Unsung guardians of food security

M.S. Swaminathan
The Hindu, 17 February

The loss of every gene and species limits our options for the future. This is why genome and gene saviours are invaluable; their efforts provide the tools to meet food security challenges.

ON FEBRUARY 20, 2007, Union Minister for Agriculture and Food Sharad Pawar will present the first Plant Genome Saviour Awards to tribal and rural women and men, for their invaluable contributions to genetic resources conservation and enhancement. This is a historic occasion for global biodiversity conservation and it would be appropriate to review briefly the genesis of the movement for recognising and rewarding the primary conservers of genetic diversity, who have so far remained unsung.

Historians have long recognised the critical role of tribal and rural families, particularly women, in the selection of plants and animals for domestication. More than 10,000 years ago, when men were hunting and gathering food, women started selecting plants from the wild for cultivation.

For example, at the Donyi-Polo Temple at Along in Arunachal Pradesh, there is a portrait of a woman credited with the introduction of rice into cultivation. This marked the transition from food gathering to growing. It is a mark of the acuteness of the early selectors that not a single plant has been added to the list of major domesticated crops over the past many centuries. This is why even the World Intellectual Property Rights Organisation (WIPO) has agreed to recognise the IPR rights of communities that have not only conserved biodiversity but also added value through selection and identification of the properties of economic value.

From the beginning of the 20th century, industrialised countries have enacted legislation to safeguard and reward the IPR contributions of commercial plant breeders. Since 1961 such legislation has been coordinated by the Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), which has its headquarters in Geneva along with the WIPO. The Director General of the WIPO is the Secretary General of the UPOV, which is an inter-governmental organisation currently with 63 countries as members. The International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (the UPOV Convention) came into force in 1968 and has since been revised in 1972, 1978, and 1991. The 1991 Act, which entered into force on April 24, 1998, has further strengthened the IPR rights of plant breeders.

Chairing Commission II of the general conference of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in 1979, I urged that the irony of the poverty of primary conservers co-existing with the prosperity of commercial breeders should be ended by developing procedures for recognising and rewarding the contributions of the former. This was followed by a resolution moved by India, Mexico, and several other countries at the FAO General Conference in 1981 emphasising the need for equity in sharing benefits from a nation's agro-biodiversity heritage. In 1983, a Commission on Plant Genetic Resources was set up by a resolution of the FAO Council, of which I was then the Independent Chairman. Deliberations in this Commission led to the birth of the concept of farmers' rights. There was a general consensus that farmers' rights should be defined as collective rights of communities involved in the conservation of agricultural plant diversity. This concept got enshrined in Article 9 of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture of the FAO (FAO Treaty), which came into force on July 29, 2004.

Much of the crop genetic diversity occurs mainly in developing countries, where farm families have been identifying and conserving economically valuable plants. Centres of civilisation have also been major centres of domestication of crop plants and conservation of agro-biodiversity, thereby indicating the intimate relationships between cultural and biological diversity. The concept of farmers' rights, however, did not find ready acceptance among most developed countries and multinational seed companies. To resolve this conflict, the Keystone Centre in Colorado, U.S., convened a series of multi-stakeholder dialogues under my Chairmanship during 1989-91. The second dialogue in this series was hosted by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) at Chennai in January 1990. Major multinational seed companies participated in this dialogue and issued the following consensus statement on farmers' rights:

"Farmers' rights, a concept which has been developed and adopted in FAO recognises the fact that farmers and rural communities have greatly contributed to the creation, conservation, exchange and knowledge of genetic and species utilization of genetic diversity; that this contribution is on-going and not simply something of the past; and that this diversity is extremely valuable. Local communities bear much of the burden of protecting germplasm and the rest of the world has an obligation to help them carry out this task and help them in utilizing the material. Yet neither the marketplace nor current intellectual property systems have any way of assigning a value to this valuable material. No compensation or reward mechanisms exist."

The Chennai consensus paved the way for the benefit sharing provisions of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) adopted at the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro in 1992, which gives explicit recognition to the rights of the primary conservers and incorporates the principles of prior informed consent and equity in benefit sharing. The MSSRF convened in January 1994 a multi-stakeholder consultation to prepare a draft Act for conferring concurrent recognition to breeders' and farmers' rights. At a follow-up consultation convened by the MSSRF in 1996, a revised draft legislation was prepared, titled "Plant Variety Protection and Farmers' Rights Act," to emphasise that the rights of breeders and farmers, who are allies in the struggle for sustainable food security, should be mutually reinforcing.

The 1996 Chennai draft provided the basic text for the final Act adopted by Parliament in 2001, under the title, "Plant Varieties Protection and Farmers' Rights Act" (PPVFR Act). This is the first legislation of its kind in the world that simultaneously recognises and rewards the contributions of breeders and farmers to the development of new crop varieties.This concept is in conformity with the provisions of both the CBD and the FAO Treaty. It satisfies the need for enacting a sui generis legislation for protecting the IPR of plant breeders stipulated under the WTO Agreement in Agriculture.

The Indian Act recognises the multiple roles of farmers — as conservers, cultivators, and breeders. As cultivators, farmers are entitled to keep and plant their own seeds (plant back rights). As breeders, they are entitled to the same rights as commercial breeders. As conservers, they are entitled to recognition and reward from a National Gene Fund. To implement these provisions, the Government of India set up a Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Authority in 2005 in New Delhi under the leadership of the distinguished agricultural scientist, S. Nagarajan. The Authority and the MSSRF organised in 2006 a consultation at Koraput, an important centre of genetic diversity in rice, to develop a methodology for according recognition to tribal and rural communities for their selfless contributions to sustainable food security. The Koraput Declaration urged:

The preamble to the PPVFR Act calls for recognition to the contributions of farm families to crop improvement made at any time. Agro-biodiversity centres like the Koraput region in Orissa, where tribal families have preserved and improved rice genetic material over many centuries, need to be protected from genetic erosion. Tribal families who have conserved important genetic material for public good at personal cost deserve recognition and reward.

The National Gene Fund should be activated since severe genetic erosion is occurring in major agro-biodiversity rich areas. There is need to create an economic stake in conservation. This can come only by according economic benefits and social prestige to the primary conservers, who are often women.

The MSSRF proposed that tribal and rural communities living in penury but conserving valuable genetic diversity should be recognised as "Genome Saviours." This is what will become a reality when the first Genome Saviour Awards are presented. This step would lead not only to financial support for the revitalisation of the on farm conservation traditions of local communities, but also help to spread genetic literacy. The loss of every gene and species limits our options for the future, particularly in the context of potential adverse changes in climate. This is why genome and gene saviours are invaluable; their past and current efforts provide the tools to meet the food security challenges of today and tomorrow.

National policy for farmers soon

Press Trust of India

COIMBATORE, Feb. 25: A national policy for farmers is likely to be in place on 15 August, the 60th Independence day of India, eminent agriculture scientist, Prof MS Swaminathan said today. Since there was no exclusive policy for farmers, the new national policy would find ways and means to raise their income, Mr Swaminathan told reporters here. Saying that the union agriculture minister, Mr Sharad Pawar had already discussed the issue with the officials, based on his draft policy, which envisaged to look after the income of farmers, he said this would be placed before the National Development Council for discussion among by chief ministers, as agriculture is a state subject. The chief ministers, after discussion would put it before the cabinet and the new policy was expected to be in place on 15 August, he said. “When there is a pay commission and other mechanism to decide the income of employees, why should not there be a policy for farmers, 70 per cent of the total population of India,” he asked. A process is on to set up a National Biotechnology Regulatory Authority, to analyse the risk and assess the benefits, which would be transparent, he said. Similarly, a National Association of Genome Entrepreneurs would be formed on 14 April here.

Swaminathan is, therefore, in the way of becoming another Mashelkar in Agronomy, another patent filer, super agent of transnational agro-companies!! - IP

Jinnah re-assessed

The Concept of Enlightened Moderation

Madan Lal Kapoor
The Statesman, 27 February

In an attempt to reassess Partition, Pakistani intellectuals, historians and educationists have recently presented their theory of Enlightened Moderation which states that the momentous event of 1947 was not the outcome of Hindu-Muslim dichotomy and animosity on the basis of religion. On the contrary, it was the result of economic disparities and inequalities prevalent between the two communities. MA Jinnah realised that economic salvation of Muslims lay in partition. This view runs counter to the claim of the religious fundamentalists in Pakistan that their country was created to promote the glory of Islam and enforce its laws in its territory. In their reckoning, Islam was in danger in united India. Did Jinnah want to create a Muslim state or an Islamic state? How far were his views similar to the theory of Enlightened Moderation or to the ideology of Islam as mentioned in the Preamble to Pakistan’s constitution? His political career from 1906 to 1948 throws sufficient light on it. He joined the Indian National Congress in 1906 and held responsible posts in the party. He was a staunch nationalist. In 1925 on the floor of Central Legislative Assembly he declared, “I am a nationalist first, a nationalist second and nationalist last”.

Non-religious person

He refused to join the Muslim League founded by the Agha Khan in 1904. There was pressure on him to lead the Muslim League but he preferred to be a nationalist. He opposed separate electorates offered to the Muslims in Minto-Morley reforms. His stand shocked the leaders of the Muslim League who tried to get separate electorates incorporated in the proposals for constitutional reforms. Jinnah warned that a separate electorate would destroy the unity of India and alienate Hindus and Muslims from each other. He was never impressed by the Muslim clergy and he did not patronise madrasas and seminaries. He did not accept Gandhi’s style of blending spirituality with politics. Far from knowing Arabic, he could not speak Urdu. He was not a religious person. He never glorified Islam and reviled Hinduism. He was a Muslim by accident but non-religious person by choice. Jinnah had a long association with Gopal Krishan Gokhale. He supported his Elementary Education Bill by telling the House. “Find money! Find money! I ask, is it such an insurmountable difficulty to get three crores of rupees?” There was a dramatic change from the ideology of nationalism to communal politics. What were the factors that made him Qaid-e-Azam, a great leader of the Muslim community only. Through the Delhi proposals the Muslim leadership tried to assert its political identity. They wanted 33 per cent reservation of seats in the Central Assembly. They also demanded the separation of Sind from Mumbai and creation of North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan as new states with a Muslim majority. The Motilal Nehru report rejected their demand and agreed to offer 25 per cent of seats. It agreed to the creation of three new states with Muslim majority, but recommended a strong Centre. Muslim leaders opposed it. The Nehru report made Jinnah feel that the Hindus and Muslims cannot make one nation. Many Muslim religious scholars ridiculed Jinnah’s idea of nationhood based on religion. Jinnah was worried about the rights of Muslims in free India. For him, “majorities are apt to be oppressive and tyrannical, and minority always dread and fear that their interests and rights, unless clearly safeguarded by statutory provisions, would suffer.” (Quoted by Rajmohan Gandhi in Understanding the Muslim Mind). He was worried too that the Congress viewed his attempts to forge Hindu-Muslim unity with suspicion. His proposal for giving one-third reservation of seats to Muslims was rejected. After the elections in 1937, Jinnah proposed that the Congress and the Muslim League should form a coalition government in the states where the Congress had won the absolute mandate of the people. Muslims became non-entities with virtually no say in the legislatures. A coalition might have given the given Muslims a feeling of participation in the democratic set-up. This proposal was also turned down. Jinnah lost all hope of forging Hindu-Muslim unity. He was disillusioned with the Congress and he concluded that its concern for communal unity and harmony was a mere charade. He started thinking in terms of Partition. MRA Baig, Jinnah’s advisor who parted company with him as a protest against the resolution of Pakistan passed by the Muslim League in 1940, wrote in his book On Different Saddles! : “Pakistan, in fact, never came to Jinnah’s mind till about 1939. I think he was perfectly sincere round about 1934 when he described Hindus and Muslims to me as two arms of the Indian body. When the Congress formed the provincial government in 1936, he expected them to form Congress-League coalitions, which was his concept of Hindu-Muslim unity. It was only when the Congress, wedded to political theories perfectly applicable to Britain, such as majority party government, and not recognising that in the context of Indian conditions a numerical majority could be synonymous with a communal majority, formed purely Congress governments in the provinces, that he turned to Pakistan.” The last chapter of the narrative of the Indian’s fate was written with a tragic note when the Cabinet Mission visited India and negotiated with the leaders of the Congress and the League. The plan of keeping India united was finalised. A lot of hard work was put in by the members of the mission and Maulana Azad the then Congress president to make the plan acceptable. It was accepted but soon rejected by both the parties on flimsy grounds. It is the irony of fate that the leaders of the Congress and the League did not show political maturity at that critical juncture. Posterity will never forgive them for their political short-sightedness. The issue of the supremacy of the proposed constituent assembly and the nature of three groupings of states created some misunderstanding which was used by both the parties to back out of the agreement. This created confusion and uncertainty. With Jinnah’s call to Muslims for direct action to get Pakistan, India’s future was doomed. Communal riots broke out in Bengal, Bihar and Punjab. Jinnah and his colleagues did not take any step to stop the bloodshed and massacre of Hindus and Muslims. His silence over the tragic events seemed deliberate and intriguing. Gandhi undertook two fasts to death, first in Calcutta and then in Delhi to counter communal violence with non-violence.

Indifference to riots

Despite negotiations to keep India united, the country was divided. Pakistan came into being. Who is responsible for not preventing the bloodshed in the subcontinent? Gandhi and his followers rose to the occasion to stop it. Jinnah remained silent and inactive. He never chided the leaders of the League for being callous and indifferent to the massacre of the Hindus. Had he pulled up his colleagues and followers by threatening them that he would resign from the Muslim League if the riot did not stop, the situation would have certainly improved. The only blemish on his political profile is his indifference to the holocaust of communal riots and his mysterious silence about the tragic bloody drama enacted by the fanatics and lumpens of both the communities. Gandhi faced their bullets and died a martyr. Jinnah became the Governor-General of Pakistan and died a natural death. The stock-taking of Jinnah’s political activities may show that he never harboured any ill will against the Hindu community. His creation of a Muslim dominated country was not to eliminate the Hindus in its territory or to force them to leave it. Though he could not do much to contain the communal holocaust, he never preached communal hatred in his speeches or writings. He simply wanted a political set-up where the economic and political rights of the Muslim community would be safe.

U.S. Base in Afghanistan Targeted During Cheney Visit

Bomb Blast at Bagram Airfield Kills at Least 4; Vice President Unhurt in Attack

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post, February 27

Vice President Cheney was shuttled into a bomb shelter at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan this morning after a suicide bomber blew himself up outside the main gate in an attack Taliban officials say was aimed at the vice president.

Cheney was uninjured and in no real danger from the blast, which killed at least four people, including a U.S. soldier, at the gate of the Bagram Airfield.

Although the vice president heard what he described as a "loud boom" at around 10 a.m. Afghan time, the explosion occurred far from the building where Cheney had spent the night in advance of a meeting with Afghan President Hamad Karzai.

But coming near the end of an unannounced trip whose itinerary was closely guarded, the incident highlighted some of the same concerns about resurgent Taliban activity that Cheney had traveled to the region to address.

Speaking about the incident en route to Oman following a two-hour meeting with Karzai, Cheney said the attack was meant as a blow against the Afghan president but would "not affect our behavior."

Cheney said he was in the bomb shelter for only "a short period of time," did not feel threatened, and had not considered canceling his meeting with Karzai.

"I think they clearly try to find ways to question the authority of the central government," Cheney said. "Striking at the Bagram [base] with a suicide bomber, I suppose, is one way to do that."

Army Lt. Col. James E. Bonner, the base operations commander, said the bomber approached the gate and "when he realized he would not be able to get onto the base, he attacked the local population." In addition to the U.S. soldier, another coalition soldier and a U.S. government contract employee died in the attack along with the bomber, the commander said. Another 27 people were wounded.

News service reports, relying on local officials, reported more than 20 people were killed.

Cheney, on an Asia trip that included stops in Japan and Australia, was not originally scheduled to spend the night in Afghanistan. He arrived there Monday following a meeting in Pakistan with President Pervez Musharraf and was scheduled to meet that same day with Karzai. Because of security concerns his presence in the region had been kept under wraps until after he was leaving Pakistan.

However, his meeting with Karzai was delayed when a snowstorm left him unable to make the roughly 20 minute-flight from the Bagram base to Kabul, and the vice president stayed the night.

The Reuters news service reported that Taliban spokesman Mullah Hayat Khan took credit for organizing the quick attack.

"We wanted to target . . . Cheney," Khan said, the wire service reported, adding that he spoke by phone from an undisclosed location.

On the flight leaving the country, a senior administration official, who insisted on anonymity, said Cheney had come to Pakistan and Afghanistan at President Bush's request because of "the continuing threat that exists in this part of the world" -- a threat exemplified by Tuesday's bombing.

Taliban fighters are thought to be regrouping along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and leaders of the militant religious group have threatened a bloody spring offensive.

Around 47,000 coalition troops, including 27,000 U.S. soldiers, remain in Afghanistan following the 2001 invasion of the country.

U.S. officials have become increasingly concerned about the Taliban's resurgence and the reappearance of possible terrorist training operations in the border area.

In a meeting with Musharraf on Monday, Cheney urged tougher action in rural border areas, a message repeated to Karzai.

The administration official said the meeting was not scheduled to "beat up" on the Afghan president, but to coordinate ideas about confronting the Taliban.

The official said that Karzai was "upbeat," but relayed comments from Afghan tribal leaders skeptical about U.S. commitment to the country -- a concern deepened, the official said, by Democratic talk of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

"They worry about that," the official said. "If they see weakness on the part of the U.S. . . . they worry about our commitment."

Democratic leaders have not pushed for a withdrawal from Afghanistan, a conflict they view as more directly tied to the 2001 terrorist attacks against New York and Washington because of al-Qaeda's once well-organized training operation there and close relationship with the Taliban.

"It is high time we moved from agriculture to industry"

Marcus Dam
The Hindu, 27 February

These are challenging times for Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, West Bengal's Chief Minister. In an interview in Kolkata, he speaks of the absence of an alternative to the industrialisation drive his government has undertaken, the opposition he faces from both within the ruling Left Front and outside, and the need to take the people into confidence. Excerpts:

Very challenging times?

Indeed... here we are facing a transitional period of development; from agriculture to industry. Many political and even ideological issues are involved. And I am closely observing the reactions of Opposition parties.

But I am very clear about what we are trying to do. If we fail to move from agriculture to industry then the benefits we gained from our agricultural polices, from land reforms, will collapse. It is high time now that we move from agriculture to industry. Therefore, yes, these are challenging times.

West Bengal is at a turning point. Could you elaborate on the challenges as you perceive them?

We are at a turning point and it is therefore critical that we formulate our policies in a very clear-cut manner. There should be no confusion over our intentions and the meaning of the transition. There should be no grey areas.

Now is the time for us to consolidate our successes in agriculture and guarantee food security. The other side of our policy is if you think that agriculture alone can help one to advance it is not possible as land is being fragmented. A father dies and his land is divided among the sons.

Moreover, prices of inputs like fertilizers, seeds are increasing. We have now come down from remunerative prices to minimum prices.

As for industry, prior to the seventh Left Front government, investment coming in annually was between Rs.3,000 crores and Rs.6,000 crores. In 2006 it shot up to Rs.30,000 crores. Now it is Rs. one lakh crores if you take all the proposals being made.

Sixty-five per cent of our people are engaged in agricultural activities. This is not a very healthy picture. Agriculture contributes 26 per cent to our economy, industry 24 with the rest from the services sector. We have to go gradually and consciously improve and accelerate our industrial growth. The figure for industry's contribution must prevail over that of agriculture. This is the most important and challenging task.

Surely there are the political spin-offs?

The political reactions are predictable. Opposition parties, basically, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Trinamool Congress, cannot accept the prospect of the Left Front government moving towards making West Bengal an industrial State. There will be political benefits deriving from this so they are unwilling to accept this position.

As for the Congress, I am in touch with some of their leaders but there are others who are creating problems. Then there are the extremist groups along with some NGOs who are also creating problems. They do not have any ideology and are politically bankrupt, opposing for the sake of opposing.

Some Left partners and some Left intellectuals who may be good in their profession are also failing to understand the compulsions of this particular period — a turning point, as you rightly call it. We are trying to persuade some of our Left partners that the consequences would be damaging if we fail to perform. We have even asked them the alternative they might have in mind. Tell it to us. If we fail to perform the new generation will not forgive us. I think gradually a consensus is emerging.

We had a meeting with major Left parties like the Communist Party of India, the Revolutionary Socialist Party, and the All India Forward Bloc, and after some exchange of opinions I feel we are slowly arriving at a consensus.

Could you elaborate on the differences?

There are two or three areas of controversy. First is the land situation. Sixty-three per cent of our land is agricultural, fallow land is strictly speaking only one per cent. Another 13 per cent is made up of forest reserves which we cannot touch. This leaves us with only 23 per cent for urban areas and industry. I have asked them [the Left partners] whether they are suggesting that we should not move forward. `Do we stay where we stand and not touch agricultural land?' They say `no.' Now it seems we are coming closer. But their apprehensions are genuine. I think that finally I will be able to convince them that this is the only alternative.
Another point being raised is that industrialisation means capitalist development. Yes, I cannot build socialism in this part of the country. This is not possible. If you want industry you have to ask all industrial houses including big business to invest... Like Birla, Reliance, the Tatas as well as foreign companies like IBM and Mitsubishi. If you say that we will only allow small industries to come up like cottage industries, handloom and handicrafts, it is not feasible. We must have modern industries and have to try to attract investment from big business. On this controversy too I think we have been able to come to a common understanding among the partners. It will take some time but finally I will be able to sort out these problems.

Some friends are unfortunately failing to understand the land position. We have 1.34 crore acres of agricultural land in our State of which we need only one lakh acres for new industry. Percentage-wise this is a mere 0.7 per cent. I tell them `let us not miss the wood for the trees.'

There has also been a re-thinking within your party on its ideological line.
Yes. Ideology is not an abstraction and will have to be applied according to the situation. What we are looking at is the Left alternative and the compulsions of the objective situation.

All these years we have revised certain important clauses regarding our party programme — about foreign investment, the multi-party system.

Now we have accepted that foreign capital should be allowed for technology and for creating job opportunities. We also accept political pluralism. These are the changes. Even in the last party Congress we adopted some resolutions regarding accepting loans from financial agencies like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. There is a debate going on within the party and we are changing accordingly.

First we have to mobilise the entire party's ranks. They must be confident about what they are doing. If there is any confusion in the ranks then it will be difficult for me.

Your government has marked certain areas as sites for future industries, for commercial purposes and for infrastructure. We have had Nandigram where there has been a swell of resentment among a section of the local people over land being taken away from them for a commercial hub in the area. You have been able to assuage their fears but is there a likelihood of Nandigram being repeated elsewhere in the State?

Not at all. If you look at the other parts of the State where we are planning projects like in north Bengal, there is no problem for land and investments are coming in. In south Bengal, we have plans for three big steel plants and there will absolutely be no problems in these areas.Even at Singur in Hooghly district, where the Tata Motors' plant is coming up, nearly 95 per cent of the people supported the project.

Nandigram is a different case: there was bureaucratic failure, which should not have happened. Without going to the people, without conducting a land survey, paper work had started which created a problem. But I think Nandigram will not be repeated in any other part of the State.

Will your Nandigram experience get you to somewhat slow down the industrial drive for a while?

As for the State as a whole, my government's position is that we must move as fast as possible because companies investing will not wait for us years on end, we cannot delay giving them land. We must hasten the speed but where there is some confusion like in Nandigram it will take some time. The people there apparently don't know what is a chemical hub, how it could change the face of the entire area.

But I am sorry. It is not the people's fault — we ought to have told them how it is going to change their lives but before doing that we took some wrong administrative measures. Therefore in that case we have to go very cautiously. If the people there think that they are happy with agriculture and the present economic and social positions, if they think they don't want to improve the quality of life, then it's all right [laughs]. I am not going to force them. If they don't voluntarily agree to give land which would help them first, before it does the government, then why should I force it?

For the Salim group which plans to invest in the area as well as set up infrastructure in other parts of south Bengal, it is a package deal. They will earn profits from their investments no doubt but we have calculated how much they are helping the State economy and how much they are gaining through profits. We have calculated how much we are losing [by giving away land] and how much they are gaining [by investing in infrastructure and other projects] and have finally come to a conclusion that will benefit our State.

Broadcast Media in China Put On Notice

Edward Cody
Washington Post, February 27

BEIJING, Feb. 26 -- Communist Party propaganda chiefs have issued a stern new warning to China's broadcast executives, saying news reports and entertainment should promote socialist loyalty and soothe tensions as the country enters a sensitive political season.

The new guidelines were issued Jan. 12 at a meeting called by the party propaganda department; a written record of the gathering is currently circulating in Beijing.

The guidelines reflect a particular desire at senior levels of President Hu Jintao's government to see a picture of harmony and contentedness in the broadcast media as the Chinese legislature prepares to meet next month and the Communist Party gets ready for its 17th national congress in the fall.

Propaganda officials regularly issue orders to Chinese television, radio and newspaper executives, listing subjects to be avoided or treated with care in the heavily censored media. But the marching orders last month appeared to be part of a concentrated effort to orchestrate the news in the lead-up to this year's major political meetings. They followed guidelines designed to maintain the traditional cultural focus and political correctness of television movies and serials.

"In foreign countries, televisions are privately owned and you can broadcast whatever you want," Wang Weiping, deputy head of the series division at China's State Television, Film and Broadcasting Administration, told the Southern Weekend newspaper recently. "But in China, television is the mouthpiece of the party and the people. This is its main mission, and entertainment is secondary."

The national party congress, held every five years, is especially important to Hu, who has headed the party since 2002. It is the occasion for him to cement his leadership and install his followers in key positions, particularly in a new Politburo and its ruling nine-member Standing Committee.

"To create a proper atmosphere for the 17th party congress, we should sing high praises for socialism," Li Dongshen, deputy head of the propaganda department, told the assembled executives, according to the written record of the gathering. "We should sing loudly the main themes of our nation."

According to the record, Li recalled that he had recently banned eight books because they "ran the red light" of party limits on what is acceptable for publication. He said that the broadcast industry faces similar problems and that "we need to assure the correct leading direction of propaganda and promote cultural richness."

For instance, he urged the executives to continue publicizing the policies of economic reform and opening that began two decades ago and that Hu continues to champion. But he cautioned that there should be "no publicizing of pro-privatization comments."

Li's remarks appeared to be part of an effort to dampen a quiet controversy between the reform-minded people around Hu and disgruntled party conservatives who maintain that the reforms are being pursued too quickly, without concern for the social welfare of millions of Chinese. The pace at which unprofitable state-owned enterprises are being sold off has become one aspect of this debate. A proposed law to establish legal guarantees for private property has become another, likely to be discussed during the annual session of the National People's Congress that begins next week.

Li warned that exposing corruption by party officials, a major topic in government declarations, should be done "positively," with emphasis on the party's efforts to end it. In dealing with corruption, whether in news or entertainment programs, he said, television producers should take care not to emphasize corrupt officials' high living or numerous mistresses.

He also said news reports should avoid "inside stories" about flaws in the legal system and the party's attempts to control the news. "Go all out for articles that preserve social stability and avoid triggering social conflict," he added.

Finally, in the new Year of the Pig, Li warned, executives should take into account the sensitivities of China's 35 million Muslims, who consider pigs unclean and offensive. "In principle, touch on the character of the pig as little as possible," he said.

Researcher Jin Ling contributed to this report.

Violence in Singur

Hardselling Capitalist Globalisation in the name of Left Alternative

Kunal Chattopadhyay
Mainstream Weekly

Several thousand police and paramilitary forces are now roaming Singur and adjoining areas in Hooghly district, West Bengal. On December 2, they fired tear gas and rubber bullets at villagers and a few outside supporters who had gone to the area. Television channels, so far strongly supportive of the moves of the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee Government, now found themselves projecting a story totally at variance with the words their newscasters were being made to utter. Even as the bourgeois media went on mouthing claims that locals (later changed to Outsiders) were attacking the police, what could be seen, for example on the Kolkata or the Tara News channels, or even in Star-Ananda, was the picture of half-a-dozen hulking cops converging on individual hapless villagers, and brutally beating them up with truncheons. One could also see the teargas shells being lobbed and the rubber bullets being fired, and huge paddy dumps being set on fire. All the while, the channels were seeking to divert attention by asking viewers to send sms on whether they condemned the behaviour of the (Right-wing opposition) Trinamul Congress members’ action in smashing up property in the Vidhan Sabha (the State legislature, where TMC MLAs had gone berserk on December 1).

Left-wing Model of Development?

To understand what was happening we need to go back and look at the model of development being pushed by the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee Government. When Bhattacharjee replaced Jyoti Basu as the Chief Minister, it was a signal to the Indian capitalist class as well as capitalists from everywhere else, that a new attitude was being developed by the CPI-M. Singur is not an isolated case. All over India, the process of taking over peasants’ land is going on. The Special Economic Sone Bill says that the SESs created by taking over land will be like a foreign country. Those who invest capital in those areas will function under laws different from the laws for the people throughout the country. In Kharagpur, West Bengal, the Tatas want another 1240 acre land. Total targeted land in West Bengal is nearly 1,00,000 acres. In Gujarat, it is the Reliance group that is staking major claims. Farmers in Gujarat are fighting the Reliance group just as farmers in West Bengal are fighting the Tatas. In addition there are transnational companies. The Salim group of Indonesia were feted a short while back by the Left Front Ministers. The group had a strong role during the coup in Indonesia that led to the murder of some half a million communists. But that is all old hat, and seemingly the Left Ministers cannot be bothered by such sentimental issues when behaving like hardheaded businesspersons. It is in this context that the government’s plan for Singur must be seen. The story of the “industrial turn-around” of West Bengal begins with the election results earlier in 2006. The CPI-M led Front had won a thumping victory, thanks to the first-past-the-post system. With just over 50 per cent votes, it had obtained 235 seats, reducing all oppositions to such a minor proportion that as per legislative assembly rules there could not even be a formal leader of the opposition. As the CM was addressing a press conference at the CPI-M office, an aide brought in a message, and the elated CM informed the press that the Tatas wanted to build a car factory in West Bengal. Within a few days, a hush-hush deal was struck. The Tatas asked for close to 1000 acres of prime agricultural land— nothing else would do for them. The government complied with such alacrity that one might be pardoned for thinking that they were bound serfs of the Tatas. They did not consult the Gram Sabha or any other elected local bodies, though even their gurus at the World Bank go through the motions of suggesting the need to consult with local bodies. Tata Motors want to launch a new car model by 2008, the one-lakh-rupee car. According to the Left Front, this is development, and cannot be opposed. It will put West Bengal in the industrial map of India. According to CPI-M Polit-Bureau member and West Bengal State Party Secretary Biman Bose, those who are opposing the move are fronting for other big companies who sell overpriced cars!

We need to look a little more closely at the entire process. The land that Tata wants is prime agricultural land. There is plenty of poor quality land in West Bengal, for example, in Purulia district, or elsewhere. Plenty of old industries are in crisis and their land could also have been converted. But this particular area has a good road connection, as it links up with the Delhi Road. That is the first real reason why Tata is pushing for this, and only this area. A second reason, likely to come up after a decade, will be argued below.So how did the State Government act? Did it, in its new found faith in market economics, tell Ratan Tata and his minions to go and negotiate land price with the peasants? Even that would have been detrimental to the sharecroppers and agricultural labourers, if direct sale of land had simply ousted them. But keeping to the spurious logic of the free market, at least this should have been done. Instead, the state government used an act, the Land Acquisitions Act, which was originally devised in the colonial period, to take over the peasants’ land. They were offered a price worked out as the average of the previous three years’ price, plus a 30 per cent hike known as the solacium. The full details of the deal with the Tatas are not known, but from the little information that came out, it seems Tata will not even pay this much to the government. According to Debabrata Bandyopadhyay, former Commissioner, Land Reforms, West Bengal, (and who is, according to many people, the main burueacratic impulse behind Operation Barga, the registration of sharecroppers, the reform measure that a generation back had enabled the Left Front to gain solid and unwavering rural support), the government has in fact saddled the people of West Bengal with a huge burden in order to bring in Tata Motors. The West Bengal Government claims this investment will create many new jobs and be a major developmental project. What is the truth? Between 1980 and 1994, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, the three top US car manufacturers, cut down the total number of their global employees from 7,50,000 to 3,75,000. Why should the Tatas behave any differently? If they are really going to sell cars at the rate of Rs 1 lakh (US $ 2246), they will be cutting costs. They have no intention of running a loss making factory.

Another question is: why do they want nearly 1000 acres of land? Maruti-Susuki, a major car manufacturer in India, need 296 acres of land on which they produce over 600,000 cars per year. Moreover, we should remember that while Maruti builds the entire car in its factory, Tata will only assemble the car there. So what is all this land needed for? It is likely that after the hue and cry has died out, much of this land would be reconverted to agricultural land, but run by the Tatas as an agribusiness. Reliance in Gujarat is going in for marketing organic food. The Hindustan Motors of the Birla Group, which had been given about 750 acres of land in Konnagar half a century back, could use only 350 acres and has now sought permission to reconvert the rest of the land. Moreover, plenty of industrial land was left, for example in the Durgapur industrial area. So targeting high quality agricultural land and insisting that nothing else will do is bound to create this kind of doubt. Clearly, the tale of alternative, left wing model of development peddled by Bhattacharjee, his Industries Minister Nirupom Sen, and his Finance Minister Ashim Dasgupta, is a murky tale indeed.Media reports indicate that the land is being taken over by the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation at a cost of Rs 140 crores. The Tatas have informed the West Bengal Government that they will compensate the government to the tune of Rs 20 crores after five years with a 0.01 per cent interest. The discounted value of the money in today’s terms will be about Rs 12 crores. So the West Bengal Government is giving to the Tatas the sum of Rs 128 crores (28,749,185 US dollars). This money will come either from taxes, or from loans contracted by the WBIDC, which again must be repaid through taxes or through cutting costs in social sectors like health and education.The most important issue of course is the story of sacrifices. Ever since independence, when foreign colonialism could no longer be blamed directly, people have been asked to make sacrifices for the nation. Not very surprising, though, that it is workers and poor peasants, tribals and low caste people, who end up making the sacrifices, while the wealthy, the bourgeoisie, the urban middle and upper middle class, the upper castes, all end up with profits. For whom is Bhattacharjee proposing this development? For Tata? For the shareholders of Tata’s companies? What about the ordinary people? The peasants are being given a paltry compensation. Even that is murky. In many cases, the land was sold to other people, by a small number of landed elements who knew about the deal in advance. But they still had the papers, so they were identified as owners deserving compensation. In many, even most cases, owners did not want to sell the land. They are aware that what skills they have are as peasants. Cash compensation is no good to them for they will not be able to use the cash in an effective way. Urbanisation of the area, inevitable if a factory comes up, will raise the cost of living. The landowners are not going to become traders all at once. As one of them quipped, if we all set up shops, in any case, who will buy?

Five villages of Singur, namely Gopalnagar, Beraberi, Bajemelia, Khaser Bheri and Singher Bheri, are affected. While peasants here are not rich farmers, nor are they absolutely poor. Net income of the owner of one acre of land is about Rs 1,00,000. So for 1000 acres the net income is around Rs 100 million (US $ 22,46,030). The gross income is even more, about Rs 250 million (US $ 56,15,075). Apart from the peasants or landowners (in some cases the owners are absentee), there are the share-croppers and agricultural labourers. All told, some seven to eight thousand people are employed, and their total income, Rs 250 million, was being added to the GDP of West Bengal. This seven to eight thousand is based on economic calculations suggesting that for around 5000/6000 peasants there will be an added 1200 or so sharecroppers and about 1000 agricultural labourers. And how many workers will the Tatas employ? Despite the Right to Information Act, in West Bengal all real information is firmly hidden. The West Bengal Government has refused to divulge these figures to organisations who have sought them. But one such organisation estimates it will be around 250 employees. If their average monthly income is pegged at Rs 50,000 the total wage bill will be Rs 150 million. (This average takes in the high salaries of the managerial cadre.) Then there will be the profits of the shareholders and the concern, which after all is the main reason for this investment. Clearly, this is a model of development that will intensify disparities.

If Fraud does not Work, Use Force

Initially, the government went into raptures about the benefits to the province. Somehow, though, the peasants did not respond. And so, pressure on them began to mount. Apprehensive of losing their sole safeguard to life, the farmers got together to launch a resistance movement under the banner of ‘Krishijami Raksha Samiti’ (Association for the Protection of Agricultural Land). From the very beginning, women have been in the forefront of the movement. In recollection of a famous song of the tebhaga movement, the greatest peasants’ movement in Bengal in the twentieth century, with ‘life and honour as stakes,’ they began to ‘hone the scythe.’ The State Government, hardly bothered about the plight of the farmers, remained stubborn, repeatedly reiterating that the Tata factory would come up on that piece of land. If the slogan of the alleged Rambhaktas (the RSS and its allied outfits) was “Mandir wahin banayenge” (the temple will be built just at that spot), the slogan of West Bengal’s alleged bam (Left) CM was “factory wahin banayenge”. On September 25, there was a massive attack. In a pre-planned move, a reign of terror was unleashed on thousands of peaceful protesters at the Block Development Officer’s office in Singur. It was the first day cheques were being handed over to those who had agreed to hand over the land for compensation, and the demonstration was a form of pressure on them as well. By the afternoon, several cases were detected in which those who had already sold off their land to others, but the mutation process was not complete, were being given cheques, denying the present legal owner. Protesting such illegal deeds by government officials, the demonstrators sat on a dharna at the BDO office, even gheraoing the District Magistrate for a brief period. At this point, Mamata Banerjee, leader and supremo of the Trinamul congress, arrived and joined the dharna. A little after midnight, a black-out was created, and under the cover of darkness, a huge police force, according to the victims well lubricated with alcohol, attacked and brutally beat up the protestors, men, women and children. Ms Banerjee was also manhandled, and her sari torn. She was then bundled off to Kolkata by force, and had to be admitted to a hospital.Hundreds were severely injured in the police assault and 72 put behind bars. Women with small children were arrested under the Arms Act and/or charged with attempt to murder. Payel Bag, a two-and-a-half-year-old, spent four days in prison, along with two pre-teen boys. 26-year-old Rajkumar Bhul became the first martyr of the Singur struggle after he collapsed with severe internal haemorrhage from police beating. Bhul’s mother, in an open letter to the Chief Minister, squarely blamed him for her son’s death. According to Sumit Chowdhury, one of the most commited “outsider” activists, who has been writing and organising solidarity, when he went to Singur two days later as part of a fact finding team, and also during subsequent trips, “the hapless and angry women in the villages—some with broken arms, bandaged eyes and scars here and there—said that the policemen were drunk, cursed in the filthiest language, kicked and molested them”. The subsequent responses not only of the government, not only of one or two individuals, but of the entire CPI-M was damning. Prakash Karat, the General Secretary of the CPI-M, who has never set foot in Singur, announced from the CPI-M headquarters in Delhi that Singur has one-crop land, that the farmers are queuing up for cash, and that the demonstrators were anti-development hoodlums. Evidently, the protests against land takeover for SESs and similar issues are reserved for provinces where the CPI-M is not a major partner in the government. Equally evidently, when Prakash Karat wrote his introduction to a recent publication entitled The Left and Environmentalism, he should have entered a caveat that all his pious utterances do not apply to West Bengal and his comrade Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee.

On the night of the violence, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had his alibi. He and other party top brass were in Delhi. But the alibi is thin. The same day, he also met the Tata top management. The next day, there was a report about a community package promised by the Tatas for Singur. But examined carefully, it was mostly verbiage. One needs to remember that the massive investment of the in Orissa and Jharkhand, two of Eastern India’s poorest provinces (though very rich in minerals and forest resources), has not led to any positive development in the conditions of poor peasants, tribals, and others. On returning to Calcutta, the CM posed as injured Christ, stating, “forgive them for they know not what they do”. After a huge outcry, two days later he was forced to say that police action had been “unwarranted”. But no single policeman is known to have been punished.At a meeting called by the Chief Minister, even a number of Left Front partners criticised the way the factory was coming up, but at the end of the meeting the government announced that the Tata Motors factory would come up on Singur at any cost. On October 9, the Opposition parties, both Right and Left, called a twelve-hour bandh (general strike including total stoppage of public activities). The CPI-M threatened to unleash its cadres. But if anything, this threat made people fearful and stay indoors.From this point, terror became the order of the day. Any ‘outsider’, unless a staunch supporter of the CPI-M come to campaign for handing over the land to the government, was treated as a member of one of the Maoist groups.Terror was of different kinds. Nirupom Sen, the Industries Minister, warned the locals that all developmental work in Singur would be halted if land was not handed over. One Minister even termed opposition to the project as ‘anti-national’. As a result of this unrelenting government pressure, some land transfer began. There was an added dimension to the handing over. As we noted earlier, some people had actually sold the land to others, but the mutation had not been done. So they took advantage of this to claim compensation.

The struggle continued nonetheless, and therefore terror took on more concrete shapes. Several of the deep tube-wells of the area, essential for regular irrigation of the fields, were vandalised at night. And this happened despite the massive (already, at that point, several hundred) policemen and women posted in the region. From early November, agitation and terror both stepped up, with the government threatening to take over the land and hand it over to the Tatas at any cost by December. Women played a militant role, resisting all threats and blandishments. One of the regular refrains of the government and the CPI-M was that the real owner have accepted compensation, it is outsiders who are causing trouble. We will discuss the issue of “outsiders” later. Here we should note that indeed, the lead in the struggle was taken, not by well to do peasants, but by sharecroppers, agricultural labourers, and the smaller owners. This is the rural mix which fought six decades back, in the tebhaga uprising. This was the base which gave the left its decisive majority even in the occasional periods in the last three decades when in the cities the Left was on the defensive. So it was inevitable that the Left Front, notably the CPI-M, would not be willing to accept that this base will now speak in its own voice. Yet that was inevitable. The tebhaga movement had been so massively successful because the authentic voice of the rural poor had been well represented by the undivided CPI and the All India Kisan Sabha. By the present decade, the AIKS was a bureaucratised carcass living on the memory of past glories. Present day leaders of the AIKS have not even seen the tebhaga. The younger among them became leaders after the Left Front was already in power. So for them the role of the peasant organisation is to collect money, collect votes, and on occasion collect lots of people in trucks and take them to Calcutta for central rallies. The apparently impressive anti-imperialist demonstrations, and so on, organised by the CPI-M conceal a reality where mass organisations act as transmission belts of a high command, herding people in different ways. And so resentment and opposition grows. In Singur, the direct attack on livelihood turned the sullen resentment into organised politics, as the Krishijami Raksha Samiti brought together most of this rural poor, albeit in a small area. This challenge could never be allowed to grow. The Left Front has always been sensitive to the emergence of left wing oppositions and alternatives from within the working class and poor peasantry. It is aware that it has little to fear if the right wing is even fully mobilised. As long as there is no serious left wing alternative, it can expect to get fairly close to half the votes every time, and therefore get a majority in the first-past-the post system. Mamata Banerjee was the only right-wing leader to recognise this, and therefore to develop a populist political style. But lacking a solid trade union and rural poor implantation, she has never, even at her most creditworthy performance proved to be a match for the CPI-M.

Every time a single trade union, or a single rural area, has shown autonomy, the CPI-M has thrown more forces in the field to smash it, than it has for defeating its Right-wing opponents. Early in the Left Front period, electricity workers had a couple of Left wing, but non-Left Front, Unions—the Workers’ Union and the Technical Workers Union, in a number of plants. Repeated violence, repeated attacks on the workers, arrests, were used indiscriminately to smash the unions. In the 1990s, the struggle of the Kanoria Jute Mills took on epic proportions, as did the regime’s attempts to malign the struggle. So in retrospect, it was not, or should not have been surprising, that despite (or because of) its Left credentials, this regime was more aggressive to the peasant struggle than almost any other regime in India.Since this may sound a bit of a hyperbole, let us take a concrete, very right wing example, to make our point. Medha Patkar has already made the point. A lot of people thought Medha was indulging in shock tactics when she said the Left Front is worse than the Gujarat Government. But this is the picture if we restrict ourselves to the attitude to peasants and industrialisation, and the violence on them. Patkar argued that even in Gujarat, she had not been restricted in her movements as much as in West Bengal. We should add, that by now the virus is spreading. First, she was debarred from Singur as an “outsider” fomenting trouble. Now, when she went to Presidency College, Calcutta, to speak at the invitation of students there, SFI thugs beat up students of the Independent consolidation, and the college authorities shut the gates on her face. She then climbed on top of the gates and spoke. But we can also go beyond what she said to add another point. In Gujarat, the government made a commitment that it would provide land for land to all the people ousted due to the Sardar Sarovar Dam. The Narmada Bachao Andolan argued that it cannot be done. Indeed, proper land-for-land rehabilitation has not proved possible even for those who have been properly identified. As I saw in two trips earlier this year, village communities have been split up, with one village resettled in eight to 10 new sites. People have been given plots for cultivation, but not enough grasing land and open fields necessary for their survival. Often there are conflicts with the original inhabitants. Sometimes, after people were settled, this new land was partially taken away in order to build the canal network that would carry the waters from the dam to the target areas. So rehabilitation has received much flak. But if we look at the entire process, we find two waves of campaigns. We find a fairly long period, so that people could get some information and try and seek redress. Pro-dam but pro-rehabilitation NGOs, such as Arch-Vahini and its activists like Anil Patel, waged one type of campaign. They sought a compromise, and the whole concept of land-for-land rehabilitation came because of such interventions. When the NBA, led by Patkar and others, criticises the rehabilitation and resettlement schemes, it is because they see the land-for-land proposal as inadequate in theory and fraudulent in practice. They see it breaking up the community, creating much social disorder, and all for the benefit of small elite groups. Whether they are right about the dam benefiting only small groups is of course much debated. But we have sought to show that the picture is much more open and shut in the case of West Bengal. The peasants, share-croppers and agricultural labourers are being pushed out of land. They are not getting any alternative land. Many are not getting any rehabilitation at all. It is our experience, from Madhya Pradesh, were the government has used cash compensation rather than land-for-land rehabilitation whenever possible, that peasants, unaccustomed to large sums of money, sent it on consumer goods, on building big houses, and so on. At the end of a relatively short period, many of them had neither land nor money. Of course, if we extrapolate from this and argue that in all respects the West Bengal Government is worse, we would be in error. But Patkar has not made such a sweeping generalisation, nor are we.Perhaps confirmation of a different kind came in the newspapers recently. On December 5, Ananda Bazar Patrika reported that there were differences within the BJP. Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi had told his party that it is opportunistic of them to try to exploit Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s recent difficulties, and they should support him over the issue of land acquisition.

November 30 - December 2 and the Aftermath

On December 30, Mamata Banerjee and her supporters were prevented from going to Singur, because Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, disallowing any congregation of five or more persons, had been clamped in that entire area. Angry, and losing her head as she is often accustomed to doing, Ms Banerjee told her supporters to turn their motor cavalcade back and drive straight to the West Bengal Legislative Assembly. From late afternoon, TV channels had a field day. No sports, no cartoon channel could compete with the live show, and then the re-runs, of MLAs smashing furniture, and generally wrecking havoc. Then she called for a Bengal bandh on 1st December 1. In view of the massive publicity given to the antics of her party, the bandh was a partial failure, even in areas thought to be her stronghold. South Calcutta, her personal fief, alone saw a near complete shut down. An emboldened Bhattacharyya moved in for the kill. On December 2, several thousand police started storming Singur. According to Samir Saha, reporting in the Bengali Dainik Statesman, ordinary police, Rapid Action Force and State Armed Police all together numbered 20,000. Even the pro-CPI-M Kolkata TV channel reported at least 6000 police. From the first, they seemed to have been instructed to go on the offensive. A wide area was surrounded, and then tear gas firing began at random. The next task was to find out the aggrieved peasants. For the police, it was of course difficult to know who was an aggrieved peasant and who a party loyalist. So this task had been given to party cadres. As Ganashakti, the CPI-M daily, admitted on December 4, in many cases locals themselves were identifying and fighting the opposition. Only, they were not fighting alone. They were moving as agents of the police, identifying specific houses. There was of course some resistance. And the resistance acted as proof that the police attack was right and proper. But if paddy stacks are set on fire, if even tomorrow’s food, let alone next year’s, is snatched away thereby, who would not resist? So peasants, already pledged to resist till the end, did strike back. The fight was utterly uneven. Stones, knives, perhaps a few crude home-made bombs (if at all we are to give credence to this part of the police story) were hurled. According to the Chief Minister, the violence was entirely the work of outsiders, anti-socials, SUCI and Naxalites. CPI-M State Secretariat member and long time trade union leader Shyamal Chakraborty asserted:The police were attacked first. The police showed great restraint. If they had not tackled in this manner they themselves would have been beaten up.From the paddy fields, reporter Ashish Ghosh could see the ‘anti-socials’ being dragged into police camps. They included lungi-clad aged peasants, as well as young rural women. Near the highway, Ghosh could see a different scene. The Superintendent of Police smilingly reporting to the Inspector General, “Sir, we have already arrested fifty. By tonight we will set up camp at Beraberi”, and the IG responding, “In three more days we will complete the operation.” Sitting next to the police was the CPI-M Panchayat Pradhan Dibakar Das. Food packets were being brought from a car for the high officers and their cadre friends. Meanwhile ripe paddy was being trampled underfoot or set on fire, one scene even the most pro-government channel could not avoid shoeing, since in one case that was also a major battle field which the channels were keen to sow, since it “proved’ their claim that it was all the work of outsiders.

The Outsider

For the last two months, the ‘outsider’ has been a major target of CPI-M propaganda, especially outside Singur. On December 4, Ganashakti wrote, only outsiders are resisting the government at Singur. Ephemera are always bolder. So a poster put up by the Students’ Federation of India, the student wing of the CPI-M, asserted that urban people dressed as peasants had done all the mischief. In other words, even if you see peasants being beaten up on TV, don’t worry, they were all urban Naxalites playing at revolution in Singur. Ganashakti of course charged Medha Patkar too with being an outsider. A CPI-M leader, evidently more illiterate than the average, asked why she did not agitate in Gujarat against land take over, and why she came to West Bengal. Medha, typical of her track record, managed to get to Singur despite the thousands of cops and plenty of party cadres keeping a watch on outsiders. This of course suggested she had a lot of local sympathisers and insider help. But of course, we rule out such a possibility a priori. And so, Ganashakti also had a big story about how many routes there are to Singur, and why the police failed to stop Naxalites and Medha Patkar from entering the village. Medha confronted the police, and for her pains she, Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights activist Amitadyuti Kumar, and Sumit Chowdhury were arrested, dragged to a car and thrown out. She was then taken to a State Government Guest House in Calcutta, seemingly because someone higher up had realised that a faux pas had been committed. But she refused to be a guest of the State Government. After spending the entire night in the police van, from which she refused to budge, she gave the police aslip and went off to Chandernagore, where the seventy arrested people had been kept. If Medha Patkar was one outsider, the “Naxalites” were another category. As the CM told the media on the December 3, there had been students of Jadavpur Univeristy. This was a coded signal. Jadavpur University, rated in recent times by the UGC as one of India’s top five, has an ill-reputation because all its teachers are not housebroken partisans of the CPI-M, and even more, because the Faculty of Engineering and Technology Students’ Union has been under the uninterrupted control, since 1977, of the Democratic Students Front, a non-party far left association which has allowed in every shade of radical left, Maoist, Trotskyist, and other. As late as 2005, JU engineering students had been beaten up by the police in order to break a peaceful hunger strike. So when Bhattacharjee said JU students, he implied radical left, militant, and “mal-adjusted”. Yet how many JU students did they find? Out of the around seventy arrested, there is one student of JU, currently in a hospital, with a broken hand. Another arrested “outsider” is Swapna Banerjee. A fifty-year-old school teacher, Banerjee is a member of the Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Mancha. Women’s involvement in the struggles led to her being closely involved in the area for several months. Immediately, The Telegraph, on December 3, invented a story that she was the main ultra-Left figure in organising and fomenting trouble. Between the police, the Chief Minister, and the inventive staff of The Telegraph, local resistance was wiped off the map. Becharam Manna became a non-person, as did 81-year-old Saraswati, who gave an interview to Soma Marik a few days earlier and promised to continue fighting till the end. But there is another, even more crucial aspect of the invention of the outsider. On one hand, we are told that even the nation is too small a unit. We are asked to accept globalisation as the inevitable goal. On the other hand, in every battle where we try to organise resistance, we are told we are outsiders, or that we have outsiders amongst us. Medha Patkar is of course the great outsider in India. She has been branded an outsider in Gujarat, in Madhya Pradesh, and now in West Bengal. In Gujarat, the regional language papers are always attacking her, arguing that as an outsider she has no business talking about the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada, which is supposedly the sole hope for Saurashtra and Kutch. In Madhya Pradesh, I was asked why Medha Patkar is sniping at the MP Government, and not at others. And for the last few days, the CPI-M and the media that has, in the interests of big capital, placed itself entirely at the disposal of the CPI-M for the moment, argued that as an outsider, Patkar has no business in West Bengal. In flagrant violation of law, she was stopped repeatedly from going to Singur, even when she was not violating Section 144 of the CrPC. She was kept locked up, along with Anuradha Talwar of the Sramajeebi Mahila Samity, at Dankuni on the night of December 4, and told on the 5th that she could go anywhere else but Singur. Yet, she had not been formally arrested, so she could not be served an externment order. In other words, what was being done to her was sheer hooliganism, even if done by men in uniforms, backed by a Chief Minister.What was unique was not the charge, “outsiders”. This is a necessary salami tactics applied by rulers. They would like each fight to be an isolated one. They can bring 20,000 police from all over West Bengal, but the peasants of Singur have to be alone. For they know, at the present level of class struggle probably better than the toiling people, that in solidarity and unity alone lie chances of victory.What was unique was something else. This was the fact that a so-called Communist Party is doing the propaganda. After all, exactly who built this party? What was its founding ideology? Were Muzaffar Ahmed, S.A. Dange, themselves factory workers? How many acres of land did Muhammad Abdullah Rasul or Bankim Mukherjee cultivate? Did not Somnath Lahiri say, that they were often called the “strike-babus”, because they would rush to any mill where a strike had broken out, in the hope of making contact with militant workers. And even if we forget those heroic pioneers of the early twentieth century, and concentrate on the prosaic present-day leaders, Shyamal Chakraborty is still hailed as a Centre of Indian Trade Unions leader. When did he last, if ever, work in a factory? Is it not a fact that Brinda Karat and Sitaram Yechury represent West Bengal in the Upper House of Parliament? If the CPI-M is going to turn regional chauvinist at this date, should it not start by inquiring about how that could happen? We for our part believe that the Leninist party building concept clearly rejects this particular notion of “insider” and “outsider”. We are even prepared to concede that within the parliamentary framework, even a CPI-M, which is certainly not a Leninist party, can send Karat to Parliament from wherever they are sure of a safe seat. The question is, why then the chauvinistic witch-hunt unleashed on Medha Patkar? What this shows is, behind the mask of regionalism and localism is the class position. And it forces everyone to start rethinking the nature of the CPI-M. How many miles must a party walk right, till it ceases to be a part of the left?

After December 2

The struggle is difficult after December 2. The organisation of resistance has been crushed for the moment by stationing 20,000 police. Arrests have meant that energies have gone into court cases; money has to go for putting up bail bonds. But the struggle is not over. On December 5, a few small parties, the SUCI, and two of the CPI-ML groups called a bandh. Despite all bluster, TV channels could only prove that roads were empty, buses plied empty, and the Chamber of Commerce expressed unhappiness at the losses incurred (surely the losses were due to the success, not the failure of the bandh). On December 8, a march to Singur, called by two CPI-ML groups, was brutally beaten up by the police. Hundreds were injured. True to form, Ananda Basar Patrika reported only the violence unleashed also on a few journalists.Some other developments are worth noting. For decades, the Left Front has had the pretence of being a “cultured” political force, as opposed to the “uncouth”, “uncivilised” politics of the Congress and the Trinamul Congress (these choice epithets are often used by CPI-M leaders). Long years in power has enabled the CPI-M to use a patronage network and get plenty of intellectuals, not the most straight-backed of all beings, to line up with it and paint it in glowing terms. But the violence resulted in condemnations pouring in from many intellectuals and artistes of Bengal. Mahasweta Devi, internationally reputed author, issued a short, blunt statement: “This is a war. Ask yourself, on which side are you? Let war meet war.” Well-known Leftist poet Sankho Ghosh, a Tagore scholar of great repute, condemned the attacks on the peasants and committed himself to organised protest mvements. Artist Ramananda Bandyopadhyay condemned the arrest of Medha Patkar and questioned why, if India is a democracy, she did not have the right to go to Singur. Statements came from singers Pratul Mukhopadhyay and Srikanata Acharya, poets like Nirendranath Chakraborty and Mallika Sengupta, authors like Sanjib Chattopadhyay, film director Haranath Chakraborty, academics like Esha De of Calcutta University, Avee Dutta-Majumdar of Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, around thirty teachers of Jadavpur University who took part in a silent demonstration in the University campus, and others. The students of Engineering Faculty in Jadavpur University boycotted the first day of their end-of-semester examination as a mark of protest. On December 8, Medha Patkar spoke at both Presidency College, Calcutta, and Jadavpur University, at the invitation of students. A number of online petitions have also been launched, while two protest letters have been sent to the Governor of West Bengal, the Chairperson of the National Human Rights Commission and the National Commission for Women, signed by human rights and womens’ organisation, NGOs, and networks as well as by Leftwing groups. Well known academics who are also activists, like Achin Vanaik and Professor Vibhuti Patel, also signed them. Arundhati Roy, Mainstream Editor Sumit Chakravartty, were among those who protested in Delhi, in front of the CPI-M office.Yet an organised force like the CPI-M, backed by the bulk of the media, which is not even reporting protests in any even handed manner, will certainly try to turn all these into a three-day wonder, urging people to move on to other things. The leading newspaper in West Bengal, Ananda Bazar Patrika, and its English counterpart, The Telegraph, have taken the lead in this. Reporting the massive violence, The Telegraph sought to play it down, to trivialise it, by using tennis match rhetoric about post-police action, it was “advantage Mamata”. It pontificated editorially that in a democracy, street demonstrations were pursued by parties that do not have faith in the democratic system. And then it went on to cite as example Lal Krishna Advani’s notorious “ratha yatra” of 1989, which had stirred up communal riots in 43 towns. As though that had been a street demonstration, and as though that could be used to justify the illegal externment of Medha Patkar. The Singur land has been taken over, but the story is just beginning. The West Bengal Government proposes to give vaster stretches of land, for example to the Salim Group of Indonesia, again from peasants. It proposes to take over land to build a nuclear power plant. And even for Singur, there is at the least the need to fight for a proper rehabilitation for the great many who have got nothing or next to nothing, for a land-for-land resettlement. International and national solidarity is needed, particularly because Stalinists all over the world today still point to the Left Front as a shining example. CPI-M MP Nilotpal Basu’s article on the Left Front was reprinted even in the US progressive paper Guardian earlier this year. Even Noam Chomsky, the libertarian, found reasons to praise the Left Front Government when he came to Kolkata. The myth of the Left Front as alternative has to be disposed of, before a struggle for a real alternative can succeed. Let the tragedy of the peasants of Singur create at least the possibility of that. They deserve such revenge.

Modern crust on poverty

The Statesman

As India pursues its trajectory of sustained development, no aspect of its society is likely to remain untouched by “modernisation”. This includes poverty. For economic growth, whatever its merits, is no panacea for poverty, as the evidence from the USA and Europe attests: poverty is not abated, but it is transformed.There is a vast difference between poverty as a consequence of a dearth of natural resources, and money-poverty, which prevents people from buying in everything needful for a dignified life. The first is a poverty of resources - the result of failed food production, natural disaster or an existential absence of the necessities of survival. The latter is a product of human-made injustice, of fabricated shortages, of contrived inadequacy.Reactions to the first are often fatalistic: what is to be done in a world of insufficiency, drought or flood, visitations of disease or pests that ruin crops. That is not to say that poor people have not traditionally developed strategies for survival - knowledge of where to find hunger foods, traditional remedies against sickness, multiple cropping as a fallback in the event of a single crop being wiped out.

Reactions to the second - which, of course, the proponents of modernisation seek to present as though it were the same thing as “natural” poverty - are less passive. For everyone knows that the wealth of industrial society far exceeds what is necessary for the survival and subsistence of everyone. In the contemporary world, the industrial system advertises itself and its prodigious capacity to produce - its iconography pervades the whole planet. So when people are hungry, cold and sick in the presence of global plenty, it is not to be expected that their response will be as it was when they were confronted by empty fields, continuous rain or the air full of insects that devour all growing things.Since modernised poverty is imposed by the very system that boasts its ability to create wealth, the response by the poor is bound to be more proactive: for it will be a reaction to systematically imposed violence.It is to be expected that the ancient torpor, the age-old acquiescence and fatalism of a rooted peasantry, will mutate. As people move from rural areas which can no longer sustain them, to the great urban agglomerations, poverty goes with them into the slums and tenements of the city.And there, poverty will become a very different phenomenon, aggravated by great concentrations of people who have little or nothing.

Modernised poverty appears as deprivation, a significant word, since it expresses the situation precisely: something is being withheld, namely the means of achieving a dignified life. There are two significant ways in which poor people seek to remedy their plight. The first is to absorb the prevailing ideology of individualism, and take personal action. This involves do-it-yourself alleviation of their outcast state by any means possible.In the urban setting especially, there will be a great increase in crime - theft, burglary, robbery, cheating, forgery, counterfeit goods, dealing in forbidden substances. This has been the experience in the rich world, and this is what India must expect, embarked as it now is, apparently irreversibly, on the road of perpetual reform, modernisation and change. The people who bless the rewards of liberalisation are the same who deplore the loss of social cohesion, the lack of respect, the decline of honesty. They should understand that these things are inseparable: growing insecurity of unjustly distributed wealth is the price they have to pay for the gains they have made; and if this means the rise of the chain-snatcher, the intruder, the ruthless miscreant and the killer, this should also be clearly understood.

The second response is a form of collective reaction. Naxalism or Maoism now affect large swathes of India, particularly rural areas where subsistence and traditional ways of life are under attack from the industrial paradigm - land alienated from Dalits, farmers, people who have made a peaceable living from time immemorial, but whose lands are required either for agribusiness or for infrastructural projects, and who are being turned into nomads by the evictions of industrial society.The government often plays the role of middleman in these transactions which cheat people of the value of their land ~ a value that has never been measured in money, since it has meant continuity, sustenance and survival, aspects of life which cannot be quantified in monetary terms.“Naxalism”, unrest, disturbances and protests against the loss of land are presented by the myopic ruling classes as though these were aspects of wilful wickedness, as if these were aspects of a gratuitous “terrorism” and not the actions of the despairing, people who are being transformed from sedate and conservative peasantry into a ragged future proletariat.

They are being compelled to scrape a living on the margins of a money-economy, in place of self-reliance, providing for themselves and their families out of their own land, their own efforts and skills.The people in remote, rural areas are not living in a separate society from the middle class in the metros and main towns: they are paying the price of the ease and affluence of those advantaged by India’s vaunted economic miracles. To affect horror and outrage against the actions of “Maoists” is an avoidance of responsibility by those who are beneficiaries of the changes in India.Neither getting tough on outlaws, nor firm action against criminality will eliminate conflict and strife.For India is conducting an economic policy which is colonial in origin; and the only hinterland from which surplus value can be extracted is through the exploitation of its own people, the peasant and the Dalits, and the land of the cultivators and farmers. The ancient acceptance of destiny by a mute and toiling poor is being subverted by the engines of “progress”.

There are two things wrong with the model of development imported from the rich capitalist societies and imposed upon India. The first is that the initial accumulation and wealth of the “advanced” countries derived in large measure from colonial and neo-colonial appropriation of goods, resources, and the setting up of an unfair global system which continues to disadvantage the poor of the earth. The second objection is that this model does nothing to alleviate inequality, even in the heart of the great global imperium of wealth.The USA and Europe, with all the advantages of the purloined substance of the peoples of the world, still cannot remove poverty, even less mitigate inequality: these remain among the most unfair societies in the world.India is the site of a vast social and economic experiment. Will India, with its old injustices, its casteism and hierarchies, easily accept the modernisation of poverty and inequity, or will the experience of artificial scarcities, human-made impoverishment, growing unfairness in a world of abundance also alter the temper and sensibility of the people? Will modernised poverty make them more angry, intractable and likely to revolt, either as criminals or political radicals?

It may be that the rulers of India are content to sit it out, to wait and see. But the growth in both crime and political disorder ought at least to sow disquiet in their minds. They show little sign of any perturbation over the future governability of a country they have delivered so eagerly to alien doctrines of partial and unjust enrichment.

The author lives in Britain. He has written plays for the stage, TV and radio, made TV documentaries, published more than 30 books and contributed to leading journals around the world. email:yrn63@dial.pipex.com

Shock and war — what a forecaster doesn't need

William Keegan

The First World War was a shock to the economic system, marking the collapse of the late 19th/early 20th century adventure with economic globalisation.

THERE IS no such thing as "failure" under modern political management. There is merely "challenge." For economists there is "shock."

If something goes wrong with the forecasts, it is attributable to a "shock" to the system. In the days before economic forecasts were even thought of, the First World War was a shock to the economic system, marking the collapse of the late 19th/early 20th century adventure with economic globalisation, and being followed by Weimar inflation, slump, and protectionism.

Wars provoke the biggest shocks. The Korean War of 1950-53 provided an inflationary shock to the world economy (via higher commodity prices) and the Vietnam War involved inflationary financing in the 1960s, which contributed to a devaluation of the dollar and the collapse in 1971 of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system, which was based on the dollar price of gold. The last straw was the Yom Kippur War of the autumn of 1973, which prompted a quintupling of the price of oil — the first "oil shock" — as the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) employed their oligopolistic muscle, which had already been irritated by the impact of a devalued dollar on their earnings from a commodity that was traditionally priced in dollars.

The Second World War had, of course, been the shock that induced Jean Monnet and others to unite the commanding heights of the German and French economies via the setting up of the European Economic Community; and distrust of the United States and its "benign neglect" of the dollar was a key factor prompting leaders such as Chancellor Schmidt of West Germany and President Giscard d'Estaing of France to set up the European Monetary System — precursor of the euro — in 1979.
Fall of the Shah of Iran

There was a second oil shock in 1979-80, directly connected with the fall of the Shah and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran.

Then there were the shocks of German unification in 1990 and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

All these "shocks" were related one way or another to wars and their aftermath or to revolutions. All of them affected the economic thinking of the time, and caused substantial alterations to prevailing economic assumptions.

Which brings us to the next possible shock to the system. Anybody who has listened recently to Tony Blair failing to apologise for his role in taking his country to war will have realised that the British Prime Minister — who would be the laughing stock of the Western world if the situation in the Middle East and its ramifications were not so serious — is being characteristically equivocal about the U.K.'s response to any U.S. plans for war with Iran.

Yet anyone who has been following the U.S. press will know that the prospect of a "strike" against Iran is now being discussed, and the Bush-Cheney axis, fresh from its "triumph" in Iraq, is, depending on the source, either seriously contemplating such a strike or (in menacing tones) not ruling it out.

The motives of George W. Bush and the neocons with regard to Iraq are probably best explained by psychoanalysts; but the only rational explanation for the Cheney approach to Iraq was that it was largely about safeguarding the supply of oil. So far, for all the chaos and the perverse impact on oil production within Iraq itself, Middle East oil has continued to flow and the price is well below last year's peak. Saudi Arabia, itself concerned about the way the Iraq venture has strengthened the hand of Iran, has counteracted the hawks in OPEC who want to push prices higher.

Quite apart from the geopolitical disasters that most experts on the Middle East (and many non-experts) predict, should the U.S. attack Iran (having deliberately eschewed the kind of diplomacy that seems to have improved its relations with North Korea) a strong body of opinion has it that the impact on the oil price of such a conflagration would be devastating.
Energy price gyrations
Obviously, economic forecasters cannot predict, or assume, such events. But it is noteworthy that the main impact on the trend of inflation in the recent past has been the gyrations of the price of energy, and the main reason the Bank of England's monetary policy committee and other central banks are forecasting a decline in inflation later this year lies with the lagged impact of the recent decline in energy prices.
The same goes for the perceived success of the U.S. Federal Reserve, which is now being credited with having achieved the much-prized trick of a "soft landing" for the U.S. economy — usually by analysts who thought Alan Greenspan was "irreplaceable" until he was replaced by Ben Bernanke.
Central bankers tend, in my experience, to be nervous, if not downright alarmed by the mystical powers attributed to them. They know they are mortal, and they worry continually about whether they "have got it right." Mr. Greenspan himself became obsessed in his latter years with the supply and price of oil.

The Bank of England's monetary policy committee (MPC) is going through a very interesting phase. Some time ago one of its members took me aside and complained at my use of the term "politburo" to describe the seemingly block vote of the internal Bank members of the MPC. More recently there have been months when the politburo itself has been split, at least over the timing of changes in interest rates. The latest news is that the only hawks on the MPC last time round were two "external" members. But one thing they are all agreed on is that the big factor, both upwards and downwards, has been the price of energy.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007

Off with the farmer

T K ARUN
TNN, 1 FEBRUARY

Rural distress leading to farmer suicides, alongside breakdown of governance and failure of democracy, is the dark cloud to which a 9% economic growth rate hangs as a silver-lining. What can be done to banish this darkness? The first step is to take a whole lot of farmers off the land, at least half of them. We just have too many farmers.

What right do sundry commentators have to ask farmers to get off the land? Well, farmers are the first ones to opt out. For those who wish to understand rural distress, the National Book Trust has brought out a little green book, in which agricultural economist G S Bhalla summarises the finding of the National Sample Survey Organisation’s Situation Assessment Survey of Farmers. The Survey found that 40% of the country’s farmers have no desire to persist with farming, but do so for want of an alternative. The book is essential reading for all politicians who wish to appreciate the reality behind emotive news reports about distress on the farm. However, the book does not go into what can be done to tackle that distress. Which brings us back to ridding farmland of an excess of farmers. How many farmers do we have?

The number that our trade negotiators cite to stave off opening up the farm sector is 650 million. This is a gross exaggeration, of course. The fact is that only around 58% of our total workforce is dependent on farming, either as cultivators or agricultural workers. Another 3% live on fishing. In fact, 27% of rural workers are engaged in activities other than cultivation.

What needs to be done is to enlarge this pool and shrink dependence on crop husbandry where under-employment is huge and productivity, low.

As per the latest estimates, less than 18% of GDP comes from agriculture and allied activities, which engage 61% of the workforce.

Clearly, productivity per worker in the non-agricultural sectors is, on average, seven times as much as in agriculture. Shifting workers out of agriculture would vastly improve productivity, boost incomes and the rate of growth of the economy. How do we go about shifting workers out of agriculture, that is, farmers off the farm? And how do we raise the incomes of those who remain in agriculture? Urbanisation, agro-processing, organised retail and organisation of farmers into Amul-like cooperatives and companies to give them institutional capability — that is the short answer.

As this column has pointed out repeatedly, India cannot prosper with the size of the urban population limited to 28% of the population as at present. It has been the historical experience, since the times of Sumer and Harappa, that human achievement has been closely linked to the development of cities.

As communities and nations prosper, more and more of the population becomes urban. India would be racing to double the share of urban population, as it continues to grow at 8% to 9% a year. It is neither feasible nor desirable for an additional 30 crore people to crowd our existing towns and cities, already bursting at the seams.

New towns and cities have to be built. For that farmland will need to be converted into urban land. There could be several ways in which farmers participate in such urbanisation. The government could take away their land by force, compensating them at current market rates for land, as happened in Kalinga Nagar, Singur or is happening near Mumbai.

Or savvy farmers could negotiate high prices for their land and position themselves to live profitably off the new urban settlements coming up on their land, as has happened, for example, in the Gurgaon and Noida suburbs of Delhi. Or farmers could proactively pool their land, build a township on it, sell and lease it out to new dwellers, provide services and produce to them, as some farmers near Pune did, setting up the Magarpatta township. Clearly, the last option is the best one.

And the first option, the worst. Where farmers lack sufficient enterprise and initiative, the government could think of setting up companies to own and lease out land being converted to urban use, making displaced farmers shareholders in these companies.

Agro-processing would add value to farm produce. The closer it is done to the farm, the greater the value that would be distributed in the rural areas, to factory hands, loaders, drivers, guards, suppliers of services newly in demand because these agro-processing enterprises have come up. Organised retail would eliminate a series of middlemen and give the farmer better prices, apart from new, high-yielding technologies. It would invest in rural storage facilities induce investment in roads and power, creating many new income-earning opportunities in the rural areas.

Organising farmers into new collective agencies is crucial — whether to take effective part in futures markets or set up wineries or cheese-making units. Urbanisation, agro-processing and organised retail would, together, narrow the rural-urban gap and make a frontal assault on rural distress.