by India Committee| The Masses
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in The Masses on December 13, 2023. Some revisions have been made but the essence remains intact. The Phoenix Program in Vietnam targeted civilians suspected of supporting or sympathizing with Viet Minh Cadre and North Vietnam in general. Today, the newest formulations of this same strategy are being applied by “israel” against Palestinians in the most brutal way in their genocide against the Palestinian People in Gaza, and also here in a much subtler way in the united states and on VCU campus.
SILGER, CG — Silger, a village in Chattisgarh’s Bastar region, has been central to a mass protest movement against the construction of roads, bridges, and military camps by the Indian government for over two years. This infrastructure is aimed at facilitating corporate mining and industrial projects which threaten to further displace indigenous Adivasi communities and destroy their ancestral lands, resources, and livelihoods. The asymmetrical force, military technology, strategy, and tactics being deployed correspond to an alarming global phenomenon of violent repression to further capitalist and colonial projects.
The mass protest in Silger is led by the Mulvasi Bachao Manch (MBM), a platform which brings together Adivasi villagers from over 20 sites across Bastar. It started in May 2021 when a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) camp was constructed in Silger without the consent of the Gram Sabha as mandated by the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996. When villagers protested, the CRPF opened fire, killing five people that week. This sparked outrage and gave momentum to the anti-camp protests across Bastar.
OPERATION SAMADHAN-PRAHAR
The MBM recognizes the roads, camps, and militarization as part of Operation SAMADHAN-Prahar – the government’s violent counter-insurgency campaign aiming to eliminate Maoists and other politicized dissidents through intensified joint security operations. The operation establishes a dense network of military infrastructure to facilitate repression and corporate plunder. Launched in 2017, Operation SAMADHAN-Prahar has provisions to set up 400 fortified police stations and a 17,000 km road network in “Left Wing Extremism” affected states. The roads serve mining projects while camps act as footholds for area domination. The resistance movements in regions like Silger are a direct response to the violent and repressive nature of Operation SAMADHAN-Prahar. These movements oppose the exploitation of resources by multinational corporations and the oppression of the local indigenous population by armed forces.
The seemingly innocuous acronym, “SAMADHAN,” stands for “Smart leadership, Aggressive strategy, Motivation and training, Actionable intelligence, Dashboard based key performance indicators and key result areas, Harnessing technology, Action plan for each theater, and No access to financing.” Without any context, the term sanitizes the genocidal and authoritarian nature of the tactics being used against the resistance movement through capitalist jargon. It simultaneously labels any resistance to the fascist encroachments as extremism while masking state, corporate, and military crimes. It represents an insidious strategy that involves the use of sophisticated weaponry, surveillance technology, the establishment of fortified police and paramilitary stations to suppress the mass movement while disseminating misinformation.
Over the past two years, the MBM has staged sit-ins, marches, mass hunger strikes, and blocked roads at multiple protest sites. They have faced arrests, illegal detention, sexual violence, and fierce reprisals by security forces. The peaceful democratic protests challenge the government’s labeling of all dissent as Maoist-instigated. They bring attention to the unaddressed issues of indigenous rights and autonomy.
The MBM declares roads, camps, and militarization as existential threats. The organization is calling for the withdrawal of camps, scrapping of road projects that did not obtain Gram Sabha consent, and for the government to address human rights violations committed by security forces. However, the state has refused to constructively engage with the Adivasi protesters and continues to use force to quell the resistance.
With rampant mining across Bastar, the movement underscores the battle between predatory capital backed by state violence versus indigenous communities trying to defend their people and habitats. How this plays out has consequences for land conflicts across India’s resource-rich areas and globally. Silger has become a symbol of Adivasi resistance, drawing support from civil society. Despite national attention, the area remains hostile as the government refuses to relent on militarization and corporatization at the cost of indigenous lives and rights.
PRIMATIVE ACCUMULATION AND IMPERIALISM
Primitive accumulation is not a historical stage of capitalist development that has come and gone, rather, it is an activity which is the genesis of capital and a motive force in its concentration. Imperialist war is an act of primitive accumulation at an international scale, where the victors displace and disposes the victims cyclically to create new sources of capital in the most heinous kind of bad infinity. As Marx wrote in chapter 31 of volume one of his masterpiece Das Kapital:
“Tantae molis erat [Latin: It was such a task] to unleash the ‘eternal natural laws’ of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between the workers and the conditions of their labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, and at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage-labourers, into the free ‘labouring poor’, that artificial product of modern history. If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital bloodstain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”
This is the process that has to be safeguarded at all costs by the bourgeois state. No matter the crimes involved in churning out capital it has to be produced, the inconveniently situated people have to be removed from the territory either by extermination or by displacement. If the people have some special status in relation to the expropriators that right will be abrogated, as happened in 2019 when the Indian state stripped the Kashmiri government of its established right to determine who is a legal resident of Kashmir and, therefore, who has the legal right to buy property in the formerly autonomous region. What is happening in Silger is a particular instance of a strategy that has been universalized by the “united states” in its colonies across the globe. This strategy exists to perpetuate the enclosure and exploitation of land that serves as the generator of value in its raw, uncut form. It has gone by many names: Mongoose, Gladio, Jakarta, Condor, Phoenix.
THE PHOENIX PROGRAM
While events like those in Malaya and the Philippines proceeded it, Vietnam is the historical locus point for Phoenix and it’s many children. The counterinsurgency programs of the “united states” were forged in the napalm that washed over South East Asia in the ’60s and ’70s. The Phoenix program was a combination of covert action, intelligence gathering (torture, infiltration, census taking, etc.), terror, and targeted assassination that was the backbone of the “united states'” invasion and occupation of Vietnam. It was the counter-point to the military doctrine best summed by General Curtis LeMay’s infamous call to “bomb them back to the stone age!” The exterminationist doctrine seems like cruder option when compared to the “light foot print” of counter-insurgency operations, but in reality the two standpoints propel each other forward dialectically. Douglas Valentine wrote in the introduction to his 1990 book The Phoenix Program:
Developed in 1967 by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Phoenix combined existing counterinsurgency programs in a concerted effort to “neutralize” the Vietcong Infrastructure (VCI). The euphemism “neutralize” means to kill, capture, or make to defect. The word “infrastructure” refers to those civilians suspected of supporting North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers… Central to Phoenix is the fact that it targeted civilians, not soldiers… Because Phoenix “neutralizations” were often conducted at midnight while its victims were home, sleeping in bed, Phoenix proponents describe the program as a “scalpel” designed to replace the “bludgeon” of search and destroy operations, air strikes, and artillery barrages that indiscriminately wiped out entire villages and did little to “win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese population.
Phoenix can therefore be understood as the “civilian” counter-part of the military operation in South East Asia in so far as it targeted civilians. The goal of Operation Phoenix was the identification, isolation, and destruction of the “Vietcong Infrastructure”. Mapping out not just the locations but the people too, concentrating them if necessary, in order to isolate the Viet Minh fish from the sea of the masses of the people. As William Rosenau and Austin Long wrote in the preface to their 2009 paper for the RAND Corporation The Phoenix Program and Contemporary Counterinsurgency
One of the principal requirements of counterinsurgency is the ability to disrupt or destroy not just the insurgency’s military capabilities but also the infrastructure that supports the insurgent forces. This infrastructure provides, among other things, the critical intelligence, recruiting, and logistics functions that enable insurgents to contend with counterinsurgent forces that are often much more capable in a purely military sense. During the Vietnam War, one of the main efforts to attack the insurgent infrastructure was known as the Phoenix Program. Phoenix has subsequently become highly controversial, and its lessons for contemporary counterinsurgency can be overdrawn. However, a careful assessment of Phoenix does provide some suggestions for improving current efforts against insurgent infrastructure.
The goal of operation SAMADHAN-Prahar is the identification, isolation, and destruction of Adivasi and Maoist Infrastructure. Both it and Phoenix are centered on “neutralizing” a restive local population by casting a high tech dragnet through it to capture intelligence sources and enemy cadre to be isolated from the masses by any means necessary. Once the enemy cadre have been captured they are processed and tortured or bribed to secure information on leadership higher up the chain. Hunter-Killer teams, death squads, or drones if you can afford them, are dispatched on this intelligence to capture or assassinate high value targets.
This style of drone strike counterinsurgency has defined 21st century warfare in significant ways, pioneered by the settler colonies, particularly the “united states” and “isreal.” As the Forum Against Corporatization and Militarization wrote in their correspondence to the Editorial Board:
India is, at the present, the world’s biggest importer of arms and the biggest customer of Israeli arms. India acquired UAVs from Israel, including the Heron Mark 2 drones, which have been used to remotely drop bombs on the unsuspecting Adivasis and their forests four times in a two year period.
The strategy and the technology of counterinsurgency have been imported by the BJP from the “united states” and “isreal” in service of the Indian bourgeoisie. Let’s take the time to understand why and how this happened.
CAPITALISM IN INDIA
By the end of the second world war, British colonialism was crumbling which triggered a wave of decolonization in the following decades. Sensing that the British soon would relinquish control of India, the Indian bourgeoisie, which was rather a tiny fraction of the entire population, began planning the path of Capitalist development in India. Though there was limited capitalist development in India during British colonialism, India was largely a feudal country with feudal relations of production along with a well entrenched caste system that complemented the production relations. As P.S Appu wrote in Land Reforms in India : a Survey of Policy, Legislation and Implementation:
The agrarian structure was also marked by great inequality in the ownership of land. A small minority of big landowners owned a substantial portion of the agricultural land, while millions of small peasants subjected to numerous abuses and weighed down by perpetual indebtedness, eked out a precarious existence on tiny, fragmented holdings employing primitive farming practices. And at the bottom there existed a vast army of landless agricultural workers whose social and economic status was even worse. A unique feature of the Indian agrarian structure was the close inter-relationship between the Hindu caste hierarchy and the agrarian structure. The big landowners invariably belonged to the so-called upper castes, the cultivators to the middle castes, and the agricultural workers to the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and other extremely backward castes.
A large part of India was agricultural or engaged in petty commodity production. Vast swathes of land were under the control of rich rentier class owing to the Zamindari system and predatory lending practices. Since these were unfavorable conditions for capitalist development, the Indian bourgeoisie undertook a few land reforms.
In matters of heavy industry and consumer goods, there were strategies of import substitution and public sector capitalism. There was pooling of national savings and huge loans were given to the industrialists. To quote J.R.D Tata, G.D Birla et al in their Plan of Economic Development for India:
In the initial years of planning, India will be dependent almost entirely on foreign countries for the machinery and technical skill necessary for the establishment of both basic and other industries. As the plan develops, our dependence on foreign countries in this matter should steadily decline. The imports of machinery and technical skill inevitable in the initial years of planning would require a large amount of external finance, the raising of which constitutes an important problem in a plan of economic development. Internal finance on the scale which we consider necessary will also raise serious difficulties, but in a planned economy these would not be insurmountable. The sources of external and internal finance which would be available to us are:
External finance: The hoarded wealth of the country, mainly gold. Our short-term loans to the U.K.-sterling securities held by the Reserve Bank of India. Our favourable balance of trade. Foreign borrowing.
Internal finance: Savings of the people. New money created against ad hoc securities, i.e. on the inherent credit of the government.
RISE OF HINDUTVA FASCISM
The origins of Hindutva fascism can be traced back to the formation of ‘Hindu Mahasabha’ in the ’20s which represented the brahminical feudal faction within the Indian National Congress (INC) which split from it after they were sidelined by more progressive national liberation faction represented by Nehru. This was accompanied by a cadre based fascist paramilitary organization Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Initially their political base was limited since most of Indian middle class and big bourgeoisie’s interests lie in the national liberation movement. Though the membership of RSS steadily grew in the ’70s – ’80s, the hindutva fascist ideology really took a leap with its impact among the masses only in the presence of certain material contradictions emerging after the period of neoliberal globalization in the early ’90s.
The ‘green revolution’ created a class of upward mobile farmers and development in industries, health and tech created a petit bourgeoisie class of service sector workers. This section, with its upper class aspirations, was suffocating under the weight of bureaucratic capitalism and wanted an end to the ‘license raj’ and ‘quota raj’ and the corruption within the bureaucracy. As the effects of liberalization of the ’90s unfolded, the petty bourgeoisie, fearing proletarianization, moved towards fascist reaction while the big monopoly capitalists funded the fascist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in exchange for a free hand within the market. BJP, fulfilled its role of a fascist party by taking the dissatisfaction of the petit bourgeoisie and mobilizing it in service of big monopoly capital.
In the process of doing this, the BJP became the sole spokesperson for nationalism with everyone opposing the fascist rule being labelled as ‘anti-national’. Modi emerged as a Bonapartist figure who would ‘fix’ the corruption and take India on the path of ‘development’. This ‘development’ was really serving the big monopoly capitalists with its privatization policy, negotiation of favorable contracts for favored capitalists (Adani, Ambani and Tata), attacks on labor laws and lowering of corporate taxes. While the Indian state has historically been oppressive against the Adivasi communities and Naxals, with Operation Green hunt and Salwa Judum, the BJP government with its hyper-nationalist ideology, has been able to delegitimize the movement further and has pushed for more aggressive methods.
In May 2017, the union minister Rajnath Singh proposed operation SAMADHAN to counter ‘Left wing extremism’ in the mineral rich regions of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. This Indian state has furthered its intent to displace the Adivasi community from their lands by the use of advanced technology and weaponry. To quote the Coordination of Democratic Rights Organizations fact-finding report When Sky Spits Fire:
A deal worth 200 million dollars was made by the Indian Government with the Israeli government for procurement of more advanced Heron Mark II drones, despite already having 180 Israeli UAVs, including 68 Heron Mark I drones in operational Capacity. Indian state has accepted usage of drones in surveillance activities to track the movement of Maoist guerrillas.
There have been 4 instances of aerial attacks in the past 3 years over the Adivasi population and Adivasis trying to protect their land from corporate plunder has ended up in the prison without any trial. Activities sympathetic to the Adivasi cause have met the same fate. The BJP has been rather proficient in its use of ‘Unlawful Activities Prevention Act’ (UAPA) to arrest anyone critical of the fascist rule.
It is not just the same oppression that unites the masses internationally, but the same methods of oppression that are used against them. The 20th century was a laboratory where the Frankenstein’s and Strangelove’s were given free reign to experiment and innovate new and terrifying methods to surgically separate the guerilla fish from the ocean of the masses. It failed in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is failing in Palestine. And it will fail in India.