We are all Binayak Sen--and we are all Bradley Manning.

• Author: Cox, Priti Gulati
• Position: Parallel Lines of Dissent

We have a situation in which the government is acting as a guarantor to the process of expropriation of access of common property resources across the country and handing over those resources to private interests. This is leading to inequity ... this process gives birth to widespread structural violence. And in response to this structural violence the resistance of the public is their right. The laws regarding revolt against the state are extensively deformed and because of this, many people are in prison.

-- Dr. Binayak Sen (1, 2)

Indian authorities are fighting against what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh maintains is "the biggest internal security challenge facing our country." (3) The people who make up this "challenge" have many names--left-wing extremists, Naxalites, Maoists, and others--but whatever terminology is used, their role is to be a thorn in the side of corporate India.

They are struggling to maintain their existence as self-reliant Adivasi (indigenous) communities. The great irony is that these communities, with some of the world's smallest ecological footprints, lie atop India's largest mineral deposits.

This "challenge" has the Indian state on one side and the tribals-turned-revolutionaries fighting for their land and water on the other. In the middle is a stew of capitalism, starvation, usurpation, "development," displacement, police brutality, rapes, smoldering villages, indiscriminate killings, draconian internal security laws, counterinsurgency operations, censored reporting, thieves' notes called memoranda of understanding backed up by corporate patronage, and the eventual destruction of the land and its inhabitants. (4)

Chhattisgarh is one of the richest states in India in terms of precious mineral resources and home to a large segment of India's Adivasis--the poorest of the poor in a poor country, and some of the most underrepresented in the political process. They are victims of a resource war that is being played out in the forests of central India. For more than three decades, they have benefited from the work of Dr. Binayak Sen, a pediatrician and civil liberties activist who has dedicated his life to providing medical service to the poor people of the state. He is also the national vice president of the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), which has sent out fact finding teams to affected areas and revealed gross human rights violations.

Most of those violations have been committed by paramilitary and...