Opinion The Enemy Within
THE Naxalite movement is at last raising serious alarm. This is a movement that has been around for over 40 years ever since Charu Mazumdar raised the banner in Naxalbari....
THE Naxalite movement is at last raising serious alarm. This is a movement that has been around for over 40 years ever since Charu Mazumdar raised the banner in Naxalbari. A generation of young idealist middle-class youth in the late 1960s was lost as it abandoned its studies and joined the pied pipers of the Maoist revolution. Then there was a reaction and after much police action,the movement seemed to have died down. Now with the beheading of a police officer,it seems India is waking up to the Naxalite problem.
For too long there has been a complacent attitude regarding fighting these forces. There has been sentimentality for the Maoists Left attitudes. After all,it seems if you can live with the CPI and the CPM comfortably,the CPI-ML is only a slightly distant cousin and soon these idealistic people will come to their senses and start fighting elections. The roots of the love for the Left go back decades into Indias colonial past. Jawaharlal Nehru was seduced by the charms of the USSR after he attended an anti-Imperialism conference in Brussels in the late 1920s Then in the mid-1930s,Stalin launched the Popular Front,which made the Leninists seem like mild reformers. Much sentimentality about Leninists originates since then. The Congress has a soft attitude about things modishly left,which is why even as the Maoists murder and intimidate,there are the usual clichés that we need development as well as force to defeat the Maoists.
India has not been similarly soft on any other internal challenges to its integrity. Neither in Jammu and Kashmir nor in any of the disputes in the North EastNagas,Mizos,Bodos has the Indian State relaxed its vigilance. Yet,more security personnel have been lost against Naxalites than in J&Kbetween 2005 and 2007,401 against the Naxals as against 370 in J&K. Somehow,the Naxals are seen as misguided or harmless or even basically right in what they wish to achieve but only wrong in their means.
Of course,the way to think about the Naxals is that they are terrorists as much as the mujahiddeen who cross the frontier in Kashmir or the ten who attacked Mumbai on 26/11. The issue,which is at stake,is not development but security. If we dont think that Ajmal Amir Kasab attacked Mumbai because it was underdeveloped then that shouldnt be the argument in the Naxals case.
The sentimentality about Leninism is quite overdone. Leninism has never been sympathetic to democracy regardless of the reformed behaviour of the CPI and the CPM. In principle,Leninism distrusts democracy of any kind. If there is to be electoral participation,that is only a stage to the final victory. Nor is development ever the goal of these movementspower is. India can have development and reach the poor better by using democratic methods as it has done for many decades. There is no need to be apologetic about the achievements of inclusive growth in this respect,especially since 1991. Of course,the problem in the Naxal areas is that the democratic process has failed to include the tribal communities. The way the lower castes and the Dalits have taken to ballot box politics by forming their own parties and competing for the fruits of office for their clients has not spread to the many tribal people in the belt from Bihar and Jharkhand up to Andhra Pradesh. It is a failure of political parties,which have not recruited these arid hilly area communities.
I do not expect the big partiesCongress,BJP or CPI/CPMto be able to do this. But there ought to be numerous political formations of the Lalu-Mulayam-Mayawati type,which can take on the system and win their place at the table where the goodies are being shared out. The orderly administrative processes of development policy do not work as well as the messy political process does.
The primary task is a military defeat of the anti-democratic Naxal forces much as one would do with the terrorists. That will create room for the local people to use politics the way the rest of India has done.
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