Author: KPS Gill
Publication: The Telegraph
Date: July 3, 2009
URL: http://telegraphindia.com/1090703/jsp/frontpage/story_11190971.jsp
As I briefly toured West Midnapore district
during the police action in Lalgarh (I was prevented from going into the affected
area on "security" grounds), the most dramatic lessons of the crisis,
through all its phases - the slow build-up over seven months of state denial,
appeasement and progressive error; paralysis in the face of rising Maoist
violence; and the final, almost effortless resolution, as the rebels simply
melted away in the face of the first evidence of determined use of force -
were abundantly clear to me: the complete absence of historical memory in
the institutions of the state, and the need for each administration to repeatedly
reinvent the wheel.
The West Bengal government is not the first
to go through this fruitless cycle; or the first to allow immeasurable harm
to be inflicted on its citizens as a result of what is nothing more than the
suspension of common sense. Right from my days in Assam, I have seen this
cycle afflict virtually every administration confronted with the threat of
terrorism across the country - even in theatres of eventual and exceptional
counter-terrorism success.
After visiting Midnapore and talking to various
people, including police officers, I learned that the operations essentially
comprised marching into areas supposedly infested by Naxalites. In the early
1970s, when the Naxalites started setting up cells in the district that I
was then heading in Assam, we had relied on building up intelligence so as
to pinpoint the hideouts of the Naxalite leadership. I recall that we had
identified 85 such places, and when we raided these places, we were able to
arrest 74 Naxalites, virtually breaking the back of the movement in the state.
In the current situation, the operations are
not intelligence-based but only aimed at area dominance. This is a strikingly
inferior response to intelligence-based operations. I still remember a remark
made by the last British inspector-general of Assam in an inspection note
at the Sonari police station, that "one proper arrest is equivalent to
six months of patrolling by a company of policemen". This, incidentally,
had been written shortly after a movement launched by the Revolutionary Communist
Party of India (well known for the Dum Dum-Basirhat raid in West Bengal) had
been put down by Assam Police.
The government and its agencies go into a
state of denial during initial manifestations of extremist violence and terrorism
- and "initial" here may mean years and decades. Administrative
inaction is couched in a wide range of alibis; agencies connected with the
state and the "intelligentsia" add to this by putting forward "solutions"
which serve as apologetics for anti-state forces. The debate is taken over
by these knee-jerk, inchoate "political" and "developmental"
solutions and by the "root cause" argument: that extremism is the
result of national issues like poverty and injustice rather than being driven
by any ideological motive.
Indeed, the Marxist leadership in West Bengal
has been exceptionally imaginative in the invention of false histories, claiming
that the Naxalite movement of the 1967-75 phase was defeated by their government's
administrative and land reforms that cut away the Naxalite recruitment base
(the CPM-led Left Front incidentally came to power in 1977). Anyone who is
even superficially familiar with the history of that phase would, however,
immediately recall that the Naxalites were crushed - indeed, brutally crushed
- by the Congress government of Siddhartha Shankar Ray. If at all reforms
had a salutary impact, it was only after the capacities of the rebels had
been comprehensively neutralised by relentless police action.
As the Maoists now restore progressive ascendancy
in parts of the state, however, such nonsense continues to be given wide publicity,
not only by ill-informed "intellectuals", but, astonishingly, by
the Marxist party leadership as well, even as the real magnitude of the threat
is denied, and the basics of policing and wide deficits in police and intelligence
capacities are ignored.
I have seen this, again and again, in theatre
after theatre. The state and police paralysis witnessed at Lalgarh was, for
instance, much in evidence in the early phases of the Khalistani movement
in Punjab. Among the hundreds of incidents illustrating the collapse of administration,
perhaps the most humiliating was the February 1984 episode, when six fully
armed policemen were dragged into the Golden Temple by militants. The response
- 24 hours later - came from senior police officials who begged Jarnail Singh
Bhindranwale to release the men and hand over their weapons.
After protracted negotiations, the dead body
of one policeman was handed over, and five policemen were released. Their
weapons were never returned. No action was ever taken on the murder of the
policeman.
Andhra Pradesh has now become a model of effective
police response to Naxalism, but few recall the decades of Maoist dominance
in wide areas of this state, and the apologetics that were advanced in favour
of the extremists in the highest echelons of government. Then chief minister
N.T. Rama Rao, for instance, described the Naxalites as "true patriots";
he and his successors, across party lines, found it expedient (as the Trinamul
Congress recently has), to form opportunistic electoral alliances with the
Naxalites - to the inevitable advantage of the rebels.
Those who now celebrate the prowess of the
Greyhounds forget that this force was created as far back as in 1989, and
it is only under unambiguous political mandate after 2005 that an enormously
empowered Andhra Pradesh police and this special force have been able to inflict
near-comprehensive defeat on the Maoists in the state.
Political leaders in West Bengal must see
through their own platitudes and falsifications to comprehend the core of
state infirmity that constitutes the foundations of the Maoist power. The
absurd alibis that have been advanced to evade the necessity of response must
be abandoned at the earliest, and not after the sheer quantum of the loss
of innocent lives - as has been the case in other theatres - simply forces
the state to respond.
