Naxalism: The Non-sympathetic View

On March 5, 2010, as part of its Eminent Persons’ Lecture Series, Institute of Defense Studies and Analyses (IDSA) organized a lecture by Home Secretary Gopal K. Pillai on “Left Wing Extremism in India”. Pillai shared with the distinguished audience his own perspective on the Naxal movement, which is considered to be one of the most serious internal security threats faced by India today.

Read a report of his speech on the IDSA website.

In a nutshell, he believes that the present laws dealing with the tribal areas ( Indian forest conservation act, the mining act, land acquisition law, power plant law etc) have several loopholes and until and unless necessary measures are adopted by the government in reforming these acts, it will not be possible to uproot the Naxal movement or any other extremist movement from India. But in order to bring development to the people, the government needs to secure the administrative control that it has ceded to the Naxals over the years and since the Naxal movement does not believe in peaceful discussion and emphasizes armed struggle, the government must take them head-on.

Raj Shukla of IDSA neatly summarises the way forward :

One, of course, is to regain administrative control of lost areas by securing them and delivering development, and to keep persisting despite the inevitable setbacks. Two, is to nurse our police forces back to health, through a slew of measures which have been discussed ad nauseam. Three, is to address the grievances that threaten to explode in a socio-economic cataclysm - mining rights, forest rights, developmental neglect, rehabilitation of the displaced, uncompleted land reforms, agricultural indebtedness, urban slums and other sources of societal inequality. Four, we could even try and cash in on the latest offer by Kishenji and utilise the services of Arundhati Roy, Mahashweta Devi and Kabir Suman as ‘independent observers’ in an attempted mediation of the dispute.

He adds,

There is of course the other school led by the indomitable M.J. Akbar, which asserts that India will survive the Maoist insurgency by ending poverty and in no other way. May be, but the bigger truth is that in a country of India’s size, diversity and conflicting aspirations, no matter what you do ( even if you were to conquer poverty once and for all), violent disaffections of some sort will afflict us. While attempting to address them, apart from other tools, you will need a sophisticated police force. The Naxal challenge is a wake up call to rejig our internal security instruments and restore their organizational ethos, autonomy and operational credibility. With regard to its violent hue, we need to act with dispatch.