The Maoist mess-up

It boils down to providing basic governance

NIRUPOM SOM
The Statesman, July 30

An illuminating article on the Communist Party of India (Maoist) entitled “Crimson Corridor” by Mr Jagmohan appeared in this newspaper on 2-3 April, 2007. I am sure officers and men of the Indian police, now encountering the extremists all over the country, will be much encouraged by it because some of them have a feeling that they are not really fighting with the Maoists but messing with them. The article was very enlightening to a retired member of the police service like me who as Superintendent of Police, Howrah, and Midnapore and thereafter as DIG, Intelligence Branch, West Bengal had tackled the same Left-wing extremists, then called Naxalites, in the sixties and seventies. During which time many of them were ideological dreamers and qualitatively much different from their present-day brethren. They were fewer in number, much less organised, and had hazy and confusing ideas about the course of the intended revolution. They were also discouraged by their leader, Charu Mazumdar, from using sophisticated weapons for liquidating class enemies though they had a fair quantity of firearms looted from the police camps of Magurjan and Rupaskundi on the ground that this would breed eliticism for whatever that may mean.
The current triumphant phase of Left-wing extremism in India can be said to have taken off when the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), also known as People’s War Group (PWG) and the Maoist Communist Centre of India (MCC) merged to form the Communist Party of India (CPI-Maoist) at some undisclosed place in the liberated zone. The merger was announced on 14 October 2004 by Ramakrishna, the state secretary of the PWG, Andhra Pradesh, while Muppala Lakshman Rao alias Ganapati was declared in a subsequent press release as general secretary of the party. The central committee of the party formed after the merger circulated five documents of which one entitled “The Party Programme” declared that the ruling classes in India had transformed the country into a prison house of nationalities under the slogan of unity and integrity of the country. The party pledged unconditional support to the ongoing nationalities’ struggles including armed struggles for coming out of such a prison. The party thus proclaimed its support to the unrest in the north-eastern states.
Another document titled “The strategy and tactics of the Indian Revolution” is really an elaborate exposition of Maoist principles of guerrilla warfare. Considering that according to the report of the Intelligence Bureau, Government of India, 40 per cent of the geographical area is within the liberated zone and 35 per cent of the population are in that zone, Maoism has apparently more followers in India than in China. A clear goal of capturing state power in India through the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army and in the final stage by the People’s Liberation Army has removed all doubts and confusion of the seventies.
The twin concept of Compact Revolutionary Zone (CRZ) and the Red Corridor are by now familiar terms. There is, however, no dependable estimate on how many of India’s 12,476 police stations are under Maoist control. However, according to an official note circulated at a meeting of the chief ministers of Naxalite-affected states in Delhi on 21 September 2004 as many as 149 districts in 12 states were admitted as being variously affected by Maoist activity. Regarding the approximate strength of hard-core underground cadres, while home ministry’s annual report 2004-05 puts the strength at 9,300, the union minister of state for home in a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha on 8 March 2006, put the strength at 7,200. He did not explain how with an approximately 23 per cent erosion of strength, the Maoists are committing violent acts in an ever-expanding area of the country.
I often feel amazed when I come across reports on the modernisation of Maoist armoury, notably their firepower and ability to detonate explosives from long distances. In the sixties and seventies, I had seen their ideological brethren liquidating their class-enemies with nothing more lethal than a knife, sword and shovel in the rural areas and with pipe-guns in the urban areas. In the current phase, the Maoist raid on Orissa’s Koraput district armoury ~ incidentally the first armoury raid in free India and second in the country after Chittagong in 1919 ~ on the NMDC stores at Hirauli in Dantewara district in Chattisgarh and on the Home Guard Training Centre at Giridih in Jharkhand have been audacious. The looting took place on a gigantic scale and involved huge quantities of sophisticated weapons, such as AK-47 rifles, LMGs, carbines, grenades, INSATS 9mm pistols, ammunition, more than 50 tons of ammonia nitrate ~ and without suffering any casualty. Going by intelligence reports, the Maoists in many states have engaged experts on substantial monthly salaries for working on the designs of anti-tank rocket launchers. In Andhra Pradesh, they possess the technology to manufacture claymore mines and detonate them from a distance of five km making use of the US-made Icon ICV8 wireless sets. In March 2006, the police arrested the Maoist electronic and communications expert, Nimmala Anji Reddy, at Akkannapet railway station. It was revealed that the Maoists had for a long time been listening to police communications through wireless sets manufactured by their own experts. Similar information was obtained by the Jharkhand police when they arrested another Maoist electronics expert, Shyam Sinku, near Jamshedpur in June 2006. The seizure by the Andhra police on a single day of 600 unloaded rockets, 275 unassembled rockets, 27 rocket launchers and 70 gelatine sticks from two districts of Mahabubnagar and Prakasam clearly indicate that the Maoists have been taking great pains to outstrip the fighting power of the security forces pitted against them.
How has the soil of the world’s largest democracy become so fertile for the growth of such virulent Left-wing extremism? The answer, according to one analyst, is that while other terrorists attack the Indian state at its strongest points ~ its secularism, its inclusiveness, its democracy ~ the Maoists attack state power where it is the weakest: in delivering basic services to those who need them most.
Mr Jagmohan has in his article presented some of the social indicators revealing a pretty dismal picture. Possibly it is Amartya Sen who has said somewhere that had Rabindranath or Gandhiji been alive today, they would have certainly felt the need for a far greater urgency to remove the grinding poverty and a far greater commitment of the government to that effect. In a state like Chhattisgarh, a third of its 21 million inhabitants are aborigines belonging largely to the Gond tribe. A typical description of the Bastar forest area runs thus: “In the tiny dirt-poor villages scattered through the forest, the Indian state is almost invisible. In one there is a hand-pump installed by the local government, but the well is dry. There are no roads, water pipes, electricity or telephone lines. In another village a teacher does come, but in the absence of a school, holds classes outdoors. Policemen, health workers and officials are never seen.”
The Chhattisgarh government has sought to bring a better life for its people by signing multi-crore deals for the setting up of steel mills and power stations. Conditions are hardly better in Jharkhand or in the districts of southern Orissa. No wonder all these areas are in the Compact Revolutionary Zone. These areas and their people require bijli-pani and sarak and some land for cultivation if they are peasants, and jobs if they are artisans or have passed out from school. But who will provide them with such basics?

Unlike the planning model formulated by the Pakistani economist, Prof Mahbub-ul-Haque, who believed in an indirect attack on mass poverty, India’s Planning Commission believes in the trickle-down effects of a fast growth rate. The results are there for all to see. Many states, including West Bengal, are cheerfully spending days and months even years in preparing the BPL list. And yet it is this state that had produced Harekrishna Konar and Benoy Chowdhury who had realised that in a village a person had no izzat unless he owned some land, however small the area, and had made full use of the administrative machinery to protect the rights of the tillers.
I have reports that both Bihar and Jharkhand have thousands of acres of vested and Bhoodan land, but the governments are in no hurry to distribute them among the landless. At present, the undertaking of development projects in the Compact Revolutionary Zone will be fiercely resisted by Maoists. And if we believe KPS Gill, adviser to the government of Chhatisgarh, even if new roads are built the local people will be too scared to use them. We may, therefore, be driven to conclude with Mr Ajay Sahani of the Institute of Conflict Management that “there is absolutely no set of economic initiatives on the horizon that can give prosperity, dignity etc to 810 million people in rural India”.

Faltering steps

While mounting audacious jailbreaks, looting armouries and killing policemen performing duty in CRZ were going on, the concerned state governments were initially groping in the dark for lack of proper intelligence and taking faltering steps to formulate an effective counter-insurgency strategy. These states till then had not only failed to spruce up their administration within the existing limitations, but their police personnel/per 100,000 population was much below the national average. Regarding the morale and professional ability, the president of the Jharkhand Police Association has lamented that “Naxalites are a dedicated cadre who move fearlessly with a do-or-die motto: policemen are here to do a job and take home their salaries”.
In Bihar, there are complaints that hundreds of police stations and outposts, in extremist-afflicted districts, make do without a boundary wall or the minimum infrastructure. The Centre’s modernisation grants are lying unspent instead of being utilised for anti-insurgency measures.
However, matters have started falling into shape especially after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Independence day speech in 2006 when he declared terrorists and Naxalites as the biggest threat to security. Since then the home ministry has been pressing the Maoist-affected states for adopting a multi-pronged approach, including sharing of intelligence and joint operations in the border areas. About 30 CRPF battalions have been placed at the disposal of these states and a special combat force of 14,000 men is being raised. In another speech on 13 April this year, the Prime Minister once again reminded the chief ministers of the affected states of the urgent necessity of going flat out against the Maoists.
According to Col (retd) Hariharan, counter-insurgency analyst of MI, India is perhaps the only country in the world, which from practically the first day of her independence has been waging insurgency and fighting it as well. Therefore, it has enough expertise to handle both operations. His first warning ~ a point also mentioned by Mr Jagmohan ~ is that politicians must stop entering into a secret understanding with Maoists to garner electoral advantage. They must also stop repeating cliches like Maoists are our errant brothers even when policemen are being killed by them. Such actions and utterances not only embolden the Maoists but also make the law-enforcement officers think again on the relevance of their operations. He also suggests proper coordination at the national level with the Centre issuing clear policy guidelines on all core issues. I do not think such an ideal position has been reached so far considering that some states ban the CPI(Maoists) and some do not. West Bengal has set up its anti-Maoist camps close to the Jharkhand border, but Jharkhand has positioned such camps not along the border but far inside ~ behind the undulating terrain of jungles giving the Maoists a safe passage to flee from West Bengal.
An important point raised in Hariharan’s article is that a proposal to enact a special law dealing with those believing in violence should be critically examined as a measure of dispensing criminal justice rather than as a political issue. An oft-quoted saying of Mao is that revolution is no dinner party. If so, fighting a revolution cannot also be a gentleman’s game and some of its essential prerequisites are superior intelligence collection, adaptation of pre-emptive and preventive measures and formation of anticipatory disaster plans. To destroy by force the constitutionally-established government in India and to seize state power is for the Maoists articles of faith. The police force that is set against them faces a war-like situation. Two cases have been mentioned in Hariharan’s article to prove that normal courts cannot provide enough protection to a force dealing with the Maoists. The first is the Srikakulam conspiracy case against Naxalites which ended in acquittal of all the accused after 10 years of trial as the court demanded additional proof of conspiracy although the accused had visited to Beijing to seek Chinese support for their revolution.
The other case reported by Mr PS Rammohan Rao, who incidentally was DGP, Andhra, when I was DGP, West Bengal, is a joint trial of 30 Naxalite accused, some of whom always managed to come out on bail, go underground, plead illness or just did not turn up in court. While the trial continued for 13 years and a half, many witnesses were liquidated.
There are several democratic countries that have armed themselves with the power of preventive detention while dealing with outfits ~ both of the Left and the Right ~ that believe in the cult of violence. In the sixties and seventies when the Naxalites were indulging in violence on a scale much limited than their present-day brethren, the Centre had enacted MISA for preventive detention. In April 2000, the Law Commission recommended the enactment of such a law to deal effectively with all terrorist outfits. Hopefully, the Centre will soon be convinced of the need for such legislation in order to strengthen the hands of the police against the Maoists. Though the Centre has failed to provide the lead, the Chhattisgarh government has already enacted such legislation in the form of the Special Protection Act that authorises preventive detention.

Ulfa affairs

As for the future of the Maoist movement in India, once the governments, both at the Centre and in the states have in the language of Clausewitz established the kind of war on which they have embarked, they must not betray the kind of vacillation that marks dealings with the Ulfa. The government must leave the details of operations in professional hands. The Indian police, I am sure, will rise to the occasion as it did in the seventies and succeed in containing the Maoists. After all, despite the Red Corridor and CRZ, the Maoist power base remains on the margins of Indian society. During the past 40 years, they have been able to do precious little towards their avowed goal of destroying the country’s democratic polity. In the neighbouring countries there are powerful forces operating with the same objective. I do not know if India’s intelligence agencies have any information if such forces are helping the Maoists. After the arrest of Maulana Naseruddin for the murder of Gujarat’s former home minister, Haren Pandya, the Naxalites in Andhra Pradesh publicly supported Dasaragh-e-Jehad-e-Shadat’s demand for his unconditional release. It is too early to predict future developments.


A retired IPS officer, the author is former Commissioner, Kolkata Police, and DGP, West Bengal.