the first battle.

These days, I am more pessimistic about the pow-er of protest alone to bring about change but I remain completely optimistic about the future of Hong Kong. I have faith in Hong Kong’s people if not our leaders. There is a shift in our mind-set, a resolve to preserve the autonomy of our city, to defend our freedoms and the rule of law. Young people feel they need to act to prevent Beijing in-terfering further in Hong Kong’s affairs. There is a resolve to preserve the autonomy of our city, to defend our freedoms and the rule of law. Young people feel they need to act.

While the struggle for genuine democracy in Hong Kong goes on, we can take so-lace that Beijing’s proposal to elect Hong Kong’s leader in 2017 was ultimately defeated when our legislature voted on it in June. This was a victory for everyone that took part in the Umbrella Movement.

The movement was unprece-dented. For the first time tens of thousands of Hong Kong people took part in civil dis-obedience. When students across the city began the week-long class boycott to protest against Beijing’s proposal, I never imagined events would unfold as they did.

There was panic and anger on the first Sunday, [28 September 2014], when police tried to clear the streets by firing dozens of rounds of tear gas. Most of us had never experienced our eyes sting-ing, or knew how to protect ourselves. My instinct was to run.

Since Occupy, many young people no longer trust the police. They are seen as serving the govern-ment rather than the people. We could not believe

they used such force against an overwhelmingly peaceful protest. People used umbrellas to protect themselves from pepper spray and baton charges, and that is how the movement got its name.

The young people taking part were more fearless than the older generation, for whom the blood-shed of 1989 Tiananmen crackdown in Beijing was still vivid. My generation are not haunted by such memories.

Dancing to Beijing’s tuneA few days in, we were all exhausted but we hoped that the huge outpouring of support would force the Hong Kong government to listen to us.

Yet, it was obvious the government was dancing to Beijing’s tune and early on there was a genu-ine fear the People’s Liberation Army would be deployed to clear the streets. This was one of the darkest moments for me. As a student organizer, I felt the weight of responsibility to protect fellow protesters. We had to think of the worst-case sce-nario, numbers of casualties and how to protect people.

One of the challenges of a genuine grassroots movement is there are so many voices and it can be difficult to make decisions or find consensus. Some students wanted to escalate the protest, but others argued we should retreat while the momentum was with us.

When talks with the government took place in late October, they offered no olive branch. People could see the government were just the puppets of Beijing. Looking back, this was the moment we should have escalated the protest.

I felt dejected and frustrated, but we kept looking for ways to inject new energy into the movement. Some of us attempted to travel to Beijing to try and meet the real decision-makers. We knew we would be prevented from leaving Hong Kong Air-port but it was important that we tried.

Final daysNovember and December were extremely difficult, as the protest dragged on with no breakthrough.

There were many opinions inside the movement as to what our next move should be. The wider support from Hong Kong people appeared to be dissipating.

My biggest regret is the night of Sunday 30 No-

vember, when some protesters wanted to occupy government buildings, in an effort to regain mo-mentum. We failed to convince enough people to join the action, leaving those who took part to face police beatings. If I could change one night it would be that.

When police finally cleared the main protest site on 11 December it was hard to watch them arrest my friends. A year on, most still have charges hanging over them.

Moving forwardThe biggest lesson I learnt from Occupy is the

need to play the long game. We need to look past the 2017 election and a narrow focus on reforming the Basic Law [Hong Kong’s mini-constitution]. We need to gain the support of all parts of Hong Kong society - protest is not the only way to do this.

The genuine participation of young people is crucial to achieving this. We are confident about our identity, our values and our place in the world. We look beyond Beijing.

We have instilled a belief in liberal values and de-mocracy in the next generation. Beijing can never take that away.

We must link up with other social movements across the world. In the face of a backlash from authorities in many parts of Asia and the wider world, young people are leading the way in bring-ing about social change. We only have to look to our peers in Taiwan, Japan, and Malaysia, to see this.

Remembering Occupy Hong Kong – reflections of a student protest organizer in Umbrella Movement

Tommy Cheung

The movement was unprecedented. For the first time tens of thousands of Hong Kong people took part in civil disobedi-

ence. When students across the city began the week-long class boycott to protest against Beijing’s proposal...

We have instilled a belief in liberal values and de-mocracy in the next generation. Beijing can never take that away...

We must link up with other social movements across the world. In the face of a backlash from authorities in many parts of Asia and the wider world, young people are leading the way in bringing about social change. We only have to look to our peers in Taiwan, Japan, and Malaysia, to see this.

PYJAMA NAREY www.thesabha.org 4

1-15 Oct 2015

A look at their salary slip will tell a bit of their plight. A worker’s basic pay is Rs 82.63 ($ 1.5) per day, with other allowances total daily wage is 250 ($4). That is, if they work 10 hours day, if they are late for work, they won’t allowed to work for the day, or if they leave early due to some illness or other necessities, hourly wages would be cut from this amount. According to labour laws, they need to pluck only 20 kilograms of tea leaves a day. But they work over time, daily, every day of the week, from 6 AM in the morning to 6 PM in the evening. However hard they work, they will be able to make Rs 300-350 per day. If they pluck up to 60 kg more than the legally required 20 kg, they will get Rs 36, if they pluck 100 kg a day, they will earn an over time of Rs 80 ($1.40). As food benefit, for three months, the company provides 75 kg of rice to each family. For this Rs 750 is cut from the salary each month. When the total price is calculated, it is just about the market price and way more than the rice distributed by the government through public distri-bution system. Yearly, Rs 200 compulsorily and a voluntary wage of one day have to be paid to the union fund for representing the workers.

The houses they live are colonial style slave dwelling places. It has a kitchen and a one room which acts as living cum bedroom. A family of seven or eight people sleep in this one room. Even when a son or daughter is married, they sleep in the same room with their parents and siblings. The roof of most of these houses are covered with Asbestos, a carcinogenic material. International labour organization has passed “Asbestos Convention, 1986” which has been ratified by 35 countries. U.S. Senate passed Ban Asbestos in America Act on October 04, 2007 unanimously. As-bestos is banned in Europe since 1 January 2005.

In fact, majority of the workers were brought from Tamil Nadu in colonial times as slaves, by the British when these hills were turned into tea plantations. Their living conditions or working condi-tions have not changed much since then. Swami Vel a retired supervisor, said with guilt in his eyes, “now a Kankani is called a supervisor. But the work we do has not changed. We force them to pluck faster and faster. There are no such things as work breaks, even when they are having tea, they will be plucking tea leaves with the other hand. Women are not allowed take a break to urinate.” This slave labour is taking a toll on the health of many of the woman workers. Constant leaning over the tea bushes to pluck the leaves have damaged the uteruses of many women workers and have been surgically re-moved, testified many strikers we talked to. Although, KDHP runs a general hospital in Munnar, the workers can avail only three days of free in patient treatment in the hospitals.

As for the men workers, the constant usage of pesti-cides like Roundup is causing severe health hazards. World Health Organization in March termed Round-up as “probably carcinogenic”. The Forbes Magazine reported that “The decision was laid out in a new analysis in The Lancet Oncology, and published on the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) website. The analysis is based on the existing research on the chemical exposure in people and lab animals. “ Pesticide spraying is mostly done by male workers. One worker, who wanted to remain unnamed said that a pesticide that is regularly used (he couldn’t specify the name of the pesticide) is mixed with oil

and sprayed so that it sticks to the tea leaves. He says that it is so poisonous that he becomes giddy by 10 AM in the morning after two hours of spraying. He showed us the burnt skin on his face developed from the fumes of this pesticide. Pesticides are heavily used in tea gardens, testified this employee. When it rains, these pesticides are washed downstream, and he said the drinking water of cities like Kochi (Cochin) is pol-luted with these poisons.

Coming back to the main demands of the strikers, the bonus issue is a tricky one. Technically, the workers are touted to be the owners of the estate. It was in 2005 that Tata Tea Ltd, then owners of KDH decided to form as reported by Business standard on March 19, 2005, “17 of its leased tea estates to a separate company called Kannan Devan Hills Plantation Ltd (KDHP), which will be owned by the employees of the tea estates.” Tata Tea Ltd which later became Tata Global Beverages Ltd. holds 28.52% of share. Another 8.95 % share is parked

at KDHP Welfare Trust. Workers are said to hold about 60 % of share of this company. V. Mariyappan, CITU (a trade union affiliated to Communits Party of India, Marxist, CPI (M)) area president says that the actual decision making power is still wrest with TATA em-ployees. “There are two representatives of workers in the director board, but they don’t know what’s really happening. They just come for the board meeting and drink tea and leave,” says Mariyappan.

Kannan Devan Hills in Devikulam Taluk comprising about 1,36,600 acres of land , was given on lease on 11 July 1877 by the Poonjar Royal family to John Daniel Munroeto during the British Raj for an annual lease rent of Rs. 3,000 and a security deposit of Rs. 5,000. In

1964, the Tata Group entered into collaboration with Finlay which resulted in the formation of the Tata-Fin-lay Group. Although the lands and plantations were later resumed by the Government of Kerala by the KANNAN DEVAN HILLS (RESUMPTION OF LANDS) ACT, 1971., the government of Kerala is only a lessor and the lease amount still stays the same. Tata Tea Ltd. was formed in 1983. After forming KDHP giving ‘own-ership’ of the company to its employees, TATA now controls over a million acres of government land for next to nothing! There are allegations that TATA has encroached upon thousands of acres of government and forest land. V.S Achuthananthan of CPI (M) had vowed to get back all the encroached lands from TATA when he was the Chief Minister of Kerala. He couldn’t take back an inch of the land occupied by TATA.

As we enter Munnar, the first sign we see is a TATA board, “Trespassers will be prosecuted”. Tata is be-having like Munnar is their private property, although they are only holders of government land, that too for

a paltry sum. There were beautiful places in Munnar we used to go, sit and relax. They were common places. Now these placed have been walled off by TATA and baton wielding security guards patrol the area. As they say, any trespassers will be prosecuted or would get a mouthful from the TATA security guard for encroach-ing upon their ‘private’ property. As a result, I don’t go to Munnar anymore, except for exceptional cases like this.

Now the question arises, where have the Trade Unions who should be protecting the workers’ right from the Corporate honchos gone? The workers allege that the trade unions took ‘three suit cases’ from the Manage-ment and betrayed them. They also released a list of 150 trade union leaders who received houses from KDHP Management. This list includes present MLA from the area S.Rajendran, former MLAs A.K Mani and Sundara Manikyam, AITUC leader C.A Kurian, G. Muniyandi of INTUC. To add insult to injury S.Ra-

jendran M.L.A reportedly said that Tamil terrorist groups are behind the workers’ agitation. On Friday, he was chased away by the striking workers when he tried to meet them. He jumped into a police vehicle and escaped. To assuage the workers’ anger, S.

Rajendran started a parallel hunger strike the next day asking the management to resolve the issue immedi-ately. It is to be noted that no leaders, from the other two recognized unions, The Communist Party of India (CPI) affiliated AITUC, which is the leading union in the sector, and Congress affiliated INTUC so far have met the striking workers.

Revathy a worker from Laxmy Estate proudly raises her identity card and says,” let the whole world see that we are not terrorists. We are only fighting for our rights.”

While talking the CITU leaders they say that their leaders have not accepted any largesse from the com-

pany management. But they concede that the other two union leaders have accepted houses from the company management. V. Mariyappan, CITU Area president said that the unions held three rounds of talks with the management to increase the bonus. The management didn’t relent. He says that all three unions have approached the High Court of Kerala to intervene in this issue.

Kanan Devan Hills and Plantations Private Limited said in a press release that any fur-

ther changes in the salary and bonus can be decided only after the meeting of the management board. “The company is legally bound to give 8.33 per cent of the salary as bonus. However, we are now giving 10 per cent. Any further change in that can be decided only after convening the board meeting,” company manag-ing director Abraham Mathew said.

Swami Vel the former Kankani (Supervisor) remem-bers the shooting down of two tea plantation employ-ees of Pasumala estate in 1952. That strike was for the rightful rice, the employees were denied by the man-agement. He fears that this strike too may have the similar fate unless the issue is not resolved at the earli-est. The government, the KDHP management, and the trade union leaders have the responsibility to resolve the crisis and to ensure that the workers get justice. If that doesn’t happen, I fear, this ‘Green Blood’ revolu-tion may turn Red. When you drink your morning tea tomorrow, look closely whether it has turned green, red or plain toxic.

Revathy a worker from Laxmy Estate proudly rais-es her identity card and says,” let the whole world see that we are not terrorists. We are only fighting for our rights.”

TATA now controls over a million acres of govern-ment land for next to nothing! There are allegations that TATA has encroached upon thousands of acres of government and forest land. V.S Achuthananthan of CPI (M) had vowed to get back all the encroached lands from TATA when he was the Chief Minister of Kerala. He couldn’t take back an inch of the land oc-cupied by TATA.

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DISPLACEMENT www.thesabha.org 5

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“There has been seepage in my farm for 5 years now, and I have lost my crops, my only source of livelihood. Whenever we approach NVDA, they snub us, they do not even entertain our complaints. Whom should we go to for all the destruction these half built canals have caused? How can we prevent these negative impacts? If not these Babus in the cars then who? ”

Devkaur lashed out at the officials when they refused to come out of their cars and visit her farm.

ON 8th September villagers of Mundla (a village, 25 km from Indore) sat and protested in front of the cars by blocking the way of the Expert Committee which was appointed by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests, to monitor the environmental aspects of the Indira Sagar (ISP) and Omkareshwar (OSP) canals.

Omkareshwar and IndraSagar are both canal projects that are part of a larger multipurpose dam project constructed across river Narmada for hydro-power and storage for irrigation in Madhya Pradesh.Togeth-er, they cover land of Mandhata, Kasrawad, Barwaha, Maheshwar, Manawar, Kukshiandareas of Khandwa, Khargone and Dhar Districts, covering approximately 1100 villages.

What were the villagers requesting? Why did they resort to blocking the way of of-ficials?

The villagers of Mundla, like those of 15-20 other villages were merely demanding that the members of the expert committee which had been appointed to monitor the environmental impacts of the canals, visit their farms and village and view for them-selves the mayhem that the canals (minor canals) had caused in their lives.

Local farmers and activists of Narmada BachaoAndolan had done a sample survey in about 10 villages in 2013, and the cumulative loss was valued at Rs. 6 crores in actual crop losses.

Currently 1100 villages are claimed to be benefited by both the canals (since the area is massive, giving a number is difficult). Many more villages are likely to suffer in the coming years as very little Command Area Development works have been taken up in the area where the canal excava-tion is undertaken.

Crop loss is an immediate impact, but over a period of time through multiple water-logging, soil quality of the land also gets affected, top soil gets eroded. Even by a conservative estimate many hundreds of acres of land has suffered seepage.

In pursuance of the directions of the Ministry of En-vironment and Forest, the Expert Committee has thus far, completed 6 field visits and submitted reports on the status of Command Area Development works and canal construction in the context of the IndraSagar-Project and OmkareshwarProjects.

Now, what the committee will write or will not write in its report that is due before the 18th of Septem-beris another matter altogether, what needs attention at this point is the way this 7th‘monitoring’ visit was

conducted. The expert committee seemed to be led by the Narmada Valley Development Authority (NVDA). The NVDA was formed in 1985 by the government of Madhya Pradesh, to oversee all major development projects in the Narmada Basin and to ensures that proper rehabilitation is provided to the displaced, and the negative impacts on environment are minimized by taking appropriate measures.

The expert committee with Chairperson Dr. B.P. Das, Hydrologist; Mr. B.B. Barman, Director, MoEF and Mr. Lakhwinder Singh, Member-Secretary & Region-al Director, MoEF, Bhopal ,visited the canal areas on 7th and 8th September, 2015 in 6-7 cars. Numerous farmers from the affected regions and activists of Nar-mada BachaoAndolan followed or rather chased the teams in their cars as they went along the canal route to inspect the work, since neither the villagers nor the village panchayats knew about the visit. The farmers also tried their best to make sure that the Committee which has a primary mandate to investigate the “envi-ronmental violations” does not spend time only on the engineering aspects of the irrigation projects.

On being asked about the schedule of the two days, the NVDA very righteously proclaimed that it was a ‘spontaneous visit’, with no pre-decided schedule, or none that they were willing to share.

The spontaneity was visible in the ‘pandals’ that had been erected at a few pre-decided sites, in the mithai-distribution and in sapling-plantation activi-ties.

Distraught farmers, wanted the committee to see the condition of their farms, the excessive silt collection and cracks in the canals. They wanted the committee to acknowledge the faulty construction and a dialogue for compensation. Many farmers who came with pho-tographs and evidence of flooding which the canals had caused in the earlier (monsoon) seasons for the Expert committee to view, were snubbed by the NVDA officials “We are here today to inspect, and don’t see any flooding, how should we believe you ?”

The so-called Action Taken Report (ATR) by the NVDA on the 6th Monitoring Report of the Expert Commit-tee did not respond to the major issues / violations pointed out by the Committee itself in the previous reports including inadequate, poor quality canal con-struction and on-farm development (ODF) as well as command area development (CAD) works leading to canal breaches, seepage and water logging. All these

have caused sever crop losses to the farmers worth lakhs of rupees for the past few years.

While on the one hand, officials tried every possible way to mislead the Committee, by taking longer routes, skipping key problematic areas, only visiting he ‘dec-orated’ spots on the canal, on the other, many farm-ers who followed the Committee at every spot, tried their best to make sure that the Committee which has a primary mandate to investigate the “environmental violations” does not spend time only on the engineer-ing aspects of the irrigation projects. NVDA officials also tried to intimidate any farmer whose opinion di-gressed from theirs.

The Committee visited a few canal sites covered by the Omkareshwar Project on the first day. The first part of the day was spent at the Phase-I areas such as Omati Distributary, Satajana andBediya distributary. As the Committee moved further to Mogava, Londhi, Barlai, Palsudthe problems of cracks alongside the canals, incomplete lining, and broken siphons, cropped up where farmers complained of water logging.

Poor siphoning had led to deposits of huge silt in the canal tracks, which was evident on the first day itself. Farmers informed the Committee that lining from Village Nazarpur (Tehsil Maheshwar) to Village Badvi (Maheshwar) upto end of Phase II of OSP is pending over a stretch of 50 kms. Much work of sub-minors and field chan-nels is also yet to be done here.

While NVDA made tall claims of “newer areas under irrigation”, local farmers and activists of NBA pointed out that much of the sub-minor and field channels work remained and NVDA cannot claim comple-tion of Phase-wise work without this. This was also exposed by the hundreds of pri-

vate pipelines that the Committee itself saw all along the main canal. NBA demanded that phase-wise infor-mation should be sought from engineers of the actual area under irrigation through direct lifting from canals and through surface / canal irrigation.

In Phase-III, despite the Committee’s assurance that it would pass through the main canal, officials led to the Committee through the main highway, leaving aside the canal area. Yet again, adivasi women and men and other farmers stopped the Committee at the Khadkal Bridge and protested in front of the Committee’s ve-hicles.

The villagers wanted to to be heard, and the peaceful dharna ultimately led the committee to relent and go back to the spot at Mundla. Here, they say that despite 7 years of muck depositions on the un-acquired farm of BabuBau, neither compensation had been paid, nor any pathway had been or was planned to be construct-ed in his field.

The only reward he and his family members got from NVDA has been a few weeks of jail and endless court dates now.(writer is a Social researcher and pho-to-journalist with a post graduate degree from TISS, currently a consultant with So-ciety for Rural Urban and Tribal Initiative.)

CHASING THE EXPERT COMMITTE ALONG NARMADA CANAL Ananya Gaur

The NVDA was formed in 1985 by the government of Madhya Pradesh, to over-see all major development projects in the Narmada Basin and to ensures that proper rehabilitation is provided to the displaced, and the negative impacts on environment are minimized by taking appropriate mea-sures.

www.thesabha.org 61-15 Oct 2015INDIA

Sena, Cobrapost and the ‘eerie’ Political Silence in Bihar

In these days of high profile political campaigning and mud slinging in Bihar, it is ironic how no political party, worth its salt, has raised any concern on the blatant and unapologetic confessions made by members of the Ranveer Sena (“Sena”) in the videos released by Cobra-post. Whilst popular opinion in urban elite circles and social media has already discredited the revelations as ‘politically motivated’, the eerie political silence that exists around the issue, clearly indicates the discom-fort of all political leaders, some of whom have posed as messiahs of the dalits, in addressing issues of dalit assertion of rights.

To label caste massacres carried out by the Sena as a mere attempt to murder individuals for revenge would be a huge understatement of its killings. Revisiting nar-ratives from the scene of occurrence of the massacres, one realizes that the assaults by the Sena were not re-sults of clashes between warring groups in the heat of the moment. On the contrary these massacres were orchestrated with impeccable cold blooded planning to ensure maximum damage.

In reporting the details of one of such massacres, the Frontline in its coverage of the Bathani Tola massacre wrote :

“….The enormity of the caste massacre had horrified the nation and the international community. The kill-ings went on for more than two hours from 2 p.m. on that day. There were three police pickets within a range of one kilometre, including one in the village it-self, but no action was taken to prevent the crime. An 18-year-old woman was gang-raped. The breasts of a 25-year-old woman were chopped off before she was killed. A nine-month-old child was tossed in the air and chopped into two as she fell to the ground. A preg-nant woman’s womb was slashed open and the foetus impaled on the sword “Similarly, in Lakshmanpur Bathe, the list of the dead included 27 women and 10 children, the youngest victim being a one year old. The assailants were on a spree of indis-criminate shooting, thereby killing every person they found in the habitation, including people were killed, eight were pregnant whilst the bodies of five women were found in positions which indicated rape and three women had their breasts mutilated.

In carrying out these massacres, the Sena achieved it objective of creating everlasting images of violence which will remain etched with the survivors of the massacre and their communities for a lifetime. Given the gory visuals witnessed by the survivors, it is likely that the trauma of the massacre coupled with the deep vulnerabilities of the victims’ communities will even affect the confidence of their future generations specif-ically in their dealings with the dominant castes. Thus, these massacres served the dual purpose for the Sena, that of establishing the hegemony of the upper castes (primarily Rajputs and Bhumihars) unconditionally in the agrarian belts and of creating fear so intense that the dalit communities shudder to question the legiti-macy of this hegemony for generations to come.The Sena justified the series of massacres carried out by it as a ‘desperate attempt’ by helpless landlords to protect their life and property from the brewing naxal-ism in Bihar. A strong argument that emerged stressed

that given the inefficiency of the police, the complete breakdown of law in the state – the prevailing ‘jungle raj’ and the anti upper caste approach of the then State Government, rising up in arms against the ‘naxalites’ was the sole alternative that remained before them to defend their life, land and honour.

Whilst the existence of the naxalite movement in the 90’s cannot be denied, there has hardly been any piece of evidence linking the victims of the massacres by the Sena to any specific naxalite activity. Far from being underground naxalites, majority of the victims were women and children residing within the village with their families. Infact in most cases they were also un-der the employment of the same landlords who perpe-trated the killings of their family members. The criti-cal fact to be stressed here is that the chosen sites of the Sena’s various attacks were located in and around hamlets where landless peasants working in the fields (and it is no co incidence that most of them were dal-its) of the landlords had tried to assert their basic po-litical and economic rights. These assertions on most occasions could have been demands as fundamental as demand for minimum wages for work, release from bonded labour, access to common property in village or freedom to exercise voting rights in parliamentary/legislative/ panchayat elections. Any such political as-sertion or refusal to submit to the existing hegemony by a dalit was a given assumption of his/her affiliation with the naxalite groups. It was a propaganda of this assumption, that facilitated the Sena’s agenda of tar-geting any and all peasants specifically dalits and seek-

ing credibility and sympathy for its intentions.

In the aftermath of the massacre, the support received from the state and its agencies were limited to ex-gra-tia payments from the state governments and employ-ment for one member of the victim‘s family. Even in terms of subsequent affirmative action or special at-tention to be given to affected villages, the state has failed to take any major steps. What is even more hard hitting is that members off victims’ families and other members of the community have had to return back to employment under the landlords’ (some of whom were directly involved in the massacres), due to lack of alternate employment

The police and the prosecution have been accused of doing a slip shod investigation both by the courts and the witnesses, thereby leaving gaps within the evidence for the benefit of the defence arguments. The judiciary on the other hand has failed to balance the procedural need to establish the normative reality before law with the quest for establishing the truth and doing complete justice.

Consequently, all Sena members who were accused in the cases of Bathe, Bathani Tola, Miyanpur and Nagari

Bazaar massacres have been acquitted by the Patna High Court. Similarly, all accused in the Shankarbigha case have been acquitted by the trial court at Arwal. This means that despite presence of numerous eye witness accounts, the Criminal Justice System func-tional in the state has failed to hold even one person conclusively responsible for the deaths of more than 145 dalits, killed in the above massacres cumulatively. Whilst appeals before higher courts are pending in the above cases, the current judicial trend leaves little hope of justice within these proceedings.

For the survivors, the above acquittals serve as a loud reminder of the ineffectiveness of systemic procedures in providing justice against oppression from the dom-inant castes. The cinematograph of bloodbath created by the Sena, serves as a huge deterrent against any de-mand for enforcement of rights. With these massacres, the Sena has successfully shown to the Dalits peasants, the probable consequence of their activism and awak-ening.

In a state comprising of 16 % of Dalit population and 17% EBCs, the promises in exchange for dalit votes even today are limited to announcements of welfare schemes and incentives for their ‘upliftment’. A right based approach for empowering these marginalized sections does not even surface in mainstream political discussions, party agendas and election manifestos.

Massacres like the ones carried out by Sena and similar upper caste militia have occurred in the state from the

early 70s. Perpetrators of these mas-sacres have obtained patronage from different political parties at different times. State collusion with perpetra-tors of dalit massacres has remained an open truth, which no political par-ty in power has either questioned or denied this involvement. The Amir Das Commission set which was set up to examine the political connections of Sena listed various names of poli-ticians providing support to the Sena.

The links that this Commission investigated cut across party lines, and included patronage networks deep within the BJP, the RJD, JD(U) and the Congress. Infact what needs to be understood is that most mainstream political parties act together as a political class provid-ing patronage to the dominant castes.

Whilst parties in the likes of the CPI-ML have been consistently working towards providing support to vic-tims of massacres on a case to case basis, their ability to bring any justice or create systems for ensuring a deterrent against future attacks remains very low due ttheir limited political outreach.

Given the said background, it would infact be desir-able that the revelations by Cobrapost live up to the allegations of being ‘politically motivated’. That some political party wakes up with the conscience to address the injustices which have gone unaddressed. And that the debate around the political and economic identity of dalits in Bihar finally gains some momentum even if it is at the cost of allowing the opportunist ambitions of a given party.(writer is a Program Officer in Access to Jus-tice Program at TISS, Mumbai and currently working on custodial death)

Medha Deo

Massacres like the ones carried out by Sena and similar up-per caste militia have occurred in the state from the early 70s. Perpetrators of these massacres have obtained patron-age from different political parties at different times. State collusion with perpetrators of dalit massacres has remained an open truth, which no political party in power has either questioned or denied this involvement.

www.thesabha.org 71-15 Oct 2015WORLD

Landfill protests in BeirutA widely used symbol of protests in the city of Beirut has been the altered flag of Lebanon with a trash bag taking place of the iconic cedar tree. Though, the cit-izens confess that it is generating negative publicity but they want to do anything and everything to raise awareness among fellow citizens and instil conscious-ness among the already paralysed polity of the country. There have been widespread protests across the city against inability of the government to provide a solu-tion to the disposal of city’s garbage.

ProblemNaameh or Naimeh, a town in the mountains of Beirut, was bearing dumping of the trash from whole of cen-tral Lebanon for many years – well beyond the planned closure date. Trash reached the brim of the landfill in the summer of 2014. The nearby residents started complaining of the foul smell and other health problems. Serious-ness of the harm can be adjudged by the tweet of Imad Bazzi, a citizen of Naameh, who says, “We closed all doors & windows with wet blankets, the smell and smoke are unbearable! My mom is suffocating #Beirut #sukleen”; while Halabi told a news agency that they can’t open their windows because of the gases coming off the dump, and he has invited ministers to come to his place to see if they can tolerate it.” Angry residents took to streets to register their protest against this practice. Gov-ernment took notice and promised to find an alternative solution soon. But no such alternative materialised and garbage was still being dumped in the Naameh landfill. Concerned about their health and fed-up of awaiting government’s solution for a year, citizens took it on themselves to solve the issue. In July 2015, as the first step, they again blocked the entry to the landfill and refused to let any other trash bag to get dumped. This led to the present waste disposal crisis in the country.

EffectThe landfill with the capacity to receive 2 mn tonnes of rubbish only for few years, is now has a mountain of over 15 mn tonnes of garbage. As a result of this, on one hand government dumped the rubbish on the popular Mediterranean coast; on the other hand citing the reason of having no place to dispose the garbage, Sukleen the main waste management company in Leb-anon stopped working and collecting waste from the households. Sukleen’s contract has also expired this year, and there has been no intimation from govern-ment about its renewal.

This has created havoc and serious health hazard in the city with piles of garbage lying on streets, grounds, roads and other public open spaces. Citizens are find-ing their own way out to dispose of the waste. Some are setting fire to the collected trash, filling up the area with dangerous smoke, local businesses are hiring pri-vate service providers to clean the street. But even the cleaners are not able to take the fumes igniting from the garbage piles. The fire also had a damaging effect on the telephone and internet services leaving 600 subscribers knocked out. Residents of city are expressing their outrage by com-

ing together in mass protests to register their legiti-mate grievance. Post government’s failed efforts to reach a consensus with respect to tenders from waste management companies, angry mobs dumped garbage outside country’s environment minister, and further demanded his resignation. As a result of excessive po-lice force to counter even the peaceful protests, there have been many clashes between the public and the police. ‘You Stink’ campaign has also emerged which is taking lead in mass mobilising and is pushing for sustainable solution to the city’s waste management problem and nationwide recycling practices.

There has been attempts to divert the effect of the momentum gained by this citizens’ mass movement

since July. On one hand, Sukleen is being accused of using this crisis to bargain for a favourable contract from government, on the other – a section within the protestors is accusing government of infiltrating their movement by sending in ‘bad elements’ causing vio-lence during the protests.

Government’s ‘Plan’Under pressure from the mass up surging and terror of health hazard due to open dumping of garbage on the street, Cabinet held a meeting in September. While the Lebanese police beat the citizens protesting in public with blubs, sticks, and arrested them, Government af-ter rounds of meeting announced their ‘plan’ to resolve the crisis. Apart from immediate cleaning up of the streets and disposing the garbage to unnamed sites, government has again decided to reopen the Naameh landfill, apart from two other new landfill sites for a year, for a week to bargain time to get in place other solutions. At policy level, government resolved to allo-cate funds to local municipalities to solve such issues at their level – creating decentralisation of waste man-agement. Plans also included a waste treatment plant in southern Sidon.

The activists and citizens have resumed their mass struggle as they are not happy with such announce-ments. Experts had called for reduction, segregation with better home sorting of trash and recycling of pub-lic waste so that organic matter could be created which

constitutes 50% of the garbage.

Similar voices in Bengaluru and Mumbai, among other cities in India“Even our drinking water has been polluted, as is the air we breathe. We don’t need assurances. We only need permanent solutions.”

The above statement might appear to be a ditto of pro-testers in Beirut, but the story of waste management is similar in Bengaluru as well. Capacity of the landfill site to take waste has long been exhausted, still there have been no plans to manage the future waste. Piles and piles of waste is continuously being disposed at the same site. It is shocking to note that around 250-

300 trucks are dumping garbage in a day. Villagers are holding widespread protests in the city and have already blocked the road leading to Dabaspet landfill area. They camped on the road for two days, resulting in long que of trucks ready to dump the un-processed waste generating by the nearby manufacturing companies.

Mumbai on the other hand can be easily called the city of garbage! The three dump-ing grounds – Deonar, Mulund and Kan-jurmarg - have such huge piles of garbage that the area in total would be largest in the world. Apart from contaminating the air, soil and water for the localities, the al-ready full landfills have become a crisis for the city generating life-threatening diseases. In addition, regular breaking of huge fires in the dumping ground - fuming poison-ous gases and smog causing severe health hazards. According to the Municipal Solid Waste rules of 2000, waste has to be seg-regated in to wet, dry and recyclable. But nothing of this sort can be seen in practice.

Neither the citizens are aware nor has the government put in place the system to collect segregated waste in all the wards. Though, separate dustbins are in place at some public places and once in a blue moon trucks are sent to collect the segregated waste but these are min-ion steps as compared to the tonnes of dumping that is carried in a day. Not to mention the illegal dumping of biomedical waste which aggravates the health hazards.

While the government on the name of solution to this crisis is trying to shift the burden to NGOs – to recycle the waste, public in Kanjurmarg along with local MLA is demanding area wise dumping of garbage in the city of Mumbai. They are not ready to anymore bear the stink of the whole of Mumbai.

While the protests in Lebanon to resolves the waste management crisis has now transformed into a total anti-government stand taking in view the failure of government to provide basic services to its citizens, the metropolitan cities in India are yet awaiting a mass movement perhaps to change the fate of garbage dis-posal. From mass awareness of gravity of the issue, push for waste management beginning from each household itself, to government’s strict efforts to put in place systems to follow recycling of waste: Indian cities need total and urgent revival.

(writer is a student of M.A in social work in criminology and justice in TISS, Mumbai)

Angry residents took to streets to register their protest against this practice. Government took notice and promised to find an alternative solu-tion soon. But no such alternative materialised and garbage was still being dumped in the Naameh landfill. Concerned about their health and fed-up of awaiting government’s solution for a year, citizens took it on themselves to solve the issue..

...While the protests in Lebanon to resolves the waste management crisis has now transformed into a total anti-government stand taking in view the failure of government to provide basic services to its citizens, the metropolitan cities in India are yet awaiting a mass movement per-haps to change the fate of garbage disposal.

Baljeet Kaur

www.thesabha.org 8

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Contact: 8454073328; abhishek@thesabha.org ; Website: http://www.thesabha.org

1-15 Oct 2015LEGAL

MOB JUSTICE in NORTH EAST INDIA

Mob justice refers to putting a person to death, eviction of a person and destruction of one’s property or undressing and beating suspected criminals without following the law. This denies the accused person a right to a fair hearing before a competent court and in many cases, a right to life. It is a situation where the public in the most haphazard way decides to unleash group action on alleged criminals. The practice is so rampant and it is a violation of human rights. It is carried out by men and women in groups and there is a tendency for perpetrators to do it in groups as opposed to individual action. In terms of gen-der, more men tend to participate in the act than women.

One of the foundations of an open and democratic society is access to justice and legal remedies - an ideal situation that incidences of mob jus-tice unfortunately render impotent. This is essentially because access to justice and legal remedy is an essen-tial precondition for the protection of human rights when they have been violated or if they are under threat of being violated. It is thus, the basis for the establishment and sustenance of the rule of law. Access to jus-tice is therefore a fundamental right that has to be enjoyed absolutely by everyone. What the ac-cess to justice right entails is that every person should have access to competent courts of law or any other institution such as the National Human Rights Commission, which have got power to ad-minister justice.

The practice of Mob justice contin-ues to attract a lot of attention glob-ally particularly in developing coun-tries in the face of global efforts to promote human rights. Mob justice or “instant justice” is when usual people take the law into their own hands and aggressively carry judg-ment and punishment on a suspect-ed criminal. The mob becomes the executor of the law as this act is a direct and undeniable violation of human rights, taking illegal actions without fol-lowing the due process and in so doing putting the rest of the public at threat alike. Human Rights are lawfully guaranteed by human rights law, pro-tecting individuals and groups against actions that interfere with fundamental freedoms and human dignity. Mob justice explicitly violates two articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—the right to a fair trial (Article 10) and the right to stand innocent of a crime before being proved guilty (Article 11) and violate article 21 of India’s constitution dealing with the right to life. The in-

crease of mob justice continues to take over our airwaves and make newsworthy headlines. This illegal chain of actions has engrossed and engaged various reactions from security agencies, human rights bodied and activists, renowned radio com-mentators, criminologists, clergy, traditional rul-ers and a section of general populace.

Today Northeast is reeling in the grip of a culture of mob violence and vigilante justice, where the local populace are so eager to deliver their brand of justice like beaten to death, tonsuring or public humiliation of any person who they considered guilty and demolition of the houses of such per-

sons. In North East India, nowadays, every single day, we often hear news items from both electron-ic and print media new narrating and showing the mayhem of mob justice. Scarcely a day comes by with no individual hearing, reading or encoun-tering the incapacitating and gruesome scenes of mob justice in our various communities. Recent-ly in a shocking incident of mob justice, a 1,500 strong crowd broke into a jail in Dimapur district

in Nagaland in North East India, and lynched a man accused of raping a girl. The man, identified as 35-year-old Syed Farid Khan, was in custody af-ter being arrested on charges of sexually assault-ing a girl who was his neighbour multiple times.

Mob justice merely takes time for mob to attack suddenly on an alleged crime suspect and the mob makes a decision whether or not to give out justice in their individuals’ illegal line of attack. It more often than not takes the form of base-less, unfounded and unlawful brutality. Mob jus-tice usually occurs very fast, unpredictably and dangerously. Mob justice takes numerous forms

and shapes: spanking suspected robbers to death; slashing suspected criminals; stripping alleged criminals bare and pounding them with blocks, firewood and iron rods till they die; subjecting alleged criminals to embarrassing and undigni-fied treatments and occasionally setting them in flames. Some sufferers have by a hair’s breadth escaped the various punishment connected to mob justice and at the same time as others have been unlucky and ill-fated to stay alive to pres-ent description of the tribulation of individual encounters.

The fact that mob justice is so rarely investigated, let alone punished, amounts to an implicit acceptance of this practice by state authorities. The state has an obligation under national and inter-national law to provide security for all its citizens, including those who are suspected of crimes.

Mob justice creates a series of vio-lence, creates a tradition of fear, and discards individual responsibility

and liability for brutal acts that are committed and perpetuated in the name of ensuring jus-tice. In spite of all the constitutional provisions, international laws and the independent judiciary arm of government in India that offer satisfactory and sufficient guarantee and protection of each person, from brutality and stopping people from involving themselves in mob justice, this illegal practice is done always.

Currently, we reside in a democrat-ic country founded and established on the rule of law and the principles of human dignity and the advance-ment of human rights and freedoms. Despite the open chorus of disap-proval against the act of mob justice to alleged criminals, the practice is increasing every day. Therefore, this culture of lawlessness, violence and

impunity noticeably, has the probable for need-less devastation of properties and loss of blame-less lives. It is thorny to come to terms with why; in this modern and democratic dispensation in-habitants resort to mob justice to mete out jus-tice in North East India.

(writer is currently one of the fifteen criminology justice fellow in TISS, Mum-bai. This fellowship explores the justice system in India and in this case, mob justice.)

Today Northeast is reeling in the grip of a culture of mob violence and vigilante justice, where the local populace are so eager to deliver their brand of justice like beaten to death, tonsuring or public humiliation of any person who they considered guilty and demolition of the houses

of such persons.

The fact that mob justice is so rarely investigat-ed, let alone punished, amounts to an implicit ac-ceptance of this practice by state authorities. The state has an obligation under national and in-ternational law to provide security for all its citi-zens,including those who are suspected of crimes.

DAMUDOR ARAMBAM