Adivasi Rebels
In April I wrote about the growing Maoist movement in India, and how the Maoists are increasingly getting support from rural peasants and Adivasis (India’s indigenous population). I later added a link to a story about how the Maoism, in its most violent form, is growing as a global movement. Only recently has the press in the United States seemed to notice this important story, but coverage is growing, and now the Washington Post’s John Lancaster has actually gone to meet some of India’s rebel leaders. He starts by providing some context concerning how serious the situation has become:
Following a long period of relative quiet, the Naxalites in the past several years have expanded their presence to 13 of India’s 28 states, according to official estimates, spurring talk of a “red corridor” extending from Nepal, which is battling a Maoist insurgency of its own, down through the wooded heartland of central and southern India. The Maoist rebels in India and Nepal have acknowledged ideological ties, and security officials suspect logistical collaboration as well.
Equipped with homemade bombs and rifles looted from police stations, the Indian rebels have staged increasingly bold attacks, such as seizing a passenger train for 12 hours in the eastern state of Jharkhand in March. They function in some remote districts as a parallel government, complete with makeshift courts and police. Their violent tactics have turned parts of Chhattisgarh, among other states, into virtual no-go areas for the government, thwarting plans for corporate mining operations in forests that many adivasis regard as their own.
Last month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described the Naxalite movement as “the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country” — no small claim in a nation with many insurgencies, including the long-running Islamic rebellion in Kashmir.
While it seems clear that incidents of violence are growing, I worry about such alarmist rhetoric by state officials. When we were in India Adivasis activists told us that the state was trying to paint all activists as Maoists (even in areas far removed from Maoist activities) in order to justify using violent means to suppress their movement. At the same time, there seems to be no doubt that the Maoists embrace the use of violence, thus making it easier for the government to justify harsh security measures:
Against that backdrop, the death toll from Naxalite violence has jumped from 483 in 2002 to 669 last year, according to the Home Affairs Ministry.
In Chhattisgarh, the Naxalite movement has found abundant recruits among adivasis angered by police harassment, dismal or nonexistent government services and collusion between corrupt officials and criminals engaged in illegal logging. According to government data, 165 people died in Naxalite-related violence last year, and the bloodletting has continued: Last month, Naxalite rebels abducted 50 members of a pro-government militia called the Salwa Judum, then murdered 13 of them by slitting their throats, police said.
“They’re absolutely ruthless killers,” a senior Chhattisgarh security official, B.K.S. Roy, said by telephone from the state capital, Raipur. “I’ve never seen this kind of brutality in my life before, the way they strike and kill Salwa Judum members. They’re hacked to death, heads severed from bodies.”
Maoists in the Philippines have similarly been criticized for their violent tactics.
To his credit, John Lancaster also explores the social conditions that have caused the Maoist movement in India to swell in recent years:
The rank and file was made up mostly of adivasis, several of whom said they joined the movement out of anger toward local authorities.
“I’ve never seen a hospital in any of these villages,” said Nirmala, a slender, short-haired woman in her twenties who joined the movement four years ago and now serves as one of Kosa’s bodyguards. “There are schools, but there are no teachers. The government says the adivasis, my people, have no rights over the forests.”
Another adivasi rebel, Neela, said she was radicalized at the age of 12, when police arrested her father for illegally clearing a small patch of land and imprisoned him for three years.
It seems clear that if India wants to stem the rising tide of Maoism it needs to acknowledge the tremendous injustices faced by the Adivsasi population, and not simply use Maoism as an excuse to further restrict their rights. At the same time the Maoists might want to take a page from the Zapatistas and give nonviolent resistance a try…
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Comments
I don’t think the main issue with Maoism is that it is a violent philosophy. It’s certainly not a “cult of the gun.”
When Mao said “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” it’s an observation – not a commandment. There is no pacifist state. It’s a contradiction in terms.
Over and over we have seen that within the confines of the capitalist (or of course semi-feudal) state, reform measures never challenge the funamental immiseration of the world’s vast majority. It is through the act of social revolution that people stand up off their knees.
After all, it the nominally “Marxist” state governments in India who have again and again betrayed the poorest people, while refusing to engage a genuine struggle (beyond affirmative action type measures) against the historically outdated caste system.
I politically support the Naxalites of India, and of course the humane and decent rebels of India exactly because they are liberation armies. They offer not charity or promises, but the promise of dignity constructed by the very victims of capitalism themselves.
Freedom is never granted. It is seized.
While I agree that states invariably betray their poorest citizens, I don’t think states created by violence are any different in this regard. I fail to see any distinction between your Utopian justifications for violence and those of the right who wish to spread “democracy” in the Middle East - in the end both views support a reality of bloodshed justified by fantasy. It doesn’t matter a wit if you can argue that a Maoist critique of bourgeois democracy shows it to be a better alternative, because we won’t see that alternative materialize - just the blood shed in its name.
As to the question as to whether there is anything inherently violent about Maoism, I never said there was; but I am talking about political movements not ideology. There is a big difference between people taking up arms to defend themselves from violence and joining a political movement that advocates violence as a means of political expression.
Finally, I wished to comment that your phrase “historically outdated caste system” seems to betray a certain teleological view of history which ignores how caste itself has been shaped by Indian modernity.
[…] Back in May I wrote a post implying that Adivasis were increasingly supporting the Naxalite movement in India. I’d like to amend that post, as a recent report makes it clear that the situation is much more complex: Since the launch of Salwa Judum, an anti-Naxalite campaign, in Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh in June 2005, the Adivasis, who constitute 78.51% of the total population of Dantewada, have become victims of the conflict between the Naxalites and the State government of Chhattisgarh. Though majority of the cadres of the Naxalites are Adivasis, they are not the decision makers. “Commander” Kosa, the secretary for the Naxals in Chhattisgarh hails from Andhra Pradesh. The apology by the Maoists for the killings of innocent Adivasis on 28 February 2006 at Darbhaguda was also issued from Andhra Pradesh . Similarly, the Salwa Judum campaign has been taken over by the State as a full-pledged counter-insurgency programme. The Adivasis are the pawns of both the parties of the conflict. They are also the perpetrators as well as the victims of the undeclared civil war. […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
[…] So why was the Indian government still giving credence to such materials as late as the 1990s? Is it simply colonial ethnography on auto-pilot, or might it be that such forms of knowledge production are still seen as a useful means of legitimating certain kinds of state interventions amongst indigenous populations, many of which remain “troublesome“? […]