The Northeast:
A Tempest of Terror
Wasbir Hussain
Associate Fellow, Institute for Conflict Management, New
Delhi; Consulting Editor, The Sentinel, Guwahati
Terror struck with a vengeance in India's insurgency-wracked
Northeast beginning on October 2, 2004, the birth anniversary
of India's apostle of peace, Mahatma Gandhi, killing at
least 60 people and injuring more than 200 others over three
consecutive days of serial bombings and gunfire, mostly
on unsuspecting civilians. The powerful bomb explosions
at a jam-packed Railway station and the popular Hong Kong
market in Dimapur, the commercial hub in the State of Nagaland,
on the morning of October 2, 2004, took 26 lives, and injured
another 104.
Rebels also
carried out a string of attacks in neighbouring Assam, killing
at least 34 people over a span of 36 hours (October 2-4,
2004), in 17 separate incidents. Clearly, India's strategic
northeastern frontier - a vast stretch that is home to nearly
40 million people, wedged between Bangladesh, Bhutan and
China's Tibet region - was bleeding profusely in some of
the biggest terror attacks in its long history of armed
insurrections, which dates back to 1951, shortly after the
country attained independence from the British.
Union Home Minister, Shivraj Patil, rushed to the region
on October 3, 2004, to take stock of the security situation,
but said it was too early to establish a link or a pattern
in the bloody raids in Nagaland and Assam. It is not, however,
particularly difficult to establish such a pattern in the
serial attacks. The timing of the terror raids is itself
significant: the attacks began on October 2, an important
day in the Indian national calendar, when the country remembers
Mahatma Gandhi, the 'father of the nation' and a champion
of peace and non-violence. Moreover, October 3, 2004, was
the 'Raising Day' of the outlawed National Democratic Front
of Boroland (NDFB),
marking the group's 18th anniversary (NDFB was formed in
1986). Lastly, the attacks in Assam, carried out by the
proscribed United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA)
and the NDFB, came within 48-hours of Assam Chief Minister
Tarun Gogoi's offer of a conditional ceasefire to both these
insurgent groups.
There are no prizes for guessing who could be responsible
for the attacks in Assam. Both the ULFA and the NDFB have
separately claimed responsibility for different incidents.
The ULFA's elusive 'commander-in-chief', Paresh Barua, telephoned
newspapers in Guwahati on the night of October 3, 2004,
and claimed responsibility for five of the attacks (on October
2 and 3). Significantly, the ULFA's military chief owned
up only those attacks where there were no civilian casualties:
the attacks at the police stations in Baihata Chariali (three
policemen were injured), near Guwahati, and at Jagiroad
(two civilians were wounded), in central Assam's Morigaon
district; the gas pipeline blast at Borhat in eastern Assam
and the landmine blast near Talap, also in eastern Assam,
where a vehicle carrying Army soldiers narrowly missed the
impact. On its part, the NDFB issued a statement saying
their attacks 'demonstrated their strength.' The NDFB killed
more than 20 people in four incidents of indiscriminate
gunfire on civilians at market places and by calling out
sleeping villagers.
Apart from a demonstration of their striking capacities
to dispel impressions that their cadres were 'on the run'
after the Bhutanese military operations in December 2003,
the ULFA and the NDFB have perhaps sought to send out a
clear message that they cannot be drawn to give up their
intractable postures and to engage in protracted peace negotiations
on the lines of New Delhi's dialogue with the Isak-Muivah
faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN-IM).
ULFA 'c-in-c' Paresh Barua made it clear when he telephoned
The Sentinel, an English daily from Guwahati, on
the night of October 3, 2004, and said, "The explosions
are an answer to Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi's ceasefire
call." Gogoi had told journalists in Guwahati on September
30, 2004, that his Government was ready to call a ceasefire
with the ULFA and the NDFB provided the rebel groups responded
positively to the offer by October 15.
The attacks in Assam may be part of a pattern, with rebels
often snubbing the Government's peace overtures by stepping
up violence or striking on days of national significance
or of importance within the narrative of rebellion, but
the explosions in Dimapur, in Nagaland, clearly targeted
at civilians, has certainly been surprising. A theory that
has gained significant weight over the past 48-hours, is
that the blasts in Nagaland, aimed at inflicting civilian
casualties and provoking public outrage thereafter, were
meant to derail the Naga peace process, underway since August
1997, when the NSCN-IM entered into a ceasefire agreement
with the Indian Government.
In fact, a top NSCN-IM leader told this writer in a telephone
interview on October 3, 2004, that the blasts in Dimapur
were a clear attempt to 'sabotage' the Naga peace process.
"An anti-Naga militant group is behind the blast. We are
close to solving the case," Kraibo Chawang, NSCN-IM's 'Deputy
Minister' for information and publicity, said from Dimapur.
The NSCN-IM has set up a 'special investigating team' to
probe the attacks and identify the culprits, a decision
approved by the group's topmost duo, 'chairman' Isak Chishi
Swu and 'general secretary' Thuingaleng Muivah. The fact
that the NSCN-IM sees the blasts as an attempt to scuttle
the Naga peace process and is bent on identifying the forces
behind the incidents, indicates that the group has taken
the matter extremely seriously.
Could the ULFA be the 'anti-Naga rebel group' of NSCN-IM's
allegations? Assam's Inspector General of Police (Special
Branch), Khagen Sharma, was noncommital: "The attacks in
Assam were coordinated strikes by the ULFA and the NDFB.
About the blasts in Nagaland, every possibility needs to
be probed." Highly placed intelligence sources, however,
told this writer that, on October 1, 2004, a day before
the serial attacks, the Assam Police captured two front-ranking
ULFA activists, Arup Terang and Nirob Chetia, from a bus
near Hahchora, in the eastern district of Sivasagar. Upon
interrogation, Arup Terang said he was an explosive expert
and had been based for some time at Dimapur. The police
had, in fact, recovered a live bomb weighing 7 kilograms
from a house at a village following disclosures made by
Terang.
There are at least two reasons that back up the thesis that
the ULFA was behind the Dimapur blasts: the group may actually
wish to derail the Naga peace process to widen the sphere
of violence in the region and to get the pressure to enter
into negotiations with New Delhi off its back. Further,
the ULFA is an ally of the Khaplang faction of the NSCN
(NSCN-K),
and could, therefore, be trying to shift the focus from
the peace talks (between the Indian Government and the NSCN-IM)
to the law and order issue. The NSCN-K is a bitter rival
of the NSCN-IM, but has gone on record saying it could be
an ally of the ULFA, but would not support any attacks on
innocent civilians.
Home Minister Patil, after visiting Nagaland and Assam,
stressed on the need for coordinated counter-insurgency
measures, including intelligence sharing, between the States
in the Northeast. But, that is easier said than done. For
instance, in Assam, the Army, police and the paramilitary
forces operate under a Unified Headquarters, with the Army
heading the operational command. Of late, a loose unified
security set up has come up in Manipur. But, there is no
formal mechanism for a coordinated security structure in
Nagaland or Tripura. This makes any attempt at a broad coordinated
counter-insurgency campaign in the region difficult. Besides,
in different states, the authorities have their own channels
open with certain rebel groups, who are either fence sitters
or are keen on talking peace. Such a situation makes a generalised
attempt to rein in all the rebel groups difficult. Things
remain murky in the Northeast, to say the least.
Bad Medicine for
a Red Epidemic
Ajai Sahni
Editor, SAIR; Executive Director, Institute for Conflict
Management
|
"They
are our children. They are angry and we have to show
them the right path with affection. We have the forces
to deal with violence but that is not the only approach."
|
|
Shivraj
Patil, Minister of Home Affairs, Government of India,
September 17, 2004
|
| |
| "…any thinking
that relaxes the will to fight and belittles the enemy
is wrong." |
|
Mao
Tse Tung, "Report to the Second Plenary Session of
the Seventh
Central Committee of the Communist Party of China",
March 5, 1949
|
Force, India's Minister for Home Affairs assures us, 'can
be used at any time', but other alternatives - "sympathy
and understanding" - need to be tried with the Left Wing
Extremists (Naxalites)
first. As a result, the present regime is advising all other
States afflicted by Naxalite violence to emulate the Andhra
Pradesh Chief Minister's initiative, and to invite the extremists
to join a process aimed at finding a 'negotiated solution'
to the protracted violence that has spread persistently,
like a cancer, to ever-widening areas of the country.
This is, currently, the politically correct and widely held
'formula' for the resolution of all conflicts in India,
and is faithfully parroted across the ideological spectrum,
with few, if any, dissenting voices.
It is useful, in the meanwhile, to see what 'our children'
have been doing.
At the meeting of the Central Coordination Committee of
Naxalite-affected States at Bhubaneshwar on November 21,
2003, the Union Home Secretary had disclosed that a total
of 55 districts in nine States were affected by varying
degrees of Naxalite violence. Just ten months later, on
September 21, 2004, an official note circulated at the meeting
of Chief Ministers of Naxalite-affected States indicated
that this number had gone up to 125 districts in 12 States,
with another 24 districts being targeted by the Left Wing
Extremists under their current agenda of expansion. Official
sources indicate, moreover, that, till August this year,
Naxalite violence had claimed 405 lives in 1,140 incidents,
as against 348 deaths in 1,138 incidents over the corresponding
period last year. A total of 1,946 lives have been lost
to Left Wing extremism over the period January 2001 - August
2004.
The dramatic expansion of Naxalite activities is more spectacular
when seen against the slow, painstaking and uncertain struggle
that went into the seizure of the 55 districts that had
fallen under their shadow by the end of 2003. The current
movement traces its genealogy back to the insurrection of
1967 in the Naxalbari area of North Bengal, but that insurgency
- after a wildfire spread in its early years - had been
comprehensively defeated by 1973, with the entire top leadership
of the Communist Party of India - Marxist-Leninist (CPI-ML)
either jailed or dead. What little remained of its splintered
survivor organizations was destroyed during Indira Gandhi's
Emergency of 1975.
It was in 1980, with the formation of the People's War Group
(PWG)
under the leadership of Kondapalli Seetharamaiah (an erstwhile
Central Organising Committee Member of the CPI-ML) in the
Telengana region of Andhra Pradesh, and the reorganization
of the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC)
in Bihar in the mid-1980s, that the movement resurfaced
in some strength. Initial successes were, again, rapid,
and by the mid-1980s, 31 districts in seven States were
afflicted by Naxalite violence. By the early 1990s, however,
the problem had been eliminated from at least 16 of these
districts, bringing the total number of affected districts
to just 15 in four States.
The reconstruction, thereafter, has been more continuous
and systematic, with wider areas being gradually targeted
and consolidated, building up slowly to the 55 districts
that had been brought into the ambit of the movement by
late 2003.
Throughout this period, the 'force' that Patil appears to
be so confident of as a final resort, has been used repeatedly,
and it is evident that the state's capacities are not as
overwhelming as the Home Minister believes them to be. The
character and scale of force that lies within the capacities
of the Indian state have clearly remained inadequate to
permanently recover the areas that have been lost to disorder
as a result of Left Wing extremist activities.
There is a pattern here. Each new incumbent in the North
Block - from where India's internal security is 'managed'
by the Ministry of Home Affairs - sets about reinventing
the wheel, with little apparent concern for history. The
cycle is almost invariable - with 'peaceful' and 'political'
resolution passionately advocated in the early days of incumbency,
yielding gradually to an eventual return to the use of force,
as Naxalite depredations mount. The same pattern is replicated
at the level of State Governments with successive Chief
Ministers advocating 'sympathy and understanding' for varying
periods, and then lapsing once again, to a reliance on the
police and paramilitary forces, rushing constantly to the
Centre for more funds and more men to strengthen their armed
capacities of response.
The interregnums of 'sympathy and understanding' have, however,
been the periods of the most rapid consolidation for the
Naxalites, who exploit ceasefires and 'peace processes'
to their potential limits for the propagation of their cause,
and for recruitment, training and expansion. Each period
of political conciliation has, consequently, seen a widening
of the geographical reach of the movement.
Patil is, consequently, located squarely within a long tradition
of political silliness, and is far from the first to invent
this 'sympathetic' approach to 'children' who need to be
weaned away from the 'wrong path' with 'affection', a tradition
most vividly illustrated in Andhra Pradesh.
In 1982, the then leader of the Telugu Desam Party of Andhra
Pradesh, N.T. Rama Rao had described the Naxalites as "true
patriots, who have been misunderstood by ruling classes",
and had sought and secured their support in the Assembly
Elections the following year, in which he then replaced
the Congress-I Government in the State. He gave free rein
to the Naxalites over the succeeding years, and by 1985,
the movement had consumed eight of the ten Districts of
the volatile Telengana region, and had spread beyond the
State's boundaries as well. By 1985, a series of ambushes
on police parties exhausted Rao's gratitude for his electoral
victory, and a 'hardline' - increasing reliance on the police
and paramilitary forces to re-establish law and order -
was restored. In 1987, the PWG was banned, and by mid-1989
the Naxalites were, once again, in flight in Andhra Pradesh
- until electoral considerations intervened, again.
This time around, it was the Congress-I, under the leadership
of Marri Chenna Reddy, that sought Naxalite support in the
elections. And for the first two years of Chenna Reddy's
Chief Ministership, the Naxalites went on a rampage. The
ban on the PWG was lifted in 1989, and 190 'hardcore' Naxalites
were released from jail. Chenna Reddy's policy of indulgence
was only reversed by his successor, N. Janardhan Reddy,
towards the latter half of 1991, after the murder of a former
Minister and a rising flood of murders, large scale extortion
and destruction. In May 1992, the ban on the PWG and its
front organizations was re-imposed, with palpable impact,
as the killings and other offences declined immediately
and continuously, till 1994, when another election returned
N.T. Rama Rao to power.
Rama Rao lifted the ban, and the old policies of conciliation
and complicity gave the Naxalites another opportunity to
revive, strengthen and extend the scale and geographical
scope of their activities. Rama Rao's successor, Chandrababu
Naidu, restored the ban on July 23, 1996, and reverted to
the policy of confronting extremist violence with the force
of arms. Nevertheless, Naidu also succumbed to the seduction
of the 'political solution' in 2002, declared a 'ceasefire'
and invited the Naxalite leadership for 'talks' to settle
the 'issue'. The talks collapsed after seven months, and
it was more than apparent that the interlude was fully exploited
by the Naxalites for vigorous consolidation, even as the
state's Forces remained paralysed by the political executive's
command not to act against PWG cadres. Naidu continues to
maintain that he was 'betrayed' by the Naxalite leaders.
Among the first actions of his successor, the Congress-I's
Dr. Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, was a suspension of security
force operations against the Naxalites, and an invitation
for 'direct talks', scheduled for October 15, 2004, to their
leadership.
This, then, has been the pendulum of the state's policy
on Naxalite violence, and it is now abundantly clear where
maximal gains have accrued, as district after district lapses
into disorder, as the institutions and mechanisms of civil
governance withdraw, abandoning vast areas to the extremists
and to the security forces that, alone, contest their dominance.
Force has, thus, been applied again and again, erratically
and haphazardly, interrupted regularly by periods of 'conciliation'
during which successive regimes sought to seduce the extremists
with promises and inducements. Each period of political
indulgence has invariably seen a further consolidation and
expansion of Naxalite activities.
Naxalite disorder, moreover, need to be located within the
larger context of the loss of control in wider areas within
India. In addition to the 125 districts currently under
the influence of the Naxalites, and the additional 24 districts
that are being targeted by them, there are at least another
63 districts in the country variously afflicted by different
patterns of ethnic or communal terrorism and insurgency
(Jammu & Kashmir: 12; Assam: 22; Tripura: 4; Meghalaya:
6; Manipur: 9; Arunachal Pradesh: 3; and Nagaland: 7). This
takes the number of districts afflicted by terrorism and
insurgency to 212, out a total of 602 districts in the country.
More than a third of the country is, consequently, suffering
from high degrees of present or potential disorder. This,
moreover, is not the sum of the threat, as abysmal governance,
divisive politics, continuous external and internal subversion,
opportunistic terrorist attacks, increasing criminalization
and other patterns of mass violence sporadically disrupt
the rule of law in widely dispersed locations across the
length and breadth of the country. It is useful to note,
moreover, that India's record of recovering areas from persistent
disorders is, at best, equivocal. These rising disorders,
further, will not be lost on India's enemies in the neighbourhood,
and an intensification of their efforts to disruption are
a matter, essentially, of time.
As the Maoist
insurgency in Nepal appears to approach
its end state, moreover, it is significant that the districts
that are falling to the Naxalite influence lie along a near-continuous
expanse of the projected Compact Revolutionary Zone (CRZ)
along India's eastern board, that would eventually link
up 'liberated areas' from Nepal in the North (and possibly,
Ladakh and Uttaranchal, other areas that are currently being
targeted), to Tamil Nadu in the South. This is a coherent
strategy articulated and adopted by the Coordination Committee
of Maoist Parties and Organizations of South Asia (CCOMPOSA)
in 2001, and that has been dramatically crystallized on
the ground in just three years. Once the present 'gaps'
in the CRZ have been filled - as it appears that they inevitably
will be, given current trends - the strategic consequences
for India would be devastating, as the CRZ would not only
result in an area of uninterrupted disorder from Nepal in
the North to Tamil Nadu in the South, but would also obstruct
vital linkages with India's troubled Northeast, profoundly
deepening the dangers in that vulnerable region. Since early
2002, moreover, the two most powerful Naxalite groups in
India, the PWG and the MCC, have been discussing the modalities
of a merger which would act as a force multiplier, substantially
increasing their capacities to dominate the regions currently
under their influence. The state's strategy of response,
on the other hand, has been far from coherent or effective.
To return to the present, as the ban on the PWG lapses in
Andhra Pradesh, dalam (armed group) members have
become hyperactive, concentrating on recruitment and training
of cadres, and extension and intensification of activities
in neighbouring States. They have begun to openly conduct
gram sabhas (village courts), 'settling' issues relating
to land disputes, caste discrimination or the sale of arrack
(home brewed alcohol). The PWG has also successfully organized
mass meetings at several locations, including a huge congregation
in the capital city, Hyderabad. In the meanwhile, other
Naxalite factions, including the CPI-ML Praja Prathighatana
Group, have rejected the negotiations, and are taking advantage
of the truce to lure cadres to their fold as well.
While the Governments of other Naxalite affected States
are now working to 'establish conditions conducive to talks',
Naxalite groups in these States, including PWG State units,
have escalated violence in many of these areas, and have
rejected offers of talks as 'deceptive and meaningless'.
Security and Intelligence organizations - as well as observers
who have long watched the trajectory of the Naxalite movement
- believe that the 'peace process' in Andhra Pradesh - and
in any other State where it may be initiated in the proximate
future - would inevitably collapse within six-odd months,
after which a reinvigorated PWG can be expected to resume
violent activities.
Advocates of the 'sympathy and affection' approach to the
resolution of the 'Naxalite problem' underestimate and misunderstand
the dynamic, the ideological motivation and the commitment
of the Maoist movement in South Asia, even as they belittle
its enormous and cumulative successes. They undervalue,
moreover, the extraordinary mobilization capacity of this
subversive creed, particularly among the marginalized millions
in this region, and within the expanding and neglected detritus
of humanity generated by the processes of globalization
and technological transformation. Mao offers not only an
ideology but also the strategy and tactics that could wreck
the uncertain peace of vast areas in the developing world
- as well as regions beyond its confines - with a scale
of violence and destruction that is yet to be imagined by
those who are framing national and counter-terrorism policies
across the contemporary and volatile world. The present
obsession with a single ideological source of terrorism
- Islamist extremism - is contributing directly to a dangerous
disregard of other and rising dangers.
