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Away from Lalgarh, a macroview
Priyaleen K
Renuka
 Areas
under the control of Naxalites are mostly remote, sparsely
populated, under-developed. Even though Lalgarh is currently in th
news and seems to be centre of Maoist activity, the real widespread
Maoist rebellion is in Chattisgarh. A primitive peasant rebellion
based on an outmoded ideology is out of keeping with the modern
India of soaring growth, Bollywood dreams and call-centres. It also
often gets lost in the din of other insurgencies like that in
kashmir or in the North East. Both, the Valley as well as the
north-eastern states are wracked by dozens of secessionist
movements.
The Naxalites
are an Indiawide force now, and the earlier major effort by New
Delhi to crush the force in 1970s clearly seems to have backfired.
Maoism in India has splintered into various armed factions, of which
the biggest were the People’s War Group and the Maoist Communist
Centre. These merged and formed the CPI (Maoist) party in September
2004. Naxalites, by one estimate, now have 9,000-10,000 armed
fighters, with access to about 6,500 firearms. There are perhaps a
further 40,000 full-time cadres.
But what is more
important is the widespread support they draw from the poor people,
many of them tribals and landless.
Off an on the
national media features spectacular attacks: a train hold-up, a
jailbreak freeing prisoners, a near-miss assassination attempt
against some leading politician. But most of the time the reporting
is one sided and often gives an impression as if Naxalism is all
about crime.
 There is little
to reflect that Naxalism now affects some 180 of India’s 600
districts and a red corridor down a swathe of central India
challenges the writ of New Delhi, almost snubbing it. This corridor
covers more than a quarter of India’s land mass.
But perhaps
theyt are not really as bog a force. Consider this: In most places
they are an underground, hit-and-run force. And only in a few
pockets are they well-entrenched, controlling a large chunk of
territory. But one this is for sure. There are many pockets where
the Indian state is almost invisible.
Lack of
development is common to all areas affected by Naxalism. If you are
in a naxal area, take it for granted that there will be no roads, no
waterpipes, no electricity and no telephone lines. In another
village a teacher does come, but, in the absence of a school, holds
classes outdoors. Policemen, health workers and officials are never
seen. The vacuum is filled by Naxalite committees, running village
affairs and providing logistic support to the fighters camping in
the forest. The fighters — mostly local tribal people — have been
battling not just the police and the six paramilitary battalions
deployed in the district, but their own neighbours.
The single spark
that lit this prairie fire was the formation of Salwa Judum, an
anti-Maoist movement, whose name in Gondi, the language spoken by
local tribes, means something like “peace hunt”. Its origins are
disputed. K.R. Pisda, the district collector, or senior official, in
Dantewada, dates it to a meeting in June 2005 of local villagers fed
up with Naxalite intimidation and extortion. Others say that the
Maoists were enforcing a boycott of trade in one of the main local
forest products: tendu patta, the leaves used to wrap bidis
(hand-rolled cigarettes).
Similar boycotts
in the past had succeeded in forcing up prices and had earned the
Naxalites some kudos. This one, the story goes, backfired. If it
ever was a spontaneous movement, Salwa Judum soon became an arm of
government policy—and a paramilitary force. Some 5,000 of its
members have been inducted as “special police officers” (SPOs) and
given some training and arms.
As the local
government tells it, thousands of people started turning up by the
roadside, fleeing Naxalite reprisals. There was no choice but to
house them in relief camps. This is a dirty little war in which
truth was long ago a casualty. Salwa Judum itself is also
responsible for displacing people—a “scorched village” policy
intended to starve the Maoists of local support. This recognises
that the Naxalites’ real strength lies not in their guerrillas in
the jungle, with their peaked caps and “country-made” rifles, but in
their civilian networks in the villages themselves.
In the largest
camp, at Dornapal, some 17,000 people are housed in huts of mud and
corrugated iron. Health workers say that many of the children are
malnourished. One man, Wenjam, says he took refuge here after
Naxalites in his local village beat him, and threatened him with
worse, because he had a government contract to fence the pond. He
had a pukka house, he said, and a herd of cattle. But, after five
months in the camp, he had not been back to the village.
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There is little to reflect that Naxalism now affects some 180 of
India’s 600 districts and a red corridor down a swathe of
central India challenges the writ of New Delhi, almost snubbing
it. This corridor covers more than a quarter of India’s land
mass. |
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Some of those
displaced are openly critical of Salwa Judum, which they say forced
them to leave their villages. They are caught between two vicious
enemies. In some villages, residents fled into the forest rather
than follow the drive to the roadside. The camps are very
controversial.
When the
Chhattisgarh government’s then home minister, Ramvichar Netam,
visited Errabore a day after a massacre, he was surrounded by angry
survivors. They pelted his helicopter with stones. Some of the
bereaved even refused the money he was handing out as compensation.
The Salwa Judum campaign, however, has important backers. Raman
Singh, Chhattisgarh’s chief minister, calls it “a success story”, a
“non-violent movement against exploitation”.
The same tune is
sung by the leader of the opposition in the state, Mahendra Karma of
the Congress party, who is, in effect, Salwa Judum’s leading light.
But he also links it to the global fight against terrorism and asks:
“Are we not supposed to protect ourselves in our homeland?” Even the
central government seemed at one time to endorse the campaign. In a
statement in March the home ministry promised to “promote local
resistance groups” against Naxalites.
Salwa Judum is
accused of intimidation, extortion, rape and murder. Its thugs have
been manning roadblocks, supposedly to hunt for Maoists, but also to
demand money. Some families refusing to join Salwa Judum on its
“combing” operations—rampages of arson, thuggery and pillage—have
been “fined” or beaten. A report on Salwa Judum by a number of
civil-liberties groups concluded that its formation had “escalated
violence on all sides...Salwa Judum and the paramilitary operate
with complete impunity. The rule of law has completely broken down.”
For local
officials in Dantewada, and the state government in
Raipur,
the Naxalites are just bandits: extortionists who hold sway through
terror alone. Their ideology, they say, long ago imploded in a
welter of violence. There is little doubt that they do use terror
and extortion. Himanshu Kumar, who runs aid projects in the
district, says he used to respect the Naxalites as working “for the
betterment of the masses”. But he now found “people supporting them
out of fear of their guns, or to gain power to loot others.”
Most of their
young recruits—illiterate tribal people—have never read Mao. But not
all support is coerced or opportunistic. And those who have studied
the Naxalites credit them with far greater organisation, discipline
and ideological fervour than any criminal gang.
An expert says
that the Naxalites have been among the most principled of terrorist
groups in selecting their targets. Their attacks are not random;
though, because they so often use crude landmines, they may kill the
wrong people. Their leaders are thinking far into the future, taking
a 20- to 25-year view of their struggle. “Liberated” areas, such as
their part of Dantewada, would be expanded until they pose a threat
even to
India’s
cities.
Nepal’s Maoists,
with whom the Indian party has “fraternal” links, are a model of how
such a strategy can work. Having managed to exclude the state from
virtually all the countryside, and waged war for a decade, the
Maoists in Nepal later negotiated from a position of some strength.
Early Naxalite leaders were students and middle-class intellectuals.
But the tribal peoples among whom they find most of their new
recruits are among India’s poorest: “the most exploited, the bottom
rung”. Typically, they live in forests and have no rights to their
land. According to the 2001 census, about three-quarters of
Dantewada’s 1,220 villages are almost wholly tribal; 1,161 have no
medical facilities; 214 have no primary school; the literacy rate is
29% for men and 14% for women.
Most of the
inhabitants are subsistence farmers eking a meagre cash income from
selling forest products, such as tendu patta. Markets in the forest
have been closed, to throttle the Maoists’ supply chain. For many
inside the forest, a visit to the market is now a long hike, camping
overnight on the way. A big iron mine, Bailadilla, on the edge of
the forest, employs few local people and in the rainy season turns a
river bright orange and undrinkable. A railway has been built to
take the ore to the sea.
The government
blames the Maoists for blocking development, such as road-building.
But the Maoists tell people that roads are intended simply to help
the state plunder the forests and take wealth out, not bring it in.
Many believe them. The Maoists profit from asymmetric expectations:
people expect the state to provide for them, and it is failing; any
good coming from the Maoists—social work, land redistribution, a
price rise for local produce—brings disproportionate gratitude. The
spread of Naxalism is causing justifiable alarm. Just as Mao Zedong
mounted the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing in 1949 to tell the
Chinese people they had stood up, Naxal leaders dream of seeing the
red flag fly over the Red Fort in
Delhi
in their lifetime.
It will not
happen. For all their geographical reach, the Maoists’ power base
remains on the margins of Indian society. They are far from sparking
a general insurrection. But, in places such as Dantewada, almost a
hole in the map of the Indian polity, it is easy to see how a crude,
violent ideology, promising land and liberation, might take root.
Other terrorists
attack the Indian state at its strong points—its secularism, its
inclusiveness, its democracy. Naxalism attacks where it is weakest:
in delivering basic government services to those who need them most.
The Naxalites do not threaten the government in Delhi, but they do
have the power to deter investment and development in some of
India’s poorest regions, which also happen to be among the richest
in some vital resources—notably iron and coal. So their movement
itself has the effect of sharpening inequity, which many see as the
biggest danger facing India in the next few years, and which is the
Naxalites’ recruiting sergeant.
24
June 2009
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