Fight Mao with Mao

Chandan Mitra

Maoists have declared war on the nation, but the Scotch-sipping, mall-going urban Indian thinks that’s happening in some remote part of the planet, maybe Belize or Benin. In reality, however, ultra-left groups have bared their fangs and progressively seized territory, created No-Go areas, taken over the local administration and even civil society functions. When Maoists take control of a geographical region they drive out not only the police and other organs of the State, including teachers and doctors, but also all political functionaries opposed to them. In other words, the entire fabric of the democratic as well as republican order collapses, leaving residents completely at the mercy of the promoters of chaos and revolution. Even the judicial system is supplanted by kangaroo courts; rough-and-ready justice being delivered at public gatherings presided by heavily armed commissars representing the ‘State-within-the-State’.

The statistics are frightening enough: An estimated 160 to 170 of India’s 600-odd districts are officially admitted to be Maoist infested. But what has happened in recent months is even more chilling. Around 20 districts spread over Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Bihar seem to have slipped into their hands almost completely. Andhra Pradesh may have driven them out temporarily, but the writ of the Indian state still runs somewhat tenuously in certain parts of that State. In eastern Maharashtra and pockets of Karnataka the desperadoes are gaining ground daily, while districts adjoining Nepal in Uttarakhand have also steadily come under Maoist influence. But the really worrisome developments are in the first four contiguous States in East-Central India.

The creation of a virtual ‘liberated zone’ in and around Lalgarh in West Bengal’s Midnapore district has rightly attracted media attention on account of the sheer ferocity of Maoist onslaught and undeniable popular support their foray appears to command. The Naxalites, operating in the State where they first took birth in 1969, have turned public anger against the high-handed and corrupt CPI(M) machinery into a veritable war against the State. The police wait helplessly outside the cordon determined by Maoist authorities, all agencies of the Government have fled the blood-splattered villages, CPM activists have been mercilessly beaten and driven out, their offices burnt, while palatial homes of local apparatchiks demolished brick by brick in broad daylight by rampaging mobs. Maoist commanders are freely accessible to the media and declare their plans to build infrastructure — such as roads, culverts, schools and hospitals over the next few years “to compensate for the neglect of this impoverished region by the CPM Government in West Bengal”. This is a significant change of strategy on the Maoists’ part. Recognising the people’s craving for infrastructure, they have now decided to set up their own delivery mechanisms to address this aspect of public need. So far they were content destroying official structures; now they are confident of holding territory long enough to construct parallel governmental machinery.

A senior police official engaged in combating Maoist insurgency recently told me that seizures conducted across States indicates that Maoist groups collect around Rs 2,200 crore annually through extortion of mine owners, contractors and other businessmen. Most of the money is used to buy increasingly sophisticated arms and ammunition. Much of the information gathering and quotation collecting, believe it or not, happens through the internet! Overground activists of these groups are in regular touch with their bosses deep inside jungles and have successfully set up a communication network, which is yet to be fully cracked by law enforcing agencies. These overground members and sympathisers include teachers, lawyers, Government servants and doctors. It was not without reason that Chhattisgarh Police arrested Dr Binayak Sen although the Government was recently forced by the Supreme Court to release him on bail.

Indian Maoists have a global network operating through so-called human rights activists, bleeding heart NGOs and even Christian Missionary groups. They are engaged in drumming up sympathy for Pol Pot clones, allegedly working to help the underprivileged and downtrodden against a ‘brutal’ Indian state. That these “selfless” do-gooders go around ruthlessly murdering those they remotely suspect of wavering, throw even six-year-old children into the flames of renegades’ huts they routinely set on fire, is of course something that will never come into the public domain because much of the media, too, is irredeemably hostile to the agencies of the State. Under orders of secret committees hundreds of tribals have been shot, beheaded and hanged from trees over the last 20 years of mindless Maoist violence. In fact they have killed more of their “own” people than the police or para-military forces.


Arguably, organs of the State as well as political parties committed grievous errors in the past antagonising forest-dwellers, mainly tribal. But over the years, the tribal in India’s forest belt has ceased to conform to the romantic picture painted by the likes of Verrier Elwin. His modern-day disciples don’t want to acknowledge this reality because it goes against their conviction that by definition the State can do no good and that the tribal should be kept away from the “evils” of civilisation, in reservations akin to museums of natural history. Perhaps the problem began with British laws that theoretically took away the tribals’ right to their forest, something they are unable to accept even after 150 years. But then the forest is no longer an Eden of Bliss in which man endearingly cohabited with animals, spirits of the jungle, totems and witch doctors. Much of India’s forests have been mercilessly degraded since Independence — particularly in Jharkhand and West Bengal. Even remote Bastar in Chhattisgarh is no more the idyllic haven it once was, complete with maverick Rajas and supine tribals. However, it is their sense out outrage at the State’s failure to protect them against rapacious mine-owners and sundry contractors that has created fertile ground for the diabolical ideas of Maoism to sprout. Conditions for Maoism’s rise vary from State to State: Caste exploitation is probably its root in Bihar, while CPM’s atrocities, coupled with abject poverty and official neglect is the cause in Bengal.

But this is not the time for academic brainstorming into the resurgence of the Maoist movement in India. This is the time to act — swiftly and firmly. Mao Zedong’s famous dictum, “Power flows from the barrel of the gun” has to be turned around by the security forces to demonstrate to the merchants of mayhem that two can play that game. Districts severely infested by the Maoist menace needs to be brought under the Disturbed Areas Act, while commandos trained on the lines of Andhra’s Greyhounds should be set on the desperadoes.

Mao talked of combating “White” (meaning official) terror with “Red” terror. This, too, has to be turned on its head to terrorise the very peddlers of terror for that is the only language they understand. Their intellectual sympathisers need to be confronted at every forum with evidence of Maoist tyranny.

These self-anointed messiahs of the downtrodden should also be directed to Lenin’s pertinent pamphlet titled “Left wing Communism — An Infantile Disorder”.