Shah’s Timetable

While addressing high-level security officials on August 24 in Chattisgarh’s capital Raipur Union Home Minister Amit Shah announced the timetable for the complete eradication of what they call left-wing extremism [LWE] or Naxalism. The deadline is 2026. This is not the first time he looked too eager to write the obituary of the five-decade-old Maoist movement in India. Nor it would be the last. The four- hour long deliberations involved senior officers from seven states, including Directors General of Police and state secretaries. Chattisgarh remains the most-talked-about state in their brutal campaign against the Maoist insurgency. In 2024, Shah’s security forces conducted several major operations against armed naxalites resulting in the elimination of 42 Maoist guerrillas in three ‘encounters’ along the Chattisgarh-Telangana border between January and April. It’s now an open secret that their much-publicised encounters are in most cases fake.

Killing reward-carrying Maoists in ‘encounter’ is a lucrative business in Chattisgarh and elsewhere for the security personnel. They simply pick up innocent civilians, having no relation with the Maoist movement, and murder them in cold blood. In the 1970s this practice reached its peak but it continues unabated still. They present the dead bodies to higher authorities for reward money. Recently one officer expressed his dissatisfaction over the meagre amount he received after sharing the booty along with his colleagues.

 As per Home Department report altogether 38 districts across the country remain affected by Maoist insurgency with Chattisgarh accounting for 15 of these. Another strategy is to terrorise ordinary people by arresting so-called ‘suspects’ indiscriminately and keeping them in jails as Undertrials for years. And everybody knows overcrowded jails in India are in reality living hells designed to dehumanise human beings. At the time of writing political prisoners, mostly Undertrials are on hunger strike in Hydrabad Central Jail. The authorities say they are all ‘dreaded Naxalites’. So they can be denied basic amenities and medical treatment sanctioned even by archaic Jail manuals of British vintage. Strangely enough, even left parties do hardly raise the issue of inhuman treatment of political prisoners in parliament or in any appropriate forum. Nor do they ever demand the unconditional release of innocent people falsely implicated in concocted cases. Only a few civil liberties bodies and human rights organisations occasionally agitate over the state’s repressive measures. But their voices are too weak to move the persons in authority. As most of the incarcerated people come from poor families they have no legal access; they just rot in black cells year after year.

For one thing, it is for the Naxalite resistance that they have not yet been able to hand over mineral-rich central India totally to the corporates. This is one reason they have massively militarised the entire region in the name of combating Naxalite violence. Their hidden agenda is how to depopulate the area, principally inhabited by indigenous people.

That the Maoists despite their huge sacrifices have failed to win over broad masses in their favour is a fact of life. That the government has been successful in isolating them politically from people, more precisely middle-class and lower-middle-class toilers is equally true. After all India doesn’t live in tribal hamlets only. It’s an unequal fight between Indian security forces and the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army of the Maoists. Then the Maoist insurgency is the only insurgency, having no rear beyond the international border of India. Also, it is the only Marxist insurgency; the rest are non-marxist and religious fundamentalist. Insurgents in the North East have the advantage of volatile India- Burma border areas and the militants in Kashmir have their solid rear in Pakistan that provides them logistical support as well. So the Shahs are in a hurry to announce the timetable of their demise. The Maoists can turn the table only by adopting a proper mass-line without which they are bound to fail in achieving their target.

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Frontier
Vol 57, No. 12, Sep 15 - 21, 2024