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Open War
Fight India’s poor left right
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The Government of India is merely a rumour in
vast areas of the country. Its writ is challenged in areas much
bigger than the size of an average European nation. The only
language that India speaks to its unhappy communities and
nations is the language of the gun. Now the negotiations are on,
because both sides have ‘em. The WSN presents a peek into this
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 India
has some 530 districts,
Pakistan
has less than half. In more that 200 districts, the writ of the
Indian Government is seriously challenged. There are many districts
where no public servant wants to be posted as the District
Collector. But
New Delhi’s
foreign policy hinges on telling the world all the time that the
Pakistanis do not know how to run their country. In large swathes of
India, the selfproclaimed great nuclear power and one of the world’s
fastest growing economies, New Delhi’s helplessness is legendary
before the umpteen people’s movements inspired by self-aspirational
ideas or fights for land, security and selfrespect.
In
Nandigram, the world saw what the Indian state is capable of doing
to its people. The mask came off from the face of even
India’s socalled progressive forces. The propeople communist
government finally revealed its Dracula teeth and monster claws as
the CPI(M) cadres went maiming, looting, threatening, raping,
killing the poorest of the poor in Nandigram to help corporates like
the Indonesia’s Salim group to set up a Chemical Hub in the region.
The CPI(M) did something similar earlier in Singur where its cadres
beat to pulp the opposition as the government acquired 10,000 acres
of land for the Tatas.
 But
then this is the kind of stuff that
India has been doing to its teeming millions for decades now,
stealing their land, rivers, forests, security for the upper crust,
the only crust to which the
India International Center is cued in to. What has been the response
of the Indian government to the many many Nandigrams across India?
In vast areas of Bihar, private armies of the thug-politicians and
resistance groups are fighting ugly, armed battles everyday. In
Chattisgarh, the writ of the government can be enforced in only
small swathes. In Jharkhand, the Chief Minister publicly says he is
only sure of his orders being followed in
Ranchi.
As for rest of the state,
New Delhi
is only a distant power.
The Government of India is merely a rumour in vast areas of the
country. In
West Bengal,
Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya said atrocities of the CPI(M)
cadres on the poor was a way of paying them back in their own coin.
Here, then, dear Indian Establishment, we bring you the saga of real
India paying New Delhi back in its own coin.
In
the small town called Sukma along Chhattisgarh’s state Highway 43,
the only sign of the government of
India are the lonely electric poles. Lonely, because there are no
cables strung on them. Most roads are bad, not because the state PWD
did not use good quality material, but because land mines meant to
keep out the Indian state’s police and paramilitary forces are made
of exceptionally good quality. Every time someone negotiates these
paths, hawk eyed locals check you out with a piercinggaze to judge
which side are you on.
 State
of statelessness starts here. Welcome to the territory where
India
is a distant entity, represented occasionally by a khaki clad gun
totter representative of India who is too afraid to tip toe over the
land mines. One hour flight distance away from Bombay, this too
shows up on the map as
India.
On Manmohan Singh’s mindscape, this is marked out as the single most
serious internal security threat to
India.
And there are so many shapes and sizes of this threat, so many
different intensities, that the simplisticsolution loving India
which has
a linear reading
of any problem has devised an all encompassing tag for it: Naxalism.
Globalization,
booming Indian economy, 10 per cent growth rate, 11th Five Year
Plan. Men like Manmohan Singh will be lost here. Unfortunately for
the designers of the new India, a country exists outside the seminar
rooms of the India International Centre also. Too bad, there is
something south of
South Delhi
also. This is called the real
India. It is
from this place that the have nots
of an unevenly prospering nation wage a grim war against the
government, armed with weapons mostly stolen from “the enemy”,
India’s security forces, and in many areas, with an ideology
imported from the China of Mao Tse-Tung, from the 1960s. There is no
CPI(M) apologist here to talk about modern China. Alongside the
local sesame, teak and mahua trees, an extreme doctrine has been
sending deep roots into the tribal psyche, especially among the
warrior tribes of Madias and Kois. The tribals allege that for
decades, the government and its business cronies have carried out a
multibillion-rupee trade in local tobacco and firewood, without
sharing the spoils with them. So, the government has been shunted
out. The state is recruiting boys and girls as young as 15 as
special police officers. These armed youngsters patrol the roads.
On a recent
excursion, Stevan Desai of the Hindustan Times, found how every
government-run primary school, post office and hospital here has
been taken over by Naxalites — the local engines of Maoist
revolutionary thought who take their name from a 1967 peasant
uprising in Naxalbari, West Bengal. Chhattisgarh now is the
Liberated Zone’s bloodiest battleground. Desai is a brave reporter,
and a sincere one. Not many of
India’s
pen pushers are now able to take time off to write about anything
other than Indian Idol clown of its American counterpart, unless it
is for some equally dumb film star. In Maoist territory, a few
rusty hand pumps are the only memories of a fugitive government. The
schools, the dams, even the tax system, are run by the Naxalites.
Villagers pay with money, or with food, shelter, clothes and
medicines. Families who cannot even afford that in this desperately
poor area where the monthly per capita income is Rs 200 (40 per cent
below the national average) give their men and boys to the
revolution astax.
 “The
Maoists told my family wehave a choice: either the men join the
movement or pay up Rs 500.We were given three chances to pay, in
food grains, if not cash,” says 19- year-old Pancham Dhulia at Kurti,
the second of the five relief camps on the 80-km highway from Sukma
to Konta where victims of the Maoists or people disgruntled with
them live in constant fear of reprisal. “My family could not pay.
They handed me
over to the movement as tax.” Such recruits ensure that your journey
from Jagdalpur, 300-odd km from state capital Raipur, to Pamed, is a
20-hour detour through neighboring Andhra Pradesh. There is a
shorter road through a village called Chintalnar, where security
forces have not ventured for months now. This road is heavily
littered with Claymore landmines, which first earned their stripes
killing thousands in World War II. Relentless sniper fire could make
the road even shorter for the casual visitor.
The ambushed
police station in Bijapur did not particularly want to be the last
representative of the Indian state in this area. All other
government institutions have withdrawn. Stevan Desai quoted Rajendar
Vij, Inspector-General of Police (Bastar Range) as saying, “We had
asked for its closure.” There are no telephones here, no cell
signal, no electricity. Policemen say there are several areas deep
in Bijapur and Dantewada where they have not ventured for two
decades. In Dantewada, the violence has wiped out 644 tribal
villages. The Maoists are likely to re-distribute this land.
Naxalites, like the police, have Insas rifles, Kalashnikovs, light
machine guns, SLRs, and .303s.
They also have
more numbers. The other road into the Liberated Zone, Highway 43, is
the only bleak artery that the government retains in about 1.3 lakh
sq km — that’s the size of 300 Mumbais — of Naxalite territory.
Along the highway are the five relief camps that stay huddled beside
CRPF shelters. From here, the Indian state issues its nervous and
disturbing answer to the siege. It recruits boys and girls as young
as 15 as special police officers (SPOs), arming them with
World-War-vintage .303 rifles. While the security forces concentrate
on their own posts, these youngsters patrol the roads and guard the
camps. These counter- insurgents are called Salwa Judum, ‘the
movement to purify’, in the local Chhattisgarhi language.
 Here,
dear WSN readers, is the real face and strategy of the Indian
Government. Get the poor to fight with the poor. Salwa Judam with
Naxalites, poor CPI(M) cadre with the Nandigram poor, unemployed
Sikhs recruited as SPOs with the Sikh militants. At Konta town on
the Andhra Pradesh border, there are 180 SPOs, many of them young
girls. They joined so that they could support their families, left
homeless and unemployed by the Maoists, with Rs 2,000-3,000 as
monthly government allowance. “If I do not hold the gun, I will be
killed, now that we are on the other side,” says a 16-year-old SPO,
requesting anonymity. “Also, I get to earn to feed my family.”
Barely 2 km away in the red beyond, the children of
India’s
own intifada play cops and Maoists, in which little boys acting as
comrades vanquish the “corrupt and evil” police forces. “The Maoist
strategy of catching them young is eerily similar to that of the
Khmer Rogue, the Maoistinspired revolutionary party responsible for
the Cambodian genocide,” says an article in the Washington DC-based
magazine Global Affairs.
In scores of
towns — Pamed, Narainpur and Koligoda — Maoists run the schools,
distribute grain and construct dams to irrigate this lush, fertile
land. A CRPF Sub-Inspector warned Desai not to cross Sukma, which
houses the last petrol station and the last bottles of soft drink.
His words should haunt New Delhi for many many years of the battles
that are still in the future: “It’s a war and, forget winning, we do
not know how to fight it.” Listen to it, India. You do not know how
to fight this war, because no nation state has ever devised a fool
proof way of fighting its own people.
You are
arraigned against yourself. You are killing your own. You are
killing yourself. What does
one say to a suicide-minded nation? Go, take a jump!
28 November, 2007
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