Code Red

INDIA’S FEDERAL GOVERNMENT wants talks with the Maoists only if they abjure violence, but it has been silent on the conditions put forward by the Maoists for starting talks. Earlier in February, Union Home Minister P Chidambaram offered to start negotiations with the Maoist leadership only if they agreed to stop the violence. “We are not asking them to surrender weapons but they should stop using them,” Chidambaram told a news conference in Kolkata after a meeting of four states called to finalise the ‘next stage,’ Operation Green Hunt. The Maoists responded the next day by agreeing to talk, but they put up two preconditions. Their military wing chief, Koteswara Rao, alias Kishenji, said that the government would have to stop Operation Green Hunt and release four top leaders, all politburo members of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). “These four leaders will be part of our negotiating team,” Kishenji told this writer.

But there is no indication that the Centre is willing to release their four leaders, Narayan Sanyal, Amitabha Bagchi, Kobad Gandhi and Sushil Roy. A senior home ministry official told this writer, “The Maoists should first commit in writing that they will stop violence and guerrilla activities all across India. Only then we can review the situation and stop Operation Green Hunt.” So it is a ‘pahélé aap’ (you first) situation: the Maoists want the government to stop Operation Green Hunt and release their leaders first, the government wants the Maoists to stop the attacks, but it is not yet clear whether the government is at all interested in releasing the four top leaders. The home ministry official said that the Maoists could negotiate with the leaders they had Chairman Ganapathy, military wing chief Kishenji and one or two other politburo members who are still free. “Releasing the arrested leaders would be a blow to the morale of the security forces,” the official said.

Within a week of Chidambaram’s Kolkata conclave, the Maoists responded by launching a blistering assault on a camp of the paramilitary Eastern Frontier Rifles at Silda, adjoining the troubled enclave of Lalgarh. While many of the force’s jawans lay dead or seriously injured, some half burnt by the blaze set by the Maoists, Kishenji called this writer and a few other journalists to tell them this was the beginning of ‘Operation Peace Hunt.’

Kishenji said, “This is our answer to Chidambaram’s Green Hunt. We feel sorry for the Riflemen who died, but the government is responsible for their death. We want peace but we will fight like hell if Chidambaram wants war.”

One of the stated objectives of Operation Green Hunt is to catch or kill top Maoist leaders to turn the organisation into what a senior Intelligence Bureau official called a “headless organisation.” It is unlikely, therefore, that any arrested top-rung Maoist leader will be released. And if the Maoists don’t budge, the home ministry, in close coordination with the affected states, will take Operation Green Hunt to its second stage.

“Some success has been achieved in intra-state operations after Green Hunt started,” Chidambaram told journalists in Kolkata after the four-state meeting. “Police forces have caught some top leaders and attacked some Maoist camps. But the next stage is to launch larger coordinated inter-state operations.” He emphasised “measured calibration” in moving Operation Green Hunt to its second stage.

Nearly 50,000 federal paramilitary troops, mostly from the Central Reserve Police Force, have been sent to Maoist-affected areas to join state forces in a massive coordinated operation. They will soon be equipped with helicopters and unmanned aerial surveillance vehicles, officials say.

India’s Maoist war will escalate, as the push for peace is weak. Last year, nearly 600 civilians, 317 security personnel and 217 Maoist rebels died in the conflict, as the Maoists steadily expanded their area of influence to cover 223 of India’s 600-odd districts across 20 states. The body count will rise as Operation Green Hunt intensifies. Unlike India’s many ethnic separatist movements in the country’s Northeast or elsewhere, who negotiate for political space and call it a day when they get their pound of flesh, there is very little ground for negotiations between the Indian government and the Maoists. The Maoists seek a structural change of Indian polity that’s unacceptable for India’s neo-ruling elite, who have developed a stake in globalisation, liberalisation and capitalism.

“Be it the Congress or the Bharatiya Janata Party, they want a free play of capital in India,” says Ranabir Samaddar, author of ABiography of the Indian Nation, 1947-1997 and a former radical Left activist. “The Maoists oppose that and would like to fight for a different political order. They are not fighting for territory, but for serious issues. There is hardly any meeting ground for talks.”

But even serious pro-state analysts, like Ajai Sahni of the Delhi-based Institute of Conflict Management, see the Maoists as “one of the most sustainable anti-state ideologies and movements.” Recently, Sahni was quoted as saying, “Unless something radical is done in terms of a structural revolution in rural areas, you will see a continuous expansion of Maoist insurrection.”

The Maoists are offering to negotiate for ‘tactical reasons’ to get a breather, to regroup, to re-equip and to gain new allies among the country’s many separatist movements and NGOs fighting for the rights of tribals, Dalits and the rural poor. But Chidambaram and Home Secretary GK Pillai, a shrewd combination, are capable of seeing through the Maoist motives. Much as they might not like to intensify the anti-Maoist operations in a rapid and abrupt manner, they might also not fall for the conditions put up by the Maoists for starting talks. The Indian intelligence agencies are trying to unite factions that have broken off from the Maoists and unite them with state vigilante forces such as Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh and CPI (M)-backed militias in West Bengal. These are the ‘support forces’ meant to spot, hunt and fight the Maoists alongside the huge numbers of federal and state troops deployed on the ground.

The government is also creating an iron curtain to keep the mass media from the battle zones. The stakes are high as the Maoist conflict turns into India’s first transregional civil war since Independence that defies efforts to localise it (which is why Chidambaram is emphasising ‘inter-state operations’). It is, indeed, a make or break situation for the two sides, the government and the ruling elite on one side of the fence and the Maoists and the poor and dispossessed on the other. The Maoists are trying to expand the theatre of battle by offering alliances with the separatist armies of the Northeast; they already have a deal with Manipur’s People’s Liberation Army and are trying several deals with the likes of the United Liberation Front of Asom.