- Thu, 9 Sep, 2010, 11:18 am -

“Operation Green Hunt” has started in Jharkhand with a lot of publicity and unprecedented police and paramilitary show of weapon power. Over 9,000 State and paramilitary personnel have been deployed “ to wipe the area clean of naxalites and Maoists”. This will inevitably result in massive displacement of poor Adivasis and large scale loss of human lives.

We the undersigned signatories severely oppose such State violence against the impoverished tribal population whom the ruling classes have neglected and marginalised for the last 60 years. With the onset of the Economic Reforms in 1991 and the “development” being reduced to the obsession with the so-called high rate of growth of GDP, a whole lot of policies and measures have been unleashed which are threatening the very survival of the Adivasis and other marginalized sections of the society, the only beneficiaries being the big capital and its cronies in the ruling classes. It is no coincidence that the Green Hunt is directed in areas rich in mineral resources so that the land can be appropriated for mineral exploitation as part of the pseudo-development process benefiting the large corporate sector.

The tribal community is being displaced from and deprived of its land, the only source of subsistence livelihood and their numbers, we are afraid, will go on diminishing as the present pattern of “development” continues and the Green Hunt proceeds. In the name of anti-insurgency operations, gross violations of human rights of tribal community will continue to take place and their cries will not be heard in the burst of firepower. We believe that violence is unacceptable whether by the State or by any other section of the society.

We call upon the Government to stop forthwith the military, para-military and police operations against its own citizens in the tribal heartland. We also call upon the government to declare a “standstill” on its policies and measures that have engendered the current crisis , that is to say, no more land acquisition, no more market appropriation of land, habitat or forests, no more mining licenses/MOUs/operations, no more SEZs. And, no more annihilation of human rights. We believe that only with the fulfillment of these pre-requisites on the part of the government a way can be found to end the current crisis.

Signed by : Dr. Vandana Shiva, Medha Patkar, Prof. Jean Dreze, S.P. Shukla, Dr. Aseem Shrivastava, Dr. Ramdayal Munda, Dr. B.P. Keshri, Sri Prakash, Alex Ekka, Sanjay Basu Mullick, Stan Swamy, Vasavi Kiro, Gladson Dungdung, P.P. Verma, Shambhu Mahato, Kumar Sanjay, Manorama Ekka, Niraj Garg, Xavier Kujur, Munna Jha, Anupam Mitra, Tanushree Gangopadhyay, Soundarya Iyer, Tathagata Sengupta, Shiv Sethi, Deepak Srinivasan, Alwyn Rodriguez, Lorraine Moreira, Aditya Vikram, Tony Herbert, Satya Sivaraman, Arnab Sen, Akshy Thiagarajan, M.J. Vijayan, Madhu Bhaduri, Abhijit Sarkar, Joachim Kerketta, Y.K. Ram, Leema Rose and many others including students.

- Signed Appeal is Released by Jharkhand Alternative Development Forum.