Freedom Road/El Camino para la Libertad is pleased to be able to offer this first-hand look at a key struggle in Orissa State in India. The battle in Kashipur is one of literally hundreds of life-and-death mass struggles raging every day in India, though hidden behind media proclamations about the new economic giant India is becoming. The author, M, is an Indian who spent a good part of the last decade organizing low-income workers into trade unions in the US and is now based back in India. In this report M raises important questions about how folks from the Marxist tradition should understand and deal with the lives and societies of indigenous, ecosystem-dependent peoples, especially in light of the tradition's historical productivist biases. A complementary look at the Kashipur struggle can be found in an article by Debarpita Manjit in a recent issue of the Indian journal, Revolutionary Democracy.
--Editors

The Indian state of Orissa first hit international news in January of this year when police opened fire and killed twelve tribal villagers at a protest. The villagers were objecting to the construction of a boundary wall for a proposed steel plant at the Kalinganagar complex. This 12,000 acre complex had been set up by the Industrial Development Corporation of Orissa (IDCO) with provisions for compensation of (confiscated) deed land and set-asides of some small household plots for landless persons. This arrangement left out the majority of local people who have been cultivating mostly untitled land, since the last recorded land survey had been actually completed in 1926. In addition, IDCO had acquired land for the complex in the early 1990s at a cost of some 37,000 rupees per acre but later resold the very same plots to private companies for 350,000 rupees per acre, nearly nine times the original price.

In the few years prior to the police attack, local people had been demanding better compensation and employment benefits from the project, but the shootings radicalized the groups' stand and for a moment brought the issues facing tribal and ecosystem-dependent peoples in India to the forefront of national attention. Villagers took their dead and sat on the road, blockading one of the main arterial highways, demanding a complete cancellation of the project. Simultaneously, protests broke out in many other parts of Orissa among communities facing similar issues. Government officials and party functionaries of all stripes rushed to the area to appease the situation.

Subsistence Life in Kucheipadar

This last year I have been able to spend some time in Kucheipadar, another Orissa village, located in the southern part of the state in Kashipur block. This village has been the heart of a militant and defiant anti-mining resistance for the last thirteen years. It is a bustling tribal and dalit (low-caste) village of about 300 households and 1500 people. For those who have never been to a village, one might think on first entering that one is actually walking into a single large extended household. The community is made up of long low rows of adjoining cement houses of two to three rooms each with tile roofs facing each other across a ten-foot common sanded alley with a gutter running through the middle.

There is much much common life that takes place in these narrow alleys. In the mornings one will find grandparents scrubbing down screaming toddlers at the gutter, crowds of black and brown women crouched around hand pumps furiously scouring mounds of cooking utensils, and patches of grain being spread out to dry in the sun while chickens peck at the corners and children play-fight stomping, screaming, making mad noise as muscled parents calmly begin their day's chores -- all within the space of a few dozen feet. People of all ages, from an elderly stooped woman making her way slowly with a stick, to a group of giggling four year olds traveling hand in hand, will pass by on their morning trip to the fields or river. There will be roped cots set out in front of the houses where elders may rest and gossip and observe between chores, much like our own elder male folk sit in circles on folding chairs in the empty lots of our now abandoned industrial cities. At night, during festival times, columns of adolescent girls and boys, linked arm to waist, will be found singing and weaving a dance in lines down these alleys while their aunts and uncles sit at their door frames and watch. I will no doubt be accused of being sentimental and emotional in my descriptions of Kucheipadar, but how can one not be emotional when watching the incredibly brutal and violent confrontation taking place between ecosystem-dependent people and the Indian state today?

Orissa has always been derided by mainstream (read: elite) India as one of the country's most "backward" regions because of its large tribal population, low literacy levels, and an enduring pattern of subsistence agriculture that is the underlying frame on which this collective life at Kucheipadar is built. Subsistence agriculture means that folks do not live in the constant rush to produce something to sell for others so that they can then buy more and more but rather planting, sowing, harvesting is part of the rhythm of life and meant first and foremost to feed one's own stomach. As in many other parts of India, the bulk of farming that takes place in this part of Orissa is rain-fed, and production is low.

Because agriculture is not geared towards surplus production, subsistence communities, by their very nature, have had to evolve lots of different interdependent relationships with the local environment that are absolutely essential to their survival and wrapped up with community life. In the absence of primary health centers or hospitals, local people have built a knowledge base through generations about medicinal plants and remedies. In Kashipur, since grain from the first growing season does not always last until the second crop is harvested, many families rely on the collection of minor forest produce of various kinds, including seasonal fruits, for part of the year. The stones from mangos, after the flesh has been eaten, can be stored and dried to make gruel during lean months. Women walk 2-3 kilometers about three times a week for firewood, which is the primary source of fuel, and washing and bathing take place at the river.

Interaction with the cash economy has been minimal until just the last few generations, so what exchange takes place within the village is often in the form of labor or grain or other foodstuff. Cash was mostly used for buying what is needed from outside the village, such as salt, kerosene, and occasionally clothing. So, as can be expected, the massive mining projects being pushed by the state government for this region at the behest of international capital are being touted as the door to modernity and development for these "primitive" peoples. But the movements in Kashipur, and the stand taken by the people of Kucheipadar, once again unmask not only the underlying financial and political interests behind these so called neutral processes of development (integration into an incredibly unjust global economic order) but also the sterility and alienation of an economic system where every productive input -- from our lands and streams to our own labor and sweat -- is reduced to nothing more than a commodity to be carved up, divided from its whole, and sold at an auction block.

The Poorest Sit on the Greatest Wealth

The tribal populations of Orissa produced many freedom fighters during the anti-colonial struggle, but independent India seems to have had little to offer its forest dwelling and ecosystem-dependent communities since 1947 other than dispossession and displacement. However many schemes, ministries and departments have been set up for the purpose of "tribal welfare" since independence, the persistently high rates of malnutrition and malaria quoted in these very same agencies' brochures and annual reports reveal a far more accurate picture of the status accorded to the nation's first citizens. The literacy rate for the tribal population is 29.6% as compared with the all-India rate of 52%. More than half of the rural tribal population fall below the official poverty line. Infant mortality in tribal areas of India is somewhere between 120 and 150 per thousand, almost double the rate for the country as a whole.

Yet while they are only 8% of the overall population, tribal peoples make up nearly 40% of the 40 million people who have been displaced by the mega-projects of independent India (dams, mines, power plants, roads and rail lines, etc.) to date. And, according to the government of India's own statistics, nearly two-thirds of these 40 million displaced are still awaiting proper "rehabilitation"! In Orissa alone nearly 14 lakh -- that is 1,400,000 people (yes, you read that number right) -- mostly tribal people have been displaced since independence. So the language in which tribal welfare schemes are developed and promoted is similar to that which the US government used in presenting to the world its haphazard and half-assed post-Katrina emergency relief programs, administered by ignorant and petty bureaucrats, as indicators of their benevolence toward poor and black folk, after allowing hundreds of elders to die of thirst while surrounded by water.

These very same communities could potentially be one of the biggest barriers, or at least speed bumps, in the ruling classes' current path of lopsided capitalist development in India simply because they sit on some of the most valuable mineral resources in the country. Orissa, particularly south Orissa where Kashipur is located, holds 69.7% of India's bauxite reserves (the ore from which commercial aluminum is produced) and also 33% of the country's iron ore. In addition, the state holds 24% of the nation's coal and 67% of its manganese.

This is in a larger global context in which India holds the world's fourth-largest reserves of bauxite and the fifth-largest of iron ore. Aluminum usage has been growing in recent years in packaging, electrical wiring, and construction, as well as in the automobile, aerospace and defense industries. Spot prices for alumina rose from US$160 per ton in 2002 to US$500 per ton in 2004. The bauxite deposits in Orissa are of a particularly high grade with low silica content, which means they require less energy to refine and can make India one of the lowest-cost places for extraction. At the same time, global iron-ore prices have climbed 19% this year after soaring a record 71.5% last year -- driven in part by the growing per-capita steel consumption and economic growth rates in China and in India itself. With the rise in the commodity prices of these minerals, there has been an ensuing rush, particularly since 2004, toward exploitation by multinational joint ventures across the central Indian, predominantly tribal, states of Chattisgarh, Orissa and Jharkand. Most of this planned extraction is for export, with related infrastructure projects in electric power, ports/rails and water, via coastal areas in Andhra and eastern Orissa.

Industrialization in High Gear

It is difficult to adequately describe the feeling of disorientation one experiences when viewing the speed and scale of the proposed extraction. Nearly every week the state government of Orissa and some international mineral or electric power joint venture is signing a new agreement. So far the state government of Orissa has signed at least 46 distinct and separate MoUs (Memoranda of Understanding) relating to steel and alumina plants alone. In the last two years Orissa went from being ranked sixth to the number-one state in India in its volume of Foreign Direct Investment. In steel alone the projected 58 million tons/year production expected from these projects would be double the current annual production of India as a whole! But whether the demand is being driven by the defense industry of the US or urban classes in India and China, it is the people of Kucheipadar and thousands of others like them, along with the small and medium farmers of rural India, who are expected to bear the cost for this pattern of industrialization. And how they will respond to the pound of flesh being demanded is a story still to be written.

In concrete terms the proposed alumina project by Utkal Alumina International Ltd. (UAIL, a joint venture of Hindalco and the Canadian company Alcan) in Kashipur, just one of the 46 proposed projects mentioned above, can be expected to displace the livelihood base of some 22,000 people across 82 villages while creating 1500 permanent jobs, of which a mere 400 would be "non-technical," meaning the only types of jobs for which local people might be eligible beyond the temporary wage labor -- digging ditches and carrying stones -- associated with the initial construction of the plant. The truth is that the actual amount of land and numbers of people who will be affected by these projects are really not known because the companies only reveal plans on a component-by-component basis, not unlike the ways in which redevelopment and gentrification projects in our own neighborhoods often only become transparent once all the back-room deals have already been signed and the supporters within the local government already brought, or bought, on board. And since much of the cultivation and collection among ecosystem-dependent peoples happens on lands and from community resources to which people have never been given formal individual title, the notion that the companies or the government would adequately identify or compensate "project-affected persons" (when they never bothered to "enumerate" them before they wanted their resources) is a cruel joke.

In the coastal areas of Paradwip, Orissa, where the South Korean steel major POSCO (Pohang Iron and Steel Corp) has planned a private $12 billion steel plant, the local people of the area have traditionally practiced a labor-intensive system of betel leaf and cashew cultivation in the ecologically sensitive dunes. Some 4,500 acres of land are earmarked for POSCO, of which only 20% are individually owned, the rest are under forests or recorded as public land. When the settlement record was last prepared (in 1984) demarcating ownership and use, it recognized only claims on agricultural lands under regular occupation. Other uses such as grazing, collection of firewood, forest produce and cashew gathering, or even fishing went unrecorded. These activities together account for possibly about one-third of people's income. As of now the stated figures are somewhere around 11 villages/hamlets with about 22,000 people (3500 families) directly affected by the project, but even going by conservative estimates, about four times this initial area would eventually be affected by the new industrial complex, including a 'minor' dedicated port.

The People Fight Back

All across the state of Orissa, resistance is widespread albeit fragmented, since there is no community that is not affected at this point. The repression and undeterred intent to proceed at all costs have been vicious and thorough, regardless of whether the local movement is being led by Gandhians, anarchists, Congress renegades, Communist party cadre, alleged Maoists, or just plain ordinary folk. Activists and local people face intense repression and harassment from the police and local authorities, especially since the end of 2004. It does not seem to matter whether the community had originally tried to bargain with the project or whether the struggle had tried to take the so called "democratic" procedural processes and spaces of the government seriously -- state pollution control board hearings, environmental clearance process, lawsuits etc. (In fact the company at Kalinganagar appears to have filed its application for Environmental Clearance with the central ministry on Environment and Forests on 6 January, 2006, four days after the killings). And any sensible person would today have to seriously question the relevance of government-sponsored "democratic" spaces when the United Progressive Alliance government is in the process of gutting the EIA notification (the oversight regulations for industrial projects) and the National Mineral Policy in order to make a simpler "clearinghouse" for corporations.

In the immediate aftermath of the Kalinganagar incident, even urban intellectuals and social service non-profits were writing in mainstream papers aghast at this shocking threat to Indian democracy. The parliamentary left parties were calling for a better Resettlement and Rehabilitation policy with 5% equity to project affected persons. A joint front of independent and revolutionary-minded struggle organizations seized the time to bring together some 20,000 persons in Orissa's state capital, Bubeneswar, to fundamentally question this pattern of export-oriented, capital-intensive extractive industrialization and whether it was at all appropriate for a predominantly agricultural society like India or a state like Orissa.

This was a bright moment, I believe. Although the front was not able to sustain itself for very long, it is certain that more such efforts and coordinations will be attempted. It is true that the issues facing ecosystem-dependent people today raise many deep issues for all of us and these issues might be difficult to handle when trying to build even the most rudimentary tactical alliances. Left ideologies have traditionally been steeped in productivist biases that seem at times to miss the living reality of decentralized ecologically interdependent community life still existent on the planet and the possible wisdom it might hold.

I am writing this remembering old heads in Chicago taking me to the vertical bridge near 35th street to look up at the big metal frames with reverence, remembering the dream that those big machines might once have represented of a world devoid of hunger and scarcity. How does one integrate or understand the struggle of ecosystem-dependent peoples as part of a larger struggle for a just and equitable world? The issues are not just economic but cultural and political as well. In India the political nature of the scheduled tribes of the northeast is recognized in terms of issues of self-determination, but this characterization is not talked about when it comes to mainland India. It is probably only through the process of engagement between communities in struggle that we will be better able to think through new ways of understanding and expressing these complexities in the current situation.