The Naxalite Movement: Exposing Scrapped Segments of India's Democracy |
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| Written by Kris Millett |
| Saturday, 05 January 2008 19:00 |
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India has been described as 'an elephant walking on a tightrope’: a majestic nation of huge promise, beset with enormous problems. Lately, the most perilous threat to the world’s largest democracy has not come from its surrounding neighbors, with their nuclear weapons and well-documented ill-wishes, but from violence by internally-based rebel forces. In 2007, terrorism-related incidents accounted for 2,765 fatalities. And what line of fundamentalist thought is most responsible for these atrocities? You guessed it, Maoism. Maoism? Indeed. Although it’s widely believed that Pakistan covertly funds violent, Islamic-oriented groups throughout India, the majority of the 2,765 fatalities came not from them, but care of the Naxalites: a forgotten group of rural Maoists, ostracized even by China. They were previously best-known for organizing a series of riots in 1968 against the ruling Communist party in the Naxalbari district. Today, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh cites them as the single biggest security challenge facing the country. These agrarian extremists have spread their influence through 14 of India’s states, and along the way they have managed to establish a support base among India's landless peasants, a group that has long felt scrapped by a democratic process designed to represent them. It is estimated that 20% of the land is under Naxal control, and, more significantly, they enjoy the support of 50% of India’s tribal population. The Naxalites adhere to a traditional doctrine of Maoism, not the symbolic brand employed by the Chinese in their state-directed embrace of capitalism. They consider parliamentary politics to be a sham, and instead advocate agrarian revolution; seizure of the state through continued armed struggle, or “people’s war”. How could a group that sounds like it fell out of the 1950s possibly wield any power in the world's largest and, arguably, most successful democracy today? In order to understand what is happening in India right now, try to pretend you are in the place of a rural Indian villager (unless you actually are, then you don’t need to pretend). You are part of a demographic that makes up 75% of India’s population of over 1 billion. There is a 79% chance you are landless, and live on less than $2 a day. Also, if you have the misfortune to be from the Dantewada district, there is a 95% chance your village does not have any health or medical facilities. If your village is lucky enough to have a school, there is little guarantee that a teacher is regularly present. As a result, 29% of the village men are literate, and only 14% of women. There is a great possibility that you don’t have the means to meet your family’s health and welfare needs. There is also great irony in that, while these brutal rural conditions persist, India's economy is burgeoning as never before, with GDP growth hitting 9.2 % in 2007. There are two rival groups trying to put a rifle in your hand. One is the Naxalites, who talk about ”mobilizing the peasantry” for a ”people’s war” against the state. They remind you of things your grandfather used to say, but seem to be making a genuine effort to improve the quality of life in your village. The other group is Salwa Judum, a militant organization created by the Indian government to destroy the Naxalites. This is the same government that has facilitated astounding levels of economic growth, yet neglected to provide your village with infrastructure, or any other incentive for gaining your support. Which side would you choose? Revolution of Rising Expectations Leon Trotsky famously stated that "the mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an insurrection; if it were, the masses would always be in revolt." India's exceptional economic growth works in concert with widespread, persistent poverty to create rising expectations amongst the rural masses, and a gulf of unequal wealth distribution for the Naxalites to exploit. The organization has identified the state's failure to address the rising expectations and has used this to its advantage in its revolt against the government. Rural hardships are nothing new to India, however; the Naxalites’ rhetoric likely fell on less sympathetic ears in 1970s, when the average GDP growth rate was around 3.5 %. The Naxalites were a virtual non-factor at the time. Today, there is 9.2% GDP growth, and 600 million people in 600,000 villages are essentially untouched by the benefits. The Naxalites have exploited this swell of discontent and created a power base. Their committees have stepped in to run village affairs, bringing heavy-handed justice to lawless areas through banishment of corrupt officials, expulsion of landlords, and raising the sale prices for crops. They have, in their own way, attempted to deliver the basic government services these areas are lacking. A 2006 report from The Economist identifies the myriad grievances the Naxalites have targeted: "In one [village] there is a hand-pump installed by the local government, but the well is dry. There are no roads, water pipes, electricity or telephone lines. Policemen, health workers and officials are never seen." In essence, the Naxalites have become an alternatively viable option for governance within rural areas of India. The Problem of Democracy The picture of tiny, dirt-poor villages where the Indian state is almost invisible, points to another factor behind the Naxalites' prominence: India’s democracy. In this case, unmet economic expectations are replaced by what Ajai Sahni describes as ”asymmetric expectations.” People expect the state to provide for them. Any good deed done by the Maoists - social work, land-re-distribution, a meagre price increase for the local produce - brings disproportionate gratitude. The failure of the democratic system to properly represent the rural poor has given the Naxalites their own opportunity to do so. India’s durable political institutions and channels of patronage have only given the rural masses the means to express discontent, and no resources to address poor living situations and economic disparities existent within their communities. The state has in no way tried to prevent multinational corporations from rummaging through the forest areas to acquire lands and extract buried wealth, nor has it had any success in cushioning the blow of commercial interests on rural and tribal ways of life. The government's primary response to Naxalism has been to arm ”local resistance groups,” i.e., Salwa Judum. This practice, however, has only compounded the woes of rural villagers, by introducing the rampant specter of bloody warfare to the areas. If India is to contain the Naxalite movement, its governing forces should be looking to provide something more than universal suffrage to its people, and strive for some semblance of opportunity, such as upward mobility, access to health, and the prospects of providing for their families. This would give its impoverished masses an image of the virtue of democracy that amounts to more than "the freedom to sleep under a bridge." The Indian state must attempt to provide for the health and education of all its citizens. It ought to offer protection to lower classes and minorities, instead of arming vigilante groups to wage war with them. Problems and Prospects for the Movement Prime Minister Singh has repeatedly insisted to followers of extremism that “real power flows from the ballot box, not the barrel of a gun.” However, it’s been his democratically-elected government’s precise inability to deal with inequities that has led those affected to consider scrapping the concept. The Naxalite movement has subsequently flourished in the void between the elected officials and the impoverished masses they claim to represent. However, few subversive movements in India have avoided indoctrination into the system, including the political party that supported the original Naxalbari movement; which in the 1960s abandoned representation of the peasants at the height of the rebellion, when it found itself in government due to a collapse of the ruling Congress Party. So far, the Naxalites have avoided engagement with India's democratic process. If history is any indicator, maintaining this stance will prove challenging. This is not entirely due to the political perquisites of the Indian system, but ultimately, the Naxalites must come to realize its essential need to embrace lower-middle class values, or else the movement will cease to grow. Although democracy has failed to represent the rural poor, the Naxalites could use its model to address populist needs, while also legitimizing their governance role in various regions of India. Without integrating themselves into the democratic model, the Naxalites will be doomed to remain only a fringe force politically (while remaining a legitimate security threat to India, so long as the colliding factors of poverty, economic growth, and democracy remain undisrupted). The Indian Naxalites’ “cousin” network in Nepal has made concessions to appeal to a broader base, and now finds itself at the bargaining table with the Nepalese government. In Revolutionary Politics , Mehran Kamrava notes that revolutions are predominantly made of “displaced and dispossessed peasants, disillusioned and unassimilated rural migrants, and the aspiring but frustrated segments of the middle classes.” The greatest success of India’s political system has been in managing to indoctrinate these disparate clusters of the population, its reach filtering down to the poorest people through the body of the local Panchayat. This, and its enduring caste system, has kept a diverse country together since independence. In many ways, India’s British-adopted political system has come, through time, to resemble the Hindu religious faith: a superstructure that acts as a sponge, able to absorb many different elements, interests and desires, and always being tolerant towards, yet resistant, to their differences. India’s Naxalites have yet to find the right strategy to knock the elephant off its tightrope. Until they manage to incorporate a wider range of class interests into the movement, the dream of the red flag flying over New Delhi will remain a distant delusion. Further Reading: “Asia: A Spectre Haunting India; India’s Naxalites” The Economist, 2006, Vol. 380, Iss. 8491, p. 52 D.K. Gupta (2007) “The Naxalites and the Maoist Movement in India: Birth, Demise, and Reincarnation” Democracy & Security, Vol. 3, Iss. 2, pp. 157-188 P.V. Ramana (2006) “The Maoist Movement in India” Defense and Security Analysis Vol. 22. No. 4, pp. 435-449 R.P. Pradham (2006) “Rural Poverty Alleviation: India’s Experience and Needed Strategy” India Quarterly, Vol. LXII, No. 3, p. 152-188 South Asia Terrorism Portal (2006) “India Assessment 2006” Global Studies: Indian and South Asia. Dubuque: McGraw-Hill, pp. 94-97
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