Among the security problems that dogged the latest general election, none was perhaps as widespread as that posed by the so-called Naxal menace. The Naxalite movement under various garbs and names today straddles nine states running north to south through parts of Bihar, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. There were several clashes, abductions, landmine blasts, casualties and infractions, not all of them necessarily reported by the media.It is amazing that there has been a longstanding conspiracy of silence virtually across the political spectrum with regard to a deep-rooted problem that simply will not go away. Mindless Naxalite violence is truly reprehensible. But state repression without tackling the causative factors has only spawned a vicious cycle of violence and reprisals that has spread regionally.Unrest and anger has been sparked by harshly iniquitous agrarian relations leading to a struggle for land and forest rights against caste and feudal oppression. The victims are uniformly at the bottom of the social heap, Dalit and tribal landless, bonded labourers and sharecroppers, whose lives revolve around hunger, usury, extreme deprivation and perpetual uncertainty. There are laws to ameliorate their condition. But on the ground, the harvest has too often and for too many been one of grief and tears.The courts are all but out of reach; for it is a tedious and tortuous road to justice, with many pitfalls and unbearable expenses, delays and appellate hurdles along the way. How many can stay the course? How long? To the helpless, the gun offers hope.The response is to crush the Naxalites. In truth, there has been an insufficiency of sincerity and sustained efforts to right these ancient wrongs. Tribal communities feel wronged by what they see as usurpation of customary forest rights to timber. Elsewhere, largely though not exclusively in permanently settled areas, land records, tenancy rights and agrarian relations remain in a shambles in the aftermath of zamindari abolition and the fiasco of land ceilings.In Andhra, a distinguished Committee of Concerned Citizens under the leadership of S R Sankaran, a former IAS officer, has sought to bring about a just resolution since 1997, without success. Its third report (December 2002) notes that between 1968 and 2000, almost 2,000 persons were killed in encounters in the state. The Committee saw the movement ‘‘as essentially an expression of the peoples’ aspirations to a life of dignity and self-respect’’. It deplored that official encouragement to vigilante groups and the shifting by the state leadership of its political burden to the police had resulted in targeted and custodial killings.The demands of the CPI(M-L) Peoples’ War Group include elimination of social discrimination in all its forms, implementation of land reforms, land distribution, the review of certain tribal regulations and rural employment. A 1998 PWG circular noted that occupation of lands belonging to landlords and the government had intensified since 1990 as part of a revolutionary land-to-the-tiller movement. Landlords had run away from the villages, selling their abandoned fields to rich and middle farmers under police protection. Thus ‘‘a contradiction’’ had arisen ‘‘between purchasers of the land and the oppressed people trying to cultivate the land’’. The impasse continues despite mediatory efforts and face-to-face meetings between PWG representatives and the government.Bihar represents another sad case of failure to update records of rights and implement agrarian laws. More than 30 years ago, a Home Ministry study warned that green acres would turn red if ameliorative measures were not implemented urgently. The landless and sharecroppers face harsh feudal harassment and eviction at the hands of post-zamindari intermediate and upper-caste beneficiaries of the incipient green revolution. There have been periodic pogroms and explosions of violence as caste armies wage war, with the law and order machinery being summoned to maintain the established order. West Bengal alone mounted Operation Barga and took other measures to enforce tenancy rights.Dispossessed and alienated cohorts are being attracted to the Naxalite ‘‘cause’’ in the absence of anywhere else to turn. Tribal communities too seek protection from impervious administrations and forest contractors. The inexorable pressure of growing numbers cannot be ignored. The situation has reached alarming proportions and requires a concerted national effort directed at agrarian and forest reform (which undivided Madhya Pradesh attempted in part) and the generation of more non-land-related rural employment with access to credit and markets for self-help groups undertaking homestead and contract farming. Roving fast-track land settlement courts, with no more than a single time-bound appeal, and the computerisation of updated land records thereafter must be considered and NGOs brought into play to assist the process.The election of a Congress government in Andhra, the endorsement won by the RJD in Bihar, the BJD-BJP alliance in Orissa, and the BJP in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, and the installation of a new administration at the Centre, all of them committed to agricultural development and rural employment, suggests a good time to begin an honest dialogue with ‘‘the wretched of the earth’’ and to launch a consensual programme of national rural regeneration.
