On Sunday, with 500 others, I attended a meeting on ‘India’s war on the poor’ at Friends House in London. The headline speaker was the novelist Arundhati Roy. She spoke eloquently and movingly about the war by the Indian state on the tribal peoples (adivasis) on behalf of companies like Vedanta that want to exploit the natural resources of these lands. She also spoke about the state’s attacks on poor farmers on behalf of rich landowners.
She read a passage from her new book ‘Walking with the Comrades’, which described how she met the Maoist rebels who are resisting government and paramilitary incursions into tribal lands. In many areas villagers have to hide in the forest, only venturing out to harvest their crops under the protection of militias. Roy was quite clear that the state’s attempts to destroy a way of life – by means of murder, rape, intimidation, disruption of economic activity – amounted to genocide. Yet an unusually candid police chief suggested to her that perhaps the best means of overcoming the Maoists would be to put a TV in every home: ‘unless they become greedy, there’s no hope for us’.
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~ See also The fundamental flaw in our fight against poverty ~
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