Everybody is a Guerilla

Can the Centre’s anti-Naxal offensive really achieve anything?

It was a mix of the Bhagwad Gita and paracetamol tablets that ultimately helped the senior police officer escape his vortex of guilt and dilemma. The officer had just been transferred to the Naxal-affected areas of Sonbhadra and Chandauli in Uttar Pradesh, a few years ago. “I didn’t know who my enemy was,” he recalls, sipping coffee in the visitor’s room of his old, colonial-era official residence. Finally, he turned to the Bhagwad Gita, “And I kept doing what was expected of me.” That was around the time that one of his men started distributing paracetamol tablets among locals. “In 15 days, he had become like God in that area,” the officer recalls.

As the Centre prepares to launch the country’s most ambitious offensive ever against Naxals (domestic Maoists, specifically), it is clear that it will take much more than divine pep-talk and painkillers to win the war. As of now, however, the Government refuses to call it a ‘war’. “Our target is to secure the areas which are now under the control of Naxals, and provide the civil administration the confidence and security to re-establish itself in these areas,” GK Pillai, Union home secretary, tells Open.

Before the sound of bullets ricochets in Delhi, the Government is making the right kind of noises. For years, it stubbornly termed Naxalism as a ‘law and order problem’. Not so long ago, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had called it a ‘virus’. But, as preparations for the final assault against Naxalites were being made, the PM told a gathering of state police chiefs: “Despite its sanguinary nature, the movement (Naxalism) manages to retain the support of a section of tribals and the poorest of the poor in many areas.” As the troop build-up began in various Naxal-affected states, the Centre announced a Rs 7,300 crore development package and withdrawal of more than 100,000 petty cases against tribals in Jharkhand. But the deployment of about 70,000 troops from central police forces like the CRPF and BSF, and special forces like Cobra and Greyhounds, also means that in the coming weeks there will be plenty of bloodshed. The anti-Naxal offensive will begin from six districts in four states—Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and Maharashtra—and Home Ministry sources say it will spread to other states in other forms. The key factor, Pillai says, is to quickly improve governance in the areas the State wrests back. “We will attack the causes of alienation,” he says.

Attacking the causes of alienation is alright, but taking control of these areas is unlikely to be easy without inflicting casualties among civilians. Already, a fact-finding mission of various human rights groups has reported killings of innocent tribals in the name of fighting Naxals in south Dantewada in Chhattisgarh. “The mission has found that poor tribals have been murdered, raped and molested,” says Gautam Navlakha, a human rights activist. “They want to get rid of Maoists so that they can loot the regions’ mineral resources. They want to privatise water, privatise forests,” he rages.

But does the Government have a choice other than the military offensive? “No,” says former BSF chief and Naxal expert Prakash Singh. “How can any government tolerate these people who indulge in violence at will?” he asks. However, he cautions that while the police forces get down to the business of eliminating the armed cadre of Naxals, the Centre needs to ensure that its plans for development in these areas actually do fructify. “There are socio-economic problems that need to be addressed. Poverty cannot be eliminated overnight, but people have genuine grievances and they must be given reason to believe that the Government is serious about making their lives better,” he says, adding, “You can’t do this just by pumping money. The message must go down to the bureaucracy involved that the funds have to reach the people. Unfortunately, that has not happened so far. Corrupt people get away, and that has to change.”

In the wake of heavy deployment of forces, some of whom have been withdrawn from Kashmir and the Northeast, questions are also being raised about whether the forces are motivated enough; the violence is so horrific that it appears as if the entire Naxal-affected belt is turning numb. In Jharkhand, the body of Inspector Francis Induwar, brutally beheaded by Naxalites, was picked up and thrown into an open truck in the manner that a municipal wagon picks up a dead cow. It took the Government three days to send the body of Sub-Inspector Chandrashekhar Deshmukh, one of the victims of the recent Naxal attack in Gadchiroli, Maharashtra, back to his village. In West Bengal’s Lalgarh, which was once described by the Home Ministry as the laboratory for anti-Naxal operations, Maoists have entrenched themselves even more deeply. Sources say this is because the central security forces—12 companies of BSF and 15 of CRPF, including two companies of the Cobra forces (about 2,700 men)—have been made to play second fiddle to the poorly-equipped West Bengal police.

“We can’t operate on our own,” complains a BSF company commander, “Our only activity is to follow the state police in patrolling metalled roads. Our task is to provide protection to the state police. At times, we enter villages and simply march through them.” He concedes that the induction of the BSF and CRPF hasn’t made an iota of difference to the insurgents. “Only in the first few days at the commencement of the operations (on 18 June) did we enter the jungles to take on Maoists. Over the past few months, we’ve been telling the state police we should start patrolling the jungles again and establish camps there, but they seem too scared to even entertain such thoughts,” the BSF officer notes.

Earlier this week, while Kishenji, a top Maoist military strategist, was holding one of his routine interactions with scribes inside a sparse forest bordering a village, security forces were patrolling a road barely 1.5 km away. The police, it is learnt, had prior information on the Maoist politburo member’s plans to meet journalists at that very spot, but could not muster the courage to make even a slight attempt to nab him.

Senior police officers of the district admit that Maoists roam about quite freely under the cover of foliage. They haven’t fled the jungles of Lalgarh. “They’re still operating with impunity in the jungles. What is really frustrating is that we’re not being given the green signal to flush them out. We can do it if we’re given a free hand,” says a police offcier who prefers anonymity. “The jungles here aren’t dense at all and offer good visibility for 25 to 30 metres at least.”

What angers the central security forces deployed at Lalgarh even more is that the state police has withdrawn nearly all armed police brought in from other districts. They see it as yet another example of the state government shirking its responsibility. “If the state withdraws its own forces, it has no right to demand more central forces for Lalgarh. And anyway, there’s no point in deploying more central forces if all they do is accompany the rag-tag state police on foot patrols along roads,” says the senior BSF officer.

The ‘success of the Lalgarh model’ can be gauged from the fact that since 18 June, Maoists have killed 82 persons (mostly CPM activists), razed 15 CPM party offcices, ransacked more than 100 houses (again, mostly of CPM workers) and driven away more than 1,000 people from their homes. As against this, the police-central security forces haven’t been able to kill or arrest a single active Maoist; of the 152 people taken into custody till now, barely a handful have any direct link with Maoists. Incidentally, the only Maoist to have died so far—Marang alias Bullet Murmu—was killed by armed CPM goons at a marketplace. Some CRPF and BSF officers fear that this could be the precise gameplan of the state government—facilitate the entry of CPM’s armed cadres into Lalgarh.

Meanwhile, the alienation of the poorest of the poor seems complete at Lalgarh. No development work has taken place over the past year. A team of bureaucrats who visited three gram panchayats in Lalgarh (“liberated from Maoists”, as the home secretary never tires of claiming) in August dished out many grand promises. But even simple ones, like issuing Below Poverty Line cards within two weeks, are yet to find fulfilment.

Senior CPM leaders vent their anger against what they call the ‘hypocrisy’ of human rights activists. “They remain silent when our workers are killed, often in front of their families, their heads and limbs chopped off. But they shout their lungs out when Chhatradhar Mahato (leader of the Maoist-backed peoples’ committee in Lalgarh) is arrested,” says CPM state secretary Biman Bose.

The state police, however, maintain that they won’t let civil society protests come in their way. “Many Maoists and their sympathisers will get arrested, maimed or killed. This will lead to protests, but one cannot fight Maoists by observing constitutional niceties,” says a top police officer. “You have to pay the rebels back in the same coin; be as brutal as they are, and employ the same tactics, or else you won’t succeed,” he says.

On its part, the Centre is tomtomming its development agenda. “There are schools but no teachers, health centres but no doctors. At places, Naxals have dug up the roads and these have not been rebuilt. So obviously, the people who live there have genuine grievances against the state, the civil administration. You can post somebody there but the person can’t go and work there. Our strategy is to secure all areas and make it possible for the civil administration to function there,” explains Pillai.

Human rights activist Navlakha laughs at this. “Thanks to Maoists, at least the Government is now pretending to think about hundreds of thousands of marginalised tribals. But where were they before Maoists came into the picture?” The Government is suspicious that its offensive will push Naxals into areas that are not within its sights as targets (for now). This is already happening. Maoists have launched a series of attacks in Bihar, for example, possibly in an attempt to diffuse the operation’s focus.

As the anti-Naxal offensive assumes bloodier proportions, with both sides fighting over every square km, expect confusion to gain dominance. As James Ahmed says in VS Naipaul’s Guerillas: “When everybody wants to fight there’s nothing to fight for. Everybody wants to fight his own little war, everybody is a guerilla.”

(With Jaideep Mazumdar in Lalgarh)

Centreguerrila warfareNaxalism