A few days later, the Army Chief told his senior officers to ‘be mentally prepared to step into the fight against Naxalism…. It might be in six months or in a year or two, but if we have to maintain our relevance as a tool of the state, we will have to undertake things that the nation wants us to do.’32
By August, newspapers were reporting that the on-again-off-again air force was on again. ‘The IAF [Indian Air Force] can fire in self-defence during anti-Maoist operations’ the Hindustan Times reported.33 An unnamed source told the Indo-Asian News Service, ‘The permission has been granted but with strict conditionalities. We cannot use rockets or the integral guns of the helicopters and we can retaliate only if fired upon … To this end, we have side-mounted machineguns on our choppers that are operated by our Garuds (IAF commandoes).’ That’s a relief. No integral guns, only side-mounted machineguns.
Maybe ‘six months or in a year or two’ is about as long as it will take for the brigade headquarters in Bilaspur and the air base in Rajnandgaon to be ready. Maybe by then, in a great show of democratic spirit, the government will give in to popular anger and repeal AFSPA, the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (which allows non-commissioned officers to kill on suspicion), in Manipur, Nagaland, Assam and Kashmir. Once the applause subsides and the celebration peters out, AFSPA will be recast, as the home minister has suggested, on the lines of the Jeevan Reddy report (to sound more humane but to be more deadly).34 Then it can be promulgated all over the country under a new name. Maybe that will give the armed forces the impunity they need to do what ‘the nation’ wants them to do—to be deployed in parts of India against the poorest of the poor who are fighting for their very survival.35
Maybe that’s how Comrade Kamla will die—while she’s trying to bring down a helicopter gunship or a military training jet with her pistol. Or maybe by then she will have graduated to an AK-47 or a light machine gun looted from a government armory or a murdered policeman. Maybe by then the media ‘available to the Services’ will have ‘managed’ the perceptions of those of us who still continue to be ‘misguided’ to receive the news of her death with equanimity.
So here’s the Indian State, in all its democratic glory, willing to loot, starve, lay siege to, and now deploy the air force in ‘self-defence’ against its poorest citizens.
Self-defence. Ah, yes. Operation Green Hunt is being waged in self-defence by a government that is trying to restore land to poor people whose land has been snatched away by Commie Corporations.
When the government uses the offer of peace talks to draw the deep-swimming fish up to the surface and then kill them, do peace talks have a future? Is either side genuinely interested in peace? Are the Maoists really interested in peace or justice, people ask; is there anything they can be offered within the existing system that will deflect the Maoists from their stated goal of overthrowing the Indian State? The answer to that is probably not. The Maoists do not believe that the present system can deliver justice. The thing is that an increasing number of people are beginning to agree with them. If we lived in a society with a genuinely democratic impulse, one in which ordinary people felt they could at least hope for justice, then the Maoists would only be a small, marginalized group of militants with very little popular appeal.
The other contention is that Maoists want a ceasefire to take the heat off themselves for a while so that they can use the time to regroup and consolidate their position. In an interview, Azad was surprisingly candid about this: ‘It doesn’t need much of a common sense to understand that both sides will utilize a situation of ceasefire to strengthen their respective sides.’36 He then went on to explain that a ceasefire, even a temporary one, would give respite to ordinary people who are caught in a war zone.
The government, on the other hand, desperately needs this war. (Read the business papers to see how desperately.) The eyes of the international business community are boring holes into its back. It needs to deliver, and fast. To keep its mask from falling, it must continue to offer talks on the one hand, and undermine them on the other. The elimination of Azad was an important victory because it silenced a voice that had begun to sound dangerously reasonable. For the moment at least, peace talks have been successfully derailed.
There is plenty to be cynical about in the discussion around peace talks. The thing for us ordinary folks to remember is that no peace talks means an escalating war. Over the last few months, the government has poured tens of thousands of heavily armed paramilitary troops into the forest. The Maoists responded with a series of aggressive attacks and ambushes. More than 200 policemen have been killed.37 The bodies keep coming out of the forest. Slain policemen wrapped in the national flag; slain Maoists, displayed like hunter’s trophies, their wrists and ankles lashed to bamboo poles; bullet-ridden bodies, bodies that don’t look human any more, mutilated in ambushes, beheadings and summary executions. (Of the bodies being buried in the forest, we have no news.) The theatre of war has been cordoned off, closed to activists and journalists. So there are no body counts.
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On 6 April 2010, in its biggest strike ever, in Dantewada the Maoists’ People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) ambushed a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) company and killed seventy-six policemen.38 The party issued a coldly triumphant statement.39 Television milked the tragedy for everything it was worth. The nation was called upon to condemn the killing. Many of us were not prepared to—not because we celebrate killing, nor because we are all Maoists, but because we have thorny, knotty views about Operation Green Hunt. For refusing to buy shares in the rapidly growing condemnation industry, we were branded ‘terrorist sympathizers’ and had our photographs flashed repeatedly on TV like wanted criminals.
AT AN AGRICULTURAL FAIR, A STYROFOAM MODEL PROMOTES MINING UTOPIA. We’re watching a democracy trying to eat its own limbs. And those limbs are refusing to be eaten.
What was a CRPF contingent doing, patrolling tribal villages with twenty-one AK-47 rifles, thirty-eight INSAS rifles, seven self-loading rifles, six light machine guns, one Sten gun and one 2-inch mortar?40 To ask that question almost amounted to an act of treason.
Days after the ambush, I ran into two paramilitary commandos chatting to a bunch of drivers in a Delhi car park. They were waiting for their VIP to emerge from some restaurant or health club or hotel. Their view on what is going on involved neither grief nor patriotism. It was simple accounting. A balance sheet. They were talking about how many hundreds of thousands of rupees in bribes it takes for a man to get a job in the paramilitary forces, and how most families incur huge debts to pay that bribe. That debt can never be repaid by the pathetic wages paid to a jawan, for example. The only way to repay it is to do what policemen in India do—blackmail and threaten people, run protection rackets, demand pay-offs, do dirty deals. (In the case of Dantewada, loot villagers, steal cash and jewellery.) But if the man dies an untimely death, it leaves the families hugely in debt. The anger of the men in the car park was directed at the government and senior police officers who make fortunes from bribes and then so casually send young men to their death. They knew that the handsome compensation that was announced for the dead in the 6 April attack was just to blunt the impact of the scandal. It was never going to be standard practice for every policeman who dies in this sordid war.
Small wonder then that the news from the war zone is that CRPF men are increasingly reluctant to go on patrol. There are reports of them fudging their daily logbooks, filling them with phantom patrols.41 Maybe they’re beginning to realize that they are only poor khaki trash—cannon fodder in a rich man’s war. There are thousands waiting to replace each one of them when they’re gone.
On 17 May 2010, in another major attack, the Maoists blew up a bus in Dantewada and killed about forty-four people.42 Of them eighteen were special police officers (SPOs), members of the dreaded government-sponsored people’s militia, the Salwa Judum. The rest of the dead were, shockingly, ordinary people, mostly adivasis. The Maoists expressed perfu
nctory regret for having killed civilians, but they came that much closer to mimicking the State’s standard ‘collateral damage’ defence.
At the end of August the Maoists kidnapped four policemen in Bihar and demanded the release of some of their senior leaders. A few days into the hostage drama, they killed one of them, an adivasi policeman called Lucas Tete.43 Two days later they released the other three.44 By killing a prisoner in custody the Maoists once again harmed their own cause. It was another example of the Janus-faced morality of ‘revolutionary violence’ that we can expect more of in a war zone, in which tactics trump rectitude and make the world a worse place.
Not many analysts and commentators who were pained by the Maoist killing of civilians in Dantewada pointed out that at exactly the same time as the bus was blown up by the Maoists, in Kalinganagar in Orissa and in Balitutha and Potko in Jharkhand, the police had surrounded several villages and had fired on thousands of protestors resisting the takeover of their lands by the Tatas, the Jindals and Posco (the Pohang Iron and Steel Company). Even now the siege continues. The wounded cannot be taken to hospital because of the police cordons. Videos uploaded on YouTube show armed riot police massing in the hundreds, being confronted by ordinary villagers, some of whom are armed with bows and arrows.
The one favour Operation Green Hunt has done ordinary people is that it has clarified things to them. Even the children in the villages know that the police works for the ‘companies’ and that Operation Green Hunt isn’t a war against Maoists. It’s a war against the poor.
There’s nothing small about what’s going on. We are watching a democracy turning on itself, trying to eat its own limbs. We’re watching incredulously as those limbs refuse to be eaten.
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Of all the various political formations involved in the current insurrection, none is more controversial than the CPI (Maoist). The most obvious reason is its unapologetic foregrounding of armed struggle as the only path to revolution. Sumanta Banerjee’s book In the Wake of Naxalbari is one of the most comprehensive accounts of the movement.45 It documents the early years, the almost harebrained manner in which the Naxalites tried to jump-start the Indian Revolution by ‘annihilating the class enemy’ and expecting the masses to rise up spontaneously. It describes the contortions it had to make in order to remain aligned with China’s foreign policy, how it spread from state to state and how Naxalism was mercilessly crushed.
Buried deep inside the fury that is directed against the CPI (Maoist) by the orthodox Left, and the liberal intelligentsia, is their unease with themselves, and a puzzling, almost mystical protectiveness towards the Indian State. It’s as though, when they are faced with a situation that has genuine revolutionary potential, they blink. They find reasons to look away. Political parties and individuals who have not in the last twenty-five years ever lent their support to, say, the Narmada Bachao Andolan or marched in solidarity with any one of the many peaceful people’s movements in the country, have suddenly begun to extol the virtues of non-violence and Gandhian satyagraha. On the other hand, those who have been actively involved in these struggles may strongly disagree with the Maoists—they may be wary, even exasperated by them—but they do see them as a part of the same resistance.
It’s hard to say who dislikes the Maoists more—the Indian State, its army of strategic experts and its instinctively right-wing middle class, or the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), usually called the CPM, the several splinter groups that were part of the original Marxist-Leninists or the liberal Left. The argument begins with nomenclature. The more orthodox Communists do not believe that ‘Maoism’ is an ‘ism’ at all. The Maoists in turn call the mainstream Communist parties ‘social fascists’ and accuse them of ‘economism’—basically, of gradually bargaining away the prospect of revolution.
Each faction believes itself to be the only genuinely revolutionary Marxist party or political formation. Each believes the other has misinterpreted Communist theory and misunderstood history. Anyone who isn’t a card-carrying member of one or the other group will be able to see that none of them is entirely wrong or entirely right about what they say. But bitter splits, not unlike those in religious sects, are the natural corollary of the rigid conformity to the party line demanded by all Communist parties. So they dip into a pool of insults that dates back to the Russian and Chinese revolutions, to the great debates between Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, to Chairman Mao’s red book, and hurl them at each other. They accuse each other of the ‘incorrect application’ of ‘Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought’, almost as though it’s an ointment that’s being rubbed in the wrong place. (My earlier essay ‘Walking with the Comrades’ landed directly in the flight path of this debate. It received its fair share of entertaining insults, which deserve a pamphlet of their own.)
Other than the debate about whether or not to enter electoral politics, the major disagreement between the various strands of Communism in India centres on their reading of whether conditions in the country are ripe for revolution. Is the prairie ready for the fire, as Mao announced in China, or is it still too damp for the single spark to ignite it? The trouble is that India lives in several centuries simultaneously, so perhaps the prairie, that vast stretch of flat grassland, is the wrong analogy for India’s social and political landscape. Maybe a warren would be a better one. To arrive at a consensus about the timing of the revolution is probably impossible. So everybody marches to their own drumbeat. The CPI and the CPM have more or less postponed the revolution to the afterlife. For Charu Mazumdar, founder of the Naxalite movement, it was meant to have happened thirty years ago. According to Ganapathy, current chief of the Maoists, it’s about fifty years away.
Today, forty years after the Naxalbari uprising, the main charge against the Maoists by the parliamentary Left continues to be what it always has been. They are accused of suffering from what Lenin called an ‘infantile disorder’, of substituting mass politics with militarism and of not having worked at building a genuinely revolutionary proletariat. They are seen as having contempt for the urban working class, of being an ideologically ossified force that can only function as a frog-on-the-back of ‘innocent’ (read ‘primitive’) jungle-dwelling tribal people who, according to orthodox Marxists, have no real revolutionary potential. (This is not the place, perhaps, to debate a vision that says people have to first become wage-earners, enslaved to a centralized industrial system, before they can be considered revolutionary.)
The charge that the Maoists are irrelevant to urban working-class movements, to the Dalit movement, to the plight of farmers and agricultural workers outside the forests is true. There is no doubt that the Maoist party’s militarized politics makes it almost impossible for it to function in places where there is no forest cover. However, it could equally be argued that the major Communist parties have managed to survive in the mainstream only by compromising their ideologies so drastically that it is impossible to tell the difference between them and other bourgeois political parties any more. It could be argued that the smaller factions that have remained relatively uncompromised have managed to do so because they do not pose a threat to anybody.
Whatever their faults or achievements as bourgeois parties, few would associate the word ‘revolutionary’ with the CPI or the CPM any more. (The CPI is involved in a struggle against the Posco plant in Orissa. But it is only demanding that the plant be relocated.) Even in their chosen sphere of influence, they cannot claim to have done a great service to the proletariat they say they represent. Apart from their traditional bastions in Kerala and West Bengal, both of which they are losing their grip over, they have very little presence in any other part of the country, urban or rural, forest or plains. They have run their trade unions into the ground. They have not been able to stanch the massive job losses and the virtual disbanding of the formal workforce that mechanization and the new economic policies have caused. They have not been able to prevent the systematic dismantling of wor
kers’ rights. They have managed to alienate themselves almost completely from adivasi and Dalit communities. In Kerala, many would say that they have done a better job than other political parties, but their thirty-year ‘rule’ in West Bengal has left that state in ruins. The repression they unleashed in Nandigram and Singur, and now against the adivasis of Jangalmahal, will probably drive them out of power for a few years. (Only for as long as it takes Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress to prove that she is not the vessel into which people should pour their hopes.) Still, while listing a litany of their sins, it must be said that the demise of the mainstream Communist parties is not something to be celebrated. At least not unless it makes way for a new, more vital and genuinely Left movement in India.
The Maoists (in their current as well as earlier avatars) have had a different political trajectory. The redistribution of land, by violent means if necessary, was always the centrepiece of their political activity. They have been completely unsuccessful in that endeavour. But their militant interventions, in which thousands of their cadre—as well as ordinary people—paid with their lives, shone a light on the deeply embedded structural injustice of Indian society. If nothing else, from the time of the Telangana movement, which, in some ways was a precursor to the uprising in Naxalbari, the Naxalite movement, for all its faults, sparked an anger about being exploited, and a desire for self-respect in some of India’s most oppressed communities. In West Bengal, it led to Operation Barga (sharecropper) and, to a far lesser extent, it shamed the government in Andhra Pradesh into carrying out some land reform. Even today, all the talk about ‘uneven development’ and ‘exploitation’ of tribal areas by the prime minister, the government’s plans to transfer joint forest management funds from the Forest Department directly to the gram panchayats, the Planning Commission’s announcement that it will allocate 140 billion for tribal development, has not come from genuine concern: it has come as a strategy to defuse the Maoist ‘menace’.46 If those funds do end up benefiting the adivasi community, instead of being siphoned away by middlemen, then the ‘menace’ surely ought to be given some credit. Interestingly, though the Maoists have virtually no political presence outside forested areas, they do have a presence in the popular imagination, an increasingly sympathetic one, as a party that stands up for the poor against the intimidation and bullying of the State. If Operation Green Hunt becomes an outright war instead of a ‘sub-conventional’ one, if ordinary adivasis start dying in huge numbers, that sympathy could ignite in unexpected ways.
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