New chief ministers harbour delusions. That is the iron law of politics. Take Andhra Pradesh’s Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy. After he notched that famous election victory of last May, he was convinced that he could actually rid the state of the decades-old Naxalite terror by engaging in a dialogue with the red brigade. As a surety of his good intentions, he allowed them to appear at his table, bearing arms and shouting slogans. As an indication of his boundless sympathy for them, he allowed them to mow down his police personnel and spread terror around. And still he spoke of dialogue.Fortunately for him, his interlocutors have chosen to end the charade. Their emissaries have just made it known that the CPI (Maoist) — the newly-refurbished grouping formed by the merger of the PWG and MCC — considers the entire dialogue process “a farce” in the face of “fake encounters” and “combing operations”. The AP chief minister must now cut his losses. Both his party and his government have paid a price for its dalliance with the Naxalites. The perception has grown that the Congress party had entered into a secret compact with them in order to come to power, which had in turn accounted for the studiously “soft approach” towards them that the Reddy government had adopted from the outset.Now that this strategy has backfired so spectacularly, the chief minister should urgently address himself to the business of ensuring that his writ runs through the state, even in the so-called “liberated” regions where Maoist goon squads have carved spheres of influence in some of the poorest regions. This calls for tough security measures coupled with effective administration. The influence of Naxalites in any region is in inverse proportion to the quality of governance therein. The state, through its sheer apathy and incompetence, has handed over vast stretches of the hinterland to them. It now needs to reassert itself through employment generation, development projects, access to education, health facilities and credit, coupled with effective security. The peace talks were just a distraction, a dangerous one at that.
