Opinion - News Analysis   

Naxals, government rethinking strategies

K. Srinivas Reddy

The naxalites have launched a "socio-economic investigation" aimed at reworking their tactics. And the government has moved to ensure greater coordination in countering them.

BOTH THE naxalites and the Indian state have launched exercises to fine-tune their revolutionary and counter-revolutionary strategies respectively. The naxalites have, if their politburo document is any indication, launched a "socio-economic investigation" in places where their movement is strong and also in targeted areas to identify new issues faced by the people. The "social investigation" is apparently aimed at redefining the strategies and field-level tactics during a brainstorming session, the Special Congress, expected to be convened shortly.

The state too has been immersed in an exercise to redefine its strategy, with a professed focus on fusing development and security-related issues to formulate a comprehensive and proactive action plan. For the first time, all the 13 affected States submitted their action plans during a review meeting on naxalism in New Delhi.

A positive outcome of the meeting is that the Centre has now made it clear it will closely monitor the implementation of counter-revolutionary strategies in different States. Hitherto, the Union Government's role was mostly confined to sending paramilitary forces, reimbursing security-related expenditure to States, and pumping in money for police modernisation. The States were expected to deal with the problem on their own, apparently because law and order is a State subject.

The naxal movement is now going through a crucial phase, after the Maoist Communist Centre of India and the CPI-ML People's War (PW) merged to form the CPI (Maoists) in September 2004. For the naxal think-tank, the pressure to take a critical look at the revolutionary movement had obviously increased after the developments in Nepal. After a decade-long armed struggle against the monarchy, the Nepal Maoists are now coming to terms with multi-party democracy.

Though the naxalites in India have rejected this shift, serious debates are believed to be on among the Central Committee members on the need for a re-look at the Indian scenario. By its own admission, the revolutionary movement in India had "declined" in some areas while seeing some "growth" in other areas. The naxalites' documents indicate that though their activity spread to Uttaranchal, Karnataka, and Kerala, it had declined in Punjab, and had been stagnant in Tamil Nadu. There has not been any expansion in the urban areas of Maharashtra.

Students, workers stay away

The naxalites' understanding is that their failure is basically due to the mismatch between their forms of struggle and the prevailing social conditions. Another issue that must be engaging the attention of the naxal leaders is the alienation of students and workers from revolutionary activity. Andhra Pradesh serves as the best example for this.

During the peak of the naxalite movement in the 1980s, different segments of society — students, workers, landless peasantry, women, and the middle class to some extent — had become willing tools of revolution. Students and workers provided the much-needed fillip to the movement; people from these sections became the ideologues who could fire the imagination of others and attract them into the revolutionary fold. But by the 1990s, inflow into the naxalite movement from these two segments almost dried up, for a number of reasons.

During the 1980s it was the collective will of the people backed by armed actions of naxal squads that was most feared by the "exploitative sections." But the 1990s saw the Maoist movement becoming more militant; the violence alienated the two segments. Though naxal activity spread to more areas in different States, the campaign had banked more on violence than on mobilisation of the masses on issues. The inflow from among students and workers became almost minimal. It is against this backdrop that the naxalites are studying whether their strategies and forms of struggle are totally "inappropriate" to the present day conditions. Hence a "social investigation."

Though not as quick as the naxals, the state too initiated measures to redefine its response to the emerging situation. The coordination meeting on naxalism comes after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh rated naxalism as the "single biggest internal security challenge." He also warned that the movement had spread to 160 districts despite it losing "intellectual attraction."

Of the 13 affected States, the movement is intense in parts of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, while it is making fresh inroads in Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Uttaranchal, and Haryana. Different States were pursuing divergent strategies. Even in Andhra Pradesh, the sole State credited with "controlling" the problem, the movement is `under control' in North Telangana while it has struck roots in the Nallamala forest area and also in districts bordering Orissa. Such is the resilience of the naxalite movement.

Be it the severity of the naxalite attack on Salwa Judum activists in Chhattisgarh or the sensational attacks in Jehanabad or Giridh, both the Centre and the affected States now appear to have achieved a unity of thought in initiating counter-revolutionary measures. The Centre has now announced formation of an anti-naxal cell in the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and an Inter-Ministerial Committee. The latter would periodically monitor the development programmes being initiated under schemes such as the Backward Districts Initiative, the Backward Regions Grant Fund, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, Bharat Nirman, and the Prime Minister's Grameen Sadak Yojana. But the success of the policy hinges on greater cooperation among the affected States and the officials expected to monitor the development programmes every quarter.

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