The Rediff Special/P V Ramana
January 25, 2005
Naxalites of the Communist Party of India-Maoist and Communist Party of India -- Marxist-Leninist (Janashakthi) trashed the peace process in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh on January 17.
Accusing the government of being insincere, the Naxalites walked out of the peace process as the state witnessed a spate of violence by the Naxalites and encounters by the police.
AP: Maoists pull out of peace talks
The breakdown of the peace talks was not unexpected. It was never meant to succeed.
The government and the Naxalites sat at the negotiating table for four days between October 15 and 18 merely out of expediency, not to thrash out a negotiated settlement.
The Congress-led government in Andhra Pradesh launched the peace process merely out of political compulsion, without forethought and careful preparation.
It clearly failed (or was calculatedly blind) to assess either the true intentions of the Naxalites or the full ramifications of adopting a 'liberal' attitude towards them. The government directed the police to call off operations against the Naxalites, let the proscription on them lapse and permitted them to operate freely -- hold public meetings, inaugurate martyrs memorials, and undertake recruitment as well as extort from wealthy persons.
In its manifesto ahead of the election to the state legislature in April 2004, the Congress promised that it would initiate peace talks with the Naxalites.
The promise was made against the backdrop of the failed assassination attempt by Naxalites of the then Peoples War Group on the then Chief Minister, Nara Chandrababu Naidu [Images], on October 1, 2003, following which Naidu dissolved the assembly and called an election.
The Rediff Interview P G Kannabiran
The PW and the Maoist Communist Center of India subsequently merged on September 21, 2004 to form the CPI-Maoist. The merger was made public just a few hours before talks with the government were to commence.
The Congress wanted to 'act differently' from Naidu's hard-line approach towards the Naxalites. Along the way, the Congress is also said to have struck an unholy and unprincipled deal with the Naxalites for electoral gains. It, therefore, had to repay its 'debts'.
The Naxalites agreed to sit at the negotiating table because they knew that they could make hay while the sun was shining. They badly needed respite from the constant fear of imminent death at the hands of the state police in real or staged encounters. More importantly, their campaign of violence was fast eroding their support base. In 2003, 44 instances of the people revolting against the Naxalites were reported.
Andhra Maoists' kin get counselling
Besides, the Naxalites had suffered numerous, severe body blows during Naidu's regime.
They lost three central committee members (Nalla Adi Reddy 'Shyam', Erramreddy Santosh Reddy 'Mahesh' and Seelam Naresh 'Murali', in 1999), a few Special Zonal Committee/State-level leaders (such as Anupuram Komaraiah, in 2003) and some district-level leaders (such as Polam Sudarshan Reddy, of Warangal, in 2003 and Nelakonda Rajitha of Karimnagar, in 2002), besides numerous cadres in encounters with the police, either real or staged.
They had nearly been wiped out from what they term is their flagship guerrilla zone �� North Telengana Special Zone (NTSZ).
The peace process the government initiated was, thus a 'Godsend' for the Naxalites.
The Naxalites hoisted red flags in lands �� private, forest and Endowments Department �� thus signaling that they stood occupied for redistribution among the landless and hence their rightful owners could not till them.
There have been several reports of the CPI-Maoist occupying land in various parts of the state.
An October 25 media report said in the third week of that month alone, the CPI-Maoist occupied 1,142 acres of land in Kurnool and Prakasam districts; earlier, they had occupied and redistributed 400 acres in Kurnool, 2,005 in Guntur, 10,000 acres in Karimnagar and 3,800 in Warangal. The list runs long.
'I don't want to become another Chandrababu Naidu'
During the October peace talks with the government, CPI-Maoist leader Akkiraju Garagopal 'Ramakrishna' stated that they had, until then, 'liberated' 120,000 acres of land from different land owners.
Earlier, in a June 4 speech in the state legislature, Home Minister Jana Reddy said, 'the government expected the armed extremist groups to refrain from intimidation, extortion or other forms of violence.'
However, the various acts of the Naxalites unambiguously indicate that the government's expectations have been thoroughly belied. At the same time the Naxalites have been able to regroup and enlarge their cadre strength.
The government then realised that it was actually paying disproportionately high and in 'excess' of what it originally 'owed' to the Naxalites and had bargained for. Further, the Union government reportedly apprised the state government of the linkages of the CPI-Maoist with Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence.
A report from Jagdalpur in Chhattisgarh's Bastar region, quoted two local commanders of the Maoists, held on January 10, as saying they had received sophisticated weapons from Pakistan-based terrorist groups. Thereafter, the state government ordered a disguised crackdown on the Naxalites.
Eventually, the talks broke down.
The state government embarked upon an unprepared and futile exercise in initiating the peace process, leaving the fear-struck people in Naxalite-affected areas to the mercy of the trigger-happy.
The fear psychosis has been aptly summed up by Sridhar Babu, the young Congress legislator from Manthani constituency, Karimnagar district, on January 10. Arguing that the local politicians are terrified, he said: 'The situation is volatile and when things get hot, they will be the first people to be targeted.'
Incidentally, Babu's father and former speaker of the state assembly, D Sripada Rao, was shot dead by Naxalites in cold blood in April 1999.
The AP government had declared cessation of armed hostilities on June 16, 2004 and the Maoists reciprocated on June 21. Even though it had in effect declared a cease-fire, it refused to actually term it as one and chose to observe an informal cease-fire.
Naxals must give up arms: AP CM
The proscription on the Maoists was not lifted, but was permitted to lapse on July 21, 2004. The government, thereafter, failed to convince the Naxalites in arriving at mutually agreeable terms of cease-fire that would have resulted in signing a formal agreement.
The Naxalites insisted on their right to bear arms, insisting that arms were inseparable to their movement. Moreover, it had asked the smaller Naxalite groups to abide by the informal cease-fire, without even involving them in the peace process.
Strangely, the government constituted a 20 member-committee to monitor the cease-fire agreement that it never signed with the Naxalites. On January 17, a day after the talks broke down, it asked that same committee to probe into violations by the Naxalites.
One hopes that in future, the state government would learn not to make itself look foolish.
More so in the eyes of the CPI-Maoists, whose armed, underground cadre strength has been variously estimated to be between 7,000 and 12,000, with a presence in nearly 150 districts across 14 Indian states.
P V Ramana is a Research Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi.
Photograph: Prakash Singh/AFP/Getty Images
ALSO READ
ALSO READ:
'All revolutionary ranks must unite'
'The PW always repays its blood debts'
'Unification is the only way to advance the cause of the Indian revolution'
'We expect a lot of violence this time'
Rajeev Srinivasan on tribal rage in Kerala
EXTERNAL LINKS
[Please note, rediff.com is not responsible for the content of these external links nor does rediff.com or its staff endorse the content of such links. These are only being provided as a source of reference]
History of the Naxalite Movement
Naxalbari Movement: The fire that was
Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)
http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/jan/25spec2.htm
|
Named after a form of the Goddess Kali--Danteshwari--and now a hotbed of naxalism, the Scheduled Tribe constituency of Dantewada goes to the polls on Friday amid the killing of several political workers and strident voices both in favour of and against the anti-Maoist Salwa Judum movement. Naxal threat shadows poll-bound Chhattisgarh
The naxal influence can be clearly felt in the constituency. The Geedam police station in Dantewada is surrounded by barbed wire, a sign of the threat to the police. During election time, the fear is all the more pronounced. The station was attacked and looted during the last assembly elections. The Maoists also carried out the biggest jailbreak in the country in Dantewada last year in which 200 odd inmates, mostly Maoists, had escaped. |
Trek to a rival empire - What makes Naxalites fight a losing war | ||||
| SANKARSHAN THAKUR | ||||
Dandakaranya Forests (Bastar): A lugubrious full moon is weighing itself up behind the craggy hill and, the day’s work done, the “people’s government” of Dandakaranya is settling down to another night at the office. Dinner must be cooked for the ranks, the ill and the battle-scarred taken care of, arms and ammunition secured, the night guard posted, the informer network whistled afresh into alert and the route to tomorrow’s camp headquarters mapped. The roll call’s just over and the tasks handed out; it’ll be a long night like every other, and an early morning, everyone’s at their stations. It’s an open-plan workplace, a bivouac scattered under a ragged forest canopy that defies address — somewhere in east Bastar, we are told, no more. We have no way of being wiser. Shortly after we were picked up at our pre-arranged rendezvous on the highway, we became Hansel and Gretel in the hands of our changing guard — we had no notion of where we could be, much less of how to trace a path back. A short dusk-hour break in a village courtyard, then a motorbike dash by dark deeper into the jungle, the rutted road having lapsed into a dirt track cutting through an obstacle course — underbrush and unploughed fields, causeways and riverbeds, sandy humps and troughs, even a precarious stretch of plateau. The bike leapt and dove, catching, at one point, a pack of rabbits startled by the headlights. Another village, another walled courtyard, another halt, this time with a piping meal of rice and dal. A short nap and after that another change of guard and another stretch ahead, on foot. Deeper in, deeper through the dark amid the eerie howling of dogs, or were they jackals? Four hours later, a little past daybreak, we were delivered to the headquarters of a rival sovereignty — the bereft and nebulous empire of Bastar’s Naxalites. Somewhere along the trek we had crossed an invisible line and entered the slipstream of a contrary world, another country. No passports asked for, no visas stamped, but the crossover was no less for the absence of those formalities. Allegiances had been reversed, legitimacies flipped, definitions turned on their head. When Comrade Pandu, de facto head of the east Bastar chapter of the “Dandakaranya People’s Government”, talks of the enemy, he means police and the paramilitary; when he refers to imperialists, he is referring to the Government of India; when he talks about loyalty and commitment, which he does often, he talks about loyalty and commitment to the scrapping of the Constitution and the overthrow of the governance system it has ordained. “Welcome to the people’s republic,” he tells us, fist clenched and raised, “It’s a sham democracy you come from, it works for 5 per cent of the people and kicks the rest where it hurts most, it must be deposed.” Left to him, Comrade Pandu, gaunt and forever Guevara-like about his headgear, would have shot the “enemy regime” dead with a burst of his AK-47, a prize, he proudly tells us, from the lightning raid on the Nayagarh armoury in Orissa in the February of 2008. But that’s a far fantasy and Pandu is no dreamer, even though he dreams an improbable dream — violent overthrow of the current system and the establishment of a “Federal Union of People’s Democratic Republics of India”. “We are embryonic, we have no illusions about that, we are not strong enough to headquarter our government because we can’t defend it, we are weak compared to the might of the state we fight, but that is no reason to give up. Revolution will not be born if there is no embryo.” The camp is thick with shadows shuffling about in the dark, guns slung over their shoulders. Some of the weaponry, like Comrade Pandu’s, is sophisticated, but most of it of dubious vintage and even more dubious ability. Shivlal, teenaged and barefoot, carries a single-bore that he says he has never fired. “Never needed to,” he says. But what if someone takes aim at him? He bares a fine, full set of teeth. “They haven’t made a bullet with my name on it.” Utterly filmi yet utterly craftless, a confidence deeply swigged in the headiness of youth.
His leader may often sound equally intoxicated. Comrade Pandu’s exposition on eventual aims and objectives in this moonlit theatre might often tempt you into thinking you’ve entered the rehearsal rooms of an ultra-Marxist skit, a fanciful indulgence that can’t be for real. But little in this story is fictitious other than the names of characters that populate it — Comrade Pandu, for instance, isn’t the man’s real name, but he and his mission are real enough. These are men and women who have forsaken more commodious — if also more ordinary — lives elsewhere in the pursuit of belief. They have lost — and taken — lives, thousands of them over the past decade of resurgence along the country’s famished eastern flank, right down from Bihar to Andhra Pradesh through Orissa and Chhattisgarh. They bear, as a collective, a formidable and ominous sounding title bestowed by the Prime Minister, no less — the “biggest internal security threat to India, a virus that needs to be wiped out”. Comrade Rupi — it’s the name of a jungle bird, not a virus, she sharply reminds you — would gladly return the compliment. “It’s about how you view the world,” she says. “From up there we might look like a virus to the system, from down here, the system looks like a virus. What has it given the vast majority of this country? Sixty years after so-called Independence, nothing has changed for most, things have gotten worse.” But for her guerrilla fatigues and her ease with guns, you’d mistake her for a schoolteacher — she’s thin as a reed, bespectacled and soft-toned. She is also, like most of the Naxalite vanguard in these jungles, from Andhra Pradesh. “Long back,” she says, “Andhra was long back, at least eight years. I hear my mother cries for me sometimes, but that is all right, this is more important, the fight we set out to fight. I jumped off the fence and committed myself, I did not come here to go back.” Is it getting anywhere, though, this fight, or is it just meandering about in this wilderness day after day, camp after makeshift camp? “Again, it depends on the way you look,” Rupi counters, eyes focused on the far woods. “There is a fight to be fought for people who have nothing and someone has to fight it. If we were doing so badly and if this were so meaningless, do you think we would have earned that dubious description from the Prime Minister? If you like, that’s one of the things that keeps me going day after day, night after night.” |
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
http://www.ndtv. com/convergence/ ndtv/story. aspx?id=NEWEN200 90082646
NDTV Correspondent Thursday, February 05, 2009, (Raipur)
The Chhattisgarh government has told the Supreme Court on Thursday that Salwa Judum, the force set up by the state to fight Naxals doesn't exist.
The government said the anti-Naxal force was almost dead and doesn't exist.
But both the court and the National Human Rights Commission was not satisfied with the government's claim.
The court observed, "Giving arms to private citizens is bad. If the state is not supplying arms how are they getting it."
__._,_.___
RAIPUR: Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh said Salwa Judum is the answer to get rid of the naxal menace in the state and made it clear that it would end only after the end of naxalism in the state
Singh said it appears that Congress members do not want to oppose naxalism in the state.
Singh said Salwa Judum was started as people of Bastar have had enough of naxal atrocities and no longer wanted to suffer silently. He added that the movement would continue till the naxal menace is eradicated
Orissa has to learn lessons from Chhattisgarh experience which has played the Salwa Judum game in the name of cleansing naxals from Dantewada area (not from whole Chhattisgarh) that has resulted in spurt in violent incidents that took lives of many innocent tribals. Police has failed to maintaining law and order but is busy in managing transfers and postings to avoid going to naxal infested areas and they expect to do their job by arming civilians.
http://www.ndtv. com/convergence/ ndtv/story. aspx?id=NEWEN200 90082646
NDTV Correspondent Thursday, February 05, 2009, (Raipur)
The Chhattisgarh government has told the Supreme Court on Thursday that Salwa Judum, the force set up by the state to fight Naxals doesn't exist.
The government said the anti-Naxal force was almost dead and doesn't exist.
But both the court and the National Human Rights Commission was not satisfied with the government's claim.
The court observed, "Giving arms to private citizens is bad. If the state is not supplying arms how are they getting it."
__._,_.___
RAIPUR: Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh said Salwa Judum is the answer to get rid of the naxal menace in the state and made it clear that it would end only after the end of naxalism in the state
Singh said it appears that Congress members do not want to oppose naxalism in the state.
Singh said Salwa Judum was started as people of Bastar have had enough of naxal atrocities and no longer wanted to suffer silently. He added that the movement would continue till the naxal menace is eradicated
Orissa has to learn lessons from Chhattisgarh experience which has played the Salwa Judum game in the name of cleansing naxals from Dantewada area (not from whole Chhattisgarh) that has resulted in spurt in violent incidents that took lives of many innocent tribals. Police has failed to maintaining law and order but is busy in managing transfers and postings to avoid going to naxal infested areas and they expect to do their job by arming civilians.
http://www.ndtv. com/convergence/ ndtv/story. aspx?id=NEWEN200 90082646
NDTV Correspondent Thursday, February 05, 2009, (Raipur)
The Chhattisgarh government has told the Supreme Court on Thursday that Salwa Judum, the force set up by the state to fight Naxals doesn't exist.
The government said the anti-Naxal force was almost dead and doesn't exist.
But both the court and the National Human Rights Commission was not satisfied with the government's claim.
The court observed, "Giving arms to private citizens is bad. If the state is not supplying arms how are they getting it."
__._,_.___
RAIPUR: Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh said Salwa Judum is the answer to get rid of the naxal menace in the state and made it clear that it would end only after the end of naxalism in the state
Singh said it appears that Congress members do not want to oppose naxalism in the state.
Singh said Salwa Judum was started as people of Bastar have had enough of naxal atrocities and no longer wanted to suffer silently. He added that the movement would continue till the naxal menace is eradicated
Orissa has to learn lessons from Chhattisgarh experience which has played the Salwa Judum game in the name of cleansing naxals from Dantewada area (not from whole Chhattisgarh) that has resulted in spurt in violent incidents that took lives of many innocent tribals. Police has failed to maintaining law and order but is busy in managing transfers and postings to avoid going to naxal infested areas and they expect to do their job by arming civilians.
Palash Biswas
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment