In the face of rising Maoist violence and brutality in the backward eastern states of India, the natural question is what would be the best way to contain the Maoists.

COMMERCIAL BREAK
SCROLL TO CONTINUE READING

The home minister P Chidambaram would like to have a law-an-order approach, meeting force with ever more force.

Thus his policy of ‘operation green hunt’, a misnomer that does not say who or what is being hunted and seems to imply that it is all for the good of the natural forests that still abound in the areas of Maoist rebellion.

There is to be saturation coverage of police and paramilitary forces to fight the Maoists. In Jharkhand for instance, these are estimated by intelligence agencies at between 2,000 and 3,000 fully armed cadre.

Paramilitary forces of 50,000 armed men are being raised to meet the threat, up from 20,000 at present. In all the affected states, the numbers add up to several times this.

A Kashmir-like situation is being created, not to fight Pakistani backed militants in one of the wealthiest states of the country, but home-grown guerillas in some of the poorest.

In official and political circles in Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand, it is often felt  that this policy will not work. Some bureaucrats talk of a five to 10 year military siege to break the back of the Maoists, while some political observers see the situation becoming worse leading to the imposition of an internal emergency.

The only certain thing is that people in the affected states will be ground between the two armed sides and life there will become even more brutish.

It need not be so. More than anywhere else, it is the lack of development, the consequent corruption and the reckless usurpation of tribal land that have created the ground for the violent Maoist insurgency.

Bihar, a state badly affected by Maoist violence till recently, has seen them retreat ever since the Nitish Kumar administration put the state on an 11 per cent growth trajectory.

And former chief minister Madhu Koda in Jharkhand created a record of sorts when he was caught having whisked away over Rs2000 crore in corruption money during his short tenure.

The major reason for the rise in Maoist insurgency, however, is the accelerated grabbing of tribal land once globalisation took root from the mid-90s.

In the last 15 years there have been 104 MoUs signed between the government and private companies that involve the transfer of 300,000 hectares or 3,000 sq km of land, at a pittance of Rs15000 to 25000 and acre, one-twentieth the market price of the land.  Senior officials in Ranchi feel that not one of these 104 projects will be able to acquire the land.

Under the fifth schedule of the Constitution, tribals in this belt cannot be deprived of their land without their consent.

The violation of these constitutional rights in Andhra Pradesh by the government in leasing out tribal lands to private mining companies led to a Supreme Court judgment which declared all agreements leasing tribal land to private mining companies as null and void.

Further, the court declared that in case private parties were to be brought in at least 20 per cent of the profits were to be used as a permanent fund for development needs, apart from that needed for reforestation and maintenance of ecology.

The displaced would not only want a fair price for ancestral land but sympathetic government help in making the transition from an agricultural to an industrial way of life. This would involve decent jobs, retraining for new occupations and unless they feel they are the beneficiaries of development and not its victims they will not give up their “jal, jangle or jameen”.

Until the 1960s the tribals readily gave up their land in the name of development but of the 2.5 million people displaced in Jharkhand alone, less than two per cent were properly rehabilitated.

Instead of ending up as rickshaw pullers and domestic servants, the displaced should be given adequate compensation, trained, given jobs or helped to start small businesses.

This is not to say that the unlawful killing of policemen by Maoists or the murder of civilians should not be stopped by using all the force of the state.

But in a situation where the armed constabulary are seen as “thugs in uniform”, feared as much as the Maoists, the use of state force has to be carefully calibrated. The danger with operation green hunt is that in their attempt to show success, many opponents of government policy will be branded as Maoists and arrested. It will do more harm than good.