Maoism, a Recalcitrant Citizenry and Counterinsurgency Measures in India
| DOI | 10.1177/2347797014551266 |
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Maoism, a Recalcitrant
Citizenry and
Counterinsurgency
Measures in India
Bidyut Chakrabarty
Abstract
India has unfriendly neighbours and yet there is hardly a significant external
threat since the 1999 Kargil war involving Pakistan. What is dubbed as the biggest
internal security threat to India is the left-wing-extremist movement that has
spread to the majority of the Indian provinces in recent years. Also identified
as the Maoist insurgency, it has ideologically inspired a large section of India’s
tribal population who, so far, remain left out from the mainstream politics. This
is not merely a law-and-order problem, as was usually construed by the major
security agencies in the past, but an outcome of the India’s planned development
strategies which failed to bring about uniform economic growth cutting across
regions. Left-wing extremism is thus a contextual response to historical wrongs
that the Indian state has committed by being indifferent to the poverty-stricken
masses around the country. This is now recognized by the policy makers in India,
who seem to have evolved an appropriate strategy by seeking to fulfil, on a pri-
ority basis, the basic human requirements of the disempowered sections of the
population. The article thus argues that the threat to India’s internal security is
far more complex and cannot thus be addressed meaningfully by coercion alone;
it requires a well thought out pro-people socio-economic programme, which
needs to be applied regardless of class, clan and creed.
Keywords
Salwa Judum, red terrorism, red corridor, national-democratic revolution,
democratic socialism, displacement, forest rights
Article
Journal of Asian Security
and International Affairs
1(3) 289–317
2014 SAGE Publications India
Private Limited
SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi, Singapore,
Washington DC
DOI: 10.1177/2347797014551266
http://aia.sagepub.com
Bidyut Chakrabarty, Department of Political Science, Delhi University, Delhi, India.
E-mail: bidyut@polscience.du.ac.in
Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs, 1, 3 (2014): 289–317
290 Bidyut Chakrabarty
Introduction
On 25 May 2013, Maoists ruthlessly ambushed a convoy carrying people for elec-
tion campaign through the forests in the district of Bastar in Chhattisgarh, which
resulted in the killing of 25 individuals, including some of the top leadership of
the Congress Party. The main target was Mahendra Karma, who was brutally
killed in the attack for having created an armed civilian vigilante group, known as
Salwa Judum, in the state comprising the tribal youth who are familiar with the
terrain, dialect and the local population. Furthermore, this was also Maoist retali-
ation against the government combing operation in the so-called Maoist districts
in West Bengal, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh, in which a large
number of Maoists, including some top leaders, were recently gunned down.
What motivated the Maoists in undertaking such a lethal attack on India’s security
forces was a heart-felt long-drawn desire of revenge against the creator of the
armed vigilante Salwa Judum and also to demonstrate their capacity to strike in
the so-called red corridor. Hence, the May 2013 Maoist guerrilla ambush is char-
acterized as ‘a piece of the larger phenomenon of the violence of the oppressed
which is always preceded and provoked by the violence of oppressor’.1
This is thus not a stray incident given the fact that Maoism is an ideologically
charged political design to seize power in India. Spreading over 16 Indian states
running through the centre of the Indian hinterland from the Nepal–Bihar border
to the Karnataka–Kerala borders, Maoists, by being involved in their daily
struggle for existence, appear to have developed organic roots among the people
in this area. As an anonymous police source confirms, some 19,000 square kilo-
metres in the region is ‘a free zone’ where the Indian state had ceased to exist and
no government official dares to enter, and in the so-called red corridor, not only
do the insurgents run parallel government, they also politically indoctrinate the
local habitat to sustain and also expand their ideological appeal.2 In the context
of large-scale land acquisition by industrial houses in what is a mineral-rich
region, especially in the district of Dantewada, Bastar and Bijapur in Chhattisgarh,
the Maoist violent response seems to be a natural outburst. Even the government
report confirms the mass-scale displacement of the local people due to ‘the big-
gest grab of land after Columbus’ which was initially ‘scripted by Tata Steel and
Essar Steel who want seven villages or thereabouts each to mine the richest lode
of iron ore available in India’.3 The result was disastrous, as a local tribal who
lost his small piece of land graphically illustrates by saying that before the land
acquisition he had a source of sustenance which was complemented by the forest
produce, a life line for thousands like him in the Bastar forests. With the transfer
of land to private operators, he now became ‘a daily wage contract labourer who
remains without food if there is no work’.4 This story is typical of Dandakaranya
area where thousands of tribals feel deprived in their own land where there was
a clear deficit of governance in view of the excesses, perpetrated by private
money lenders and junior government functionaries in the revenue and forest
departments.
To continue reading
Request your trial