The Multi Layered Dimensions of the Maoist Conundrum:Part 2

The Maoist problem started in 1980 with the formation of the Peoples War Group (PWG) under the leadership of Kondapalli Seetharamaiah and the reorganisation of the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) in Bihar in the mid 1980’s. In September 2004, the movement got a fillip when the PWG and the MCC united. Their playing field is what is now called the Red Corridor – a vast swath of land that stretches from Arunachal Pradesh to the borders of Nepal.

The Red Corridor is viewed as the launch platform to spread the movement far and wide. The “Naxals” (after Naxalbari, the village near Siliguri in West Bengal, where the movement started) have spread to over 160 of India’s 604 administrative districts. They finance their operations by levying taxes on contractors, traders, mine and colliery owners, forest and land lessees and by loot and exploitation common in unpoliced hinterland areas. Their guiding deity is the CPI (Maoist) party, which has ambitious plans for spreading all over India to bring in its perception of Kranti (Revolution).

The Maoist movement is networked abroad, with at least 36 organisations that have Maoist underpinnings in the South Asian region encompassing Bhutan, Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The ideological content is from China, which is suspected of providing tacit moral as well as material support to these organisations. Proof of such support has, however, not been inconclusively established as another point of view is emerging that China has moved on from its earlier position of mentor and benefactor and is today detached from the cut and thrust of this movement, keeping in mind, its world power aspirations. Since July 2001, a Coordination Committee of Communist Parties and Organisations of South Asia (CCOMPOSA) has been at work, though little is known of its functioning, successes or failures.

The spread of Naxalism, in the words of the well known and extremely well informed ideologue, Mohan Guruswamy, “is an indication of the sense of desperation and alienation that is sweeping over of large sections of our nation who have been not only systematically marginalized but also cruelly exploited and dispossessed in their last homelands”. In an yet unpublished , deeply researched paper titled “The Heart of our Darkness” which he has written for the benefit of the country’s top politicians, bureaucrats, media and think tanks and which he has put out in August 2010 on a blog for value addition by interested Naxal watchers, Guruswamy focuses on the age old exploitation of the Adivasis, who are the majority occupants of the Red Corridor; people who live in the thick forests and mineral rich areas which are now being savagely pillaged by ruthless exploiters of an economically resurgent India, with none of the benefits accruing to the inhabitants. He states that “The late Professor Nihar Ranjan Ray, one of our most distinguished historians, described the central Indian Adivasis as ‘the original autochthonous people of India’ meaning that their presence in India pre-dated by far the Dravidians, the Aryans and whoever else settled in this country. The anthropologist Dr. Verrier Elwin states this more emphatically when he wrote: “These are the real swadeshi products of India, in whose presence all others are foreign. These are ancient people with moral rights and claims thousands of years old. They were here first and should come first in our regard.” Unfortunately like indigenous people all over the world, the India’s Adivasis too have been savaged and ravaged by later people claiming to be more “civilized”. They still account for almost 8% of India’s population and are easily it’s most deprived and oppressed section. There are some 573 communities recognized by the government as Scheduled Tribes and therefore eligible to receive special benefits and to compete for reserved seats in legislatures and schools. The biggest tribal group, the Gonds, number about 7.4 million; followed by the Santhals with about 4.2 million. Central India is home to the country’s largest tribes, and, taken as a whole, roughly 75 percent of the total tribal population live there.

He adds that “In the decades after independence, the exploitation has only become more rampant. In Orissa over 72% of all Adivasis live well below the poverty line. At the national level 45.86% of all Adivasis live below the poverty line. Incidentally the official Indian poverty line is a nothing more than a starvation line, which means that almost half of India’s original inhabitants go to bed every night starving. Several anthropometric studies have revealed that successive generations of Adivasis are actually becoming smaller unlike all other people in India who benefit from better and increasingly nutritious diets. What little the Indian state apportions to the welfare and development of indigenous people gets absorbed in the porous layers of our government. The late Rajiv Gandhi once famously said that less than 15% of the money allocated to rural areas actually percolated down.

The killing of 76 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) soldiers on April 6, 2010 at Dantewada “seems to have finally woken up the Indian establishment to the fact that while they have been obsessing with economic growth and India’s place in the world, the country’s hinterland is witnessing an awakening of another kind”, he adds. He does however draw a line between the Adivasi awakening and the Maoist movement and is of the opinion that the two are not necessarily linked. In his words, “It would not be very far off the mark to state that over 200 million people now live in areas where insurgents of some kind or the other are in armed conflict with the Indian State”.

The Government of India has a typically bureaucratic response to this major crisis now gripping the Adivasi homelands in six states. The Home Minister, P Chidambaram, has launched a somewhat inappropriately named offensive “Operation Green Hunt” to beat down the insurgency.  India, Guruswamy says with understandable pessimism, has its Tribals living in “the heart of darkness,” alluding to a tiny impoverished Adivasi town in Betul District of Madhya Pradesh, close to the geographical centre (heart) of India.

OTHER PROBLEMS THAT CONFRONT THE WAR AGAINST LWE

Against the backdrop of the Tribals being at the heart of the Maoist conundrum, there are many other problems that bear identification and sharing with the reader. Let us briefly discuss them.

Mistaking Industrialisation for Development

Writing in the Foreign Policy magazine, authors Jason Miklian and Scott Carney write that the Maoist attack on India’s richest mine, Bailadila, on February 9, 2006, which resulted in looting of 20 tons of explosives after the armed guards were shot, was one of India’s most profound strategic losses in the country’s protracted battle against its Maoist movement. Today, even though India’s GDP is more than five times what it was in 1991, plenty of Indians have missed out. Economic liberalization has not even nudged the lives of the country’s bottom 200 million people. They add that “If you were to lay a map of today’s Maoist insurgency over a map of the mining activity powering India’s boom, the two would line up almost perfectly. Ground zero for the rebellion lies in Chattisgarh and Jharkhand that are home to 46 million people. Revenues from mineral extraction in Chattisgarh and Jharkhand topped $20 billion in 2008, and more than $1 trillion in proven reserves still sit in the ground. But this geological inheritance has been managed so disastrously that many locals — uprooted, unemployed, and living in a toxic and dangerous environment, due to the mining operations — have thrown in their lot with the Maoists.  The mines are also cash registers for the Maoist war chest.”

Mohan Guruswamy writes that the National Mineral Development Corporation, a PSU, operates Bailadila in Dantewada district. Instead of bringing prosperity to the local people it has done irrevocable harm. Few benefits of this economic exploitation have trickled down to them while the ecological degradation of the area is devastating. Even worse has been the social degradation that has visited the Koitur Gonds in general and the sexual exploitation of their women in particular by people from the so-called civilized sections and regions of India.

He adds that the failure of Government in the tribal homelands is well documented. Even the Prime Minister was forced to admit it. In the same meeting of November 27, 2009 Dr. Manmohan Singh conceded that the Indian state and establishment have abused and exploited the country’s more than 80 million tribal people. “There has been a systemic failure in giving the Tribals a stake in the modern economic processes that inexorably intrude into their living spaces. The alienation built over decades is now taking a dangerous turn in some parts of our country. The systematic exploitation and social and economic abuse of our tribal communities can no longer be tolerated.”

Jason and Carney mention that Government sponsored vigilante organisations like Salwa Judum (raised in Chattisgarh in 2005) have instilled fear and terror amongst the Tribals who fear their reprisals as much as they fear the Maoists, but, ironically look towards the Maoists for relief, not so much the Government.  ”The Maoists have been killing locals for years,” Mahendra Karma, the founder of Salwa Judum, told us. When we do so, there is a human rights violation charge against us.”

In a sense, however, they say that India has already lost this war. It has lost it gradually, over the last 20 years, by mistaking industrialization for development — by thinking that it could launch its economy into the 21st century without modernizing its political structures and justice system along with it, or preventing the corruption that worsens the inequality that development aid from New Delhi is supposed to rectify.

The Panchayats [Extension to Scheduled Areas] Act, PESA Imbroglio

The Panchayats [Extension to Scheduled Areas] Act, PESA, puts the powers of managing the forests in the hands of the Panchayats run by the tribes who reside there. It was a progressive legislation. PM Man Mohan Singh asked the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA) to carry out an independent assessment of the Panchayati Raj ministry.  The report was finally submitted with a chapter added on the status of PESA implementation. In its final form, however, this chapter has been dropped. Its study (Tehelka, the magazine which published Kirpal’s article, has obtained a copy) is revealing. Of the 76 extremist affected districts, 32 are PESA districts. The chapter criticizes the Centre, the state and the police forces for “a damaging mix of misgovernance, alienation and violent insurgency” against tribal people. PESA is a new legislation and overrules all the land acquisition Acts. But the states overrule PESA and apply the central Land Acquisition Act of 1894 vintage to acquire tribal land. There is speculation that mining lobbies, who are experiencing a boom, do not want its stringent clauses implemented. A former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh told IRMA: “Its (PESA) implementation would put an end to mining projects.”

Lack of Apex Level Synergy: Balancing Environment with Economic Growth

The Hindustan Times has reported that Prime Ministers Office (PMO),  on November 15, 2010, has, in an admission of helplessness and desperation,  decided to look for succour from the Planning Commission, after the Environment Minister, Jairam Ramesh  firmly refused the PMO’s stand  on “go and no go areas” for coal mining. The PMO had suggested that the Environment Ministry increase the “go” areas for coal mining from 3.80 lakh hectares to 4.5 lakh hectares and give the necessary environmental clearances for setting up two power plants. Jairam, on the contrary has ruled that the power plants that were supposed to be set up in this Hasdeo-Anand area of Chattisgarh will not be approved without the necessary environment and forest clearances. While Jairam’s stand can be lauded for its firmness and proactivity, the polarization of views at apex Governmental levels starkly indicates the absence of a strategy that balances out growth and environment.

Nationalised and Cooperative Banks have Failed to Deliver

Col Gopal Karunakaran says that one of the serious problems is with the banking sector and the need to review  its  credit distribution policy to the local, often landless inhabitants. He says that in  a  survey done by the Times of India (July 27, 2007) it was revealed that fully 40% of rural India still depends on the traditional money lender because the nationalised and cooperative banks have simply failed to deliver.  The rules regarding collateral for taking a loan are so stringent and unrealistic that the Tribals simply cannot avail of loans from these banks, which appear to function in a time warp.

Ownership of Anti-Maoist Operations

Pragmatic Euphony brings out a vexed problem that lies at the heart of the Maoist conundrum and has so far defeated all attempts at its resolution. This is the issue of ownership of the anti-Maoist operations. The Centre maintains that law and order is constitutionally a State responsibility and all it can do is to assist, if asked. Thus, as per the constitution, the State governments actually own these operations but, in the public opinion of the country, the ownership rests with the Union Home Minister. This dichotomy has not only led to political recrimination but also hugely differing attitudes between States governed by UPA and those run by parties that are in opposition to the ruling UPA. As the Maoists affect the electoral outcome in these states, the elected state governments [Congress in Andhra Pradesh earlier, JMM-BJP in Jharkhand, the NDA government in Bihar now and a prospective Trinamool-Congress government in West Bengal] are keen to emphasise their primacy in the domain of law and order to avoid any substantive security operations against the Maoists.

The Issue of “Divided” Leadership in CPMF

Gen NS Malik writes that in India, the PMF have been raised on the lines of police forces, manned, trained and officered by them, unlike in other nations. He opines that police officers are not leaders of fighting troops. They can at best be managers and that too, of logistics, for the PMF. Thus, all leading is left to the lower ranks. The Indian Police Service (IPS) leadership comes in only at the level of IG or DG, and that too what he terms as a “rest posting or a filler posting before moving to a plum assignment. This divided leadership is the major cause of poor training and low morale, as nobody seems to be responsible or accountable.

Appalling Intelligence Failures

It is almost mandatory now, for those in authority to be informed of a Maoist strike after their carnage is over and the perpetrators have disappeared. What used to be an extraordinarily vigilant, effective and far sighted police service during British times has now become a sad caricature of itself, much like the perpetually distressed Thompson police duo that provides such comic relief in the Tin Tin capers. The legacy of CPO ineptitude in Intelligence matters has passed on to the CPMF fraternity, and certainly the CRPF, nominated the lead force for combating internal strife, disorder and unrest. Intelligence is all about back breaking assiduous collection of information about the target group, its assimilation, collation, synthesis and, finally, conversion into real time, 24×7, updated and actionable intelligence. The reality is that we have failed in all steps of the Intelligence cycle, with disastrous impact on our ability to combat LWE terror.

Crisis of Capacities

The SATP portal has mercilessly pegged at this point. Notwithstanding the urgent need, the crisis of capacities remains substantially unaddressed within the intelligence, enforcement and administrative apparatus. It is evident, the portal opines, “that there are several State Governments and political constituencies whose heart is not in the CI efforts the Centre is trying to catalyse to meet both Maoist and insurgency challenges. In a parallel article, the redoubtable Ajai Sahni says that the crisis of capacities transcends all fields of Government endeavour. “The disturbing reality”, he says, “is that basic capacities, not just for policing or counter-terrorism, but, indeed, for governance, enterprise and social action, have been allowed to decline to such an extent that the most rudimentary tasks of nation-building, indeed, even of administrative maintenance, cannot be executed with a modicum of efficiency. Perversely, he quotes the example of US democracy which works on the assumption that “the best government is the least government”. Consequently, the US focuses as exclusively as possible on what are considered ‘core functions’ and minimizes engagement in welfare and in activities that can be taken over by the private sector. Perversely, because Sahni rues that here in India, the administrative philosophy in India is the exact opposite, with the Government’s fingers planted firmly in every possible pie. The conclusion drawn is as logical as it is straight line and brutal: even as all shades of opinion as well as Government rues that it is bloated and over staffed, in core areas, it is embarrassingly understaffed, leading to a crisis in capacity where it actually matters.

The Mother of all Problems: Inability to Implement Police Reforms

Even India watchers used to the languid “this will also pass” manner in which official and political India goes about Governance cannot cease to be shocked by the apathy, tunnel vision as well as inability of the Government of India regardless of which party’s government was in power, to implement Police Reforms, even after the Supreme Court has personally got into the act. There is little else that even this apex body can do when the Government of the day exhibits neither will nor vision nor capacity to carry them out. The facts speak for themselves. After waiting for years for the Government to implement them, the Supreme Court of India, in response to a petition filed ironically by a retired police officer, delivered a historic judgment on September 22, 2006, instructing central and state governments to comply with a set of seven directives laying down practical mechanisms to kick-start police reform. The Court’s directives seek to achieve two main objectives: functional autonomy for the police – through security of tenure, streamlined appointment and transfer processes, and the creation of a “buffer body” between the police and the government – and enhanced police accountability, both for organisational performance and individual misconduct.

A summary of the wide ranging directives of the Hon’ble Supreme Court is listed below:

• Separate law and order from investigation.
• Set up a Police Establishment Board at state level for postings and transfers.
• Selection of DGP of the state with a two-year fixed tenure.
• Two-year fixed tenure for IG, DIG, and SP &  SHO.
• Set up National Security Commission for selection and posting of heads of central police organisations.
• Set up police complaints authority at district and state level.
• Set up state security commissions.

The Tribune of July 21, 2010, succinctly sums up the status as on that date as under:

• Not a single state has managed to fulfill all the criteria prescribed by the Supreme Court with regard to the State Security Commission (SSCs).
• Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland are the only states that have adopted the court’s prescribed criteria with regard to the selection, tenure and removal of the Director-General of Police. A few states have only partially incorporated these criteria whilst several states are not compliant with this directive.
• Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and the north-eastern states of Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland are in full compliance with this directive which provides for a fixed tenure for officers on operational duties.
• A majority of states have not fully implemented this directive.
• Most states have established a Police Establishment Board
• No state government has established Police Complaints Authorities at both district and state level that fully comply with the Supreme Court’s orders. Many states have established Authorities which only partially comply with the court’s directive in terms of the composition, mandate and powers.

Sheer Lack of Public Will also a Contributory Factor

The article goes on to say that even if one accepts that there is no political will, what this nation doesn’t have either on the subject is the “public will”. Public will, which is committed public opinion or effective public opinion, is closely linked to political will in a representative democracy like India. The media can play a major role in this agenda-setting process but it has, lamentably, failed to focus on this issue of grave national importance. The article gloomily concludes the only way it could, after making these damning disclosures: “Let it be said then. This nation — the political parties, the government, the media, the judiciary and even the civil society — truly doesn’t give a damn about the safety, security and protection of its own citizens.”

It is worth remembering that one of the important components of police reforms was the introduction of a new Model Police Act. The draft act was submitted to the government in October 2006 but is yet to see the light of day. One key suggestion was the creation of Special Security Zones (SSZ) that ran across state boundaries in affected states. State governments were ordered by an October 2006 Supreme Court edict to create an appropriate police structure and a suitable command control and response system for each such special security zone. This was part of the police reforms and mandated to allow police authority across states to synergise their intelligence, responses, communications and leadership. Nothing, absolutely nothing has happened on this front either.

To be continued in two more parts

next…

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF COMBAT SOLDIERING: WHAT THE CRPF NEEDS TO LEARN AND UNLEARN

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