Context:
The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) condemns the cowardly attack in Chingavaram by the Maoists that killed 35 persons including 11 civilians in Chhattisgargh state on 17 May 2010. It is reported that a bus in which the victims were traveling along the Dantewada-Sukhma road hit an Improvised Explosive Device (IEV) believed to be planted by the Maoists resulting in this heavy death toll. 27 persons are reported to be seriously injured in the incident and are receiving treatment. The exact number of persons killed and injured in the incident is yet to be confirmed.
It is reported that immediately after the explosion, the Maoists fired indiscriminately at the injured and at those who tried to escape. The use of IEDs similar to landmines in circumstances as reported in Chingavaram is prohibited under the Second Protocol to the Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects. The incident also violates Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, a law that applies to non-international armed conflicts and to extremist groups like the Maoists and Naxalites in India.
The magnitude of the problem, its root causes and the development paradigm:
It is estimated that 156 districts in 15 states face ‘threats’ from armed movements with the states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, West Bengal, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh the worst affected. Today the Maoist and Naxalite movements in the country have evolved into an armed and rebelling group, well organised and fighting locally against the ‘state’. Though the theory and practice of these movements are questionable, they liberally exploit the anger and frustration from decades of neglect and oppression of the rural populace in India, particularly the tribal communities. Parallels of this form of emotional exploitation can be drawn also to the insurgent activities in the north-eastern states in India.
The Maoist and Naxalite movements in the country are mostly rooted in the government’s failure to guarantee the basic norms of a democratic state to a large section of the country’s population, particularly in rural regions and remote villages. This explains why these parallel extremist movements are mainly spread across the remotest villages in the country.
Many such villages are home to various tribal groups. These communities depend upon forest and agricultural produce for their survival. Owing to negligent government policies and the drastic exploitation of natural and forest resources, with complete disregard for the population that depended upon these products for hundreds of generations, large sections of the rural population have lost both their habitat and livelihood options.
Many tribal communities are on the verge of extinction and the government is in no mood to listen or dialogue as evidenced in the recent attack upon the Anti-POSCO movement in Orissa. Voices of protest, and requests by the native population for consultations with the government, have faced not just rejection but stiff oppression. The situation is also plentifully exploited by the extremist movements as evidenced in the events prior to the police assault on the Anti-POSCO protesters. It is reported that minutes before the police charging upon the protesters, shots fired and country bombs hurled at the police.
The government policy on mining is spelled out in the National Mining Policy released in April, 2008. The policy aims at boosting national development through mining and disregards completely the concerns and welfare of the original inhabitants of the land. Accepting tenders from corporations with deplorable records and supporting their activities using state resources stands proof to the government’s lack of commitment to the people.
Left with no means to survive and their original habitats rapidly being depleted, the rural populations in the country have become more vulnerable to exploitation by landlords and corrupt politicians. Exploitation often takes the shape of bonded labour, a practice criminalised in laws that are hardly enforced. Police and other state agencies, like the forest department, are easily bought over by landlords owing to the widespread corruption in the system. In frustration, the oppressed populations fall prey to extremist ideologies like those promoted and professed by the Maoists and the Naxalites, finding in them a means of fighting back to regain dignity at the very minimum. Such fights, of varying intensity, have spread to an alarmingly large area of the country. Unfortunately, the government response has been equally violent, resulting in murders and widespread loss of property. The legal and moral question the government must answer is can development be forced upon a population?
Exploitation of violence:
Lopsided, religiously coloured and politically motivated defence tactics – like the formation of the ‘Salwa Judum’– have resulted either in standoffs between government-backed forces like the Judum and the extremists or in combat, in which lives are lost on both sides. In some parts of the country, the Judum has replaced the state and those leading the Judumare using it as a tool for oppression in the excuse of fighting extremism.
It is reported that groups like the Judum as well as the Maoists and the Naxalites are armed with weapons that cannot be procured from licensed arms dealers in India and for which no private licences are issued. Procuring weapons and the ammunition required for these weapons is a matter that the state as well as the central government must investigate and plug holes with immediate priority. It could be a hard task since even some parliamentarians and other local political leaders in the extremist affected regions employ private militiamen and armed private guards who brandish imported unlicensed weapons. Any attempt to unarm these private armies will be sabotaged by the local politicians.
At the core of this is an important question regarding the quality of law enforcement in the country. The Maoists and Naxalites are only exploiting the failure of an important state apparatus, the local police.
An equally worrying factor is the recruitment of tribal youth as members of the village defence forces. On the periphery, volunteering to become a member of the village defence force is a mere gesture to assist the state in combating violence. However the constitution of the village defence force has deeper implications. Often becoming a member of the village defence force is not a matter of choice, but an issue of survival for the tribal youth.
The extremist groups force the tribal youth to join their cadres accusing those who refuse as state agents. Incidents are common where those who refused to take up arms are murdered; or their houses burned, dispossessed of their livestock and forced to flee from the villages. On the other hand the state agencies, in particular the state police, seek information from the members of the tribal communities and once again those who refuse to cooperate are accused as Maoist or Naxalite cadres and are arbitrarily detained, tortured and even executed. Such murders are whitewashed as ‘encounter killings’, a convenient euphemism used by the state agencies for murdering civilians and circumventing the due process of law in the excuse of combating violence. Caught between these two opposing and equally violent forces, the unemployed tribal youth finds the government’s offer as a means of employment and a source of security.
The very concept of village defence force defies accepted norms of state responsibility to offer protection and security to the life and property of the citizens. The members of the village defence force are given inadequate combat training; they are not considered as the employees of the state and their acts, irrespective of its nature, are offered implied impunity. This unique position exposes the members of the village defence force to exploitation to carry out the ‘dirty work’ for the state agencies. Many tribal youth are recruited with the false promise, that after the operation, they would be inducted to the state police. On these grounds the recruitment and deployment of the village defence force have no higher morale or legitimacy than the recruitment strategies used by the Maoists and Naxalites.
In the fights between the state and the extremists atrocities have been committed by both sides, as would be the case in any unregulated war where might and connivance make right. Hundreds of policemen have lost their lives or been seriously injured in these wars; a similar number of extremists have also been killed or injured. This is in addition to the large number of innocent persons killed by both sides because of mere accusations and suspicion.
Worst of all is the number of innocent persons killed in fake ‘encounter killings’ organised by the state agencies. Men and women are almost daily arrested, tortured and killed by state agencies in the name of fighting extremism. Such murders are in no way different from those carried out by the extremist groups. They are equally coldblooded and criminal. However, so far not a single such case has been investigated or the perpetrators punished.
Encounter killings and the use of torture defy the basic premise of democracy and it negates the fundamentals of fair trial. Encounter killings violate India’s legally binding obligations as mandated in the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, an international document to which India is a party. By all means encounter killings have no place of acceptance within the existing legal framework in the country. The National Human Rights Commission of India has repeatedly required state agencies to conduct independent investigations and video document the autopsy of victims of encounter killings and file reports on each incident to the Commission. Though a rule sought to be enforced by the Commission, filing of these reports thus far has remained an exception.
Murder and violence cannot be justified for any reason. On that ground alone, extremist activities in the country have no moral basis, even though they would define their activity as a radical political movement, necessary to fight oppression. When murdering innocent persons and imparting fear among the populace becomes a means to political ends, the Maoist and Naxalite movement runs parallel with other terrorist organisations in the world.
The Naxalite and Maoist problem is complex. A concoction of caste issues, feudalism and lawlessness in rural India intoxicates the people, so their minds become fertile ground for extremist ideologies. The government has responded by opting principally to counter violence with violence, adding fuel to the fire. Between these two diametrically opposing forces is no middle ground, which leaves the common people no way to avoid violence.
The murder of civilians and police officers, destruction of private and government property including vital transportation links like the rail network by the Maoists and Naxalites has to be analysed and understood as part of a well calculated and executed strategy to increase state offensive. It appears that the Maoists and the Naxalites look forward more towards the state’s use of aerial combat operations, an option the state has refused to initiate until today.
The continuing offer by the Union Home Minister for dialogue and a peaceful way of settling disputes with the extremists shows the intention to deal with the issue in a mature way, a democratic principle the Maoists, Naxalites and the leading opposition parties like the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), repeatedly fails to understand. This is no surprise since the ideological framework based on violence of these two political groups runs parallel to that of the Maoists and the Naxalites.
Arbitrary violence used by the state in combating extremism will only inflate the situation, an opportunity eagerly awaited by the extremists. It will also further alienate the citizens affected by the violence from the state, an essential requirement for the extremist group to expand and sustain.
The democratic way forward:
The moral ground for the state to fight the extremist group must not be thus based on the use of counter violence. The fight against extremism must begin from a considered approach of gaining confidence of the citizens, the worst affected rural population in particular. In doing so the government must be able to prove that the country is a matured democracy and not a chaotic state of intense vested interests. One of the important steps towards this is the enactment and the prompt implementation of a national land reforms policy augmented by the revision of some of the existing laws like those limiting the rights of the tribal community to use the forest and forest produce as they did for hundreds of generations in the past.
Combating violence has to begin within government agencies. Strict action must be taken against state agents, in particular officers of the police force and the forest department, who commit crimes against innocent civilians. But so far no such action has been taken. In addition there must be a credible and transparent mechanism to listen to the grievances of people caught in the crossfire, and a policy of welcoming armed civilian combatants, including the Maoists and Naxalites, to surrender and be reintegrated into society.
The policy of using village defence force must be reviewed with inputs from civil society organisations that work with the tribal communities and the ordinary people who are affected by extremist violence. State run essential services like medical and educational facilities must be provided to the rural population and the regular functioning of these state institutions at the rural level guaranteed free from corruption and discriminatory practices like caste based discrimination.
Fundamentalist religious forces resorting to violence in the name of vigilante groups that have rooted in the extremist affected regions must be banned and actions taken against political parties that support these groups. Policies behind the industrial development programmes currently implemented and planned to be executed in the extremist affected regions must be reviewed with an intention to realistically assess the environmental as well as human impact of these programmes. The assessment must be made respecting the rights of indigenous communities that are affected by these programmes.
Until these steps are taken by the government, the Maoist and Naxalite extremism in India has the potential to flare up and burn down the democratic norms the founders of the nation promised to the future generations. The Chingavaram incident must be reviewed as an eye-opener, not an excuse to wage a full blown war.
