How many Maoists are there in India? The estimates are imprecise, and widely varying. There are perhaps between 10,000 and 20,000 full-time guerillas, many of them armed with an AK-47. These revolutionaries are conversant with the use of grenades, landmines, and rocket-launchers. They have maintained links with guerrilla movements in other parts of South Asia, exchanging information and technology with the (now-decimated) Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and with the Nepali Maoists before the latter’s conversion to multi-party democracy.
What we know of the leaders and cadres suggests that most Maoists come from a lower middle class background. They usually have a smattering of education, and were often radicalized in college. Like other Communist movements, the leadership of this one too is overwhelmingly male. No tribals are represented in the upper levels of the party hierarchy.
The general secretary of the now-unified party, the Communist Party of India (Maoist), calls himself ‘Ganapathi’. He is believed to be from Andhra Pradesh, although the name he uses is almost certainly a pseudonym. Statements carrying his name occasionally circulate on the Internet—one, issued in February 2007, reported the ‘successful completion’ of a party congress ‘held deep in the forests of one of the several Guerilla Zones in the country …’ The party congress ‘reaffirmed the general line of the new democratic revolution with agrarian revolution as its axis and protracted people’s war as the path of the Indian revolution …’ The meeting ‘was completed amongst great euphoria with a Call to the world people: Rise up as a tide to smash Imperialism and its running dogs! Advance the Revolutionary war throughout the world!’
This chillingly straightforward credo was endorsed by a Maoist activist whom I met in Chhattisgarh in 2006. Working under the pseudonym of ‘Sanjeev’, this revolutionary was slim and clean-shaven, and soberly dressed, in dark trousers and a bush-shirt of neutral colours. Now thirty-five, he had been in the movement for two decades, dropping out of college in Hyderabad to join it. (The profile was typical—the leading Maoists in Chhattisgarh are all Telugu speakers from Andhra Pradesh.) Speaking in quiet, controlled tones, Sanjeev soon showed himself to be both deeply committed as well as highly sophisticated. Their sangams, he said, worked to protect people’s rights in jal, jangal, zameen—water, forest and land. At the same time, the Maoists made targeted attacks on state officials, especially the police. Raids on police stations were intended to stop the police from harassing ordinary folk. They were also necessary to augment the weaponry of the guerrilla army. Through popular mobilization and the intimidation of state officials, the Maoists hoped to expand their authority over Dandakaranya. Once the region was made a ‘liberated zone’, it would be used as a launching pad for the capture of state power in India as a whole.
Sanjeev’s belief in the efficacy of armed struggle was complete. When asked about two landmine blasts which had killed many innocent people—in one case members of a marriage party—he said that these had been mistakes, with the guerrillas believing that the police had hired private vehicles to escape detection. The Maoists, he said, would issue an apology and compensate the victims’ families.
However, of other (and scarcely less brutal) killings he said these were ‘deliberate incidents’; that is, intended as such.
I knew beforehand that the Naxalites were no Gandhians, but it took a conversation with a Muria tribal to see them in clearer light. This man, a first-generation graduate and former schoolteacher who had been rendered homeless by the civil war, explained to me how behind the macho image of an armed revolutionary lay a man who lacked any moral courage whatsoever.
His words ring in my ears still—he said, in Hindi, ‘Naxaliyon ko himmat nahin hai ki wo hathiyaron gaon ké bahar chhod ké hamare beech mein aake behas karé.’ (The Naxalites do not have the guts to leave their weapons outside our village and then come and have a discussion with us.) It was an arresting remark, deep in insight and understanding about the real meanings of democracy. Despite his machismo and certitude, the Naxalite was actually so fearful of his own self that he dare not engage in democratic debate—even with poor and unarmed villagers. If he really had confidence in his beliefs, why would he seek in the first instance to enforce them at the point of a gun?
The remark of the Muria teacher also allowed me to see that Maoist violence was not random or anarchic, but highly focused. Schools were attacked because the revolutionaries did not want children to be exposed to a pedagogy other than their own. The Maoists regularly murdered panchayat members and leaders (including many women) because they saw electoral democracy, even—or perhaps especially—at the village level, as a threat to their vision of a one-party state.
In the short-term, the Maoists may sometimes provide the tribals succour against the exactions of the forest guard or the moneylender. In the medium-and long-term, they provide no real solution. For them, the tribals are essentially cannon fodder, a stepping stone in a larger war against the Indian state which will end—or so their ideologues claim—with the Red Flag being planted on the Red Fort in thirty or forty years’ time.
This dream is a fantasy, but, since the Maoists are determined to play it out, a bloody war of attrition lies ahead of us.
The Indian state will not be able to easily recapture the hearts and minds of the adivasis, nor able either to authoritatively reassert its control, by day and especially by night, in the territories where the extremists are now active. At the same time, if the Maoists try to move into the open country, they will be mowed down by the Indian Army. And so, in the hills and forests of central India, the conflict persists, without any side able to claim a decisive victory.
In the long run, perhaps, the Maoists might indeed make their peace with the Republic of India, and the republic might come to treat its adivasi citizens with dignity and honour. Whether this denouement will happen in my own lifetime I am not sure. In the forest regions of central and eastern India, years of struggle and strife lie ahead. Here, in the jungles and hills they once called their own, the tribals will continue to be harassed on one side by the state and on the other by the insurgents. As one adivasi in Bastar put it to me—‘Hummé dono taraf sé dabav hai,
aur hum beech méin pis gayé hain.’ It sounds far tamer in English—‘Pressed and pierced from both sides, here we are, crushed in the middle.’
V
The history of postcolonial India, like the history of interwar Europe, is one of an unstable democratic regime in the middle, challenged from the left and the right by absolutist ideologies that seek to replace it. In January 1948 Mahatma Gandhi was murdered by a Hindu fanatic; six weeks later, under the orders of Moscow, the then undivided Communist Party of India launched an armed insurrection against the Indian state. Through resolute leadership, the threats from left and right were contained, and a democratic Constitution put in place. However, ever since, the Hindu Rashtra and the Communist dictatorship have stood as sometimes recessive, sometimes aggressive, alternatives to the democratic idea of India.
A third challenge to the idea of India also goes back to the founding of the nation. This is the notion that the Indian Union is an artificial cobbling together of many rival nationalities that must, in time, break up into its constituent parts. In the summer of 1946, a section of the Nagas announced that when the British departed, they would form an independent nation of their own. In the summer of 1947, similar claims were put forward by (among others) the Dewan of Travancore, the Maharaja of Kashmir, and the Nizam of Hyderabad. The 15th of August 1947 was marked as a day of mourning by the Dravida Kazhagam, an influential Tamil party that likewise wished to strike out for an independent nation. Some Sikhs were upset by the division of British India into India and Pakistan, since they had hoped that a third nation, Khalistan, would also be brought into being.
Many British imperialists believed that an independent and united India would not survive. These sceptics included the former prime minister Winston Churchill as well as officials serving in the subcontinent at the time of the tr
ansfer of power. The Mizo Hills, then known as the Lushai Hills, were governed by a man named A.R.H. Macdonald. In March 1947, Macdonald wrote to his immediate superior that his ‘advice to the Lushais, since the very beginning of Lushai politics at the end of the War, has been until very recently not to trouble themselves yet about the problem of their future relationship to the rest of India: nobody can possibly foretell what India will be like even two years from now, or even whether there will be an India in the unitary political sense. I would not encourage my small daughter to commit herself to vows of lifelong spinsterhood; but I would regard it as an even worse crime to betroth her in infancy to a boy who was himself still undeveloped.’
In subsequent years, the infant developed sufficiently to persuade or coerce its recalcitrant partners to unite with it. But the process took time and money, and spilt a great deal of blood. Between 1947 and 1950 more than five hundred princely states were integrated into the Union.
In 1963 the Dravidian parties formally dropped the plank of independence. The Mizos launched a rebellion in 1965; two decades later, their leaders laid down arms and successfully entered the democratic process. The 1980s witnessed a movement for Sikh separatism in the Punjab; this was finally tamed, albeit with considerable loss of life. The 1980s and 1990s also witnessed much violence instigated by the United Liberation Front of Assam; this too, has abated, with a vast majority of Assamese seeking a better life within India rather than a separate homeland for themselves.
As I write this, three nationalist insurgencies retain their force and relevance—those in Nagaland, Manipur and Kashmir. The first of these has been led for more than three decades by a Thangkul Naga named T. Muivah. In the late 1980s, the Dutch writer Bertil Lintner trekked across the India–Burma border to meet the Naga leader in his jungle hideout. Muivah told him that ‘the only hope the Nagas had to achieve their independence would be if India itself broke up’. The Nagas had made contact with Sikh and Kashmiri separatists, and Muivah ‘fervently hoped a similar movement would emerge among the Tamils of southern India—which would indeed plunge the country into the anarchy he desired’.
The Tamils remain quite content to live within the Indian Union, and (the recent reappearance of Bhindranwale posters notwithstanding) the Sikh separatists are no longer active or influential. But the Valley of Kashmir remains on the boil; Manipur is home to dozens of armed insurgent groups; and despite fourteen years of ceasefire no agreement has yet been reached between the Government of India and Muivah’s men.
The discontent in these three states has four major causes: their distance, geographical and cultural, from the Indian heartland; the power of the idea of national independence among young men; the impunity enjoyed by soldiers from arrest and prosecution, with their actions against civilians then leading to more discontent; and the support by the Centre to manipulative and corrupt local politicians. But the insurgents have their own crimes to account for, as for instance the expulsion of Pandits in the case of Kashmir, and the steady extortion of civilians by Manipuri and Naga rebels. They are also often funded by foreign nations. That said, the principal reason for the conflict remains the intense commitment of the rebels on the one side, and the excessive use of force by the state on the other.
Those with a detached, long-term view may point out that it took centuries for countries like Spain and the United Kingdom to successfully subdue the ethnic minorities that live on their borders. There is also the example of the American Civil War, and of China’s troubles in Tibet and Xinjiang. These are all illustrations of the pain, the anguish, the bitterness and the brutality that often accompanies the process of nation-building.
India, however, claims to be a modern democracy. The standards it sets itself must be different from those acceptable in aristocratic regimes of the nineteenth century or of totalitarian states of the present time. To reconcile the Kashmiris, Manipuris and Nagas to the idea of India must involve methods other than coercion or bribery.
The state’s reliance on repression, and the rebels’ insistence on full national sovereignty, has led (in Tagore’s phrase) to ‘ceaseless conflicts’. If the violence is to end, the Government of India must do far more to reach out to the people of Kashmir, Nagaland and Manipur. The notorious Armed Forces Special Powers Act must be repealed. Policemen and soldiers guilty of human rights violations must be punished. The constant interference with the functioning of democratically elected state governments must end.
At the same time, one should not romanticize little nationalisms, for they can be rather ugly themselves. The intolerance of Naga activists was on display in the summer of 2010, when they blockaded the Imphal Valley for more than two months, denying access to food, petrol and medicines intended for ordinary civilians. The narrow-mindedness (and perhaps paranoia) of Meitei insurgents is evident in their banning DVDs of Hindi films from being shown even in private homes. As for Kashmir, readers may wish to consult an essay by Yoginder Sikand in the Economic and Political Weekly laying out the reactionary, medievalist, world view of the Hurriyat leader, Syed Ali Shah Geelani.
There is also the question of viability.
The small, hilly, land-locked independent homelands the radicals dream of will, in an economic and political sense, be unviable. (And an independent Kashmir will most likely become a receptacle for Al Qaeda.) If Tamils and Mizos can live within the Indian Union, there is no reason why the Meiteis and Nagas cannot. Educated, English-speaking and characterized by a high level of gender equality, these communities can access the best jobs in the whole of India (in fact, some of their members already do). Why then restrict oneself to a small, circumscribed piece of turf?
The idea of India is plural and inclusive. The Constitution of India is flexible and accommodative. As it stands, India incorporates a greater variety of religions (whether born on its soil or imported) than any other nation in human history. It has, among other things, a Sikh majority state (the Punjab), three Christian majority states (Mizoram, Nagaland and Meghalaya), a Muslim majority state (Jammu and Kashmir), Muslim majority districts in Kerala, Assam, Bihar and West Bengal, and districts dominated by Buddhists in Kashmir and Arunachal. India also has a greater variety of languages and literatures than any other nation, and a federal form of government. If flexibility is promoted more sincerely and accommodation implemented more faithfully, one can yet arrive at a resolution which allows for real autonomy, such that Manipuris and Nagas and Kashmiris have the freedom both to determine the pattern of their lives in their own state, and to seek, if they so wish, opportunities to work and live in the other states of the Union. *
VI
These three conceptual and ideological challenges (Hindu fundamentalism, Communist dictatorship, and ethnic separatism) all date to the founding of the nation. To these have more recently been added three more mundane and materialist challenges. These are inequality, corruption, and environmental degradation. In India today, there are gross and apparently growing inequalities of income, wealth, consumption, property, access to quality education and health care, and of avenues for dignified employment. These diverse disparities in turn run along diverse social axes, among them caste, religion, ethnicity, region, and gender. Upper castes (and Brahmins and Banias in particular) go to better schools and better hospitals, and are massively over-represented in the professional and entrepreneurial classes. In economic as well as social terms, Hindus, Sikhs and Christians are significantly better off than Muslims. The tribes of central India, as we have seen, may be even worse off than Muslims. Those who live in the west and south of the country have more regular sources of income than those who live in the north or east. All across India, per capita income is much higher in cities than in the countryside. Finally, in every social strata, men have easier access to education, health care, and employment opportunities than do women.
I am not a socialist, still less a Marxist. The history of Communism shows that those who seek by force to create a perfectly equal society only end up suppressin
g citizens, catalyzing violence, and creating a new class of nomenklatura who enjoy greater privileges and even greater immunity from public scrutiny than did medieval monarchs. The state of North Korea today is perfect proof of the idiocy and barbarity of the search for perfect equality.
As that wise Indian, André Béteille, always points out, what we must strive for is reasonable equality of opportunity, not absolute equality of result. That we have plainly not achieved, hence the disparities noted above. The life chances of a Dalit remain grossly inferior to those of a Brahmin; of a Muslim to those of a Hindu; of a tribal to those of a Hindu or Muslim; of a villager to those of a city dweller; of an Oriya or Jharkhandi to those of a Maharashtrian or Tamil.
One consequence of market-led economic growth shall be to accentuate these differences. Since upper castes tend to have higher levels of education and greater mobility across India, they are likely to garner the most profitable jobs. Since well developed regions have a reputation for being rich in skills and open to innovation, the bigger investors will flock to them. Since cities have more resources and better infrastructure as compared to small towns and villages, they will continue to get the bulk of new investment. In this manner, the already substantial gap between (for example) Bangalore and rural Karnataka, south India and eastern India, city-dwellers and country-folk, will grow even larger.
These inequalities of income and status are made more striking by their magnification in the media, with its breathless worship of wealth and success. A leading newspaper routinely speaks of the India that wants to march ahead allegedly being kept back by the other India that refuses to come with them. There is a kind of Social Darwinism abroad, where the new rich promiscuously parade their wealth, while insinuating that the poor are poor because they deserve to be poor. The exhibitionism of the rich has reached its apogee in the construction of a twenty-seven-storey building in downtown Mumbai. Costing two billion dollars, and covering 400,000 square feet of interior space, this structure is meant for the exclusive use of a single nuclear family.