Quote Originally Posted by Dayuhan View Post
Missing the point, I think. Once tribal people are educated, to they become more receptive to externally imposed "development" - meaning dams, mines, logging, etc - or less?

I ask because I live in one of the best educated truly "tribal" areas in the world... and people here go crazy militant at the first mention of a dam or a mine. I suspect that while education might weaken a movement like the Naxalites, it's likely to dramatically strengthen the kind of protest that Medha Patkar is known for.
Alright, no dams and no mines. What about power plants, cotton mills and steel plants? How do you plan to employ them? If your answer is a agriculture then it's a wrong one. Killing of school teachers and blowing up railways is not exactly a right path to the empowerment of tribal.

Education and urbanization will not only weaken this movement, it will kill the ideology. As I said, no such thing as caste and creed exists in urban India. It's a bane and it exists in rural and backward parts of this nation.

The likes of Medha Patkar are here to stay and they will stay for an unknown period. In the land of Gandhi, she is breaking no rules by protesting peacefully.