India’s deadly Maoists,
The Economist, 26 July 2006
Police in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh say they have killed eight Maoist rebels, the latest deaths among hundreds in a long insurgency that now affects nearly a third of the country’s districts “THE single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country,” is how Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, in April described its Maoist rebels, known as “Naxalites”. Many were taken aback: a violent insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir has claimed tens of thousands of lives; its north-eastern states are wracked by dozens of secessionist movements; and its cities have been subject to repeated terrorist atrocities—culminating in this month’s bomb attacks in Mumbai, which killed nearly 200 people.
Compared with such well-known horrors, the Naxalite threat is low-key, insidious, and, to the city-dweller, largely invisible. Yet it now affects at least 170 of India’s 602 districts: a “red corridor”, running from the Nepali border in the north to the state of Karnataka in the south. It takes in some of the poorest parts of India, and in particular forests inhabited mainly by tribal peoples. In some places Naxalites have, in effect, replaced the state, running local affairs through their own councils, and administering their own rough justice. The Indian government estimates that the Naxalites, heirs to a 40-year old movement that splintered and then united in 2004, now have some 10,000 armed fighters, and a further 40,000 full-time supporters.
They have also executed ever-larger military operations: attacking trains, arranging jail-breaks and, most recently, arranging a co-ordinated attack on a police station, a paramilitary base and a resettlement camp for people displaced by the conflict. In one attack, on July 17th, some 800 Naxalites were involved, and more than 30 people were killed—mostly hacked to death with axes.
That came in Dantewada, a remote, forested, dirt-poor and sparsely populated district in the south of Chhattisgarh state. Dantewada has become the main focus of the war with the Naxalites, following the emergence in the district, a year ago, of an anti-Maoist movement, known as Salwa Judum. This is usually translated as meaning “peace march” in the local language, Gondi, but is perhaps closer to “purification drive”. Portrayed as a spontaneous response to Maoist exactions, Salwa Judum is now—and many say always has been—an arm of the state, where about 5,000 local tribal people have been armed as “special police officers”, and pitted against the Naxalites.
As part of this campaign, villages have been emptied, supposedly in order to protect the residents from the Maoists, but often, in practice, in order to root out Maoist sympathisers. Another aim may have been to provoke the Maoists into violent retaliation, and so lose them local support. The result has been a bloody local war in which at least 350 people have so far lost their lives, and nearly 50,000 are holed up in relief camps, with little prospect of being allowed back to their villages, and harbouring well-founded anxieties about the state’s ability to protect them.
A huge swathe of Dantewada, where no roads penetrate the forest, remains outside the government’s control. There, the Maoists are well-entrenched. Nearly 60 years after independence, the Indian state has still failed to deliver to these parts even rudimentary development: roads, schools, health-care. A big iron mine in the district employs mainly outsiders and pollutes a river. It is easy to see why a crude, violent ideology, discredited even in its homeland, might take root, and why Mr Singh might be right about the Naxalite threat. Other terrorists attack the Indian state at its strongpoints—its secularism, its inclusiveness and its democracy. Naxalism attacks where it is weakest: in delivering basic government services to those who need them most.