Working to a plan

Naxalites gathered at the venue of the CPI (Maoist)'s ninth congress at an undisclosed place in Chhattisgarh.-Naxalites gathered at the venue of the CPI (Maoist)'s ninth congress at an undisclosed place in Chhattisgarh.

The "attention-grabbing" attack in Chhattisgarh is an indication of the Maoists' resolve to intensify their activities on various fronts.

EXACTLY a month before the People's Liberation Guerilla Army (PLGA) of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) attacked the Rani Bodli police outpost in Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh on March 15, the State government had, in association with the Institute of Conflict Management, organised a broad-based conference on "Maoist Insurgency: Assessment of Threat and Doctrines and Strategies of Response". It was attended by a clutch of political leaders, sociological analysts, retired and serving security specialists and intelligence officers. Even as the conference began, news came in that Maoists had exploded a device in Dantewada district, killing five people. "It was indeed a way of stating that they [the Maoists] had taken note of the conference," one of the participants at the meet told Frontline later.

Such symbolic communication has been a central part of the political and organisational practice of the CPI (Maoist). A similar message was sent out on an earlier occasion, in October 2005. When the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Jharkhand was signing in Ranchi, the State capital, a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the L.N. Mittal group for carrying out mining-related activities in the Chaibasa forest areas inhabited by Adivasis, explosions in the Chaibasa region killed a number of security personnel. A senior State Home Ministry official perceived the blasts as a warning to the Mittal group to back out from the project.

The Maoist attacks in February and March 2007 were not confined to Rani Bodli. Ten days before the attack on the police outpost, the PGLA gunned down Sunil Mahato, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha Member of Parliament from Jamshedpur, his two body guards and a party associate. Later, the CPI (Maoist) went on record stating that the killing was planned in 2003. A few days prior to the incident, 14 policemen were blown up in a landmine explosion in Bokaro. Such was the intensity of the blast that the Union Home Ministry rushed a helicopter with National Security Guards commandos for the immediate evacuation of the injured policemen and the protection of the site.

The Rani Bodli attack and the Mahato killing have been rated as the most "attention grabbing" strikes of the PGLA in recent times. The context for such exploits was provided by the "unity congress" of the CPI (Maoist) held in late January and early February in the forests, on the Jharkhand-Bihar border. The congress, which was also described as the ninth congress of the CPI (Maoist), according to party sources, "marked the completion of the unity of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) People's War Group (PWG) and the Maoist Communist Centre of India (MCCI)". The unification process started in September 2004 with the merger of the two groups.

The "unity congress" took stock of the movement since the merger and decided to intensify the party's activity on various fronts. The Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh attacks are directly related to the resolutions made at the "unity congress". There was a growing perception, particularly among a section of security officials associated with the Union Home Ministry, in the months preceding the congress and the attacks in March that the CPI (Maoist) was suffering repeated political, organisational and military reverses. The military reverses were pronounced in Andhra Pradesh, where the original PWG faction used to control vast areas, literally running a parallel administration. The reverses included the killing of Madhav alias Gurra Chennaiah, the State secretary of the CPI (Maoist), in July 2006 and the killing of Chandramouli alias Naveen, a member of the central committee and the central military commission of the party in early 2007. A large cache of arms procured for the use of the PGLA was reportedly seized in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh in 2006.

The military reverses, sections of the Home Ministry claimed, had set off dissent in the erstwhile PWG. According to them, information leaked out from the rank and file even suggested that sections of the PWG and the MCCI were contemplating an annulment of the September 2004 merger. The leadership of the two factions were, apparently, not able to reconcile their vastly differing styles of functioning. It was also reported that the problem was intense in States such as Jharkhand, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, which are considered the party's strongholds. The Home Ministry assessment was that the CPI (Maoist) was holding on to its aggressive tactics and organised functioning only in Chhattisgarh, where the PGLA was in a state of perpetual conflict with the state-controlled security agencies and Salwa Judum, the anti-naxalite militia raised with the support of the state machinery.

In this background, Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil claimed at various fora, including Parliament, that barring Chhattisgarh, incidents of naxalite violence showed a significant decline in 2006. According to him, the overall magnitude of naxalite violence in terms of the number of incidents declined by 6.15 per cent in 2006. It was also hoped that with the modernisation of the State's police force, improvement of its telecommunication systems, induction of modern weaponry and development of other related infrastructure, there would be significant increase in the capability to face the Maoist challenge.

However, the successful conduct of the "unity congress" with the participation of Maoist delegates from 14 States, including the northeastern States and Jammu and Kashmir, and the "exploits" that followed, indicate that such confidence is misplaced. The resolutions passed at the "unity congress" obviously reflect a new enthusiasm in the CPI (Maoist). Among other things, the Maoists have called for strengthening the "nationalities struggles" of Kashmiris, Assamese, Nagas, Manipuris and Tripuris. The resolution points out that these nationalities "have been long since waging armed struggle against the Indian government for their right to self-determination, including the right to secede from the so-called Union of India. The Indian ruling classes and their imperialist masters, particularly U.S. imperialism, have been suppressing these struggles mercilessly."

Other focus areas include "struggles to free our comrades from the jails besides waging different forms of struggle within constitutional limits". The "unity congress" noted: "With support from the masses, we carried out historic actions such as the Jehanabad [in Bihar] and R Udaigiri (in Gajapati district of Orissa] jailbreaks." It further exhorted the entire party rank and file to "move in this direction and develop the prisons as centres of struggle". Ever since the merger of the PWG and the MCCI, the CPI (Maoist) has identified corporatisation of agricultural land as a major area of struggle. This point was reiterated at the "unity congress" emphasising that the 300-odd Special Economic Zones that are coming up in different parts of the country are nothing but foreign economic enclaves.

The congress affirmed that in this struggle it would align also with forces that did not exactly follow the communist line of thinking. Maoist sources told Frontline that such allies identified at the congress ranged from former Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh to Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy. The focus of the struggles against the SEZs is significant in the background of statements from the West Bengal government and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) that Maoist elements have infiltrated the agitation in Nandigram against the industrial project there. Maoist sources, however, deny any involvement in the Nandigram agitation.

Whatever the truth about this particular argument, there is little doubt that with the conduct of the "unity congress" and the strikes that have followed, the CPI (Maoist) is in a new aggressive mode. According to a participant at the "unity congress", the leadership of the party is convinced that only the CPI (Maoist) can fill the ideological vacuum being created by globalisation and liberalisation.

"All parties involved in governance, whether they preach Left ideology or Right, will have to make compromises with the forces of liberalisation and globalisation to continue the very business of governance, and this is what is deepening the ideological crisis in those parties. And that is where we are going to step in," he told Frontline. There are also reports, in the wake of such projections, that the CPI (Maoist) is trying to rope in more splinter naxalite groups into its organisational ambit.

Clearly, these political initiatives are as much a challenge to the governments at the Centre and the States as the military moves of the PLGA and the CPI (Maoist). But the big question is whether the governments and the Home Ministry that spearheads the anti-naxalite operations have a wider perspective and plan of action to take on these multifarious challenges. When it prepared a status paper on the Maoist challenge in March 2006, the Home Ministry identified a series of social and political steps along with military plans to counter the naxalite threat.

Perhaps a thorough review of the proposals made in it and the manner in which they have been implemented could well be the starting point of the evolution of a concrete action plan.