[Reader-list] Fwd: [humanrights-movement:1580] Protest Demolition of a Gandhian Aashram in Chhattisgarh: Sign Petition at <http://petitions.aidindia.org/VCA>

[Venugopalan K M]

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Date: Mon, May 25, 2009 at 8:03 AM
Subject: [humanrights-movement:1580] Protest Demolition of a Gandhian
Aashram in Chhattisgarh: Sign Petition at
<http://petitions.aidindia.org/VCA>
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Protest Demolition of a Gandhian Aashram in Chhattisgarh: Sign
Petition at <http://petitions.aidindia.org/VCA>

I/IV.

Press Release



The Committee for the Release of Dr Binayak Sen, Mumbai, Mumbai
expresses its grave concern at the report of demolition of the
premises of Vanvasi Chetna Ashram (VCA) in Dantewara,Chhattisgarh by
the local administrative authorities on the morning of 17th May 2009,
and the subsequent detention, harassment and brutal bashing up of some
of the inmates, visitors and volunteers including students and
journalists – both men and women.

The sudden demolition on the plea of encroachment of forest land and
regardless of the fact that a court case is already pending, as it is
more than evident, was carried out just to intimidate and stifle any
and every voice of conscientious dissent raised against the barbaric
and utterly illegal ongoingSalwa Judum campaign of the BJP-government
of Chhattisgarh.



The Vanvasi Chetna Ashram, had been set up and has been working since
for the welfare of the local adivasi way back in 1992. Since 2005, it
is raising its voice to demand governmentaccountability and social
justice in the light of violence against adivasis and their forced
displacement from their villages by the state-sponsored militia Salwa
Judum, in Dantewada and Bijapur districts. The VCA is one of the few
community organisations engaged in resettlement and rehabilitation of
displaced adivasis by organising individual and community support
programmes under very adverse conditions.



The Committee is shocked to note that the state administration,
instead of recognising and supporting the invaluable service that the
VCA is providing to the most marginalised communities inthe area, has
launched a campaign of vilification and cruel assault against the
organisation.

The Committee also notes that this demolition was carried out in the
immediate wake of the announcement of parliamentary election results.
It evidently signifies that the state administration takes the
positive electoral performance of the ruling party in the state as an
act of popular endorsement of its brutal policies, castigated even by
the Supreme Court of India in Last year April. Quite disregarding the
fact that such policies have been delivered a decisive rebuff on the
all-India plane.

In the view of the Committee, no matter whatever be the electoral
verdict, such brazen acts of stateatrocities can never be condoned and
have got to be stoutly countered.

This is of a piece with the detention of and refusal of bail to one of
the most prominent humanrights activists in the state, Dr. Binayak
Sen, on the strength of the draconian Chhattisgarh Special Public
Security Act, 2005 for the last two years in the teeth of national and
global outrage and protests.



Under the circumstances, the Committee demands of the state government
the following:

·        Immediate legal action against the officials who ordered and
carried out the illegal demolition.

·        Full compensation to VCA and the rebuilding of its premises.



[A detailed report is available at <www.binayaksen.net>.]



May 18 2009

Committee for the Release of Dr Binayak Sen, Mumbai

II
http://www.binayaksen.net/2009/05/veronica-kalpana-gautam-vca/

They demolished Gandhian ashram, and beat us badly

Posted at May 21, 2009

Symbi student, 18, narrates her first-hand experience of state
repression in conflict-torn Dantewada in Chhattisgarh
By Veronica Kalpana Gautam

Mumbai Mirror



THEN

NOW

Pictures of the non-profit Vanvasi Chetna Ashram in Dantewada,
Chattisgarh, before and after demolition by the state authorities on
May 17

As part of my Media and Communication programme of Symbiosis
International University, I have been interning with Vanvasi Chetna
Ashram, a Gandhian non-profit organisation, based in the conflict zone
of Dantewada in Chhattisgarh.

For the last few years, the ashram has increasingly raised its voice
against state atrocities upon civilians. I have been involved in the
projects to rehabilitate villagers who fled due to atrocities
inflicted on them by both warring parties.

According to Human Rights Watch, more than 40,000 people have left
their homes due to the conflict between the Naxalites and the
state-sponsored, counter-insurgency of the Salwa Judum.

The legitimacy of the Salwa Judum yet to be decided before the Supreme
Court. Meanwhile, the Court has passed orders to rehabilitate the 644
villages of the conflict zone, but the administration has ignored
them.

Only Vanvasi Chetna Ashram and other local NGOs from Andhra Pradesh
have been active in the rehabilitation of these villages and are often
hindered by the government.

I was involved with the rehabilitation of the villages of Basaguda
block during the second week of May. Most villages in these areas have
no access to electricity, transport, and the only source of rice and
ration is the Ashram itself. About 90 per cent of all homes in these
areas have been destroyed.

Two days after the initial rehabilitation of more than 100 people, I
returned to the village of Kawalnar where the Ashram’s main office and
housing facilities have been located for the last 17 years.

Eventually, a notice issued on May 13, delivered on May 16, stated
that everyone must vacate the premises by 7 am on May 17. I learnt
that the legal matter of encroachment itself was sub-judice and thus,
no legal action could have been taken.

The land itself comes under the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution and
it gives sole authority to the Gram Sabha — the villagers. And not a
single building can be built or destroyed on that land without their
permission.

In 1994, the Gram Sabha of Kawalnar had already allotted the land to
the Ashram for carrying out their service work. The day before, the
same villagers confirmed that they do not want the Ashram to go.

On May 17, at 6.30 am, about 50 CRPF Jawans arrived and took positions
around the Ashram’s premises, ensuring not a single villager could get
to the main buildings. After a while, some 500 security personnel and
sub-divisional magistrate Ankit Anand had arrived.

Kopa Kunjam, a social worker and an employee of the ashram, asked the
magistrate for the letter granting permission from the Gram Sabha
authorising the demolition. The Magistrate blatantly ignored this
imperative procedure and ordered the demolition to proceed by 8 am.

As the demolition began, a photojournalist, two students from IISc
Bangalore, another from Gujarat, and I were manhandled and detained in
a van.

Our cameras and our bags were confiscated and two of us were beaten
with malice. The photojournalist Javed Iqbal was deliberately singled
out for his reports on police atrocities and beaten.

Later, we were all taken to the Dantewada police station, and made to
give statements on our motives, our identities and our perceptions of
the work of Vanvasi Chetna Ashram.

We were then taken to the hospital for a medical check-up under police
supervision where no one really checked for physical injuries. We were
eventually released after the check-up.

Regarding the continuation of my internship, I have no compulsions to
leave. If I didn’t have two more years of college to finish, I would
have stayed back and continued to be a part of the struggle for social
justice, being in the company of incredible people and social workers
like Himanshu Kumar, Kopa Kunjam, Akkalbatti Naag, Sukhdev Kadiyam,
Abhay Sinh Rathwa along with researcher Bela Bhatia and
photojournalist Javed Iqbal.

These are the people who are still upholding the principles of
Gandhian idealogy against an increasingly brutal state machinery, that
shows no signs of giving up.

III.

http://www.binayaksen.net/2009/05/two-sides-to-democracy/

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1090523/jsp/opinion/story_10994522.jsp

TWO SIDES TO DEMOCRACY - The demolition of a Gandhian ashram in Chhattisgarh

Posted at May 23, 2009

Politics and Play - Ramachandra Guha
The Telegraph , Calcutta

In the early hours of May 17, while the rest of India was asleep after
an election conducted honestly and won fairly, a massive contingent of
police and paramilitary descended on a Gandhian ashram in the interior
of Chhattisgarh. They woke up the sleeping social workers, and gave
them exactly one hour to pack their belongings. The Gandhians were
then escorted outside the ashram that had been their home, thus making
way for the bulldozers that had been sent to demolish it. The machines
were supervised by some 500 men in uniform, variously owing allegiance
to the Central Reserve Police Force and the Chhattisgarh state police.
Over the course of that Sunday, as the rest of India was considering
the consequences of the election just held, the Vanvasi Chetna Ashram
in Dantewada was razed to the ground. The office, the training hall,
the staff quarters, even the tubewells — nothing was spared.

In the summer of 2006, I had myself eaten several meals in that ashram
in Dantewada. Its founder, Himanshu, is a sharp-eyed, well-built, and
forever smiling man in his late forties. Originally from Meerut, he
was inspired by Vinoba Bhave and Nirmala Deshpande to devote his life
to the adivasis of central India. In 1992, he moved with his wife to
Dantewada to fulfil his calling. He recruited a group of local boys
and girls, and with their assistance worked on bringing education and
healthcare to the adivasis.

By the time I visited the Vanvasi Chetna Ashram, it had established a
solid presence in the district. Its campus lay in the little village
of Kanwalnar, about 10 miles from Dantewada town. Ringed by mango
trees, the ashram contained a set of low, modest buildings where the
members lived. From this home in the forest they ventured out into the
surrounding countryside, to work among the Gonds and Koyas and Murias
of the district.

The activities of the Vanvasi Chetna Ashram would be reckoned by most
people in most times to be uncontroversial. But these are dangerous
times in Dantewada, with a civil war raging between Maoist
revolutionaries and a vigilante group promoted by the state
administration and known as Salwa Judum. In this war, the tribals are
caught in-between — so are Gandhian social workers. No one living in
the district of Dantewada is now allowed to be neutral, to condemn
even-handedly the barbaric acts of the Naxalites as well as the
barbaric acts of the Salwa Judum.

As a consequence of the civil war, more than 50,000 tribals in
Dantewada have been uprooted from their homes. Some left voluntarily;
while many others were forcibly displaced by the Salwa Judum or by the
Maoists. These refugees live in camps strung along the main road, in
leaking and unstable tents, and without proper access to food, water,
and means of employment. Many victims of the civil war fled across the
border to Andhra Pradesh, where they live in equally pathetic
conditions.

After months of living in this way, some tribals asked that they be
allowed to return to their villages, so that they could live in their
own homes, and close to their lands and their livestock. While the
state wanted them to stay on in the camps, the villagers were
encouraged to go back by the Vanvasi Chetna Ashram. Thus Himanshu and
his co-workers set about rehabilitating those adivasis who wished to
have no more of life in the camps.

The pretext behind the demolition of the Vanvasi Chetna Ashram is that
the campus has ‘encroached’ on government forest land. The Gandhians,
on the other hand, insist that they built on revenue land acquired
legally and with permission from the local panchayat. The case is
currently being heard in the local courts. Rather than await the
court’s verdict, the district authorities uniliaterally chose to
demolish the ashram, in what is very clearly an act of vindictive
retaliation against the refusal by these Gandhians to wholly condone
the support to the Salwa Judum of the Chhattisgarh state government.

As it happened, four students from the Indian Institute of Science in
Bangalore were visiting Dantewada on the weekend of 16/17 May. They
were thus eye-witnesses to the ashram’s demolition. One scholar I
spoke to said that the sub-divisional magistrate directing the
operations, Ankit Anand, was particularly belligerent. When a student
weakly protested, Anand commanded the police to have him silenced. The
boy was taken away, beaten up, and asked to confess that the good
Gandhian Himanshu was (a) an agent of the Naxalites; and (b) running a
prostitution racket.

It was surely not an accident that the state of Chhattisgarh chose the
very weekend that the election results were being declared to carry
out this savage act of retribution. Who, at a time like this, would
care about a violation of democracy in a remote and inaccessible
corner of the country while the world was celebrating the victory of
democracy in India as a whole? For this writer, the juxtaposition of
these two events was powerfully symbolic. For I have long argued that
India is a ‘50-50’ democracy. In the formal, institutional sense of
holding fair elections contested by many parties, allowing freedom of
movement for its citizens, and nurturing a free press, India is indeed
democratic. But in other respects, it falls short of the democratic
ideal. Kin and caste play far too important a part in politics and
governance. Levels of corruption among politicians and officials are
unacceptably high. The autonomy of the judiciary is somewhat
compromised. The use of force by the State is often capricious and
arbitrary.

Even in safe and (mostly) peaceable places like my hometown,
Bangalore, one can occasionally encounter the dark side of Indian
democracy — as in tax officials who take bribes, or politicians who
fill in common waterbodies and sell them to private builders. But it
is in the conflict zones of Kashmir, the Northeast, and central India,
that the State shows itself at its most unappealing. To be sure, there
are extenuating circumstances, such as separatist movements and
revolutionary struggles. But to explain is not to apologize. One must
condemn the violence used by the Naxalites and by the Kashmiri
insurgents. One must yet insist that the Indian State, our State, be
held to a higher order of morality and accountability.

Over the past few years, the government of Chhattisgarh has had a
particularly undistinguished record in this respect. The burning of
adivasi villages under the government-sponsored Salwa Judum has been
documented in a series of independent reports. Then there is the
unconscionable incarceration without bail of the respected social
worker and doctor, Binayak Sen, on the very flimsy charge of carrying
a letter from one Naxalite to another. Now comes this savage act of
retribution against a group of law-abiding, peace-loving, and utterly
non-violent Gandhians.

Supporters of the Chhattisgarh government deflect such criticism by
pointing to the fact that the chief minister of the state has won a
series of elections. But democracy does not begin and end with the
counting of votes. Those elected to political office are sworn to
uphold the rule of law, and to honour the ideals of the Indian
Constitution. This holds true at the national as well as provincial
levels. It applies equally to Congress-led governments as to Bharatiya
Janata Party-led ones. So long as incidents such as the demolition of
the Vanvasi Chetna Ashram occur and recur, India will not count as
much more than a 50 per cent democracy.

ramguha at hotmail.com

IV.

http://petitions.aidindia.org/VCA/

Petition to express deep shock and dismay at the illegal demolition of
the premises of Vanvasi Chetna Ashram

To:
Ms. Pratibha Patil,
President of India

Mr. ESL Narasimhan Governor of Chhattisgarh India

Mr. Raman Singh Chief Minister Chhattisgarh,India

cc: Mr. Joy Oommen, Chief Secretary of Chhattisgarh, and Mr. RP Jain,
Home Secretary of Chhattisgarh

We are writing to express deep shock and dismay at the illegal
demolition of the premises of Vanvasi Chetna Ashram (VCA) by the local
administrative authorities on the morning of 17th May 2009, and the
subsequent detention, harassment and brutalization of students and
journalists working with VCA by the police. We condemn the campaign of
vilification and harassment that the state administration has
unleashed against VCA, and demand its immediate end.

Vanvasi Chetna Ashram, has been working for the welfare of the adivasi
(indigenous) people of south Bastar (Chhattisgarh, central India)
since 1992, consistently fighting for their legal rights and access to
their forests, lands and livelihood.. Since 2005, VCA has also called
for government accountability and social justice in light of the
violence against adivasis and their forced displacement from their
villages by the state-sponsored militia Salwa Judum in Dantewada and
Bijapur districts. VCA is one of the few community organizations
engaged in resettlement and rehabilitation of displaced adivasis[1] by
organizing individual and community support under very adverse
conditions,and is also providing themlegal aid.

VCA has recently been involved in highlighting the complicity of the
state administration in several cases of extrajudicial
killings—including the case of Singaram massacres, where 19 villagers
were killed on 8th January, 2009. What was initially presented by the
state as a case of Maoist insurgents being killed in an alleged
“encounter” with the state security forces was later revealed by media
and human rights organizations to be a staged killing of unarmed
villagers[2]. VCA has been at the forefront of asking the government
for accountability, and has brought this case to the Chhattisgarh High
Court. It is therefore, particularly alarming to note that the Sub
Divisional Magistrate who carried out the demolition of the VCA
premises, Mr. Ankit Anand, is also the one who conducted the
magisterial inquiry in the Singaram killings, and has a clear conflict
of interest.

Ever since VCA took a strong stance against the government’s support
of Salwa Judum a few years ago, the government has been conducting an
unending campaign of harassment against the organization, as detailed
below:
·In February 2007, a case of “illegal” encroachment on village forest
was lodged against VCA, even though the said piece of land had been
granted to them by the Kawalnar Gram Sabha resolution in 1994. VCA
challenged this original notice in the court.[3]
·In July 2007, while the case was still under consideration in the
courts, VCA was issued an eviction order by the local revenue
official, ordering them to immediately vacate their premises.[4]
·In January 2008, VCA received another notice from the Registrar of
Firms and Societies in Chhattisgarh, threatening to cancel their
registration under the Societies Registration Act of 1973, on the
basis of the complaint of the District Collector that they have
encroached government land (even though the matter was still sub
judice).[5]
·In December 2008, VCA’s registration under the Foreign Contribution
Regulation Act, 1976, was “temporarily suspended in public interest”
without any reason being provided—making it impossible for them to
receive funding from international organizations. [6]
·Finally, on 16th May 2009, the VCA was delivered a notice dated 13th
May, informing them that their premises were going to be bulldozed the
next day. Not only is this a blatantly illegal notice, considering
that the matter was still under judicial consideration, the late
delivery of the notice also ensured that the VCA were also left with
no time to move the courts to get an injunction to stay the order (the
16th being a holiday). [7]

Even though the VCA immediately responded to the notice informing the
local administration of the status of the case, it made no difference.
On the morning of the 17th of May, a 500 strong posse of policemen,
Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and other security forces cordoned
off the area, and bulldozed the entire structure, painstakingly put
together by the VCA and the local community over 17 years, not even
sparing the tubewells and an open well which had been constructed by
the Government. The police and armed personnel manhandled five VCA
visitors and staff members, including a freelance photojournalist, two
PhD research scholars from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, one
woman student intern from the corporate firm Symbiosis, Pune, a
relative of the Director, who was there on a personal visit and a
health worker.[8]

We unequivocally condemn the systematic campaign of harassment and
intimidation that the administration has launched against Vanvasi
Chetna Ashram, and demand that it be immediately halted and the
organization be fully and properly compensated. Not only has the
administration flouted all norms in ordering the demolition of a
structure still under court’s consideration, the undue haste and
urgency shown in implementing this order is also very disturbing.
Furthermore, we note that this area is governed by Schedule V, and
hence, Gram Sabhas have the primary responsibility to take all
decisions over land use. However, by effecting this demolition, the
administration has shown utter disregard for the opinion of the Gram
Sabha.

We demand the following:
· An end to the systematic harassment of all human rights activists
and critics of the Chhattisgarh state.
· Immediate legal action against the officials who ordered and carried
out the illegal demolition.
· Full compensation to VCA and the rebuilding of its premises.
· Immediate action against the police officials responsible for the
brutalization of the visitors and staff members.
· An assurance from the administration, that it will seek explicit
consent of the Gram Sabha before erecting or demolishing any further
structures in the area.,


Sincerely,

Peace Is Doable
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