INTERNAL SECURITY - Rethink needed in dealing with Naxalite violence

An Expert Group in the Planning Commission calls for a more development-led approach to people's resistance, and a renewed commitment by the State to the democratic system. 

When the Naxalite movement first emerged in the late 1960's, the Research and Policy (R&P) Division of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) produced a report on the Causes and Nature of Current Agrarian Tensions, which famously said that the green revolution would turn into a red revolution in the absence of far-reaching agrarian reforms. 

The MHA has to play a crucial role in the interpretation and assessment of major social and political conflicts in the country and issue guidelines to state governments. The Intelligence Bureau (IB), an 'attached office' and a large and secretive organisation with tentacles spread all over the country, provides basic inputs and analysis to the Ministry. Unhappy with 'over-classification', the then Union Home Secretary L P Singh set up the R&P Division in the 1960's, giving it freedom to prepare independent studies on conflicts situations across the country. The Division did well and built up an impressive and computerised database on communal violence. 

And so its cautionary note on strengthening agrarian reforms should have been heeded by the government. In the event, the said reforms never took place, with entirely foreseen consequences. Now it is officially reported that Naxalism affects 480 police stations spread over 12 states and covers roughly 125 districts. Moreover, the State has preferred to deal with the phenomenon only as a law-and-order issue, and not in terms of development issues. For instance, the Prime Minister, addressing a conference of Chief Ministers on  the Naxalite Violence in April 2006, used a law-and-order terminology that would have pleased any Director General of Police! 

Addressing the same meet the Union Home Minister offered to place 26 battalions of Central paramilitary forces at the disposal of state governments to deal with the Naxalites. In its annual report, the Union Home Ministry spelt out an elaborate police strategy, along with funds, to deal with Naxalite violence in different states, including the encouragement of 'local resistance groups' such as Salwa Judum in the Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh. 

The government's stance has been consistently myopic. Throughout the country, dalits and adivasis have been displaced in their millions due to development projects, and large numbers of them have joined or support the Naxalites. Further, violence against these communities is increasing, as reported by official agencies themselves. But neither the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment nor the Ministry of Tribal Welfare was invited to the above chief ministers' conference. Nor were the two Commissions on the Scheduled Castes and Tribes. 

Further, neither the Prime Minister nor the Union Home Minister in their addresses, mentioned the special Constitutional responsibility of Governors to provide the central government with detailed reports on the welfare and development of adivasis. Nor did they bring out the special Constitutional responsibility of the Government of India to ensure the protection and welfare of these two deprived and marginalised communities. With the development deficit in these communities totally overlooked, there is little reason to wonder at the continuing growth of the Naxal problem. 

The R&P Division of the MHA, which did much useful work, has now been wound up and a new Policy Planning Division has taken its place. The annual report of the ministry states cryptically that the Division deals with 'counter-terrorism'. No details are given. Further, the Divisions in the ministry dealing with the development of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes have been transferred to new and largely toothless ministries. The Civil Rights Cell set up to prevent 'atrocities' against SC's and ST's no longer exists. The ministry has lost the developmental edge it once had, and has become an increasingly paramilitary agency. 

Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas

But this have proven to be of limited value, and so, every once in a while we are forced to look anew at the old, unaddressed development problems. The most recent example of this is a report of the Planning Commission's Expert Group on Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas (April 2008). Eschewing the dominant thinking, it delineates a comprehensive developmental response to counter the impact of the Naxalite violence in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. Rejecting the security-centric approach, it provides a refreshingly ameliorative approach. 

While its terms of reference are quite general, the Expert Group deals essentially with the causes of discontent among the people, that has led to the spread of Naxalite violence in an increasingly virulent fashion. The introductory chapter goes into the socio-economic and political context; the condition of dalits, adivasis and women; access to basic resources including forests and land; special economic zones and common property resources; labour, employment and wages; displacement and rehabilitation; the process of adjudication; environmental degradation; political marginalisation of the dalits and adivasis; statistical pointers; and governance. 

Further, the report notes, the development paradigm pursued since independence has aggravated the prevailing discontent among marginalised sections of society. This paradigm has been conceived and imposed from above, insensitive to the needs and concerns of the poor causing displacement, destroying social organisation, cultural identity, resource base and has generated multiple conflicts undermining their communal solidarity making them increasingly vulnerable to exploitation. There are different kinds of movements and to call them all 'law and order problems' is to find a rationale for suppression. The tensions must be contextualised in terms of social, economic and political background. The people's right to livelihood and a dignified and honourable existence must be brought back on the agenda.

 

And this can only happen, says the report, if the State itself feels committed to the democratic system, and human rights and humane objectives inscribed in the Preamble, Directive Principles of State Policy and Fundamental Rights of the Constitution. The State has to adhere strictly to the Rule of Law, for it has no other authority to rule. The right to protest, even peacefully, must be recognised by the authorities, who are instead inclined to meet even non-violent agitations with severe repression. What is surprising, given this, is not the fact of unrest itself, but the State's failure to draw the right conclusions from it. 

The rest of the report deals with extension of Panchayati Raj to Scheduled Areas (PESA); investigating people's discontent and support for extremists; the State's response; and finally, recommendations. 

Copies of the report have been sent to all the concerned central and state government establishments, including the MHA. It is not clear what the ministry's response would be, in view of its largely repressive approach to popular resistance. The report must be circulated to all police agencies concerned with Naxalite violence, including the IB, which makes a major contribution to the study of the violence in the ministry. Considering the nature and variety of conflicts in different parts of the country and the absence of meaningful information on them in the ministry, it would be necessary not only to revive the R&P Division but set up several interdisciplinary study-and-action groups, consisting of scholars, civil servants and social activists, to go into conflict situations and produce reports for policy action. 

The entire 'Indian police system' needs to read the Expert Group report and imbibe the essence of its contents to begin to provide a meaningful response to Naxalite violence. There is a need to change the mindset in the ministry, which accord low priority to reports on rural violence emerging from agencies such as the Planning Commission and the Ministry of Rural Development as compared to intelligence reports, which are classified and enjoy a mystique and prestige of their own! Ironically, the various recommendations from the state-security apparatus have not made much of a dent on the Naxal problem, but despite this failure, police action appears to be favoured response of the state to all disturbances. That has to change. 

Indeed, more than merely revising the state-security approach to Naxalism, it would also be hugely helpful if long-overdue police reforms are taken up. The Indian police system is a huge, complex and essentially paramilitary one founded in colonial objectives, and while the British may have been justifiably proud of it, Republican India has failed to either change this organisational model with the concomitant repressive legal structure. Dependence on the Intelligence Bureau, which is a police organisation with a highly state security-centric and not a peoples-security-centric approach, is no longer viable, if it ever was. 

NAXALISM - Social banditry

In their readiness to identify with the oppressed, Naxalites are in contrast to the bureaucrat, the politician and the police officer, but they are not revolutionaries.

The novelist and critic, C S Lewis, said he had no time for those who thought that since they had read a book once, they had no need to read it again. The great works of literature were to read again and again. The urge to go back to a book was prompted sometimes by aesthetics, the desire to savour once more its artful or elegant prose; and, at other times, by the sense that one would learn something new on a second reading. Thus, it is said that War and Peace makes one kind of impression when read while young, quite another when read in middle age. 

My own tastes run in the direction of non-fiction, but at least in this sphere I think I am exempt from C S Lewis's strictures. Among the books I go back to are autobiographies, such as those written by Neville Cardus, G H Hardy, Mahatma Gandhi, Verrier Elwin, Salim Ali and Leonard Woolf. I have also read Tagore's tract on nationalism three or four times, and C L R James's Beyond a Boundary at least once every other year. 

These return journeys have chiefly been undertaken for pleasure. However, I recently reread a book for instruction. Like some other Indians, I have been thinking a great deal recently about the rise of the Maoist movement in the country. Who or what are these Maoists? Are they, as the home ministry tells us, a bunch of thugs and murderers, or are they, as some left-wing intellectuals claim, idealistic and high-minded revolutionaries who shall create a society free of evil and exploitation? 

In search of answers, I went back to a book I had first read some years ago. In the 1980's,  I had read the works of British social historians who had written about lower-class protest in early modern England. Within that vast and once very influential literature, I thought that one study in particular might help clarify my ideas about the Maoists now active in central and in eastern India. This was E J Hobsbawm's book, Bandits. 

 

Hobsbawm observes that in several countries and historical epochs (as for example, early-20th-century Mexico), bandits had joined revolutionary political struggles, "not because they understood the complexities of democratic, socialist or even anarchist theory, but because the cause of the people and the poor was self-evidently just." 

And so I read that book again. I learnt (or learnt afresh) that there is an important distinction to be made between the ordinary criminal and what Hobsbawm calls the "social bandit". Whereas the former is despised by poor and rich equally, the latter "never cease[s] to be part of society in the eyes of the peasants (whatever the authorities say)". "The point about social bandits," writes Hobsbawm, "is that they are peasant outlaws whom the lord and state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders for liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped and supported." 

 

Hobsbawm was writing about another continent in another century. Still, his book does seem to speak somewhat to the India of the present. In an evocative passage, he writes of social bandits in medieval Europe that "they lived their wild, free lives in the forest, the mountain caves, or on the wide steppes, armed with the 'rifle as tall as the man', the pair of pistols at the belt?, their tunics laced, gilded and criss-crossed by bandoleers, their moustaches bristling, conscious that fame was their reward among enemies and friends." 

This description, with a word or phrase changed or modified, could fit the current bete noire of the West Bengal state government, the Maoist leader who uses the nom de plume, Kishenji. To be sure, he wears a cloth mask rather than a moustache, while, to broadcast his fame (and notoriety), he uses those very modern devices, the cell-phone and the television camera. However, the way he speaks and the manner he affects bring to mind the swagger and self-regard of the medieval social bandit. Like that character, Kishenji will be wild, and he will be free - and he thinks the police will never catch him. 

Hobsbawm observes that in several countries and historical epochs (as for example, early-20th-century Mexico), bandits had joined revolutionary political struggles, "not because they understood the complexities of democratic, socialist or even anarchist theory, but because the cause of the people and the poor was self-evidently just, and the revolutionaries demonstrated their trustworthiness by unselfishness, self-sacrifice and devotion - in other words by their personal behaviour". Then, he continues, "That is why military service and jail, the places where bandits and modern revolutionaries are most likely to meet in conditions of equality and mutual trust, have seen many political conversions." 

 

Once more, the parallels with the current crop of Naxalites are not hard to detect. What they have going for them is their lifestyle - they can live with, and more crucially, live like the poor peasant and tribal, eating the same food, wearing the same clothes, eschewing the comforts and seductions of the city. In this readiness to identify with the oppressed, they are in contrast to the bureaucrat, the politician and the police officer. And to take Hobsbawm's other point, from the late 1960's onwards, the jail has indeed been a crucial site for the transmission of Maoist ideology in India. 

Historical comparisons are never exact. In some respects, the Indian Maoists are like the social bandits of early modern Europe. They too emerged in response to inequalities in society and the manifest corruptions of the State. With the government indifferent to the needs of the poor, a band of motivated individuals have come forward to identify with their interests. 

Here, the parallels break down. For the Maoists seek not justice for a single individual or village, but a wholesale re-ordering of society. Their ambitions are far larger than, for example, those of the late Koose Muniswamy Veerappan, he of the bristling (and outsize) moustache. Whereas the gang of that Tamil Robin Hood operated in a single hill range, the Maoists have a network stretching across several states. 

Hobsbawm wrote of the bandits he studied that "they are not activists and not ideologists or prophets from whom novel visions or plans of social and political organization are to be expected". The Maoists, on the other hand, see themselves as ideologists and even prophets, although it must be said that their vision and plan are not novel but wholly derivative. They hope that, in time, they will prevail by the force of arms over the Indian State, thus to capture power in New Delhi much as their revered hero, Mao Zedong, had captured power in Beijing 60 years ago. 

This larger aim marks them out from the likes of Veerappan, as, of course, does their access to more deadly weapons such as AK47's, dynamite and land mines, not to speak of their practice of a virtual cult of violence which takes pleasure in blasting transmission lines and railway stations and beheading policemen and alleged informers. As it happens, however, the revolutionary dreams of the Maoists are a fantasy. The Indian State is far more powerful today than the Chinese State was back in the 1940's. And in spite of all its manifest faults and failures, most Indians prefer our current, multi-party democracy to a one-party state to be run by the Maoists. 

For these, and other, reasons, we must withhold from them their own preferred appellation, that of "revolutionaries". They are considerably less than that, but also far more than ordinary criminals. Should we then see them as social bandits for a post-modern age, capable, like their medieval counterparts, of irritating the hell out of the government of the day, if ultimately incapable of overcoming or replacing it?