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| India-Pakistan |
| Naxalism’s New Killing Fields |
| 2003-05-25 |
| The Naxalites are what Communist insurgents are known as in India, they are similar to the Maoists of Nepal, but they are not very well known outside of the region. Edited for length. The number of police personnel killed by Naxals in the new states of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh is even higher than those killed in Jammu and Kashmir. Left-wing extremism is proving to be a serious challenge, accepted last month’s parliamentary standing committee report, even as killings increase in Andhra, Bihar, Maharashtra and other states. Ajit Kumar Jha reports on the triggers for the newer patterns of Naxalite militancy On March 19, 1999 the cadres of the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC), an extremist left-wing outfit, slaughtered 35 upper caste landowners in the nondescript hamlet of Senari in Central Bihar’s Jehanabad district. Routinely reporting political killings in Bihar for a while, I was no stranger to carnages. However, my trip to Senari, soon after the mayhem left my stomach churning. The barbarity of the killing was indescribable, the methods used brutal, the tragedy heart-wrenching... Recounting the stories today is instructive since it describes the inhuman depths to which the phenomena, loosely described as the Naxalite movement, has sunk. Dreamt and conceptualised in the late 1960s in north Bengal as ‘‘a liberation struggle, a new democratic revolution to attain freedom for the poor and downtrodden’’, the original movement has transformed beyond recognition, as have the ideology, the strategies, and the social support base. Even during the Charu Mazumdar-led adventurist phase (1969-75), when ‘‘class annihilation’’ was practiced as an official strategy against ‘‘landlords and the compradore bourgeoisie,’’ the violent ‘‘professional revolutionaries’’ would never have hired butchers from Palamau to carry out the assassinations. Today, the two units outlawed under POTA — the MCC and the PWG — are little more than extremist gangs bordering on criminality. They make a living either out of assassinations or by abducting officials and claiming ransom. A report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on home affairs tabled in Parliament recently admits: ‘‘In 2002, a sudden spurt has been witnessed in the level of violence by left wing extremists. During the year, 1465 incidents of violence have been reported as against 1208 incidents in 2001.’’ The report argues that left wing extremism has spread to newer areas ‘‘such as North Chhattisgarh, western districts of West Bengal, parts of north Bihar, eastern UP and eastern and southern Jharkhand. In all, 53 districts in nine states of the country are under the sway of this movement.’’ Other than the shifting geographical contours, the movement has changed a great deal in terms of ideology and its social base. The procrustean framework of class analysis has been rejected and replaced by caste analysis greatly dependent on regional variations. Both in highly literate Kerala as well in least literate Bihar, the movement is searching for a new social base among Dalits, tribals and backward castes. In Andhra, the new PWG chief Ganapathy is a Dalit. The main reason for such a shift are twofold: first, the increasing identity politics in north India around castes and communities; second, the inability of Naxalism to attract the new generation of career-oriented students. Therefore, the new forms of Naxalism have stooped down to recruiting butchers for its killing fields. The Maoist Communist Centre and People's War Group hope to carve out an independant communist state in East India that would be linked with a newly Communist Nepal, from which the revolution could be exported to the rest of India. The chance of this actually happening is less than nothing, of course, but that hasn't done anything to dissuade the killing. |
| Posted by:Paul Moloney |