Securing the Nation

IN EARLY LAST year, Union Home Minister Amit Shah paid an impromptu visit to a Central Re­serve Police Force (CRPF) camp at Potakpalli village located deep in Sukma district of Chhattisgarh. Shah also visited the local fair price shop, a health centre and a school in the village. The visit to what was until then a ‘no-go’ area under the control of Maoists for decades signalled that the Centre was steadily gaining control over territory that had been lost earlier. The tide had turned in favour of the govern­ment in Dandakaranya.

A year later, especially since the Assembly elections in Chhat­tisgarh in late 2023, the results are even more spectacular. In different parts of the state, more than 100 Maoists have been killed in separate operations. The close coordination between the Centre and the state government, the massive sums of money devoted to building road and other infrastructure in Left Wing Extremism (LWE) affected areas and, most importantly, the will to clearly see the problem and act decisively are now paying off. When Shah recently asserted that Maoism will be finished in the next two to three years, his confidence had a basis in ground reality. But these changes did not come about on their own—they required expenditure in blood and treasure over the past decade.

The same situation can be seen in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). The record turnouts in the Srinagar and Baramulla Lok Sabha elections speak for themselves. The voting percentages have put to shame many constituencies in different parts of India where turnouts have been lower than those seen in J&K in 2024. Far from being home to a sullen and restive population, these elections show that the people of J&K wanted to exercise their democratic rights which were denied to them in the shadow of guns and terror.

Prior to the abrogation of Article 370, a psychological environ­ment had been created in the erstwhile state that made it appear that the detachment of J&K from India was not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’. In the three decades since insurgency began in the summer of 1989, successive Indian governments had reduced their vision in that state to one of merely ‘holding’ territory—a full and proper integration with India was considered the stuff of dreams until the events of August 2019. Since then, terrorist incidents have declined drastically and stone-pelting has ended. Terror incidents in J&K are now mostly in areas where geograph­ic features allow terrorists to hide. These are mostly in the high reaches of the Pir Panjal Range in Poonch and Rajouri districts. The phenomenon of the mass appeal of terrorism in the districts of South Kashmir has nearly ended.

Equally spectacular results have been obtained in the north­eastern states of the country where an alphabet soup of separat­ist groups had indulged in insurgency for nearly 70 years. Beginning in 2014, when the Centre signed an agreement with the Achik National Volunteer Council (ANVC)—an armed group operating in the Garo Hills area of Meghalaya—nine peace agreements have been signed. The latest one being with the United Libera­tion Front of Asom (ULFA) in December last year. The memorandum of settlement with ULFA paves the way for ending a long-running and difficult-to-end insurgency. In addition, five ceasefire and suspension of operations agreements have been signed with insurgent groups in the region.

The results have been fruitful. In a large region where almost every state was forced to enforce the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), the footprint of the stringent law has been reduced greatly. In Assam, except for four districts in the easternmost periphery of the state—Tinsukia, Dibrugarh, Charaideo, and Sivasagar—the law has been withdrawn from the remaining 31 districts of the state. Similarly, there has been a progressive withdrawal of AFSPA in Manipur and Nagaland. In Arunachal Pradesh, it remains in force only in three police sta­tion areas of Namsai district apart from Tirap, Changlang and Longding districts. These districts and police stations are in re­gions where there is spillover from the insurgencies in Assam and Nagaland. AFSPA was fully removed from Tripura and Meghalaya in 2015 and 2018, respectively.

If one looks at the three insurgent violence-marred regions— Maoist-dominated Central India, J&K and the Northeast—each shows a specific set of strategies pursued by the Modi government to restore peace and order. In areas with Maoist insurgency, the key challenge was to create adequate infrastructure so that security forces could dominate the landscape. In J&K, a lasting solution required the end of Article 370, a step necessitating political heavy-lifting, domestically and internationally. It is in­teresting that this was tried later, after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had attempted to bring peace to J&K by allying with the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), first with Mufti Mohammad Sayeed and later his daughter Mehbooba Mufti. In the event, the latter approach failed as Mehbooba’s politics depended on catering to a separat­ist constituency. In the Northeast, it was a set of individually crafted peace deals that clicked as a solution. In each region, after decades of violence, ‘peace constituencies’ had developed a strong interest in responding to overtures for peace.

The clearest approach in strategies can be seen when one com­pares the Maoist insurgency and the one in the other two regions, J&K and the Northeast. Tackling LWE violence required an area-domination approach and hence needed capital-intensive invest­ments in infrastructure. In the last five years alone, an estimated `19,328 crore has been spent on building roads and bridges and reimbursing state governments for security costs. The actual run­ning costs of maintaining a network of security forces is consider­ably higher. Under the first Road Requirement Plan (RRP), close to 5,200km of road has been built. Under another road-building project—the Road Connectivity Project for LWE-affected areas— nearly 9,000km of road has been built out of the planned 12,162km.

This approach has paid off. The number of ‘Red Corridor’ dis­tricts has come down drastically. But this required a key ingredi­ent that was missing before 2014.

AT THE CORE of the approach followed by Prime Min­ister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah was a stout refusal to compromise with national interests in handling these crises. Three things followed: one, a signal was sent to all separatist groups across the country that there would be no compromise with India’s territorial integrity. Two, those groups that wanted to join the mainstream were welcomed with open arms—as has been the case with virtually all the armed groups in the Northeast—but those who refused to heed that point were dealt with without mercy. Maoists and the terrorist groups in J&K are a case in point. Finally, the necessary resources were found to implement this vision. This was not easy as there were multiple and often competing demands for the same resources—political capital and monetary resources. But an uncompromising vision of India’s territorial integrity and unity meant that no stone was left unturned to solve these longstanding problems.

The Modi-Shah approach stands in sharp contrast to the ear­lier approaches that were downright bumbling or, worse, even sinister in their goals. This was true for all regions in question where insurgencies raged for a long time.

In 2008, the now defunct Planning Commission published a report titled ‘Development Challenges in Extremist Areas’. The report was authored by a set of people handpicked not for their ex­pertise in development in “extremist areas” but for their political and ideological orientation. Of the 17 experts on the panel, only two—the current National Security Advisor and Prakash Singh, a former DGP of Uttar Pradesh—had experience in managing security issues in “extremist areas”. The report’s conclusions were that Maoism in India was the result of the dispossession of Adiva­sis from their land and forest resources and rising inequalities in India. The recommendations—78 in all—did not have anything about managing the security situation. It is interesting that had these recommendations—especially those that dealt with em­powering village communities in hundreds of remote villages in Maoist-dominated districts of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Odisha—been implemented, this entire territory would have been lost forever and short of a major military effort, the ground could not have been recovered.

Yet, 16 years after the report was published, it is security-cen­tric efforts that have led not only to the government regaining control over these areas but also in clearing them of Maoist pres­ence. Shah’s visit to Potakpalli and the presence of healthcare facilities, along with ration shops and schools, would have been impossible if the so-called ‘development approach’ advocated by India’s intellectuals had been adopted.

But the New Delhi of those years (2008-14) was in the grip of a spurious ‘development versus security’ debate. A similar ‘nego­tiations versus security’ debate that ran parallel to the debate on tackling Maoism was launched in J&K. It was equally spurious and far more dangerous.

The standard tactic to ‘buy peace’ in J&K by the Centre after every bout of violence was to send an ‘expert group’, ‘fact-find­ing missions’ and a ‘group of interlocutors’. The nomenclature changed but the idea remained the same—send a group of people to Srinagar (the groups usually did not venture beyond that city), meet separatist groups, and make some assorted recommenda­tions. These missions went nowhere—hardline separatists like Syed Ali Shah Geelani would settle for nothing except outright secession of J&K while mainstream opinion wanted a level of ‘autonomy’ that could not be given without losing control over the province. If anything, these missions made matters worse by emboldening the most obdurate sections of Kashmiris. By 2019, these missions had become farcical—ambitious politicians, ‘human rights activists’, and assorted Delhi intellectuals would visit the Valley and issue ‘reports’ geared towards specific audi­ences, domestic and global. These missions had nothing to do with restoring peace, let alone furthering the national interest.

The earlier efforts failed primarily because they lacked political imagination about what had to be done. They had multiple goals— furthering the political ambitions of the ruling party in New Delhi, placating separatists in J&K, and ‘managing’ Maoists in Central India. There was no path towards an endgame. The Northeast was thought to be ‘intractable’ because of a very large number of insur­gent groups. What made the situation worse in states like Assam was the active encouragement given to illegal immigration with the intent to change the demography of the state for political ends.

A solution to these problems had to wait for a government committed to protecting India’s core interests.

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