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India’s secret war made public!
05/21/10

India’s gravest security threat is not Pakistan. The threat is a domestic one and the deadly war is unfolding in the jungles of Central India. It is actually a never-ending and decades-long war that the Indian government seems to be rather shy of. So far thousands, mostly policemen, have died in the fight between the Maoists (also called the Naxalites) and the State.

However, this Monday, following a landmine attack in Chhattisgarh, which killed at least 30 people (15 civilians and 15 Special Police Officers traveling on a bus), the Indian government decided to review its strategy against the rebels. Home Minister P. Chidambaram stated this week, “I was given a limited mandate… we will go back to the cabinet to revisit that mandate.”

More and more, things seem to be out of control. Last month, in Dantewada, 75 paramilitary troops were killed while trying to tighten security. For many observers, the insurgency has spread to the rural areas of 20 of India’s 28 states. The Indian government has three possible ways to engage with the Maoists. First option, the military is ordered to take over the operations and to train the police without getting directly involved. “This strategy will save the Indian government the embarrassment of conceding the failure of the police force (…) the ruling Congress party is aware that failure to tackle the Maoist insurgency could hurt its prospects in eight state elections lined up over the next two years,” commented journalists Krittivas Mukherjee and Bappa Majumbar in Reuters. Second, the military takes over the ill-equipped police and engages a frontal war (with the use of air power) against the 20 000 Maoist combatants. This is highly unlikely because the rebels live in perfect harmony with the poor in the region of Central India. And this will amount to a publicized vast bloodshed. Third, the government continues with the police action like it has always been the case.

Meanwhile, the Indian government is trying to win the public relations war. After having said that the government will review its counter-insurgency policy to eradicate the Maoist menace, Mr. Chidambaram criticized “unhelpful elements of civil society because there is a lot for what they have to answer.” Without naming her, it was clear that he was referring to famous writer Arundhati Roy whose lengthy human story with the Maoists ran recently in several magazines and on the Internet.

In February 2010, quietly and unannounced, Arundhati Roy visited some of Central India’s forests, home to a mélange of tribespeople (many of whom have taken up arms to protect their people against state-backed development projects and referred to as Maoists or Naxalites). Her unique journalistic “encounter” with armed guerrillas and their families, for which she combed the forests for weeks at personal risk, puts faces and names on the nameless Maoist rebels. Her essay, “Walking with the Comrades” was published on March 19, 2010 and sheds a completely different light on the conflict.

“The Indian Constitution, the moral underpinning of Indian democracy, was adopted by Parliament in 1950. It was a tragic day for tribal people. The Constitution ratified colonial policy and made the State custodian of tribal homelands. Overnight, it turned the entire tribal population into squatters on their own land. It denied them their traditional rights to forest produce, it criminalized a whole way of life. In exchange for the right to vote, it snatched away their right to livelihood and dignity(…) Over the past five years or so, the Governments of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal have signed hundreds of MOUs with corporate houses, worth several billion dollars, all of them secret, for steel plants, sponge-iron factories, power plants, aluminum refineries, dams and mines. In order for the MOUs to translate into real money, tribal people must be moved. Therefore, this war,” writes Arundhati Roy.

It is no surprise today that the Director General of Police of Chhatisgarh is reported to be seriously examining whether Arundhati Roy should be prosecuted under the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act (CSPSA) / Unlawful Activities Prevention Act for her writings…