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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The red heart of India

The red heart of India

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published Published on Nov 6, 2009   modified Modified on Nov 6, 2009

A DOZEN men, women and boys, some no older than 15, milled about their rough tents as twilight fell in a remote forest clearing. Some were in lungyis and T-shirts; others wore fatigues, with bolt-action Enfield rifles slung on their shoulders and bandoleers around their waists.

Comrade Vijja, a burly man with a bottlebrush moustache, sat with some of his troops around a cooking fire, sipping sweetened tea. He sounded a defiant note in the face of a massive assault the Indian government plans to launch against him and his comrades this month. “We are fighting a protracted people’s war,” he says of India’s Maoists. “No matter how many troops you send here, we will not be defeated, because we have the people’s support in this war.”

Comrade Vijja commands his squad of Maoists from hideouts in Bijapur district of Chhattisgarh state, one of the deadliest theatres of the insurgency. The road to this Maoist heartland winds through the thick jungles of the Bailadila hills, past a series of “liberated villages”.

In 2006 Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, called this insurgency the country’s “biggest internal security threat”. At the time, his words seemed shocking. But the Maoists, known as Naxalites, after the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal where the movement started four decades ago, have since expanded their reach. They are now active in 22 of India’s 28 states, up from nine in 2004. They have the run of a “red corridor” through much of the eastern and central part of the country. They speak grandiosely of surrounding the cities and someday overthrowing the government in Delhi.

After years of neglect, the Indian government is planning a huge military confrontation with the rebels. “Operation Green Hunt” is to send paramilitary troops to Maoist-affected states like Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, augmenting the forces already there. In all, as many as 100,000 troops may be involved. They will bring armour, minesweepers and possibly even unmanned aerial vehicles, to kill or capture 20 rebel leaders and to flush out their estimated 12,000 fighters.

The government is also trying to rally public opinion against the rebels. “Naxals are nothing but cold-blooded murderers,” screams a half-page advertisement in Chhattisgarh’s newspapers. The government-paid message features gruesome photos of bloodied youngsters.

As the government intensifies its campaign, human-rights groups argue that the problem cannot be solved by brute force. They warn that the military effort will only exacerbate violence in the long run. Rajendra Sail, an activist with Chhattisgarh’s People’s Union of Civil Liberties, says the Maoists’ support comes mainly from India’s indigenous tribal groups, who see themselves suffering at the hands of the rich and are displaced by industrialisation. The governments of mineral-rich states have signed lucrative deals with multinationals to build steel mills and power stations. But according to Mr Sail, the economic benefits of these deals never trickle down to the affected villagers. Indeed a government-sponsored committee in 2008 found that most of the Naxalites are tribals and dalits—the people once called “untouchables”, at the bottom of the Hindu caste system. Together these groups make up a quarter of India’s population.

The burgeoning middle class has seldom viewed the Maoists as a real threat to the country. But more frequent and brutal attacks in recent months have sharpened minds, prompting debate over how the Naxalites should be treated. Last month Palaniappan Chidambaram, India’s home minister, offered the main Maoist body a place at the negotiating table, in exchange for a ceasefire. His offer was refused.

Counter-insurgency efforts have met little success. In 2005 Chhattisgarh’s state government set up Salwa Judum, an anti-Naxalite militia, and armed it with guns, spears and bows and arrows. But as violence between the Maoists and state-sanctioned gangs has escalated, tens of thousands of tribal people have been forced to flee their homes. Brigadier B.K. Ponwar, the director of Chhattisgarh’s Counter-Terrorism and Jungle Warfare College, says the enemy is no longer a ragtag militia. It is now one of the world’s biggest and most sophisticated armed extreme-left movements.

In September police in Delhi captured a top Naxalite ideologue, 58-year-old Kobad Ghandy, a London-educated accountant. He had lived underground since the 1970s, becoming a senior member of the Naxalites’ policy-making body, the Politburo. Mr Chidambaram says that Mr Ghandy is part of a clandestine urban intelligentsia that works on behalf of the Maoists through front organisations.

Brigadier Ponwar calls this “a politico-military-socio-economic-psychological war”. But he judges that “military action must be the engine of this effort.” Rebel attacks have been growing more audacious and more lethal. Often equipped only primitively, Maoists strike in large numbers to overwhelm their targets. Attacks on police stations, hijackings, and Taliban-style beheadings are on the rise. In 2008 the fighting killed 721 people and this year looks worse. Last month a band of about 200 Naxalites killed 17 policemen in a pitched gun battle in Maharashtra state. More than 700km (440 miles) away, in West Bengal, a Maoist-backed militia hijacked a train carrying 1,200 passengers and held it for six hours.

From his jungle hideout, Comrade Vijja says his forces are preparing for the looming government offensive by training local villagers to chase away the army “the way you chase away a pack of elephants”: guerrilla-style, hit-and-run, with arrows, machetes and, where possible, guns and bombs. “In the past, they have sent several contingents of elite forces. They burned down villages and killed innocent civilians, but they could not stamp us out,” he says. “What makes them think they will succeed this time?”

The Economist, 5 November, 2009, http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14820724&source=hptextfeature
 

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