The PM has said that the
Maoist movement is India's gravest security threat.

It suits
the Maoists and the government to inflate the danger. It makes it easier to come
down with all the force of your security apparatus. The inflation is mischievous
. And it creates a situation in which every other kind of resistance is subsumed
into this mad binary and dealt with as such. The most frightening thing is the
criminalisation of the democratic space. You're either with us or against us.
Bush is back, if he ever went away.

Policemen have been killed.

Policemen are being killed. People are also being killed and
that's not being reported . If it is, they just say they are Maoists. You can't
extract any easy moralities out of these killings. You have to look at the
principle. The debate can't be about whether it is okay to kill policemen or
whether it's okay to kill tribals. Obviously, it's not okay to do either. How do
you rescue the situation? We have to look at why this is happening. If you are
going to say Maoists are as mad as Islamists and should be liquidated, it's not
going to help. It would mean liquidating hundreds of thousands.

These are the poorest people of the country - they have no schools,
no hospitals, no water, none of the amenities the state is supposed to provide.
When the state talks about their well-being and development, it means
displacement and mining. Bauxite mining in Orissa is one of the most devastating
kinds of mining. To get one tonne of bauxite you have a stripping ratio of 1:13
so you have to mine 13 tonnes. You create radioactive red mud. This is dumped
into rivers and belches carbon dioxide into the air. From bauxite you get
alumina and then aluminum. For one tonne of aluminum you need 1,300 tonnes of
water. All this for the weapons industry. Bauxite mountains are porous and
function as natural water tanks that hold water and irrigate the plains. Bauxite
mining is devastating a whole ecosystem . This is what the mining company
Vedanta is doing. The bauxite in Niyamgiri in Orissa is called Kondolite after
the Kond tribals in Orissa.

There's an MoU on every mountain and
river. When profits are so huge, the capacity for cruelty is also
huge.

(

As told to Nina
Martyris

)