:: Editorial

Fight Naxals with guns and butter

Sept.22 : The usual media stories about the Naxalites, who go under various acronyms in different parts of the country, are depressing to read. Typically, in central India’s tribal belt, which includes the states of Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Jharkhand, fringes of Maharashtra, Bihar and West Bengal, and Chhattisgarh, well-armed Naxal brigades kill the innocent (usually the poor who do not join them, or a local notable), attack government property and public institutions, and eliminate policemen, some times in open confrontations or through the use of landmines and improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Usually the authorities are found helpless in these situations and little protection can be afforded to ordinary folk residing in Naxalite-ravaged zones. So, there was a bright spot last Friday when in Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh CRPF commandos, coordinating with the state police, tactically engaged the so-called Maoists in thick jungles that had hitherto not been penetrated, killed a number of them, unearthed an arms factory, and seized a stockpile of sophisticated weapons.

The regions in which Naxals are active are ungoverned spaces, not unlike parts of the world where groups like the Taliban operate. Road and rail links are absent, and signs of development few. Ordinary people live in dread of the desperadoes and generally do their bidding for there is no government to come to their aid. It is therefore in the fitness of things that the parts of the Dantewada forests where the uniformed men took on the so-called Maoists are not relinquished. Indeed, tactics incorporating military means and developmental activity is the long-awaited imperative if these regions have to be freed from the clutches of the "people’s brigade’.

The Naxalites of the present generation who terrorise the poor to gain control of territory are not Robin Hoods. They are neither revolutionaries nor bandits of the kind that Hobsbawm wrote about. The fire of idealism and romanticism that drove misguided young men and women — many from backgrounds of privilege — 40 or 50 years ago to take up arms "in defence of the poor", and revolt against an indifferent state power, has ceased to burn. In many cases, Naxalites now are mixed up with destructive elements such as Islamist militants, the LTTE, and the underground operatives of the Northeast. Their stock-in-trade are weapons and drugs. They are terrorists, not political ideologues. A democratic state cannot but take them on — militarily, politically and ideologically. Having said this, the same state also needs to be interrogated for its lethargy and its aversion to drawing the poorest in the country into the arc of development. The Naxalites feed on the poverty syndrome and revel in conditions of underdevelopment which permit them to ply their trade unmolested. In order to contest them convincingly, the state must carry the fruits of progress to the ordinary people. There is a curious absence of a meaningful reference to this in observations made from on high. The Prime Minister and the Union home minister typically refer to the Naxalites as the country’s biggest internal security threat. That in part is not an unrealistic assessment. But it is time our leaders began to articulate a fuller understanding of the problem.