Naxalism in India

I have had some free time in my hands over the last week which I have used on increasing my global gyan. In the process I stumbled upon the issue of naxalism. After having read through about a dozen articles I decided to put my views on the issue.

Let’s start by understanding what naxalism is. Here is what I make of it – Naxalism is a violent movement largely by the tribal people in India in some rural parts of India. The movement is characterized by killing of government officials, land lords and disruption of the state machinery. Most of the people engaged in this were and are landless laborers.

The major region in India where this movement is gaining strength is what is now called the red corridor. But this being a tribal or adivasi movement is largely prevalent in the backward regions of backward states – viz. Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and parts of Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, West Bengal, Bihar and the NE states to name a few. Here is the red corridor as depicted in Wikipedia.

Now let’s see why the naxalist people are killing people. For that we will have to go to how naxalism started in India. The word naxalism comes from the region naxalbari in west Bengal. The dispute then was regarding land being taken away from farmers. The idea of naxalism is to follow a more communist way where farmers get their share of land, whereas most of the land was in hand of landowners. This resonated with students in Calcutta and even they joined the movement. The movement became stronger and for sometime some of the major universities were taken over by naxal groups. The state retaliated with an iron fist and stopped the occupation of such government institutions.

The reason why the naxal movement has continued to live on is because the government is using very oppressive methods to crush the force. There have been outcries of human rights violation.

Coming back to the original question: why the naxalite are killing people. These are the most deprived people, mostly farmers. The fruits of development are yet to reach these areas and jobs are hard to come by. The people live in abject poverty. This kind of situation is the fuel to such behavior, but this is not reason enough for them to take up the gun. The kindling point was taking away of land. In India, lobbies work stronger than one realizes in first sight. The industrialists want land in these areas at cheap costs and the governments to woo them, and get money from them will take away land from the tribal. The government does not have proper land policies in place to support them. Land acquisition has invariably meant that these people lose their only source of livelihood.

This was the problem to start with but the current problem is that of revenge. The naxals feel wronged because of the way the problem was handled. The government retaliated with force, killing civilians who sympathized with the naxals as well as naxals with brute force. The same stories of fake encounters, rapes of women are repeated. The adivasi civilians are being killed in the cross fire. This means more people are getting angered against the government and joining the naxals. This explains why the movement is getting stronger.

While one can argue that it was the naxals who started with a violent approach, one cannot weigh the government and the naxals in the same scale. The government is elected by people; it is responsible for the people and cannot become the same autocratic force as the naxals. Secondly it must understand that by drawing guns against its own people, for whom it has not done much anyway in terms of development, it breeds such insurgencies.

Remember the case of Cuba. Fidel Castro, a lawyer by profession, uprooted the Batista government by the support of the people who had lost faith in the government as it had started killing people. The latest operation green hunt is a similar step, where in the government is employing its army (the one which should be protecting the borders) to uproot the naxalist group using night vision cameras etc. This is the demise of democracy. IF the current government does not wish to be the next Batista, it should stop this stupidity and restore peace. IT should start making outlays in building schools, hospitals and roads. At the same time, it should make it difficult for the naxals to procure arms but not kill the naxals.

Naxalism is not a law and order problem in India, it is simply a socio-economic problem and hence the solution is also in economic development.

This is a good read on the life of naxals.
This is about Operation Green Hunt.