:: Nihal Singh

Talk to Maoists, but also show who’s boss

S. Nihal Singh

Oct.29 : By staging the cop drama in West Bengal, the Maoists have shown that apart from holding territory and causing mayhem, they can take on the government in the game of public relations. For weeks, the Union home minister, P. Chidambaram, has been spreading one message, that Maoists are murderers and the sympathy the urban intelligentsia has for the Maoist cause is misplaced.

Even as the government was wrestling with the Maoists’ new tack, they administered another blow: the hijacking of the Rajdhani train. As if on cue, they freed the briefly detained drivers and the passengers were left unharmed. The Maoists were saying louder than words that they were making a political point, that they were fighting for a cause and were not always bloodthirsty.

Mr Chidambaran’s mission has been to take head on the theory that rural development and tackling Maoists can go hand in hand, dismissing it as a romantic concept. His point is stark and simple: How can you build roads and dig wells when the state does not control the territory? On the other hand, the Maoists often subvert the system by taking cuts from contractors on development schemes.

The Maoists perhaps went overboard in parading the kidnapped cop as a prisoner of war, seeking to place their guerrilla movement on par with the military and police authority of the state. But the West Bengal chief minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, had mud on his face by swapping the cop for alleged Maoist sympathisers in a murky deal, which, he later explained, was an exception, not the rule.

The muddled thinking of the Maoists was in full display by their representative mouthing all the clichés in the 20th century handbook of the Communists — railing against the straw men of corporations, alleging that India is playing a subservient role to the American establishment. Mr Bhattacharjee says he will continue to fight the Maoists, but the irony is that his party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), is itself living in a time warp, often regurgitating the clichés of a bygone age abandoned by much of the Communist world.

How the Indian Communists of various stripes can reconcile themselves to the successors of the fathers of the revolution, the Russians, having abandoned the creed and the Chinese becoming the most avid capitalists by flaunting the images of Stalin in one case and of Mao Zedong in the other is best left to them to explain. The Maoists, of course, aim to emulate the example of their Nepalese confreres to achieve power, first by sharing it and then proclaiming their goal of a one-party state.

Putting aside recent dramatic developments, the important point to debate is: How did the Indian state find itself in its present predicament, with large areas in the country, particularly those inhabited by tribals and backward classes, under Maoist control? Several factors have gone into the making of the Maoist menace, characterised by the Prime Minister as the greatest internal threat to the country. They range from the erosion of the credibility and integrity of the civil service, the neglect of large parts of the country denied basic development, schooling and healthcare and the compulsions of industrialisation, often at the cost of the poorest and the most deprived.

There are no simple answers because good governance cannot be suddenly produced on order and the political system in the states, particularly in the Hindi belt, has been plunging such low depths of mendacity and politicking that law and order functions are often reduced to selective justice. What offers some hope for the future is Mr Chidambaram’s clear enunciation of the problem, his efforts to give police and paramilitary forces the equipment and training they need and seeking better co-ordination between the Centre and the states and among the states themselves.

The West Bengal decision to do a deal with the Maoists to secure the release of the kidnapped cop has been a setback to the Centre’s efforts because they undercut the philosophy behind New Delhi’s new resolve. Instead of painting Maoists into a corner by exposing them as ruthless men and women seeking power by the force of guns, they were given prime-time television news channels’ exposure to demand further concessions of the authorities as equal actors in the drama.

Mr Chidambaram has let it be known that he does not expect the Maoists to give up their arms; his only condition to holding talks with them is that they desist from using force either to murder people or to destroy state property. There is little expectation of the Maoists accepting these terms and they seem set to exploit the weaknesses of the authorities. They give primacy to incidents of wrong and scandalous conduct of the police forces, often poorly trained and equipped and still psychologically living in the era of the British Raj.

Among the great failures of successive governments has been the inability to undertake serious police reform. Mr Chidambaram complains that police officials are treated as a political football. Indeed, one of the most depressing aspects of a new chief minister taking office is to witness the callousness with which he or she undertakes the wholesale transfer of police, and civil service.

It is well recognised that force alone cannot resolve the Maoist problem. Indeed, the success or otherwise of Mr Chidambaram’s new initiatives will lie in a judicious mix of force with persuading the Maoists and the wider public to create a climate for meaningful talks.

The new government offensive to depict the Maoists in their true colours as murderers of civilian and security personnel is one aspect of the programme. The other is effectively to confront Maoists in their strongholds by expanding the successful Andhra model.

Human rights activists and dissenters are the lifeblood of a democracy and it is right that voices should be raised against high-handed acts of the authorities. But their contention that the government must talk to Maoists on their terms is impractical and would be demeaning for any self-respecting government. While there might be some idealists joining the Maoists today, the bulk of their members are men and women seeking power through the destruction of the state.

To hear the terms in which Maoists proclaim their ideal state is to revert to the Utopia promised by Lenin and destroyed in the very act of applying it to one relatively backward state, instead of initiating it in a highly industrialised country. Stalin proved that the Communist creed could be effectively used as a ruthless instrument of ruling a one-party state.