War Against Naxals - For Peace?

Few popular sentiments:

‘Naxalites are nothing but cold-blooded criminals’

‘Naxalites are irrational people causing damage to life and property without any reason’

‘Naxalites are planning to bring down the Indian government and take over the country’

‘Naxalites are the biggest threat to our internal security’

Who are they actually?

Naxal movement is not something new. The armed revolt started in independent India very long back and it did not got popular because it didn’t got people's support.

For various reasons like exploitation of the poor (particularly the tribal communities by local landlords and corrupt politicians) the small section of armed men and women were fighting against it in various parts of the country. In Andhra it was called the PWG, Bihar it was CPI-ML, Orissa and West-Bengal it was naxals. Few years back many of these groups got merged and started to fight together. Naxals are operating in the affected areas where the socially and economically backward tribes are living.

Tribal communities have been living in the mineral heartland of our country for years. They are the poorest of the poor in our country. They were living without any of the basic facilities like education, health-care, employment opportunities, and pathetic social infrastructure. Infant mortality rate to be at 47 percent in these regions of the country. Over three lakh villages have no road connectivity.

They are indigenous people of those areas and they too have every rights like every one of us in our country. But have been ignored for all these years.

The so called economic boom did reach the tribes, but differently. They were thrown out of their homes in the name of development; denying proper compensation and whoever revolts against it were silenced by naming them traitors or naxals. There were many fake encounters of killing the poor innocent tribes in the name of naxals. All these issues had made more and more tribes joining the naxal movement.

Naxal movement is getting stronger as the time passes.

How our Indian government fought till now?

Its the systemic governance failure of successive governments of independent India had made the naxal movement stronger. Without reaching-out those affected people Indian government have been fighting naxals in different way and it has failed miserably.

State and Central governments used Police, CRPF, Salwa-Judums to fight these naxals. Who are these Salwa-Judums? They are nothing but the same tribes who were given the gun by the government to fight against their own people whom government identifies as naxals. Now the fight between police and naxals has been transformed into fight between tribal communities itself. I can’t imagine how a civilized government can give guns to few sections of people to fight against their own people? Along with Police, Salwa-judums also staretd killing many of the innocent tribes in the fake encounters.

We all know how much corrupt our police department is! Along with that CRPF also joined and did lot of atrocities against the tribes like rape of women and girls, and silencing any opposition or dissent by murder, killing many innocents and many other violence. Recently government also started the Operation Green-hunt to hunt the naxals.

I strongly believe if one innocent is killed, at least it will make 3 innocents to join naxals. So, every atrocity of Police, Salwa-Judums and CRPF will create more and more naxals.

Can we use Army?

Our Home Minister has been asking for a larger mandate that is to use the military power to eliminate the naxals. Already our defense minister and also military commanders made it very clear that using army is not a viable solution.

In my opinion considering the military option is the most senseless argument. If Police and CRPF can create so much of horror and human-rights violations, think of how an army will be? We already witnessed enough of its human rights violations in Jammu-Kashmir itself. We can’t blame military for that, because that’s how they were trained to act.

There is an argument made by few sections of people that, lets eliminate naxals using army as the Srilankan government did for LTTE. What Srilankan government did was a complete violation of human-rights, genocide and it was condemned by nations like US, UK and also in UN. (Because Indian government was supporting the current Srilanka government for our own reasons the case was not pressed against the Srilankan government). Are we suggesting annihilating our own people? Because they are not supporting/accepting to our so called development, industrialization and market-based economy, are we suggesting to genocide few thousand people?

Who are we to dictate how they have to live?

What could be done?

As my sympathy is with naxals and tribes who were fighting for their rights, I did not condone their violence against innocent people. I too unequivocally condemn their attacks on innocent people.

But we should also try to understand that in the past they were not killing innocent people and only recently they have stared it. Does our government is pushing them to do so?

I believe the solution to this problem should not be found on violence.

IMHO, the following can be done to solve this issue in the longer run:

• Stop the Operation Green-hunt immediately. Also ask the naxals to stop their violence

• Dismantle the Salwa-Judums and relocate all the displaced tribes to their homes

• With the help of naxal sympathizers, start the talks with the naxals to understand their demand (even though the Maoists agenda says they don’t believe in Indian democracy, I believe they also will not deny development. At least it will have positive impact on tribes). Do not have conditions for talks like asking them to drop their weapons, which I think is unreasonable. (Is it ok to talk with the naxals? Yes. We had peace talks with much more dangerous terrorist groups in the past in kashmir. So nothing wrong in talking to our own people)

• List down the development activities that need to be taken care with clear timeline

• Form a Panel with members from all political parties, tribes, NGOs, Human-right activists and naxals

• Let the government allocate funds immediately to those projects and let the Panel monitors its development and give the report to Prime-Minister directly and regularly

• Let’s involve the locals and tribes for the developmental activities

Once development reaches the tribes, they will return to their normal life and naxals will be weakened. We can ask the remaining naxals to drop their weapons and join the political system. We all know Nepal had witnessed one of the worst Maoist attacks in the past decade. But later they too joined the main stream political system and fought the election.

I am sure that can be done with naxals too.

I echo the sentiment of Holly in P.S I Love You by Cecelia Ahern, "Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity"