Tropic of Chaos

by Christian Parenti

  A brilliant young economic historian, Vamsi Vakulabharanam, has identified and explained the politics of this contradictory, seemingly nonsensical set of facts. The answer, he writes, lies in the credit system. The moneylenders demand that cotton be planted with their capital because cotton is inedible, so during times of crisis, producers cannot “steal,” that is eat, it. Moneylenders essentially give advances on crops, then receive the harvest. If a farm family is dying of hunger and their crop is grain, chances are they will eat the collateral crop to stay alive, rather than give it to the moneylender. Cotton avoids that problem. Thus, even when food crops, like grains, command higher prices, they carry greater risks for the moneylenders. Cotton is the moneylenders’ biological insurance; they steer farmers away from food crops, even if the potential for profits is higher, because only cotton is guaranteed collateral. Using this insight, Vakulabharanam shows that since 1980, farmers in Telangana have moved away from planting coarse grains, like jowar, barley, and millet, toward growing cotton, even as the price signal should have them doing the opposite.

  This shift has coincided with the neoliberal reforms that removed from agriculture many legal protections and government subsidies—including public credit and public investment in irrigation.42 In response to the relative withdrawal of the state, farmers took on more expenses themselves and, in turn, had to raise capital wherever they could—that meant from moneylenders. The more farmers turned to private moneylenders, the more they were under pressure to grow more cotton. And the more cotton they grew, the lower its price sank.

  Thus, Telangana farmers become trapped in a downward economic cycle: they need expensive inputs and capital to produce a crop that drops in value even as they invest more heavily in it. And the central equipment—especially as climate change makes the region drier, due to extreme weather and frequent drought—are the well and irrigation systems. So, the farmers borrow. Vakulabharanam calls it “immiserizing growth”—agricultural output rises but incomes sink. Others have described the same set of contradictions as “modern poverty” or a form of “development-induced scarcity.”43

  Irrigating Corruption

  Recent mismanagement and political meddling have compounded the climate-change-driven water problem in Andhra Pradesh. In particular, the neglect of the traditional water-management system is due to the interventions of N. T. Rama Rao. A Telugu-speaking film star, N. T. Rao, as he was known, scripted himself into the political scene by founding the Telugu Desam Party, a Telangana regionalist party that sought greater development in northern Andhra Pradesh and governed throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s. He made his charismatic appeals directly to the people with a populist mix of ideas from the Left and Right.

  On the one hand, he fought vigorously against the Naxalites, presiding over the creation of the Greyhounds—those police counterinsurgency forces. On the other hand, he did much to disrupt old power groups and deliver services to the popular classes of the region. As part of this attack on established and inherited privilege, he abolished the feudal munasob and karanam system in which local dignitaries inherited tax-collection, water-management, and irrigation maintenance jobs—all opportunities to shake down the farmer. The film star did away with these village satraps—a bit of justice but also just one more layer of political interference between himself and the masses—but, unfortunately, nothing better fully replaced them. Some village committees, raitu sangam, were organized but not funded. The transition to a different, more democratic system of water management remained incomplete and disorganized, so local irrigation has suffered.

  Corruption is also a problem affecting water management. In the village of Patagvada, a few kilometers down the road from Jaamni, across the Big Stream and up a small hill, the people are in thrall to the Congress Party. The reasons for that are very concrete (forgive the pun): Congress paved the village’s main street with cement and has promised to legalize and upgrade the jerry-rigged electrical connections that the village has been using to pirate power. The villagers tell me how five boreholes were promised, and five boreholes are listed in district records as having been drilled, but only one was actually completed. And so, the people suffer diminished yields, lower incomes, greater stress, illness, fear, and frustration. The winter rains having failed, the Big Stream is but a few stagnant pools.

  Dry Cocktail of Rage

  All these social factors—the withdrawal of the state, the rise of capital-intensive farming and the depredation of moneylenders, and the incompetence and corruption of the local state, all in a semiarid climate—make up the preexisting crisis upon which climate change now descends. This, like counterinsurgency and war, contributes to the catastrophic convergences of climate, poverty, and violence.

  From under the arbor, I can see why Linga Reddy Sama and the other farmers in Jaamni are so pessimistic about farming. They have a clear a set of ideas about the environmental politics of what they are doing: the Bt cotton they use is killing the land. A few say that population growth has led to overharvesting of the forest, which they (correctly) believe is adversely affecting rainfall. Further away in the hills there’s been commercial and often illegal logging. Here, though, the deforestation is a by-product of their local fuel and construction needs.

  In the remote forests of Chattisgarh, Naxalite activity is so intense that the paramilitary state police are largely pinned down, restricted to their fortresslike compounds—redoubts reinforced with sandbags, wire, log walls, and gun turrets. When the police venture out, the Naxals ambush. The guerillas also mass their troops for large attacks that sometimes overrun the paramilitary police compounds and detention centers. For example, in November 2005 Naxalite guerillas stormed a jail in Jehanabad, Bihar, “firebombing offices and freeing several hundred prisoners.” In March 2006 “they attacked a police camp in Chattisgarh, killing fifty-five policemen and making off with a huge cache of weapons.” They have bombed railway stations and transmission towers. During the 2009 elections, they took a whole passenger train hostage and attacked a multibillion-dollar iron ore slurry pipeline. 44

  The Naxalite weapon of choice is the command-activated landmine. As these are not pressure-detonated mines, they can be planted in a road months before use: rain, mud, traffic, and sunshine bake the road above the mines into perfect camouflage. The buried mines become impossible to detect under the hard-packed tracks, but the explosives are active and linked to long wires that can be connected to detonators and triggered whenever the guerillas are ready.

  Like improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Naxalite landmines are effective on several levels simultaneously. Tactically, landmines maim and kill the paramilitary police. Psychologically, the explosives wear down and demoralize the enemy. Politically, the mines function as a social barrier between the counterinsurgency forces and the people whom they seek to control. The situation is so bad that elements in the Indian air force are lobbying to start an aerial bombing campaign upon the parched lands of the Red Corridor.45

  Dark Arts of Repression

  Instead of robustly embracing new, green agricultural technologies and supports for farmers facing an uncertain climate, the state is focusing on repression. The relative victory over the guerillas in Telangana results from a near-perfect mix of classic guns-and-butter counterinsurgency. At the thin end of the wedge are the above-mentioned Greyhounds, the paramilitary special forces of the state police. Established in the early 1990s, this counterinsurgency force has been highly effective, never hesitating to use violence but also investing enormous energy in intelligence. That is to say, the Greyhounds target their terror effectively. Often they travel in civilian dress, out of uniform, heavily armed but undercover, passing among the population unannounced, largely unseen, as teams of assassins rather than as occupying soldiers. They are part special forces, part death squad.

  For years, the Greyhounds conducted search-and-destroy operations in the forest belt of northern Telangana, and they still do. Sometimes t
hey confront armed dalam (the cadre) in firefights. More often, they kill unarmed guerrillas and civilian supporters.46 Aided by a network of paid informants, tribal irregulars in service to the state, and former Naxals who have switched sides, the Greyhounds spent half a decade combing the hills, mapping both the physical and social terrain, observing the comings and goings of activists, learning the social networks in the villages, and then—in the style of the US Army’s Operation Phoenix in South Vietnam—breaking the key social links between the guerrillas and the people. That is to say, they killed both the dalam, the armed cadre, and the unarmed sangam, or activists. The strategy continues, though not as intensely. Always, when the dead are displayed to the press—blood smeared and dirty, laid out, two or three at a time, on reed mats—the Greyhounds ascribe the assassinations to self-defense. The euphemism describing the killings is always the same. They are “encounters” or accidental collisions between armed bandits and the forces of order. In the Red Corridor, this is the nomenclature of state terrorism. 47

  The zenith of Naxalite activity in Andhra Pradesh occurred in October 2003, when the chief minister of the state, N. Chandrababu Naidu, was visiting the famous Venkateswara Temple to attend part of a Hindu festival. As his convoy left the temple, a series of six remote-controlled claymore mines lifted the earth beneath the vehicles in a deafening shock of linked explosions. The minister’s bulletproof ambassador car was mangled and flipped off the road. But, to the credit of Hindustan Motors’ retrofitting, Naidu survived with only light wounds to the face and chest. His driver and four other members of the legislative assembly, however, were very badly hurt. The assailants were cadre of the outlawed People’s War Group (PWG), one of the largest and oldest Maoist parties in India.

  “The attack on Naidu shows that there really is no alternative but to revive dialogue and peace talks between the PWG and the government,” said one of the Naxals’ aboveground spokespeople, the popular left-leaning folk singer Gaddar, who uses only one name.48 Indeed, the attack was one of the Naxals’ most spectacular assaults yet, not because of its size but because of its target; they had almost decapitated a state government. The Political and Economic Weekly lamented the implications:With the state government panic-stricken by the attempt on the life of Chandrababu Naidu and the PWG peeved by the failure of its attempt, both sides are hardening their vengeful attitudes and Andhra Pradesh is likely to go through another cycle of vicious killings. The victims will be fall guys. The police will target poor villagers and human rights activists as “suspected Naxalites” (as they have done by raiding the house of the veteran civil liberties movement leaderKGKannabiran) and arrest or kill them in false encounters. The PWG, in its turn, will take it out on some village “pradhan” or subordinate government employee, branding them as “informers,” and let off steam by setting fire to a few railway stations or bus depots.49

  After the bombing against Chief Minister Naidu, the police in Andhra Pradesh turned up the heat. Naidu’s government reopened negotiations with the PWG. (Talks had been under way starting in June 2002, but a massive attack on a bus full of police ended them.) The police were ordered to pull back and the rebels were implored to do likewise. “We have reports that squads are roaming in villages with arms. We are requesting them not to move around with weapons,” said Andhra Pradesh’s home minister.50

  Initial talks were conducted via emissaries, one of them a famous Naxalite writer, Varavara Rao, who gave me his account on a hot afternoon in Hyderabad. “The government was not serious,” said the old writer. “They were using the talks to research the Naxal networks.” By 2005, Varavara Rao himself had been arrested, accused of murdering policemen. As the hammer of the state was descending again, he told the press, “The Congress is like sweet poison. While the TDP [regionalist party] government always ruled out talks with us, the Congress is talking of peace but killing revolutionaries in stage-managed encounters.”

  The Andhra Pradesh cease-fire and those in other states were ultimately part of a ruse, a larger strategy to flush out the underground networks of the PWG so as to liquidate and jail them. The federal government had finally begun promulgating a three-pronged counterinsurgency: strengthened intelligence at the state level; sustained, intelligence-driven police repression; and accelerated economic development in Naxal-affected areas. Between 2003 and 2005, over fifteen hundred casualties were reported every year from each of the eleven states affected by Naxalite violence. Just over three hundred police were killed during that time.51

  Sowing Chaos

  The Naxalite violence in Andhra Pradesh peaked just after 2005.52 Ultimately, the Greyhounds proved too much for the Naxals of Telangana; the Maoists fell back into the forest of Chattisgarh and there multiplied. In that province, police had developed a force of civilian vigilantes, called the Salva Judum, which in the local Gond dialect means “peace march.” Initially an organic self-defense organization, the Salva Judum was co-opted by the state. Participation became mandatory, and this “third force” became an armed auxiliary of police repression.53

  The new paramilitaries include many former Naxals and, in this regard, resemble the civil patrols of the Guatemalan counterinsurgency or the early paramilitaries in Columbia.54 In January 2009, the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee reported that one “encounter” in Chattisgarh was actually a massacre of eighteen tribals by armed Salva Judum backed up by police.55 Critics say the government-sanctioned vigilantism of the Salva Judum has forced more than fifty thousand people into roadside refugee camps.56

  India’s internal war is a stark example of the catastrophic convergence. Poverty made worse by neoliberalism meets counterinsurgency and repression meets climate-driven ecological crisis. If the monsoons fail or hit too hard, the Maoists, the Greyhounds, and the Salva Judum all threaten to play an increasingly destabilizing role in the coming years. They are precisely the types of centrifugal, unaccountable, violent criminogenic forces that insurgency and counterinsurgency leave in their wake to degrade the already battered social fabric. Total war at the grass roots—now the preferred response to social crisis and violent chaos—releases political sepsis that produces devastating corruption, anomie, trauma, and pathology—none of which are useful in confronting climate change.

  The Naxals are only one source of instability. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was correct when he called India “fissiparous.” Despite the strong win of the Congress Party–led coalition in the 2009 elections, the country’s parliamentary politics are defined by fiercely independent regional political parties and locally powerful charismatic leaders.57

  Across rural India, social tensions are intense. There is spasmodic intercommunal violence between Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. Mass migration of Bangladeshi Muslims into Hindu-dominated regions of India is fueling religious nationalism in both communities. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindutva fanatics, traffics in cryptofascist Islamophobia. Meanwhile, Pakistan sponsors Muslim terrorist groups, and in the northeast armed secessionists are fighting for an independent state of Assam. Across the rugged dry north, social banditry continues, and in the growing megacities, like Delhi, criminality is on the rise. These problems wait on the horizon of Indian history, threatening to grow much worse as climate change intensifies.

  In the cities of the south, the information technology and business process outsourcing boom has produced a class of new billionaires.58 Yet, the Indian political leadership cannot, or will not, deliver electricity, water, basic health care and education to the majority of the population. According to the United Nations’ new multidimensional poverty index, more poor people live in eight Indian states than in all of sub-Saharan Africa.The Indian ruling classes need to wake up, or climate change will destroy them. How should India fight the Naxals? By adapting to climate change with economic redistribution, social justice, and sustainable development.

  IV

  LATIN AMERICA

  CHAPTER 13

  Rio’s Agony: From Extreme Weather t
o “Planet of Slums”

  The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. But what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.

  —ALEXANDER HERZEN, on the failure of the 1848 revolutions

  THE BLACK POLICE helicopter floated above Rio. Ahead of us loomed the huge mountaintop statue of Christ, arms outstretched to the city; below us lay the long, wide expanse of Ipanema Beach. Inland from the posh neighborhoods on the water rose abrupt mountains of solid rock topped by lush jungle. Stacked up haphazardly along these steep slopes were the favelas, the densely packed unplanned neighborhoods of the poor and working classes.

  If the contrast of white beaches and dark mountains defines Rio’s postcard-perfect geography, it is the surreal inequality of luxury condos overlooked by impoverished slums that defines Rio’s social landscape. Originally built by squatters from the rural northeast and named for a hardy weed of that region, the poverty- and crime-plagued favelas are the open sore on Rio’s welcoming smile.