 Right. Welcome everybody. I'm Vanita Dharmodarin from the University of Sussex. Welcome to the public forum entitled Burning Ground, Mining Adivasis and India's Civil War in conjunction with a disappearing world exhibition in the Brunei Gallery, which has been organised by Robert Wallace and Jennifer, and they'll be saying a few words at the end of this meeting. So we have with us the celebrated writer and activist Arundhati Roy, who's acclaimed a novel, The God of Small Things, was followed by several volumes of non-fiction writing, and we are very happy to have her here today. The Algebra of Infinite Justice in 2001, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire in 2005, Listening to Grasshoppers in 2009, and her most recent book, Broken Republic in 2011 on India's Civil War. She's a leading advocate against neo-imperialism. She's a social campaigner who's received several awards and prizes for her non-fictional work and her campaigning more recently. And we are very, very glad to have you here. Welcome, Arundhati. We also have Felix Spadell towards the end, a well-known anthropologist trained in Oxford, whose two important studies, one of them in conjunction with Samreindra, has been the sacrifice of a human being in 1995. He worked extensively among the cons, and his most recent work, Out of the Earth, which both Samreindra and he call an Anthropology of Aluminium. Which is on East India's Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel. So he's going to also address us. Finally, we have some Reindardas, a multilingual writer in Oria and in English, and also a filmmaker whose most recent film entitled Earthworm and Company Man. He has just come back from making a film recently on the Konmahals. Both Felix and Samreindra have traveled extensively on the Bokside, flat-topped hills, and they have covered the region, and they know the region extensively. So it will be very good to hear from both of them. And what we are here to discuss, of course, is the dramatic impact of recent globalization events in India and the impact on the landscapes and lifestyles of local Adivasis and the responses by these local communities to what is happening to them. What India is facing today is a sort of clondite mining rush, unparalleled, and the scale and the scope of which Arundhati is going to take the lead here and read from a very powerful book of essays, The Broken Republic. So I would invite Arundhati to lead through a reading from this book. Thank you. It's a delight to see so many people here. Before I start reading, I'd just like to say a few words. Just before I came in, somebody asked me, do you feel nervous when you have to speak to large numbers of people? And I said that, you know, I used to feel nervous, but now there is such a fury in me that the nervousness was forgotten a long time ago because of what is happening in the country in which I live. And just very simply, if there's one thing that you take away from this meeting, I want you to know that the Indian government is about to deploy the army. Army in Central India, an army with a budget of $45 billion for weapons to fight the poorest people in the world. This is what is about to happen in the next few weeks. So all of you who think that India is some kind of, you know, bumbling, cuddly, you know, modern democracy, please pay attention to this. It's of course a very old story, the story of mining and environmental destruction and indigenous peoples. It's a story that the history of this country is very familiar with too. The intellectual differences apart from the political differences have to do with the fact that in today's modern world when we know about climate change, when we know that the planet is on the edge of a crisis that perhaps we can't even pull back from, when we know that there's more plastic in the oceans than photo plankton, when we know that 90% of the natural growth forests have disappeared. There is a difference between that story, that ancient story of mining corporations versus indigenous people and now. And in India, this country that called itself a democracy and is trying to industrialize and whose leaders have only one goal in mind, which is to have the fastest economic growth in the world, that country, its USP is that it's a democracy. But while western nations were industrializing and while they were developing laws and codes of civil rights and democracy, of course as we all know they had their colonies where they were committing genocide to extract raw material. India does not formally have colonies so it's colonizing itself and it's colonizing its own nether parts. So the most successful secessionist struggle in India is the secession of its middle and upper classes into outer space from where it joins the world's elites and looks down on the poor and says, what's our bauxite doing in your mountains? What's our water doing in your rivers? What's our timber doing in your forests? So this book of essays, it really has three essays. The second essay is called Walking with the Comrades and it's an essay about the weeks I spent in the forests of central India in a forest called Dandakaranya, walking with the Maoist guerrillas who've been waging an armed struggle against, well I could say the Indian state but I'll say the corporate Hindu state of India. And there are serious questions in that, are the Maoists really Maoists? Since 99.9% of that guerrilla army consists of Adivasi peoples. We can talk about that later. But I'm going to read from the last essay because I think it'll give you a sort of overall picture of what's going on there and then we could open it for discussion. The last essay is called The Trickle Down Revolution and it begins with the murder of the Maoist spokesperson who's called Comrade Azad who had been nominated by the party to hold talks with the government of India and instead he was killed in what in India is known as an encounter. So it starts actually with an anonymous poem from this country written in 1821 which says the law locks up the hapless felon who steals the goose from off the common but lets the greater felon loose who steals the common from the goose. In the early morning hours of the 2nd of July 2010 in the remote forests of Adilabad the Andhra Pradesh police fired a bullet into the chest of a man called Cherukuri Rajkumar known to his comrades as Azad. Azad was a member of the Politburo of the banned communist party of India, Maoist and had been nominated by his party as his chief negotiator for the proposed peace talks with the government of India. Why did the police fire at point blank range and leave those telltale burn marks on his chest when they could so easily have covered their tracks? Was it a mistake or was it a message? They killed a second person that morning, Hemchandra Pandey a young journalist who was travelling with Azad when he was apprehended. Why did they kill him? Was it to make sure no eyewitnesses remained alive to tell the tale or was it just whimsy? In the course of a war if in the preliminary stages of peace negotiations one side executes the envoy of the other side it's reasonable to assume that the side that did the killing does not want peace. He looks very much as though Azad was killed because someone decided that the stakes were too high to allow him to remain alive. That decision could turn out to be a serious error of judgement not just because of who he was but because of the political climate in India today. So in this region something like 200 or more memorandums of understanding have been signed with major mining corporations. Every forest, glade, every mountain, every river has been sold to corporations who are not managing to get the traction they need to start work. So there's a sort of desperation building. So now it's the trickle down revolution. Days after I said goodbye to the comrades and emerged from Dandakaranya forest. I found myself charting a weary but familiar course to Jantar Mantar on Parliament Street in New Delhi. Jantar Mantar is an old observatory built by Maharaj Sawai Jaising too of Jaipur in the 18th century. In those days it was a scientific marvel used to tell the time predict the weather and study the planets. Today it's a not so hot tourist attraction that doubles up as Delhi's little showroom for democracy. For some years now protests unless they are patronized by political parties or religious organizations have been banned in Delhi. The boat club on Rajput which has in the past seen huge historic rallies that sometimes lasted for days is out of bounds for political activity now and is only available for picnics, balloon sellers and boat rides. As for India Gate candlelight vigils and boutique protests for middle class causes such as justice for Jessica the model who was killed in a Delhi bar are allowed but nothing more. Section 144 an old 19th century law that bans the gathering of more than five people who have quote a common object which is unlawful in a public place has been clamped on the city. The law was passed by the British in 1860 to prevent a repeat of the 1857 mutiny. It was meant to be an emergency measure but has become a permanent fixture in many parts of India. Perhaps it was at gratitude for laws like these that our Prime Minister while accepting an honorary degree from Oxford thanked the British for bequeathing us such a rich legacy. Our judiciary, our legal system, our bureaucracy and our police are all great institutions derived from British Indian administration and they have served the country well he said. Jantarwantar is the only place in Delhi where section 144 applies but is not enforced. People from all over the country fed up with being ignored by the political establishment and the media converge there desperately hoping for a hearing. Some take long train journeys, some like the victims of the Bhopal gas leak have walked for weeks all the way to Delhi though they have to fight each other for the best spot on the burning of freezing pavement. Until recently protesters were allowed to camp in Jantarwantar for as long as they liked, weeks, months, even years. Under the malevolent gaze of the police and the special branch they would put up their faded Shamianas and Badans. From here they declared their faith in democracy by issuing their memoranda, announcing their protest plans and staging their indefinite hunger strikes. From here they tried but never succeeded to march on parliament. From here they hoped. Of late though democracy's timings have been changed. It strictly offers hours now from 9 to 5. No overtime, no sleepovers. No matter from how far people have come, no matter if they have no shelter in the city, if they don't leave by 6pm they are forcibly dispersed by the police if necessary with batons and water cannons if things get out of hand. The new timings were ostensibly instituted to make sure that the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi would go smoothly. But nobody's expecting the old timings back anytime soon. Maybe it's in the fitness of things that what's left of our democracy should be traded in for an event that was created to celebrate the British Empire. Perhaps it's only right that nearly 400,000 people should have been driven out of the city and many seen their homes demolished or that hundreds of thousands of roadside vendors should have had their livelihood snatched away by the orders of the Supreme Court and that tens of thousands of beggars should have been shipped out of the city and more than 100,000 galley slaves shipped in to build the flyovers, metro tunnels, Olympic sized swimming pools, warm up stadiums and luxury housing for athletes. The old empire may not exist but obviously our tradition of civility has become too profitable an enterprise to dismantle. I was at Jantar Mantar that day because a thousand pavement dwellers from cities all over the country had come to demand a few fundamental rights. The right to shelter, the right to food, ration cards, to life which is a protection from police brutality and criminal extortion by municipal officers. The sun was sharp that day but still civilized. This is a terrible thing to have to say but it's true, you could smell the protest from a fair distance. It was the accumulated order of a thousand human bodies that had been dehumanized, denied the basic necessities for human or even animal health and hygiene for years, if not a whole lifetime. Bodies that had been marinated in the refuse of our big cities, bodies that had no shelter from the harsh weather, no access to clean water, clean air, sanitation or medical care. No part of this great country, none of the supposedly progressive schemes, no single urban institution has been designed to accommodate them. Not even the sewage system, they shit on top of it. They are the shadow people who live in the cracks that run between schemes and institutions. They sleep on the streets, eat on the streets, make love on the streets, give birth on the streets, are raped on the streets, cut their vegetables, wash their clothes, raise their children, live and die on the streets. If the motion picture were an art form that involved the olfactory senses, in other words if cinema smelled, then films like Slumdog, Millionaire wouldn't win Oscars. The stench of that kind of poverty wouldn't blend with the aroma of warm popcorn. The people at the protest in Jantar Mantar that they were not even slumdogs, they were pavement dwellers. Who were they? Where had they come from? They were the refugees of India shining. The people who are being sloshed around like toxic effluent in a manufacturing process that has gone berserk. The representatives of the estimated 60 million people who have been displaced by rural destitution, by slow starvation, by floods and drought, by mines, steel factories and aluminium smelters, by highways and expressways, by the 3,300 big dams built since independence and now by the special economic zones. They are part of the 836 million people of India who live on less than 20 rupees a day. The ones who starve while millions of tons of food grain is either eaten by rats in government warehouses or burnt in bulk because it's cheaper to burn food than to distribute it to the poor. They are the parents of the tens of millions of malnourished children in our country of the one and a half million who die every year before they reach their first birthday. They are the millions who make up the chain gangs that are transported from city to city to build the new India. Is this what is known as enjoying the fruits of modern development? What must they think, these people, about a government that sees fit to spend 240 billion rupees of public money for a two week long sports extravaganza which for fear of terrorism, malaria, dengue and New Delhi's new superbug, many international athletes refuse to attend, which the Queen of England, titular head of the Commonwealth, would not consider presiding over, not even in her most irresponsible dreams. Standing at Janthar Mantar on that bright day, I thought of all the struggles that are being waged by people in this country, against the big dams in the Narmada Valley, Polavaram Arnachal, against mines in Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, against the police by the Adivasis of Lalgarh, against the grabbing of their lands for industry and special economic zones all over the country. How many years and in how many ways have people fought to avoid just such a fate? I thought of Comrade Maase, Narmada, Rupi, Niti, Mantu, Madhav, Saroja, Raju, Goodsai, Usendi and Comrade Kamla with their guns slung over their shoulders. I thought of the great dignity of the forest I had so recently walked in, and the rhythm of the Adivasi drums at the Bhumkal celebration in Buster, like the soundtrack of the quickening pulse of a furious nation. I thought of Padma with whom I travelled to Varangal. She's only in her thirties, but she has to hold the banister and drag her body behind her when she walks up the stairs. She was arrested just a week after she had had an appendix operation. She was beaten until she had an internal hemorrhage and severe organ damage. When they cracked her knees, the police explained helpfully that it was to make sure she would never walk in the forest again. She was released after serving an eight-year sentence. Now she runs the Amarulla Bandhu Mitrulla Sangham, the committee of relatives and friends of martyrs. It retrieves the dead bodies of people killed in fake encounters. Padmasen spends her time crisscrossing northern Andhra Pradesh in whatever transport she can find, usually a tractor transporting the corpses of people whose parents or spouses are too poor to make the journey to retrieve the bodies of their loved ones. The tenacity, the wisdom and the courage of those who have been fighting for years, for decades to bring change or even the whisper of justice to their lives is something extraordinary. Whether people are fighting to overthrow the Indian state or fighting against big dams or only fighting a particular steel plant or mine or SEZ, the bottom line is that they are fighting for their dignity, for the right to live and smell like human beings. They are fighting because, as far as they are concerned, the fruits of modern development stink like dead cattle on the highway. Thank you. Felix to say a few words. Thank you. Great to see everybody here and great that Owen Dattie could come. When we were organising this event, some people, I think from the media said, you can't call it into civil war because people don't know there's a civil war there. Is there a civil war there? Of course that's why we have used this title because many people do not know what is happening. What's amazing is many people in the cities in India don't know or don't want to know. Many people outside the country, many people who travel all around India have no idea that a civil war is going on but I would say, and I should think the others would probably agree with me, certainly most people do who I speak to, that knowing Indian history fairly well, I would say this is the worst war there has ever been in India and especially because it's directed against the village people themselves who have kind of been there since time began pretty much, since for hundreds of years certainly. The place where Owen Dattie was walking with comrades about is part of what used to be called Basta, the biggest district in central India, South Chattisgarh. And personally it's my favourite place in India, personally it's my favourite place in the world. It's become a kind of hell on earth. And of the adversities who live there, I would say of all the societies, I mean as an anthropologist, of all the societies I know of, I would say the societies of Basta had got most things most right. I won't go into much detail now but I mean the legal system, when they look at somebody brings a case and it's discussed in the village, the main purpose is not to decide who's right and who's wrong, it's to reconcile. And both sides are usually fined and that pays for a feast of reconciliation. I mean they're civilised to a degree that is quite hard to imagine from the outside, for children also, the place of women also, the place of sexuality. There's a tremendous value placed on sharing and equality and this is the society that is being really torn apart. But there is one war in India's history that actually stands at the dawn of Indian history as it's recorded, that is quite similar and that is what's known as the Kalinga war where the Emperor Ashoka attacked the Kalinga people or state. It wasn't a state, it wasn't hierarchical. And actually the Kond people, their name for themselves is Kubinga and I'm convinced I think many people think that the Kalinga were basically the Kond's and they've now retreated more to the mountains. But the Ashoka himself says on his inscriptions that he set up all over the country apparently with regret, but one doesn't really know, he was a politician too. My armies slaughtered 100,000, enslaved 150,000 and many times those numbers died of disease and famine afterwards. So in a way that was, if you like, that was the Aryan invasion of Orissa, the Maurian Empire, an invasion of a new kind of people conquering Orissa. And it's very interesting that the biggest steel complex in Orissa is called Kalinga Laga because the pride of Orissa, the ancient history, the ancient glory of Orissa is conjured by this name Kalinga, whose kings later after Ashoka also were powerful. So Kalinga Laga is a set of steel plants and there have been several different steel companies have built plants there, 100,000 of Adivasis have been already displaced and the company Tata has been trying to build a steel plant there for the last five, six years. One of the kind of biggest, most emotive events in 2nd of January 2006 when police basically opened fire after various things happened and a policeman was killed and about 14 Adivasis were killed, including women and children. And so Kalinga Laga is also a kind of, that became a symbol of resistance and I think it was in December 2009 that, Lavin Putnite, the chief minister of Orissa went for the first time to Kalinga Laga not to kind of commiserate but to open a new police station and he publicly thanked the steel companies, probably especially Tata for paying for this new police station, which in a way made it clear what we all knew that in effect the police often acts as kind of agents of the big companies. So Kalinga Laga and what is also very interesting in relation to the Civil War it's been said right from the beginning, this is the Maoists who are doing this problem the media and the politicians tend to say that but the people on the ground are very adamant that they have in effect kept the Maoists out but since this new police station and the violence there has escalated without any media coverage, really very, very, very, very little because Tata has a huge control over media. So you know, there might be radicalization, it might be that there is more and Maoist influence now and in that sense I would say that I see many parallels between the war against the Maoists which is really a war against the tribal people in India and the war on terror, the bigger picture that in many cases as possibly Osama bin Laden, if he wasn't there, they would have had to invent him and certainly with the Maoists in many ways they are, their power has been they're something needed by the state as a kind of bogey I mean so many people have been falsely blamed as Maoists and so on but talking a little bit about the civil war, a little bit about the advices the mining industry brings a very close relationship with London because in many ways, especially in terms of the finance of mining London is the mining capital of the world and this is something I, growing up as a Londoner, I had absolutely no idea of certain key centres in London if you like so one of them is a London metal exchange that in effect through trading decides the price of aluminium and other non-ferrous metals five days a week one is the four big accountancy firms, the big four and we've seen with especially the company Vedanta how each of the four in turn, almost by rotation has validated the reports of Vedanta they say in it, according to the documents we have been shown and our site visit on whatever dates we certify that this is sustainable development as defined by so-and-so I mean they might just as well say, it doesn't mean anything but here's our certificate and of course they've paid a lot of money for that I mean the big four are there at every stage of many, many, many, many vital companies, the finance, the hedge funds, the private equity funds the banks, why did Vedanta register itself in London for the finance and you know, many, many, many stories in that which I won't go into very much now but with Tata, Tata is a very crucial one in this particular story because in Buster, two companies signed very crucial MOUs or deals in mid-2005 one was Tata for steel plant and iron ore mine and one was Essar, Essar Steel but Essar Energy is another company that's also registered in London that energy, the power, whether it's dams or coal mining or nuclear that electricity energy is something a lot of finance collects around so when it was a Tata decision to close the Redlands Steel Plant in North England and that's one of Britain's last steel plants and it's almost like when the environmental regulations are really quite strong and labour rights are quite strong and things are being done right, then it's no longer economical to run that plant and that's one of the things about why we use the word cartel in the title of the aluminium book that if you look at the ores, what the country is getting for the basic aluminium ore, bauxite and for iron ore and chromite and manganese and the other basic metals it's absolutely nothing in relation to the damage being done to both the environment and to the communities who live in the mining areas so the amazing photos that you see here which is just one area, jarkand coal mining of maybe there are several hundred such mining hells in Indio alone not to mention of course Indonesia and many other countries but nearly all of these mining areas are in Ativasi areas so one of the amazing things is recently in, I've just come back from nine months in India and there's a massive kind of opening up of corruption and people talking about corruption and some of it involves mining in Orissa, in Karnataka, in Goa, especially but what I feel as a kind of British person is knowing how much is orchestrated from outside the country, especially of the financial policy especially through the IMF and World Bank also through the DFID, the Department of International Development of the UK Government that it's very easy in a sense to talk about corruption in India at least it's good that it's getting much easier but really the corruption starts in London where you go into these big, every event has had its AGM and a more grand kind of institution and with the big four they have such a good reputation, so squeaky clean but that's where the corruption starts from and one of the examples is really the kind of World Bank financing of coal from a very long time and the whole way that the policy has worked Orissa has been the most indebted state, why? because over several decades the World Bank has orchestrated lots and lots of loans to build an infrastructure for the mining industry coal mines, dams, roads, railways but the extent of debt means they have the Orissa Government over a barrel that financial policy is completely decided outside and what the politicians are doing, it doesn't make a difference which party is really elected because the financial policy has in effect been decided through these deals for mining so in many ways, again coming back to Tata, why was he made a sir? Why was he now a sir Ratan Tata? The relationship with Britain goes very deep and I have to tell you this story that one of India's leading conservationists told me some time ago that he said, I had a chance to meet Sir Ratan Tata alone, not alone going I said to him, look why don't you set an example and you, why don't you, given undertaking that you won't set up steel factories and mines in virgin forest areas and Tata said to him, don't paint me into a corner as some good guy if I did that I'd lose, my competitors would get the edge over me I'm just a common criminal, he said that, of course he won't say that to the media and in fact he's not a common criminal, he in effect is a kind of very uncommon criminal and in a way the kind of pattern of capitalism in India is very much what was called the rubber balance in America that people who had tremendously admired but also hated and envied and so on so a little bit about the connection of London and the wider war on terror, I don't actually publish the Walking with Comrades I feel that article really changed history in a way, it's something and of course as she says in many ways, democracy and I would say not just in India but in other places is a kind of sham or charade that it doesn't make very much difference what part is it elected because the main power is with the banks and corporations very often and one of the examples where to me India maybe is the world's biggest democracy is that her article could be published well I think if anybody spent time with a Taliban and wrote a sympathetic account of the Taliban walking with a Taliban, I'm not sure that could be published here and in many ways to me what's driving the war is partly the kind of invasion of the massive land grab all around the coast but it's also the atrocities being done by men in uniform and there again I would say America or Britain with America has set a pattern so for example in Afghanistan with the drone attacks on villages when people are killed it's I mean partly I feel many of what we call terrorism a lot of it is fueled by a massive outrage at the injustice and double standards I mean who is asking for those people who are controlling the drones to be brought to justice I don't think that's even on the agenda and similarly with the Maoist civil war I feel it will be very hard to bring to any proper end or to find a real peace unless there is a sense of kind of justice in a sense rule of law that if a Dalit or an Adivasi can go to a police station register an FIR a first information report and then go to the court and expect some hope of justice then in a sense that that would cut out the exploitation and it would there would be no need for the war but it's a very very long way from that and it's been quite good there have been certain senior policemen for example who have written or spoken openly in interviews about how the security forces are very often out of control in this war and I mean that is something that somehow needs to be highlighted a lot more there have been some very courageous journalists writing about it in India but their work hardly comes over here so there is a sense of not really knowing what's going on and the other reason I mean in thinking about how peace could be brought there now after Azad's killing especially part of the difficulty is when a polarization happens like that then it's very hard so much blood has been spelt people have been forced to take sides to me in many ways the Maris are kind of mirror to the mainstream that several people have said that when they interview senior Maris leaders and get to the subject of mining they will not speak on that and with I mean one can understand why because if they if whenever the Maris have attacked a mine or a factory they don't seem to have tried to stop it they're especially interested in explosives and it's widely reported that a lot of the mining companies give them protection money so there is a kind of and in many ways the kind of materialism that is there embodied in the mining is also maybe that's to me part of the shadow carried by the kind of Marxist tradition that because he chose materialism materialism can creep as we've seen in China kind of by stages into a kind of capitalism again and also that kind of sacrifice of life that the the comrades who are there who I mean they have witnessed such atrocities that if somebody comes and offers them comradeship and a gun why on earth would they not accept and they're very motivated but to me the problem is the polarization is happening between two extremes that actually are quite similar in the belief in a sacrifice of life to achieve their aims while the kind of normal life is completely it's going in one sense because of the mining and the land grab and it's going in another sense because of the militarization and the guns so one thing against the that is also makes thinking about how to bring peace to the situation very difficult is the power of the corporations and in a way it's been good that Gerard Ramesh as India's environment minister to begin with was made some quite radical decisions like that Vedanta shouldn't be allowed to mine name Giri that BT Brinjal this GM crop shouldn't be allowed and so on but since then he has allowed given environmental clearance to a lot of projects one of them is Posco where right now on the coast of Orissa thousands of police are besieging villages with a lot of violence Kalinga Nagar's another one and there are many many many of these spots in in India now and I also want to in a way what we're talking about is the neoliberal power structure the World Bank and IMF in January this year 40 billion dollars of new funding loans was agreed to expand 747,000 kilometers of roads in India and if you go over India now especially in the tribal parts you find kind of ancient avenues of trees just being mown down one big tree in five minutes and the roads are not signposted to the cities they're mainly signposted to the ports and all around the coast of the country there are the new ports and in a sense it is a kind of loot of the country that's going on and the kind of high GDP in India is very much a kind of bubble from the investment pouring into the country based around looting the resources of the country so if the rule of law can be imposed it first needs to be imposed on the robber barons on the companies and that's in a sense what Jerem seemed to be starting to do at least he said and said to the media very strongly I'm so sorry I've had to give clearance for this project that project the Maheshwara Dam and so on despite numerous illegalities because orders came from the Prime Minister's office to do that but where did the orders come I mean the Prime Minister is also a World Bank employee so the power structure is something I'm talking about the neoliberal power structure here that the power of the banks and corporations Adam Smith who's the kind of hero of the neoliberal mindset in a way he was a tremendous critic of the East India Company in particular and of corporations in general and this is something that is forgotten and left out of a lot of the textbooks about Adam Smith that he said if the regulations containing the power of corporations companies are ever taken off the world will see a worse form of tyranny than it is ever known and that is the age I mean since Mrs. Thatcher and Regan that has been the trend that we live in a time now when that's what's happening so and of course all this is happening in the name of development so in a way how I see it is that in terms of real development I would say there hasn't been very much progress for the last 2000 years in terms of as a species could we actually begin to stop wars so I want to end on that note but I want to ask you something that isn't usually asked to be done in this kind of place which is in a way peace also begins here so and it begins in accepting another so what I'd like you asked to do if you don't mind is look into the eyes of the people on either side of you and just hold their hands for a moment now to just comment for 10 minutes can I ask some rendering now to speak for about 10-12 minutes I've got a watch to watch for coming to this beautiful I know things are very heavy here what's going on in India just before I came last night I was watching YouTube footage of what's going on in post-query where actually in Gorkojung and Dinkya and other places they are chasing like animals and beating of women and some women were really hot and they were showing their Bruce to the camera and they are all unreported nothing is being published in the media yet yeah it's on today too there would be some no I'm talking about the violence that's going on in Orissa at the moment and the violence is related to London because my friend was talking about the financial world here and the company who is involved in doing this is Posco but the company who is actually behind this also is BH Billiton these companies, BH Billiton if you remember that this year one of the former minister of DI Fahri called Sritivadera, Barones Sritivadera she joined BH Billiton on the board and she was on the board of Oxfam for 5 years as a trustee and it doesn't surprise me at all because Oxfam did a secret survey in Orissa in 2002 to 2005 for 5 years they were doing 3 years they were doing some survey about how to actually understand activism how to understand activism they did a survey and that's a very interesting survey it's called how to actually isolate the radicals and activists there is a line there in the report which is published by a PR think tank called Social Compass you can look at the web and you can pay for 400 pounds or you can hire from me and read it it's very interesting actually the point why I want to make is that few people can make big difference I salute those people who put these things in the YouTube I was there with my friend Miriam we were actually watching the red mod being the impoundment broke and there was not a single line in any newspaper in India about the red mod that was being the impoundment that was being broken by Vedanta and they were claiming the rain because it's an act of God so they can claim the insurance and they don't have to be responsible and that's the kind of CSR these companies are claiming and there are some NGOs in the world who are actually giving them certificates CSR clean green certificates there are NGOs who are actually signing a mo-use with the same corporates we are fighting against I want to make this point very clear because social movement is quite an interesting thing we all work in the grassroots so we know how actually important one activist can be one activist in Tamil Nadu he filed a small case against Kohli Hills and a big mountain was saved because of one small act of submission two people in Goa they filed one small thing about a mining company and the company came with 100 million dollar lawsuit against this person, Sevi one activist who does these things in his own way in Niamgiri, I can talk about the Niamgiri movement in 2002 you were eight people only meeting in a hot summer day in a small place and thinking that how do I actually talk about this movement and I see a lot of people here so it creates me a lot of hope when you laugh and when you hold hands we can hold that hand and go to the same corridor of power and knock at the doors that the violence that is going on in Orissa has got some roots here as well because when I talk about Postco, I talk about BH Bliton I talk about DFID, I talk about Siddhi Badera I talk about all these connections the connections, the networks can be very long and very big and the activists in India whether they are in the forest or they are in the urban areas they are going through a very tough time and they are being deliberately marginalized, isolated they are being called as radicals sometimes they have been given a negative image and we want to bring some hope here there are so many such movements going on the Reddy brothers and the Madhu Kodas and the Anilagrawals need to be visible here my question to this London media is that why a tenth billionaire of Europe is not visible whose wealth has risen to 583% after the financial crisis it is Anilagrawal I am talking about why he is not visible and why Financial Times publishes articles about him that he has secured the mountain when the mountain is in court and the mountain has not been secured yet and the struggle is still going on in the ground I have these questions to all these big four medias and the big four accountancy firms who legitimize corruption in the third world countries and when the third world millions, those who are in the streets those who are pavement dealers, those who are in the forest they are shouting all we need to hear them they are not very difficult people to access to there are voices in the ground there are activists who are bringing these voices immediately what you hear is that something happens in India and then there is a flood of some disinformation campaign the PR campaigns Nira Radia who runs many PR companies one in London and three in India who was involved in 2G scam she was also holding the account of Vedanta and today's Chief Justice of Supreme Court of India the Mayor Holder of Vedanta SH Kapadia so also Home Minister he was on the board of Vedanta when he was Finance Minister his wife was the lawyer for Vedanta and Vedanta is a company which is listed in London Stock Exchange and has got many other connections Vedanta signs MOU with ICICF Bank and Vedanta signs MOU with many other banks the same banks who sign MOU with many of the NGOs say that we are protesting against Vedanta I want to talk about this very clearly that there can be only few people who can change and if we actually make ourselves visible in this protest to express our solidarity the protest politics has to be formally made to be visible in the global day of action we have several such movements going on in other parts of the planet like Trinidad, Iceland, Greenland Vietnam, South Africa, Mojial there are many places on this planet where people are resisting and these people are fighting the same enemies we are fighting against this is a new age of seeing how anti-capitalist movement can actually bring a lot of hope instead of bringing depression we are sitting in a place where the most probably the most of the teachers fund is being invested in Vedanta a part of that fund it's called the University Super Annuation Scheme, USS your University pension fund is being invested in Vedanta to start with you should actually do something about it it's a company which is causing genocide for the Dong Ria Khan and here after five years I was here in 2006 and I spoke about this this is where the action is needed we do not want the action to be seen as an abstract let us make few things possible let us make these enemies visible let us ask the media that why don't you see about Anil Agrawal who is he how come he became the fastest growing billionaire of this planet he is the fastest growing billionaire of this planet yet you will find anything critical about him in the media this is where I feel that by talking about our friends before I came in I wanted to talk about that I am going to London and I am going to speak about it what should I speak about people's movement and the hope in people's movement they say just tell them about how actually we need to be visible there are ways how to make them visible and how to actually stand for them in the protest so I want to end my discussion with a song which comes from the ground and hopefully it will be the last song of the Bauxite mountains I have so many songs to sing I want the song to sing a song please allow me to sing a song which was the song which we have been singing since 1993 hey don't leave me don't leave me don't leave me don't leave me don't leave me don't leave me don't leave me don't leave me don't leave me don't leave me don't leave me don't leave me don't leave me don't leave me don't leave me don't leave me don't leave me don't leave me Thank you.