The Hindu : Dealing with the danger

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Sunday, Oct 19, 2003

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Dealing with the danger

New Delhi's role is considerably less interventionist than in other violence-scarred regions, writes Praveen Swami.

THE UNION Ministry of Home Affairs' Annual Report, released earlier this year, describes Maoist violence as "a cause for serious concern, with naxalite violence increasing during the year."

Yet while the report devotes 20 pages to the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir and another seven to the Northeast, it disposes of the naxalite problem in just eight paragraphs. Even though 53 districts sprawled across nine States have seen the loss of 1,596 lives between 2000 and 2002, these numbers are small compared to those in Jammu and Kashmir or the Northeast. Seen through New Delhi's prism, then, the conflict is lucky in not being relegated to a footnote.

New Delhi's role is, as a consequence, considerably less interventionist than it is in other violence-scarred regions. The Union Home Secretary presides over a Coordination Centre, which holds regular meetings with the Chief Secretaries and Directors-General of Police of the affected States. The Centre is supposed to facilitate inter-State operations and streamline the flow of information between State forces. But, says a senior intelligence official, "most of the meetings are in, tea-and-biscuits, and out."

In addition, the Government of India reimburses a large part of the security-related expenditure incurred by the terrorism-affected States. Until March 2006, the Union Government is committed to subsidise State purchases on bullet-proof vehicles, weapons and communication devices. It also foots the bill for raising new battalions of the India Reserve Police, a paramilitary formation, and meets the costs of deploying Central forces. Until the end of the 2002-2003 financial year, the Union Government had disbursed Rs. 96.70 crores to the affected States.

Policy consensus in New Delhi, however, holds that such measures will be of little use unless the States concerned succeed in ensuring social equity and economic development. At the Chief Ministers' Conference held in New Delhi this February, the MHA's Annual Report records that participants "underlined the fact that one of the basic reasons for ills of extremism [sic.] is the lack of good governance. Therefore, the need to make the administrative machinery more responsive, transparent and sensitive was emphasised."

Official India's opinion, in this particular case at least, represents an extraordinarily wide consensus. Basic issues of development and equity, many commentators seem to agree, feed naxalite activity; addressing rural poverty is therefore a precondition for an end to violence. Writing in March 2000, commentator P. Raman argued "it is (then Finance Minister) Yashwant Sinha rather than L.K. Advani who should be concerned with the task of checking the growing rural rebellion." Scholar Manoranjan Mohanty, in turn, argued that the violence was the outcome of "the rising consciousness of the deprived sections of society." Acknowledging this argument, the Union Government has asked the Planning Commission to commit Rs.15 crores over normal expenditure to each affected district over the next three years.

Dissidents in and outside the security establishment, however, contend that both the `basic issues' diagnosis and the Union Government's remedy are misplaced. For one, the problem is not a lack of development expenditure. Over Rs. 2000 crores have been pumped into Andhra Pradesh's hard-hit Telangana region for a variety of poverty-alleviation schemes, for example, without notable result. The problem is not just poor governance. There is considerable evidence to suggest naxalite groups claim a large cut of Government expenditure, to top up what is generated by extortion from contractors, businessmen and professionals.

As important, it is not clear that there is a causal relationship between poverty and naxalite violence. The `basic issues' thesis, commentator Ajai Sahni says, rests on an "uncritical acceptance of the general theory that all political violence is rooted in economic and social deprivation." Naxalite groups flourish, he notes, in relatively well off districts of Bihar such as Patna, Nalanda and Gaya. Some 29 per cent of civilians whose lives have been claimed by naxalite terror in Andhra Pradesh since 1990 were Dalit, while 59 per cent belonged to the backward classes — a sign, perhaps, that the poor often find themselves opposed to those who claim to speak for them.

Indeed, political game-playing by mainstream political formations might have as much to do with upsurges in violence as economic conditions. In 1982-83, the former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, N.T. Rama Rao, described the naxalites as "true patriots who have been misunderstood by the ruling classes". He de-escalated anti-naxalite operations, winning the electoral support of naxalites but also opening the way for the escalation of terrorist violence to unprecedented levels. His Congress successor, Mari Chenna Reddy, returned the compliment in 1989; Mr. Rao replayed his gambit in 1994.

On each occasion, the data shows, violence skyrocketed. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader, Koratala Satyanarayana, succinctly told the Advocates Committee on Naxalite Terrorism set up by the Andhra Pradesh High Court in 1997: "The political parties which have been in power in the State for the last three or four decades have been trying to utilise or use the services of these extremist groups either to come to power or to perpetuate their power."

As the Union Home Ministry's Annual Report makes clear, violence is on the upswing again. There are disturbing signs that a new threshold of terror could soon be established. Intelligence experts have been watching with concern efforts by the People's War and the Maoist Communist Centre to liaise with the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), which now rules large tracts of that country. Their objective, Indian intelligence believes, is to carve out what naxalites describe as a compact revolutionary zone, stretching from Nepal through Bihar to Andhra Pradesh. Leaders of the Akhil Bharatiya Nepali Ekta Samaj, a CPN (M) front organisation proscribed last year, are believed to have held several meetings on strategy and tactics with their counterparts in India.

Troops from the Special Services Bureau, a unit of the Research and Analysis Wing that was recently transferred to the MHA, have recently been tasked with securing the porous India-Nepal border. Few, however, believe the exercise is useful. "It is like trying to stop water flowing through a sieve with a few toothpicks," says a senior MHA official. Worst of all, the money spent on police modernisation within the affected States has yielded relatively little. Not one of the nine States concerned has a police-population ratio of 3:1,000, the figure experts consider the minimum acceptable even for normal conditions. In most States, the figure hovers between 1:1,000 and 1.5:1,000, nowhere near the levels necessary to actually establish state authority on the ground.

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