The Back-Benchers' Blog

In 2009, the prime Minister of India declared left wing insurgency to be the greatest internal security treat that India had ever faced. Having failed to contain the movement from spreading to large parts of tribal India, the government launched operation Greenhunt to crush the movement through use of military force. Surprisingly, few months before the military operation was launched, Islamic insurgents had attacked Mumbai, the financial capital of India, killing around 150 non combatants. Eight years before that, Hindu terrorists had organised a state sponsored pogrom in the state of Gujarat in which more than a thousand innocent Muslims were butchered.

Even today the whole of north east is in a state of flux with more than a dozen large insurgent groups operating in the region. In such a scenario the prime minister’s haste in adopting a military solution to the Naxalite problem baffled many.  It was even surprising given the fact that statement appeared ridiculous given the fact that left wing insurgency had claimed less than 5 percent of all insurgency related killings in India and overwhelming majority of those killed in such violence were combatants or people directly representing either side of the state-Maoist divide. Unlike Islamic and Hindu terrorism, mindless killing of innocents was small if not negligible. However, a careful study of the evolution of the Indian state in the last twenty years unlocks the apparent mystery in the prime minister’s statement.

A look at the map of Indi gives us a good idea about the nature of the current phase of Naxalite movement as opposed to its earlier avatar in the late sixties. The overlap between the districts with Maoist influence and district with high tribal population is too stark to be believable. However recent studies by Oindrila Dube[1] from the Centre for Global Development, New York university has shown that percentage of tribal population in a district is the single most important (perhaps the only) determinant of incidence of Maoist violence in a district. The reason is a no brainer for people who have followed the trajectory of India’s development. For the tribes of India, the last 60 years of the Indian republic has been era of neglect, deceit and exploitation.  A careful study of the census data from the last century shows that there has been a downward movement in the relative achievements of the Indian tribes.[2] For example in terms of literacy Indian tribes fared much better than the lower castes of Hindu society during the last caste census of 1931. With the passage of time the relative positions have not only been reversed but the gap between the tribes and other castes have increased manifold. Even in terms of provision of public goods by the state, tribal villages in central and eastern India have lagged far behind their non tribal counterparts. As a consequence the tribal districts of India have become synonymous with starvation, malnutrition, illiteracy and high mortality. The argument that conflict ensures that these areas remain underdeveloped flies in the face of all available data. Long before the return of the Maoists as a major political poor, the cleavage between the tribal and non tribal India had become stark. Thus while India was celebrating the launch of “Nano-the poor man’s car”, tribals in the region of Kalahandi-Bolangir were dying of starvation.

However this story of neglect is just the tip of the iceberg. Since independence the Indian state adopted a conflictual attitude towards the tribals. Located in remote, inaccessible parts of the country, the only time the tribals encountered the state was when the state appeared in the form of an appropriator. For generation, tribals had depended on the forest produce and traditional forest cultivation as their means of livelihood. However, as a continuation of the colonial policy, the government nationalized all forests in the country and declared forest cultivation illegal. Without any alternative policy in place, the only means of tribal livelihood was declared.  The daily life of a tribal became a game of hide and seek with the Indian state. If this was not enough, came Nehru’s “temples of modern India”. Large sections of tribal population in Central India were displaced without proper rehabilitation to make way for “developmental projects”. The fact that such projects benefitted certain elite sections of the society at the cost of tribals is well documented in Duflo-Pande’s paper on dams.[3] Duflo-Pande showed that dams that displaced large number of tribals on central India had a positive impact on downstream districts while having a negative impact on upstream districts. With time, especially after the nineties, displacement started taking different forms. Tracts of tribal lands, rich in mineral resources, were parcelled out to multi-national corporations with scant regard for the cultural and environmental concerns of the resident tribal population.

The second phase of Naxalite movement in India should be studied in the context of this history of neglect and exploitation. It’s an escalation or may a natural consequence of low intensity conflict that had characterised the relationship between the Indian state and its tribal population in the last sixty years. The Maoists understood the tribal discontent and tapped it for their purpose. The huge Maoist army that today rules large parts of Central are formed of disenchanted tribal youth who might never have read the red book but who since their childhood have witnessed the Indian state as an oppressor. Any military action against the Maoists will only deepen that image of the Indian state and will thus be counterproductive in nature. The notion that a brutal military offensive can work rests on the assumption that a military offensive can the cost of tribals to fight against the state. With their back against the wall, the tribals of this country have nothing to lose and hence such a strategy is surely to fall on its face. Had such an strategy worked that rag tag army of the Maoists could have been vanquished by the the Indian paramilitary troops and state funded private militia –Salwa Judum long ago. The kind of atrocities inflictd by Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh in the last five years reminds one of the colonial Indian state policy in Nagaland and Mizoram half a century ago. People have been evicted from their villages in Dantewada, forced to stay in Salwa Judum run concentration camps in Geedam and their villages have been burnt down to ensure that the insurgents are deprived of food and shelter.[4] The human cost of such state action has been enormous but the aimed objective of exterminating the tribal support for Maoists have remained a distant dream. On the contrary, such brutality has ingrained the image of a repressive Indian state on the minds of another generation of tribal population.

In such a scenario, the only realistic solution to the problem will involve a strategy that will have two components:

It is extremely important to have unconditional talks with the Maoists. Indian history is full of examples which show that talks have often achieved what state repression could not. The current scenario of relative peace in Nagaland is the outcome of peace talks between the NSCN-(IM) and the Indian government and the ceasefire that resulted from that. If the government of India could have unconditional talks with people who are seeking independence from the Indian state, why can’t it do the same with people who are in no way secessionist, but are fighting a battle against repression and neglect? Chidambaram’s pre conditions for talks create a vicious environment where the tribals see the proposal of talks as a ploy to weaken the movement and not to solve their problems. The home minister non –serious response to the Maoist proposal of a ceasefire have disappointed all of us who expect a peaceful solution to this problem.

Secondly, the government should reach out to the tribals of India and undertake rapid developmental activities in these areas to gain the trust of the adivasis that it has lost in the last half a century. Decisions about “development projects” should be democratised to ensure that tribals of this country become stakeholders and “development” is not thrust down their unwilling throats. Not all parts of tribal India is Maoist effected, thus the government’s contention that such activities should be preceded by a military offensive, does not have much weight. Participatory development in such areas will wean away tribal youths from this movement and will deny the movement of its much needed foot soldier.

Such a strategy will be much more humane and much less costly that the urban middle class Indian dream of the Indian Air force bombing the whole of Dantewara into oblivion.

References:

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[1] DUBE, O AND NAIDU,S (2009) : Maoists, Minerals and Environmental Change

[2] SETHI, R AND R. SOMANATHAN (2009): Caste Hierarchies and Social Mobility in India

[3]DUFLO, E & R. PANDE (2007): Dams, Quarterly Journal of Economics.

[4] SUNDAR, N (2009): Counterinsurgency and Regrouping: Experiences from India