[Previous entry: "DoJ search requests: Google said no; Yahoo, AOL, MSN yes."] [Next entry: "Brazil to Keep Command of U.N. Forces in Haiti"]

01/20/2006:

"Fatal Clash at Mill Site Shows Perils of India's Rise"

KALINGANAGAR INDUSTRIAL AREA, India, Jan. 13 - On the first Monday morning of the year, four bulldozers, accompanied by nearly 300 police officers, arrived on a rocky patch of farmland on the edge of a wooded village and began leveling the earth. It was meant to be the first step in the construction of India's third-largest steel mill.

Soon, from the bowels of the wooded village came an army of resistance. Armed with scythes and swords, stones and sticks - and according to the police, bows and arrows - the indigenous people who live on these lands in eastern India advanced toward the police line by the hundreds. Exactly what happened next is a matter of contention, except that by the day's end, the land was littered with the gore of more than a dozen dead and a fury that lingers.

"We will not leave our land," Chakradhar Haibru, a wiry, stern-faced leader of the indigenous people, vowed in an interview. "They are trying to turn us into beggars."

Reminiscent of the peasant uprisings in China, the standoff here has reverberated across the country and snowballed into a closely watched political storm.

The confrontation is effectively a local territorial dispute, over whether and how one of India's most prominent industrial conglomerates, Tata, will build a plant on land that its current occupants, mostly indigenous villagers, refuse to vacate. But the dispute also raises a far wider challenge for India: how to balance industrial growth against the demands of its most marginalized citizens.
nytimes.com