Eye for an eye makes the whole world blind?
Praful Bidwai
Khaleej Times, 3 June 2006
The government of Chhattisgarh in central India is about to launch a massive military operation against Naxalites with more than a dozen paramilitary battalions under the supercop and former Punjab police chief KPS Gill.
The operation has been called the ultimate knockout punch to the Naxals. The CRPF will be assisted by commandos from Mizoram trained in counter-insurgency operations by United States troops in a decade-old programme.
Gill’s strategy involves gathering reliable intelligence on the Maoists’ hideouts, and hitting them hard "in a sudden and well-coordinated attack", so they can’t "regroup and retaliate". The plan also entails evacuation of tens of thousands of people from forests.
This thoroughly ill-conceived operation will further brutalise Chhattisgarh’s Adivasis and violate the law of the land without being particularly effective against the Naxalites. The operation is a sequel to a "people’s campaign" called Salwa Judum (peace hunt) launched last year by the government, which has all but triggered a civil war in parts of Chhattisgarh. Salwa Judum (SJ) targets the Naxalites for violent attacks. Its members comprise wealthy Adivasis, traders and contractors. SJ is the creation of Congressman Mahendra Karma, known as "the 60th member of BJP CM Raman Singh’s cabinet".
A group called Independent Citizens’ Initiative, comprising scholars, former civil servants and activists, recently inquired into SJ’s activities. ICI’s report makes disturbing reading. It shows that SJ is not the claimed "people’s spontaneous movement". It’s a government-sponsored organisation, with an armed wing of 3,200 Special Police Officers.
The Chhattisgarh government, says ICI, has "outsourced" law-and-order to this "unaccountable, undisciplined and amorphous group". SJ has been forcing tribals to take up arms against the Naxalites-or be beaten up, illegally fined, or have their homes burnt down. SPOs are meant to work under the authority of the state police. But in Chhattisgarh, the police has ceded all power to the SJ’s lumpens.
SJ’s violent operations have turned the tribal belt into a virtual war-zone. Adivasis are forced to fight the Maoists. Scores of villages have been evacuated. Officially, 46,000 people have been forced into so-called relief camps. According to ICI, the number is closer to 70,000.
ICI has found evidence of killings, the burning of homes, and attacks on women, including gang-rape. There are arbitrary arrests and several people seem to be missing. The press is tightly controlled and intimidated.... SJ is guilty of recruiting even minors as SPOs — a breach of the Geneva Conventions and of several covenants on child rights.
Worse, an attempt is also underway to break up tribal communities into the equivalent of strategic hamlets which the US created in Vietnam. This model isn’t as far-fetched as might appear. Last fortnight, two US Embassy officials met the Chhattisgarh chief secretary to offer ‘assistance’ in fighting Naxalites. Although the government hasn’t accepted the offer, it’s following the same approach to insurgencies that the US favours.
Ostensibly, the UPA government advocates a "two-pronged" strategy: deal sternly with Naxalite violence; but address the sources of discontent underlying it through development programmes. In reality, the government has concentrated on the "modernisation" of police forces, deployment of paramilitary troops, and use of lethal weaponry. Most of the Rs 2,475 crores committed to India’s 55 worst Naxalite-affected districts has been earmarked for police-paramilitary operations. Very little has gone into development funding. According to ICI, relief camp conditions are "seriously inadequate".
The government is obsessed with using force. This springs from a ‘thanedar’ mentality: coercion is the most effective way of dealing with social discontent. This approach fails to understand that Naxalite activity has spread to some 160 of India’s 600 districts because of agrarian distress, destruction of forests by the timber mafia, uprooting of Adivasis due to predatory mining, irrigation and metallurgical projects, and rapidly growing disparities.
It’s no surprise that more than two-thirds of the 55 most severely Naxalite-affected districts lie in the tribal belt. In state after tribal state, the Adivasi economy has been squeezed. Millions of Adivasis have ceased being an agricultural people and lost the organic historical links with land, forests and water.
More generally, Naxalite activity has grown year after every single year because of India’s jobless growth, which benefits only a tenth of the population. Naxalism’s spread is extremely rapid in areas in which the state has withdrawn from public services and become predatory. It’s hard to defend the violent justice that many Naxalite groups readily hand out to their enemies. However, the problem cannot be resolved by coercion, especially Salwa Judum-style lawless use of force. This cannot but further alienate Chhattisgarh’s Adivasis. Each time an innocent tribal is brutalised and separated from his/her means of livelihood, a Naxalite sympathiser is created.
Gill is a votary of coercion. A great myth about him is that he effectively, and yet lawfully, crushed the Punjab insurgency. His methods were lawless: torturing suspected militants, harassing their families, deploying unnumbered jeeps, and killing hundreds of those merely suspected to have harboured Khalistanis. The National Human Rights Commission has just authenticated the judicial finding that almost 2,000 people were cremated without identification in a single year in Punjab. Clearly, Gill has a lot to answer for. In a more just society, he would be tried for crimes against humanity. The Khalistani movement died not because of Gill’s brutal methods, but because its militants antagonised the people.
By relying on the Mizo contingents trained in "counter-insurgency", and more generally, on brute force, Gill will visit even more violence than SJ on Chhattisgarh’s people. He must be stopped in his tracks. The Centre must radically revise its Naxalite strategy and open a dialogue with Maoist groups.
If the Manmohan government can hold repeated talks with Kashmiri and Naga separatists, there is no earthly reason why it cannot talk to non-secessionist groups which voice the people’s grievances. The Naxalites have a history of 39 years. They represent something in this society. It just won’t do to try to crush them by force.
Copyright 2006 Khaleej Times
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