g GEOPOLITICS June 2015 INTERNALSECURITY THE MAOIST MENACE A REVOLUTIONARY RIDDLE WRAPPED IN THE MAOIST MYSTERY INSIDE THE INDIAN ENIGMA by AJAY K. MEHRA With due apologies to Sir Winston Churchill, I adapt his famous description of the Soviet Union’s action at the beginning of the second World War on 1 October 1939, when Russia allowed Germany to station its troops at the shores of the Black Sea, to describe the continued presence of the Maoist revolutionary politics in the liberal democratic India. It has the world’s largest republican constitution and has conducted sixteen general elections to elect the Lok Sabha (Parliament), aside from several elections to the Legislative Assemblies in states and to the local bodies. Yet the phenomenon variously described as Naxalism, Maoism and Left-Wing Extremism a variety of contradictions. For example, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit on 9 May 2015 to Dantewada in Chhatisgarh, a hotbed of the Naxalism, starkly exposes the enigmatic paradoxes embedded in India’s liberal democracy cohabiting with the Maoist movement in parts of the country. Even as he attempted touching an emotional cord by appealing to the Maoists to spend just five days with a child who has lost his parents to the violence to realise that ‘if there is any future it is in peace’. He added, ‘Embrace humanity once and meet the aggrieved families, you will never take that path again…. Much more than any government or any law can change you, you will be transformed by a boy who suffered your bullets. Even as the PM made an emotive appeal, while announcing 25,000 crore investment, which include projects to set up a major steel plant as well as a railway line, the Maoists took 200 villagers hostage, killed one to make their presence and intentions felt. Earlier, a Maoist couple and three others were arrested in Kerala and one in Pune. Some former Maoists in Kerala described them as Exalites (ex-Naxalites), as Kerala currently has no Naxals. The paradoxes can hardly be missed. The impression of the police being overly rigid in their typologies of a Naxal in rounding up the leaders, the Maoists being inflexible and brutally demonstrative in their approach and strategy and possible controversies whether the investments announced by the PM would benefit the people of the region, i.e., the tribals who lack education and technical skills for the jobs that could be generated, or they would just create opportunities for the corporates to exploit the natural resources. In fact, not only the corporates, who obviously have only commercial interests, but also the Indian state have focused over decades on exploiting mining and forest resources leaving out the local adivasi and girijan population, spurring revolutionary politics. Indeed, the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 does attempt some protection for the forest dwellers, the adivasis in particular, but neither in its original form 1957, nor after the 2015 amendment the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act (1957)/Ordinance protects their interests. In fact, it does not have a clause for consent from the locals, strengthening the hands of the private sector. Thus, India’s experiment with the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolution, beginning in 1945-46 continued even after independence and enacting a republican constitution continued. The seven decade old ‘revolution’ has had both mountains and valleys on its activity graph, but it has continued despite generational and leadership changes, several of them have been eliminated in confrontation/‘encounter’ with the security forces. Indeed, I am including the momentous Telangana Armed Struggle (TAS) – 1946-51 – as the beginning of what has been popularly discussed and described as the Naxalism or Maoist movement. Not only it was the first such revolutionary experiment in India just two decades after the formation of the Communist Party of India (CPI), it was also the first one since the Russian revolution (1917), albeit much smaller in scale and scope. Also, the seeds of revolution gradually shifted after its withdrawal in 1951 to West Bengal, without completely snuffing out the revolutionary amber in Andhra Pradesh. The significant fact is that in seven decades, the issues such as land, forest resources, mines and minerals, land acquisition, displacement and resettlement, development deficit, have continued to remain the main causative factors, even though their contexts have changed – neo liberalism and globalisation bringing in new players and scale of operations. As this armed movement consolidated in the new millennium, four major strands of mutually complementary discourse on Maoism – theoretical, developmental, 2 human rights and security-centric – have developed; of course they all factor in complexities brought in by the process of globalisation. An Expert Group appointed by the Planning Commission (now abolished) in its report Developmental Challenges in the Maoist Affected Areas (2008) used the conclusions of the 1960s report of the US National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders based on three basic principles: (i) To mount programmes on a scale equal to the dimensions of the problem; (ii) To aim these programmes for high impact in the immediate future in order to close the gap between promise and performance; (iii) To undertake new initiatives and experiments that can change the system of failure and frustration that dominates and weakens our society. The Expert Group was obviously referring to the need to mount developmental programme to close the developmental deficit and the need to experiment with fresh initiatives to win the hearts and minds of the marginalized sections drawn towards the Maoist politics. Needless to say that we are far away from this goal. D. Bandhopadhyaya (now MP Rajya Sabha), who chaired the Planning Commission Expert Group, recently analysed the factors that have persisted since the Naxalbari uprising till now in Foreword to Santosh Mehrotra edited Countering Naxalism with Development: Challenges of Social Justice and State Security (New Delhi: Sage, 2014). A retired bureaucrat, he was the Director, Land Records and Survey of the West Bengal Government when ‘A peal of spring thunder … crashed over the land of India’ on 25 May 1967. Referring to the expansion of the phenomenon reported by the Union Home Minister in November 2009, he stresses the dichotomy of ‘security vs. development’ that led to its 2,000 times expansion in 42 years. His brief recounting of the events in 1967 offers useful insights and lessons for both the Maoist movement and the Indian state. Hare Krishna Konar, the Land and Land Revenue Minister, had returned confused from China before the 1967 general election as the lower rung of the Chinese leadership he met had no suggestions to offer to the CPM leadership on Indian situation in 1967. Later, Konar led the Cabinet Mission to the trinity of the Naxalbari movement – Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal – which was a failure and eventually led to the 1969 split and the creation of the CPI (ML). However, Konar used Bandhopadyaya to spearhead a massive quasi-judicial operation to unearth and vest concealed ceilingsurplus lands. That prepared the ground for the launch of the Operation Barga (197881) by the land reform minister Benoy Chaudhary in the first Left Front government that assured security of tenure, hereditary right of cultivation, and fair sharing of crop (75 3 percent for the sharecropper and 25 percent for the landowner), benefitting 1.6 million sharecropper households. His account of oral history, in which he highlights the role of Konar, suggests that ‘ameliorative measures for the displaced, dispossessed, and angry tribals’ weakened the Naxalite movement considerably in West Bengal by the beginning of the 1980s. Comparing the events in 1946-51 during the TAS with 1966-81 in West Bengal, two things become absolutely clear. First, pauperization of the sharecroppers, cultivators and tribals by the landlords, dispossessing them from land has been the main factor causing stirring that the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist leadership of the communist movement used to rally people on the ‘revolutionary’ path. Second, the leadership in both cases was too enamoured about the Russian and/or Chinese models, attempting to draw lessons without factoring in Indian reality and doctrinaire about the idea of revolution. Further, the Srikakulam movement in Andhra Pradesh was about natural resources and exploitation of the girijan population in the Agency areas by the usurers from the plains. Its extension with the People’s War Group in 1980 focused on mobilising the landless, the dalits and the tribals. The merger of the two most militant groups – CPI-ML (People’s War) and the Maoist Communist Centre of India – on September 21, 2004 formed the CPI (Maoist); which acquired military edge with People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army of 3,500 fighters equipped with sophisticated arms and well-formed organizational structure and set New Democratic Revolution as its aim. In an interview to the magazine The Worker, on 11 July 2007, the top Maoist leader Ganapathy described the unification of the Maoist parties as ‘a crucial moment in the history of India’s Maoist struggle….’ because (t)oday the Maoist movement is facing the great challenge of building a strong PLA and establishing the base area in the remote countryside as an immediate task….’ He asserted that their ‘revolutionary leadership’ was necessary ‘when the entire country is being transformed into a neo-colony, when the country is being sold away to the imperialists and the big business in the name of SEZs, when workers, peasants, employees, students, sections of the intelligentsia, dalits, women adivasis, nationalities, religious minorities and others are seething with revolt.’ Interviews of the slain Maoist leaders Azad and Kishenji too voice similar sentiments. Azad justified brutal violence, even making light of beheading of a police Inspector in Jharkhand saying – ‘It is hypocrisy on the part of those making such a big fuss about the plight of one Francis Induvar’. He rejected Indian elections and political parties saying only alternative is people’s democracy. In an 4 interview to the Frontline newsmagazine in November 2009, Kishenji too justified their violence and indicated that the Maoists would soon form a Liberated Area and begin their own people’s government based on democratic centralism. The outline and affirmation of the Janatana Sarkar also reaffirms their claim. The theoretical studies on Maoism, mostly by the Left-oriented scholars, put the Indian government in the dock, which also plays a victim. Indeed, the Maoist movement has questioned the legitimacy of the Indian state and democracy. A recent study by Ajay Gudavarthy Maoism, Democracy and Globalisation: Cross Currents in Indian Politics Commenting on the Maoists’ strategy of area wise seizure of power creating liberated zones, they run a parallel government in certain parts of central India, though there is no presence of the Indian state there. Consequently the MHA has focused on special laws and enormous weaponization and deployment of the security agencies, as also raising dubious ‘spontaneous movement’ like the Salwa Judum, which was disbanded following a Supreme Court judgment, but is being resurrected again. He characterizes the new trends as the ‘new politics’, which ‘has made a rhetorical use of available democratic protest forms’, yet moving towards a hegemonic majoritarian politics with more laws, greater centralisation, and enhanced surveillance. These bring in undemocratic and violent solutions, which are unlikely to make a more democratic and tolerant society. Gudavarthy’s provocative characterization of Indian democracy as violent would surely be contested. However, the key to this analysis, more particularly in the context of Maoism is to factor in society. Is Indian democracy, a larger framework in which the Maoist movement too operates, not a reflection of the Indian society? The Maoist movement that had got stuck in ideological and strategic parallelism in its 1960s Naxalbari phase, attempting to imitate and own up the China path, has obviously survived and consolidated at the beginning of the millennium due to social, political and economic paradoxes within the Indian state and society. The role of the state indeed cannot be studied without bringing in the society. The movement hit a pit when some of its key leaders were killed in encounters with the security forces in the past couple of years, some of them alleged to be fake. That even the Indian state is nowhere near finding a solution to this enduring ‘revolution’, Chhatisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh’s claim that the Indian army can solve it in four days notwithstanding, shows that several issues are deeply entrenched and ruling dispensations over decades have only complicated them rather than solving them. Persisting as part of the India’s democratic politics and state, which its existential paradox, the Maoist movement faces the survival 5 question to make their ‘revolution’ succeed. The patches of pauperization in the country gives them cadre, even silent support bases, but the hopes of urban living even for the poor do not bring them cadre and bases in cities. They have had to make compromises with the mainstream politics, weakening the ideological edge. The need for finance compels them to ‘taxation’ and extortion, whether that makes them compromise with the willing contractors and corporates or not, deserve examination. Running a parallel government necessitates some modicum of democracy. Their people’s democracy is conveniently defined and lacking a code of law, they brutalize justice through Kangaroo courts. They have been so far insensitive to the democracy question. This puts the movement and all the actors involved into an unresolved jigsaw. Honorary Director, Centre for Public Affairs, Noida 6