Ruinous civil war

Published : May 07, 2010 00:00 IST

THE killing of 76 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel in Dantewada by the Maoists has generated shock waves because of its sheer scale, audacity and element of surprise. The effect stands magnified by heavily biased media reporting, which presented the episode as war, massacre and worse, and by comments from high functionaries of the state, including Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram. Television channels hysterically attacked everyone from Gandhians, civil-liberties defenders and Left-leaning intellectuals as part of a continuum stretching from hardcore guerillas of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) to social workers and health activists critical of the conduct of Operation Green Hunt, the greatest military operation ever in the Indian heartland. Some maliciously described the critics as Maoist collaborators and accomplices who should be muzzled.

None of these channels had bothered to report the countless civilian killings by the paramilitary forces and police in Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, the depredations (including instances of beheadings, rape, torture and arson) of Salwa Judum, the state-created militia of right-wing thugs, and the circumstances that compelled 300,000 tribal people to flee their homes. They have never linked the violence in the tribal heartland to the impoverishment and dispossession of large numbers of vulnerable people under shamelessly elitist economic policies.

Nor did they express an iota of sympathy for the victims of the state and parastatal agencies. The number of deaths these have caused are many multiples of the number killed in the latest ambush. Pertinently, all 76 killed were combatants, not civilians. In 2009, 589 civilians were reportedly killed in the seven States that have a strong Maoist presence. The bulk of them were in all probability killed by police/paramilitary forces, which had earlier razed and cleaned out 700 villages in Bastar.

Media hypocrisy and blatant double standards are deplorable in the best of circumstances. They partly reflect the middle class jaundiced us-versus-them attitude to conflicts between the tribal people and the state and complete incomprehension of the social and economic realities of the Adivasi belt with its desperate poverty, absence of public services, plunder of resources by the state-forest-contractor-mining-industry mafia, enormous corruption, and collapse of the state. What makes them particularly pernicious is their purpose: to escalate Green Hunt by associating Indias regular armed services with it and greatly raise both the technological sophistication and lethality of the weapons used.

None of this justifies the Dantewada killings except through some convoluted logic of retaliation to Green Hunt, or as a means by which the Maoists demonstrate to their cadres and the public that they are not cowed down by the states offensive; they can kill massively and thus demoralise the paramilitary forces.

Indeed, even those who are sympathetic to the justice agendas that underlie naxalism must ask what such tactics achieve barring a hardening of the official line that favours crushing the Maoists even if that involves high civilian casualties through the conscious targeting of tribal people suspected to be sympathetic to the Maoists.

Already, the CRPF has begun a campaign of revenge in Mukram village, beating an Adivasi to death.

The Maoists surely know that even 10 Dantewada-style attacks will not destabilise the state or lower the paramilitary forces morale beyond a few months. If their military objective was to divert troops away from their core control areas in the Dandakaranya forests, the use of force was disproportionate and irrational and causally unrelated to a specific act of state violence.

Ethically, it is impermissible for a movement or party that aims to create a just and equal society to use excessively violent means, which show scant regard for human life and a dangerously militarised notion of politics. Violence in self-defence, or through the spontaneous exercise of the will, by an oppressed community, to resist is one thing. Offensive violence by a self-appointed guerilla army, which is excessive and unrelated to military necessity is quite another. Such violence risks reducing politics, centred on class agendas and the defence of the exploited and oppressed, to military offensives and counter-offensives. Worse, it is liable to be used by the state as an excuse to unleash yet more violence against the underprivileged.

P. Chidambaram and co. are doing just that in a palpably devious manner. They threaten to use yet more violent options, including, if necessary, air power, because the state is at war: If this is war, and we have never used that word, it is a war that has been thrust upon the state by those who do not have a legitimate right to carry weapons or to kill. Chidambaram has ruled out talks with the Maoists because that would mock the supreme sacrifice made by 76 jawans.

Let us deconstruct these arguments serially. First, it is not the Maoists but the state that started what is shaping into a civil war. The undeclared war began with the super-predatory neoliberal policies of the past decade under which minerals, forests, land and other natural resources are forcibly privatised through leases and sales to business sharks at throwaway prices.

This has escalated the structural violence that has always existed in Indian society, especially in its notoriously iniquitous tribal belt. To alienate the people from natural resources and complete their dispossession, the state must use military force on behalf of capital. Extremists/Maoists/naxalites are only the surrogate targets.

The real objective is to remove the people as a factor in policymaking, as human beings whose vital rights precede the privileges of capital, as citizens with agency.

It is irrelevant whether the state formally calls this war or merely says time and again, and in numerous ways, that it will militarily crush extremism. In practice, it has steadily raised the level and scope of violence to accomplish its larger policy objectives. With Operation Green Hunt, coordinated among 60,000 security personnel, and centrally directed, it has moved towards declaration.

The state has used regular, well-known military manoeuvres such as intensive combing, area denial, sanitising villages, denial of access to insurgents and area domination. Vishwa Ranjan, Director General of Police, Chhattisgarh, boastfully claimed immediately after Dantewada that nearly 40 per cent of the liberated zone had already been reclaimed from the Maoists. We are aggressive in our mission.

In the process, the line of demarcation between legitimate and illegitimate use of force has been blurred. The police/paramilitary often indulge in brutal beatings, torture, rape and murder as means of instilling fear among supporters/sympathisers of insurgents and teaching them a lesson. Chidambarams description of the Maoists as those who have no legitimate right to kill appears grotesque given that the security forces behave as if they have that right and seem to exercise it with impunity.

Civilised, sensible states treat extremist violence and terrorist attacks as crimes in extreme cases, crimes against humanity, to be prosecuted as crimes not as acts of war. The United States fatally erred in responding to 9/11 by unleashing the Global War on Terror. The consequences are there for all to see.

There is another danger. Our hawks have responded to Dantewada by demanding that we retrain and reconfigure our paramilitary forces by bringing them more in line with the regular armed services. To deal with insurgency, which is a combat situation, they must be trained to infantry standards, led by military officers, and equipped like the army. Some have suggested a new sub-cadre of policemen akin to regular infantry officers in their training, leadership qualities and combat skills, who form a special paramilitary force devoted to counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism. (It is remarkable how these worthies conjoin the two. But let that pass.)

These demands are unworthy of consideration. For one, they perpetuate and consolidate a militaristic approach to the Maoist movement, based on the pitiless use of force against non-combatant civilians, without addressing any of the myriad injustices that sustain the movement.

This approach is guaranteed to brutalise society without eradicating Maoism. For another, they breach the distinction, critical in democracies, between the police/paramilitary and regular armed services. The former must never have a military culture, leave alone function, as they did in the Middle Ages, when the army and police were one.

And for a third, such proposals shift the public debate from a sober approach to extremism, which demands radical rethinking and a massive programme of human-centred development. The greatest lesson from Dantewada is that one must not succumb to hawkish demands, in keeping with the Rights agenda, to further militarise society and politics. What one needs is a mutually agreed ceasefire and talks with the Maoists.

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