Managing Maoists

One of the major achievements of the Mamata Banerjee government is the curbing of the Maoist movement in West Bengal.

OF all the achievements that West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee claims for her 11-month-old government, the one that she can truly take credit for is the curbing of the Maoist movement in West Bengal. Combining armed forces' operations against the extremists with the promise of development, Mamata Banerjee managed to subdue the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), which, for more than three years, had perpetrated a reign of terror in the forested tribal areas of the contiguous districts of Pashchim Medinipur, Bankura and Purulia, commonly known as the Jangalmahal region.

There have only been four cases of murder by the Maoists since May 2011, when the Trinamool Congress came to power. The last killing took place more than six months ago in Purulia. Incidence of violence has also reduced drastically. This is a huge change from the situation in 2009 and 2010 when killings, abductions and intimidation were the order of the day in the Jangalmahal region. In 2009, there were 255 incidents of Maoist violence as against 35 in the previous year, and West Bengal was ranked fourth in the Centre's list of Maoist-affected States, after Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Odisha.

Things have improved much now, with hardly any violence. Earlier, the Maoists were prominent in Jangalmahal, carrying arms and moving about freely in the villages. From the local information that we receive, these days they are not seen much, and when they are they are apparently travelling unarmed, Manoj Verma, Superintendent of Police, counter-insurgency force, said to Frontline. Verma, who has been involved in anti-Maoist operations for a long time, does not rule out the possibility of the lull being a tactical retreat. Though their activities have died down in West Bengal, they continue to remain active in the border regions. This may be a ploy to lie low and regroup when the time is right. Usually, it is during election time that they resurface and try to take advantage of the political tussle, he said.

Less than two months after assuming power, Mamata announced a huge list of development projects in the region. All tribal families in Jangalmahal would be declared BPL (below poverty line), and families with an annual income of up to Rs.42,000 would be able to purchase rice at Rs.2 a kg. She promised to upgrade the heath care system and pledged to address the drinking water crisis in the region. She also announced major projects in the field of education, including the establishment of a Central agricultural university and new colleges.

Mamata Banerjee also announced that 10,000 young people from the region would be recruited in the police force as special constables, home guards and national volunteers. Though the opposition criticised this move and likened it to the creation of Salwa Judum, the civil vigilante group of Chhattisgarh that the Supreme Court ordered to be disbanded, police sources in the region said the people's response was overwhelming.

Erosion of mass support

One of the biggest blows to the Maoist movement has been the huge erosion of mass support. As they are not getting public support, they are not able to conduct meetings or recruit local people. As a result, they are on the back foot and are finding it difficult to conduct operations, said Praveen Tripathi, who until very recently was Superintendent of Police, Paschim Medinipur. According to a source in the local administration, the very sight of development work taking place has reassured the people. The local people are seeing roads being constructed and buildings coming up, so they now want the development work to continue and have no truck with the Maoists, said the source.

The biggest blow to the Maoists was the killing of their top leader, Koteswar Rao (alias Kishenji), in an encounter with the joint security forces in November last year. Kishenji, who was the head of the outfit's military commission carrying out operations in Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha and Bihar, was the main force behind the movement in the State. Soon after his death came the surrender of Suchitra Mahato, another symbol of the movement. Most of the important people in the organisation have either surrendered or died in encounters with the security forces, and the few that remain are not getting much public support, said Praveen Tripathi.

In the early part of 2010, when the Maoist movement was at its height, 28 police station limits in the State were officially declared Maoist-affected. According to police sources, this was a conservative estimate made on the basis of the violence index without taking into account the spread of the movement. In 2012, the movement has been restricted to the regions bordering Jharkhand and Odisha. Barely 10 police station limits can now be said to be Maoist-affected, a senior police source told Frontline.

On April 24, addressing a rally in Lalgarh, Pashchim Medinipur, which was the epicentre of the Maoist movement in the State, Mamata Banerjee congratulated the people on resisting the Maoists and restoring peace in the region. It was at the same venue that she held a similar rally in 2010; at that time she had the support of the Maoists, several of whose leaders even led processions to the venue.

Political observers said that Mamata Banerjee's dealing with the Maoists was an exercise in realpolitik. Since 2008, activists and supporters of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and other parties of the Left Front have been the main targets of Maoist violence. Until she came to power and decided to take on the Maoists, Mamata Banerjee had maintained that there were no Maoists in the State and that the killings were a result of infighting within the Left. At the height of the Maoist movement, she demanded the withdrawal of the security forces from Jangalmahal. The Maoists were targeting CPI(M) members relentlessly to create a political vacuum in the region, which was traditionally a Left bastion, and it is no secret who benefited from this vacuum, an intelligence agency source said.

The Trinamool's alleged association with the Maoists dates back to 2007 when they claimed to have participated in the Nandigram agitation, which was spearheaded by Mamata Banerjee. The death of 14 people, including two women, when the police opened fire on local residents protesting against alleged land acquisition by the then CPI(M)-led Left Front government had sparked the agitation.

Later, when the Maoist movement started in Lalgarh following police arrests after a failed assassination attempt in the region on Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee in November 2008, Mamata Banerjee lent her support to the Maoist-backed People's Committee against Police Atrocities (PCPA). In February 2009, she even shared the dais with Chhatradhar Mahato, the then chairman of the PCPA.

However, after her huge victory in the Lok Sabha elections in 2009, the Trinamool leader was seen to be distancing herself from the PCPA. She remained silent when Chhatradhar Mahato was arrested though she did not drop her demand for the withdrawal of Central forces. After assuming power in the State in 2011, she did not keep her promise of withdrawing the security forces from the region. The unspoken ceasefire in Jangalmahal began before the elections and ended five months later, after the new government was formed. The Maoists then resumed their programme of killing, only this time they targeted Trinamool Congress workers.