Talking of talks

Since they are waging a “protracted people’s war through the barrel of the gun”,Maoists will persist in eliminating their enemies. That came from arrested senior CPI (Maoist) leader Narla Rabi Sharma,as reported in this newspaper on Sunday. If that were not alarming enough,there is also the sophisticated organisational structure and resourcefulness of the Maoists — from elaborate vertical hierarchies and concentric divisions of activity to funds to state-of-the-art weapons to their presence in so many districts in so many states of the Indian Union where they not only offer socio-economic “services” but also engage in large-scale indoctrination in the tenets of their violent creed. They move in quietly,begin their propagandist onslaught,entrench themselves,start recruiting,and then embark on mining roads,blowing up bridges,railway stations,schools,raiding police stations for kidnapping or killing police personnel and looting arms. Their funds and arms come from diverse sources,but of particular concern must be the levies or fines that corporate and industrial giants pay the Maoists to carry on with their economic and industrial operations which are nevertheless anathema to the Naxals.

That such insurgents would dismiss Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram’s crystal-clear,three-word appeal “Halt the violence” does not surprise. To the home minister’s call for an end to Maoist violence and the Union government’s offer of facilitating talks between Maoists and state governments on “all matters” — including land acquisition,industrialisation,development and forest rights — the CPI (Maoist) retorted that laying down arms would be a “betrayal of people’s interests” and that an agreement might be possible if the Centre abandoned its “illogical”,“obstinate” stand that Maoists abjure violence. Of course,technically,the Naxals were not being asked to lay down arms — their doing so is too fantastic to even imagine — but the insurgents leave no doubt through this response that they are nothing but cynical terrorists exploiting those they claim would be betrayed if they stopped killing their “enemies”.

The home minister had recently made a bold attempt to intellectually challenge Maoist ideology even as his security forces battle the extremists. Now,albeit expectedly,they have rejected his simple appeal. There’s no harm in “talking” to Maoists per se,but since they never seem to be in the mood to merely talk,counter-insurgency operations against them must continue full-force. The ultimate and foolproof solution to the Maoist threat is the end of it — and to that end the Indian state must progressively reclaim territory currently in their control and establish the rule of law therein.