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Does size matter?
And what’s the size anyway?
Dilwala Singh
 How
serious a nation is in tackling a problem or engaging with it is
often deduced from how seriously it views or quantifies the problem.
The Naxalite threat that
India faces is one such issue and the confusion in the India
establishment is clear from the fact that two top people running, or
trying to run, the country have different views on it. Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh as early as 4
November 2004 described the Naxals as “an even greater threat to
India than militancy in Jammu
and
Kashmir
and the North East”. And only last December told a gathering of
India’s
chief ministers that “Left wing extremism is possibly the single
biggest security challenge to the Indian
state”.
India’s
Home Minister, in 2005 called the Naxals as “our children gone
astray”, and last month categorically and repeatedly refused to
accept they constitute the “single biggest security challenge”.
This is
India’s confusion. Manmohan Singh’s “largest internal security
threat” has now been downplayed by the Home Ministry’s latest annual
report (2006-07) that says Naxal violence in 2006 was reported from
only 395 police stations out of a nationwide total of 12,476. That’s
not only down from 460 the year before but represents just 3.1 per
cent of the country’s police stations.
 But then, here is another
report. The Institute of Conflict Management claims Naxal violence
affects a total of 192 districts in 16 states. Ajit Doval, the
former head of India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB), wrote that it
affects nearly 40 per cent of India’s land mass and 35 per cent of
its population. Who is right? And how big is the threat? And is the
size of the problem only indicator of the seriousness of it? Does
India react only when problems grow to a size XXL? If you look at
Naxal violence in terms of the states affected, it covers 40 per
cent of India, if you see it in terms of districts affected it’s 30
per cent, but seen in terms of police stations reporting Naxal
activity the figure shrinks to just 3 per cent.
So
there you are, yo-yoing between 40-30-3 slanging matches as the
poorest of the poor get caught in the crossfire of economic- social
upheaval with bullets and arrows whizzing by. Race
Course Road and North Block perplex anyone with their confused
approach. Any saner query is met with “No Response” and that is
exactly the response of the Indian Government to the entire problem,
unless it thinks efforts and foolish initiatives like Salwa Judam
are any reasonable response.
 India
has little will to comprehend the challenge and tackle it
effectively, because it is shy of going into its genesis and
grasping the intricacies of the issues involved. Moreover, in the
dominated by ideologies 20th century, a large number of Indian youth
were attracted towards Maoism, a Chinese variation of Marxism, that
had romantic and revolutionary slogans, such as “power flows from
the barrel of the gun”, “a single spark can start a prairie fire”
and “capture the countryside to encircle the cities.” What has
Indian state given in response? Salwa Judam?
5
March 2008
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