Fighting India's Maoists Means More Than Guns - Council on Foreign Relations

Fighting India's Maoists Means More Than Guns - Council on Foreign Relations

Interviewee:	Mahesh Rangarajan, Professor, University of Delhi
Interviewer:	Jayshree Bajoria, Staff Writer

April 26, 2010

The killing earlier this month (Hindu) of seventy-six government troops by Maoists in the central Indian state 
of Chhattisgarh highlighted the threat from this growing insurgency and the debate over how best to counter it. 
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called the 
threat posed by Naxalites, as the Maoists are locally 
known, the "single biggest internal security challenge 
ever faced by our country." Last year, Indian home 
minister P. Chidambaram noted Maoists held 
pockets of influence intwenty of India's twenty-
eight states and ordered a major offensive against 
them.

Politicians and others are divided on whether an 
armed offensive by the state is sufficient to solve 
the Naxalite problem. Mahesh Rangarajan, a 
leading Indian historian and political analyst, 
says the insurgency is not just a security issue. 
Social and economic dimensions also have to be 
addressed, he argues, for what has become a 
major "political challenge" for the Indian 
democracy. Rangarajan rules out talks between 
the state and the armed Maoists, but stresses 
that the state must address social justice for 
India's disaffected tribal groups. Many of these 
groups have not benefited from India's economic boom, 
and some have suffered from it, says Rangarajan.

Who are the Naxalites, and what do they want?

The Communist Party of India (Maoists), which was 
formed in 2004, came about as a result of a merger 
of two smaller groups. All such groups trace their 
background to a party which was founded in 1969 
called the Communist Party India (Marxist-Leninist). 
It drew its inspiration from an armed uprising of a 
group of peasants and tribals led by a couple of Marxist leaders in 1967-68, in a village called Naxalbari in West Bengal. So the word Naxalite is often applied to such 
groups by their opponents, and by themselves. It's a 
Marxist political party which believes that the only 
way to create a just society in India is by an armed revolutionary overthrow of the existing state system. 
This puts it at variance with the mainstream 
communist parties of India. India has several 
communist parties, [but] the Maoists reject those 
leftist groups, who they see as having sold out to the 
dominant classes in Indian society.

Do these Maoists themselves belong to the 
tribal society?

There has to be a distinction made between the CPI 
(Maoists) in terms of the leadership of the party--who 
are largely educated, middle class radicals--and their 
social base, political base, and their clout, which comes 
from forested districts that are largely inhabited by 
members of the scheduled tribes[lowest in the 
country's stratified social order]. Scheduled tribes 
form about 8 percent of the population in India; 8 
percent of one billion is a very large number of people. 
There are other marginal groups, most of whom are 
dependent on dry land agriculture and wage labor for 
a living.

These are backward areas; these are dispossessed 
people, they're extremely marginal--their life 
expectancy, access to healthcare, education, level 
of entitlement--is far below the national average. And 
it is these districts, many of them forested, some rich 
with minerals, that have got caught up in the throes 
of rapid economic development that makes India 
such a powerhouse. And the displacement of people 
by dams, by mines, by forest reservations and nature 
reserves, is seen by some as creating more fertile 
ground for such extremism to stick. So they are in 
areas which have not benefited to a large extent from 
the huge economic transformation of India and could 
even be said that there are significant sections of 
population who have probably lost out.

There are a number of groups active in such areas; the 
bulk of them are peaceful. Maoists are part of the
spectrum, but they're on the extreme end of the 
spectrum. So their base is in precisely these areas, they 
also have a base in some plains areas where there are 
major disparities between [land-owners] and the 
landless, particularly in central and north Bihar, but 
that is one region where their base has somewhat 
declined in recent years because of better governance 
and delivery of services to the poor.

At the same time, tribal people that Maoists 
claim to champion have also suffered at the 
hands of Maoist violence. Do the Maoists have 
a following in the tribal areas where they 
operate?

Their sympathizers claim that they have substantial 
support. Prominent among them is the celebrated 
author Arundhati Roy and others. Their opponents 
would say that whatever base they have is due to 
coercion, and it is well-known that they have recruits 
from such communities; they maintain small armed 
cadres of what they call the People's Liberation Army.

But despite having such support, in the last decade and 
a half in their period of growth in some parts of India, 
they have run regular protection rackets [extortion]; 
miners, foresters, operational school teachers, virtually 
everyone working in these areas has to give a part of 
their pay to such groups. The price for not paying 
enough is that they deal with you pretty severely, and 
it's no surprise that a large number of the people who 
are killed by them are police constables, forest guards, 
lowly government officials, elected village council 
leaders. But no one would claim that the CPI is simply 
a criminal enterprise. It is a political organization. It 
has a political objective and it has some measure of 
sympathy or support, whether that is due to fear or 
because of ideological allegiance or simply desperation--
there's a big debate on that. We have had in India an 
insurgent tradition among a section of left-wing groups 
going back more than forty years. That tradition ebbs 
and flows. We are living through a period of a relative 
flow.

India's home minister has called for an all-out 
war with the Maoists as well as offered 
negotiations if they give up arms. So some 
might say India does not have a clear policy
on how the Indian state wants to deal with the 
Maoists.

No, I don't think that's a fair observation. India has a 
long track record of dealing with insurgencies. There is 
a long record of insurgents coming back into the fold, 
giving up the guns, and accepting the constitution. 
There is also a record of insurgent groups having 
been battled down and simply put down. These are 
people who are armed, they do have a measure of 
support. This is a country which has the world's third 
or fourth largest army, it has a very substantial armed 
presence, but in the last week we've had statements 
from the chief of army staff saying they're willing to 
help train the police--so they don't want to be involved 
in this. And [similarly] from the chief of air staff. 
They're correct. You don't have an army and an air force 
in a democracy to use them against your own people. 
And the kind of areas they're in, you're not fighting a 
regular army. If you were to deploy paramilitaries and
armies on a mass scale, a lot of innocent people would 
probably get killed. There's been a tradition of Maoist 
cadres when they have staged armed attacks, [soon 
after] they melt away and you won't find a single cadre 
around, and if you do, they will blend into the local population.

So there is debate which is on. It's a healthy sign in a 
democratic society to have a debate, particularly 
because nobody wants a situation where sections of 
Indian society who are weak, who are excluded by any 
stretch of civic benchmark that you might use, get 
victimized in the process. So when the union home 
minister says he is open to negotiation if they give 
up arms, he's not under the illusion that they'll give 
up arms; it's a signal to say that the government is 
willing to take an extra step for peace, but I don't think 
anyone seriously expects them to give up arms. They 
haven't for forty years, there's no reason for them now 
and they've never promised that.

Can talks be a solution?

I doubt it, because this is a group with a very clear 
political ideology and objectives. In the past when 
there have been talks, it has not led very far. The 
divide is too fundamental between groups who believe 
the means to justice is through an armed overthrow 
of the political system, and those who believe that 
however extreme your grievances, there is space 
within the political system to accommodate and 
address those grievances or injustices.

So, then what is the solution?

The challenge has to be seen not only as a security 
one but as a political one, and one of the reasons 
Maoism lost its appeal in the 1970s and 1980s is that 
some of these issues [their grievances] continued to be 
addressed by government. Now for perhaps the last 
fifteen to twenty years during India's reform and 
liberalization, people took eyes off this dimension 
of the Indian reality. It needs to come back into focus.

So there are two dimensions to it. There is the security 
dimension which has to be addressed, but there's also 
the social and economic dimension.

These are very important parts of India in economic 
terms, in terms of forests and mineral wealth, but 
they're also important because this is a substantial 
section of Indian society. Maoism is in pockets of 
adivasi [tribal, literally meaning indigenous people] 
country. These maps that paint the whole thing red 
[communist], they are misleading. But it is a
 challenge for Indian democracy, which in the past 
has been able to deal with other sorts of divides--the 
religious divide, the caste divide, the divide between 
different regions of this vast country. So, it's a security 
challenge, but it's also a political challenge for the 
ruling alliance and for the political system as a whole.