:: Saturday, April 26, 2003 ::

Ethno-Nationalist Irredentism in the Chittagong Hill Tracts: A case of 'Creeping Genocide'?

Neither the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) nor its 700 000 indigenous peoples are widely known. In terms of physical geography the CHT'S 13, 221 square kilometres are part of a much larger, heavily forested but largely inaccessible and remote mountain range, stretching for 1800 kilometres from western Burma to an area where it merges with the eastern Himalayas in China. Its present-day incorporation within Bangladesh is the historical product of the post-1860 British advance to the east and northeast of Bengal, in order to provide a buffer zone (a less famous equivalent of its North-West Frontier) for its burgeoning Indian empire. This artificial boundary demarcation prefigured the political separation of the CHT at the end of British rule, in 1947, from Myanmar (Burma) to the south, and the Indian states of Tripura and Mizoram to the north and east. Despite their close ethno-cultural affinities with other peoples of Sino-Tibetan origin in these states, and the lack of ethnic or religious identity with Bengalis, the Chakma, Marma, Tripura and nine or 10 other ethnographically diverse tribal peoples of the CHT found themselves instead in (East) Pakistan.

It is what has been happening to these peoples since 1947, and more particularly since the Bengali secession from Pakistan to form an independent Bangladesh in 1971, which is this post's subject. A number of concerned nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) have closely monitored their situation and in more than one instance have unequivocally accused the Bangladeshi government of commiting genocide against the jummas--the term of collective self-identification used by CHT peoples in recent years. Survival International, which works for tribal peoples worldwide, has noted their extreme plight claiming a figure of 125, 000 fatalities since 1947. The International Labour Organisation has spoken of 'the calculated annihilation of the tribals'. In 1984 the Anti-Slavery Society forecast that genocide would result if nothing was done. Amnesty International, always more circumspect in its choice of terms, nevertheless issued a report at the height of the killings in 1986, which charged genocide in all but name. Scholars, notably the anthropologist Wolfgang Mey, have added their voice. With little evidence that the 1989 change from military government to democratic rule had tangibly improved jumma fortunes, and by this time with an estimated 10% of them refugees in neighbouring Tripura, a number of agencies came together as the CHT Commission to investigate the situation fully at first hand. Their report Life is Not Ours, published in May 1991, spoke of 'a genocidal process' which two sequels appeared to confirm as a long-term trend.

By contrast, the Bangladeshi government has vigorously refuted these charges as 'totally baseless and preposterous allegations' a claim founded on the counter-charge that their source was 'disgruntled', 'misguided' or 'miscreant' troublemakers. This has usually been a shorthand for the Parbottya Chattagram Jana Sanghati Samiti (JSS), the largely Chakma-recruited Chittagong Hill Tracts Peoples Solidarity Association which the Bangladeshi government has consistently accused of working in the interests of 'a foreign power', namely India. If the implication here is that the NGOS are credulous Western do-gooders who have been unscrupulously duped into meddling in matters which they do not understand, the Bangladeshi government is not alone in arguing that the threat to the jummas has been exaggerated. At the first conference of the Association of Genocide Scholars in 1995, Ted Gurr entirely excluded them from a long list of South east Asian minorities in danger, more recently placing them in a medium-risk or even residual category only. Neither do the jummas appear in Harff and Gurr's list of genocide and politicide victims since 1945, nor in the recent global survey by Helen Fein.

Adjudicating on which story to believe is not helped by the fact that the CHT has been a militarily controlled area, mostly off-limits to would-be independent observers, since 1964. Reports of atrocities and massacres reach the outside world either via the JSS which might be argued to have a vested interest in their exposure, or a Bangladeshi government obversely intent on denying that anything of the kind took place or, if it did, blaming it on the Shanti Bahini (literally 'Peace Force' !), the jumma guerrilla army closely linked to the JSS. But the problem is seriously compounded by Western perceptions of Bangladesh. A new state founded in 1971 out of an extremely bloody secession from Pakistan, Bangladesh has always been considered in the camp of the 'victims' not the 'perpetrators.' 1971 itself, with its mass rapes and murders to the tune of possibly three million fatalities, began this process. This genocidal trauma was succeeded by a series of other 'natural' disasters which led to the death or economic ruination of further millions. With a massive population increase, insufficient industrial capacity with which to absorb the excess and 85% of its development funds coming from Western aid, Bangladesh has often been treated as a basket case which, in the circumstances, could be excused its proclivity towards authoritarian military rule. What happened in the CHT, especially in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was thus clouded not simply by Bangladeshi but also Western agendas to commence radical remedial programmes aimed at pulling the country clear of the dependency trap.

Situating Genocidal State Policies: The Historical Legacy

Normative contemporary assumptions as to the 'necessity' of development undoubtedly complicate any analysis of the conflict in the CHT. But there are, in fact, three interrelated questions here. First, what is meant by genocide or at least a 'genocidal process' and is its usage appropriate with regard to the region? Second, to what extent--if having made the case--can its causation be rooted in a state-led developmental agenda? Third, if that too is the case, might we not consider what has happened to the jumma as a special category of genocide, or perhaps, find another term such as 'ethnocide' to describe it?

In spite of the existence of the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide there is no scholarly consensus on what constitutes or causes the phenomenon. Running through the debate is a basic fault-line between those who emphasise the role and responsibility of specific, named and usually ideologically motivated perpetrators and those who concentrate rather on the economic and social configurations and interests within which those perpetrators operate. Often lost or deprioritised in these readings is the nature of the relationship between the 'perpetrator' state and the 'victim' community. The oversight may seem understandable when one considers, for instance, the Holocaust--the twentieth century genocide par excellence--given that the only dynamic interaction between the Nazi regime and Jews took place entirely in the paranoid heads of the former. On one level, this may tell us something unusual about the Holocaust. On another, the very fact that the Nazis believed--or at least proclaimed--that Jews qua Jews constituted a genuine and mortal threat to their existence, regardless of all empirical evidence to the contrary, might offer comparison with other genocidal regimes which have similarly charged ethnic, religious, or social groups with malicious intent to subvert or destroy their own state and society. Determining whether a regime's (or broader society's) cultural notions or political assessment of such groups is accurate, inaccurate, inflated, confused, contradictory or even entirely illusory--not least because in some instances of genocide the alleged group has been dreamt up out of thin air--represents one of the most thorny problems for the analyst. Nevertheless, the issue of interaction, whether real or imagined, cannot be ducked. This is why I have argued that 'genocide occurs where a state perceiving the integrity of its agenda to be threatened by an aggregate population--defined by the state in collective or communal terms--seeks to remedy the situation by the systematic, en masse physical elimination of that aggregate, in toto or until such time as the group no longer is perceived to represent such a threat'.

While this is not so much a definition of genocide as an attempt to identify its perpetrators, victims and moment, it also begs the questions at what point, and indeed why, genocide becomes such. Harff and Gurr argue that the necessary evidence for a prima facie case of genocide requires a sustained pattern of killing over a given period of weeks or months. My own formulation implicitly supports this thesis. Yet Raphael Lemkin, the creator of the term 'genocide' and chief lobbyist for the UN Convention, although he considered the phenomemon 'a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves', posited that these actions did not necesarily entail 'immediate destruction' but were part of an overall plan to cause 'the disintegration of the political and social institutions of the group', including the 'destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups'.

While I would argue that what Lemkin is describing here is not genocide per se so much as a 'genocidal process,' his explanation should persuasively remind us that the moment of mass systematic annihilation can never be viewed in isolation. Even in the most far-reaching examples, notably 1915 Ottoman Armenia, the Holocaust, and 1994 Rwanda, genocide represents rather the extreme end of a continuum of repressive state strategies, which might include marginalisation, forced assimilation, deportation and even massacre. Usually pursued over many decades, these strategies latent if not explicit aim is, at the very least, to neutralise if not to 'get rid' of a perceived 'problem' population. Yet it is only, usually, in extreme crisis circumstances, suggesting that these other strategies have demonstrably failed or been exhausted, that the state resorts to genocide. Even then, most genocides do not follow an absolute trajectory but are usually aborted at some point or, possibly, succeeded by a return to other carrot and stick strategies of forcible integration or exclusion, even in some instances, running parallel to, genocide itself. If this already sounds messy, not to say contradictory, it is well to remember that the regime's 'preponderant access to the overall resources of power', may determine that the victim community's only practical response is to negotiate. Certainly, this has been a major ingredient of the CHT tragedy. Paradoxically, however, this also reinforces the sense of a genuine perpetrator-victim dynamic and in so doing runs the added risk of striking a moral equivalence between the actions of the two where it does not entirely legitimate, or even vindicate that of the perpetrator. Yet if genocide is, as the UN Convention claims, not only 'a crime under international law' but 'an odious scourge', surely we should be seeking to indict the perpetrators, not blame the victims?

The starting-point of most genocide research does indeed involve analysing the ideological underpinnings and or authoritarian tendencies of genocidal regimes, or, as with the seminal work of Leo Kuper, the nature of ethnically plural societies where the dominant ethnic group is unable or unwilling to share state power with others. However, while these foci for research are legitimate and appropriate, I would posit that an alternative first premise might be found in Kuper's stark assertion that the sovereign territorial state has 'as an integral part of its sovereignty, the right to commit genocide... against peoples under its rule and that the United Nations for all practical purposes defends this right'.Kuper's statement is unsettling because it seems to pose the potentiality for genocide among all modern states, though firmly in the context of an international system of such states. Moreover, it seems to contradict the very terms of the UN Convention, whose collective opprobrium and repugnance towards any system member who transgresses it should represent a powerful disincentive to any would-be perpetrator. Yet not only was Kuper right to argue that genocide is generally allowable within the system, one might go on from this to argue that it is the system itself which provides the primary and most powerful reasons for states to attempt it.

Thus, I would argue that states commit genocide because they see it as being in their developmental interests to do so. Genocide is, of course, like war, a high-risk strategy and, as already noted, undertaken as a symptom of the state's frustration and last-ditch desperation. Yet it is also based on the premise that, like successful war, it will make the state and nation stronger, more streamlined, more capable of surviving the vicissitudes of a harsh international political economy, even enabling it to compete more effectively within it. Genocide, in other words, provides a means to catch-up and make good what is perceived as lost ground between the state and its competitors in an international system which by its very nature and historical evolution is heavily weighted in favour of some states and not others. Indeed, it is the attempts of particularly driven regimes to find some short-cut, accelerated movement, or alternative route to achieve these goals which explains why genocide, as a byproduct of these efforts, is such a peculiarly twentieth century phenomenon. The Bangladeshi agenda with regard to the CHT fully--but paradoxically-illustrates these tendencies. Bangladesh operates on the notion that it is a nationally homogeneous and hence unitary state, a statement which would be true were it not for the relatively small number of adivasi ('tribal' peoples) which include the jumma of the CHT in the east, as well as other groups such as the Garo and Santal peoples in the north. Yet while Bengali ethnic prejudice against the adivasi as a whole is an element in our genocidal equation, it is notable that the Garo and Santal, despite their acute degradation and marginalisation, have not been targeted for elimination. The jummas' dubious distinction lies in the fact that they traditionally inhabit and claim land rights in the CHT which amount to 10% of Bangladesh's territory and whose assets the state specifically wishes to realise and consolidate in the interests of its nation- and state-building. Or, as two senior army officers are alleged to have proclaimed at a public meeting in Panchari in 1979, 'We want the land and not the people of the CHT'.

It is Bangladesh's developmental agenda, rather than the specific attributes or ideological leanings of particular military or civil administrations, which have determined that the state's long-term objective with regard to the CHT includes 'getting rid' of the jumma. But different actors, especially during the period of military rule from 1975 to 1989, with varying formulations of how most rapidly and effectively to achieve this goal, have shaped its increasingly genocidal tendencies. The contradictions in the situation are as follows. First, the state officially considers all citizens of Bangladesh as full members of the Bengali nation. But it acknowledges that the adivasi are culturally distinct and so proposes to resolve the discrepancy by leading them rapidly into the mainstream. 'Getting rid' of the jumma, in other words, has always been intended to follow the least toxic, least genocidal but nevertheless compulsory path--assimilation. Second, at no time, even during the worst years of military atrocity in the CHT between 1979 and 1986, has there been a sustained moment of genocide in the way that and Harff and Gurr describe it. Does our argument about genocide or genocidal process, therefore, not collapse at this juncture? My answer is an unequivocal no. Although there has been no single 'moment' of genocide and though successive governments' behaviour with regard to the CHT has been complicated by intermittent, usually clandestine (and more recently official) negotiations for a settlement with the JSS or Shanti Bahini, the overall situation has been one of more than 20 years sustained crisis in which the state has employed the gamut of genocidal strategies described by Lemkin. These include the militarisation of the whole region, swamping it with Bengali immigrants, placing the jummas in cluster villages under military surveillance and denying them access to the commons and forests to sustain their livelihood and life integrity, persistent human rights violations, including disappearances, repeated rape, vandalisation and desecration of religious (especially Buddhist) sites and shrines, destruction of villages and property, physical and mental abuse of individuals, repeated killings, especially though not exclusively of known jumma activists, leaders, professionals, monks and nuns, and finally some 13 major massacres extended over the period 1980 to 1993. These actions taken together would certainly constitute genocide within the meaning of the 1948 Convention.

Nevertheless, given that my argument proposes a distinction between 'genocide' and 'genocidal process' are there not grounds for categorising events in CHT more precisely? Kuper, Fein, Dadrian, Harff and Gurr have all treated genocidal attacks on indigenous peoples as a distinct category within their various typologies, Fein, for instance, calling this category 'developmental' genocide. These scholars do not seek, hierarchically, to order the annihilation of indigenous peoples as less significant or less noteworthy than other genocides, and indeed in some instances have compiled detailed 'fourth world' case studies. Yet do not these categorisations carry with them certain assumptions, even a certain cultural baggage about the nature of 'fourth world' versus 'third' or even 'first world' interaction? Indigenous peoples in the Indian subcontinent and beyond have been the subject of received wisdoms largely emanating from 19th century anthropologists. These claim for the 'tribes'--itself a patronising and problematic term--an originality to their inhabitated region (quite false in the jumma case) plus evolutionist notions which stereotype them as the remnant or residue of the oldest, most primitive elements of humankind. If this depiction, on the one hand, would have them 'closer to nature' and even 'noble' in their savagery, on the other, it demotes them to the bottom of the civilisational heap, at best as exotic anachronisms, at worst as backward but marginal obstacles in the path of an ineluctable progress. This essentially Western narrative is, however, closely mirrored in a Bengali counterpart. In this, the 'innocence' and 'naivety,' of the hill tribes is clearly indicated by jhuming, the shifting cultivation using slash and burn techniques traditionally practiced in the CHT forests. The alleged evolutionist gap between this 'inefficient' economic mode and the more 'advanced' plough cultivation of the plains in turn provides the rationale for a specifically Bengali version of la mission civilisatrice in which the childlike and jangli natives are offered the guiding, not to say uplifting, hand of their more sophisticated neighbours as they are inducted into the benefits of civilisation and modernity. Implicit in both Western and Bengali narratives is the assumption that tribal cultures are doomed in the face of modernity and that survival for their members is dependent on the rapid abandonment of their traditional ways of life. Indeed, translated into a debate on genocide, some scholars have gone further, by claiming that the destruction of native societies is inevitable.

Tony Barta, for instance, attempting to apply Marxist analysis to conflict in the Australian outback, has argued that the impact of white capitalist settlers on hunter-gathering aborigines precludes coexistence between the two, leading only to 'relations of destruction'. His assertion that 'incompatible forms of economy and society' are at the root of the problem shifts responsibility for aboriginal extermination from the state to the dominant society, as does Harff and Gurr's contention that it is settlers who usually initiate exterminatory action, often 'out of private animosities'. But if the state is relegated to the background or if the killing happens without any one authority consciously or deliberately willing it, where is the genocide? The UN Convention is clear that intention must be involved and although it is silent on the role of the state, it is difficult to imagine a systematic onslaught on a population which does not involve its resources and capabilities. If the destruction of native peoples is simply an inexorable, even deus ex machine by product of modernisation, we would be forced to concur with the view of Glaser and Possony that it is not genocide. Theirs, in fact, is a minority view. But the scholars who emphasise intent in their analyses provide little guidance as to how tribal annihilation is part of the main plot. Fein's identification of war, totalitarianism and ethno-conflict as genocide's three major post-1945 causes is of only tangential help with regard to the CHT, while my own assertion that genocide requires a dynamic of real or imagined interaction between state and community is seemingly refuted in Harff and Gurr's characterisation of indigenous peoples as passive, inactive or ineffectively resistant in the face of destruction. One weakness with the 'inevitability' thesis is that it fails to take account of examples where, at least to date, the resource demands of the dominant society or state have not been overriding, as has been the case with the Garo and Santal in Bangladesh or where, as in neighbouring India, the state has found a pluralistic, albeit precarious, accomodation with its many scores of 'scheduled tribes'. Another more telling failing with the thesis is its rather one-dimensional underestimation of the indigenous peoples themselves. The vibrancy, resilience and self-assertion of India's adivasis against 'developmental' encroachment has been a crucial factor in the state's recognition of their group rights. In Bangladesh by contrast, it is the jummas' very refusal to cave in under similar pressures which provides one key to our genocide.

Mark Cocker, recently writing of the turn-of-the-century German annihilation of the Herero in South-West Africa (Namibia), has noted how 'paradoxically the critical factor driving them towards a genocidal policy was a concern that these tribal peoples had shown a potential well beyond their allotted station'. This has been exactly the story with the jumma. Far from behaving according to a supposed 'passive' tribal type, they have not only absorbed and adapted the language and tools of modernity in order to make good their perceived ancestral claim to the CHT but, where this has clearly been a losing battle against greater odds, have tenaciously struggled, sometimes violently, to impede the state and dominant community's political, cultural and demographic penetration of it. Indeed, the struggle of the jumma is directly comparable with that of the Mayan Indians of Guatemala, the Kurds in Iraq, the Tibetans, the peoples of East Timor and Irian Jaya (West Papua) as well as, looking back a century, that of the remaining unsubdued Indian tribes in the USA. All these societies, whether we would describe them as 'third world' or 'fourth world,' have, historically or contemporaneously a commonality in their evolving sense of collective peoplehood and identity forged in the crucible of another more dominant society's state and nation-building programmes. The demands of each for national recognition or even national self-determination on the territory which they inhabit have thus not simply collided with the state's assumption as to its primacy but with its very definition of what constitutes the 'nation'. In none of these instances, we may note, did the state set out to exterminate these people simply on the grounds of their ethnic difference or 'otherness'. That they have increasingly done so, in part bears witness to these communities' obdurate refusal to be coerced into the national mainstream on terms determined by the state, combined with their coherent political and political-military resistance to deny it hegemonic control over the land and resources which they consider to be theirs. It is this state-community dynamic which has led, in each instance, through a series of state strategies characterised here as a 'genocidal process', to their culmination, at some stage, in the actuality of genocide. In the case of the jummas, the only distinction lies in the fact that this actuality is difficult to isolate to a single sequence of events. This is why I have called it a case of 'creeping genocide'. In all other respects, the critical preconditions and characteristics of genocide are evident, regardless of the victim groups' 'tribal' background.

Indeed, in terms of typology, jumma resistance, would certainly qualify the CHT to be placed within Fein's category of 'retributive' genocide, in addition to her 'developmental' category, while examination of the perpetrator's agenda might equally entitle it for consideration within her 'ideological' category. Equally, Harff and Gurr's hegemonial genocide or repressive/hegemonial politicide categories would fit the CHT case-history. Ringfencing the extermination or attempted extermination of 'fourth world' groups may have a moral function in highlighting the prevalence of such extermination but at the same time may serve to undermine its often shared affinity with examples of genocide erroneously assumed to be more mainstream. Modern genocide is rooted in general patterns of development. But the reason why it occurs in some situations and not in others is very much a byproduct of a state's specific developmental agenda, often focusing on a geographical arena where its desire for rapid implementation confronts the people, usually its notional 'citizens', who happen to live there. Understanding - not condoning - a genocidal outcome thus requires an examination of the motives of the perpetrators as well as the cries of the victims.

The View from Bangladesh: The Imperatives of Nation-building From the Centre

The successful secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971 was seen by its political elites as a prelude to a process of rapid nation- and state-building which would enable the new country to take its rightful place in the international community. Its progress towards this goal would be gauged by economic indices evaluating its growth and vitality and by the creation of an institutional and juridical framework confirming its political stability. These, at least, would be the primary criteria of the dominating Western powers and major fiscal institutions in the global political economy. Yet the country's ability to engage with, let alone compete in such a system, was from the start confounded by basic structural, environmental and above all demographic weaknesses. The population of Bangladesh, the eighth largest in the world, ought to have been its chief asset. But, numbering 123 million today compared with circa 40 million in the 1950s, and estimated to double again from its present figure in the space of the next 40 years, possibly not stabilising until it reaches the 340 million mark, its growth represents not simply a drain on the economy but a portent of absolute disaster. Historically, the land of the immensely fertile riverine delta area which constitutes most of a country only the size of Nicaragua, provided for a large, agriculturally based population. But this traditional resource base is now rapidly shrinking, the most dramatic symptoms of which have been a series of floods and cyclones which, in 1988 for instance, displaced some 40% of the population. The two major long-term causes of these ecological and climatic changes, however, can be traced to the deforestation of the up-river Himalayan states, leading to severe land erosion in downstream Bangladesh, as well as to global warming, the effects of which, even with a mere one metre rise in sea level, could turn some 10% of its population into permanent environmental refugees. Even the most optimistic projections could not hope to absorb more than a fraction of the many millions of peasantry already displaced via industrial or postindustrial enterprise. There has been some development of this kind, particularly recently, but unlike many other South east Asian states, no obvious economic take-off. One of the poorest nations in the world, with 80% of its population below the poverty line, the economic prospects of Bangladesh have been described as 'elusive', while its efforts to 'catch up' have resulted in a $16.135 billion external debt, costing $700 million to service in 1991.

None of this grim outlook necessarily on its own accounts for the country's chronic political instability, although it may do much to explain why the CHT has remained a subject of consistent fascination, not to say obsession, among its political elite. At 10% of the country's total land mass, yet with a physical geography in utter contrast to the alluvial monsoon-flooded plains, the deeply forested ravines and valleys of the CHT represent the nearest thing Bangladesh has to a wild west, a 'final frontier', even an El Dorado. The CHT supposedly has a 'huge potential for development'. A recent government-sponsored report claims that its 'forest and mineral resources' make it 'vital in a geo-political sense' while its 147 inhabitants per square mile, compared with 1567 per square mile in the rest of the country, demand that its future 'should be viewed from a total national perspective'. The implication of these comments is clear. While on a level of social engineering the CHT is proposed as an at least part solution to Bangladesh's overpopulation, via a mass relocation of plains people to the hills, on another more obviously economic one, its supposed untapped wealth, particularly in the form of oil and gas, is represented as an opportunity (and possibly a final one) of reversing the country's fortunes in favour of a major breakthrough. What is missing from this picture is the indigenous population. This seems strange in the light of a (then Pakistani) government-commissioned study which in 1967 confirmed that the CHT was in practice 'as constrained as the most thickly populated district' in Bengal. Yet if the received wisdom states that the supposed emptiness of the CHT is 'a myth', the perceived wisdom holds firmly to the notion that it is a territorium nullius, i.e. unoccupied land crying out for industrious Bengalis to inhabit and develop it. The discrepancy is itself instructive, underscoring a state leadership preference to believe what it wants to believe because the alternative, namely coming to some power-sharing accomodation with the jumma, would mean relinquishing its much cherished dreams of national fulfillment.

This is not, however, a simple case of collective wish-fulfillment persisting in unreason. It is grounded in an acute sense of historical injustice done to Bengalis, contrasting with a single moment of good fortune which all good Bangladeshi nationalists would claim as their birthright and inheritance. This was in 1947 at the time of Partition and involved a decision by the British commissioner, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, to award the CHT to Muslim Pakistan rather than to India in his settlement of boundaries between the two states. The CHT, in other words, was a windfall from colonialism. This is interesting for no other reason than the fact that Bangladeshi nationalists blame colonialism, either British or Pakistani, for most of the problems that have afflicted their country since independence, especially in the CHT. Yet it was these same colonialisms which provided the conception, direction and parameters for the development of the region which subsequently shaped the Bangladeshi period of administration. By ignoring the inconvenient fact that Bangladesh is a willing successor to these colonialisms, beginning when the Grit was brought for the first time, through its annexation to British India, firmly within the Bengali political sphere of influence, this Bangladeshi version would seek to claim that it was these same colonialisms which stymied the development of the region in its legitimate Bengali interest. In this version, however, the jumma are less 'invisible' and more the pawns of colonial or other outside powers intent on malevolent disruption of this correct trajectory. Accordingly, phase one of the Bangladeshi version - the period of British rule from 1860 to 1947 - emphasises the way the imperial power sought to isolate and exclude the CHT from the rest of Bengal. From the beginning, the British did in fact operate a special administrative status for the region, codified and made legally binding in its 1900 'Regulations', affirmed again in its 1920 declaration of the region as a 'backward Tract' and confirmed again in its 1935 classification of it as 'a totally excluded area'. This, nationalists argue, was mistaken and dangerous on two counts. First, it unbalanced the traditional economic and social interplay between hill and plains, impeding Bengali entrepreneurial development of the region and fossilising outmoded economic practices based on jhuming, which thereby prevented what should have been the natural absorption of the hill tribes into the more 'advanced' society and polity of the plains. Second, the British gave to the 'tribes', especially the chiefs whose power they had advanced in order to administer the Regulations and collect taxes on their behalf, the erroneous notion that they had provided for a special autonomous status for the region, as present day jummas continue to contend. This was doubly misplaced because not only were the Regulations entirely self-interested - in typical imperial fashion they were designed to divide and rule, keep other parties out, while preserving the region's forest assets for the British - but also it was these very same Regulations which struck at the heart of the tribes' self-sufficiency. As this was dependent on traditional usufruct rights to the forests which, under the terms of the Regulations, had been largely sequestered as crown property, the tribes found that the practice of jhum was no longer sustainable, precipitating a destabilisation of the region which has continued to the present day.

If one strand of this argument is to point out that it is the British not the Bengalis who should be blamed for the decline of the hill tribes, another is to lament the willingness of their leadership, nonetheless, to be the imperial power's dupes. And, as if this was not bad enough, they kept on repeating the mistake in the post colonial experience by aligning themselves with those most inimical to the future Bangladeshi nation. It happened in 1947 itself when tribesmen attempted to resist CHT incorporation in Pakistan by running up the Indian flag in the main towns, thereby embedding in Bengali consciousness the conviction that the jumma as a whole were a pro-Indian fifth column, while in 1971, when Bangladesh was struggling for its very existence, a number of Chakma and Marma chiefs advertised their hostility by allowing themselves to be recruited as rakajars - irregulars - on the side of the Pakistani military. This apparent alignment with Pakistan was not only unforgivable in the light of the genocidal massacres then being perpetrated against Bengalis but because the whole period from 1947 to 1971 was conceived of by Bengalis as phase two of a rampant - this time internal - colonialism in which Bengal and its CHT hinterland were utterly subordinated to the political and economic will of Islamabad. Indeed, in this view, Islamabad's policy with regard to the CHT demonstrated the regime's single-minded marginalisation of the Bengali interest at its most egregious. Although Pakistan's military dictator, Ayub Khan, retained the special status of the CHT until 1962, its designation by him in the late 1950s as a concession area which would be opened up to international finance, pointedly excluded the involvement of Bengali administrative and financial elites. At the core of the regime's developmental agenda was a plan to throw a dam across the Karnaphuli river, at the region's heart, in order to create a huge hydroelectric project. The completion of the Kaptai dam in 1963 was thus intended as the infrastructural baseline for a rapid industrial take-off. However, not only was this seen by Bengalis as being for the benefit of the Pakistani regime rather than for the national development of its eastern part, the economic and environmental impact on the region itself, as the government-sponsored Forestal report later acknowledged, was both massive and devastating. 40% (or 54 000 acres) of its prime agricultural land was submerged, displacing 100 000 indigenous, mostly Chakma people. Not only were they not consulted about the dam they were not compensated either financially or with other land. In fact, there was no other obvious land to offer to these sedentary rice-growing farmers; only a vastly oversubscribed residual forest area where jhuming was proving unsustainable. The Bangladeshi verdict on Pakistani rule in the CHT is thus to blame it for errors and mismanagement which turned almost one-sixth of the population into environmental refugees, militarising it and opening up the sale of its land to 'outsiders'. However, righting these wrongs would not be brought about by an end to development per se but rather by the region's full integration into an independent Bangladesh. Only this could save its indigenous tribes from complete destitution.

Bangladeshi self-justification with regard to the treatment of the jumma would thus begin with the vociferous denial that they intended any harm to their physical well-being or cultural existence. On the contrary, the independent state of Sheik Mujibur Rahman and his successors might be composed mostly of Muslims, might celebrate its near-linguistic and cultural homogeneity, but its constitution guaranteed equality before the law, economic and educational opportunity, as well as the free practice of the religion of one's choice, regardless of ethnic background. The implicit message to the peoples of the CHT was that there would be no distinction between them and the Bengali majority and nothing to prevent their full access to the social and political life of the country. What wrecked this proffered embrace was the recalcitrance and hostility of the tribal chiefs themselves. It was they who demanded a renegotiation of the status of the CHT within Bangladesh as an 'autonomous tribal zone', they who wanted a return to the anachronism of the British-imposed Regulations, they who took up arms against the state in 'a conspiracy against Bangladeshi sovereignty'. If the nascent state's military responded with search and destroy missions in the CHT, this was because the tribal leaders had brought them upon themselves. If these operations turned into a long-term counter-insurgency, this was because the Shanti Bahini, from its formation in 1973, not only violently challenged the integrity and cohesion of the state but did so with the covert assistance of a foreign power, India, which, after its initial patronage of Bangladesh, had turned into its main enemy. The Shanti Bahini's guerrilla war, its repeated violent attacks on army outposts and later on Bengali settlers, conclusively proved that it was not the Bangladeshi state but the Shanti Bahini which was culpable of provocation. In the circumstances, Bangladesh was entitled to respond as would any sovereign state: in legitimate self-defence of the body-politic.

Evaluating the Offical Story: What is Left Out and What is Put In:

The Bangladeshi version of the CHT problem cannot be simply dismissed out of hand, not least because there are elements of the overall picture here. In addition, it offers an important insight into the workings, including the anxieties, of the Bangladeshi state mind. The flaw lies in its assumption that the obstructive behaviour of many jummas is primarily a matter of political manipulation by a mischievous leadership and not a legitimate response to impossible developmental pressures which, moreover, represent not a repudiation of the British and Pakistani programmes in the CHT but rather their intensification by Bangladesh. The wanton destruction of the subcontinent's forests by the British forced them to reconsider their policy in the late 19th century in an attempt to preserve this depleted resource. Their creation of `reserved forest,' as in the CHT, was aimed at maintaining a market economy of profit and not a moral economy of survival. From the first, therefore, the British were not interested in its people or their jhuming culture which, interfering with their monopoly, they vigorously attempted to destroy or shift in the direction of settled agriculture. The Pakistani regime followed this same trajectory but with the added remit to their Canadian consultants, Forestal Inc., to create 'a master plan for the integrated development of the area' based on 'optimum land-use possibilities'. Interestingly, Forestal's report noted that under optimum conditions jhuming was highly sustainable. However, its recommendation proposed that it should be phased out in favour of industrial development in the vicinity of the dam, and fruit production elsewhere, as the best way of maximising the region's resource potential.

Since 1971 there have been various modifications to this agenda, including plans for afforestation, rubber plantations and fruit farming, interspersed with more recent talk of 'ecological biodiversity', as Bangladesh has increasingly sought to promote itself to Western financial institutions. However, its basic thrust has not changed. It assumes the termination of a sustainable, localised economy, based on a long-term human adaption to the forest environment, in favour of 'a fundamental switchover from' both wet rice and shifting cultivation technology to a modem agro-industrial technology'. In practice, this has meant not only the coercion of the tribal peoples in order to make them relinquish jhum but also the reconfiguring of the very lands they inhabit in favour of fruit gardens or rubber plantations owned or controlled by the state or its nominees. `Forced into a dependency on the market economy', their only remaining role, so far as one exists at all, is as sharecroppers or day labourers in this system. This, avows the CHT Commission, is at the root of the `structural violence' in the territory. One might wish to reply that this sort of social engineering is hardly peculiar to the CHT. Millions of rural people, especially in today's third world, have suffered exactly this sort of economic strangulation and consequent social degradation as their usually postcolonial governments have struggled to enter the global marketplace in the interests of state-building and development. Almost by their very nature, these top-down, state-led programmes, whether capitalist or socialist, have demanded a politically neutralised, pliant and, where necessary, moveable labour force. The 'inevitability' argument is also strong. The popular Bengali writer, Abdus Sattar, for instance, claimed in the 1970s that the CHT tribes were living an antediluvian and timeless existence, protected by their sylvan isolation from the realms of history and the ways of the world; the implication being that, even if brought kicking and screaming into it, what was being done for them was, like with children, for their own good!! Even the most egregious facets of this process, such as the jummas' forcible eviction from their native homes and subsequent resettlement in military-supervised joutha kamars - cluster villages - are neither unique to the CHT nor, in themselves, genocidal. However, to view these features in isolation from the broader contours of Bangladesh's state-building ambitions would be mistaken. Indeed, the great paradox - and hence danger - of the pivotal role allotted to the CHT in its developmental programme lies in the enormous gulf between the aspiration and the actual ability to implement it. Or put another way, the Bangladeshi lurch towards genocide in the Grit has been less the result of ineluctable forces of modernisation per se and more the result of an extremely weak state striving to realise what may well be unrealisable.

From its inception through almost to the present day, the most visible symptoms of this weakness have been factional and extremely fractious party politics, a lack of democracy, lawlessness and endemic violence, governments which have repeatedly abused their office through corruption and nepotism, bloody coups and, above all, between 1975 and 1989, dictatorial military rule, first under General Zia and then, after his assassination, under General Ershad. The speed with which a post-liberation, populist-based polity, which had no notable military tradition and whose armed forces represented only a tiny fraction of the population, went down this praetorian route is itself noteworthy, as is the close similarity between these military regimes and those of Pakistan. However, the generals moved into the driving seat in the power structure of the nascent state and took on the mantle of custodian and shaper of its national destiny not only because a specific civil regime was weak but because of much deeper structural problems. Unlike Pakistan, Bangladesh lacked a strong bourgeoisie with which to develop major industrial or commercial enterprises or to provide native capital for key infrastructural programmes. From the first, the state was required to be `the leading sector for capital accumulation and development'. This entailed foreign, primarily Western aid and investment which would only begin to flow once conditions of stability and prospects for repayment were ensured. Sheik Mujib's initial Awami League regime failed to provide these preconditions, while the radical politics and internecine strife of the other party machines offered no obvious grounds for confidence. However, the Bangladesh Defence Forces (BDF) were unusually placed to provide the necessary guarantees. Their organisational capabilities were already pivotal as the only body in the country capable of mounting post-cyclone or flood relief operations. And, given the lack of credible alternatives, their supervision of a dirigiste-style state capitalist development seemed plausible. Their commitment to this course, enshrined in Zia's slogan `develop or perish' was not in doubt. Nor, as it turned out, was their ability to tap external developmental funds. It is no accident that the attempted rapid development of the CHT, with its concomitant creeping genocide came in the years of the generals.

But it is erroneous to read into this outcome an out-of-control military putschism or a distinct but narrow 'hard regime' ideology. The generals' power rested on and indeed was closely intermeshed with the dominant social forces in the state: the zamindar class of rich landowning families who monopolised patronage in the countryside and the large urban lower middle class who had provided the backbone of the national independence movement. Because these social forces were themselves relatively weak, their reliance on the military regimes to enrich them through patronage, status and jobs was consequently all the more pronounced. Yet if private gain acted as a partial goad to develop the region, perceived national imperatives shared by the civilian elites as much as the military were its primary catalyst. Certainly the generals were at the helm as the CHT campaign took on an accelerated, forced-pace momentum and as the struggle with the Shanti Bahini intensified. But the generals also gave responsibility for the formulation of development strategy to a bureaucratic and technocratic elite, many of whom had held senior positions under the previous Pakistani administration and now dominated policy and decision making in key institutions such as the National Economic Council and Planning Commission, as well as in advisory and governmental roles in the president's secretariat and cabinet. It was thus a civil-military bureaucratic regime with a united sense of its leading role as guardian of the interests of the Bangladeshi nation-state that in 1976 launched the CHT, Developmental Board (CHTDB) with a declared aim of `boosting the socio-economic uplift of the region' through its designation as a `special economic zone'. This sounded not dissimilar to previous Pakistani plans. The difference was that this agenda was now an urgent priority with the aim of fully and finally consolidating the peripheral region and its resources into the life of Bangladesh. This was signalled in Zia's creation of a special presidential-led Cabinet Committee for the CHT which, as the highest decision-making body on matters pertaining to it, continues to function to the present day of civilian democratic administration, and is still advised by the army chiefs, including the GOC Divisional Commander in Chittagong, who also acts as CHTDB chairman.

This close military supervision of the CHT'S development programme underscores the degree to which its post-1976 implementation was being seriously opposed by the Shanti Bahini, who also gave the conflict an increasingly geopolitical dimension as it became apparent that they were able to make raids into the CHT and then escape to bases either in Burma or, more particularly, across the Feni river into the Indian state of Tripura. In response, what was broadcast by the government as legitimate efforts to seal these borders in order to isolate and defeat the insurgents, masked not only a military build-up in the CHT - to an estimated 115, 000 army personnel or almost one soldier for every five or six tribals - but a government counter-insurgency campaign in which all jummas were potential targets.

The Role of Western Aid: Harbringer of Hope or Agent of Decay?

The extent of the BDF build-up ought to have signalled that something was seriously awry with the Bangladeshi CHT agenda. By the late 1970s the relevant NGOS were reporting persistent human rights abuses and military atrocities. By this time, too, major international organisations such as the World Bank were supposed to make careful assessment of the environmental impact of development programmes on sensitive regions before lending money, while abhorrence of undemocratic, authoritarian regimes should have left Zia or Ershad firmly out in the cold. In fact, neither factor impeded lavish assistance from Western donor governments, banks and even humanitarian agencies. The first five-year CHTDB plan, for instance, was funded entirely by Western aid, even though, as the JSS claimed, 80% of it (and subsequent aid) was spent on infrastructural projects such as all-weather roads, bridges, electricity and telecommunications specifically beneficial to the BDF. The question has to be asked why. Without detailed information, answers are inevitably speculative but might include the following:

(a) There were precedents predating the existence of Bangladesh. Ayub Khan in particular had been very successful in cementing links to the USA, and had built the Kaptai Dam largely on the basis of a loan from the its Agency for International Development, (USAID). Another major contributor to CHT development under Pakistan was the Japanese dominated Asian Development Bank (ADB).

(b) Praetorian regimes were regularly considered in a positive light among Western governments and agencies. Where their states were considered to be weak and undeveloped but where the West had geostrategic or economic interests (ie more or less everywhere), a 'safe pair of hands' in the form of an an Ayub Khan, a Pinochet or a Suharto was considered infinitely preferable to a populist left-leaning or communist regime, whether or not the general in question had ridden roughshod over human rights or even committed genocide. If the perceived trade-off between democracy and stability always favoured the latter, a further Western rationalisation posited the supposed popular benefits of strongman regimes with a reputation for 'getting things done'. The Turkish supremo, Kemal Ataturk, provided the role-model for this praetorian route to Third World modernisation. Assessing Zia and Ershad in a similar light may well have coloured Western perceptions.

(c) In the context of the late 1970s and early 1980s the resilience if not Reaganite resurgence of cold war mind-sets, especially following the American debacle in Indo-China, led to the almost automatic labelling of rural guerrilla movements and their grassroots supporters, whether in Southeast Asia or Central America, as communists and, therefore, ipso facto forces of destabilisation and subversion. Elements of the Shanti Bahini did enunciate communist and Maoist tendencies, while receiving significant grassroots jumma support. This concretised rather than weakened Western backing for the Bangladeshi push in the CHT and meant that its use of Western-derived counter-insurgency doctrine, with its emphasis on 'draining the sea to starve the fish', would be covertly countenanced and even assisted by Western governments, regardless of the lack of discrimination between combatants and civilians.

(d) There were powerful economic incentives. Global-scale exploration, by Translational Corporations (TNCS) for minerals, oil and gas in the 1960s era of Western economic boom was accelerated by the oil crisis of the early 1970s to embrace areas formerly considered too inaccessible or remote to offer a substantial return on their extraction. In the case of the CHT not only were the military regimes, via Petrobangla, the state's own oil exploration and development agency, able to excite the interest of Shell and other companies in these ventures, they were also able to elicit some $23 million of World Bank money and an additional $9.2 million from the Saudis for exploratory purposes. The oil prospects may also have been a spur to a number of donor government-assisted programmes in the CHT, notably road-building by the Australian Development Assistance Bureau (ADAB) and the significant afforestation undertaken by the Swedish International Development Authority (SIDA). Most of these operations were curtailed when the Shanti Bahini began posing a threat to their Western personnel or, in the Swedish case, when domestic pressure started to affect the government's support for the Bangladeshi agenda. However, TNCS, as a general rule, have a record of silence when people are dispossessed, made destitute, sick, or even massacred by governments upon whom they depend to provide security for their operations.

(e) Western anxieties about world overpopulation meant that relevant donor bodies were willing to give a sympathetic ear to Bangladeshi proposals to relocate vast numbers of Bengali peasants from the ecologically fragile delta region to the supposedly land-rich plenitude, safety and potential prosperity of the CHT. These proposals were supported with the stock-in-trade but entirely spurious argument that the hills were lying idle and uncultivated and, in the interests of the 'productivity and development' of `the national economy', urgently required 'new additional hands ... to be exported there'. This argument seems to have been accepted at face-value by Western agencies in spite of the fact that it did not take into account whether plains farmers would be able to adapt to the entirely different conditions of the hills (even assuming they would be given enough land and initial seed with which to ensure long-term survival) or that the generals' reasons for wanting a large Bengali population there were primarily strategic and not demographic. In the early 1970s Bengali settlers still only represented around 11% of the total CHT population. With funding from the ADB, USAID, the World Health Organisation and Unicef, beginning in 1980 a major state-supervised settlement programme in the CHT introduced 100 000 settlers, succeeded by a further 100 000 the following year. By this time the incoming element of the population accounted for one-third of the total CHT population. Zia had been instrumental in these plans but Ershad, installed in power in 1981, intended to force the pace still further, projecting 250 000 settlers for the year 1982. By then, however, the CHT was in chaos.

The view from the Jummas: The Growth of Adivasi Consciousness and Resistance

Rumours were rife among the jummas in the late 1970s that President Zia intended to make them a minority in their own land. But the actual relocation agenda suggested starker prospects still. Under military supervision the most fertile valleys would be repopulated with Bengalis, as would the remote borders. Neutralised through this demographic force majeure, the hill tribes would have to submit to the will of the Bangladeshi nation-state and accept their own relocation into joutha khamars where their ultimate fate would be determined by the BDF. HOW should this agenda be interpreted? We have noted that on paper the aim was for jumma integration into the life of the nation - perhaps `encapsulation' might be a more appropriate description - not extermination. But another way of approaching this official version might be to hypothesise that what actually was being asked of them was to `disappear', and that what was at stake by 1980 was the manner in which this would happen. One important consideration is to note the apparent absence of alternative or lateral options. Back in 1947 the CHT tribal chiefs had petitioned the British against incorporation in Pakistan, proposing instead a confederation of Indian-led tribal states linking the CHT with neighbouring Tripura, Assam and Cooch Behar. There were obvious ethnic and religious reasons for this request, not least because, in terms of the Muslim-Hindu divide which propelled the drive towards Partition, the jumma as a mix of Hindu, Buddhists, animists and Christians clearly fell on one side of it and not the other. This did not necessarily point towards the inevitability of some Kulturkampf between Muslim Bengalis and tribal peoples. The historic relationship between them has been described as one of `uneasy symbiosis',while good intercommunal relations in the wake of a smaller wave of plainspeople settlement in the 1960s suggested that social coexistence was possible.

Clearly this argument has its limits. The frequency with which, from the 1970s, Buddhist temples, monasteries and Christian churches were desecrated by gangs of settlers as well as the army, to say nothing of a persistent gender-specific mistreatment of the jumma in the form of rape, forced marriage and forced conversion, all suggest a racist contempt for the hill people which seems to have intensified with the increasing post-1975 Islamisation of Bangladesh. Yet there are also grounds for arguing that, rather than these attacks being random outpourings of popular settler hostility, they were actually part of a well-orchestrated BDF campaign to emasculate the jumma politically and socially as a prelude to their complete marginalisation, if not physical annihilation. What all informed commentators agree is that the cause of the Bangladeshi anti-jumma drive was not about ethnicity per se but only about that ethnicity in the context of control of jumma-held land. Obversely, the jumma leadership sought an autonomous status and separate legislature for the CHT based on the 1900 Regulations, not simply to protect their right to be ethnically and culturally different but as the best guarantee for preserving their land rights. So long as the region was within Pakistan, its distance from the power-centre to some extent cushioned the jumma from the full implications of this dichotomy. When, however, soon after the creation of Bangladesh, 12 tribal leaders sought to plead the autonomy case with Sheik Mujib, his notoriously brusque response--`We are all Bengali ... we cannot have two systems of government ... forget your ethnic identity, be Bengalis' - crystallised not only the new reality but the true nature of the impasse.

Few dominant elites in modem states are prepared to negotiate pluralist power-sharing or special status for subordinate entities, let alone with regard to the demands of usually relatively small groups of native peoples. Nor could the jumma have derived consolation from the knowledge that new polities in their drive towards social cohesion and development have nearly always treated tribalism, segmental loyalties and intermediate arrangements as at best suspect and at worst directly inimical to national integrity and unity. Manobendra Narayan Larma's formation of the JSS as a political party to campaign exclusively for the interests of CHT indigenous peoples came in the wake both of Sheik Mujib's refusal to consider autonomy and of a series of sweeping and indiscriminate reprisal raids against the CHT for alleged complicity with the Pakistanis. That the JSS in turn spawned a military wing, the Shanti Bahini, under the leadership of Manobendra's brother, Shantu Larma, only underscores the jummas' conviction that the Bangladeshi state had ruled out either compromise or coexistence. However, the emergence of these overtly radical organisations cannot be viewed in isolation. A groundswell of political activism in the CHT had been developing since the 1950s. Paradoxically, the Pakistani and Bangladeshi states had fuelled these tendencies through the creation of schools and technical colleges and in the extension of adult suffrage to the whole population. In this sense, it could be argued that their assimilative promises were as good as their word. On the other hand, the conscious exclusion of jumma graduates from state office or employment, or the simple lack of openings, helped swell the ranks of the CHT Students Association, the Women's Federation, and the Rangamati Communist Party. Given the pressures the jumma were then under, as well as the broader political climate of the 1960s and 1970s, it is hardly surprising if these movements took on an increasingly combative Marxist-Leninist or Maoist orientation.

But even if these overtly political mobilisations were largely limited to student or professional circles, they were indicative of a social and cultural shift in the CHT. Traditionally, it was the tribal chiefs, whose power had been advanced and cemented under British rule, who provided the interface between the state and tribal peoples. It was they who had first contested the Radcliffe Award in 1947 and had attempted to set up the first CHT Peoples Association to fight incorporation into Pakistan. Yet while these ideas continued to command broad jumma support into the Bangladeshi era, the manifest failure of the chiefs to plead their case to either Sheik Mujib or his successors was compounded by the loss of their actual power in favour of a state-appointed district commissioner for the region with virtually unlimited powers. Many of the chiefs, moreover, were bought off with largesse channelled through the CHTDB. With the traditional leadership thus discredited, the growing ranks of the JSS sought new strategies with which to combat the social and environmental onslaught threatening to overwhelm tribal society. The collapse of jhum and with it the first reported cases of starvation; the inroads of the BDF and, in the wake of their newly macadamed roads opening up the remote interior, Bengali logging merchants, settlers and foreign company personnel; the flight of thousands of refugees into Tripura; and, finally and most dangerously, the forced relocations into joutha khamars, all seemed to demand a more urgent and comprehensive counter-response.

On one level this was supplied by the Shanti Bahini, its active operations, from the mid-1970s, succeeding in containing the BPF to their encampments or to the main towns, while also creating its own administrative, judicial and fiscal framework in 'liberated' areas of the CHT, backed by village militias and financial exactions made from tribes people and settlers alike. Yet the insurgency was never sufficiently strong, numerically or logistically, to take on the BDF in classic military terms, while its very existence arguably represented a provocation which made a genocidal backlash against the population it was claiming to defend all the more probable and imminent. If the verdict on the efficacy of the Shanti Bahini is thus mixed, that on its parent organisation, the JSS, is much stronger. In the early 1970s, Manobendra Larma could publicly voice in parliament: `I am a Chakma. A Marina can never be a Chakma. Chakma can never be a Muron and Chakma can never be a Bengali.' Yet within less than a decade a history of disparate, fragmented and often warring tribal or sub-tribal loyalties had been reshaped through the idea of being a jumma (i.e. someone whose CHT roots lay in the practice of jhum) into one not only of shared victimhood but of common historical identity. For the native peoples of the Gilt this `imagined community' represented not only a repudiation of the state's equally `imagined' notion of a homogeneous Bengali or Bangladeshi people but offered an alternative unitary formula in its stead. Or to take the argument a stage further, the very idea of jumma nationhood combined with the ability to struggle for it, not only threatened to wreck the developmental agenda of a new but already highly unstable Bangladeshi state but even its theoretical underpinnings.

The Dynamics of Genocide: The Operations of the State-Machine:

It might, therefore, be argued that it was the collision between an already existent, post-secessionist nation-state, trying to overcome the limitations implicit in its febrile existence, and a still emerging stateless nation, attempting to transcend its limitations by either renegotiating its relationship to that nation-state or seceding from it altogether, that finally led to an explosion of genocide. For the Bangladeshi regime not only was the challenge to its monopoly of violence posed by the Shanti Bahini totally unacceptable but even more so their ability to hold to ransom the settlement programme itself. The long-term future of their one and only allegedly resource-rich frontier was being put in serious doubt. But the flight in the early 1980s of key companies and donor agencies from the CHT, following attacks on ADAB road builders and other Western contractors, may well have been the last straw. Turning the tide in order to get their agenda - and with it, paradoxically, the support of the West - back on course seemed to demand desperate remedies.

Evidence that the BDF was meeting Shanti Bahini raids with mass reprisal attacks on villages and with the detention, torture and often Central American-style 'disappearance' of thousands of targeted jumma teachers, students and civil servants had been mounting since 1977. But the military regime arguably crossed the Rubicon from 'genocidal process' into active genocide on 25 March 1980, at the village of Kaokhali Bazar, west of Rangamati. Here a junior army officer using the pretext of a Shanti Bahini ambush of an army unit some weeks earlier, ordered tribal elders form the area to meet to discuss matters of law and order, and then proceeded, without warning or provocation, to have his soldiers gun down everybody in the village. The massacre was extended to 24 neighbouring villages, resulting in between 200 and 300 deaths, all of unarmed men, women and children. Mass rape and mutilation, including of nuns and monks, accompanied this sequence, as did the ritual desecration and/or destruction of Buddhist and Hindu temples. The participation of local police and Bengali settlers in these atrocities suggested its close pre-planning.

While events at Kaokhali excited both Bangladeshi and foreign attention, they did not lead either to international censure or to an end to the killings. On the contrary, the initial operation seems to have provided a model for much larger and more extensive massacres perpetrated with regularity over the next decade and more. Between 10 and 22 December 1980, for instance, further army raids in the Harina Valley area left some 800 villagers dead. These massacres also coincided with the introduction through parliament of a 'Disturbed Areas Bill', which gave army officers, down to NCO level, the authority to shoot without warning anybody engaged in `unlawful activity'. The bill did not specifically mention the CHT, although Mey argues it was primarily aimed at curbing the insurgency there. Although it was never in fact passed, the martial law declared in the wake of the 1981 Ershad coup gave the BDF the carte blanche it was seeking. A new wave of atrocities committed around Matiranga, in late June, and repeated in the Feni valley, in September, again involved gangs of armed settlers alongside the BDF and this time panicked at least 17, 000 jumma to flee to Tripura, bringing the total number of refugees in the border states to 40 000.

Throughout this sequence the regime countered charges of genocide levelled against it by claiming that its military operations were of a counter-insurgency nature only and were concentrated on the northern, most heavily (Chakma) populated part of the CHT because this was where the Shanti Bahini were strongest. The blame, thus, was on the insurgents through their switch to direct attacks on Bengali settlers and Western contractors whom the government was duty-bound to protect. Moreover, Ershad's regime sought in 1982 to refute any allegation of ill-intention towards the jumma by abandoning state-sponsored settlement and ruling that there would be no new land grants made to settlers. In the following year there was an offer of amnesty to the Shanti Bahini, which was taken up by several thousand of its more hardline faction, while in 1987 Ershad went so far as to appoint a national committee to look into the conflict and its underlying causes. Its recommendations included the protection of the `ethnic, cultural and religious heritage of tribal people and the promotion of their substantive participation in the running of the local government and development programme'.

If all this was aimed to support the Bangladeshi contention that stories of mass killing were part of a foreign-inspired disinformation campaign of which it was the victim, the mounting NGO dossiers painted a quite different picture. Shanti Bahini raids were certainly recognised as a significant ingredient herein but primarily as a pretext for operations which included the ethnic cleansing of whole districts to make way for Bengali settlers. In the summer of 1983, for instance, helicopter gunship bombing in the Panchari area to flush out jumma villagers was supported by para-military Ansars (auxiliaries). In army reprisals the following year, Ansars again figured prominently in scorched earth operations which left hill people either dead or starving. As on previous occasions, mass rape, especially of young girls, often accompanied by their mutilation and/or subsequent murder, was a persistent and prevalent atrocity. Its purpose, as previously perpetrated on Bengalis by the Pakistani army in 1971, was clearly to defile and punish whole communities. But, in the double knowledge that defiled women could not be readmitted into their own families or communities and therefore that mass rape would prevent births, and that rape survivors and those around them would suffer long-term psychological trauma, these assaults were clearly part of a state-sponsored eliminatory programme. Attempts to argue otherwise, as when in 1986 a government submission to an investigating Amnesty International team claimed that massacres around Khagrachari, Panchari and Matiranga, in so far as they had occun'ed at all, were the fault of rogue junior personnel in paramilitary or volunteer units were, in Amnesty's view, entirely unconvincing. The sheer scope, scale and intensity of these operations, on the contrary, suggested that government violence against the population of the CHT had become endemic.

The Aftermath of Genocide: A Bleak Future:

When all is said and done, the irony of the BDF anti-jumma campaign is that it failed abysmally. The insurgency was not crushed. The jumma did not 'disappear'. On the contrary the thousands languishing in Indian-controlled refugee camps in Tripura further internationalised the issue, while also providing India with a powerful stick with which to beat Bangladesh in favour of its own geostrategic interests. Nor did the Bangladeshi government come anywhere near to completing its agenda inside the CHT. If the majority of the remaining, usually starving, jummas were now in joutha khumars, where they were now dependent on military-supplied food aid, 300 000 Bengali settlers found themselves incarcerated in 78 similar `cluster villages', this being the only way the BDF was able to protect them.

Did this spell an end to the creeping genocide? The evidence as before is contradictory. On the one hand, reforms initiated from 1989 onwards suggested that the eliminationist strategy of previous years had been abandoned. Ershad's division of the CHT into three districts, Rangamati, Khagrachari and Bandarban, each of which was to be run by councils whose powers supposedly amounted to `considerable autonomy', sounded promising. Moreover, the subsequent collapse of his regime and its replacement by the first civilian government in 15 years under Begun Khaleda Zia also seemed to offer genuine prospects for a legal jumma participation in an emerging democracy. This changing political climate may have helped persuade the Shanti Bahini to declare a unilateral ceasefire in August 1992, though a more likely cause was the intense international pressure upon the new government to engage in talks with the JSS. After the free elections in June 1996, in which Sheik Hasina Wajed (the daughter of Sheik Mujib) was returned as prime minister, these talks resulted in a peace deal now in the early stages of implementation.

Yet, if this implicit recognition that the jumma have a case and that there is a possibility that the future of the CHT might involve a partnership with them, suggests a major shift in government thinking, the JSS leadership has until recently remained adamant that 'so-called reforms' were nothing more than a cosmetic sop for Western consumption. Thus, the District Councils have been imposed without consultation, and, far from offering a special autonomous status were actually designed to integrate the region more fully into Bangladesh in line with the 61 district councils created by the military regime for the rest of the country. Similarly, Ershad's 1989 annullment of the 1900 Regulations left the jumma with less, not more protection, not least because the real authority in the region remained the military. With 85 000 troops in the region, regular firefights - despite the supposed ceasefire - with the Shanti Bahini, continued maltreatment and killing of jumma, including three massacres after the advent of `civilan' rule, one of them, at Logang village, Khagrachari, in April 1992, the largest single massacre of all, military, if not government intransigence against compromise has remained the rule. In fact, the main superficial difference compared with previous years has been the BDF's operation of its anti-jumma campaign behind proxy bodies. One of these is the Parbatya Gana Parishad, the Hill Tracts People's Council, a militant organisation for defending Bengali settlers, largely recruited from membership of the fundamentalist Jamat-e-Islami party. Another is the so-called Tiger Force, a militia composed of Manna and Mru tribesmen, whose traditional rivalries with the Chakma and hence Chakma-dominated JSS are clearly exploitable. Not that it has stopped the BDF intervening on its own account. On the very day of the June 1996 elections, Kalpana Chakma, the young and popular organising secretary of the CHT Women's Federation, was abducted from her home in Baghaichari by military personnel. Although the new government promised an enquiry, Kalpana Chakma has not been seen since.

Even if one might wish to excuse such 'incidents' as symptoms of a very fragile, still very BDF-dependent democracy, struggling to get a grip on an endemically lawless country, that very fragility must pose a major question mark over the degree to which a genocidal trajectory in the CHT can be avoided in the future. We have already noted that such a prognosis is dependent on factors which go well beyond the political vagaries or even economic imperatives of Bangladesh itself. The cataclysmic nature of the 1998 flooding underscores the degree to which acute, long-term environmental and population pressures in the whole sub- Himalayan delta region are no respector of internal or international borders. The technically illegal spillover from Bangladesh, in recent decades, of some millions of plainspeople into the hill country of neighbouring Indian states, notably Assam, and the death of many thousands of these settlers at the hands of hill tribesmen, suggests that the interrelationship between these pressures and national minority conflict is hardly limited to the CHT. Nor has the Bangladeshi government been slow to recognise their importance. `It seems crazy that aid donors would want to endanger the survival of millions of Bangladeshis just for the sake of the hill tribes - who are 0.5% of our population,' said an official spokesperson in 1994.

While endorsing the immensity of its population problem, this analysis has disputed that this factor alone has determined successive regime's response to the CHT either in the recent past or into the forseeable future. Certainly it is convenient for a government dependent on Western aid to present the issue thus and offer itself as the best hope for a humanitarian solution. Yet in practice no Bangladeshi government has ever shown particular interest in assisting the poorest elements of society, 50% of whom are virtually landless. On the contrary, because of the state's continuing dependence on the zamindari, to whom the poor are heavily in debt, or in other ways beholden, its response to rural peasant mobilisation has always been unremittingly coercive.

Nevertheless, social relations in the Bengali countryside do feed into the government's CHT policy in a critical way. The majority of plains settlers there come not from the very poorest strata of society but slightly up the social rung. These marginal farmers have also suffered unrelenting and usually cross-generational debt to zamindari from which the offer of resettlement in the Grit has provided an apparently attractive escape route. By Bangladeshi standards not only does this involve relatively generous government assistance, plus the promise of up to five acres of free land, but most importantly, it offers complete release from their debt burden. It could be argued that in this way the government is, after all, attempting to solve something of its population crisis while providing a better future for those fortunate enough to be relocated. Unfortunately, the flaws in this position are manifold. The settlers have not adapted well to hill conditions, which do not favour a replication of lowland agriculture, while their position has become increasingly untenable as jumma resistance has grown. In July 1988, for instance, 233 Bengalis were killed by the Shanti Bahini.(n94) Worst of all, the settlers have burnt their bridges to their former homes in the plains by renouncing whatever sharecropping or tenancy rights they formerly possessed, this being the arrangement by which they received their necessary certificate of relocation to the CHT, stamped by their local Union parishad (district) chairman who, very often, was also their landowner.

Thus, cynical as it may sound, resettlement in the CHT has neither been beneficial to the migrants themselves nor to Bangladesh's overall population problem, which is so vast that even the transfer--were it possible - of several million Bengalis to the CHT would make no appreciable difference. However, it has served two closely interelated interests; that of the dominant class and the state. For the roughly 10% of the population who already own 50% of it, the land transferred by departing migrants has helped consolidate their holdings (as well as their economic control over remaining peasant farmers), as well as giving them a stake and vested interest in CHT exploitation. More importantly, for the state, settlers have provided the necessary malleable fodder with which to strategically swamp the natives and thereby secure control of their land and borders. The figures speak for themselves. In 1951 the ratio of new settlers to native inhabitants was 1:90. By 1981 it was 28:72. In 1994, many years after sponsored settlement had officially ended, the Bengali population in the CHT numbered 468 825 or 48% of the region's total of 967 420. Indeed, in two out of the three districts, Khagrachari and Bandarban, the more fecund settlers now outnumber jummas. In response to JSS cries of foul play, the government has responded by claiming that Bangladeshis were simply exercising their right to travel to other parts of their own country. Implicit in this statement, however, is the further insinuation that the `tribals' are either not part of that constituency or by their behaviour have put themselves outside of it. On one level, as we have already suggested, there is a half-truth here. The roots of genocide in the CHT do rest in part in the refusal of the jumma either to lie down and die quietly, or alternatively, to accept a place within the Bangladeshi scheme of things, for instance as colourful but otherwise harmless exotica, weaving carpets and dancing for the tourists, in some ethnographic zoo. Instead, their tenacious and bloody fight-back against state and settler encroachment alike, and their articulation of their political right to self-determination, has challenged the very notion of a religiously and culturally unified Bangladesh. Herein lies their jummas' cardinal sin. By enunciating a separate and illegitimate nationhood apart from the given, authorised version, they have outlawed themselves and thereby become `enemies of the people', not unlike Turkish and Iraqi Kurds, Tibetans in China, the Maubere in Indonesian East Timor and the Karen in neighbouring Burma.

All these peoples and many more have suffered genocide. Nevertheless, it is doubtful that any of them have done so simply because of the principle at stake. Why, after all, cannot modern polities who see themselves as part of an international community, concede that they are made up of heterogeneous ethnic or even national parts and that the logical solution is to decentralise and/or federalise in the interests of inter-communal peace and stability? The answer lies not simply in abstractions but in assets. For Bangladesh to concede jumma demands for some form of self-determination would not simply entail abandoning future hopes of settlement, while putting previous settler programmes into reverse, reinstating jumma land rights and evacuating the BDF in favour of a locally run and staffed police force. It would mean handing over partial if not complete control of the CHTDB, in other words, denying to the state itself the potential wealth to be realised from the region's as yet unextracted resources. And in this lies the essential conundrum. At what point can any modern state relinquish its nation and state-building agenda? Can we imagine a USA in the 1870s calling a halt to its final surge of transcontinental expansion in order to strike a deal giving genuine territorial autonomy to the Lakota and Cheyenne? The idea sounds palpably absurd. The USA, of course, was already by then a very powerful and unfettered state and the consolidation within it of these central territories simply made it more powerful and wealthy. Bangladesh is a weak state. But it also desperately desires to be strong. All the more so because its situation is getting worse. Predictions of economic growth, founded in the early 1990s on an emergent, largely self-propelled garment industry, have proved something of a false dawn. Agricultural production has dropped, foreign aid been cut back. Darker clouds beckon still with the advent of global economic instability. If the Bangladeshi economy is really `coming to a crisis' as one of its leading economists has predicted, the need for some miracle cure may be seen by its elites as all the more urgent and necessary.

This is why the issue of the CHT and with it the genocidal threat to its native peoples is unlikely to go away. For all of its history Bangladesh has looked to the territory as a panacea for its economic ills. Much more powerful countries have similarly looked to their supposedly virgin frontiers, or territories beyond, as the route by which to transcend mundane limitations on the accomplishment of great national projects. The idea that the CHT could be key to Bangladesh's 'great leap forward' thus continues to hold elite imagination. With the big Western oil companies again queueing up to get back in to the CHT, and with renewed prospects for Western aid and investment, the onus on the state and its military arm finally to complete the Bangladeshisation of the territory as its short-cut to economic take-off is great. Yet achieving this desired goal is now also complicated by a different set of Western desiderata. Although Bangladesh continues to be a major recipient of Western aid, Western bankers and sponsors have been scrutinising its democratic and more specifically human rights credentials more thoroughly, not least because of its past CHT record. New criteria include the return of the 54 000 jumma refugees from Tripura and a peace agreement with the JSS. But there is clearly something schizophrenic here. On the one hand, TNCS want the CHT pacified and insurgent-free, on the other, Western institutions under pressure from NGOs, want Bangladesh to stop killing the people for whom the insurgents have been fighting.

I have argued that a formulation of genocide as that which is done by active perpetrators against passive victims, while it may sound commonsensical, is often too simplistic. Clearly the jumma have been victims but this does not mean that they have behaved as one-dimensional, plaster-cast saints. Nor should we expect them to have done so, considering the pressures they have been under. In response to the Bangladeshi onslaught on their homeland, their militant wing, the Shanti Bahini, not unlike elements of the American plains Indians in an earlier time, have killed hundreds of settlers and soldiers, undoubtedly used coercion against some of their own people, on occasion fought bitterly among themselves, and done their utmost to maximise the stories of BDF-committed atrocity in order to draw international attention to their cause. But the state of Bangladesh has also gone out of its way to demonise the jumma as criminal agents of an Indian conspiracy and to scapegoat them for an instability which is actually the fault of its own development programme. Projection is a classic ingredient of genocide. But so is state frustration at its own inability to achieve its goals by other means. What happened in the 1980s when the BDF tried repeatedly to mass murder its way towards the conquest of the CHT was both a declaration of its right as a sovereign state to operate with impunity within its own territorial boundaries and at the same time a broadcast to the world that it was unable to make the necessary breakthrough by this radical method. If this study in failure could be considered the best deterrent against a further attempt, it is also, obversely, a likely advert for a repeat performance. Genocide feeds off failure. In Bangladesh's case it also paradoxically feeds off its own history of secession from Pakistan, a precedent it is unlikely to allow the jummas to repeat in the CHT. Victims, after all, can become perpetrators.

Secession, however, is not what the jummas are seeking so much as a redefinition of the Bangladeshi state. And in this lies a challenge not just to it but to some basic assumptions associated with contemporary third world - and first world - development. To seek autonomy as the jumma are doing carries with it not just a plea for cultural and religious diversity but ideas for practical implementation which might involve decentralising power from the centre, sharing resources between different groups and perhaps even considering the political economy of human scale. That would be asking a great deal of Bangladesh and not just with regard to the CHT. Indeed, implicit in the notion is the one thing that might genuinely transform the lives of millions of Bengali peasants; basic radical land redistribution. At stake in this course would not simply be the vested interests of Bangladesh's dominant landowning classes but the whole thrust - and indeed rationale - of its post-independence modernising agenda, geared towards competing within the Western-dominated and - regulated global political economy. To abandon that agenda is as remote for Bangladesh as it for the West to reconsider the terms of its hegemony. Thus, while on the one hand Bangladesh needs the international community to assist it in paths of conflict resolution and the jumma need it as guarantor for their sheer survival, on the other, it is the international system which has provided the motor which has driven the Bangladeshi car towards its genocidal CHT precipice. Perhaps democratic government, with its eyes on international aid signposts, may miraculously make good its CHT peace deal and steer the whole country towards a safer route. Alternatively, as the road becomes ever more bumpy and perilous - implicitly suggesting poor signposting - the likelihood of the car's steering-wheel being wrenched from its current occupant by its military codriver, possibly with backseat encouragement from a Jamat-e-Islami passenger, may lead in turn to one last-ditch effort to realise the unrealisable.

The future for the jummas seems at the moment to be a dark one.

:: Conrad Barwa 3:39 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Report by Orissa School Children confirms hunger and malnutrition: The Young Teaching the Old

Five school children from Kalahandi, in Orissa, who have been studying the food habits of tribals in the region, have found that these communities sell the crops they grow and in their place eat low-nutrition wild roots and tubers. Students of the Police High School, in Bhabanipatna, visited several tribal villages and talked to the residents. They also spoke to doctors about the nutritive value of the food the locals consumed. The report, which exposed shocking levels of deprivation, was presented at the 10th National Children’s Science Congress in Mysore, Karnataka.

The report notes that although the tribals of Kalahandi grow various types of millets and cereals, they sell most of their produce for sustenance. For most of the year they survive on wild roots and tubers collected from the forests. These, though rich in starch, lack protein. Further, the quick depletion of roots, tubers and other fruits is forcing more and more tribals to depend on mango kernels, from which they make gruel. According to the report, an unbalanced diet and unhygienic preservation methods make the tribals more prone to disease. The low-protein intake and unbalanced diet, the students claim, have led to higher infant mortality in the region. The report adds that the food the tribals consume consists of 68% carbohydrates, five per cent protein, 15% minerals and two per cent fat.

“The students hail from the region which often makes news for starvation deaths. They are accurate in their assessment,” says a teacher at the Police High School. Reports of hunger deaths first rocked the state in 1965-1966, when a drought in the districts of Kalahandi and Koraput led to a famine that claimed around 1,000 lives. In 1985-1986, the Kashipur region in Koraput district made headlines following an admission by a district official that 200 people had died of starvation. In 1988-1989, another 300 people died in Orissa from starvation, although the government did not accept hunger as the cause of death. Last year, there were 345 starvation deaths across the state.


:: Conrad Barwa 8:46 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Big Dams and Small People: A Symposium on the Sadar Sarovar and the Narmada

Local Views of the Narmada: Sacred Virgin:

The Narmada, a large river originating in the Maikal ranges of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, flows through the western Indian states of Maharashtra and Gujarat before dissolving into the Arabian Sea, having traveled over 1300 km . Over 95% of the Narmada's flow lies in Madhya Pradesh, the remainder in Gujarat and Maharashtra. The Narmada has a catchment area of about 100,000 km2 –– 32% of which is covered by broad-leafed dense forests. It has 40 tributaries that support over 25 million people in the Narmada Valley through agriculture, fishing, and tribal lifestyles that are symbiotic with the forests and the river. To the residents of the valley, however, the Narmada represents more than geographic detail: it is a powerful source of spiritual strength; just the sight of the river is enough to absolve them of all sins; it gives merriment and radiates happiness; and it is a sacred virgin that retains its sweet taste even after dissolving into the Arabian sea .

The Indian government's plans to dam the Narmada date back to the late 1940s. Nehru laid the foundation stone of the first dam on the Narmada at Kevadia, a small hamlet in Gujarat, in April 1961. This dam was named Sardar Sarovar, to honor the memory of Sardar Patel, a popular leader from Gujarat who played a prominent role in India's struggle for freedom. Sardar Sarovar is made up of the dam, its reservoir, a riverbed powerhouse, power transmission lines, main canal, canal head powerhouse, and an extensive irrigation network. The finished height of Sardar Sarovar is designed to be 455 ft, which will create a reservoir 214 km long that will submerge approximately 39,000 ha of land, of which about 14,000 ha is forest land and 11,000 ha agricultural, falling within the three states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra. The irrigation envisaged will function through a network of canals 80,000 km long linked to a canal 458 km long from the dam site in Gujarat to the Rajasthan border. All this will require approximately 85,000 ha of land, complex engineering, and immense resources.

Actual construction on Sardar Sarovar never began because the three riparian states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra could never settle their disputes over sharing the benefits expected to accrue from the dam. In 1969, the Indian government established the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal (NWDT) to resolve differences between the three states over benefit sharing. After a decade of legal wrangling, the NWDT finally rendered its judgment in 1979. The NWDT also created the Narmada Valley Development Plan (NVDP) which the government publicizes as "massive small-scale development", but which, for the Andolan, represents "state-sponsored creation of inequity". The NVDP is the largest river valley project in India, scheduled for completion in 2040. It envisages damming the Narmada through 30 major dams, 135 medium-sized dams, 3000 small dams, and close to 30,000 micro water-harvesting or conservation schemes. Sardar Sarovar was one of the 30 major dams in the NVDP, and is the second largest dam after the Narmada Sagar Dam which now stands in Madhya Pradesh. Of the 30 major dams planned, 10 are to be constructed on the main stem of the Narmada and 20 on its tributaries. Those to be built on the tributaries Tawa, Bargi, Sukhta, and Barna (all in Madhya Pradesh) have already been built.

In order to apportion the waters of the Narmada among the three riparian states, the NWDT had to estimate the amount of water available. Such estimation required at least 40 years of recorded data on the actual volumetric flow of the river. Because such data was then unavailable, the NWDT decided to extrapolate from rainfall data and arrived at a figure of 28 million acre feet (MAF) as the volumetric water flow of the Narmada. The paramount importance of this figure cannot be overestimated because it is used to determine many project parameters such as the height, location and number of dams, the area to be submerged, the number of people who will be displaced, and the cost–benefit analyses of the project.

Recently, however, on the basis of studies carried out by the Andolan, the Central Water Commission of the Indian government conceded that there is less water in the Narmada than had been assumed by the NWDT. As a result, the Andolan has demanded replacement of the figure of 28 MAF with 23 MAF, a figure based on actual observed flow data for the Narmada over the past 44 years, from 1948 to 1992. It is widely believed that this reduction in the volumetric flow of the Narmada by almost 20% will seriously undermine any possible benefits from the Sardar Sarovar dam. Yet, the Indian government refuses to use the figure of 23 MAF arguing that the NWDT's judgment is legally non-reviewable. Or as Arundhati Roy, author of the Booker prize-winning novel, "The God of Small Things", and a prominent supporter of the Andolan, derisively writes, "...the Narmada is legally bound by human decree to produce as much water as the Government of India commands it to produce".

Dissent in the Valley: Mass Movement from Below

Protest against the Sardar Sarovar dam or the NVDP was not spontaneous or immediate. The first stirrings of dissent in the Narmada Valley, after the NWDT made its judgment public in 1979, were motivated solely because of electoral gains and soon died out. Protest by the Andolan, in its present form, began when Medha Patkar, then faculty and part-time doctoral researcher at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Bombay, arrived in Maharashtra in 1985 to study tribal life and culture. Patkar's academic objectives quickly changed after she saw first-hand the slipshod treatment of those expected to relocate because of Sardar Sarovar. Patkar began an arduous and ongoing struggle to disseminate information about Sardar Sarovar and to mobilize people in the villages of the Narmada Valley. From 1985 to 1987, Patkar organized the residents of the 33 villages in Maharashtra who would be affected by Sardar Sarovar under the Narmada Dharangrast Samiti (Narmada Displaced People's Organization, hereafter referred to as the Samiti) and represented their concerns and rights to the government. Opposition to the dam was not part of Patkar's agenda; all she sought was equitable, humane, and dignified resettlement of those people whom Sardar Sarovar would displace. Patkar and the Samiti actually cooperated with the government on all matters concerning Sardar Sarovar. Simultaneously, Patkar carried out detailed studies on Sardar Sarovar, the NVDP, and its effects on the people of the Narmada Valley. These studies, which enlightened Patkar about the disaster that Sardar Sarovar would produce, were accompanied by the gradual realization that the government was not willing even to listen to the Samiti, let alone meet any of the Samiti's demands. Frustrated, Patkar merged the Samiti and other like-minded social organizations in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra into an umbrella organization called the Narmada Bachao Andolan. In 1988, the Andolan declared complete opposition to the dam and began its extraordinary struggle, coining the slogan Koi Nahin Hatega, Bandh Nahin Banega! (No one will move; the dam will not be built!).

The Andolan and Medha Patkar: An Labour of Love

The Andolan is, not surprisingly, an unregistered organization –– no tax benefits for donors, no invitations to United Nations conferences, and no flashy designations. Instead, it maintains an absolute freedom that derives from unimpeachable integrity and old-fashioned morality. Sensitive to allegations of being anti-development and thus unpatriotic, the Andolan's policy is not to accept foreign funds; prize money from foreign awards is donated to other voluntary organizations. The Andolan is neither a non-governmental nor a voluntary organization –– it is a movement. Evidence of this can be found not merely in the rhetoric of its pamphlets but also in the routine of daily life. Contrary to media and popular perception, Patkar is not the sole leader of the Andolan. Patkar is accorded the respect due a founder, and she is indeed the Andolan's public face. However, every decision of the Andolan is taken in a democratic manner that involves activists, tribals, and representatives of those who will be displaced. Patkar herself is quick to dispel excessive focus on her, saying, "The Andolan has no leaders, only activists".

Nevertheless, her role as emotional bulwark in the Andolan and as a contemporary Indian role model in the debate on development and the environment, is too seminal to be set aside, despite the desires of the self-effacing Patkar. Born on 1 December 1954, in Bombay, Medha Patkar is the eldest child of Vasant and Indutai Khanolkar –– both ardent trade unionists. Patkar went to a school where the language of instruction was Marathi , and she grew up in an atmosphere which instilled in her a healthy dislike for materialism. Patkar fell two points short for admission into medical school. When asked her about this, she modestly replied, "That figure would have been higher but for my achievements in public speaking. I did not have the requisite academic merit to become a doctor". Subsequently, she joined the Ram Narain Ruia College of the University of Bombay to pursue a Bachelor's degree in Chemistry, which she now considers a "mistake" . She realized what her true aspirations were and so moved to the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Bombay, one of India's most prestigious non-technical universities. After acquiring a Masters degree in Community Development, Patkar joined TISS as a faculty member and part-time doctoral student. It was while researching tribals for her doctorate that Patkar stumbled upon the dam, and the rest is history. This frail but remarkable woman sacrificed her marriage, risked her life numerous times, and gave up a comfortable academic position to spend her life endeavoring to achieve the dreams she most cherishes. That Patkar has been successful is evident from the Andolan's strong roots among the masses –– an inspiring exception to the renowned Indian environmental historian, Ramachandra Guha's definition of India's environmental debate as "an argument in the cities about what is happening in the countryside". Patkar, who has always shunned personal recognition, accepted the Right Livelihood Award in December 1991 and the Goldman Environmental Prize in May 1992, among many other honors, only as an activist on behalf of the Andolan.

Patkar, perennially saddled with two blue denim bags bulging at the seams with books, papers, correspondence, maps, and posters, travels by foot, boat, and uncomfortable public transportation along with the other tribals of the Narmada Valley, eating tribal cuisine and living by a lifestyle that leaves little room for comfort. Patkar truly leads by example. If Bill Aitken, author of "Seven sacred Rivers", thinks that the Narmada "symbolises what is honest and profoundly beautiful in a human being", then Patkar truly epitomizes the Narmada.

A Brief History of the Andolan protest: the Burden of the Past:

In September 1989, over 50,000 people gathered in the Narmada Valley at Harsud, a middle-sized business town in Madhya Pradesh, to declare their support for the Andolan and to express their resolute determination to fight "destructive development". This was followed by a march, on 28 September 1990, when thousands of villagers traveled to Andolan headquarters in Badwani, Madhya Pradesh, to reiterate their determination to drown in the Narmada's reservoir rather than relocate. The governments of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra were shaken by the support that the Andolan was receiving in the Narmada Valley. Barricades and hordes of policemen became a standard fixture outside the Andolan's office and at public meetings. An Andolan activist, Rehmal Vasave, was killed in August 1993 when police fired on a public gathering in Chinchkhaddi, Madhya Pradesh, which was organized to boycott the annual land survey being carried out by the government. Similar incidents against the Andolan include the destruction of the Andolan's office in Vadodara, Gujarat, by political activists. Researchers who were critical of Sardar Sarovar at the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Vadodara, Gujarat, were warned of cuts in their research funding. In the words of Arundhati Roy:

>[W]hat's all the secrecy about? Why not release all the studies that have been done into the public domain (including the unfavourable ones)? Why not have them peer reviewed? Why not publish a detailed break-up of the costs? Why not account for the amount spent so far? Why not clarify where the remaining money is going to come from, on what terms? Why block every attempt at a review? Why refuse permission to the World Commission on Dams to visit the dam site? What's the paranoia all about?

In December 1990, some 6000 men and women, with their hands tied to symbolize the non-violent nature of the Andolan's protest, attempted to stop construction on Sardar Sarovar by camping at the dam site in Kevadia, Gujarat. However, they were stopped at Ferkuva on the Gujarat border by armed police and political activists, described by the Gujarat government as its concerned citizens. Refused the right to cross the border, this ragtag army of tribals and villagers was beaten, arrested, put into waiting trucks and taken to police stations or left several kilometers away in the wilderness. Similar confrontations continued for almost two weeks. Appalled by this ongoing treatment of their protest, seven members of the Andolan, led by Patkar, began an indefinite hunger strike on 7 January 1991. The prospect of seven people, one of them the immensely popular Medha Patkar, demonstrating a willingness to sacrifice their lives for this cause, caught India's imagination. Media personnel, government officials, and politicians descended on Ferkuva. After 22 days of fasting, and concerned with the deteriorating health of Patkar, the Andolan's senior leadership prevailed on her to discontinue her fast and return to the Valley, identifying her physical presence in the struggle as most important. The Andolan called off the hunger strike on 28 January 1991, but not before announcing a policy of non-cooperation with the government. The Andolan decided to completely boycott all governmental procedures and policies in the valley, describing their strategy of non-cooperation as Hamare Gaon Mein Hamara Raj! (Our Rule in Our Villages!).

The decision of the Gujarat government to stop the marchers from camping at the dam site had backfired severely, and the Andolan's story went international. About the same time, three US-based environmental groups –– the Environmental Defense Fund, the Environmental Policy Institute, and the National Wildlife Federation –– began lobbying the US Congress in an effort to force the World Bank to stop aiding Sardar Sarovar. Acutely embarrassed by the accusations of supporting human rights abuse, the World Bank, in a historic and unprecedented move, instituted an independent review of the Sardar Sarovar Projects.

In September 1991, Bradford Morse, former head of the United Nations Development Program and chairman of the World Bank's independent review, arrived in India. The Andolan, dubious about the outcome of the independent review, refused to meet Morse and his team. Unperturbed and still determined, Morse and his team visited every important site in the valley, commissioned experts to examine all aspects of the project, and met all related parties. Convinced by Morse's sincerity, the Andolan relented and began cooperating with the independent review. "Sardar Sarovar: the report of the independent review" (also known as the Morse Report), the most powerful and objective critique of Sardar Sarovar ever written, was released in June 1992. It described the canal network as larger than can be "economically justified", since it would "flow at less than half its capacity two-thirds of the time". It concluded:

We think the Sardar Sarovar Projects as they stand are flawed, that resettlement and rehabilitation of all those displaced by the Projects is not possible under prevailing circumstances, and that environmental impacts of the Projects have not been properly considered or adequately addressed. Moreover we believe that the Bank shares responsibility with the borrower for the situation that has developed.... It seems clear that engineering and economic imperatives have driven the Projects to the exclusion of human and environmen