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Sunanda K. Datta-Ray | Win War on Poverty First to Vanquish Naxal Threat

Although fewer educated middle-class youths are now drawn to the rebel ranks, the ideology may still cast a spell on idealistic recruits in the remote countryside

Indians who are celebrating a series of military victories over the Maoist rebels may not realise that these battles are only a minor feature of the war against poverty that isolated groups of armed peasants have waged since 1967. That was the crucial year when cultivators at Naxalbari village in north Bengal rose in revolt demanding legal title to the land they had tilled for generations.

Underlying this clash is the harsh economic reality of a country where the richest one per cent owns more than 40 per cent of the national wealth while the bottom half shares just three per cent of it. The number of billionaires soars by 12 per cent every year and high-net-worth individuals -- with assets exceeding $10 million -- register an annual increase of 9.4 per cent. Little wonder then that the richest Indian, Mukesh Ambani, whose Reliance Industries is worth $92.5 billion, should also be reckoned Asia’s wealthiest, ranking 18th in the global stakes.

Such anomalies are quintessentially Indian. During those decades when India was a poverty-stricken British colony, an Indian prince, the Nizam of Hyderabad, was regarded as the world’s richest man. This is the kind of imbalance that people like the alleged rebel, Nambala Keshava Rao, also known as Basavaraju, who was killed in May, was believed to be fighting against. An engineer by training, he was general secretary of the proscribed Communist Party of India (Maoist). The government’s massive Operation Black Forest targeting Basavaraju killed not only him but 27 others in Chhattisgarh state.

Another assault involving 20,000 troops eliminated 22 Maoists in Telangana’s Karregutta Hills. A third red bastion fell a week later when commandos waded through Maharashtra’s swollen Indravati river to gun down four People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army fighters, also affiliated to the banned CPI (Maoist). The shooting soon afterwards Pappu Lohra, who headed the splinter Jharkhand Jan Mukti Parishad, and his lieutenant, Prabhat Ganjhu, enabled the authorities to boast that the Bastar area of Chhattisgarh had been purged of Maoists. Bastar has been in ferment since 1966 when the police shot dead its 20th hereditary maharaja, Pravir Chandra Bhanj Deo, whom the tribal peasantry worshipped as God and their saviour.

Formal politicians of all hues have little time for Naxalites. Jyoti Basu, a British-educated Marxist barrister who was chief minister of West Bengal for 23 years, dismissed them as “wagon-breakers”. His Congress predecessor, Siddhartha Shankar Ray, also a British-trained barrister, turned the para-military forces on the Naxalites in vengeful fury. On the right, home minister Amit Shah vows that India will “be Naxal-free by March 31, 2026”. Echoing his triumphalism, Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote on X that he was “proud of our forces for this remarkable success”.

Naxalites claimed to be inspired by Mao Zedong’s revolution in their quest for a “liberated zone” amidst India’s hills and jungles. The uprising was suppressed in Naxalbari itself but became the catalyst for a larger Maoist movement spreading from the ethnically Mongolian Northeast to Central and South India, especially to regions where aboriginal tribes account for a high share of the population. This so-called “Red Corridor” covers more than a third of India’s 780 administrative districts.

Around 287 Maoists were killed last year. More than 10,000 people have died since the 1960s. Although fewer educated middle-class youths are now drawn to the rebel ranks, the ideology may still cast a spell on idealistic recruits in the remote countryside. What might aggravate their despair is India’s studied silence on the roots of the challenge, or about ameliorating grievances that prompt simple peasants to take to arms. Most complaints are rooted in the poverty and deprivation that are endemic in village life but some also indicate discrimination and ethnic prejudice. As with the original complaint in Naxalbari, many of these tribespeople with their pre-Aryan cultural roots say they are denied legitimate entitlements.

Basavaraju was the seniormost Naxalite to be gunned down in three decades: the price on his head showed him to be the most wanted man in the list compiled by India’s counter-terrorism body, the National Investigation Agency.

Given his ideological background, he would have known of the wanton luxury of India’s top one per cent, whose colossal social spending provoked the benign former Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, to warn in 2006: “It would not be an exaggeration to say that the problem of Naxalism is the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country.” In those balmy years, Naxalites threatened the tenor of life in only 160 districts.

Of course, India is on the move. Thanks to the economic liberalisation that Dr Singh initiated and Mr Modi nurtures, the number of Indian billionaires has shot up from only seven in 2019 to 191, of whom 26 have joined the elite club only last year. India accounts for 3.7 per cent of the world’s wealthy, with 85,698 high-net-worth individuals according to The Wealth Report 2025. Globally, the country ranks fourth in the number of HNWIs, following the United States (905,413), China (471,634) and Japan (122,119). Nor is this all. While the number of Indian HNWIs grew by six per cent year-on-year from 80,686 in 2023 to 85,698 in 2024, the collective wealth of the 100 richest tycoons exceeded a trillion dollars.

Mr Modi’s policies since returning to power for a third term in June 2024 are thought to have given a spurt to investor confidence and put the stock market on overdrive.

In itself, this raises no cavil. Neither does the disclosure that India is now the world’s fifth-largest military spender, ranking after the United States, China, Russia and Germany, and spending almost nine times more than Pakistan. Size, geopolitical circumstances and commitments at home and abroad may demand that defence should be prioritised. But no defence is effective if the home front is neglected. An India that claims UN Security Council membership on the basis of its nuclear prowess and not its standard of living invites derisory comparison with the former Soviet Union, which a British journalist, Xan Smiley of The Economist, had dismissed as “Upper Volta with missiles”.

People need food, potable water, medicare, houses, jobs, schools, roads and conveyance. The glories of a long-dead Hindu Rashtra, gigantic statues and stupendous temples don’t add to welfare. Nor will the threat of Naxalism – or some other form of sabotage from within -- be banished so long as millions of Indians on the brink of famine struggle with the constant worries of daily necessities.

( Source : Asian Age )
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