MAOISTS SURGE AHEAD The Nation Under Siege

88 Pages·2011·2.5 MB·English

MAOISTS SURGE AHEAD
The Nation Under Siege
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MAOISTS SURGE AHEAD
- The Nation Under Siege
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Contents
At the Threshhold - Six Questions .... 5
1. Real Objectives of Maoists’ War .... 9
Principal Targets - National Unity and Indian Army .... 10
Right of Self Determination of Nationalities .... 11
“India an Imperialist Power” .... 12
Charu Majumdar’s Thesis .... 12
2. Strengths and Capabilities .... 16
Maoists’ advance in Nepal .... 17
Strategic alliance with Jihadis .... 17
Arming the PLGA .... 19
Flow of Funds .... 22
Propaganda Blitzkrieg .... 22
3. PLGA to Peoples’ Liberation Army .... 24
Stages of Guerrilla War .... 24
Tactics of Guerrilla War .... 24
The Central Military Commission .... 26
Forces - Base, Secondary, Main .... 27
Battles - Guerrilla, Mobile, Positional .... 29
4. Brutal Killings, Genocide and Destruction of Infrastructure .... 30
Bihar .... 30
Chhattisgarh .... 33
West Bengal .... 37
Jharkhand .... 41
Maharashtra .... 42
Orissa .... 44
Andhra Pradesh .... 46
Madhya Pradesh .... 48
5. Security Forces Targeted .... 49
Bihar .... 49
Uttar Pradesh .... 51
Chhattisgarh .... 52
West Bengal .... 58
Jharkhand .... 59
Orissa .... 60
6. Public Face of CPI (Maoist) .... 63
Civil Liberties and Human Rights Platforms .... 63
Revolutionary Writers Associations .... 65
Academics and Intellectuals .... 67
Media .... 70
7. The Political Response .... 73
Unified Command .... 74
Avaoidable Debate .... 75
Political Class in Frankenstein Mode .... 76
Appendix
A. Resolution on Nationality Struggles .... 82
B. Resolution against Hindu Fascism .... 83
C. Front Organizations of Maoists .... 84
D. Naxal Insurgency : Major Developments since 1967 .... 86
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At the Threshold - Six Questions
T
he Maoists had ambushed and completely wiped out an entire battalion of CRPF on 6 April
2010 at Chintalnar in Chhattisgarh. Even before the nation could recover from the shock they
struck again on 29 May. Their diabolic explosion on the railway track at Khemshuli in West
Bengal rammed the Mumbai bound super-fast express (Gnaneswari) into a goods train crushing to
death 148 innocent passengers including women and children. Over 190 injured. These were not
isolated incidents. They were part of a grand strategy to use terror as a political weapon for captur-
ing the Indian State.
Two powerful naxal groups, the Peoples’ War (PWG) and the Maoist Communist Centre
(MCC) operating in non-overlapping geographical regions merged together to form CPI(Maoist).
The Union Home Ministry and various intelligence agencies haven’t studied in depth the implica-
tions of this merger. Firstly, naxals attained an all-India status. The arrival of new political jargon,
namely, ‘Pasupati to Tirupati’, ‘Red Corridor,’ etc was but a reflection of this newly acquired
stature. Secondly, an improbable had happened. Terrorist outfits, all over the world, generally split,
do not unite for various reasons. Added to these developments, the Insurgency got further boost
because of the rapid advance of fraternal Maoists to the central stage in neighboring Nepal almost
about the same time.
Ever since the merger new areas came under Maoists’ influence. A decade ago, there was hardly
any presence of their activity in West Bengal. But now, thanks to Singur and Nandigram, the
districts of Medinipur, Bankura and Purulia have come under their grip. By 2006, the Maoist
Insurgency has pushed the cross-border terror in Kashmir to second position. Look at the follow-
ing figures:
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No.killed during 2006-2010
Maoists’ War Kashmir
Insurgency
Civilians 2237 661
Security Forces 1297 511
Maoists / Militants 1200 1880
The above figures should not be viewed as mere crime statistics. These were not just ordinary
murders. The impact of killing a security person would be different from killing a civilian. Each
fatality on the side of security forces, leads to the elevation of another militant as guerrilla because
a new weapon was added to the armory.*
The above table also conveys that the Peoples’ Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) is expanding
rapidly. Not just that. As the Union Home Minister, Chidambaram, admitted recently, the Maoists
are in the process of converting PLGA into Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA). This development
implies that the Maoists are getting ready to take on the security forces, even outside their zone of
influence. The Maoists claim that they have begun ‘mobile wars’ in Andhra-Orissa Border zone.
Some areas are totally under Maoist control, inaccessible to the Indian State. In hundreds of vil-
lages of Malkangiri dt of Orissa only Maoists’ writ runs. The kidnapping of the Collector of
Malkangiri in February 2011 amply unfolds the situation. In Abuzmarh of Chhattisgarh, the
Maoists run a parallel government. They enforce conscription to strengthen guerrilla units. For
over ten months in 2008-09 State withdrew itself from Lalgarh and Salboni area of West Bengal.
Fifteen police stations were closed.
This huge set back, in the first place, was due to the intellectual dishonesty on the part of the
political leadership. The Centre and the states futilely search for the solution in development alone.
Development is the primary responsibility of the Governments in all regions irrespective of the
presence of Maoists. One should not be oblivious to the reality that the Maoists do not allow
developmental activities in areas under their domination in order to maintain supremacy. Develop-
ment at best serves as supplementary measure to insulate unaffected areas from the Maoist virus
and to wean away future recruits. But it would not stem the rising tide of insurgency.
The Maoists consider the State as their enemy. ‘Enemy’ is the epithet that they use in their
literature and speeches against the government. As such they treat the State’s property as enemy’s
property. They do not hesitate to destroy State’s or people’s assets such as railways (trains, engines,
tracks, stations and communication equipment), telephones, roads, culverts, buses of public trans-
port corporations and even schools and hostels. They do not view road as a means for development
but as a facility for quick movement of enemy’s forces. They view school as a facility for stationing
enemy’s troops. Look at what they have done to public properties in Chhattisgarh during the past
two years.
* A Maoist document titled Post Election Situation-Our Tasks of 12 June 2009, claimed that they had killed 2000 security
personnel including Central Para-military Forces, injured about 2000 and snatched away 2,500 weapons, one lakh
rounds of ammunition since the PLGA was founded on 2 December 2000.
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Schools 96
Roads 71
Other Public Assets 400
(The Hindu, Editorial, 19 May 2010)
According to UNISCEF Report, the Maoists have either blasted or set on fire 300 schools in
Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Orissa during 2006-09
They had destroyed Railway properties worth crores of rupees in Jharkhand, Bihar, and West
Bengal besides Chhattisgarh during the past decade under one pretext or other. Their growth was
dependent on creating terror. Nation’s unguarded assets constitute soft targets for Maoists’ explo-
sions. In Andhra Pradesh, during 1980s and 1990s, they had destroyed 94 assets of railways, 300
telephone exchanges, 500 government buildings and 1500 state owned buses. In 2010 there has
been a spate of such attacks in other states. In April 2010 schools were blasted in Bihar. Tatanagar
bound express was fired upon in West Medinipur dt. in May 2010. During the same month, a
bomb went off under a train carrying oil through Bihar: 14 freight cars caught fire. On May 19,
Maoists bombed a freight train near Jhagram. In February 2010, Railways were targeted 11 times
In this context the following observations of Ajai Sahni, Executive Director, Institute of Con-
flict Management, New Delhi, are candid enough: “…Development cannot be a counter-insur-
gency strategy. It is the duty of the government to carry out developmental activities. But it is a
much-longer-term programme than counter insurgency”.
“People who are talking about this are basically saying that good health is a solution to disease.
But when you look at India demographically and its cumulative developmental deficits, 836 mil-
lion people (77 per cent of the population) are living on less than Rs.20 a day. More than half of
them live on less than Rs.10. They are living on the edge of survival and are you telling me that the
government has the capacity to bring this section to middle-class prosperity in 18 months?”
“The model of development here is also not unidirectional. Even as it is benefiting many, it is
actually harming many people. Rural distress has increased in the past decades. Why don’t you
develop your areas where there is peace? In Delhi, the Maoists are recruiting students, retailers
affected by the ceiling drive and multinational retail companies, people displaced or affected by
SEZs, unorganized workers. If you have cancer, you have to treat it first. I cannot tell a cancer
patient to go home and try to be in good health.” (Frontline, 6 November 2009)
The inadequacies and poor responses felt in the political front were far more pronounced than
the reverses in the security front.
The Maoists and their pseudo-intellectual fellow-travelers are very clever people. They juxta-
pose the failures of the system against their path of violence. They raise questions that the dumb,
poor and marginalized, would like to ask the insensitive administration.
The social unrest that erupted in several pockets across the country because of the Special Eco-
nomic Zones and mega projects in power, steel, mining and coastal corridor sectors by the corpo-
rate houses, wasn’t the creation of Maoists. Lakhs of acres of land was forcibly taken away from the
marginalized farmers and tribals to pass on to the corporate giants in the name of industrial devel-
opment. Not only Nandigram (Indonesian Chemical Company Salem), Salboni (Jindal),
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Lohandiguda(Tatas), Durli (Essar), Nagarnar and Dilimili (NMD), Raoghat, Kalinga Nagar have
become synonymous with the deprivation of the livelihood of the poor. The callous approach of
the governments towards these so called growth projects has opened up new avenues for the Maoists
to expand. Any comprehensive strategy to defeat the Maoists in their war cannot ignore the con-
cerns of the poor. Whatever success that the security forces might achieve in this war, need to be
consolidated by policy corrections in the economic front.
The Political leadership has been committing a serious blunder in another aspect as well. They
look to the other way when it comes to taking on Maoists ideologically. Maoists skillfully exploit
the rivalries among the political parties and groups within them. Since 1982 onwards, the opposi-
tion party in Andhra Pradesh whoever it were, unabashedly soft towards naxals. Sympathisers of
naxals got elected to the Assembly alternately on TDP and Congress tickets. In the end it only
strengthened the pernicious ideology.
A major section of the media and journalists have been the biggest alleys of Naxals. Media
reports on Maoist attacks were always biased.. They might not endorse the violence explicitly, but
not a single editorial was written without riders giving respectability to the naxals. In this age of
paid news, it not difficult for the Maoists to get the events published the way they want.
Six Questions
People of this country raise the following six questions in the context of Maoists’ rapid advance in
several states:
1. Misery and underdevelopment in rural areas might be the root cause for Maoist Insurgency. But
does economic development alone wipe out this scourge from the body politic of the nation?
2. The naxal insurgency has been in existence for the past four decades. How could it survive so
long? How could it survive the collapse of Leninism in Europe and the advent of market economy
in Mao’s China?
3. Can a political ideology be made ineffective without a public debate? Why the Indian political
class is so shy and reluctant to take on the Maoists politically?
4. Why the intellectual sections in considerable numbers, be they academics, poets, writers, artists,
and film directors lean towards Maoist ideology? Why the role of state-funded institutions such as
JNU in spreading this pernicious ideology was not discussed in public domain?
5. Why large sections of the media eulogize Maoists? Was it because of the influence of Western
media which has been consistently anti-India?
6. Why our intelligence organizations were so apathetic vis e vis Maoist Insurgency? Was it because
of lack of proper orientation and training or because of the lack of political direction? Is our
intelligence apparatus free from the ideological influences of Maoists? Is it free from infiltration?
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1
Real Objectives of Maoists’ War
* To seize power state by state
* Principal Targets: National Unity and Indian Army
* “India an Imperialist Power”
T
he CPI(Maoist) has explicitly stated in its Strategy and Tactics of the Indian
Revolution (One of the five documents adopted at the merger conference of the Peoples’ War
Group and MCC in September 2004) that it wants to seize power state by state through
armed struggle. They haven’t minced words:
“The unevenness of development in India
indicates that it is not possible to stage a
simultaneous revolution (i.e., an armed in-
surrection) throughout the country and that
the line of area wise seizure of power
through the strategy of protracted people’s
war has to be adopted basing on the rela-
tively backward and strategic areas of the
countryside. This means revolutionary war
has to begin in those regions that are rela-
tively more backward and where the social
contradictions are sharp. The strength of the
armed forces of the reactionaries is quite in-
adequate in the vast countryside of India
and the inadequacy of the transport and
communication system and other infrastruc-
ture makes it inconvenient for the quick move-
ment of the enemy forces. The people’s
armed forces - the people’s army and the
people’s militia, on the other hand, can ad-
vance and retreat easily, according to the
needs of the struggle, in the vast country-
side, that is, there is enough room for their
manoeuvre in face of a big military offensive
by the enemy’s armed forces.”
“Thus the vastness of the countryside,
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the inadequacy of the transport and communication system and the isolation of the
remote countryside from the military centers, and above all, the inadequacy of the
reactionary armed forces in comparison to the vastness of the country and the popula-
tion, if all these are taken into consideration, the military strength of the reactionaries is
relatively weak in the countryside compared to that in the cities, and hence from the
military point of view, the vast countryside is the most advantageous for the revolu-
tionary people’s army to strike at the enemy. Hence, we can transform the vast tracts of
the countryside into red resistance areas, guerilla zones, guerrilla bases and liberated
areas by making use of the favourable terrain which is abundant in some regions of the
Indian countryside. Liberated areas can also be established in the plains when the
domestic and international situation becomes more favourable and the people’s army
becomes powerful i.e., when the revolutionary war is at a high peak.” (The Central Task
of Revolution – Seizure of Political Power by Armed Force, Chapter 6) *
“Indian Army – A Paper Tiger”
The ideologues of CPI(Maoist) rouse the morale of their cadres by creating false images such as
“Indian Army is only a paper tiger”. They put forward a perverse logic that Indian Army’s interests
are different from the interests of the people. Argues the above mentioned document:
“It should, however, be noted that the enemy is superior only from the tactical point of
view. In the strategic sense, enemy’s armed forces are only paper-tigers. Their interests
are diametrically opposed to the interests of the broad masses and hence cannot get
any cooperation from the people. Their morale and combat capacity are quite low prima-
rily because of their mercenary nature; and the contradiction between officers and
soldiers also contributes to it considerably. Moreover, since the vast majority of them
are peasants in uniform, the influence of the agrarian revolutionary war will have a deep
impact on them.”
And hence the Maoists theorize that it is possible to overpower the Indian Army:
“However strong the enemy’s military power may be and however weak the people’s
military power, by basing ourselves on the vast backward countryside-the weakest
position of the enemy-and relying on the vast masses of the peasantry, eager for agrar-
ian revolution, and creatively following the flexible strategy and tactics of guerrilla
struggle and the protracted people’s war, - as a full meal is eaten up mouthful by
mouthful, exactly in the same way, - by applying the best part of our army (a force few
times stronger than that of the enemy) against different single parts of the enemy forces
and following the policy and tactics of sudden attack and annihilation, it is absolutely
possible to defeat the enemy forces and achieve victory for the people in single battles.
It is thus possible to increase the people’s armed forces, attain supremacy over the ene
my’s forces and defeat the enemy decisively. (The Central Task... Ibid., Chapter 6)
Principal Targets - National Unity and Indian Army
One of the important strategic considerations of CPI(Maoist) was based on the assuption that
dispersal of Indian Army units to meet the challenges posed by insurgency movements in various
parts of the country is imperative. This was again based on the fundamental ideological plank that
India is not a national at all, but a conglomeration of nationalities kept together by the Indian
* To a specific question “If you really have a pro-people agenda, why insist on keeping arms? Is your goal tribal welfare
or political power?” by Tehelka, Mallojula Koteswar Rao alias Kishanji replies: “Political power. Tribal welfare is our
priority, but without political power we cannot achieve anything. One cannot sustain power without an army and
weapons” (Tehelka, 21 November 2009)
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