Maoist Insurgency Rocks India

The Indian society is suffering from simmering religious and ideological dissensions that have the potential to jeopardize the economic development of the country. Moreover these fissures area reflection of betrayal of secular character of Indian polity. The successors of the founding fathers have failed to accommodate the legitimate grievances of diverse communities inhabiting India. In late May 2009 the Naxalites (Maoists) took up arms against the communist government in West Bengal and threw out the police personnel occupying the Lalgarh police station. The state operation started in early June to regain control of the area involved police repression in the form repression in the form of alleged torture, illegal detention and arbitrary arrests. The Maoist leader claimed in a recent interview the mass Naxalite movement in 2009 aimed at creating a ‘liberated zone’ and that they ‘will have an armed movement going in Calcutta by 2011’.

The genesis of the Maoist insurgency in India lies in the peasants’ movement and the agrarian discontent. The movement began in March 1967 when a group of revolutionaries led by Charu Majumdar launched an uprising at Naxalbari, a small village of West Bengal, after a hapless tribal youth was attacked by local landlords over a land dispute. In its early stages the movement had its center in West Bengal but now it has spread into less developed areas of rural Central and Eastern India such as Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh. Now The Maoists have a presence in 40 per cent of India’s geographical area and are especially concentrated in a region commonly known as ‘Naxal belt’ comprising 92000 square kilometers. In 1969 the Naxalites organized themselves into the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). The CPI (Maoists) was formed in 2004 with the merger of two prominent Naxalite outfits, the People’s War Group (PWG) and the Maoist Communist Center (MCC). In the early 1970s, the movement seemed to be reaching the peak of its influence with the creation of vast guerrilla zones. Some years later the movement was split into several opposing factions. By 1980 it was estimated that around 30 Naxalite groups were active, with a combined membership of 30 000. A 2004 home ministry estimate put numbers at that time as "9,300 hardcore underground cadre… [holding] around 6,500 regular weapons beside a large number of unlicensed country-made arms". The Naxalite infrastructure includes sophisticated weapons such as Kalshanikov rifles and Claymore landmines, modern wireless equipment and electronic gadgets.

Today some groups have started participating in parliamentary elections while others are determined to continue with their guerrilla armed struggles. The government of India has declared above 200 districts out of total of 620 as the ‘Maoist-infested’.

In recent attacks during the last two months the Maoist rebels killed almost 110 policemen in Chhattisgarh. The Indian PM Manmohan Singh has described the Maoist uprising as ‘the biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country’ as several states, like Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, are facing terrible internal insurgency by Naxals. The writ of the state has been given a serious blow in Lalgarh area where the Maoist People’s Committee is in full control of everyday affairs. The Maoists in Chhattisgarh recruit adolescent girls as a stepped-up drive to increase the membership of the women’s wing. They also induce minor children to join their cause as it is easier to brainwash them and infuse their minds with extremist ideology.
The security experts have dismissed the view that the insurgency is just a law and order issue. Political exclusion and socio-economic underdevelopment lay beneath the estrangement of the peasants. The vicinities in which the Naxalites operate are in dire need of economic development and rural elevation. The local villagers view the new development with suspicion as they are not sure whether the economic benefits will accrue to them. The majority of the populace considers economic projects simply an excuse for ‘rapacious developers’ to seize land from farmers without adequate compensation.

The Naxalite rebellion has serious implications for India’s energy security as the affected areas have vast coal reserves required for industrial boom of India. The media reports suggest the five states in which the movement is the strongest account for 85 per cent of the coal reserves. The toll in Naxal related violence was 231 in 2008. The Indian government has so far formulated no concrete plan to deal with the Naxal problem. The political parties do not seem reluctant to appease the Maoists for the sake of votes. The Central government passes the buck of responsibility for fighting such elements to the states and the latter lack financial resources, trained forces as well as the weaponry to suppress the insurgents.

The Maoists claim to be fighting on behalf of the rural poor and the landless peasants. They justify their actions as the political program to overthrow the Indian state, comprising the big landlord-comprador, bureaucratic, bourgeoisie classes and the imperialism that backs them, through armed struggle and establish a people's democratic state under the leadership of the proletariat. It states that the principal and immediate task of the present stage of the revolution is to arouse and organize people for agrarian revolutionary guerrilla war in the countryside - specially in the remote countryside - and to build the people's army and a rural base through guerrilla warfare.

The unfortunate civilians are also victims of insurgency because of brutal, forced membership campaigns. In many states, the private armies and vigilante groups have been sponsored by the government to counter the Maoists. Tens of thousands of civilians have been displaced by the fighting between Maoists and counter-insurgents. In one of the worse affected states, Chattisgarh, over 40,000 tribal people have been moved to the inadequate government camps.

The security forces engaged in anti-Naxalite operations are convinced that the CPI (M) is steadily building up a wider network involving associates in neighboring countries. The wider strategic motive of the Maoist rebels is to carve out a Compact Revolutionary Zone (CRZ) spreading from Nepal through Bihar up to the Danakarnaya region of Andhra Pradesh. Prakash Singh , former Director General of Border Security Force(BSF), is of the view that the successive Union governments have mooted multi-pronged solution to resolve the problem but without any concrete result on the ground. The government authorities must show their commitment to implement land reforms, weed out corruption and provide people just and responsive governance in order to deprive the insurgents of their fodder. The Central Government of India has been planning to set up National Security Guards (NSG) hubs all over the country to promptly respond to terrorism but no strategy has been outlined to train state police force to confront the Maoist threat.
The Naxalite leadership is certain that the newly launched operation of the government would not make much difference on the ground situation in the 12 States where the organisation has varying degrees of influence.

A middle-level leader of the party, opined that this assessment was based mainly on three factors. One, the strike power of the party has increased considerably in the past year. Two, the socio-economic problems that have contributed to the steady growth of the party have only accentuated in vast parts of the country, especially in the rural, tribal and forest regions where Naxalite influence is the most conspicuous. Three, in the background of the above-mentioned factors, the government's intelligence gathering would not be effective. All this, the leader said, would make the planned operations a non-starter.