New Delhi:
Post Lalgarh, West Bengal may not have banned CPI Maoist, but the centre has finally listed it as a terrorist group. Interestingly, the US State Department had done so way back in 2005.
What explains the police failure in Lalgarh? Why does our intelligentsia still fail to see Naxal violence as terrorism? How does a Maoist guerilla army manage to frighten and paralyze a state far more powerful and better armed? Radhika Bordia interviewed Ajay Sahni, one of the leading counter terrorism experts in India, on Lalgarh and the wider canvas of Naxal violence that has emerged in the last few months.
NDTV: How do you respond to Lalgarh being called India's Maoist war zone?
Ajay Sahni: This is all exaggeration beyond any point of justification. This is, and ought to have been treated as a small localized insurgency. It was the inaction of the state government over an extended period of time that allowed it to build up. At the end of the day, this was not a major confrontation. It is being called the 'Maoist Liberated Zone'. This is utter nonsense. It is liberated because the state will not go there. If the state government had responded at the right time with measured force you would see it is just a small local crisis.
NDTV: We have seen images of the Lalgarh police station locked, no presence of policemen, in fact, as you say, no reactions in time. What do you think are the reasons for this absolute failure?
Ajay Sahni: The single reason is politics. If the political executive does not take decision or paralyze the police reaction, or if the police has not been given the necessary political capacities to respond in local areas, then you cannot say the police has failed. In theory, in law, the police is required to respond the minute they see a breach of law, but we are living in a particular political context in which the spine of the police has repeatedly been broken. The net result is the police can't act without political orders. What's more, in a crisis like this, the local force will require some reinforcements from the outside before it can act. That reinforcement only comes through a political commitment. You must understand that power of the country is vested in the elected government. That is where the responsibility and accountability needs to lie.
NDTV: The government feared a Nandigram like backlash, and the CPM was worried about the coming elections. Has that meant the people of Lalgarh have paid a price?
Ajay Sahni: You act crudely and badly in Nandigram. You pay a political price. And then you fail to act in Lalgarh. Eventually it is the people who pay the price. I think the conduct of all political parties here has been deeply distressing and disruptive, and each of these political parties will pay a price because we must understand the one political formation consolidated and gaining through these disruptive processes is the Maoists. All the others are losers. The TMC maybe successful in disrupting or supplanting the Marxist government but they will be faced by the Maoist power the minute they take over. They think they have an understanding, or an alliance, but soon it will be the TMC cadres who will be murdered in the villages, just as the Marxist cadre is being killed in the villages today. That's because at the end of the day through these processes it is the Maoist who is consolidating, and for him, the TMC or the various people's committees that have come up are just useful idioms. They serve a purpose and are dispensed with after.
NDTV: Lalgarh is also an example where all our ideological contradictions in handling something like the Maoists comes to fore. You have a CPM government which was the first in welcoming the Maoists coming to power in Nepal. I believe Bengal is the only state where the Maoists were not banned and joint operations with other state police forces not allowed.
Ajay Sahni: I think you should just dispense with the whole analysis of the ideological contradictions in political parties in India today. No party stands for any ideology whatsoever. Every party is functioning in terms of its own perpetuation of power. The so called Marxist government is pursuing a capitalist agenda, so either stop calling yourself Marxist, but then China remains your great model. They wish to retain the authoritarian methodologies, the cadre based thuggery they have established over the decades, but they also want to have all the money come in. So there is no possibility of any kind of ideological reconciliation of these opposites.
NDTV: In some ways the complete <I>thuggery</I> of the CPM, as you keep calling it, has emerged in the open in Lalgarh. But the danger is even the other political parties are only seeking their own political advantage and therefore the Maoists are not being checked in time either?
Ajay Sahni: First of all, you must understand a large degree of the popular upsurge in Lalgarh, Singur, and other places, a large part of this is because the marxists have run a harsh, very authoritarian model where all aspects of governance were controlled by party cadres right down to the village level. That is stifling and has remained stifling for decades. When this begins to unravel you begin to see the masses tending towards whatever force supports the unravelling of this authoritarian structure. This is where the Trinamool comes in first. Once the TMC has created the base, the Maoists come in and start consolidating their power, and because it gets linked up to electoral politics, you have a situation where the state is either failing to act or is acting irrationally. We have just not seen stable, sensible, sagacious leadership in West Bengal.
NDTV: So how do you think Lalgarh will end? What are the Maoists aiming for?
Ajay Sahni: The outcome of Lalgarh is not important in terms of whether they hold on the territories. The intention of the Maoists is never to hold the territories at this stage. At the moment what they are doing is a process of conscientisation of the masses, which means organizing them politically, throwing them into confrontations with the police, often provoking violent confrontations deliberately so that some of these people will get hurt, and a few people might die. But in the process, these people will lose their fear of the police and state and getting bloodied. The most volatile elements are being identified as potential Maoist cadre. At the end of this, the Maoists would have identified the 20- 40 people in Lalgarh who would then be extracted and trained as their cadre. This is something they do very systematically, whether in Lalgarh, or in Gurgaon, where they take a trade union and put it in confrontation with the management.
NDTV: I think the abysmal ineptitude of the state in dealing with tribal issues in this country gets completely confused with the rise of Maoist power.
Ajay Sahni: The incoherence of the political thinking is so great, they are unable to separate two issues : one is the challenge of the Maoists. They think the Maoists represent some democratic upsurge rooted in 'development deficits' which means the discrimination or denial of certain benefits to the people. What they do not realize is that the Maoist strategy essentially instrumentalises these deficits. Maoists are not concerned with the redressal of the grievances. Maoists never put up a demand saying give people these benefits and we will back off. Maoists only use what they call 'partial struggles' for what they call 'a people's war'. This is stated in their documents. They say categorically that if these partial struggles do not further their objective, they are irrelevant.
NDTV: And we have got enough examples of this, from across the country. Maoists target any key development that takes place in these places which is of any benefit to the people. But what is bewildering is that despite evidence pf this on an almost daily basis, still a lot of confusion in the way the intelligentsia takes a stand, the way the political parties act?
Ajay Sahni: A slogan can stop thinking for 10 years and that is the problem with this country. All our political parties do not appear to have the capacity to think beyond slogans. So you have political parties that say - 'Lets address the root causes. Lets dialogue'. How do you have a dialogue with a man who is so ideologically committed. He will kill you if you disagree with him. This is really the Maoist position. This is a totalitarian faith. Maybe a secular faith but a totalitarian faith. You have to come to terms with this fact and then begin to realize how it expands and what its strategies and tactics are. All this is in the public domain. Unfortunately no one wants to read it.
NDTV: The fact is that we have not been able to fully establish what is this notion of ground support for Maoists. Repeatedly in these places, we find terrified villagers not even willing to give their name on camera. So while there are stories of how tribals are better of in Naxal controlled areas, we in the media have no way of substantiating it.
Ajay Sahni: Two points. In any area where lawless force is rampant, you should not think that you can reach people's opinion. Take a parallel. If you went to Afghanistan during the Taliban rule, I am sure everyone would have told you this is the best government. But the minute the Taliban is out of the way everyone rushes to the barber shop and rushes to the movies. When there is a gun to the head, do not believe that any kind of democratic opinion can be articulated. Also, how do you explain the instance of Andhra Pradesh. It was the worst Naxal affected state till just three years ago. It had the most fatalities, the maximum districts affected by Naxalism. Today, it has virtually no incidence, and only 4 districts along the Orissa border that are marginally affected because of groups coming in from Orissa. If one state can put an end to Naxal violence by creating a trained police force to take on the Naxals, why are other states still talking nonsense about development? Of course, you must have development but you cannot predicate counter insurgency responses on the resolution of development deficits.
NDTV: In terms of strategy, military may not be the right word, but what is the Maoist capacity to fight? Is it exaggerated? Or have we underestimated their capacity to fight? How equipped are they, in say a state like Bengal?
Ajay Sahni: Maoist power is basically a consequence of the state's infirmity. It's not as if they have this tremendous invincible army. They are nothing compared to the might of the Indian state. But what if the Indian state does not deploy its forces? For instance, the estimates of armed Maoist cadre in Lalgarh were not more than a 100 odd at any stage. Are you telling me that West Bengal does not have the capacity to deal with a 100 cadre? It is the same everywhere. Since we are not confronting them, their power is tremendous. Since we are not deploying adequate force to deal with them, they are able to blow up people. What does it take to blow up 20 people here or there? They have randomly mined kilometers and kilometers where they know some VIP or police contingent will come. When they get information that a police contingent has come that way, they know it will head back on the same route because there is only one route in that area. All they do is connect it up and blow up the contingent. Does that make you a military force that is a threat to India? No but if they continue to blow people up like this at a fairly systematic basis, they demoralize forces, they paralyze government, the entire civil administration flees the area. You have no possibility of delivering the basic services of governance to the people. The people are abandoned. The Maoists consolidate their military strength further and further. You need to understand what is going on and stop talking rubbish about development as a solution. You cannot develop what you don't control. The Maoist is not trying to control the area. This has to be clearly understood. They know they can't have any liberated zones in India. The asymmetry of power is too great. What they seek is disruptive dominance - the capacity to ensure that you cannot carry out the tasks of governance. And you are allowing them to consolidate that dominance.
NDTV: We have repeatedly seen images of ill equipped police stations, we know the abysmal police people ratio in our country, but how aware is the grass root policeman on what he is confronting?
Ajay Sahni: The grassroot policeman is terrified. He has not been trained to confront this. In many states, in many police stations, the grassroots policeman has been disarmed because they wished to avoid the risk of an attack solely to loot the arms. Even if the policeman is armed, he can't really protect himself so if he has weapons then Naxals will attack him just to get the weapon. This is as far as the state policemen go, let's now come to the central forces. The central forces have been thrown in as small pinpoints into a vast order. These are not rational deployments. You throw in a company of CRPF here, but it has no linkage with another CRPF unit deployed 15-20 km away. 20 km sounds good. But if an attack happens and I have another contingent 8 km away, remember even 8 km can be 24-48 hours in the situations the Maoists create. When they launch an attack, they mine all the approaches; they create further impediments by feeling tress which could also be mined. So road clearing process has to precede before an operation against them can be launched, and that usually takes 12-20 hours, in some places 40 hours, by which time the Maoists have slaughtered everyone they intend to slaughter and walked away. There are 32 - 34 battalions of CRPF in the entire Maoist belt. A battalion is 1000 men but the actual deployed force is never more than 500 men. So you are talking about 17,000-20,000 men and the centre says oh we have sent sufficient force. What are 20,000 men from Bihar down to Andhra?