The failure of the state to cradle all its citizens paves the way for rebellion, unarmed and armed
Lalgarh was a reality show par excellence for the TV crews that descended on it. Hundreds of police and paramilitary jawans were on the march from all sides to reclaim an area lost to Maoists. Helicopters flew overhead and, with no visible target, dropped leaflets for the villagers. Rumour was rife that the roads were mined, guerrilla squads were about to attack the forces and a veritable mahabharata was in the offing. In Writers’ Building in Kolkata, senior police and administrative officials were receiving minute-by-minute accounts. The Centre had conveyed to the state its willingness to send in the Army.
But there was hardly any serious resistance from the other side and no casualty reported till the afternoon of June 19. Some threats emanated over the telephone from the leader of a tribal front that had “liberated” the entire area without firing a single round. The tribals would face the elite COBRA commandoes and other forces with their arrows and axes as soon as they approached Lalgarh, said the leader.
It was bizarrely reminiscent of ulgulan or tribal rebellion that has occurred periodically through history.
Not that there were no armed Maoists or that roads were not mined or that shots were not fired from their side. The Maoists were very much active. Koteshwar Rao aka Kishanji, believed to be the number two in the CPI(Maoist), was leading them on the ground. But, before the government operation began, the Maoists and the villagers of Lalgarh – organized under the banner of the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities (PCAPA) – had only killed some CPI(M) workers. No doubt the area was “liberated”, for the police was inactive in the area. They were confined to the Lalgarh police station and had abandoned other chowkis. It was no longer possible to govern Lalgarh.
It is well known that, throughout history, ulgulan has always failed. Nor can a “liberated” zone exist in a modern country. But the fact is that none was aware of the Maoists taking over a large area (up to 1,000 sq km according to media reports) in Bengal. Lalgarh’s is a story of failure of governance for decades.
Union Home Minister P Chidambaram refused to call it a war. Emerging from the Cabinet meeting on Day 2 of the operation, he diplomatically avoided answering the question as to whether it signified a colossal failure of governance in Bengal. “I am not here to make any judgements,” he said, and emphasized that he endorsed Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s appeal to the CPI (Maoist) and the tribal leaders to come to the negotiating table. He knew this “war” was against thousands of tribals who had rebelled and sensitiveness on the part of the state was called for. Unfortunately, the sensitiveness was too late.
The explanation for the failure of the state in Lalgarh also explains the emergence of the Maoists all over the country.
A year ago, Lalgarh was quiet. It was so because there was no resistance to total control of the area by CPI(M) cadres, to accumulation of wealth by party zonal committee secretary Anuj Pandey and many others, to the party-sponsored “syndicate” that extorted “protection” money from vehicles passing through the area, to selective disbursal of money and benefits of government programmes. And there was no expressed resentment at the poverty that continued without amelioration three decades after a “people’s government” had come to power. For the “people’s government”, starvation deaths reported by human rights organizations were part of CIA bourgeois conspiracy, while the absence of agro-based industries or other sources of employment was probably a conspiracy hatched on Mars. Revelations of the silent terror of guns was propaganda of the cheapest variety.
In November 2008, a mine exploded on the highway at Bhadutala, 40 km from Lalgarh. The target was the Chief Minister’s convoy, which included Union Steel Minister Ram Vilas Paswan. That night, the police pounced on Lalgarh, brutally injuring even women and arresting school-going children. The police knew some Maoists were working in Lalgarh, with bases in Jharkhand. The most prominent of them was Sashadhar Mahato.
The police action was fuelled by the knowledge that there was no Maoist squad in the area. Unexpectedly, the villagers retaliated. They came out in hundreds, then thousands. They laid siege to Lalgarh police station and dug up the roads to stop any further invasion by police forces. For months, the agitation – organized under the banner of the PCAPA, led by Chatradhar Mahato, brother of Sashadhar Mahato – prevented the police from entering the area. Alongside, they took up development work like road building that had been neglected for years. All this was done under the auspices of the Maoists. Koteshwar Rao and another leader, Bikash, organized the work in this “liberated zone”.
Without a single shot being fired by the Maoists, the area had been “liberated” by virtue of the administration collapsing in the face of the people’s non-violent uprising. During the elections, the Maoists gave a boycott call but the PCAPA helped the police to relocate and combine many booths in four places in Lalgarh. It was another matter that hardly anyone came to exercise their franchise in those booths.
Lalgarh has added a new dimension to the deep-rooted problem of non-governance in rural areas. The state collapsed because it had no sway over the people. All over India, the Maoists have a strong base only in those areas where the state has failed. What was unique in Lalgarh was that the area was “liberated” by a mass movement. It has thrown up new challenges for governance, where the “enemy” initially is not the armed Maoists but unarmed villagers in thousands facing the state machinery.
Maoist cadres have little knowledge of Mao or Marxism. For them, resorting to arms is simply an assertion of the rights of tribals, Dalits or “most backward” castes. The latter, in turn, are drawn to Maoists for various reasons: personal revenge, the glamour of handling a gun, the battle against collective injustice and so on. Thus, the cadre includes both hardcore and dedicated elements and a section that is neither ideologically oriented nor motivated to fight for social justice. The leaders impose Maoist doctrines on these cadres and on their wide support base. There is no point in denying that they do have a mass base. But this base is with them not owing to doctrine, but because the Maoists have won their confidence.
The march of security forces towards Lalgarh or a fight-to-the-finish in Chhattisgarh do not represent a solution to the problem of Maoist insurgency. Neither does provision of food and other essentials or scope for employment. The problem is more complex. Lalgarh has shown that poverty alone is not sufficient cause for ulgulan. When humiliation goes beyond a point, people are goaded into the final battle. It can be political or caste oppression, some other form of social injustice or police atrocity that provides the spark to ignite the wildfire.
Unlike traditional Marxist theory, the Maoists in India operate in areas where they mostly have no class enemy – like a rich landlord. The enemy is deprivation by the state in matters of economic justice, and its indifference in matters of social justice and the individual’s dignity.
Perhaps not quite prepared to handle this problem, our system of governance will have to reinvent its strategy to counter the Maoists if it is to find a solution. A long march towards Lalgarh, though unavoidable, is not the answer.
(The writer is a freelance journalist and author of the novel, A Naxalite Story.)
What was unique in Lalgarh was that the area was ‘liberated’ by a mass movement. It has thrown up new challenges for governance, where the ‘enemy’ initially is not armed Maoists but unarmed villagers facing the state machinery
Lalgarh has shown that poverty alone is not sufficient cause for ulgulan. When humiliation goes beyond a point, people are goaded into the final battle
