Vedanta and Beyond: Expsoe the Congress’ ‘Human Face’, Strengthen Ongoing Struggles Against Corporate Land Grab

For the past few years, Vedanta Alumina’s proposed bauxite mining project in the Niyamgiri hills of Lanjigarh in Orissa has seen a sustained resistance by the tribals and protest campaigns by environmentalists, political activists and human rights groups all over the world pointing out its social and ecological implications. Vedanta proposes to extract bauxite from this extremely ecologically fragile area, home to the Dongria Kondh tribals who are completely dependent on the local ecology for their very survival. And in the process of applying for clearance for this disastrous project, the company has violated any number of legislations: the Forests Rights Act, the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act, the Forest Conservation Act, and the Environment Protection Act to name just a few.

This project was aggressively pushed not just by Vedanta, but by the Orissa state government as well as the UPA. Let us have a look at some facts:

• 14 years ago, Bhakt Charan Das, Congress MP from Kalahandi, openly supported the Vedanta project in the Lok Sabha and continued to argue for a bauxite mining project in the Niyamgiri hills for several years even in the face of massive protests.
• Home Minister P. Chidambaram was Vedanta’s advocate till 2003 and regularly defended the company’s financial and environmental violations. He was also a member of the board of directors of Vedanta.
• The UPA’s Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) colluded with Vedanta and deliberately overlooked a damning report by the Supreme Court’s Central Environment Committee to issue an ‘in principle’ approval to the project in 2008.

As the protests grew stronger and stronger, every possible method was used to quell the movement. Adivasis were forcibly evicted by the local administration and company goons, activists and leaders of the movement were threatened, beaten up and arrested on trumped up charges, full page advertisements appeared in national newspapers in a futile effort to drum up support for the project. However, the protests continued, leading to several high profile investors withdrawing from the project due to the public outcry. Finally, as a result of the massive campaign, the MoEF was recently forced to withdraw its previous consent and stall the project.

Shamefully, the Congress, which has uptil now been one of prime supporters of Vedanta, is now trying to project itself as a ‘messiah’ of the tribals! Rahul Gandhi’s recent statement at Lanjigarh, where he claimed to be a ‘soldier’ for tribal interests in Delhi is nothing but a cruel joke for the thousands of people across the country who continue to struggle against displacement, corporate land grab, and UPA-sponsored neo-liberal policies. Rahul Gandhi’s patently false rhetoric is part of the Congress’s larger game plan of projecting a ‘human face’. After the notable failure of the NDA’s ‘India Shining’ campaign, the Congress has couched its essentially anti-poor, anti-people, pro-corporate agenda in the garb of ‘Bharat Nirman’ and the aam aadmi’s welfare!

Congress spokesperson Manish Tiwari has stated that the aim of Rahul Gandhi’s visit was to ‘send the larger message out to the indigenous people of India that their concerns are not unseen and unheard’! Flying in the face of such ‘feel-good’ statements are the Congress’s actual policies. We have not forgotten for instance that thousands of tribals and poor have been displaced by the Sardar Sarovar Project in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh – while the Manmohan Singh government actively supported the project and refused to act on a damning report submitted by three of its own cabinet Ministers on the pathetic state of rehabilitation! Over the past few years, the aam aadmi has had to bear the brunt of the UPA’s pet policies – its support for displacement and corporate land grab in the Narmada valley, Gurgaon, Maharastra and elsewhere in the country, the whopping Rs 5,02,299 crore annual tax waiver which the UPA gifted to India’s richest corporations in this year’s budget, the privatisation of essential facilities like water, electricity, health care and education, and the inflation which has made it difficult for the poor to avail of essential commodities.

In 1948, Jawaharlal Nehru, speaking to tribals who were to be displaced by the Hirakud Dam, adviced them: “If you are to suffer, you should suffer in the interest of the country.” This sentiment has always been echoed in the Congress’s policies. Today, Shiela Dixit’s Delhi government is demanding the same ‘sacrifice’ from Delhi’s poor and working classes so that bureaucrats and corporations can amass huge profits in the name of the purported ‘national pride’ in hosting the Common Wealth Games! It is now known that the Delhi government diverted Rs 744 crore from the Special Component Plan for SC/STs to CWG-related projects, thereby flouting Planning Commission guidelines.

Ironically, on the same day that Rahul Gandhi was attempting to project the Congress as a ‘saviour’ for the weaker sections of society, the Supreme Court has slammed the Congress government in Haryana for allowing the massacre of Dalits to take place in Mirchpur, and for not taking ANY action on the criminals responsible! The Congress’s ‘human face’ has been effectively unmasked – no amount of rhetoric can hide its anti-poor character.