Standing with Jarnail Kaur & the Adivasi
Father Joshua Lickter | Sikh Information Centre
Recently, Indian industrialist Naveen Jindal announced his candidacy for MP on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ticket. For the uninitiated, the BJP is the political branch of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the world’s largest volunteer paramilitary organization. They embrace a Hindutva (Hindu Nationalist) socio-political agenda that promotes casteism, as well as the oppression of any non-Hindu Indian religions.
BJP officials have openly celebrated the destruction of mosques, and rebuilt Hindu temples on top of the former Islamic holy sites to great fanfare from their constituency. India’s current prime minister, Narendra Modi, belongs to the BJP, and under his rule, India has been condemned by multiple human rights organizations for its blatant disregard of religious freedom, a right guaranteed by its constitution. This is the same party that pressured Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to attack Darbar Sahib in 1984, which led to a widespread anti-Sikh genocide. The SAGE Encyclopedia of War: Social Science Perspective estimates that during this horrific blemish on India’s history, “around 17,000 Sikhs were burned alive or killed” (2016, Pg. 433).
The BJP’s current human rights violations include demands to ban public displays of any Christian symbol, as well as shutting off the internet in areas where violations occur so their transgressions will not be known. When thousands of Indian farmers recently attempted to travel to Delhi to ask Modi to honor his promises to overturn laws that harmed them, they were met at the border with excessive force, authorized by the BJP. This included teargas fired from drones as well as an assault of rubber bullets, pellets, and live rounds. Transgressions like these have become standard operating procedures for the party Naveen Jindal has embraced and joined.
Jindal promotes himself to the world as a benevolent philanthropist. In 2011 he donated $10 Million to the Texas University Business School he attended. They honored him by naming the school after him: The Naveen Jindal School of Management. This money, however, was acquired by profiting off his exploitation of others. He considers the Governor of Texas, Gregory Abbott, a friend, and recently brokered a trade deal between Texas and India. According to Abbott, Texas and India “share the common values of family, faith, compassion, and hard work. As we look towards the future, we must ensure that the next generation of leaders in Texas and India will be the innovators who solve the world’s foremost crises and that embracing the values we share leads to liberty and prosperity unmatched throughout the entire world.” That may sound wonderful, but perhaps someone should evaluate the humanitarian cost of such an alliance and ask if Texas truly shares any common values with people like Naveen Jindal.
To get a more accurate picture of Naveen Jindal’s character, one has only to look at what he has done to an Adivasi woman named Jarnail Kaur. She currently has 11 lawsuits filed against him for stealing her tribal land. The Adivasi are one of the world’s oldest indigenous people groups. In India, powerful industrialists like Jindal have built entire corporate empires profiting off stolen tribal lands. Jarnail Kaur and her family have been fighting Jindal in court for almost twenty years trying to get their ancestral land back. Jindal has responded with threats, violence, and intimidation. In June 2023, a popular Indian wrestler, Sumer Pehalwan Singh, publicly accused Jindal of hiring him to rape and intimidate Jarnail Kaur. When Sumer refused, Jindal’s men beat him within inches of his life. Sadly, others did comply with Jindal’s wishes. Jarnail Kaur has been sexually assaulted and beaten multiple times since bringing the cases against Jindal. However, she has remained vigilant. She doesn’t just fight for her own ancestral land, but for other Adivasi land Jindal has stolen.
In a recently released video from 2022, Jarnail Kaur interviewed another one of Jindal’s victims, an Adivasi named Chakradhar Rathia. He recounts how Jindal forcefully took his land from him, erected concrete barriers around it to block entrance, and dumped toxic fly ash inside it, using it for disposal of Industrial waste produced by Jindal’s many industrial plants. The fly ash renders the air unbreathable at times and makes future farming impossible. If anyone tries to clean up the ash, Jindal’s workers intimidate and beat them, and even have them arrested by police. When Jindal’s workers first started erecting barriers on Chakradhar’s land, his sons tried telling them to stop. They were beaten, and his son Santosh ended up unlawfully detained in prison for three days.
Authorities completely ignored due process. They issued no arrest warrants, and when they released Santosh from prison, they handed him papers to sign his ancestral land over to Jindal. When Santosh refused, police informed him that they would find ways to make him sign.
Chakradhar did all he could to try and appeal the theft of his land. According to Jarnail Kaur, “Naveen Jindal has never paid them a single rupee for their land, nor has the government ever listened to their requests for help. They have continuously filed complaints to collectors, Sub-Division Magistrates (SDM), Tehsildars, and the legislators, but have not been granted a hearing.” Tehsildars determine land value, verify property ownership, and collect taxes, and they seem particularly prone to corruption in cases like these. Power brokers like Jindal can offer favors and bribes to authorities with no accountability whatsoever. This places the vulnerable Indigenous population in a hopeless situation where they have no choice but to submit to “corporate Mafia” types like Jindal. Chakradhar recounts what happened when he threatened to report Jindal’s workers to the authorities:
“They say ‘Just try and file a case against us!’ And when we try, the police won’t listen to us, no one will hold a hearing, and the courts won’t listen to us. The SDM court would not listen to us. We had a decree in SDM court, we went to Raigarh, but they rejected it. I even told them we had registered the land. But they said it was not our land, it was Jindal’s land.”
According to Jarnail Kaur, Jindal utilizes “Land Mafia” tactics to acquire Adivasi property all the time. He engages in illegal benami property transactions, and then makes sure government officials look the other way.
India’s Prohibition of Benami Property Transactions Act of 1988 defines benami as a transaction or arrangement “where a property is transferred to, or is held by, a person, and the consideration for such property has been provided, or paid by, another person”. The 1988 act passed in an attempt to prevent people like Jindal from manipulating the system and acquiring stolen land through bribery and power-plays. Jindal, and others like him, have built their empires on the backs of the vulnerable through exploitative practices like benami.
Unfortunately, laws against the practice are only as good as the ability to enforce them; when the enforcers can be bought off, and those who voice dissent can be easily silenced by threats of murder or imprisonment, abuse happens without restraint. Even though a court ruled in Chakradhar’s favor in 2016 and found Jindal had acquired the land through an illegal benami transaction, local officials ignored the ruling, and higher courts refused a hearing.
Sadly, Chakradhar’s story does not end well. In spite of multiple appeals, he never got his land back from Jindal. Like many other Indian farmers who have lost their land, he had to sell his farming equipment to make ends meet, which led him into a painful spiral of depression and alcoholism. Broken by all Jindal had taken from him, he passed away on December 10, 2023.
This tragic story illuminates the plight of just two of Jindal’s many victims. Plenty more exist, though few have found the courage to publicly speak out due to Jindal’s threats against them and their families. However, Jarnail Kaur’s vigilance has inspired many Adivasi to risk everything to be publicly counted as casualties of Jindal’s land-grabbing schemes. This includes Jarnail Kaur’s son, Henry, a law-student who has been spending much of his time in Delhi monitoring the cases against Jindal, as well as the wrestler, Sumer Singh. It also includes victims like Kaniram,Tirtho Khadiya, Govardhan, Salikram Khadiya, Ramdayal Khadiya, Phakir Khadiya, Bono Bai, Susila Kishan, Bhagat Ram Khadiya, and Malik Ram Khadiya. All of them have names and families; all of them have been victimized by Jindal; all of them know how dangerous standing up to Jindal can be.
Jindal only cares for human rights when it suits him. He has mastered the ability to use his money and political power to further his own corrupt agenda. His former political party, the Indian National Congress, has already conceded the seat in Parliament to him. His election seems a sure thing. Hopefully, voters in Haryana State will choose to “Avoid the Jindal Swindle” and vote for someone else in protest, if for no other reason than to let Jindal know that as more and more people learn the truth about him, justice will one day prevail. Likewise, as more Americans become aware of Jindal’s connection to Texas Governor Gregory Abbott, perhaps Abbott will be investigated for complicity in transnational repression. The last thing America needs right now is for one of its most powerful political figures to be found in the pocket of a man like Jindal. If Governor Abbott truly thinks Texas shares values with India, and people like Jindal, then perhaps he too has been swindled.