Health, Human Rights, and Performance: Interrupted Stories

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the creative guidance and support of Laura Ellingson and two anonymous reviewers who co-scripted this story with me.

Notes

¹Most of Dr. Sen's work focused on offering treatments for diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria that are prevalent in the region, although this work later shifted to creating food security for the poor as he increasingly realized that undernutrition was the major cause of these illnesses. By extension of this human rights framework of his work, when the state started its attack on tribal populations by forming the SalwaJudoom, arming the tribals under the framework of eliminating the Naxalites in the region [the Naxalite movement is a Maoist movement that has developed strong footholds particularly in the subaltern sectors of India], Dr. Sen spoke out against the state-sponsored violence on the tribal population. For him, the violence on the tribal populations in the form of Salwa Judoom was an attack on their human right to health. He joined the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) to draw attention to the state-sponsored killing of tribal people in the form of “fake encounters,” the arrest and torture of tribal community members who were falsely accused as being terrorists, the gang rape of women, and the decimation of villages to make space for the numerous development projects in the country. Following his increasingly visible work with the PUCL that drew attention to the state-sponsored violence in Chattisgarh, the local police in Chattisgarh arrested Binayak Sen on May 14, 2007 under the Chattisgarh Special Public Security Act with charges of smuggling letters for a jailed Naxalite. Following an intense and concerted campaign for his release, Dr. Sen was released in 2010, only to be jailed again on December 26, 2010 on the basis of a court verdict that was based on false charges (see www.freebinayaksen.org for additional details)

²West Bengal is a state that neighbors the state of Chattisgarh. Since the 1960s, West Bengal has had a strong culture of land reform movements under the leadership of the Communist parties. However, against the backdrop of the increasing neo-liberalization of India, West Bengal has become a site of large-scale displacement of rural populations, accompanied by the increasing marginalization of the subaltern sectors. It is with this backdrop of extreme poverty and marginalization that multiple rural communities across West Bengal have started organizing in resistance to the state apparatus. The marginalization of the poor in the rural areas is more and more the feature across several regions of India, and has been accompanied by several localized resistance movements across the country.

³Five Year Plans are federal-level development planning policies of India that are carried out once every five years. These plans set up the strategic and tactical markers for projects of development.

⁴In protesting the imprisonment of Dr. Sen, several civil society groups, activist organizations, and human rights organizations started mobilizing offline and online. During both his first arrest in 2007 and then his more recent arrest in 2010, activist groups organized in direct action, through posters, protests, street marches, and performances. They also started organizing online petitions, discussions, and forums. Websites (www.binayaksen.net; www.freebinayaksen.org) and Facebook (http://www.causes.com/causes/559019) campaigns have been launched, demanding the release of Dr. Sen, drawing in local and global voices, creating networks of solidarity, and building relationships with global structures of influence to pressure the state.