The Hindu : Opinion / News Analysis : A return to the killing fields

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Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

A return to the killing fields

K. Srinivas Reddy

The talks have broken down, and the Maoists and the Andhra Pradesh Government are adopting an-eye-for-an-eye tactics.

AN UNHAPPY situation now prevails in Andhra Pradesh. The guiding principle behind the revolutionary movement has been reduced to just unleashing terror; winning over the masses has been given a complete go-by. On the Government side, the onus is once again on the police; the civil administration has withdrawn.

Hopes of reviving the peace process through negotiations between the Maoists and the Government are fading. In the naxalite camp, it is now up to the underground squads. The Government's strategy is more and more focussing only on one option — elimination of the naxalites.

Since the resumption of hostilities after the naxalites announced they were pulling out of the talks process in mid-January, 68 of them have been shot dead by the police. The Maoists too intensified their activities — attacking policemen, police stations, political activists and civilians branded as informants. As many as 102 people, including a dozen policemen, have been killed by naxalites this year.

People trapped

With both sides seemingly guided by the principle of balance of terror, the people are caught in the crossfire. The talks were officially called off on January 16. Four days later, police shot dead three naxalites in Sircilla of Karimnagar district.

The naxalites hit back, attacking unarmed policemen in Nalgonda and Mahabubnagar districts. On March 1, the gruesome Vempenta incident took place in Kurnool district. Eight villagers were called out into the jungle under the guise of settling a dispute over the killing of some Dalits and hacked to death.

On March 7, the police in a well-coordinated assault near Manala in Nizamabad district shot dead 10 naxalites and took two into custody. Four days later, Maoists raided the Chilkaluripet police station in Guntur district and killed four policemen and three civilians, including the mother of a police officer.

Then came the April 1 raid on the Achampet police station in Mahabubnagar district where two police constables were killed. A month later, the rebels used a rocket launcher to attack the Durgi police station. Soon afterwards came the biggest attack in recent times: an abortive attempt on the life of the Prakasam SP, Mahesh Chandra Laddha. An improvised explosive device (IED) was exploded, killing two civilians.

Such tit-for-tat actions are common in Andhra Pradesh but the brutality of the methods employed by the naxalites have everyone worried. In Vempenta, the victims were gagged and hacked to death one by one; in Chilkaluripet, too, a police officer was axed to death. In its earlier avatar as the People's War, the outfit had cautioned its cadres against resorting to such brutality.

Caught amid all this are the masses, the crucial component of winning either the revolutionary or a counter-revolutionary war. Despite claims by some political leaders that the Government views the issue as a socio-politico-economic problem and that it is attempting to find a solution by solving the people's problems, it is becoming clear that the focus is more on using the police.

Caution from within

That the revolutionary movement is going astray with the cadres laying greater emphasis on violence has been pointed out by Varavara Rao, a firm believer in the "New Democratic Revolution" and one of the emissaries of the Maoists during the talks process. In a letter sent to the politburo, he says "the developments, especially the killings in the name of informants, political workers" are causing extreme concern to him. "I am not convinced," he writes in the letter, which was seized from two Maoist couriers.

It is not only Varavara Rao who has opposed this violence. Party politburo member Cherukuri Rajkumar a.k.a Gangadhar made a clinical analysis of the dangerous trend. He is of the view that the leadership failed to involve people and that the revolutionary movement had been reduced to a mere conflict between the underground squads and the police.

He makes another interesting observation. Despite lakhs of people turning up for public meetings organised by the party during the talks period, the Maoist leadership had failed to mobilise even a small section of people against the Government. Worrying the Maoists now is the fact that the media in the State, which had always given them favourable coverage, had begun equating the Maoists with the police with regard to the violence. "This is happening due to some actions done by us ... we should change this trend," Rajkumar writes.

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