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WITH the Union Home Minister, P. Chidambaram, unfolding his latest strategy to combat the Maoists, described in official lexicon as the single biggest threat to India’s national security (pipping the insurgents in J&K and the Northeast to this dubious distinction), the debate on how the state and civil society should respond to the Maoist challenge has intensified. Despite routine assertions that the ‘real’ issue is development and inclusive governance, there is little doubt that the state is readying itself for a protracted war. ‘Efforts at initiating development can only follow the successful recapture of territory from armed groups determined to thwart the state at every turn.’ Such, it appears, is the current official consensus.

Fortunately, while proposals to more directly involve the armed forces seem to have currently been shelved, we are now being advised ‘to expose, isolate and target the entire spectrum of Naxalite ideology – from the militant in the jungle to the ideologues in our midst.’ Shades of an emergency!

Unsurprisingly, significant sections of our intelligentsia – not just those ideologically enamoured of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought or those described by the media as ‘bleeding heart liberals’ – are deeply disturbed by this ‘hardening of altitude’ and ‘upping the ante’ by the state. No one who has followed the progress of counterinsurgency operations in India’s troubled areas – be they border zones in our northwest and northeast or the tribal dominated forested tracts in the central Indian plains – can be unaware of the tragic collateral damage that accompanies these operations: thousands displaced, hundreds arrested, often on the flimsiest of suspicion, livelihoods devastated, killings, torture and rape – the list is unending.

Because so much of this ‘undeclared war’ takes place beyond the gaze of independent media, most of us in the safer environs of the metros remain unconcerned about the growing culture of violence and impunity and the steady retreat from the constitutional virtues of freedom, justice and human rights that we espouse to demarcate ourselves from ‘less civilized’ peoples and nations. Nor do we ever bother to ask ourselves why, sixty years plus into our existence as an independent republic, vast regions, today seen as beyond the jurisdiction of the state, continue to be a ‘fourth world’, an ‘internal colony’ valued more for the forest and mineral resources that need to be extracted, than any concern for the people.

Yet, to continue to treat the current lot of Maoists as merely better organized, trained and equipped successors to the Naxalites of the late 1960s or early 1970s – ideologically inspired (even if misguided) revolutionaries committed to usher in a truer, more egalitarian and participatory society – is to miss out on the changes that have taken place in the last four decades. Much like the transformation of disillusioned and militant Tamil youth in Sri Lanka in the early 1980s into an intolerant and militarized LTTE committed to using every tactic, no matter how illegitimate and violent, to forward their aim of Tamil Eelam, significant sections of the Maoists too are not averse to using all the means at their disposal, including extortion and brigandage, murder and killing, blowing up infrastructure and buses, among others, to ‘further the revolution’. For those caught in the inevitable crossfire, many of them hapless civilians, there is often little to choose between the warring sides.

As sociologist Nandini Sundar, in a recent essay in Outlook, points out: ‘Certain wars can never be won with force, but only with justice and reconciliation, dialogue not death.’ The same issue of Outlook reports an opinion poll that ‘lack of development’ is the main cause of Maoism; that the government should negotiate with the Maoists, directly or though mediators; and that the Maosits in turn should call for a ceasefire, if not surrender, and enter into a dialogue. Intriguingly though, close to half the respondents also believe that the fight against the Maoists will never end.

One would like to believe that this is not true, that better sense will prevail on both sides, and that like Sri Lanka, we too will not have to experience a quarter century of ‘undeclared war’ before one side suffers a conclusive defeat. It might be useful to revisit the history of counterinsurgency in Mizoram, usually touted as ‘successful’ by security experts. True, eventually Laldenga did come to the negotiation table and the Mizo National Front became another political party. Laldenga, once a dreaded insurgent even became chief minister of Mizoram and was given a state funeral on his death. But, in the process, Mizoram was radically transformed, with over 80 per cent its people uprooted and re-settled, not always for the better. Can we hope that the new surge against the malcontents will not turn into another Mahabharata, a dharmayuddha that ushered in the Kali Yuga?

Harsh Sethi