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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Limits of People's War by Kanti Bajpai

Analysts have documented in some detail the constraints facing the government: the countryside is vast; the forests help protect the militants; the adivasi population in particular supports them; the hit-and-run tactics of the Maoists keep the security forces off balance; the increasing unification of the various factions makes the movement formidable and not easy to divide and conquer; its access to money and guns is growing as is its political hold over sections of the population; and the government’s forces are poorly trained and equipped, and lacking in leadership.

Confronted by this diagnosis of the Naxalite problem, the government and various security commentators have sounded the alarm. Naxalism does indeed appear to be the biggest internal security challenge that India has ever faced. Against this, however, we must consider the difficulties and constraints faced by the Maoists, in particular the military challenges.

To understand those challenges, we need to remember the broad outlines of people’s war. It depends on a unified movement and creative leadership, committed and intellectually sophisticated cadres, a supply of arms, ammunition and money and, of course, the growing support of the population. In addition, however, people’s war depends on controlling enclaves of territory, breaking out from these enclaves to wider areas, and, more specifically, encircling the cities, which eventually fall to the besieging forces. People’s war does not, in the beginning, take the security forces head-on in battle. It gradually gathers strength to dominate the countryside and starve the cities into submission.

There are several problems facing the Naxalites in achieving this. Let us understand the challenges they face by way of some comparison with China in 1949, when the revolution finally beat the Nationalist forces led by Chiang Kai Shek.

First of all, India today has a much larger urban population than China did, in terms of absolute numbers and in percentage terms. In 1949, China’s cities had a population of about 70 million. This represented 11-12 per cent of the total population. Now India presents a different picture. Its urban population in the 2001 census, a decade ago, was over 280 million, which represented roughly 28 per cent of the population. Ten years later, the figures are higher. India in 2009 has 100 cities with populations of over 400,000 people, and 42 cities have more than one million people. The 11 biggest cities have about 100 million souls. This urban structure is massively dispersed in India — and the bigger, more influential cities are not in the areas of Naxalite strength. To lay siege to these cities will stretch Maoist forces at the best of times hugely, even if they do not attack all cities simultaneously. China’s big cities of the day were small in comparison. Shanghai had a population of five million, which would put it in ninth place in India today, and Beijing had about four million.

The second problem is that the insurgents are relatively safe and secure and can operate with comparative ease in the core areas which are heavily forested and feature deep ravines and rocky, hard-to-access terrain. As long as the Naxalites stay within these mostly adivasi areas in central India and Andhra Pradesh, they are limited in their reach and influence. However, the Naxalites have a rather challenging problem on their hands if and when they choose to emerge from these remote strongholds and, in particular, when they come out into the plains. When they do emerge, they will encounter armed police, paramilitary forces, and perhaps even army units who will enjoy all the advantages. The Indian army in particular will chew them up. The army has fought counter-insurgency in much more difficult terrain as have paramilitary forces. They will operate very effectively in relatively open battle situations. Having said this, the government cannot afford to be complacent. If it waits for the Naxalites to emerge from the remote and forest areas, it will give the militant leadership time to recruit, to train, to unite the factions, to spread the political message, and to refine tactics and strategy. New Delhi must, therefore, continue to disrupt the Naxalites and to force them to stay on the move.

Thirdly, Maoist people’s war is no longer the novelty it was in the 1930s and 1940s. It was a novelty in part because it was improvised and invented along the way, as the civil war in China spread and went through various cycles of victory and defeat for the Communist Party. Since then, Maoists and various military academy strategists have laid bare the nature of people’s war. It has been studied by every professional military of any consequence all over the world, including the Indian army. The tactics and strategy as well as the political education of cadres and of the population are well known. That does not mean it is easy to combat; but it does mean that the broad approach to dealing with it is quite well understood.

If one adds these three constraints together, the military task in front of the Naxalites appears fairly massive. The Indian government, in addition, has political and economic resources that it can deploy to improve conditions in the countryside so that the support base — material, human and psychological — for the insurgents is reduced. The pronouncements of the prime minister, the home minister and the Planning Commission indicate that they are conscious of this. There is a tremendous amount of administrative change that needs attention as well — including police reform.

In spite of everything that has been argued here on the odds against a successful people’s war strategy, there is one card that the movement can play to change the game. If it is able to hollow out the cities from within and foment urban disaffection and violence even as rebellion in the countryside deepens, then one of the biggest hurdles to a Maoist victory will have been rattled if not toppled. The government must pay attention to conditions in the cities as well, and to the possibility of organized armed groups waiting to strike at a moment of crisis.

The Naxalite militancy has certainly grown, and it reflects the disaffection primarily of adivasis in the central belt of India. While there are formidable obstacles in the way of a successful people’s war, the government should use this strategic lull to understand the sources of the simmering anger and violence. New Delhi need not panic, but it cannot afford to ignore the plight of millions of unhappy Indians. Policing Naxalism is not the government’s strongest card. Its strongest cards are development, justice and empowerment.
 
The author teaches at Oxford University