NEW
DELHI - India appears to be taking a big gamble with
Maoist insurgents. Encouraged by the central government
in Delhi, the ruling Congress-led coalition government
in the state of Andhra Pradesh has removed a
nine-year-old ban on the People's War Group (PWG), which
was recently put on a terrorist watch list by the United
States.
Chief Minister Y S Rajashekhar Reddy's
government announced an "unofficial" suspension of
operations against the Maoists in May, almost
immediately after assuming power in Andhra Pradesh after
national elections. This move was confirmed by an
"official ceasefire" last week.
With a ceasefire
in place, the Reddy government now plans to hold talks
with the Maoists, even though all such previous attempts
have merely served to provide them with much-needed
breathing space, helping them to regroup and extend
their influence.
About 1,100 armed cadres are
estimated to be active in the jungles and rural areas of
the farming state of Andhra Pradesh. No dates have been
set, but the talks could be weeks away. An earlier
attempt to hold talks in 2002 failed because authorities
refused to lift the ban on the PWG before the talks.
Already, though, reports are emerging that the
PWG has shifted its attention to the virgin territory of
neighboring Karnataka state. While Maoists are clear in
their approach, knowing exactly what they want to
achieve from ceasefires and negotiations - time to
consolidate gains and enter new areas - the same cannot
be said about most governments who adopt the "peace
process" approach.
The Maoists aim at nothing
less than overturning the present system of periodical
elections that, in their view, go by the name of
democracy in India and bring to power crooks and
criminals of all hues. They intend to bring about what
they call "people's democracy", another name for the
"dictatorship of the proletariat", unmindful of the
abject failure all such experiments have met in the past
all over the world. , They know this cannot be achieved
through peaceful negotiations with the government of the
day.
What the governments aim at, however, is
unclear. Reddy himself is a beneficiary of India's
electoral democracy. He has risen to his present
position of eminence from starting out as a small-time
hustler to becoming a ruthless businessman who knew how
to milk the system. As such, the present system suits
him just fine.
Maoists and other left-wing
extremists are better known in India as Naxalites, on
account of the movement having started from Naxalbari in
West Bengal in the late 1960s. PWG and its associates in
the Maoist Communist Center (MCC), the Communist Party
of India (Marxist-Leninist) or CPI-ML, and scores of
similar organizations are an all-India phenomenon,
having bases in several states such as West Bengal,
Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh,
Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh,
Kerala, Maharashtra and now Karnataka.
They
virtually run a parallel administration, levying taxes
and administering swift though brutal justice in large
parts of India's hinterland. With ever-increasing
escalation in their influence and concomitant violence,
they have killed more people in recent years than the
high-profile secessionist insurgents in the northwestern
state of Jammu and Kashmir or the separatists of India's
northeast.
Indian Maoists have recently formed
international associations as well. Their links with
Nepalese Maoists are well known. Indian intelligence
sources quote Maoist literature as speaking of creating
a "compact revolutionary zone" stretching from
Maharashtra and northern Andhra Pradesh through central
and eastern India to Nepal by "liberating" a long strip
running from Nepal in the northeast of India to Andhra
Pradesh in the south and Maharashtra in the west. Many
in Nepal believe that the Nepalese Maoist leader
Prachanda and his deputy Baburam Bhattarai have taken
shelter in India, apparently without the knowledge of
the Indian government.
Not so well known are the
Maoists' other international connections. On July 1,
2001, Maoist insurgents from India, Nepal, Bangladesh
and Sri Lanka formed an umbrella organization called the
Coordination Committee of Maoist Parties and
Organizations of South Asia to unify and coordinate
activities across the South Asian region. This has
facilitated the exchange of expertise, weapons training
and flow of weapons. While Indian Maoists are said to
acquire guns from Nepal, explosives stolen from quarries
and ordnance factories in India are diverted to the
Nepalese Maoists.
In recent years, the PWG has
also begun to form fruitful relationships with several
Marxist-Leninist/Maoist groups of Europe, Africa, Latin
and Central America, in addition to other parts of Asia.
After a Brussels congress of left-wing extremists in
2001, the PWG began to have regular interaction with
similar groups in Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Chad, Senegal,
Nepal and the Philippines.
The activities of the
PWG and the People's Guerrilla Army (a coalition of
several Maoist groups) have featured regularly on the
websites of the international Marxist-Leninist-Maoist
movement since then. The possibility of PWG
rediscovering its links with Assam's secessionist group,
the United Liberation Front of Assam, and Sri Lanka's
Tamil separatist group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam, as well as forming new links with radical
Islamist groups in the region, is particularly worrisome
for the government of India.
The Andhra Pradesh
government's initiative, with active support from Delhi,
is likely to be replicated by other states. It therefore
has all-India implications. Jharkhand state Chief
Minister Arjun Munda and Chhattisgarh's Raman Singh have
already welcomed the initiative. The PWG, too, has shown
its readiness to talk to the Jharkhand government if it
too announces a ceasefire. The CPI-ML has indicated that
it is "not averse" to negotiations with other state
governments, provided "they give up their repressive
measures".
The governments of other states
affected by the influence of Maoism are keeping their
fingers crossed. The states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh,
Maharashtra, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Orissa are
watching the situation with concern, maintaining a
posture of studied ambiguity. Karnataka alone has ruled
out any cessation of police operations to facilitate
peace talks with Maoists.
This correspondent
spent several days recently in the Maoist heartland of
Jharkhand in Palamau district and the adjoining
Aurangabad district of Bihar. The extent to which
Maoists control the rural and small-town economy is
phenomenal. While people routinely evade taxes to be
paid to the government, no one even thinks of hiding his
earnings from the Maoists. In some areas, even peasants
working on daily wages donate a day's wage every month
to the local Maoist group.
Practically every
businessman, self-employed professional and government
official has made his peace with the parallel Maoist
administration that works most of the night. It rules
the roads, collecting toll dues from regular
transporters, in the night as the government does during
the day. This gives them plenty of money with which to
buy an adequate armory of weapons, including 8mm rifles,
single- and double-barrel breech-loading guns and hand
grenades, not to speak of an abundant supply of
ammunition.
The law-and-order machinery is as
ineffective in countering the Maoist threat as it is in
upholding the rule of law. The police do stage
encounters at times, usually killing only those Maoists
who were already in their custody. This results in
further escalation of violence as the Maoists hunt for
police informers. Some young and enthusiastic police
officers, fresh from their training, occasionally
organize a genuine raid on their hideouts, but according
to local policemen, merely manage to get some policemen
killed.
Eventually, their enthusiasm dies down
and they accept the inevitability of the situation,
making no further effort to root out the problem.
However, once every fortnight or so, cynical villagers
report, police parties organize fruitless raids in the
jungle and fire at mountain rocks from a distance as
police bullets have to be expended for the record. In
any case, most of the local people feel Maoism is not a
simple law-and-order problem that can be handled by the
police force, no matter how professional and well
equipped.
Another revelation for this
correspondent, visiting this area after a gap of several
years, was the extent to which casteism has seeped into
the Maoist movement, complicating the situation even
further. For all their faults, communists were
considered free from communal and caste viruses. Though
their fight is against upper-caste (which also means
upper class in the Indian context) exploitation of the
poor, most of their leaders were themselves from
upper-caste families. Their main inspiration was
ideology and they claimed to have de-classed themselves.
But now the leadership appears to have passed
into the hands of Backward castes, who have turned the
so-called revolutionary movement into a narrow casteist
enterprise. The result is that though they are
ostensibly fighting the cause of the poor, the largest
number of people killed in Maoist violence is the Dalits
(the lowest castes also called untouchable) and the
smallest number is that of the upper castes. Their
casteism is so narrow that even the Backward caste
leaders cannot all stay in the same group. The PWG has
thus become a Kurmi-Koeri caste (slightly higher in the
Backward hierarchy) party and the Maoist Communist
Center (MCC) is the Yadav (milkmen) caste party.
Describing this situation, one Maoist sympathizer quoted
Vijay Kumar Arya, a key MCC leader, as having said
earlier, "Caste is a fact of life. We can't wish it
away."
This narrow caste division in the Maoist
movement is affecting electoral politics of several
states as well as the move toward uniting the Maoist
movement itself. In Bihar, for instance, the
Yadav-dominated PWG cadre would be more sympathetic to
the government run by union Railway Minister Laloo
Prasad Yadav's wife Rabri Devi, while
Koeri-Kurmi-dominated MCC cadre to the opposition
supported by voters from their caste. In Jharkhand,
while the PWG is interested in peace talks with the
government, its ally, the MCC, has opposed the move.
Indeed, MCC activists killed six Jharkhand armed police
personnel last month to demonstrate their displeasure at
the peace initiatives. This is affecting the PWG-MCC
"unification talks" as well.
The bureaucracy,
including security services and security analysts, is
deeply unhappy with the Andhra Pradesh peace initiative,
particularly as it is likely to be picked up by other
states. In its view, as state governments - encouraged
by the center - engage in a peace process with
particular groups in one state, the same groups use the
opportunities of the ceasefire to extend operations to
new territories, even as they consolidate activities in
areas that they already dominate.
This is a
pattern witnessed again and again. The peace process
entails reversing the gains of the past years and
affects the morale of the police. But politicians, they
complain, refuse to learn. Instead, the political
leaders merely wonder what gains the bureaucrats and
security analysts are talking about. The last chief
minister of Andhra Pradesh, Chandra Babu Naidu, also
initiated a similar dialogue, but failed to make any
breakthrough. With sheer luck he survived a devastating
Maoist attack toward the end of his term.
Confrontationist policies, too, that treat
Maoism merely as a law-and-order issue have not yielded
any dividends. Maoists continue to consolidate their
gains and make progress. As a result, large parts of
India's hinterland are virtually run by them. Maoist
militant cadres, both boys and girls, can be seen on
television screens undergoing military training in the
same open way as soldiers of the Indian security
services. They don't even need to hide their faces now
as they used to.
It is not clear whether the
government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has any
definite plans for dealing with Maoist insurgency. No
one in the central government is prepared to speak on
the subject. The only clue one gets is from the writings
of the prime minister's special security adviser and
former director of the intelligence bureau, M K
Narayanan.
Calling for "new ideas" and "creative
methodology" to deal with what he called the "the red
quake", he wrote last October: "It would be wrong to
underestimate the new dimensions of Naxalite militancy
or try to meet it with weapons which were reasonably
successful during the '70s and the '80s. Thinking the
unthinkable is vital if the battle is to be won."
Waiting for Narayanan to think the unthinkable,
India has its fingers crossed.
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