Dear Sukla�
I have actually been saying for a long time that there is no one to one connection between sj and tata/essar or the mining., but a general one but then have been accused of not having the right line, and recognising the connection.�
extracting a section from a paper in wrote in 2007
Blood mining
While one history of the Salwa Judum places it within the context of a standard counter-insurgency tactic directed against communist guerillas, the version lately preferred by the Maoists and a number of human rights activists is that the Salwa Judum is part of a �ground clearing exercise� for industry and mining.[1] The Dandakaranya region, and Dantewada district in particular, are said to have 18% of India�s iron ore deposits, along with large reserves of graphite ore, limestone, uranium and other minerals. They point to the coincidence that the Chhattisgarh government signed an agreement with both the Tata and Essar groups to invest in steel plants in Bastar and Dantewada on the same day that Salwa Judum started, June 4th 2005. Both MoUs (memorandum of understanding) were initially kept secret. Both the Tata steel plant at Lohandiguda, for which the company is trying to acquire some 2161 ha, and the Essar Steel plant at Bhansi for which Essar wants 900 ha have been strongly opposed by villagers who will lose their lands to the project. Under PESA 1996, a special law for scheduled areas (areas dominated by indigenous people or adivasis), the government is required to gain the consent of the villagers. In both cases, villages were forced to give their �consent� at gunpoint. Both the plants, however, have the support of non-tribal emigrants, who see the prospect of business expanding and their children getting whatever limited jobs come on offer.
While nationwide the anxiety about Maoists is connected to SEZs, the connections in Bastar seem too quickly drawn. Of course, there are links in the person of Mahendra Karma, who leads the Salwa Judum and who is acting as an agent for both Tata and Essar in acquiring land, and in the fact that Essar is funding the permanent resettlement of villages. However, both the large steel plants proposed for this region are in villages where people have not been forcibly evacuated and elsewhere in the country, displacement is taking place without strategic hamletting. Maoist influence had not reached Lohandiguda, and protests against both plants are currently being led not by the Maoists, but by the parliamentary left, the CPI.
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The real connections perhaps lie in the silence that now surrounds whatever happens in the region and the atmosphere of impunity that has been created. Now that villages have been emptied, there is a great deal of smaller scale prospecting and felling that goes unchecked. In a government guesthouse on the Andhra side of the border, waiting to cross over to Chhattisgarh, I met a businessman from Andhra Pradesh who had just acquired 3 ha of land for a granite quarry in a village, all of whose inhabitants had been moved to camp. While their permission was required under PESA, they were no longer there to give it. He said he sniffed opportunity at times of conflict, when competition was low - his company had acquired some 100 ha in different villages in small lots and under different names to circumvent the laws requiring federal clearance for forest clearance.
[1]�See, e.g., Ilina Sen, Ground Clearing with Salwa Judum,�Himal Southasian, November 2006: 42-44.