Chhattisgarh Maoist attack

The killing of 73 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) men in Chhattisgargh state by Maoist insurgents is a stark reminder that, despite all its claims of development and progress, trouble is brewing in India. While the Indian government has been busy pumping billions into the defence budget, Maoist guerrillas have been organising and spreading imperceptibly through the resource-rich rural, tribal areas of Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and West Bengal. Despite fighting the Naxalite movement for decades and crushing it with all its might, the Indian government has not been able to eliminate it. As the newspapers reported, New Delhi has been caught by surprise by this latest attack in the forests of Dantewada district where the Maoist guerrillas ambushed a police patrol and later also fired at the reinforcements that came to collect the bodies. Taking off from the Naxalbari village in West Bengal, this movement follows the model of revolution created by Mao Tsetung, hence the Maoist tag. Having undergone state repression for decades and near elimination in the 1970s in Indira Gandhi’s regime, the movement has seen a revival in the 1990s.

The subject is very familiar. Local people resisting an uncaring and exploitative government through organised insurgency. The insurgent districts of India, called the ‘red swath’, are rich in minerals and big mining companies are running their operations in several areas to line their own pockets while the government believes this is necessary to sustain the progress of India’s giant economy. Arguably, vested interests within the Indian government, fed by the rapacity of capital-driven motives, would like the government to crush the insurgent elements by force, hence Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s statement that they pose the greatest threat to the Indian state. However, the government has failed despite repeated attempts and the guerrillas have returned with renewed vigour each time. The reasons are not difficult to surmise.

For all its ‘shining’, India is a land of great inequality. Millions of people live either at bare subsistence level or below. Failure to transfer the fruits of the economic boom to the marginalised, address the genuine demands of the insurgents and the people they represent, and treat them with the dignity and respect they deserve has brought India to this pass. People on the margins of this economic miracle called ‘Shining India’ are obviously the main recruits of the revolution. The guerrillas today are better organised and far more effective and have been inflicting heavy damage to the state with their activities. Therefore, Manmohan Singh’s words are increasingly ringing true.

There are striking parallels in Pakistan as well, which is undergoing insurgency in Balochistan for similar reasons. There are attacks on state installations and target-killings of ethnicities other than the Baloch almost on a daily basis. The use of brute force, instead of quelling the insurgency, has bolstered the determination of the Baloch. Learning from India, one can argue that the insurgency is not going to go away. The solution lies elsewhere. They need to be heard and their due rights given to them, without prejudice.

Whatever the fate of the Naxalite movement, only time will tell. But it certainly poses a radically new paradigm not only for India, but also for the world that, until recently, had been celebrating the global triumph of capitalism. *

dailytimes pk