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INDIGENOUS women in India are being brutally persecuted for defending their lands against a massive corporate and governmental mining rush, Survival International warned today in a report coinciding with International Women’s Day.
The mining boom, which includes plans to increase coal production to one billion tonnes a year, is concentrated in six central states that are home to 57 million Adivasi people, who rely on their land for their livelihoods and to contain their sacred sites, Survival International says in the report.
“Adivasi women are playing a central role in resisting this destruction of their land and are being beaten, arrested, raped, imprisoned and killed because of it. Their attackers almost always act with impunity.”
The report, entitled Brutalised for resistance: the assault on indigenous women in Modi’s India, accuses government agencies, police and the security forces of being intimately involved in the attempts to terrorise Adivasi women.
Draconian anti-terrorism laws, it says, “are used to silence dissent, and any who resist are falsely labelled as members of the Maoist armed insurgency. Since [right-wing Hindu chauvinist Prime Minister] Narendra Modi came to power, the number of women charged with sedition has nearly trebled.”
Dayamani Barla, an Adivasi leader from Jharkhand said: “Modi’s government is violating our constitutional rights and is trying to sell every inch of our lands, mountains and rivers.
“Adivasi people, not only in Jharkhand but right across India, are not safe and neither are their lands and territories. Every inch of our lands is being given to the corporates.”
Dr Jo Woodman of Survival International said: “Across central India tens of thousands of Adivasi people are defying the corporate takeover of their lands with incredible bravery. Women are at the forefront of this resistance, and are being abused, imprisoned and killed for their courage on a truly horrific scale.
“The repression they face isn’t crushing their spirit: on the contrary, resistance is growing. But there’s an urgent need for support from around the world to join Adivasi people in opposition to this illegal and immoral assault on their lands and lives.”
