This excerpt from The Hunt For The Treasure Of Vijayanagara Empire details the tragic situation of the tribals in India akin to the Helots – a derogatory term used by the Romans to indicate non-Romans in their country, intermediate in status between slaves and citizens.
Liberalization and Privatization were the tools of the mercantile world in the long history of 400 year struggle to dominate resource rich Asia in general and India in particular. Since the beginning of liberalization of Indian economy for the supposed ‘development’ of India many Indians within the border of India became second-class citizens or non-citizens in their own native lands, country and cultural settings. They became the Helots of India, a derogatory term used by the Romans to indicate non-Romans in their country, intermediate in status between slaves and citizens. However still for whose sake is this development, is still not yet answered as it is tacitly understood that it is for the western countries to continue their geopolitical fight with their yester year cold war adversaries – the Russians.
It wouldn’t be farfetched to say that in the name of development India is now run only for the profit maximization of giant western Multinational Corporations (MNCs) which are in their latest avatar from the erstwhile East India Companies (EICs). In fact most of the owners of current MNCs are the grand children of the previous East India Companies, in lineage, spirit, methods, tactics and business policies (read Business Intelligence).
The first order of business of East India Companies in those days was to take fertile lands under organic farming and multiculture agricultural land and put it to produce monoculture cash crops like Opium or Indigo. As a result absolute famine conditions would dawn in a few years and displace owners out of land. The only silver lining of East India Companies or later British Government was they provided alternate land and employment for all those displaced civilians from forests or river banks or fertile lands. Though according to British Land Acquisition Act of 1894 the Government was not legally bound to provide any compensation to displaced people except cash compensation; the British did so because they were afraid that not providing suitable compensation may lead to another 1857 style Freedom Struggle which they were in no position to fight. Independent India need not worry about any revolt by her citizens as all have absolute freedom to be in dependency on England or the West.
So we amended the same British Act of 1894 in 1984 with more provisions to displace people and their living habitats just for the development of MNCs. According to Amnesty International Reports, people in India are displaced from all states in India – Orissa, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Pondichery, Maharashtra and Meghalaya. How many people are displaced? Nobody knows. Government of India collects many statistics every year on everything and anything except on the displaced people from the resource rich forests or river banks or fertile lands. None in India in government circles have any figure for the number of people that have been or are being displaced by big developmental projects or sacrificed on the altar of Developmental Mantra by every national government.
Where do these displaced people go? Eventually they end up in slums of urban centers on government lands or on disputed lands. They become vote bank for urban political parties. In most cases once the land title is allotted these slum dwellers are uprooted from these slums so that big corporation can build shopping malls or apartment complexes for the development of the nation.
Various courts in India including the Supreme Court are either silent on this human tragedy of forcible displacement or in rarest cases sided with the government and big MNCs in pursuing their agendas. In many cases even if there were no environmental clearances for such huge ecology damaging projects like Tehri Dam or Tata and POSOCO or Vedanta, still they went ahead grabbing the lands of poor and destroying the ecology for MNC interests.
Most of these displaced people are from virgin forests from where coal to diamonds, rare earth metals to gold could be hauled out at throw away prices, which would be used to make high technology cutting edge products again to be sold to India at many times more profit than the actual cost of the materials/products hauled out.
MNCs want these tribal Indians to go away from their resource rich lands sometime like yesterday. But they are afraid just like the East India Company, that such evacuation (read rehabilitation) may create revolt among people. To avoid such inconvenience MNCs are now using the very democratically elected governments to do the eviction of population in the guise of protection of wildlife and sustainable development.
A massive such eviction is taking place in the State of Andhra Pradesh from the virgin forests of Nallamala range for the exclusive benefits of De Beers, a diamond mining corporation owned by the ancient bloodlines that controlled the East India Company which is on a centuries old hunt for the hidden treasures of the Indian Kingdoms.
Subscribe now and read this extensively researched complete article on The Hunt For The Treasure Of Vijayanagara Empire which details the centuries old plan of the East India Company to loot the hidden treasures of the Indian kingdoms in the Inaugural Jul-Sept 2015 issue of GreatGameIndia – India’s only quarterly magazine on Geopolitics & International Affairs.
