People's Democracy

Police Terror in Greater NOIDA

Suneet Chopra

A FACT-FINDING team of the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) and All India Agricultural Workers Union (AIAWU), led by AIKS president, S R Pillai and including Noorul Huda (AIKS finance secretary), Vijoo Krishnan (AIKS joint secretary) and Suneet Chopra (AIAWU joint secretary) visited the village of Parsaul and Bhatta in the Greater NOIDA area on May 12, 2011. UP state Kisan Sabha president Dharampal Singh, CPI(M) district secretary Chandrapal Singh, Sadaram Bhati (convenor of the Committee against Land Acquisition, Gautam Budh Nagar), and several local kisan leaders accompanied them.

HEAVY POLICE

BUNDOBAST

The area was heavily policed with road-blocks on all the main entries and exists to the villages. Medha Patkar had courted arrest that morning, but we were able to bypass these as our convoy of three cars was able to enter through unguarded byways. We arrived at the home of Uday Vir Singh Malik, an AIKS leader in the district, and began our journey through the lanes and bylanes of Parsaul village, from where we proceeded on foot and on motorcycles to Bhatta village. It was heartening to see that this centre of peasant resistance had slogans of the AIKS painted on its walls as the AIKS had since January 17 been supporting a peaceful agitation for three months under a joint struggle committee before an incident of “arresting” government personnel took place on February 18, gheraoing two senior government officials, since the authorities had callously allowed desperation to build up among the peasants. Still the peasantry showed patience and released them, demanding that the government meet them and discuss with them about their grievances. The government refused to take up the matter and tempers flared.  

A similar holding back of a sub-inspector took place on February 21. He was rescued only after the security men clashed with the farmers. Many were injured and an FIR was lodged against 200 unnamed farmers. It was evident that the authorities were itching for a fight and preparing for mass arrests. The desperate farmers then tried to stop work on the Jamuna Expressway at several points on February 23. The road-blocks were cleared the next day. The dharna continued peacefully.

In an act of fresh provocation the state government directed the authorities on March 3 to ensure that farmers are not able to disrupt the progress of the work at any cost. It is to be noted that this development ostensibly under the 1894 Land Acquisition Act goes beyond it as it interprets private projects as public interest which is in keeping with the ideas of neo-liberal thinking of the Central and many state governments but against the letter even of this colonial law. On March 13 the protesters responded peacefully by calling a mahapanchayat demanding that 50 per cent of the land acquired for private purposes be returned to the peasants; if acquired for development, 80 per cent of the money earned be given to the farmers as compensation; the implementation of the rehabilitation policy of 2000; uniform rates of compensation throughout the state and a change in the colonial Land Act. They also demanded that local people be given preference in schools, hospitals and firms coming up on the land taken from them.

Everything went peacefully and the representatives of the farmers met a UP minister, Chaudhary Laxmi Narayan. But the situation worsened as he did not visit Bhatta and Parsaul villages, as he had promised. This enraged the farmers who tried to disrupt the Delhi-Howrah rail link and clashed with the police. The dharna still continued peacefully till March 26 when a clash was engineered when the police fired rubber bullets on the protestors at Mirzapur village. Eye witnesses tell us that there were stone pelters who fled, but the police arrested 12 farmers who are said to be mostly innocents. The farmers still attempted a peaceful settlement on April 1, meeting top police and administrative officials, but the government obviously did not want an agreement. On April 7, farmers and officials both said they were hopeful of an agreement, but nothing was done.

LIKE AN INVASION

BY AN ENEMY ARMY

The matter would have rested there but some people, claimed by the authorities to be roadways workers but suspected to be surveyors by the local people, aroused suspicion in the area on May 6. They were apprehended by the peasants as they refused to leave. The police ensured their release with massive deployment when a clash occurred once more. In this clash two policemen and one farmer were reported killed. The police are then reported to have gone on rampage.

The only way to describe the onslaught was that it was like an invasion by an enemy army. Most of the men had either run away or had become victims of murderous attacks, or are missing. Even children were not spared. Retired army personnel, those of security forces and school teachers, most of whom said they had nothing to do with the agitation, had had their homes raided and vandalised. We saw shattered washing machines, battered cars, burnt tractors, ransacked or gutted houses of the poor and the middle classes --- giving one an idea of the frenzy of the attackers.

The most evident sign of the terror they had instilled was the fact that most of the young men were missing and a number of people had fled the village. They had not come back even five days later. Why this happened was evident from the condition of the victims who were there and who we were able to interview. We met Rajinder Singh (around 70) who was already disabled and has become blind after being brutally beaten up. There was Sheoraji Devi (around 80), with her left hand partly cut off  by an earlier accident. She, who was already a heart patient, was beaten unconscious. Another old lady of 80, the mother of Dhan Singh, whose grandson Kapil was in hospital with gunshot wounds, had a wound above the eye that was still oozing after five days. Young Kanti Sharma was lying helpless on a bed with her baby. She was suffering from internal injuries. “Don’t leave marks on them that are visible,” the PAC said. Her husband is missing. Her money was looted and her house plundered. There is nothing to eat.

At the house of Subhash Chandra Sharma, a retired havildar in the army, we saw a motorcycle, tractor, chaff cutter all destroyed grain looted, with his mother Veermati having been brutally assaulted. In the house of Shish Pal, two of whose family members are serving in the BSF in Jodhpur and Srinagar, we saw two motorcycles that were destroyed and furniture wrecked. In the house of Mukut Lal Sharma, school teacher, not only were over Rs 60,000 looted and things plundered; his son Inder Pal, who is a local shopkeeper, was taken from home, beaten up and is lying seriously injured in jail with false charges. Two other brothers are school teachers, hardly likely to take up arms against the police. Most of the people in this area told us that they had not been in the agitation but were not spared the brutality and pillage. A large number of people are missing. It is claimed that they were burnt in cow-dung and chaff heaps where we found burnt  bones, but it would require forensic testing to check out whether these bones are those of humans or not. Witnesses, however, claim that a number of dead bodies have been disposed of in this way.

We met a number of landless families of the Muslim community who claimed that all their men and young boys were missing. One can only hope that the brutal killings of the Hashimpura victims of nearby Meerut district two and a half decades ago have not been repeated by the PAC this time. Hearing the victims, one cannot feel reassured. The government of UP, which seems to have procrastinated for reasons best known to itself, allowing matters to boil over as they did, must now assuage tempers and bring relief to the people at once.

WAGES OF

NEO-LIBERALISM

The AIKS and AIAWU have noted that the minimum that is required is a high-level judicial enquiry into the manner of land acquisition and the incidents at Bhatta-Parsaul, fix responsibility for the police brutalities and take action against those guilty. Immediate arrangements must be made to trace the missing people and create conditions for their peaceful return; the injured must be given treatment at once at government expense; the families who have lost their members or goods must be compensated adequately and all false cases foisted on the innocent farmers be taken back. Most of all, negotiations must be restarted to settle the issue in a manner that ensures justice to the peasantry and security to the villagers unsettled by the process of takeover of land, requiring both proper compensation and resettlement. This should take into account the market rates for the land acquired, a share in the profits of the changed landuse and preferential treatment in jobs generated by the developmental process.

We must understand that this volatile situation is the result of the central government’s policy of lopsided development. This policy offers to the private corporates and the wealthy the real estate plundered from the peasantry illegally and by force at throwaway prices, and it will not only affect our food security adversely, but uproot whole communities of our fellow-citizens and scatter them like dust without ever thinking of how much more difficult it will be to ensure their livelihood and security in future. It is shocking that the country is being held to ransom for the sake of the speculative profits of a handful. This cannot be permitted.

Nor is this a question of UP alone; it is part of the neo-liberal policies begun by Narasimha Rao and continued under Vajpayee and now Manmohan Singh. They are no less responsible than Ms Mayawati for what has happened. Similar struggles are bursting out in Haryana, Maharashtra, Karnataka and many other parts of the country where the skyrocketing prices of land developed at the cost of the state is being handed over to speculators while the owners of the land are swept away like rubbish. This must not be allowed to go on. Not only must new legislation for acquiring land be brought in but it must be implemented in the interest of the peasants whose only source of livelihood it is. This cannot be done without strengthening organisations of peasants and agricultural labour to guard their interests and lead their struggles to success in a class society where every class is expected to organise and fight for its class interest.