The All-India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries, of which the Darjeeling district committee of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which spearheaded the Naxalite movement, was an important constituent, became the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) in 1969. The latter, however, splintered soon thereafter and, at one stage, there were about 40 different groups and parties professing allegiance to the Maoist political stream. Yet, despite this and the harsh repressive measures, the movement spread from the Naxalbari area to Debra and Gopiballavpur in Midnapore district in West Bengal, Mushahari in Bihar, Lakhimpur Kheri in Uttar Pradesh and Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh within a short period.
The movement has continued to grow, and now covers substantial tracts in West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, with contiguous areas of these States forming a ‘Red Corridor’ stretching from Andhra Pradesh to Nepal. It has also established a presence in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. The insurrectionary violence now being witnessed at Lalgarh and elsewhere in India is led by the Communist Party of India (Maoist), formed in September 2004 through the merger of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) People’s War and the Maoist Communist Centre of India.
A significant feature of the Maoist movement is that, stamped out in one place, it has raised its head in another. Thus, suppressed in West Bengal by the end of 1972, it re-emerged as a force in Andhra Pradesh, where it had been crushed earlier, by mid-1970s and in Bihar in the 1980s, and then in the other States.
One reason for the movement’s survival and spread has been the inadequacy of the state’s response. Counter-insurgency is a highly complex and multi-dimensional business spanning territories as far apart as psychological warfare, electronic surveillance to human intelligence-gathering and actual operations on the ground. Each of these areas requires expertise, state-of-the-art equipment and motivation of the highest order, which is lacking in most State police forces steeped in sloth and venality. In fact, it is the predatory nature of the State police forces that makes it difficult for them to enlist popular support against the Maoist, and easy for the latter to whip up popular anger against them and make them targets of attack.
The impact of this basic drawback has been aggravated by the fact that the police are poorly armed compared to the Maoists who often sport AK series rifles against their .303s. They lack adequate communications equipment, an absence which has been acutely felt in Lalgarh, and mobility, there being very few adequately armour-plated vehicles which can withstand landmine blasts. Even the special outfits that several State Governments have cobbled together have not helped because of inadequate weaponry and equipment and the fact that officers and personnel leading them are from the State police establishments and thus tend to be defined by their ethos and conventional mindsets.
Besides, police forces have to be led at the political level by leaders who command respect by virtue of their personal attributes and who either themselves have the vision and intellect to recognise the magnitude of the challenge posed by the Maoists and the nature of the response required, or are wise enough to leave matters to police officers who have it. There are few such leaders at the State level. Rather, the majority of them, including those in ministerial chairs, are known to be corrupt and not terribly bright, which makes it easy for the Maoists to run down not only them but the entire parliamentary system of Government as an instrument of exploitation and class domination.
Political leaders are frequently unable to identify officers who have the integrity, commitment, intellect, sensitivity, political acumen and courage to lead counter-insurgency operations — as opposed to those who have not. The factionalism that prevails in the Indian Police Service — as also that of the Indian Administrative Service — cadre of various States, makes the matter particularly difficult. Poorly-led police forces are at a serious disadvantage when facing most Maoist leaders who are educated, committed and have years of operational experience behind them.
Maoists also have the advantage of a ready reservoir of recruits from tribal and other disprivileged families that find themselves deprived of their traditional means of livelihood and uprooted from their meagre landholdings and homesteads by a ruthless, inhuman process of development that principally benefits the emergent upper and middle classes at the cost of the poor. Matters are compounded by a rapacious, extortionate and arrogant bureaucracy which strips citizens of both money and dignity whenever an opportunity presents itself, and which constitutes something very similar to the New Class which Milovan Djilas defines (The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System) as being “made up of those who have special privileges and economic preference because of the administrative monopoly they hold”.
The state being still the principal instrument of development, with functions extending from running banks, hospitals and insurance companies to providing electricity and water connections to homes and factories, the intense and widespread alienation that follows cannot be overstated. One then hardly needs to be surprised by what one is witnessing in Lalgarh. And there will be many more Lalgarhs without a fundamental change in the way India is governed.
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