Two tribals killed in Gujarat police firing

EVERY DAY IN NEWS WE SEE ENCOUNTERS,POLICE FIRING,ARRESTS AND ALL KIND OF OPPRESSIONS....IT IS THE DEMOCRACY OF INDIA.....

POLO/AHMEDABAD: The unresolved dispute over the rights of tribals to forest land took a violent turn in Gujarat on Wednesday when two tribal men were killed in police firing at Polo in Sabarkantha district.
The district administration claimed the firing was in self-defence after a 500-strong mob armed with bows and arrows attacked a police station.
Tribal activists, however, said cops had taken away 15 tribals accusing them of inciting others to claim forest land. Three tribals were seriously injured in the firing.
Sanja Rupji Balat, 31, and Shailesh Rathod, 27, who were part of the group of tribals living on the fringes of the the Dholwani forest range, were hit by bullets in the firing at Antarsuba police station.
Police said nine forest officials and six cops were injured policemen when tribals clashed with them. District officials said the mob gheraoed the police station. According to the administration, the tribals were asked to disperse, but they didn't obey the orders.
''We are treated as lesser humans by forest and police officials. Fifteen of our men had been taken away by police saying they incited others to claim forest land. After our appeals to release them didn't yield any result, we decided to go to the police station,'' said Kajal Ninama, a tribal activist from Vijaynagar

Gujarat Tribal agitation turns violent, three killed

Tribal agitation in the Vijaynagar Taluka today took a violent turn and two tribal were killed in police firing on the spot while one succumbed to bullet wounds on the way to hospital. The incident took place at the office of the Range Forest Officer where five tribal were brought for felling forest trees. For quite sometime tribal in the region are staking claim on the forest land.

In this incident, Forest officials had picked up five tribal from neighbouring villages around 4 am and brought them to the office of the RFO at Antarsumba, 35 kms from Idar taluka town of the Sabarkantha district. As the news of detention spread, several thousand tribal gheraoed the office.

In the arguments that followed the seize of the office situation turned violent and police opened fire. Two tribal were killed and three were seriously injured. The injured were brought to Civil Hospital here. This happened around 10 am. Local MLA Ashwin Kotwal said that the forest officials should have tried to explain the situation to the crowd alleging that police fired indiscriminately.

In the tense jungles of the area known as polo, tribal in the four days have forcibly occupied around 10 hectares of forest land by chopping off trees and setting afire shrubs and other vegetation. There is a movement going on in the area, a kind of soft naxalism, in which tribal are staking claim on the forest land saying that they were taking away the land which belonged to them.

Government had yesterday transferred the Dholvani range RFO VR Pandav for not being able to handling the problem

India's landless prevented from marching on parliament

These are Some Kind of Useless things like NBA But any way they will understand the requirment of armed struggle.

ANEEB

Some of the 25,000 protesters who have been marching on the Indian capital for three weeks to shame the government into keeping its promise to redistribute farmland. Photograph: Amit Bhargava



Thousands of landless workers, indigenous people and "untouchables" from the bottom of Indian society were today prevented from taking their demands to the country's parliament - the final leg of their month-long protest march.
Despite giving the authorities months to organise for the arrival of the 25,000 protesters, police told the organisers Ekta Parishad that demonstrators could not leave their field in central Delhi where they have been camping since Sunday.

An Ekta Parishad spokesman told reporters that the marchers, many of whom had come carrying their belongings on their head, were facing an "acute shortage of water".


Article continues

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"It is miserable for them," Jagdish Shukla said.
The Janadesh, or "People's verdict", march has seen the participants walk 200 miles since October 2 in a bid to highlight the growing divide between rich and poor in Indian society. Organisers said that since the march was non-violent, they would wait "patiently" in Delhi for an "appropriate response".

In recent years India's gathering industrial boom has displaced hundreds of thousands of rural poor from their land. The result has been violent protest - this weekend two people were shot demonstrating over plans to set up a chemical plant over 9,000 acres in West Bengal.

Many industrial groups are increasingly concerned that issues of land ownership have prevented projects from taking off. Albert Brunner, the chief executive officer of Bangalore international airport, told a conference today that when work started on the new terminals no one had told the villagers they were to be moved off the land.

"We had a situation where we were building around villages and moving around them," he said.

The marchers have demanded that the Indian government make good on its promises to reform land and tenancy rights. Many of India's poorest people, especially from tribal communities, have lost land because of the absence of property deeds.

PV Rajagopal, the Gandhian activist behind the march, said a solution could be found. "We need to have a national land authority, identify lands available for redistribution and then regularise holdings of the poor and the marginal peasantry. It is about changing the pattern of the development so the poor benefit too," he said.

The government is understood to be working on a compromise that will compensate those whose lands and livelihoods are lost in India's drive to modernise.