Growing social divide feeds Maoist insurgency

In India in the past year alone, the country's increasingly violent Maoist insurgency has taken thousands of lives, including hundreds of members of the security forces.

It is now believed to have taken root in 220 of the country's 626 districts, spread across nearly 100,000sq km.

Disruptive acts ranging from derailing trains in remote areas to bombing schools, hospitals, government offices and industrial infrastructure are costing hundreds of millions of dollars.

It has led Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to describe it as the country's single biggest internal security challenge and to suggest that it might well be losing the battle against Maoist rebels.

The Maoist movement began in 1967 in the village of Naxal in eastern India. It was inspired by Mao Zedong's communist ideology encouraging poor peasants to violently rebel against the upper classes, landlords and the Government.

Over the next three decades, Naxalism (as the insurgency is more commonly referred to in India) spread to neighbouring districts and across entire states down the country's eastern and central regions, gaining ideological support from left-leaning urban intellectuals.

Last month, the British-based Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative said eight Indian states accounted for 421 million deprived and poor people - over 400 million more than 26 of the poorest African nations combined.

These are among India's most populous - and poorest - states, mostly in the eastern and central parts of the country, almost exactly the so-called "red corridor" states in which Maoism has grown the fastest.

Indian intelligence authorities say there are more than 20,000 armed Naxalites, plus workers and sympathisers many times that number, in these states.

Successive governments have responded to the symptom rather than the deep-seated malaise of economic deprivation. They have moved in armed security forces to quell violent uprisings as they have happened.

There is continued neglect of the growing masses of the dispossessed, left out of India's new-found economic progress that has seen the country's middle class swell to more than the US population, a factor that has given Maoism even more support in recent years.

Today's Maoist monster menacing nearly 40 per cent of India's territory is a creature fashioned from the glaring failure of the country's much-avowed pursuit of its heavily socialist-flavoured democratic policies towards creating a so-called egalitarian society.

The Maoist movement, which began pitting the poor landless against wealthy landlords and upper castes, has now expanded to encompass all economically dispossessed people against the Government, the rich and the middle classes - the classic trappings of a class war between the haves and the have-nots. As the Indian economic juggernaut trundles on at near double-digit growth rates, its demand for natural resources and power has long outstripped supply.

The Government has opened the hinterland for all sorts of mining and infrastructure investment projects. This has put increasing demands on land and further alienated the largely uneducated rural poor, ill-equipped to partake of whatever benefits these projects might have to offer.

In the past couple of years, Maoists have increasingly targeted such big projects in the mining and power generation sectors destroying equipment, kidnapping and killing personnel and calling regionwide general strikes.

Several billion-dollar projects have begun to stall or are running behind schedule as a result. Among these are ArcelorMittal's US$9 billion steel projects in Jharkhand and Orissa and South Korean steel major Posco's multi-billion-dollar steel plant, also in Orissa.

India's fast-growing mobile market has also been hit in these states with attacks on 58 cellphone sites by the end of June this year alone. An attack on three pylons carrying a high-tension power line cut off electricity to an entire district for a whole week in 2007.

Meanwhile, the Maoists have stepped up their attacks on the railways, with one derailment in May costing 148 lives.

Last month's accident in which an express rammed into a stationary freight train killing 50 people is also now being treated with suspicion of Maoist involvement.

Restrictions on the movement of trains at night, ranging from lower speeds to complete suspension of services after dark, are in place at several remote stretches of India's vast railway network in the affected states.

Defending her support for Maoist ideology and disruptive methods of protest at a lecture in Mumbai last month, Booker Prize-winning novelist (The God of Small Things) and human rights activist Arundhati Roy said: "The poorest and most malnourished have waged a war against mighty corporates who want to have control over natural resources like minerals, water and forests. It's the question of survival. We can make them [Naxals] win this war if we join them."

Earlier, she had controversially dubbed Maoists as Gandhians with guns.

The Government is under increasing pressure from state administrations to take decisive action, especially following the massacre of 80 Central Police Force personnel in April this year.

Its long-professed two-pronged "security and development" strategy has clearly come a cropper. The Government has so far resolutely avoided the states' requests to deploy the highly trained Indian armed forces in the hinterland. To do that is seen as politically damaging for any government.

Last month, India's Ministry for Home Affairs announced a "unified command" for insurgency-affected states that will entail raising 34 new police battalions, setting up 400 police stations and the deployment of more helicopters in the Maoist strongholds.

The growth of Maoism in India's vast hinterland would not have been possible without popular grassroots sympathy and support in the initial years.

Even if that support has waned in certain pockets, it is quite possible that the hugely armed and tactically more competent leadership continues to coerce support with the help of terror over the areas they control - often with the help of crooked local politicians. The greatest worry for the Indian Government and its over-stretched security apparatus - especially in the aftermath of the 2008 Mumbai carnage - is a possible future alliance between external terrorism groups across India's northwestern and eastern borders and Maoist groups - something that security hawks already suspect.

There have been reports of foreign arms and ammunition flowing into the Maoists' growing arsenals.

* Dev Nadkami is an Auckland journalist and editor of the Indian Weekender community publication.