A dagger has been lodged into the heart of India and unless it is taken out, the future of the republic will be in peril. What makes things even more serious is that there is no agreement over what kind of a dagger it is and how to take it out. The heart of India stretches from Bihar in the north to Karnataka in the south, Maharashtra in the west to West Bengal and Orissa in the east. The dagger is adivasi (tribal) disaffection turning into armed Maoist insurgency and it is difficult to take it out because of a fundamental disagreement. Most of India’s organised polity — the UPA as well as the Opposition BJP and the Left — thinks it is a revolt against the state which has to be met with force, while a minority, oddly sympathised by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, feels you cannot declare war on your own people, and that too on the earliest inhabitants of the land. The least you can do is to ask yourself why these tribals feel aggrieved after 60 years of independence.
The Maoist insurgency is now top of the mind because last week, in their deadliest attack so far, they ambushed and killed an entire force of 76 CRPF and local policemen in the Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh. They clearly know tactics and use of explosives and have sufficient modern weapons. The location underlines the fact that this district is mostly in Maoist control. Intensive police action, with weaponry and training from all over the world and abundant state resources, will be used to suppress the revolt, decimating the Maoist cadre and leadership. But the wound in the heart of the tribals will remain, to give rise to another revolt maybe decades later.
Two long essays, a scholarly piece by Ramachandra Guha in EPW in 2007, and a classical straight-from-the-heart piece by writer-activist Arundhati Roy in Outlook last month, tell us both how it came about and what has happened on the ground.
You don’t need to agree with Roy’s politics to appreciate her gripping report of what is happening, gathered after days of trudging on foot through the dense forests of Dandakaranya with Maoist cadres and talking to some of their leaders. It helps you put a finger on the raw nerve of tribal disaffection and their desire to eke out a living in their forests without outside depredation. Three lakh acres have been distributed among the tribals and 60,000 sq km has been “liberated”, she says, with the Janatana Sarkar administration of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in place. It even has its “save the jungle” department and a leader cites a government report that forest cover has gone up under Maoist watch! New ground in tribal society has been broken through the assertion of the women’s cadre, Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangathan, in the Maoist movement.
Guha makes the telling point that the deprivations of tribals in peninsular India is more striking than that of even Dalits and Muslims. In the national consciousness, the tribals are not just marginal but invisible. In terms of human development indicators, the adivasis are worse off than even the Dalits! They have been disposed of by development and conservation, displaced first by the “commanding heights” of the economy and then by globalisation. Their major problems are land alienation, denial of forest rights, and displacement by development projects and national parks and sanctuaries. The British introduced laws which Independent India unquestioningly inherited, turning the lords of the forest into subjects of the forest department.
It is helpful to see where Guha and Roy agree and disagree. Both agree that the economic condition of the tribals is abominable. If malnutrition is the legacy of the past, poor education promises to be the curse of the future. The iron ore and bauxite, which should have been their blessing, have turned out to be their curse as they are unable to fight the displacement or make the best use of rehabilitation. Where the two disagree is in their view of the Maoists. Roy is soft on them, talking mostly about the violence on tribals and touching, only in passing, on the barbarity of the attacks of Maoists on their “enemies”. Critically, they differ on the sandwich theory — that most of the tribals are caught between the violence of the Maoists on the one hand and that of the state machinery and settlers on the other with little hope of deliverance. Guha subscribes to this, Roy does not.
It is difficult to think up solutions because a critical statute, giving back to the forest dwellers their rights, is already in place. But it is the state governments which have to work it. And they will be the last to do so. They are in the grip of settlers, the non-tribals, who have taken over. The worst depredator, the state-sponsored vigilante Salwa Judum, led by a Congress MLA, came into its own when the BJP government assumed power in Chhattisgarh. Is there hope for the tribals and forests of central India? If not, is there hope for the kind of India some of us want?
