At least 14 people were killed and some 75 villagers injured Wednesday, when West Bengal’s Stalinist-led state government ordered a more than 4,000-strong contingent of police—including para-military, Rapid Action and Combat Commando forces—to reestablish the government’s authority in the environs of Nandigram, a town located about 150 kilometers from Kolkata (Calcutta.)
In early January the peasants of Nandigram rose up in revolt after learning of government plans to seize 10,000 acres of land in the area for a Special Economic Zone to be operated by the Indonesian-based Salim Group. On the night of January 6-7, more than 200 Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPM] thugs invaded Nandigram, with the tacit support of the police, so as to terrorize the populace and stamp out the opposition movement. Six people died in the ensuing confrontation, but the villagers ultimately chased off the CPM goons.
Until Wednesday the area had remained “out of bounds” to government authorities, with the local populace digging up roads, destroying bridges and building barricades so as to ensure Nandigram remained off limits to government representatives.
From all accounts, Wednesday’s clash was a mini civil war. The police entered the area from three different directions and two of the police columns encountered fierce resistance.
Behind a wall of several hundred women and children, thousands of villagers gathered armed with sickles, rods, and scythes. According to some reports some of the villagers were also armed with homemade pipe bombs and country-made pistols.
The police fired teargas and rubber bullets to force the crowds to disperse, but when the villagers fought back, they resorted to firing live-bullets.
Under the headline “Nandigram Bloodied—Killing fields: 11 die in police firing,” the Hindustan Times described the police attack as follows: “[As] the villagers started fleeing, policemen followed them and dragged some out of their houses and beat them. ‘It was like a war I don’t know where my family members are,’ said Saber, a villager. ‘Bodies were scattered all over the paddy fields smeared with blood. The injured were screaming for help but the policemen kept kicking them.’”
The death toll has since risen to 14 and may well rise again as the police rampage left many critically injured.
Wednesday’s police action was planned and ordered by the highest levels of the CPM-led Left Front government. And West Bengal Chief Minister and CPM Politburo member Buddadeb Bhattacharjee, his senior ministers, and the CPM’s all-India leadership, are all vociferously defending the storming of Nandigram as necessary to end a “lawless situation in Nandigram”—that is to uphold the authority of the capitalist state—and are excusing the police massacre as “self-defence.”
The claims of self-defence are belied first by the government’s decision to order thousands of police clad in battle-gear to invade Nandigram and second by the government’s own casualty figures. According to the statement Bhattacharjee made in the West Bengal Assembly Thursday, while 14 villagers were killed and several score injured, only 12 police suffered injuries and “serious and extensive injuries could be avoided as all the policemen were in protective gear.”
[...]
(The SEZs are an attempt by the Indian ruling elite to duplicate the Chinese government practice of providing investors with land, long-term tax breaks, relaxed environmental and labor regulations and cheap, and highly government-regimented, labor. ...
[...]
... the peasants of Nandigram are well aware that most of them lack the skills to be employed in modern industry and that the monetary compensation offered by the government can be quickly consumed, leaving them with no means of livelihood.
The massacre at Nandigram has shattered the pretensions of the Left Front and the CPM to defend India’s workers and toilers and shown them to be agents of domestic and international capital who stand ready to unleash violent state repression against working people.
Awful!
Poor people in India are getting shafted with this whole globalization business. They are trying to hold on to what is theirs but the powers-that-be don't plan to allow that. The Maoists who won in Nepal have allies in the Bengal/Jharkhand region and all hell is going to break loose in within the next few years.
Definitely sounds like a recipe for disaster. So tragic and frustrating for the poor locals. 
Are you familiar with the Naxal problems in the 1960s-1970s? We are looking at a repeat, except this time the 'peasants' are better organized and much better armed. My in-laws are in Calcutta and this could get very dangerous.
I hope it won't get too bad in Kolkata (is that the right spelling of the new name?).
No, I didn't know about the Naxal troubles so long ago. I was living in Andhra in Naxal areas (first in East Godavari District then in Anantapur District, from 1984-2005). There were always robberies and we often heard of taxis being stopped with rocks in the roads and robbed, but nothing big happened where I was. Still, it was frightening.
No, I didn't know about the Naxal troubles so long ago. I was living in Andhra in Naxal areas (first in East Godavari District then in Anantapur District, from 1984-2005). There were always robberies and we often heard of taxis being stopped with rocks in the roads and robbed, but nothing big happened where I was. Still, it was frightening.
Thirty years ago--in 1967--a "Spring Thunder" of revolutionary struggle broke out in Naxalbari, India. Poor and landless peasants, tea plantation workers and tribal people in the northern part of West Bengal, near the border with Nepal, rose up against centuries of poverty, brutality and humiliation. They armed themselves with bows and spears, snatching guns when they could. And they took up the most advanced ideas--Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
[...]
The result of the revolutionary line was the outbreak of armed struggle in Naxalbari in the spring of 1967. As In the Wake of Naxalbari described it: "From March 1967 to April 1967 all the villages were organized. From 15,000 to 20,000 peasants were enrolled as whole-time activists. Peasants' committees were formed in every village and they were transformed into armed guards. They soon occupied land in the name of the peasants' committees, burnt all the land records `which had been used to cheat them of their due,' canceled all hypothecary debts [mortgages], passed death sentences on oppressive landlords, formed armed bands by looting guns from the landlords, armed themselves with conventional weapons like bows and arrows and spears, and set up a parallel administration to look after the villages....
"By May that year, the rebels could claim as their strongholds Hatighsha under the Naxalbari police station, Buraganj under the Kharibari police station, and Chowpukhuria under Phansidew police station, where no outsider could enter without their permission."
For three liberating months, the old way in Naxalbari was driven out by the Spring Thunder. In 2,000 villages, revolutionary mass organization of peasants held political power, administering affairs according to their revolutionary interests under the leadership of communist revolutionaries.
The Naxalite Movement Shakes India
In July, the government's military encirclement and suppression campaign finally snatched back the political power that the masses had seized. But the Naxalbari uprising sparked a revolutionary movement that flared throughout India.
[...]
The result of the revolutionary line was the outbreak of armed struggle in Naxalbari in the spring of 1967. As In the Wake of Naxalbari described it: "From March 1967 to April 1967 all the villages were organized. From 15,000 to 20,000 peasants were enrolled as whole-time activists. Peasants' committees were formed in every village and they were transformed into armed guards. They soon occupied land in the name of the peasants' committees, burnt all the land records `which had been used to cheat them of their due,' canceled all hypothecary debts [mortgages], passed death sentences on oppressive landlords, formed armed bands by looting guns from the landlords, armed themselves with conventional weapons like bows and arrows and spears, and set up a parallel administration to look after the villages....
"By May that year, the rebels could claim as their strongholds Hatighsha under the Naxalbari police station, Buraganj under the Kharibari police station, and Chowpukhuria under Phansidew police station, where no outsider could enter without their permission."
For three liberating months, the old way in Naxalbari was driven out by the Spring Thunder. In 2,000 villages, revolutionary mass organization of peasants held political power, administering affairs according to their revolutionary interests under the leadership of communist revolutionaries.
The Naxalite Movement Shakes India
In July, the government's military encirclement and suppression campaign finally snatched back the political power that the masses had seized. But the Naxalbari uprising sparked a revolutionary movement that flared throughout India.
Wow, so that is how the Naxalites started! And for so short a time!
QUOTE(Gupt @ Mar 18 2007, 05:00 PM) 
Are you familiar with the Naxal problems in the 1960s-1970s? We are looking at a repeat, except this time the 'peasants' are better organized and much better armed. My in-laws are in Calcutta and this could get very dangerous.
Difference here is that the ACTUAL peasants (not someone claiming falsely to "represent" them as Naxals have been doing) is against the party the Naxals would be expected to SUPPORT (it obfuscates about them anyway), CP/I-M.
QUOTE(CherryXS @ Mar 20 2007, 07:55 AM)
QUOTE(Gupt @ Mar 18 2007, 05:00 PM)
Are you familiar with the Naxal problems in the 1960s-1970s? We are looking at a repeat, except this time the 'peasants' are better organized and much better armed. My in-laws are in Calcutta and this could get very dangerous.
Difference here is that the ACTUAL peasants (not someone claiming falsely to "represent" them as Naxals have been doing) is against the party the Naxals would be expected to SUPPORT (it obfuscates about them anyway), CP/I-M.
Bengali Naxals have always been against the CPI-M. Their party is the CPI-ML.
QUOTE(Gupt @ Mar 18 2007, 04:53 PM)
Poor people in India are getting shafted with this whole globalization business. They are trying to hold on to what is theirs but the powers-that-be don't plan to allow that. The Maoists who won in Nepal have allies in the Bengal/Jharkhand region and all hell is going to break loose in within the next few years.
Not to stray from India, and I know the Maoists in Nepal have ties to those in India, but I wouldn't exactly say they've won yet. They will likely be a strong minority in the new constituent assembly, but still a minority. I doubt we'll see a Maoist PM or a Maoist majority in Nepal anytime soon (please, please let me be right!). In fact, there was apparently a strong march (10K people per the news) against the Maoists in Kathmandu just a couple of days ago.
I worry about my in-laws, too, in Nepal. We are going to visit in June... about the time they are scheduled to have elections... yikes!
Maya
QUOTE(maya62 @ Mar 21 2007, 09:03 AM)
Not to stray from India, and I know the Maoists in Nepal have ties to those in India, but I wouldn't exactly say they've won yet. They will likely be a strong minority in the new constituent assembly, but still a minority. I doubt we'll see a Maoist PM or a Maoist majority in Nepal anytime soon (please, please let me be right!). In fact, there was apparently a strong march (10K people per the news) against the Maoists in Kathmandu just a couple of days ago.
I worry about my in-laws, too, in Nepal. We are going to visit in June... about the time they are scheduled to have elections... yikes!
Maya
I worry about my in-laws, too, in Nepal. We are going to visit in June... about the time they are scheduled to have elections... yikes!
Maya
Maya, maoists (Naxals, JVP, Sendero-Luminoso, etc.) never have cared for elections--only for wrecking of societies. They never have a vision for reconstructions.
(shown by Naxals' most frequent attempt to boycott elections)
QUOTE(CherryXS @ Mar 21 2007, 09:16 AM)
QUOTE(maya62 @ Mar 21 2007, 09:03 AM)
Not to stray from India, and I know the Maoists in Nepal have ties to those in India, but I wouldn't exactly say they've won yet. They will likely be a strong minority in the new constituent assembly, but still a minority. I doubt we'll see a Maoist PM or a Maoist majority in Nepal anytime soon (please, please let me be right!). In fact, there was apparently a strong march (10K people per the news) against the Maoists in Kathmandu just a couple of days ago.
I worry about my in-laws, too, in Nepal. We are going to visit in June... about the time they are scheduled to have elections... yikes!
Maya
I worry about my in-laws, too, in Nepal. We are going to visit in June... about the time they are scheduled to have elections... yikes!
Maya
Maya, maoists (Naxals, JVP, Sendero-Luminoso, etc.) never have cared for elections--only for wrecking of societies. They never have a vision for reconstructions.
(shown by Naxals' most frequent attempt to boycott elections)
OK... this is not comforting
I wonder if the Nepali Maoists will try to boycott the very elections they have been clamouring for. Things are such a mess. Still.
I am trying to have hope that they have submitted (kind of) to being held in UN camps, have surrendered some of their weapons, and have reached an agreement about what portion of the Assembly will be CPN-M seats. Am I being completely naive?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/6474303.stm
Singur and Nanadigram massacre created the seed of revival in Maoist movements in West Bengal
Kiran Chaube
Mar. 22, 2007
Something went very wrong for West Bengal and India. What the communists in West Bengal did will create havoc in coming months. The massacre of farmers, stealing their lands and above all insult to the working class has created a scenario where the Naxlsbvari movement and Moism will prosper.
The Maoists are not good for any society, but the Indian Government, Indian military and security forces, did not stop the Marxists who acted like the Nazis. For the first time, common people in West Bengal realized that there is not much difference between the Congress party of Sonia Gandhi and the Marxists. They all want to grab the land of the poor to bring American dollars, European Euro and hard cash and prosperity for politicians from Indian oligarchs and industrialists.
People in Singur and Nandigram had enough of that. They understand the game plan. They are now turning towards the Maoists they could make it happen in Nepal. Can they bring West Bengal and Indian Government to its knees?
Maoism is the worst thing that is possible to any society. They kill anyone and everyone without reason. But what causes that kind of savage movement? What caused the French revolution? What happened in Bolshevik revolution? What made Mao the great leader of China? The answer lies in exploiting and torturing common people by the rich.
Capitalism does not mean cheating the poor. That is what happened in Singur and Nanadigram. The communists of India are opportunists. They were caught pants down in bed with Western capitalists and Indian oligarchs stealing land and livelihood from the poor farmers of West Bengal.
The saddest part of the whole thing is that the Indian Military stood still allowing torture of common people by communists controlled cops of West Bengal. The Indian central Government under Manmohan Singh did nothing because it wants to stay in power with the sixty odd seats held by the left parties in the parliament. Sonia Gandhis party sacrificed Indian common people for maintaining status quo in power. The decency, freedom, and human rights all went down the tube.
Tracking the Naxal resurgence in India
Bidyut Chakrabarty
22-Mar-07
Naxalism, a euphemism for the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionary movement in India, drawing the nomenclature from an unheard of village, Naxalbari, in West Bengal that became the epicentre of tribal-peasant revolt in the spring of 1967, has witnessed a resurgence since the early 1990s.
Naxalism typifies a particular kind of militant and violent armed struggle by the peasants, tribals and dalits, led by a leadership drawing doctrinal support from Marxism-Leninism and strategic inspiration from Mao. The contemporary Maoists draw heavily upon the iniquitous land tenure system and exploitation of the peasantry by landlords in framing their ideological aims. The Indian Ministry of Home Affairs has openly acknowledged that 13 states and 170 districts (out of 604) are affected by this movement, now cast as the most serious threat to India's national security.
Until the Maoists in Nepal became a part of the government, there was talk of Maoist elements in India and Nepal establishing a "red corridor" from Pashupati in Nepal to Tirupati in South India, a claim the Nepali Maoists vehemently deny. Nonetheless, Indian policymakers recognise that a "red belt" runs within the subcontinent, from the Uttar Pradesh-Bihar border with Nepal in the north, through West Bengal, Jharkhand, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.
Though it gave a name to the Maoist movement in India, the Naxalbari movement of the late 1960s was crushed within five years in West Bengal. Attempts to reinvigorate the movement in Bihar and other neighbouring states did not take off. Though the movement remained splintered and factionalised even within Andhra Pradesh, it has since not only galvanised the girijans (tribals) there, but spread to other states too. The 1990s witnessed a renaissance of the movement. They have managed to put the police and para-military forces under considerable pressure, while achieving some degree of unity to their cause.
Two consecutive attacks by the Maoists on Indian jails in 2004/5 to release their colleagues and the more recent massacre of security personnel in Chhattisgarh on March 16 illustrate the magnitude of what is officially characterised as "red terror". Even the government-sponsored resistance campaign Salva Judam has been reduced to para-military combat, with little capital spent on its most fundamental purpose to address genuine socioeconomic grievances in the affected districts and states.
Naxalism has since spread and consolidated in the tribal belts and underdeveloped and underprivileged areas. Here the Maoists impose taxes, mete out quick (often ruthlessly brutal) justice and run administrative bureaucracies, schools and health services. Having lost their mass character and because their activities are rather secretive, the agenda of the Maoists differs in the various states where they operate.
The Maoists draw their sustenance from existing inequities. Due to the existence of problems relating to land, in the absence of land reforms; the small farmers, landless labourers and the tribals continue to suffer. Though apparently and avowedly carrying out "people's struggle", democratic function has never been their concern. This is clearly evidenced in the "kangaroo justice" meted out to dissenters from within, suspected police informers, and to those who refuse to accept their regime.
Successive Indian governments have not been equipped to deal with the Naxalites, both ideologically and programmatically. In spite of Naxalism being framed as a law and order problem, the lack of sufficiently trained personnel and an appropriate strategic outlook to deal with the problem has stymied India's policy options. Available accounts suggest that complicity of state administrations with the rural rich, have given the Maoists a reason to continue with their campaign. The police are accused of killing "extremists" in cold blood during fake encounters, although this is always denied. Torture and custodial deaths have often elicited criticism and agitation by the Indian human rights lobby. More damaging for security forces has been the accusation of the victimisation of innocent civilians to elicit information on the Maoists.
Lately, Naxalism has invited attention from the highest quarters. A Monitoring Committee of the affected states, headed by the Union Home Secretary has been created with the Home Minister personally coordinating the efforts. A special combat school to train the police has been set up in Chhattisgarh under an Army Brigadier. More battalions of para military forces have been created and more battalions are being deployed to fight the Naxals. Even the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has declared the Naxal "challenge" as the most serious internal security threat to the country.
The police approach to the "Naxalite" problem exposes weakness within state governments, nay the Indian state, to this socioeconomic problem. Naxal forces seek to compel the state, which is guided primarily by its responsibility to govern rather than transform to adopt policies and enact legislations that, left to itself, it is not inclined to pursue. Various state governments have, from time to time, banned Maoist outfits, without developing any consistent policy to deal with such elements. These bans, along with preventive detention or anti-terror laws that allow the police to come down heavily on such groups, have very often boomeranged and created a political constituency for the Naxals.
Very recently, Manmohan Singh posited that the Naxalite problem had a strong socioeconomic dimension that was at the very heart of the issue. In fact, he made a distinction between the hardcore revolutionary, who had to be dealt with severely, and the foot-soldier, who ought to be weaned off from the path of violence through socioeconomic packages. The statement suggested a significant shift in dealing with the "red menace", by constituting it as a socioeconomic issue rather than a law and order problem. Delhi and the various state governments would probably be better served by the Prime Minister's wisdom, even though the multiple dimensions to the problem continue to challenge the Indian bureaucracy.
Bidyut Chakrabarthy is the Dean of Social Science at the University of Delhi, India.
Kiran Chaube
Mar. 22, 2007
Something went very wrong for West Bengal and India. What the communists in West Bengal did will create havoc in coming months. The massacre of farmers, stealing their lands and above all insult to the working class has created a scenario where the Naxlsbvari movement and Moism will prosper.
The Maoists are not good for any society, but the Indian Government, Indian military and security forces, did not stop the Marxists who acted like the Nazis. For the first time, common people in West Bengal realized that there is not much difference between the Congress party of Sonia Gandhi and the Marxists. They all want to grab the land of the poor to bring American dollars, European Euro and hard cash and prosperity for politicians from Indian oligarchs and industrialists.
People in Singur and Nandigram had enough of that. They understand the game plan. They are now turning towards the Maoists they could make it happen in Nepal. Can they bring West Bengal and Indian Government to its knees?
Maoism is the worst thing that is possible to any society. They kill anyone and everyone without reason. But what causes that kind of savage movement? What caused the French revolution? What happened in Bolshevik revolution? What made Mao the great leader of China? The answer lies in exploiting and torturing common people by the rich.
Capitalism does not mean cheating the poor. That is what happened in Singur and Nanadigram. The communists of India are opportunists. They were caught pants down in bed with Western capitalists and Indian oligarchs stealing land and livelihood from the poor farmers of West Bengal.
The saddest part of the whole thing is that the Indian Military stood still allowing torture of common people by communists controlled cops of West Bengal. The Indian central Government under Manmohan Singh did nothing because it wants to stay in power with the sixty odd seats held by the left parties in the parliament. Sonia Gandhis party sacrificed Indian common people for maintaining status quo in power. The decency, freedom, and human rights all went down the tube.
Tracking the Naxal resurgence in India
Bidyut Chakrabarty
22-Mar-07
Naxalism, a euphemism for the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionary movement in India, drawing the nomenclature from an unheard of village, Naxalbari, in West Bengal that became the epicentre of tribal-peasant revolt in the spring of 1967, has witnessed a resurgence since the early 1990s.
Naxalism typifies a particular kind of militant and violent armed struggle by the peasants, tribals and dalits, led by a leadership drawing doctrinal support from Marxism-Leninism and strategic inspiration from Mao. The contemporary Maoists draw heavily upon the iniquitous land tenure system and exploitation of the peasantry by landlords in framing their ideological aims. The Indian Ministry of Home Affairs has openly acknowledged that 13 states and 170 districts (out of 604) are affected by this movement, now cast as the most serious threat to India's national security.
Until the Maoists in Nepal became a part of the government, there was talk of Maoist elements in India and Nepal establishing a "red corridor" from Pashupati in Nepal to Tirupati in South India, a claim the Nepali Maoists vehemently deny. Nonetheless, Indian policymakers recognise that a "red belt" runs within the subcontinent, from the Uttar Pradesh-Bihar border with Nepal in the north, through West Bengal, Jharkhand, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.
Though it gave a name to the Maoist movement in India, the Naxalbari movement of the late 1960s was crushed within five years in West Bengal. Attempts to reinvigorate the movement in Bihar and other neighbouring states did not take off. Though the movement remained splintered and factionalised even within Andhra Pradesh, it has since not only galvanised the girijans (tribals) there, but spread to other states too. The 1990s witnessed a renaissance of the movement. They have managed to put the police and para-military forces under considerable pressure, while achieving some degree of unity to their cause.
Two consecutive attacks by the Maoists on Indian jails in 2004/5 to release their colleagues and the more recent massacre of security personnel in Chhattisgarh on March 16 illustrate the magnitude of what is officially characterised as "red terror". Even the government-sponsored resistance campaign Salva Judam has been reduced to para-military combat, with little capital spent on its most fundamental purpose to address genuine socioeconomic grievances in the affected districts and states.
Naxalism has since spread and consolidated in the tribal belts and underdeveloped and underprivileged areas. Here the Maoists impose taxes, mete out quick (often ruthlessly brutal) justice and run administrative bureaucracies, schools and health services. Having lost their mass character and because their activities are rather secretive, the agenda of the Maoists differs in the various states where they operate.
The Maoists draw their sustenance from existing inequities. Due to the existence of problems relating to land, in the absence of land reforms; the small farmers, landless labourers and the tribals continue to suffer. Though apparently and avowedly carrying out "people's struggle", democratic function has never been their concern. This is clearly evidenced in the "kangaroo justice" meted out to dissenters from within, suspected police informers, and to those who refuse to accept their regime.
Successive Indian governments have not been equipped to deal with the Naxalites, both ideologically and programmatically. In spite of Naxalism being framed as a law and order problem, the lack of sufficiently trained personnel and an appropriate strategic outlook to deal with the problem has stymied India's policy options. Available accounts suggest that complicity of state administrations with the rural rich, have given the Maoists a reason to continue with their campaign. The police are accused of killing "extremists" in cold blood during fake encounters, although this is always denied. Torture and custodial deaths have often elicited criticism and agitation by the Indian human rights lobby. More damaging for security forces has been the accusation of the victimisation of innocent civilians to elicit information on the Maoists.
Lately, Naxalism has invited attention from the highest quarters. A Monitoring Committee of the affected states, headed by the Union Home Secretary has been created with the Home Minister personally coordinating the efforts. A special combat school to train the police has been set up in Chhattisgarh under an Army Brigadier. More battalions of para military forces have been created and more battalions are being deployed to fight the Naxals. Even the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has declared the Naxal "challenge" as the most serious internal security threat to the country.
The police approach to the "Naxalite" problem exposes weakness within state governments, nay the Indian state, to this socioeconomic problem. Naxal forces seek to compel the state, which is guided primarily by its responsibility to govern rather than transform to adopt policies and enact legislations that, left to itself, it is not inclined to pursue. Various state governments have, from time to time, banned Maoist outfits, without developing any consistent policy to deal with such elements. These bans, along with preventive detention or anti-terror laws that allow the police to come down heavily on such groups, have very often boomeranged and created a political constituency for the Naxals.
Very recently, Manmohan Singh posited that the Naxalite problem had a strong socioeconomic dimension that was at the very heart of the issue. In fact, he made a distinction between the hardcore revolutionary, who had to be dealt with severely, and the foot-soldier, who ought to be weaned off from the path of violence through socioeconomic packages. The statement suggested a significant shift in dealing with the "red menace", by constituting it as a socioeconomic issue rather than a law and order problem. Delhi and the various state governments would probably be better served by the Prime Minister's wisdom, even though the multiple dimensions to the problem continue to challenge the Indian bureaucracy.
Bidyut Chakrabarthy is the Dean of Social Science at the University of Delhi, India.
I found this online. Apparently this will be the new flag of India if the Naxals win the civil war they are so desperately trying to start.
Maoist rebels are fighting a brutal low-level war with the Indian state
Aug 17th 2006 | DANTEWADA DISTRICT, CHHATTISGARH
Ganesh Ueike, secretary of the West Bastar Divisional Committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), seems a gentle, rather academic, man, who does not suit his green combat fatigues or clenched-fist red salute. He shuffles dog-eared bits of paper from a shabby file in his knapsack and writes down the questions he is asked. He answers them in slogans that he gives every appearance of believing. He wants to liberate India from the clutches of feudalism and imperialism.
The rare interview took place last month, in a thatched shelter in a clearing in the Bastar forest in southern Chhattisgarh. The spot was some seven hours' walk from the nearest road, and there had been a day-and-a-half's wait for such a big leader to emerge from a hideout even deeper in the jungle. His party, he said, was facing renewed suppression, because the resources of finance capitalism are facing sluggishness in their development, and are looking for new routes, such as the mineral riches of this forest.
Mr Ueike did not mention that, just a few hours beforehand, at the edge of the forest, in a place called Errabore, his comrades had fought back. Several hundred had mounted a co-ordinated attack on a police station, a paramilitary base and a relief camp for displaced people. They killed more than 30 of the camp's residents, mostly by hacking them to death with axes. The scholarly Mr Ueike did boast that his army relied on low-tech weapons.
This was the latest battle in a year-long civil war in Dantewada district, in which more than 350 people have been killed, and nearly 50,000 moved into camps such as the one at Errabore. It is a remote, sparsely populated, under-developed region bordering three neighbouring states, and nine hours' drive from Chhattisgarh's capital, Raipur (see map). It is here that India's widespread Maoist rebellion is most intense.
On August 15th, in his National Day speech in Delhi, India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, linked Naxalism with terrorism as the two big threats to India's internal security. The terrorism is all too familiar. India's cities have endured repeated atrocitiesculminating in July's bomb attacks in Mumbai, which killed nearly 200 people. But many are surprised that Mr Singh accords Naxalism such a high priority. A primitive peasant rebellion based on an outmoded ideology is out of keeping with the modern India of soaring growth, Bollywood dreams and call-centres. Moreover, India has fought many better-known wars. A violent insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir has claimed tens of thousands of lives. Its north-eastern states are wracked by dozens of secessionist movements.
But Mr Singh may be right about the Maoists. Known as Naxalites, after the district of Naxalbari in West Bengal where they staged an uprising in 1967, they are these days almost a nationwide force. Greeted by China's People's Daily at the height of the Cultural Revolution as a peal of spring thunder, they were almost wiped out in the 1970s, as the Indian government repressed them, and Maoism went out of fashion, even in its homeland.
In India they splintered into various armed factions, of which the biggest were the People's War Group and the Maoist Communist Centre. These merged and formed the CPI (Maoist) party in September 2004. P.V. Ramana, of the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi, estimates the Naxalites now have 9,000-10,000 armed fighters, with access to about 6,500 firearms. There are perhaps a further 40,000 full-time cadres.
In nearly 1,600 violent incidents involving Naxalites last year, 669 people died. There have been spectacular attacks across a big area: a train hold-up last month involving 250 armed fighters, a jailbreak freeing 350 prisoners, a near-miss assassination attempt in 2004 against a leading politician. Naxalism now affects some 170 of India's 602 districtsa red corridor down a swathe of central India from the border with Nepal in the north to Karnataka in the south and covering more than a quarter of India's land mass.
This statistic overstates Naxalite power, since in most places they are an underground, hit-and-run force. But in the Bastar forest they are well-entrenched, controlling a large chunk of territory and staging operations across state borders into Andhra Pradesh and Orissa. In the tiny, dirt-poor villages scattered through the forest, the Indian state is almost invisible.
In one there is a hand-pump installed by the local government, but the well is dry. There are no roads, waterpipes, electricity or telephone lines. In another village a teacher does come, but, in the absence of a school, holds classes outdoors. Policemen, health workers and officials are never seen. The vacuum is filled by Naxalite committees, running village affairs and providing logistic support to the fighters camping in the forest. For the past year, those fightersmostly local tribal peoplehave been battling not just the police and the six paramilitary battalions deployed in the district, but their own neighbours.
The single spark that lit this prairie fire was the formation a year ago of Salwa Judum, an anti-Maoist movement, whose name in Gondi, the language spoken by local tribes, means something like peace hunt. Its origins are disputed. K.R. Pisda, the district collector, or senior official, in Dantewada, dates it to a meeting in June 2005 of local villagers fed up with Naxalite intimidation and extortion. Others say that the Maoists were enforcing a boycott of trade in one of the main local forest products: tendu patta, the leaves used to wrap bidis (hand-rolled cigarettes).
Similar boycotts in the past had succeeded in forcing up prices and had earned the Naxalites some kudos. This one, the story goes, backfired. If it ever was a spontaneous movement, Salwa Judum soon became an arm of government policyand a paramilitary force. Some 5,000 of its members have been inducted as special police officers (SPOs) and given some training and arms.
As the local government tells it, thousands of people started turning up by the roadside, fleeing Naxalite reprisals. There was no choice but to house them in relief camps, of which there are now 17. This is a dirty little war in which truth was long ago a casualty. Salwa Judum itself is also responsible for displacing peoplea scorched village policy intended to starve the Maoists of local support. This recognises that the Naxalites' real strength lies not in their guerrillas in the jungle, with their peaked caps and country-made rifles, but in their civilian networks in the villages themselves.
In the largest camp, at Dornapal, some 17,000 people are housed in huts of mud and corrugated iron. Health workers say that many of the children are malnourished. One man, Wenjam, says he took refuge here after Naxalites in his local village beat him, and threatened him with worse, because he had a government contract to fence the pond. He had a pukka house, he said, and a herd of cattle. But, after five months in the camp, he had not been back to the village.
Armed police do sometimes escort groups home for a visit. Mr Ueike says there are no ordinary people in the camps, only SPO people and their families, whom he dismisses as village feudal families and some lumpen elements.
Yet some of those displaced are openly critical of Salwa Judum, which they say forced them to leave their villages. They are caught between two vicious enemies. In some villages, residents fled into the forest rather than follow the drive to the roadside. The camps are very controversial. Even K.P.S. Gill, a retired policeman known as a supercop for his vigorous role in putting down various insurgencies, and now an adviser to the Chhattisgarh government on dealing with the Maoists, says it would have been better to protect people in their villages.
When the Chhattisgarh government's home minister, Ramvichar Netam, visited Errabore the day after the massacre, he was surrounded by angry survivors. They pelted his helicopter with stones. Some of the bereaved even refused the money he was handing out as compensation. The Salwa Judum campaign, however, has important backers. Raman Singh, Chhattisgarh's chief minister, calls it a success story, a non-violent movement against exploitation.
The same tune is sung by the leader of the opposition in the state, Mahendra Karma of the Congress party, who is, in effect, Salwa Judum's leading light. A native of Dantewada itself, Mr Karma, like Mr Singh, sits under a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi and stresses the movement's peaceful origins. But he also links it to the global fight against terrorism and asks: Are we not supposed to protect ourselves in our homeland? Even the central government seemed at one time to endorse the campaign. In a statement in March the home ministry promised to promote local resistance groups against Naxalites.
Now, however, V.K. Duggal, the home ministry's top civil servant, who, like state officials, calls Salwa Judum spontaneous, says that at a meeting last week the central government advised the Chhattisgarh government not to extend the movement to other areas. Delhi is offering assistance: an extra paramilitary battalion; armoured vehicles; minesweeping equipment; and imaging technology to help locate remote Naxalite camps. It draws the line at helicopters for offensive operations. Its emphasis is on persuading the Maoists to join mainstream politics. In his speech this week, the prime minister said he wanted Naxalites to understand that real power flows from the ballot box.
Mr Karma and local officials in Dantewada make much of the Maoists' inhumanity. He says they load the corpses of their victims with mines, so those retrieving the bodies are also killed. Om Prakash Pal, the police superintendent at Dornapal, displays a gruesome photo album of mutilated bodies. Even Mr Gill, who has seen more brutality than most, thinks the Maoists stand out in this respect: Their ideology is that the manner of killing should frighten more than the killing itself.
Salwa Judum, too, is accused of intimidation, extortion, rape and murder. Its thugs have been manning roadblocks, supposedly to hunt for Maoists, but also to demand money. Some SPOslike some Naxalitesmay be local hoodlums, who have signed up for the money on offer, and the shiny new bicycles and motorbikes still wrapped in plastic at the Dornapal police station. Some families refusing to join Salwa Judum on its combing operationsrampages of arson, thuggery and pillagehave been fined or beaten. A report on Salwa Judum produced in April by a number of civil-liberties groups concluded that its formation had escalated violence on all sides...Salwa Judum and the paramilitary operate with complete impunity. The rule of law has completely broken down.
For local officials in Dantewada, and the state government in Raipur, the Naxalites are just bandits: extortionists who hold sway through terror alone. Their ideology, they say, long ago imploded in a welter of violence. There is little doubt that they do use terror and extortion. Himanshu Kumar, who runs aid projects in the district, says he used to respect the Naxalites as working for the betterment of the masses. But he now found people supporting them out of fear of their guns, or to gain power to loot others.
Most of their young recruitsilliterate tribal peoplehave never read Mao. But not all support is coerced or opportunistic. And those who have studied the Naxalites credit them with far greater organisation, discipline and ideological fervour than any criminal gang. Ajai Sahni, for example, of the Institute of Conflict Management, a Delhi think-tank, points to the detailed socio-economic surveys they conduct before starting operations in a target area, helping to identify grievances they can exploit.
He also says that the Naxalites have been among the most principled of terrorist groups in selecting their targets. Their attacks are not random; though, because they so often use crude landmines, they may kill the wrong people. Their leaders are thinking far into the future, taking a 20- to 25-year view of their struggle. Liberated areas, such as their part of Dantewada, would be expanded until they pose a threat even to India's cities.
Nepal's Maoists, with whom the Indian party has fraternal links, are a model of how such a strategy can work. Having managed to exclude the state from virtually all the countryside, and waged war for a decade, the Maoists in Nepal are now negotiating, from a position of some strength, their share in governmenta decision their Indian comrades quietly deplore, despite a pretence of solidarity.
Early Naxalite leaders like Mr Ueike, who has spent nearly 30 years in the movement, were students and middle-class intellectuals. But the tribal peoples among whom they find most of their new recruits are among India's poorest: the most exploited, the bottom rung, according to Ajit Jogi, a tribal leader and former chief minister of Chhattisgarh. Typically, they live in forests and have no rights to their land. A law to remedy this is under consideration, but resisted by conservationists. According to the 2001 census, about three-quarters of Dantewada's 1,220 villages are almost wholly tribal; 1,161 have no medical facilities; 214 have no primary school; the literacy rate is 29% for men and 14% for women.
Most of the inhabitants are subsistence farmers eking a meagre cash income from selling forest products, such as tendu patta. Markets in the forest have been closed, to throttle the Maoists' supply chain. For many inside the forest, a visit to the market is now a long hike, camping overnight on the way. A big iron mine, Bailadilla, on the edge of the forest, employs few local people and in the rainy season turns a river bright orange and undrinkable. A railway has been built to take the ore to the sea.
The government blames the Maoists for blocking development, such as road-building. But the Maoists tell people that roads are intended simply to help the state plunder the forests and take wealth out, not bring it in. Many believe them. The Maoists profit from what Mr Sahni calls asymmetric expectations: people expect the state to provide for them, and it is failing; any good coming from the Maoistssocial work, land redistribution, a price rise for local producebrings disproportionate gratitude.
To bring development to these neglected reaches, the government needs to assert control. Salwa Judum is the wrong way to go about it. A larger, better-trained police force would help. In India, on average, there are 55 policemen for every 100 square kilometres; in Chhattisgarh just 17. In districts such as Dantewada, policing is an unattractive, life-threatening career. Mr Pal, the Dornapal policeman, is a young and competent-seeming officer from the state of Uttar Pradesh. But he has been criticised in the press for lacking experience.
Some 2,000 policemen have attended a Counter-Terrorism and Jungle Warfare Training School, which opened a year ago at Kanker, on the road from Raipur. The director, B.K. Ponwar, a retired army brigadier, wants to teach policemen to fight a guerrilla like a guerrilla. They learn to slither down ropes, as from a helicopter, practise peppering a range with live bullets, run fierce obstacle courses and study survival skills, such as jungle cooking (First, catch your cobra...).
Eradicating Naxalism, however, is more than a local policing problem. One difficulty has been that, under India's constitution, security is a matter for state governments rather than the centre. So national policy for dealing with the Naxalites has been inconsistent. In 2004, the government of Andhra Pradesh held abortive peace talks with local Naxalites, while other states continued to fight them.
Mr Ueike talks boldly of expanding Naxalite influence into new areas: Kashmir, the north-east, and India's cities. The spread of Naxalism is causing justifiable alarm. Just as Mao Zedong mounted the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing in 1949 to tell the Chinese people they had stood up, Mr Ueike dreams of seeing the red flag fly over the Red Fort in Delhi in his lifetime.
It will not happen. For all their geographical reach, the Maoists' power base remains on the margins of Indian society. They are far from sparking a general insurrection. But, in places such as Dantewada, almost a hole in the map of the Indian polity, it is easy to see how a crude, violent ideology, promising land and liberation, might take root. Mr Singh had a point when in April he said the Naxalites posed the single biggest internal-security challenge ever faced by our country.
Other terrorists attack the Indian state at its strong pointsits secularism, its inclusiveness, its democracy. Naxalism attacks where it is weakest: in delivering basic government services to those who need them most. The Naxalites do not threaten the government in Delhi, but they do have the power to deter investment and development in some of India's poorest regions, which also happen to be among the richest in some vital resourcesnotably iron and coal. So their movement itself has the effect of sharpening inequity, which many see as the biggest danger facing India in the next few years, and which is the Naxalites' recruiting sergeant.
Brigadier Ponwar, who joined the Indian army as it went to war in Bangladesh in 1971, says he spent the rest of his career fighting terrorists at home. After fighting low-intensity wars on its periphery for a generation, India risks having to endure another, in its very core, for the next.
Aug 17th 2006 | DANTEWADA DISTRICT, CHHATTISGARH
Ganesh Ueike, secretary of the West Bastar Divisional Committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), seems a gentle, rather academic, man, who does not suit his green combat fatigues or clenched-fist red salute. He shuffles dog-eared bits of paper from a shabby file in his knapsack and writes down the questions he is asked. He answers them in slogans that he gives every appearance of believing. He wants to liberate India from the clutches of feudalism and imperialism.
The rare interview took place last month, in a thatched shelter in a clearing in the Bastar forest in southern Chhattisgarh. The spot was some seven hours' walk from the nearest road, and there had been a day-and-a-half's wait for such a big leader to emerge from a hideout even deeper in the jungle. His party, he said, was facing renewed suppression, because the resources of finance capitalism are facing sluggishness in their development, and are looking for new routes, such as the mineral riches of this forest.
Mr Ueike did not mention that, just a few hours beforehand, at the edge of the forest, in a place called Errabore, his comrades had fought back. Several hundred had mounted a co-ordinated attack on a police station, a paramilitary base and a relief camp for displaced people. They killed more than 30 of the camp's residents, mostly by hacking them to death with axes. The scholarly Mr Ueike did boast that his army relied on low-tech weapons.
This was the latest battle in a year-long civil war in Dantewada district, in which more than 350 people have been killed, and nearly 50,000 moved into camps such as the one at Errabore. It is a remote, sparsely populated, under-developed region bordering three neighbouring states, and nine hours' drive from Chhattisgarh's capital, Raipur (see map). It is here that India's widespread Maoist rebellion is most intense.
On August 15th, in his National Day speech in Delhi, India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, linked Naxalism with terrorism as the two big threats to India's internal security. The terrorism is all too familiar. India's cities have endured repeated atrocitiesculminating in July's bomb attacks in Mumbai, which killed nearly 200 people. But many are surprised that Mr Singh accords Naxalism such a high priority. A primitive peasant rebellion based on an outmoded ideology is out of keeping with the modern India of soaring growth, Bollywood dreams and call-centres. Moreover, India has fought many better-known wars. A violent insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir has claimed tens of thousands of lives. Its north-eastern states are wracked by dozens of secessionist movements.
But Mr Singh may be right about the Maoists. Known as Naxalites, after the district of Naxalbari in West Bengal where they staged an uprising in 1967, they are these days almost a nationwide force. Greeted by China's People's Daily at the height of the Cultural Revolution as a peal of spring thunder, they were almost wiped out in the 1970s, as the Indian government repressed them, and Maoism went out of fashion, even in its homeland.
In India they splintered into various armed factions, of which the biggest were the People's War Group and the Maoist Communist Centre. These merged and formed the CPI (Maoist) party in September 2004. P.V. Ramana, of the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi, estimates the Naxalites now have 9,000-10,000 armed fighters, with access to about 6,500 firearms. There are perhaps a further 40,000 full-time cadres.
In nearly 1,600 violent incidents involving Naxalites last year, 669 people died. There have been spectacular attacks across a big area: a train hold-up last month involving 250 armed fighters, a jailbreak freeing 350 prisoners, a near-miss assassination attempt in 2004 against a leading politician. Naxalism now affects some 170 of India's 602 districtsa red corridor down a swathe of central India from the border with Nepal in the north to Karnataka in the south and covering more than a quarter of India's land mass.
This statistic overstates Naxalite power, since in most places they are an underground, hit-and-run force. But in the Bastar forest they are well-entrenched, controlling a large chunk of territory and staging operations across state borders into Andhra Pradesh and Orissa. In the tiny, dirt-poor villages scattered through the forest, the Indian state is almost invisible.
In one there is a hand-pump installed by the local government, but the well is dry. There are no roads, waterpipes, electricity or telephone lines. In another village a teacher does come, but, in the absence of a school, holds classes outdoors. Policemen, health workers and officials are never seen. The vacuum is filled by Naxalite committees, running village affairs and providing logistic support to the fighters camping in the forest. For the past year, those fightersmostly local tribal peoplehave been battling not just the police and the six paramilitary battalions deployed in the district, but their own neighbours.
The single spark that lit this prairie fire was the formation a year ago of Salwa Judum, an anti-Maoist movement, whose name in Gondi, the language spoken by local tribes, means something like peace hunt. Its origins are disputed. K.R. Pisda, the district collector, or senior official, in Dantewada, dates it to a meeting in June 2005 of local villagers fed up with Naxalite intimidation and extortion. Others say that the Maoists were enforcing a boycott of trade in one of the main local forest products: tendu patta, the leaves used to wrap bidis (hand-rolled cigarettes).
Similar boycotts in the past had succeeded in forcing up prices and had earned the Naxalites some kudos. This one, the story goes, backfired. If it ever was a spontaneous movement, Salwa Judum soon became an arm of government policyand a paramilitary force. Some 5,000 of its members have been inducted as special police officers (SPOs) and given some training and arms.
As the local government tells it, thousands of people started turning up by the roadside, fleeing Naxalite reprisals. There was no choice but to house them in relief camps, of which there are now 17. This is a dirty little war in which truth was long ago a casualty. Salwa Judum itself is also responsible for displacing peoplea scorched village policy intended to starve the Maoists of local support. This recognises that the Naxalites' real strength lies not in their guerrillas in the jungle, with their peaked caps and country-made rifles, but in their civilian networks in the villages themselves.
In the largest camp, at Dornapal, some 17,000 people are housed in huts of mud and corrugated iron. Health workers say that many of the children are malnourished. One man, Wenjam, says he took refuge here after Naxalites in his local village beat him, and threatened him with worse, because he had a government contract to fence the pond. He had a pukka house, he said, and a herd of cattle. But, after five months in the camp, he had not been back to the village.
Armed police do sometimes escort groups home for a visit. Mr Ueike says there are no ordinary people in the camps, only SPO people and their families, whom he dismisses as village feudal families and some lumpen elements.
Yet some of those displaced are openly critical of Salwa Judum, which they say forced them to leave their villages. They are caught between two vicious enemies. In some villages, residents fled into the forest rather than follow the drive to the roadside. The camps are very controversial. Even K.P.S. Gill, a retired policeman known as a supercop for his vigorous role in putting down various insurgencies, and now an adviser to the Chhattisgarh government on dealing with the Maoists, says it would have been better to protect people in their villages.
When the Chhattisgarh government's home minister, Ramvichar Netam, visited Errabore the day after the massacre, he was surrounded by angry survivors. They pelted his helicopter with stones. Some of the bereaved even refused the money he was handing out as compensation. The Salwa Judum campaign, however, has important backers. Raman Singh, Chhattisgarh's chief minister, calls it a success story, a non-violent movement against exploitation.
The same tune is sung by the leader of the opposition in the state, Mahendra Karma of the Congress party, who is, in effect, Salwa Judum's leading light. A native of Dantewada itself, Mr Karma, like Mr Singh, sits under a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi and stresses the movement's peaceful origins. But he also links it to the global fight against terrorism and asks: Are we not supposed to protect ourselves in our homeland? Even the central government seemed at one time to endorse the campaign. In a statement in March the home ministry promised to promote local resistance groups against Naxalites.
Now, however, V.K. Duggal, the home ministry's top civil servant, who, like state officials, calls Salwa Judum spontaneous, says that at a meeting last week the central government advised the Chhattisgarh government not to extend the movement to other areas. Delhi is offering assistance: an extra paramilitary battalion; armoured vehicles; minesweeping equipment; and imaging technology to help locate remote Naxalite camps. It draws the line at helicopters for offensive operations. Its emphasis is on persuading the Maoists to join mainstream politics. In his speech this week, the prime minister said he wanted Naxalites to understand that real power flows from the ballot box.
Mr Karma and local officials in Dantewada make much of the Maoists' inhumanity. He says they load the corpses of their victims with mines, so those retrieving the bodies are also killed. Om Prakash Pal, the police superintendent at Dornapal, displays a gruesome photo album of mutilated bodies. Even Mr Gill, who has seen more brutality than most, thinks the Maoists stand out in this respect: Their ideology is that the manner of killing should frighten more than the killing itself.
Salwa Judum, too, is accused of intimidation, extortion, rape and murder. Its thugs have been manning roadblocks, supposedly to hunt for Maoists, but also to demand money. Some SPOslike some Naxalitesmay be local hoodlums, who have signed up for the money on offer, and the shiny new bicycles and motorbikes still wrapped in plastic at the Dornapal police station. Some families refusing to join Salwa Judum on its combing operationsrampages of arson, thuggery and pillagehave been fined or beaten. A report on Salwa Judum produced in April by a number of civil-liberties groups concluded that its formation had escalated violence on all sides...Salwa Judum and the paramilitary operate with complete impunity. The rule of law has completely broken down.
For local officials in Dantewada, and the state government in Raipur, the Naxalites are just bandits: extortionists who hold sway through terror alone. Their ideology, they say, long ago imploded in a welter of violence. There is little doubt that they do use terror and extortion. Himanshu Kumar, who runs aid projects in the district, says he used to respect the Naxalites as working for the betterment of the masses. But he now found people supporting them out of fear of their guns, or to gain power to loot others.
Most of their young recruitsilliterate tribal peoplehave never read Mao. But not all support is coerced or opportunistic. And those who have studied the Naxalites credit them with far greater organisation, discipline and ideological fervour than any criminal gang. Ajai Sahni, for example, of the Institute of Conflict Management, a Delhi think-tank, points to the detailed socio-economic surveys they conduct before starting operations in a target area, helping to identify grievances they can exploit.
He also says that the Naxalites have been among the most principled of terrorist groups in selecting their targets. Their attacks are not random; though, because they so often use crude landmines, they may kill the wrong people. Their leaders are thinking far into the future, taking a 20- to 25-year view of their struggle. Liberated areas, such as their part of Dantewada, would be expanded until they pose a threat even to India's cities.
Nepal's Maoists, with whom the Indian party has fraternal links, are a model of how such a strategy can work. Having managed to exclude the state from virtually all the countryside, and waged war for a decade, the Maoists in Nepal are now negotiating, from a position of some strength, their share in governmenta decision their Indian comrades quietly deplore, despite a pretence of solidarity.
Early Naxalite leaders like Mr Ueike, who has spent nearly 30 years in the movement, were students and middle-class intellectuals. But the tribal peoples among whom they find most of their new recruits are among India's poorest: the most exploited, the bottom rung, according to Ajit Jogi, a tribal leader and former chief minister of Chhattisgarh. Typically, they live in forests and have no rights to their land. A law to remedy this is under consideration, but resisted by conservationists. According to the 2001 census, about three-quarters of Dantewada's 1,220 villages are almost wholly tribal; 1,161 have no medical facilities; 214 have no primary school; the literacy rate is 29% for men and 14% for women.
Most of the inhabitants are subsistence farmers eking a meagre cash income from selling forest products, such as tendu patta. Markets in the forest have been closed, to throttle the Maoists' supply chain. For many inside the forest, a visit to the market is now a long hike, camping overnight on the way. A big iron mine, Bailadilla, on the edge of the forest, employs few local people and in the rainy season turns a river bright orange and undrinkable. A railway has been built to take the ore to the sea.
The government blames the Maoists for blocking development, such as road-building. But the Maoists tell people that roads are intended simply to help the state plunder the forests and take wealth out, not bring it in. Many believe them. The Maoists profit from what Mr Sahni calls asymmetric expectations: people expect the state to provide for them, and it is failing; any good coming from the Maoistssocial work, land redistribution, a price rise for local producebrings disproportionate gratitude.
To bring development to these neglected reaches, the government needs to assert control. Salwa Judum is the wrong way to go about it. A larger, better-trained police force would help. In India, on average, there are 55 policemen for every 100 square kilometres; in Chhattisgarh just 17. In districts such as Dantewada, policing is an unattractive, life-threatening career. Mr Pal, the Dornapal policeman, is a young and competent-seeming officer from the state of Uttar Pradesh. But he has been criticised in the press for lacking experience.
Some 2,000 policemen have attended a Counter-Terrorism and Jungle Warfare Training School, which opened a year ago at Kanker, on the road from Raipur. The director, B.K. Ponwar, a retired army brigadier, wants to teach policemen to fight a guerrilla like a guerrilla. They learn to slither down ropes, as from a helicopter, practise peppering a range with live bullets, run fierce obstacle courses and study survival skills, such as jungle cooking (First, catch your cobra...).
Eradicating Naxalism, however, is more than a local policing problem. One difficulty has been that, under India's constitution, security is a matter for state governments rather than the centre. So national policy for dealing with the Naxalites has been inconsistent. In 2004, the government of Andhra Pradesh held abortive peace talks with local Naxalites, while other states continued to fight them.
Mr Ueike talks boldly of expanding Naxalite influence into new areas: Kashmir, the north-east, and India's cities. The spread of Naxalism is causing justifiable alarm. Just as Mao Zedong mounted the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing in 1949 to tell the Chinese people they had stood up, Mr Ueike dreams of seeing the red flag fly over the Red Fort in Delhi in his lifetime.
It will not happen. For all their geographical reach, the Maoists' power base remains on the margins of Indian society. They are far from sparking a general insurrection. But, in places such as Dantewada, almost a hole in the map of the Indian polity, it is easy to see how a crude, violent ideology, promising land and liberation, might take root. Mr Singh had a point when in April he said the Naxalites posed the single biggest internal-security challenge ever faced by our country.
Other terrorists attack the Indian state at its strong pointsits secularism, its inclusiveness, its democracy. Naxalism attacks where it is weakest: in delivering basic government services to those who need them most. The Naxalites do not threaten the government in Delhi, but they do have the power to deter investment and development in some of India's poorest regions, which also happen to be among the richest in some vital resourcesnotably iron and coal. So their movement itself has the effect of sharpening inequity, which many see as the biggest danger facing India in the next few years, and which is the Naxalites' recruiting sergeant.
Brigadier Ponwar, who joined the Indian army as it went to war in Bangladesh in 1971, says he spent the rest of his career fighting terrorists at home. After fighting low-intensity wars on its periphery for a generation, India risks having to endure another, in its very core, for the next.
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