BAREFOOT
Amid spilt blood: A steady voice
HARSH MANDER
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The gentle determined efforts of a citizen's enterprise trying to end the nexus of state and naxal violence continues to be ignored.
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PHOTO: P.V.SIVAKUMAR
CEASELESS CONFLICT: Naxalites undergoing training
Large swathes of central India are today
convulsed in unending cycles of
brutal blood-letting, alternately by
state authorities and radical left
militant formations. A movement that
started in Naxalbari in West Bengal four
decades back has today penetrated vast
impoverished forested regions - but also
some more prosperous agricultural
tracts - in 125 districts spread across 12
states.
The movement and its repression by
the State have engulfed the lives of millions
of people in the daily routinisation
of brutal violence: of horrific killings,
either at the hands of the police or armed
cadres of Naxalites, who are usually organised
into squads or dalams. People
die every other day in police `encounters',
assaults on police stations, reprisals,
explosions, and murders of alleged
informers. In 2006 alone, for instance,
the government reported 1509 incidents
of violence, in which 272 alleged Naxalites
were killed, as were 157 policemen.
In addition 521 civilians were eradicated,
ordinary people entrapped helplessly
in this incessant crossfire.
Climate of fear
The large majority of people whose
lives are taken belong to indigent Dalit
and tribal communities, and include
many idealistic youth and some women.
Many policemen killed are also young
men, often from dispossessed communities,
who have joined the security forces
in search of livelihood and protection.
The climate of fear is stoked further by
State detention for long years of hundreds
under terror laws. In addition in
the Salwa Judum in Chhatisgarh, government
arms tribal people to combat
the armed might of the militants, in a
kind of out-sourcing of dangerous policing
to ordinary tribes-people, recklessly
creating a civil war situation.
This ever-spiralling decline into
ceaseless bloodshed is even more precipitous
today with highly disturbing
news reports that some governments are
planning a military offensive `to the finish'
this winter to crush the Naxalite
insurgency, inspired by the military destruction
of the LTTE in Sri Lanka. The
governments wantonly ignore the lessons
of history, of the futility of attempting
to crush through the force of the
State, struggles that arise from massive
historical injustice; and the cataclysmic
toll such an enterprise would take of
human life and suffering. Meanwhile
Naxalites continue powerful daring assaults
on the police, targeting even senior
officials.
Both sides would do well to heed instead
a citizens' enterprise of great ethical
significance which was undertaken
to attempt to end these cycles of violence
and suffering, and to restore the
right of peaceful and normal living of
common people. A group of citizens of
undisputed high moral standing came
together in early 1997, convened by S.R.
Sankaran, a retired IAS officer who is
universally respected for his contributions
towards social justice for marginalised
people, his personal integrity,
humanity and the austerity of his lifestyle.
The committee included Kannabiran,
President of the People's Union of
Civil Liberties, human rights' scholar
Hargopal, and others. The committee
they constituted expressed its opposition
both to state impunity, and to what
it described as the impunity of a revolutionary
political movement which
claims that its struggle is to provide an
alternative and just system.
Unnoticed by much of the country, it
doggedly persisted for more than nine
years to try to restore peace and justice
to the troubled districts of Telangana.
Their efforts failed ultimately to bring
lasting peace. But the process of dialogue
with both the state and militants carries
important ethical lessons, because the
committee unusually applied the same
democratic and moral principles in evaluating
acts of violence by the State and
by revolutionary parties.
The committee was unequivocal, firstly,
in its condemnation of the killing of
alleged Naxalites by the police in encounters,
which it described as `targeted
extralegal executions'. It documented
unambiguously how the police have developed
the `habit' of picking up people
from their homes and public places and
shooting them dead, sometimes in the
vicinity of their own villages. It maintained
that the State has shifted its political
burden to the police, encouraging
them to indulge in what are euphemistically
described as `encounters'. These
are custodial and targeted killings, extinguishing
human life and the right to
life itself. These encounter killings are
not isolated aberrations or unintended
transgressions of law by individual police
personnel, but a deliberate systemic
response of the State. The governments,
particularly the police, believe that in
case of encounters - irrespective of the
law of the land - there need not be any
independent investigation. These encounters
`introduce terror as a component
of governance and erode its very
democratic essence'.
The committee is equally scathing in
its condemnation of Naxalite violence,
which unleashes indiscriminate violence
and terror upon people `rather
than on the mobilisation of people for
social transformation'. Its strategies include
physical liquidation of people, attacks
on police stations and targeted
killing of police personnel, killing of socalled
informers and `coverts', exploding
of landmines resulting in large scale
deaths, destruction of public property
and other forms of arbitrary actions including
death threats, or even a `ban' on
political parties.
These arbitrary and violent actions of
Naxalite parties are seen to contribute to
`further brutalise the society and lead to
the shrinkage of democratic space'. Often,
in public perception, the Naxalite
movement has come to essentially connote
a confrontation between the police
and the Naxalites, each having its agenda
of violence. `There is a general public
feeling that people are sandwiched between
Naxalites and police apparatus.'
Responses
The Naxalite groups have responded
in writing to appeals issued from time to
time by the committee, in fact with far
more seriousness than the government.
The CPI(ML) People's War declared, for
instance, in a letter in Telegu to the committee,
that `extremism (democratic
struggles of the people) is inevitable in a
situation of inadequately addressed social
and economic problems'. They felt
the committee wrongly equated police
violence with Naxalite violence, and `isolated
cruelty and violence from people's
struggle'. They added: `It is the birth
right of people to resist by legal or illegal
means, peacefully or by arms, violence
and atrocities on people, cruel exploitation
of workers, peasants, students, intellectuals,
women, minorities, dalit and
adivasis by oppressive landlords, big
capitalists, high officials, imperialists'.
They admitted to what they described as
`mistakes' causing suffering to ordinary
people, but apologised to the people, and
claimed to `correct immediately' these
`unintentional mistakes' whenever they
occurred.
To the government, the sane advice of
the committee is that social peace can be
restored and sustained only if justice
and dignity is ensured for every person.
The State must address the structural
violence built into the societal system in
regions torn by militancy such as inequality,
exploitation and lack of freedom
or democratic space. They must
strive to strike at the root causes of violent
unrest, including deprivation and
assaults on land, human dignity, wages,
employment, repression and harassment,
particularly `encounters' and detention
under terror laws.
The committee's humane and impartial
pleas to both governments and militants
to abjure violence are tragically
lost in a wilderness of decades of mutually
reinforcing violence. The government
continues to act as `the prosecutor,
the judge and the executioner' all rolled
into one, continuing `extra-judicial killings
with impunity'. In so doing, the
State itself extinguishes the right to life,
and from this there is no recompense.
The Naxalites on their part continue to
resort to military violence rather than
mobilising oppressed masses to resist
injustice, and they `attach no sanctity to
human life'.
Today there seem none who is willing
to heed the gentle and courageous counsel
of this citizens' group. Their steady
voice has been a lonely one in the brutalised
cacophony and tumult of violence in
these regions, and their respective supporters
nation-wide. The impoverished
people in large forested parts of central
India seem condemned to continue to
negotiate life amidst blood that is spilt
everyday.
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