Cultural Activists Protest Firing on Farmers in Jharkhand

In order to loot the land, forests and natural and mineral resources of Jharkhand, the corporate forces consider it the ‘world’s one of the easiest places to do business in’ and since then the Modi-Raghuvar governments have trying to ensure the same by imposing a police-raj in the state. Two brutal incidents of police firing on farmers protesting against forcible land grab by NTPC have taken place in the last one month in Badkagaon and Gola. On 5 October, a people’s protest was held in Ranchi under the banner of Jan Sanskriti Manch. Various cultural activists and intellectuals gathered to raise the questions- “Yeh kiska lahoo hai, kaun maraa?” (Whose blood is this, who died) and “Acche din ki aas mein, log badal rahe hain laash mein?” (In the anticipation of better days, people are turning into corpses). Several social and cultural activists including -veteran filmmaker Shriprakash, Shekhar from Samvaad, Prof. Mithilesh (Pragatisheel Lekhak Sangh), M.Z. Khan (Janwadi Lekhak Sangh), Xavier Kujur (JSM, Jharkhand), Gautam Singh Munda, Sonia Tiriya (Prerna, cultural team associated with the Jharkhand unit of Jan Sanskriti Manch), Josephina Panna (a youth social activist), Jagmohan Mahto (RYA), and Saba Parween and Navreen (AISA), participated in the programme. The venue of the programme had various posters with lines from poetry of Brecht, Paash and other revolutionary poets. The activists demanded that the culprits of this planned massacre be punished and also that state oppression being unleashed on the farmers of the region be immediately stopped.

Convening the programme, Anil Anushman of Jan Sanskriti Manch said that this people’s protest is cultural activists’ warning to the Modi- Raghuvar governments that they should recall how a state government of Bengal tried to forcibly snatch land from the farmers of Nandigram and Singur and began their oppression, cultural and social activists and intellectuals gathered in streets in huge numbers to confront the government. In Jharkhand too, the activists will intensify people’s movement in favour of the farmers and the tribals by way of ‘Meri Zameen, Meri Kavita’ (My land, my poem) campaign. Massacres in the name of development will not be tolerated.

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