Are The Naxals On The Right Track?
Depending upon the political leanings, the Naxals can be anything from the “gravest internal security threat” (PM Manmohan Singh) to the disconsolate, “ordinary people who have taken up arms to fight the exploiters” (People’s March Magazine). According to the oldest and the most widely read English language newspaper in Pakistan, The Dawn, Naxals now exercise control over around 40% Indian territory. The Minister for Home Affairs, P. Chidambaram, has vowed to put an end to this menace for once and for all and has already deployed 75,000 troops for this task under a controversial operation named ‘Operation Green Hunt’.
The question is: Are the Naxals really the liberators of the poor, as they claim? Or, if the government is to believe, they are trying to establish an oppressive regime in the country through violence and force.
The Naxals are the liberators
The Naxals represent the Adivasis, the Dalits and poorest of the poor. These are the people who haven’t yet been a part of the ‘Shining India’ story. These are the downtrodden, disgruntled youth who are fighting for their rights against the corrupt and powerful ruling class. According to the Forbes Rich India List, the 100 richest Indian families account for a quarter of country’s GDP. The Naxals are a direct consequence of his gross injustice and income inequality.
India is only a nominal democracy with a handful of oligarchs ruling the country and the masses living in dire conditions. According to The Guardian, a British newspaper, there are more poor people in India than in 26 Sub Saharan countries combined and back home, The Times of India reported on 15 July, 2010 that 64.5 crore people in India or 55% of our population is poor. And as far as the molestation of two girls – Muni and Bela – is concerned, if proved the Naxals have a disciplinary committee to take appropriate action against the guilty comrades.
Superpower, well the nation is on the verge of turning into a failed state and the naxals are there with a helping hand. Everybody knows what caused the movement to come into being in the village of Naxalbari. The poor were being subjugated both by the rich landlords and the state and when they took to arms they were labeled as Naxals or terrorists.
The general secretary of the CPI (Maoist), Ganapathy has already made it clear in his interview with the Swedish reporter Jan Myrdal that the party has learnt from the past experiences with socialism in the world. Therefore, it’s unlikely that the mistakes would be repeated. Also, the statistics concerning the deaths of people in the former Soviet Union and during the Cultural Revolution are dubious figures reported by the western propagandist tools.
Recently, the Naxals have been blowing up government-run schools in the region. These schools were abandoned a long time ago and were not being used to teach children. The Naxals have attacked only those schools where the security personnel were residing.
The government has failed to provide even the basics needs such as electricity, food, water, education to the people of this country even after sixty years of independence. The Naxals feel It is time to scrap the current model of government and opt for a revolutionary system of governance.
The Naxal guerillas in the forests of Central India are facing the 75, 000-men strong, heavily armed CRPF, police of several states and several COBRA (the best equipped paramilitary unit in the country) units. The forces have the full support of the Indian state which spends a hundred trillion rupees annually on her defense. so how is it that such a powerful state is finding it so difficult to control the chaos created by only a few thousand Naxal guerillas fighting with bows and arrows or at best with old rifles? It is because the masses identify themselves with the cause of Naxals and support them against the Indian state. The exploited tribals and other poor people see them as the liberators.
According to Arundhati Roy, a Booker Prize winner writer, the greed of the Indian elite and the rising middle class is at the heart of conflict because, she says, unlike the industrializing western countries we don’t have colonies to plunder therefore “we’ve begun to eat our own limbs” and have started grabbing natural resources – forest land, water, minerals – from the most vulnerable (the tribals and the poorest in country). The Naxals are only fighting for the rights of the poor.
No democratic government in the world bombs its own people using jetfighters but the Indian government did that in Mizoram to quell an insurgency there during Indira Gandhi’s tenure as the prime minister. Isn’t it the Saddam Hussein way of doing things? The tribals haven’t been bombed yet but the treatment with them hasn’t been less brutal and if they have taken measures to protect themselves, the government is outlawing their activities and labeling them “the biggest threat to the state”.
Does the government think the literate people are too naïve to decide for themselves the good from the bad? If not, then why is the government banning Naxal/Maoist publications and arresting any one trying to put their point of view to the general public? The death of Swapan Dasgupta, editor of the Bengali edition of a Maoist magazine, in police custody under ambiguous circumstances is another proof of the fact that there is something that the government doesn’t want to come out.
The Red Corridor is only a name coined by the media and the government; it should rather be termed as MoU Corridor, with the big multinationals and their Indian compradors trying to control the area. These areas are rich in minerals which belong to the people of this nation but the corrupt government is using their power to give these big fish the right to exploit the minerals at the cost of the people of this nation. The Naxals are doing nothing wrong in their attempts to foil the wicked intentions of our corrupt officials. If the government is so concerned about the people, why is it that there are only a handful of hospitals in the Naxal affected areas? In spite of that the government is sending troops where the Naxals are sending medical aid and educating children. What the government couldn’t do for the poorest in India in the past sixty years, the naxals are doing now in spite of the government’s resistance.
The Naxals are terrorists
‘Liberators of the poor’ is only a mask they are wearing to hide their wicked intentions: to turn the country into an oppressive state. Naxals are a well-trained group of people who are fighting a calculated battle against the people of this country. If this were not the case, how can the surrender of two Maoist cadres – Muni (20) and Bela (17)—before senior Orissa government officials in March 2010 be explained? Both the girls alleged they were molested and tortured by the fellow Maoists.
The foreigners don’t know much about this nation and as per the Planning Commission of India the number of poor people in the country was 27.5% in 2004-05 which is down from the figure of 51.3% in 1977-78. The foreign currency reserves are close to US $280 billion and the international community acknowledges that we are soon going to be a superpower. The people will only be more prosperous if India emerges a super power.
Naxalbari is not a poor village any longer and people there are living in harmony with each other. The cause for taking up arms could have existed a few decades ago, but it makes no sense in today’s atmosphere when the nation is one of the fastest developing countries in the world. The Naxal violence will only divert our resources – which otherwise could be put into developing the country – thus hampering development and affecting the wellbeing of the people.
No one is unfamiliar with the troubles which befell the people in the countries where socialists came to power. More than two million people perished when Stalin was in power in the former Soviet Union and the Cultural Revolution initiated by Mao Zedong caused 20-30 million deaths in China. What guarantee is there that the same wouldn’t happen in India should the Naxals come to power?
The Naxals have blown up several schools in the states of Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh. What explanation do they have for these heinous tasks?
The country has achieved freedom after millennia of being under slavery and it would take some time before the things get back to normal. It’s not that the government is sitting with one hand on another; the Indian Air Force is now the fourth largest in the world; the literacy rates are up – from 12% to 66%; – child mortality rates have come down drastically and so have the poverty rates since independence.
The Communist Party of India (Maoist) was formed only a few years back on 21 September 2004 from two entities namely the Maoist Communist Centre of India and Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) and the People’s War Group. These three organizations had fought independently of each other for decades and decided to join hands only when they were too weak to continue of their own. Now, alliances of this type often don’t last very long and there is a high probability that these two groups may start fighting each other or push the country into chaos once they grab power.
The Naxals have strayed away from their principle of helping the poor. And according to the family of Kanu Sanyal, one of the founders of Naxal movement in India who later committed suicide in March 2010, Kanu had grown disillusioned with the Naxal movement, especially after Maoists started killing poor farmers under the guise of the struggle.”
The Naxals have never been pro people. They simply emerged from nowhere to make political gains by goading the illiterate, innocent tribals to fight against the government. The gullible tribals were brought under Naxals’ sway in a systematic manner. It wasn’t long before they took to attacking the officials sent by the government for development purposes, hindered their own developed, thus cementing the Naxal propaganda allegations that the government wasn’t interested in any development work in the poorer parts of the country.
Conclusion
Because of ban on pro-Naxal publications, it is difficult to get their side of the story. But if intellectuals like Arundhati Roy believe the Naxals are fighting for a just cause, then there must be some truth in it. Violence, on the other hand, is not justifiable in any circumstances and the Naxals are notorious for their fiercely violent methods to convey their message. In the fight between the Naxals and the CRPF, it’s only the poor who suffer or the security personnel who are killed, and not the real culprits.
