South Asia Terrorism Portal
Maoists: The Truth Won’t Go Away Ajai Sahni Editor, SAIR; Executive Director, Institute for Conflict Management
Another ritual has been completed. On March 31, 2006, the Directors General and Chief Secretaries, along with other senior police and administrative officials of 13 ‘Naxalite’ (Maoist) affected States in India met with a number of Central Ministers and officials at Delhi to be reminded of the stock phrases and clichés about ‘multi-pronged’ approaches, sharing of intelligence, intensified developmental efforts in affected areas, ‘speeding up’ of long-stalled land reforms, police modernization and strengthening, and above all, the ‘adoption of a collective approach’ and ‘coordinated responses’ by the States. In a slight departure from earlier years, the meeting emphasised that they would be no talks with any Maoist group, state unit or faction, unless they unambiguously gave up arms. Further, it was evident that the Centre continues to extend support to the Salva Judum misadventure, as it was decided that ‘local resistance groups would be trained in self-defence’ albeit, now under greater police protection. For those who had been holding their breath for startling disclosures of a dramatic and comprehensive strategy or policy on the Maoist challenge at this meeting, the effort was altogether wasted. The platitudes articulated at the meeting of the Coordination Centre simply repeated the formulae laid out in the March 13, 2006, ‘status paper’ on the Naxalite problem tabled in Parliament by the Home Minister, and in substance, the Annual Report of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), 2005-2006, released earlier. There is little evidence of any hard design that could help translate these platitudes into an effective strategy and structure of implementation.
There is a deeper infirmity in all this. These various exercises are in continuity with nearly three years of fudging the issue, of underplaying the problem. Thus, at the Coordination Centre meet, emphasis was particularly laid on the fact that, while total fatalities had increased significantly, ‘if Chattisgarh were excluded, the number of incidents and casualties would come down by at least half’, and that while Naxalite violence was on the rise in this one State, ‘the situation in 12 other affected States was by and large under control’.
Such frantic clutching at statistical straws cannot constitute an objective assessment of the magnitude of the threat. It is clear that the decline in Maoist violence in all other affected States, with the exception of Andhra Pradesh – where well-equipped and prepared Police and Paramilitary Forces appear to have been given a clear political mandate to act forcefully against the rebels – is a tactical choice on the part of the Maoists rather than the consequence of any significant State action or initiative, or any dramatic improvement in the strength, effectiveness and capacities of the security apparatus. Indeed, the vulnerability of the security system in these States has been repeatedly and unequivocally demonstrated in a succession of audacious attacks by the Maoists, who have struck at will on targets of their choice. Attacks this year alone have already included the overrunning of the Ramagiri Udayagiri township and jail in Orissa, the ‘hijacking’ of a train in Jharkhand, the murder of a former Member of the Legislative Assembly in Bihar, as well as a number of attacks on Police Stations and Security Forces transports in various States.
Underplaying the Maoist threat is everywhere in evidence in the establishment discourse, and is part of a long tradition within the intelligence and security community, which has sought to propagate the fiction that the Naxalite threat is an ‘internal problem’ that can ‘easily be contained’. This has been an established article of faith, demanding no proof, and has been routinely parroted by senior intelligence and security officials, undeterred by the fact that this ‘easily contained’ problem has refused to go away for over forty years.
In his classic, On War, Clausewitz noted, “The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and Commander have to make is to establish... the kind of war on which they are embarking: neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.” Regrettably, there is little evidence that India’s security establishment has even begun to make this ‘act of judgment’ or display to capacities to arrive at an accurate determination of the nature of the ‘protracted war’ in which the Maoists are engaged, and to which they remain unswervingly committed.
In the meantime, the Maoist threat appears to have overtaken all other insurgencies in the country on available objective parameters – geographical spread and number of fatalities. At least 165 districts in 14 States, out of a total of 602 districts in the country, were affected by various levels of Maoist mobilisation and violence by the end of year 2005. Terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir affects 12 districts, while the combined influence of the multiple insurgencies in India’s Northeast afflicts, in various measures, 51 Districts in India’s Northeast. Over the past years, moreover, while fatalities in various other insurgencies have tended to decline consistently (with the exception of Manipur) fatalities as a result of the Maoist conflict have continuously been augmented. It is useful, in this context, to compare the trajectory of fatalities in the Pakistan-backed ‘jihad’ in Jammu & Kashmir, unambiguously India’s worst problem in terms of fatalities till last year, with the Maoist toll.
Year
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006*
Maoist Data (2002-2005): MHA Other Data: Institute for Conflict Management
*Till March 31
It is useful to see the degree to which the establishment’s ‘act of judgment’ is flawed or distorted by wishful thinking and obfuscation. The Ministry of Home Affairs Annual Report for 2004-2005 noted that the Naxalites had an “assessed strength of around 9,300 hard-core underground cadres”. The MHA’s report for 2005-06 gives no numerical estimate of the armed strength of the Maoists, but noted that “Naxalites continue to focus on fresh recruitment and militarization of their cadres.” Nevertheless, on March 8, 2006, the Union Minister of State for Home, in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha (Upper House of Parliament) stated that the present strength of ‘armed Naxalites’ was “around 7,200”. Where did 2,100 armed cadres go? And if the Maoists’ military strength has been so substantially eroded (by nearly 23 per cent), what explains their rampage across wide and expanding areas of the country?
There is also an apparent effort to equivocate on the rate of expansion of the Maoist influence as well. An official note circulated at a meeting of the Chief Ministers of Naxalite-affected States at Delhi on September 21, 2004, stated that as many as 149 districts in 12 States were variously affected by Naxalite activity. The MHA Report 2005-2006, however, declares that “Parts of 76 districts in 9 States… are badly affected by Naxal violence though in varying degrees.” In addition to the fig leaf of ‘badly affected’, there is also the oft-repeated quibble over the fact that only ‘parts of’ these districts, and not the ‘entire districts’ are, in fact, affected. These ‘parts’ are then defined in terms of numbers of Police Stations affected. Thus the MHA’s report claims that 509 police stations in 11 States were affected by “Naxal violence” in 2005, underlining further that the “Total number of police stations in the country is 12,476”. But this is specious at several levels: first, on the same argument, the entire jurisdiction of these Police Stations is not affected, only parts are under Naxalite influence and activity, and we would need, then, to perhaps further disaggregate to village or household level; moreover, the same arguments applied in the preceding year when the much larger numbers of districts were being enumerated as highly affected, moderately affected, marginally affected and targeted; moreover, the threat of the Naxalites is not limited to the areas of immediate violence, nor does this threat vanish if violence is not manifested at a particular location for a specific period of time. It is in the complex processes of political activity, mass mobilisation, arms training and military consolidation that the Maoist potential has to be estimated. While incidents of violence and fatalities would be crucial in any threat assessment, they cannot exhaust its entire content. The authority of the law and of the state, moreover, is an indivisible; if it is successfully challenged in one location, it is weakened everywhere.
Facts, Aldous Huxley unfortunately reminds us, do not cease to exist because they are ignored – or, one may add, brushed under the carpet. The truth is, the Maoist menace continues to expand, except where it has been confronted by coherent use of force – as is presently and substantially the case in Andhra Pradesh, where area domination exercise under the leadership of the local Police, backed by the armed reserve forces and the Grey Hounds, and a well-developed intelligence network has succeeded in beating back the Naxalites to a large extent, and has forced their leadership into flight. The Andhra Pradesh Police has long prepared for this confrontation and has consistently developed its capacities to engage with the Maoists in their ‘strongholds’, though it has been repeatedly inhibited by political constraints from effective action. These constraints appear, for the moment, to have been lifted.
Other States, however, remain far from prepared. Indeed, a consistent feature across all the major Maoist-affected States is that they have extraordinarily poor policing capacities. As against a national average of 123 police personnel per 100,000 population, and some peaceful States with ratios as high as 760/100,000 (Mizoram) and 602/100,000 in Sikkim, Bihar has just 56, Jharkhand – 74, Chattisgarh and Orissa – 92, and even Andhra Pradesh, just 99 per 100,000 population. Worse, there is ample evidence that large proportions of the Central allocation for police modernisation and upgradation remain unspent or are being diverted or mis-spent.
Great faith has repeatedly been placed on ‘developmental initiatives’ in Maoist-affected regions, and this was again reiterated at the meeting of the Coordination Centre, which emphasised the need for ‘speedy land reforms’ and ‘streamlining the delivery mechanisms for implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme, Bharat Nirman, Backward Districts Initiative and the Prime Minister’s Rural Roads Programme. These exhortations neglect fundamental realities of the ground in areas of conflict, where the delivery mechanisms and administrative machinery of the state cowers under the shadow of violence, with Government officials often paying extortion sums and ‘revolutionary taxes’ to the Maoists. ‘Land reforms’ will have little impact in regions where a red flag on a piece of land conclusively alters its title; and the funds flowing in for various developmental schemes have no channels into the rural hinterland, where only the para-military column dares to venture.
Another aspect of establishment delusion is the faith placed on the capacity of the Constitution’s Article 355 to empower the Centre to generate the adequate and permanent mechanisms for a coordinated counter-terrorism offensive spanning as many as 14 Indian States. Law and order remains firmly a State subject, and the history of coordination between States has been abysmal. Article 355 may give the Centre overriding powers to “protect the States… against internal disturbances”, but this is an emergency power that suffers from all the documented infirmities of Article 356, and will prove more effective in its abuse than in its use. It cannot create the permanent institutional mechanisms required for a protracted war against the Maoists, including the establishment of Central agencies with standing powers to act across State boundaries over extended periods of time, with or without the assent of (potentially politically hostile) State Governments. It is clear that little thinking has gone into the framework of legal and constitutional changes that will be needed to effectively tackle a coordinated insurgency that already afflicts over a fourth of the country.
The Standing Committee of Chief Ministers of Naxalite-affected States is scheduled to meet on April 13, and is to be addressed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The Prime Minister, in the past, has articulated a much clearer message and mission on this issue than any of his Cabinet colleagues, or, indeed, than is evident in the collective voice of his own Government. It remains to be seen whether this exercise continues with the ritualism of the past, or is finally able to define a concrete and implementable agenda for the future. For now, the state has little to congratulate itself on.