In all of the previous post about the bustling, if bewildering political landscape of India, I skipped over one of the most interesting parts - and one that adds to the volatility. The increasing grip on inland territories of Maoist guerrillas is not something widely associated with India - Nepal, sure, but India? Yet the so-called Naxalites control large swaths of India's rural heartland.
How much is somewhat hard to establish. The government and much of the media do like to lump any local recalcitrance in with the Maoists. When minor ethnic groups on the far borders of the country resist the central authorities, they're often labelled Maoist by default as well, whether or not there is a link - or so one of my fellow bloggers at Observationalism, who did mediation work in the northeastern state of Nagaland, said.
Moreover, while hardcore Maoist guerrillas do control extensive chunks of forested territory in east and southeast India, they arguably possess something of a hybrid identity. There's the ideology and rhetorics of revolutionary communism. But often they seem as much interested in petty banditism. Distant cousins, perhaps, of the FARC in Colombia, those revolutionary communists who turned into drug and war lords.
Still - India is no Colombia, obviously, but even so some 500 civilians and police were killed in insurgent clashes last year, Reuters reported. In 2006, Prime Minister Singh described Maoist violence as "the single biggest internal security challenge" faced by India. Sources quoted on Wikipedia put the number of guerrillas at 10-20,000 and claim "the guerrillas control an estimated one fifth of India's forests, as well as being active in 160 of the country's 604 administrative districts." See also the map to the right from the Indian news site IBNlive (click on the map and scroll down to see it in full size).
That's not peanuts. And when there are elections, they attack.
Reuters and this openDemocracy update report that Maoists killed at least seventeen people on the first polling day, April 16, attacking polling officials and security personnel across four states (Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Bihar and Orissa). Five election officials were killed in a landmine blast in Chhattisgarh's Rajnandgaon district, and seven Border Security Force personnel were killed in a landmine explosion in Jharkhand's Latehar district. Maoists opened gunfire at two polling stations, in the Gaya district of Bihar and in Bastar, Chhattisgarh, and there were further gun battles in two districts in Jharkhand state and a village in Chhattisgarh, where a police trooper was killed. Eight poll officials were kidnapped in Jharkhand. In Orissa state, Maoists raided four polling stations and set fire to voting machines. And that's just among other things. Reuters reported that "in some Maoist-hit areas people did not vote, fearing attacks by the rebels who had threatened to cut off their hands."
That, mind, was just the first of the five voting days that will take place before the month-long elections are complete. The Maoists hit international headlines this week, ahead of the second round of voting last Thursday, when up to 250 rebels seized a train carrying several hundred passengers as it travelled through Jharkhand state. After three hours, they freed the hostages and retreated back into the jungle.
In various other locations, they detonated a landmine that blew up a jeep carrying polling officials in Bihar, killing four policemen and an election official; shot dead two leaders of the governing Communist Party in West Bengal; blew up a railway station, a school building and a health centre in three separate incidents in Jharkhand; and bombed a block development office and set ablaze eight trucks in Bihar.
Last November I was at a conference about media policy in London, and over dinner queried an Indian participant about the Maoist rebellion. He sketched a picture of indebted, desperate peasants who had been driven into the Maoist camp by circumstances, but without enthusiasm. He described rural areas with a large indigenous population, where the local peasants have seen farmers move in from outside who had more capital and could pursue a more industrial-type farming, for profit rather than subsistence. Those new arrivals can better withstand the current crisis than them too, stoking violent resentment.
To stem the chaos, he said, the state had started to hand out weapons to the farmers to defend themselves - which in turn merely escalated the clashes. The army harshly suppresses peasant protests where it can too. And so peasant communities turn to the Maoists as a kind of local defence force.
Major economical interests are involved here, Randeep Ramesh reported for the Guardian three years ago:
Campaigners say that the reason why the government has opened a new front in this battle lies beneath Chhattisgarh's fertile soil, which contains some of the country's richest reserves of iron ore, coal, limestone and bauxite. Above live some of India's most impoverished people: semi-literate tribes who exist in near destitution. [..] Last year the Chhattisgarh government signed deals worth 130bn Indian rupees (£1.6bn) with industrial companies for steel mills and power stations.
If that sounds like the Maoist rebellion constitutes a commendable struggle of David against Goliath, however, think again.
The Maoists themselves, my Indian colleague continued, are a predatory force; a class of de facto bandits who live off the produce they force the impoverished peasants to supply them with, in a parasitic relationship. They benefit in particular from peasants who grow poppies and marijuana: they help keep the police away in return for a share of the profit. A comparison with the Sicilian mafia comes to mind.
Nevertheless, the Maoists see themselves very much as ideological warriors for revolution. In practice, their ideological, ethnic/tribal, and mob-like identities overlay each other, and in symbiosis keep fuelling the brush fire of armed insurrection. But this insurrection is largely fought over the heads of the peasants, who end up being used and victimised by both state and guerrillas, as Ramesh reported:
[I]n the dense forests of southern Chhattisgarh state, [..] the state has armed thousands of villagers with guns, spears and bows and arrows. Child soldiers are often ranged against opponents of similar age. In Chhattisgarh a battalion of Indian paramilitary forces has backed this militia, known as Salva Judum (Peace March), against the Naxalites, turning the forest into a battlefield.
Entire villages have been emptied as tribal communities flee from the burnings, lootings and killings. The civil conflict has left more than 50,000 people camping under tarpaulin sheets without work or food along the roadsides of southern Chhattisgarh.
India remains a booming country, even now the crisis is hitting. But its territory seems to cover time as well as space. While it's the 21st century in South Delhi, in some of India's regions it's still 1949 - and history has a way of avenging itself.
