Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Strategic Hamleting

I saw srategic hamleting in Mizoram around 1977 and wondered how it started. Arundhati Roy explains in Walking With The Comrades:
"Unlike the Jan Jagran Abhiyaan, the Salwa Judum was a ground-clearing operation, meant to move people out of their villages into roadside camps, where they could be policed and controlled. In military terms, it’s called Strategic Hamleting. It was devised by General Sir Harold Briggs in 1950 when the British were at war against the communists in Malaya. The Briggs Plan became very popular with the Indian army, which has used it in Nagaland, Mizoram and in Telangana. The BJP chief minister of Chhattisgarh, Raman Singh, announced that as far as his government was concerned, villagers who did not move into the camps would be considered Maoists. So, in Bastar, for an ordinary villager, just staying at home became the equivalent of indulging in dangerous terrorist activity."
P.S. See also Nandini Bedi's comment ( Comment number 207 in the Outlook article)on a different side of Maoists in the same area.

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