Maoist group meet to focus on Green Hunt, economic crisis

Hyderabad, April 19 (IANS) Resistance group Revolutionary Democratic Front (RDF), at its first conference here April 22-23, will demand an end to the anti-Maoist Operation Green Hunt and discuss how to turn the current economic crisis in the country into a revolutionary opportunity.

More than 300 delegates from across India, including writer and activist Arundhati Roy, historian Amit Bhattacharya, Maoist leader Tusharkanti Bhattacharya's wife Soma Sen and Dalit scholar Anand Teltumbde, will be present at the meet.

At the two-day event, which includes a procession and a public meeting, the RDF will press for the withdrawal of paramilitary forces from the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh.

Two keynote papers are to be presented during the event on transforming the economic crisis into a revolutionary opportunity by giving a decisive turn to people's movements for rights over 'jal-jangal-zameen' (water, forests and land), and highlighting the excesses being committed on adivasis as part of the Operation Green Hunt, Revolutionary Writers' Association leader Varavara Rao told IANS.

"By deploying lakhs of paramilitary personnel in Jharkhand, Bihar, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Bengal, etc, the ruling classes are trying to crush the revolutionary movement. Hundreds of people have been murdered by the forces in this marauding war, while lakhs of people have been forced to run away from their homes," says a RDF statement.

The RDF came into being in 2005 with the merger of All India People's Resistance Forum and Struggling Forum for People's Resistance. The group aims to intensify anti-feudal and anti-imperialist struggles for establishing a new democratic society, improve coordination among people's movements and give them the form of an organised and united resistance struggle.