By: Siddharth Malani
smalani@agamasoft.co.uk
April 02, 2004

Recently, I saw an interview of some naxals operating in the eastern states of India, on BBC. To my amazement, I realised that I was almost completely misinformed about these groups. The media never highlighted the ideology of the naxals. It only focussed on what they do instead of how and why they do it.

Some good things : 

Some of the things I saw made me feel good although most of the thing were either bad or scary. The good thing was these naxals were not anti India. In fact, they were pro India. They were just anti-government and anti-capitalism. 

Some bad : 

The bad thing was that the naxal leaders were enthusing a large number of illiterate and dis-illusioned tribal youths in their group. Most of these youths were misinformed and looked as if they were hypnotised to follow the leadership without thinking what was right or wrong. One of the leaders when asked what he thought of the road development, had this to say, “The government is building the roads to bring in their forces to attack us.” Such is the paranoia and misunderstanding. It could be some ulterior motive in deliberately not acknowledging any positive development. Some of the youth might have joined in due to excesses of the police but most of them were following the leader by some strange vision of Mao (their leader hence the name Maoist).  

In order to get an upper hand over the police and Indian security personnel the naxals have cleverly identified the problems of the tribal population. They have distributed land amongst the tribals and have increased the price they earn by selling bidi to the markets (albeit at gunpoint ). Even some of the school teachers teach at gunpoint. 

The thing that I feel most bad about is that so many youths get killed or are involved in such fatalistic misadventures without knowing the exact reason why they are involved in the first place. They were also talking of a red revolution. The red here signifies bloody revolution. 

And some scary !!! 

Of the scary things, there are three in particular. One, all naxals have a plan ultimately to get into a large group and march towards Delhi and attack our very institution of democracy. It is highly improbable that these groups can get anywhere near, but it does make me nervous, nevertheless.  

Two, the leadership of the naxals are either very foolish, in that they do not, yet understand the economic benefits of democracy and capitalism and still live in a fools paradise where communism prevails, or that they do not want to give away the power of being self appointed generals in their armies.  

The most scary thing is that they do not like any type of media i.e. TV, radio and actively denounce the use of it by organising road shows. This means more and more youth will get disconnected and would be more vulnerable to joining such organisations. It might be one of the motives behind discouraging use of media. 

A positive note : 

The government has made progress in some of the villages by communicating with the tribals and has indeed gathered support from the locals. The economic prosperity is clearly evident in such villages as roads have decreased travelling time to nearby towns from a day walk to half hour rickshaw drive.  

Alienating these groups will be of great risk for the country and will eventually lead to a bloody battle with a massacre of thousands of youths misguided by some lunatic leadership. All this can easily be avoided either by covert operations to break these groups tactically, or through education of the tribals. Hopefully, the government will take adequate steps to prevent such a situation.

Siddharth Malani