The Naxalite challenge

Governments at the Centre and in the states are finally cranking themselves up to deal with the growing menace of communist extremism, which is said to have spread to as many as 160 districts, or about a quarter of the total. Two developments have raised warning antennae in recent months. One is the growing daring with which attacks are being mounted""on jails, police stations and trains. Another is the assessment that the menace has been spreading to two new districts every month. While mainstream public opinion has been vaguely conscious of the problem, it has remained at the periphery of most people's focal points because it has been generally assumed that the trouble spots are remote, forested areas not linked to urban centres or to the main agrarian belts. But it would be a mistake to assume this, or even that the problem is confined largely to the depressed eastern half of the country; for districts around two of the boom towns of the south, Hyderabad and Bangalore, are also affected.

Nor is the challenge posed by isolated groups with limited resources. Following the coming together of the Maoist Communist Centre (which functioned mostly in Bihar and Jharkhand) and the People's War Group (which spread in different directions from Andhra Pradesh), the challenge to the state is being mounted by an organised force with reach and money. And since the 160 districts are a contiguous belt, running south from the Nepal border, the dangers of territorial control and international links come together to spell a significant challenge to state authority. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was right, therefore, to describe this last week as the most serious internal security crisis the country has ever faced""and in saying this he was not ignoring, one must presume, the long-running sores in the north-eastern part of the country and in Jammu & Kashmir.

Unfortunately, the response to this crisis has been typically confused. One state government after the other has made the mistake of blowing hot and cold, going soft in the hope of co-opting the extremists, and then trying to get tough again when the first ploy fails. Indeed, mainstream political parties have even sought to use the Naxalites' help at election time, while private caste armies have taken on the job of the state in some cases. There are even reports that commercial banks are being forced to shut down in some of the affected districts, with private money-lending activity taking their place. These are all dangerous portents.

When not fiddling with poorly conceived tactical moves, politicians have not gone beyond acknowledging the obvious, which is that there are two aspects to the problem: law and order, and socio-economic justice. That is because both sets of issues have to be addressed by the state machinery in largely dysfunctional states where governance has in cases ceased even to be a pretence. This has been acknowledged, but no one has been able to do anything about it""though there is hope that Nitish Kumar, as the new chief minister of Bihar, will be able to reverse that state's long slide into near-complete lawlessness. The response to the Naxalite challenge must come by way of extending the successes of the Indian democratic and development experiments to the troubled Naxalite-affected areas. That can be done only by state governments, with the support of the Centre, if the challenges of state leadership and effective governance are successfully met.