(Mani Shankar Aiyar is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha)The massacre of 15 security personnel in the Sukma district of Chhattisgarh once again brings into painful relief the grim failure of the country, and of the Chhattisgarh government in particular, to find a lasting solution to the menace of Naxalism that looms larger in Chhattisgarh than in any other State of India.
Two terms of a BJP state government that is now into its third term shows that the only thing worse than no governance in the Bastar/Abhujmarh area of the state is bad governance. For the root of the problem lies in the state having shamefully abnegated its responsibility towards its large tribal population, proceeding from terrible governance when the Naxals took over, to no governance now.
If the reward for this neglect has been three successive terms for Chief Minister Raman Singh, it is because a state carved out primarily for the welfare of the tribals has, under the BJP, become a fiefdom of the non-tribals. They are quite content to see much of their tribal population effectively under martial law as that fences them off from dealing with the underlying issues of grave neglect, woeful discrimination and gross injustice that caused the vacuum of governance that the Naxals (or Maoists, as they prefer to call themselves) were sucked into.
This was not always so. I have known the region since childhood as my mother's brother spent virtually the whole of his career as a forest officer there. It was the most tranquil, peaceful place in India. We spent all our school holidays there. As a young man, I walked and slept in the very forests where now no man dares to go. In middle age, it was the first place to which I took Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in my capacity as his Manager, Tours & Travels. We spent the night in a small forest guesthouse. There was no need for special security. Then Digvijaya Singh became Chief Minister of the composite state of Madhya Pradesh for ten long years. And all those ten years, the Chhattisgarh region was so restful that a peaceful transition to a new state was rendered feasible.
The first Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh was a Congress tribal, Ajit Jogi. The peace held. Alas, Raman Singh and the BJP arrived on the scene - and all hell broke loose. The reign of the Naxals in large parts of Bastar/Abhujmarh has only been consolidated through a decade and is provoking more of the repressive security measures that are virtually every week taking a dire toll on the unfortunate policemen posted to the area. Even now, after the latest ambush, governmental attention is more focused on security measures like mobile towers than the fundamental problem caused by the exclusion of tribals, and their elected representatives, from their own governance.
All this has been studied by both the Central and state governments. The 2008 Bandyopadhyay report commissioned by the Planning Commission was a revelation - but has since been left as neglected as tribal issues themselves by the authorities concerned. UPA-II's brilliant decision to appoint its most able tribal minister as the common Union minister for both Tribal Affairs and Panchayat Raj looked for a while like the light at the end of the tunnel. But despite his heroic efforts, the Raman Singh government would not budge, and the critical 18-year old legislation - The Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996, (PESA) - that holds the key to resolving tribal issues in LWE (Left Wing Extremism) affected areas lies forlorn on the statute books, nothing having been done by the state BJP government to invoke its provisions - despite the Congress government in neighbouring Maharashtra having shown how to use the Act in their state's LWE-affected regions.
This is essentially because the BJP does not believe in tribal empowerment. (They only want to harvest tribal souls for Hindutva). Indeed, the Modi government has been by far the most ruthless in driving out tribals to accommodate corporates. As the Twelfth Plan ruefully notes, 76 per cent of those displaced in Gujarat have been tribals - in a state where no more than 8 per cent of their population is tribal.
When I attempted to draw attention to this deeply worrying source of tribal discontent, Arun Jaitley thought he was being witty, witty when he said in the Rajya Sabha that we who espoused the tribal cause were "half-Maoists". I retorted that it was a privilege to be described as a half-Maoist by a full-fledged fascist; the BJP held the House to ransom for three full days. This is their Hitlerite conception of democracy.
So long as the BJP has such contempt for tribal people and their problems, there is little hope of even the mildest and most courteous of Union ministers persuading their state governments to understand that it is only if we present our tribal people with a clear option between running their own affairs under the state government's aegis and falling victim to Naxal violence that they will turn away from those who have entered their territories as "benefactors". The choice before them today is between a predatory State and predatory terrorists. The difference is that the State hitherto is perceived as intervening only to exploit them, while the Naxals are seen as living among them and sharing their hardships.
Were PESA to be implemented, as pledged in the conformity legislation of the Chhattisgarh Assembly, the tribals of Bastar/ Abhujmarh would have the right and the means to deploy vast financial resources in accordance with the individual priorities of each tribal habitation, and subject to supervision and control by the highly egalitarian tribal communities themselves. Only at that juncture, and no earlier, would they see every reason to throw in their lot with a state and nation that empowers them rather than remain in thrall to the Maoists.
I tried to explain this to Jaitley when I was eventually permitted to speak in the Rajya Sabha : that we have to deal with Naxalism as the American colonists dealt with alligators in the swamps of Florida - they drained the swaps to rid the alligators of their life-sustaining environment. Similarly, we have to grant participative development under PESA to the tribals to wean them away from their Naxal patrons. That, not mobile towers, is where the fundamental answer lies.
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