Naxals War on the Economy?

GRK Murty
This shows the savage nature of the Maoists—the brutality and
savagery they are capable of”—this is what P Chidambaram, Union
Home Minister, had to say about the horrific killing of 76 CRPF jawans
by Maoists at Dantewada in Chhattisgarh on 6th April. The fury and
anguish that such slaughter generates is quite understandable. But
the plain truth is: It takes us nowhere.

For, the Maoists did it simply to provoke the state to react brutally
and perhaps indiscriminately too, against them and their
sympathizers—Adivasis, tribal people, and marginalized rural folk—
and thereby prove why their revolutionary path is right. The State
must understand this logic of Maoists rightly with a cool mind and
work towards its defeat, resolutely backed by an apt strategy for
policing the errant.

After all, the Naxals too are the people of India. And, the State can
only pursue politics to set its people on the right course. It cannot let
army fight against them. But to police them, to show them that their
‘ism’ is wrong and to get them back on the democratic path, is
certainly the job of the State. It must strive to achieve it intelligently
sans emotions. At the same time, it should also show respect for the
lives of the policemen who are fighting against the Maoists, who
have deep endurance duly backed by large scale popular support of
local population, by better equipping them with right intelligence and
equipment.

To be successful, any fight against such uprisings, must essentially

aim at destroying their very roots. Else, they keep revisiting,
disturbing the lives of the peace-loving majority, as is happening in
India since the early 1950s. But Maoists have entrenched themselves
deeply in all those areas where they are currently operating from.
Obviously, the first question to be asked is what has made them get
entrenched so deeply so as to challenge the administration of the
Sovereign in quite a large part of India.

Glancing through the pages of history, one comes across the late
Begum of Bhopal, a stateswoman of great stature of pre-
independent India, telling Lord Meston, the Lieutenant-Governor of
the then United Provinces, that “the seed beds of revolution are the
hunger of the masses and the discontent of the classes.” It seems
she also warned him that both these conditions were present in
British India.

This observation from history raises a simple question: What is the

truest fact about today’s India? The answer cannot be anything other
than: ‘Grinding POVERTY’. Isn’t it true that the self-respect of the
classes is hurt at every turn by political subjection? Is it not a fact that
the polity has squarely marginalized the tribal population and the
rural folk from the newfound wealth of the country? Even 9% growth
rate in GDP could not do much in altering their economic plight—
they are still suffering from lack of access to the basic resources to
sustain livelihood. On the other hand, such phenomenal growth
witnessed for the last two decades has certainly widened the gap in
the economic status between the village and town folk; between the
upper and lower caste people, and between the industrial and
agricultural labor. With the result, lot of dissatisfaction is brewing
among the deprived sections. Secondly, the social, political,
economic and cultural discrimination faced by the weaker sections of
the society across the country and the displacement—enforced
eviction of people on account of developmental projects such as
irrigation projects, mining projects, techno parks, SEZs, etc.,—of
tribals and other habitants from their lands and natural habitats have
all cumulatively driven large number of discontented people towards
the Naxalites.

Efficient and impartial policing is another important requirement of

any society. But the weaker sections have no faith in the police that
justice will be done to them against the powerful. On the other hand,
Naxals are found attending to the grievances of these people with
alacrity. As a surrogate state, Naxals have indeed been helping these
groups in occupying substantial tracts of government land. Besides
poverty, factors such as denial of justice, human dignity, etc., have
led people to believe that relief can be had only outside the
government system of administration.

In short, today, “we have two worlds of education, two worlds of

health, two worlds of transport and two worlds of housing...” within
the nation and it is this kind of “structural violence which is implicit in
the social and economic system” that is offering support to the
radical groups to justify their violent acts and thereby garner deep-
seated sympathy among the ‘have-nots’ of the society.

To eradicate this deep-rooted evil permanently, the State must

launch a two-pronged attack: one, to eradicate the structural
imbalances between the different sections of the society, and two,
to simultaneously police the Maoists with a strong determination to
pluck out the malady from its roots. In the pursuit of the former, the
corporate entrepreneurs have a great role to play. They need to
appreciate that today, not only the management, but also the whole
wealth created by the corporates of India, stays with the families that
own them. It is time for the Indian corporates to move towards
philanthropy like the Gates, Buffetts, etc., of the US if they want the
kind of free market economy to exist for long. It is time they use the
wealth to build a new social order in the country. It is only then that
the entrepreneurship of these stalwarts will become meaningful.

Can an entrepreneur afford to live in a glass house and yet pursue

‘freemarket economy’ for long, while the masses around him are
struggling to acquire basic resources to sustain livelihood?