WAR and peace, peace and war: the title of Tolstoy’s great novel springs readily to mind, to the literary-minded anyway, confronted with the latest instalment of the war between the state and the Maoists. The state, declaring that it seeks peace, launches a particularly brutal offensive. The Maoists, speaking, as always, in the crudest doctrinaire terms, commence a skilful retreat on the ground, convinced that they will live to fight another day. Meanwhile most of those who die, and all of those who suffer, are ordinary adivasis who have long been confined to the limbo of non-citizenship in an ostensibly republican country.

Citizens – that is the key word. The founding principles of the Indian republic are resonant and resounding, like pebbles in a tin box. Our constitution is a cautious document that works hard to guarantee democracy – federalism, the separation of powers (which Montesquieu famously identified as the cornerstone of British liberty) – but pays only lip service to equality. This sleight of hand was achieved by ensuring that the actual machinery of the state – the administrative, police and judicial apparatus – preserved a close continuity with colonial precept and practice. Ergo, the most radical laws could be passed in the secure conviction that they would never be implemented properly or even half properly. Thus reform would be an incremental affair at worst, and still born at best. In return for embracing democracy, our ruling elites granted themselves a permanent veto over radical reform.

Nevertheless there was one promise that they – and the state – did make: of material amelioration and progress. This meant the usual modest things: education, basic social services, a gradual end to absolute destitution and want. This compact began to be flouted almost as soon as it was made, with the outright denial or slow breakdown of state sponsored education and healthcare, a duty the Nehruvian state considered far less important than the holy grail of conventional industrialization. This industrialization it sought to achieve without altering social relations in the countryside in terms of land ownership, or skills and capabilities: that being the case, it was inevitable that its fruits would be monopolized by socially dominant groups and castes.

In agriculture, the ultimate solution was to create islands of high productivity without disturbing existing landholding patterns: this too merely augmented the power of regionally dominant castes. The poor – specially the socially marginalized – were treated in effect as non-citizens, fodder for the machine, raw material to be expended or debris to be sacrificed, always in the name of national interest. So a social safety net was never put in place, and the destruction of subsistence livelihoods and the environment raged unchecked.

Zamindars obtained generous compensation during zamindari abolition; those displaced by dams and industry were left to fend for themselves. No wonder that what seemed obvious in the India of the early 1960s were its failures – of land reform, of education, of health, of socially applied science. No wonder that the first insurrections against the republic commenced less than twenty years after it was inaugurated, in predominantly adivasi regions such as Naxalbari and Srikakulam.

 

The Maoist movement in India began with Naxalbari – which means that it dates back 40 years, and the most striking thing about it has been its steady growth. The earliest insurrections were crushed relatively easily; subsequently with the savage repression of the CPI(ML) on the streets of Calcutta the movement entered a brief phase of eclipse. These were the years of Indira Gandhi’s ascendancy in her left leaning avatar, her overweening hubris and fall, the brief euphoria of the Janata movement and its equally quick collapse.

The ’70s ended with a whimper, with every hope of fundamental reform in tatters. The middle class would continue to consolidate itself in the subsequent decade until it felt strong enough to break the shackles of the ‘socialist’ past. Meanwhile the ’80s was also the period when the Maoists began to entrench themselves, mostly in adivasi regions, through patient incremental work, building an organization alongside armed squads: by the mid-1990s, parts of Telangana and the great triangle with Bastar at its heart had become their stronghold.

The explanation for the steady increase in Maoist influence since the late ’70s is simple: the character of the Indian state, its relationship with its poorest and most marginalized citizens did not change. If anything it grew more contemptuous, more brutal and more exploitative as neo-liberalism came into full flower and the economic boom of the ’90s commenced.

By then education and health-care had been effectively privatized, the functioning of the police and criminal justice system was an unacknowledged scandal, and the public distribution system leaked like a sieve. Cumulatively the burden on the poor was steadily ratcheted upwards. In the organized sector, the power of the trade unions – representing a small labour ‘aristocracy’ that cared very little about its unorganized counterparts – was gradually broken. Abysmally low wage rates in the informal and small scale sector produced the profits that drove economic expansion, while in agriculture, labour costs were held down by employing seasonal migrants (created in droves by the collapse of dryland cultivation) and increased recourse to mechanization for which the state provided cheap capital.

 

This economic boom produced a second wave of industrialization that engulfed adivasi regions in central and eastern India. Unlike the first one of the ’60s and ’70s which had been largely state sponsored, it was driven almost wholly by private investment in mining and processing with the iron and steel industry as its motor. The results were the same: loss of land, the continuing destruction of forests and subsistence livelihoods, unemployment, exploitation, pauperization.

There is something Kafkaesque in the insistence that industrialization creates employment when all that it has ever done in adivasi regions is destroy it. Older livelihoods are lost – new jobs, such as they are, go overwhelmingly to immigrants or local non-adivasis. Meanwhile the air, the water, the landscape are fouled beyond redemption – since industry returns suitable rates of profit only when enabled to ignore labour laws and pollution regulations, and the exploitative web, both old and new, is strengthened.

 

This second wave of industrialization is still cresting and the only regions relatively untouched by it are those where Maoism is strongest. We can assume that the Maoists have no objection to industrialization as such. We know from indirect evidence that they have long extorted protection money from already existing projects, but to allow the wholesale takeover of adivasi land in the core areas of their influence would be to undercut their very roots. The state for its part had been content enough to leave them in effective control of economically and politically marginal regions such as Bastar.

The active theatre of war remained Telangana where Maoist bases were politically important, and spread widely enough to enable them to launch the kind of assault from which Chandrababu Naidu narrowly escaped. All the more unpleasant tactics used against the Maoists were pioneered in Andhra Pradesh: the use of renegade commanders and the deployment of special units, for example; but all of them were to pale before the novel experiment of the Salwa Judum. Its creation marked a new chapter in the state’s attitude to Maoism.

For by then the old equilibrium had changed. The Maoist advance still continued despite localized setbacks, most notably in Andhra Pradesh. Orissa and Jharkhand, in particular, became beachheads of further expansion. In addition, they achieved footholds in northern Karnataka and parts of the Karnataka Ghats. At the same time, the state’s perception of itself, and of Maoism, began to alter.

The Indian state of the ’70s had been prepared to admit that Maoism was, in a sense, an outgrowth of its failures. The Indian state of the late ’90s recognized no failures worth speaking of except those of the past, reflecting as it did the ideology of a triumphalist and exuberantly consumerist middle class wedded to a peculiarly retrograde variety of laissez faire capitalism. The result was a ludicrously inflated self-perception based on economic success (its very narrow social base had long since ceased to matter) married to a desire to project its power both internally and externally. A hard state was what the middle class and their rulers wanted, a state in which poverty and the poor were swept safely out of sight, and law and order were absolute values.

This political or strategic view coincided with economic calculation. Regions such as Dantewada became more important as the economy kept growing and its appetite for electricity and minerals increased. Thus, from every point of view, political and economic, it became more important than before to crush the Maoists definitively, an objective to which developments in Nepal contributed. And so the Salwa Judum was eagerly embraced, setting in train a sequence of events whose poisoned legacy will doubtless return one day to haunt the republic.

 

The Salwa Judum was not created by the state – it began as a movement led by sections of the adivasi middle class and local non-adivasis with a certain amount of popular support from villagers fed up with the Maoists’ fierce arbitrariness. For if the Maoists were, in a sense, protectors against a rapacious state, they were themselves violent, arbitrary, and sometimes corrupt. However, this movement quickly became transformed out of all recognition as the state threw its weight behind it, arming it and looking the other way as it commenced an orgy of violence, burning and emptying villages by the dozens.

The Chhattisgarh government devised a new anti-Maoist strategy, on the fly as it were: at its core was the belief that every adivasi was a potential or actual Maoist supporter, and that the best way to destroy Maoism was to physically destroy all settlements in the forest and relocate their inhabitants to policed camps. Exactly how they would survive deprived of lands and livelihoods was a question of no interest either to the Salwa Judum or the state.

The second part of the strategy was to divide adivasi communities by enrolling enough adivasis as special police officers, by coercion and inducement, and getting them to commit the kind of crimes on other adivasis – rape, murder – that would make the cleavage permanent. The state could be sure that the Maoists would collaborate in this particular endeavour and they were right. The SPOs became the Maoists’ main target, with the result that they and their families were driven even further into the arms of the Salwa Judum.

 

In essence, the Salwa Judum is a gigantic criminal enterprise, authentically fascist in character. The list of illegalities begins with the enrolment of special police officers – the state arms private citizens under the fig leaf of providing them with temporary employment and uses them to commit various crimes. Dantewara, according to independent accounts, swarms with men without uniforms armed to the teeth: the utter negation of the first principle of a democratic polity which holds that the state’s armed representives must be instantly identifiable and minimally accountable.

The state seals off the entire region using the Salwa Judum (the effective or operative branch of which are its own SPOs) as an excuse – to outraged or inquisitive citizens who seek to know what is happening it replies that it cannot guarantee their security vis-a-vis the Salwa Judum and either forbids them to enter, or surrounds them with so many armed men that free movement becomes impossible. The state uses its own functionaries – policemen, paramilitary forces – as well as the newly recruited SPOs to attack villages periodically and burn them down in order to deprive their inhabitants of any resource that might be provided to the Maoists, or which they might live upon. It indulges in periodic murders since in the eyes of the security forces all adivasis are closet or potential Maoists: normal standards of guilt or innocence do not apply to them.

 

The state – the Chhattisgarh government aided and backed by the central government – does all this in the very heart of an ostensibly democratic, republican country. The media remains silent since Dantewara’s inhabitants are not newsworthy, are not in fact proper citizens. The lower courts echo the state’s view of the situation; the Supreme Court issues various mildly critical orders with evident disinterest as to their implementation.

It is over four years since Dantewara has been effectively sealed off in a kind of cordon sanitaire from which a trickle of news of terrible atrocities sometimes emerges. An adivasi majority district in the heart of the country can only be visited with the permission of the local police and a private militia: if this is not fascism, what is? What happened in Nandigram was nothing in comparison for there the state’s opponents, or the CPI(M)’s, had at least the means to defend themselves: in Dantewara there is only the silence of deserted, burnt out villages.

The irony, of course, is that this strategy, even as a strategy of war, is a resounding failure: the Maoists are retreating, as they retreated from Telangana, leaving ordinary villagers to bear the brunt of the state’s violence, secure in the conviction that they will return one day. Meanwhile, recruitment into their ranks is being swelled by atrocities committed by the security forces. Many adivasis have doubtless begun to believe that it is better to be punished for an actual rather than a potential offence: there is, in any case, no other source of protection.

 

For the central point in question is not, nor has ever been, Maoist violence. It is the violence of the state – the ordinary, everyday extortion and pressure under which adivasi communities live, as well as specific episodes of displacement and dispossession – and the legitimacy of its methods of combating Maoism. For any and every means cannot be justified: certainly not the systematic and deliberate violation of human rights, forced displacement, rapes and murder. These tactics are the short route to both the eventual disappearance of democracy and republicanism . But they have been put to effect before and still are, it will be argued.

Certainly both in Kashmir and the North East, the state has done as bad and worse. But it had the fig leaf of the excuse that its opponents were secessionists, hostile to the idea of India. The Maoists are merely advocates of a different kind of India, and nothing is more certain than that they cannot be defeated this way. What is happening in Dantewara is a transposition into the heart of the country of the illegitimate tactics long used at its borders – if it continues for too long, the exception will become the rule and the quickest way to deal with any and every kind of dissent will be to punish whole communities under the convenient pretext of combating Maoism.

 

As disturbing as the state’s strategy is the deafening silence that accompanies its claims: the Chhattisgarh government’s uninhibited advocacy of violence, the Home Minister’s Orwellian pronouncements, Manmohan Singh’s pieties. Take, for example, the repeated exhortations to the Maoists to give up violence. Why, what on earth for, when the state itself refuses to abjure violence, its readiness to expropriate lands and forests and displace adivasi communities in the name of the nation, its denial of basic social services such as education and health care, its active connivance in the exploitation of adivasis by non-adivasi interests.

What guarantee do the Maoists have, in case they do lay down arms, that their constituents will not be displaced by industry and excluded from forests, in short, swept away by ‘development’ which the state so eagerly espouses? The short answer is none at all, and it is no accident that the state refuses to formulate a credible negotiating position. It exhorts the Maoists to repent their error but admits no error itself in its policies of 60 years in adivasi regions, except the negative one of not bringing development, as though it were not precisely this ‘development’ that is the subject of such bitter resistance.

It is surely time to begin asking fundamental questions about the nature of the state and the acts of its representatives in adivasi regions; for the state is not a bloodless, faceless abstraction as Chidambaram would like us to believe. On the contrary, it is the authentic representative of a middle class which has long since ceased to regard the majority of Indians – the poor – as citizens of the same nation, and whose attitudes represent a real danger to the very idea of democracy.