Jharkhandis see bid to destroy culture

It will not only be the creation of a separate province but an ideal state with the leadership of the working class.

The people of Jharkhand do the most difficult work for the least amount of money. These people make factories, but do not acquire the  right to work in them. All these days they used to get mining work,  but today machines are being brought and they are being removed from this field also.

 Though they live in the jungle, there are no  Jharkhandis in the forest department. There, contractors and officers together are involved in cutting down entire forests and blaming the Adivasis for this. Who destroyed the Chhotanagpur forest? This is  obvious from the wealth and the houses of the officers of the forest  department and the contractors of Dhanbad, Hazaribag, Ranchi and  Patna. Not only do the people of this district have no place here, even the trees do not. That is why saal trees are being cut and  sagwan planted in their place. With society, the forest too changes.

 A well-planned destruction of Jharkhand is taking place, not only socially and economically, but also culturally and morally. The bow and arrow, the Adivasis’ traditional weapons, with which they fought wild animals as well as the exploitation of the urban  exploiters, are being snatched away from them through an ordinance.

Alongside this, the sale of liquor has been started with police protection. Fifty years ago, Rabindranath Tagore had written that the British had started the opium trade in China from Hongkong with the help of cannons. In the same way in India today, the Congress has  started the sale of liquor with the help of the police, just below Gandhiji’s photo. Not just the land and the forests, but even the character of the people of this area has been destroyed and made a  source of income.

The culture of Jharkhand, specially  Adivasi culture, was basically a  socialist culture, lacking differences of high and low, ritual and  dowry, purdah and communalism, and having in it equality and pride in work. This culture is being destroyed and the educated Adivasi is being stuffed with capitalist, that is,  an alien culture, so that he may  lose his own language, manners and character and thus get alienated  from the mass of Adivasis and from Jharkhand society, and become a  follower of alien exploiters.

 This is the reason that Jharkhand district is suffering not only because of the lack of development but by reason of “development’’.

Industries have been established here with the same aim as they are in  colonies, ie, to take away the wealth of the region in the form of  profits, out of the region. Under British rule, the ruling class used  to build their own houses, clubs, schools, in select places in India, and used to live as a separate society. Today, 33 years after  Independence, the new ruling class in Jharkhand also has its own colony, club, school and its own distinct world. The Rotary and Lions Club alongside the tottering panchayat bhavan, the convent school next to the crumbling village school, the Tata club adjoining the ruined  Zorapokhar — these are the symbols of the two societies, between which the only relationship that exists is that of the ruler and the exploited.

Under the prevailing system in India, industrialisation in an undeveloped region does not result in the betterment of the backward people of the region. It results in the establishment of colonies over them by some cunning “advanced’’ persons, in which they have to leave their homes gradually and be displaced. Development towards its own  destruction — this has become the future of Jharkhand.

 Adivasi movements have always fought for economic, political and  cultural revolution. The campaign led by Birsa Munda included in it the declaration of a new land system, and the call for prohibition of  alcohol was a call for a moral revolution. Give up alcohol and take up  the bow and arrow — this has been the call of every Adivasi movement.

 Jharkhand has always held honour in greater esteem than money — this  has been demonstrated in the liberated area of Palma by Jharkhand’s revolutionary leader Shibu Soren. It is true that neither freedom nor independence was achieved by all these movements, but in 1908, in Chhotanagpur, a special law had to be enacted, giving protection to Adivasi lands. Though this law never landed on earth from the paper it was written on, it had to be repeated in Bihar in 1970.

This is why the ruling class hesitates to give Jharkhand the  status of a separate province. They know that the creation of Jharkhand will not only be the creation of a separate province, but  the creation of an ideal state in the leadership of the working class which will challenge the entire exploitative system in India on the basis of socialism.

 This is why the ruling class is first destroying the character of the people of Jharkhand, in order to break the movement. An attempt is being made to infuse the self-centred nature of capitalism into Jharkhand society, through various baits and through granting some facilities to a few cunning people.

The people of Jharkhand never beg, they wage a fight for their rights. In this too, the politics of ‘loans’ is destroying their self-respect. Not employment and education, but the lure of ‘loans’ and ‘relief’ is being dangled before them. The Bihar government’s ordnance prohibiting the use of the bow and arrow, but allowing the sale of alcohol to continue, is part of the destruction of the Jharkhandi character. The movement for a separate Jharkhand province is not a movement to increase the 22 states in India by one. It is a movement to protect and develop the Jharkhandi character.

(This article is translated from Singhbhumi Ekta, May 1, 1982, before the state was created. A K Roy was one of the founders of Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, which he left after it became a mainstream political party.)

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