Join the Naxal dots

For North Block, Madhuban may as well be on another planet. The Union home ministry’s responses to the curious incident that shook this small Bihar town on the Indo-Nepal border last week was so tame, so tepid, it could have been a teddy bears’ picnic. In actual fact, it was another signal that this country has got a serious problem of Maoist extremism on its hands and has no credible response to it. The impunity which marked the Madhuban raid that Maoists — possibly from Nepal — conducted, also indicates how emboldened they have become in recent times in the face of a comatose state.

For some reason the UPA government suffers from great inhibitions when it comes to taking on the Naxals. Many of its stalwarts even appear to have a sneaking ideological empathy for them. The state seems to be endlessly postponing the moment of decisive action, opting instead for fantasies like the peace dialogue the Andhra Pradesh government had experimented with a year ago, only to emerge with a bloody nose. The forces who are really consolidating in the meanwhile are the Maoists themselves. Not only have the Maoist Communist Centre and the People’s War Group merged — and emerged with their powers of perpetrating damage considerably enhanced — Maoists today have a presence in almost every state. Apart from the red corridor running from Nepal almost uninterruptedly through to AP, states like UP, Uttaranchal, West Bengal and Sikkim, by virtue of straddling the porous 1,751 km border between Nepal and India, have been sites of Naxal growth.

This demands an intelligent response from the Centre that goes beyond the confabulations and the sipping of endless cups of tea that meetings of the grandiosely named ‘Central Coordination Committee of Naxalite-affected States’ entail. This august body has met innumerable times but their expertise has not made any palpable difference — and least of all in the jungle hideouts of these brutal and faceless cadres.