Today, if the youth of this country are asked whether they know Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal or not, chances are that they will give you a puzzled look. Or maybe ask them if they have heard about the Naxalbari uprising and you will again get nothing but confused faces. Now do the same with people in their late 50s or 60s and they will tell you all about the scourge that Naxalite terrorism used to be.
As India successfully concludes its maiden G20 summit in the heart of the capital and looks forward to becoming the third-largest economy in the world by the turn of this decade, the fact that Naxalite terrorism has become a term little heard of is a sign of its forward movement towards inclusive development.
In the late 1960s at the peak of India’s socialist days, a little-known village of Naxalbari in West Bengal became the launchpad for a protracted armed revolution against the state. It so happened that the peasants and workers working on tea plantations in that village, who also had a long history of being exploited by the landowners and moneylenders, united against an incident of violence by a landowner against a poor worker. This incident sparked a mass rebellion across the state and also spread to other parts of the country. Although the rebellion may look like a spontaneous event, in reality, the groundwork was being laid in advance by the radical faction of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
In interviews to Indian media, Abhijit Mazumdar, son of Charu Mazumdar has himself explained how his father, along with his other co-ideologists, had put years of hard work into launching and sustaining a Maoist uprising in Naxalbari. In fact, there is a precursor to the Naxalbari uprising in the Tebhaga movement launched in Bangladesh by the same set of activists including Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal. The aftermath of the Naxal uprising led to the creation of a security challenge for the Indian state that would last for the next 5-6 decades.
Growing up, I remember being asked to write a long note on the causes of Left-wing extremism in India and how it is a nuisance for the state, in my school’s social science exam every year. Often, the newspaper also would be full of headlines where political leaders, security personnel and ordinary citizens would be targeted by the Naxalites. On one hand, there was the Kashmir insurgency where militants were bleeding the state through multiple cuts and on the other was the Maoist insurgency, which had infested no less than 10 states and around 180 districts by the year 2010.
Since the foundation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) more popularly known as the People’s War Group, the violence by Left-wing extremists had spread across the interiors of the country in states such as Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar and Chhattisgarh. These extremists who called themselves ‘revolutionaries’ waged an active war against the Indian state while singing tunes of the Chinese state which, according to them, was an ideal type. Some old-timers even recall chanting, “China’s Chairman is our Chairman”. China witnessed a total communist revolution under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) founded by Chairman Mao Zedong which later led to the establishment of the communist state, People’s Republic of China (PRC).
This PRC seems to the Indian communists as their role model till today. They also swore allegiance to Mao’s ideology where he preached, “political power flows from the barrel of the gun”. But unlike China, where the Kuomintang, the nationalist party lost the war to the CCP and eventually was forced to limit itself to the Republic of China (known as Taiwan currently), in India, no such victory could be secured by the communists.
In 2009, the UPA government launched ‘Operation Green Hunt’, a large-scale counter-offence with massive troop deployment across Maoist-infested states such as Andhra, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. Although due to the criticism by the communists, the then Home Minister P Chidambaram did a U-turn later and said no such operation existed and it was an invention of the media but on the ground, the troop deployment did take place for real. By 2013, more than 84000 troops were stationed across the so-called ‘Red Corridor’. In 2014, with a change of government, India’s fight against the Naxalites got an unprecedented boost. The Modi government not only showed more conviction in taking on the Left-wing extremism but it also changed its approach — from a narrow counteroffensive driven approach to a multi-pronged strategy.
In 2015, a National Policy and Action Plan was launched to deal with the Maoist challenge where the Union Home Ministry adopted multiple methods to control and curtail Left-wing extremism. This included security-related measures as well as development interventions to ensure that the districts that had been lost to the Leftist extremists could be once again integrated into the mainstream. Along with this, emphasis was laid on ensuring the rights and entitlements of local communities so that they could not be brainwashed by the communist forces into picking up arms.
As a part of this action plan, many new schemes were introduced by the Home Ministry. Key among them are the Special Infrastructure Scheme, Security Related Expenditure Scheme and the Special Central Assistance Scheme. As part of these schemes, more than 600 police stations have been fortified at the expense of the Central government to make sure that they do not fall to the Maoist designs in vulnerable areas. Also, massive funds have been released by the Centre to create critical infrastructure to bridge the long-existing gap in Maoist-infested districts. This includes the construction of post offices, bank branches and ATMs.
Despite 75 years of independence, some of these basic facilities and financial inclusion was still evading a large population residing in these districts. The Security Related Expenditure Scheme has also helped the states in building their capacity to curtail incidents of Left-wing violence. As a part of this, Rs 2600 crore has been released by the Modi government since 2014-15 to ensure the training of security personnel, rehabilitation of surrendered Maoists and compensation for property damaged due to Left-wing extremism.
These steps as taken by the government have been accompanied with an emphasis on the creation of infrastructure such as roads and telecom networks in the vulnerable districts. More than 13,000 km of roads have been laid down in such places along with more than 3000 mobile towers for better connectivity. Along with this, ITIs and Skill Development Centres have also been opened in the tribal belts to make sure that the youth in these regions can find meaningful avenues of employment. These efforts have started bearing fruit as according to the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs, the number of districts hit by Left-wing violence have come down to 45 from 96 in 2010. Even the incidents of violence have come down sharply from around 1136 in 2013 to 531 incidents in 2022, with the number of deaths reduced by around 75 per cent in such cases.
The rising economy of India has not only equipped the state with the material capability to take on the Maoists but it has also made the war against the state an increasingly unattractive phenomenon for the Naxalites. Many prominent Naxal leaders have surrendered in the last decade in order to lead a life away from violence. Ironically, even as the rural Naxals have realised the virtue of peace and the conducive conditions for economic development that are now present in India, the breed of urban Naxals is refusing to withdraw from hate-mongering against the state. As they used to say in earlier times, some Leftists still believe that “China’s Chairman is our Chairman”. But he clearly is not.
The author is a PhD from the Department of International Relations, South Asian University. She writes on India’s foreign policy. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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