Redeeming the Republic Read online

  IV

  Altogether, the tribals have gained least and lost most from six decades of democracy and development in independent India. This is not to say that Dalits and Muslims have not been discriminated against. However, their concerns have found powerful expression through democratically elected parties and politicians. The tribals have not even had that consolation. If there was no adivasi Ambedkar, there has been no adivasi Mayawati either. This is the vacuum that the Maoists have sought to fill, with increasing success, and also with increasing sympathy among sections of the Indian intelligentsia.

  Metropolitan intellectuals have been fascinated by left-wing rebels for a very long time. From Mao through Ché Guevara and Fidel Castro, on to Subcomandante Marcos of the Mexican province of Chiapas and the late Comrade Kishenji of (as the news reports had it) ‘somewhere on the Jharkhand-West Bengal border’, guerrillas in the forest or highland have attracted admiring comment from writers and poets themselves living in the cities. The contrast, indeed, explains the intensity of their commitment. Because they themselves lead bourgeois lifestyles in a land where so many are so poor, these writers sublimate their guilt by an effusive and excessive endorsement of armed rebels who claim to speak on behalf of the deprived and disadvantaged.

  My own trip to Dantewada in 2006 disabused me of any lingering romantic sympathies I may have had with the Naxalites. The state’s policy of arming vigilantes was illegal and indefensible. At the same time, the Maoists had contributed to an escalating cycle of violence, by beheading alleged ‘informers’, assassinating village headmen, and setting off landmines which killed civilians as well as policemen. They had also blown up schools, transmission lines and railway tracks, and stopped paramedics from working in villages under their influence.

  From its origins in the late 1960s, the Naxalite movement was riven by internal discord, by sharp and often bloody rivalries between different factions, each claiming itself to be the only true Indian interpreter of Mao Zedong’s thought. However, by the end of the last century the People’s War Group (PWG) and the Maoist Coordination Committee (MCC) had emerged as the two groups which still had a functioning organization and a devoted cadre of revolutionary workers. The PWG was very active in Andhra Pradesh, whereas the MCC’s base was principally in Bihar.

  The Naxalite movement gathered force after the merger in 2004 of the PWG and the MCC. The new party called itself the Communist Party of India (Maoist). That its abbreviation, CPI (M), mimicked that of a party that had fought and won elections under the Indian Constitution was surely not accidental. We are the real inheritors of the legacy of revolutionary Marxism, the new party was saying, whereas the power-holders in Kerala and West Bengal are merely a bunch of bourgeois reformists.

  The new, unified party has been eight years in existence. In that time it has rapidly expanded its influence. The erstwhile MCC cadres have moved southwards into Jharkhand and east into West Bengal. Those who were once with the PWG have travelled into Orissa and Chhattisgarh. This last state is where the Maoists have made the most dramatic gains. Large parts of the district of Dantewada, in particular, are under their sway. On one side of the river Indravati, the Indian state exercises an uncertain control by day and no control at night. On the other side, in what is known as Abujmarh, the state has no presence by day or by night.

  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, t
he 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 transfer 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. *