“Early this week Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi voiced concern over the Naxalite menace in his state. Immediately thereafter the Centre admitted that incidence of Naxal violence and casualties registered a rise in 2007, compared to the previous year. Obviously in an attempt to obfuscate, rather than elucidate, the issue, the Centre, while admitting that the Naxalites were on the ascendant, claimed that the police stations affected in 2007 fell to 361 from 395 in 2006.”__________________________
by A.J. Philip
(April 26, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) It is difficult to identify Dandakaranya, the forest of Dandaka, a cursed wilderness, full of demons and pestilence, where Prince Ram settled down to spend 14 years of vanvas. Today’s Dandakaranya covers an area of nearly 92,000 sq. km - double the size of Kerala -- and spans impressive chunks of the states of Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh.
Dandakaranya has been the home of the Naxalites for nearly a quarter century, i.e., ever since they launched armed action against landlords and moneylenders. However, the ‘Naxalite country’ is not confined to these states alone. In fact, a vast swathe of land called the Red Corridor from the Indo-Nepal border in Bihar all the way down to Dharmapuri in Tamil Nadu is in various stages of Naxalite control.
Early this week Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi voiced concern over the Naxalite menace in his state. Immediately thereafter the Centre admitted that incidence of Naxal violence and casualties registered a rise in 2007, compared to the previous year. Obviously in an attempt to obfuscate, rather than elucidate, the issue, the Centre, while admitting that the Naxalites were on the ascendant, claimed that the police stations affected in 2007 fell to 361 from 395 in 2006.
In nearly 165 districts, out of a total of 602, the Naxalites have in place a parallel administration with varying degrees of success. Small wonder that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described Naxalism as the nation’s biggest internal security problem.
Yet, there is little understanding of the Naxalite threat. There are only generalised comments in the public domain, including the mainstream media. When the Naxalites strike as in a north Bihar district early this month, the policemen can only flee with or without their weapons. In this milieu journalist Sudeep Chakravarti* is an exception in that he travels to the heart of Maoist zones in the country to bring back a story, which is as much poignant as it is dreadful.
Unlike many other armchair “opinion makers” for whom Naxalites are modern-day demons, he tries to understand the phenomenon from a perspective that can only be described as humane. In his perception, the Naxalite is not a monster out to drink the blood of the innocent but somebody who has been forced to take up arms by a system that thrives on age-old prejudices. It would be instructive to remember that in Nepal, the demand for a “new democracy, abolition of monarchy, formulation of a new Constitution”- all democratic demands -- were put forward first by the Maoists.
The Naxalites often claim that Bhagat Singh was also a communist, “trained, armed and emphatically Left”, as evidenced by his statement: “We don’t wish to suffer by inviting a black evil to replace the white evil. Indian workers must come forward - overthrowing imperialists as well as their Indian agents who wish to perpetuate the same economic system rooted in exploitation”.
The author starts his inquiry from a rhetorical question former Prime Minister and Mandal messiah V. P. Singh asked: “What is stopping the youth of our country from becoming Maoists?”
“Nothing”, for those who have been left out of the “Shining India”, would be an appropriate answer. Four decades have passed since the debt-ridden peasants in Naxalbari village in Darjeeling district in West Bengal took to armed struggle against the landlords. “Spring thunder struck all over India”, claimed a Naxal icon. The mighty state took pride in suppressing the Naxalites in a matter of six months.
“Naxalbari has not died and it will never die,” prophesied Charu Mazumdar, the Marxist theoretician who found an answer to India’s problems in Mao’s The Little Red Book, which prescribes three stages of revolution - “the struggle stage, the guerrilla stage and the liberated stage”.
Mazumdar was not wide of the mark when within months of Naxalbari, a small group of Naxalites led by Kunhikal Narayanan, his Maharashtrian wife Mandakini, young daughter Ajita and comrade-in-arms Philip M. Prasad attacked the Pulpalli police station in north Kerala. Around the same time, they attacked a Bhumihar landlord in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district forcing Sarvodaya leader Jayaprakash Narayanan to camp in the area for months to give purposive leadership to the youth, lest they should fall into the lap of the Naxalites.
By no stretch of the imagination can it be said that Naxalism was nipped in the bud when the police used extra-constitutional measures to take on young men and women who were attracted to the ideology. The factors that helped the cause have remained more or less the same.
The arm of the state does not reach many areas in the country - “at least half of India is not being governed.” In fact, the government is disinterested in the development of rural areas as its interests lie in the urban conglomerates. While a rural bank a day is reportedly closed forcing farmers into the clutches of Shylocks, “several micro-finance institutions in rural areas, funded by major private sector banks like ICICI and HDFC were hitting farmers with sky-high interest rates”. Small wonder that farmers commit suicide even in prosperous Punjab. Does it really bother the rulers?
The politician-contractor-bureaucrat nexus is too thick to ignore. As former Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Ajit Jogi, who is not lily white when it comes to corruption, says, if all the money the government has spent on the development of Bastar is added with interest and given to the people, every family in this tribal district would be richer by at least Rs 1 crore. Even 60 years after Independence, there is virtually no development in this area. Roads are now built for quicker deployment of the police.
The lack of development is compounded by the fact that for a vast majority of people in this region, the daily income is only a fraction of $1, the international standard for determining poverty. Sure enough, Naxalites are able to attract cadres - 50,000 in one count - and several more sympathisers and supporters. After all, it required just 19 indoctrinated young men to bring down the twin towers in New York and force the president of the lone superpower to look for cover.
There is no strategy worth the name to fight Naxalism. Chhattisgarh has come up with Salwa Judum, which Chief Minister Raman Singh compares to the “fragrance of the forest in summer”. It has forced thousands of people to move into camps where living conditions are horrible. The Supreme Court has come down heavily against the practice of arming people but the Chhattisgarh government which appointed supercop K.P.S. Gill to fight the Naxalite menace still goes by his strategy of out-gunning, out-communicating and out-running the Naxalites, though without any measure of success.
The government has armed itself with such draconian laws as Chhattisgarh Vishesh Jan Suraksha Adhiniyam, or Special Public Safety Act, under which anybody can be arrested for the remotest connection with the Naxalites. The warning is clear: If the socio-economic deprivations that compel the poor to choose the path of violence are not addressed in right earnest, a situation will emerge when fighting Naxalism will be a futile exercise.
( *Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country by Sudeep Chakravarti, Penguin/Viking )
- Sri Lanka Guardian
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