India should wake up to Maoist terror after Sukma massacre
Who hasn’t got a peeve? But we don’t pick up guns and shoot our own people
When more is said and written about a commercial film like Baahubali 2 than about the cold-blooded slaughter of 26 soldiers in Sukma and the echo of this massacre in India’s so-called leftist campuses who support these killing and, having done so, roam around freely, then we have to wonder how correctly we are ploughing the fourth estate. In the words of US President Donald Trump, has media lost the plot?
Professor (Dr) Buddha Singh of the controversial leftist liberal Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) based in New Delhi said his car was vandalised and unknown persons targeted his house by throwing stones because he held a condolence meeting for the 26 CRPF Sukma and Kupwara martyrs slaughtered by Maoists.
Mao Tse-Tung’s little red book of thoughts is so passe it makes a VCR look fashionable. Even in China it has no credence so who is it inspiring in Chattisgarh, Andhra, Bihar and Jharkand. It is estimated that over the past decade and a half, these insurgents have reached a strength of 65,000 men and women and mostly hail from the impoverished and marginalised sections of society.
Their rage is fueled by a desire to overthrow the legitimate government and build a nationwide movement that addresses their sense of injustice and exploitation over the years and follows Mao and Lenin in a throwback that has no roots anywhere else in the world. Who hasn’t got a peeve? But we do not pick up guns and shoot our own people. In 2006, then Indian PM Manmohan Singh warned the country that the Maoists would be ‘the biggest security challenge for India.’ Eleven years later it seems to have gotten worse. This neglect of using Intel to break the movement and address the grievances and make consolidated moves to bring some sense of security to the villagers currently held at ransom between a rock and a hard place (on the one side the constant threat of being arm-twisted by the Naxalites and on the other, the armed constabulary) is now kicking sand in the nation’s face.
To a great extent, the ostrich in the sand approach has backfired and the sudden offensive now could produce more blow back and disenchantment in the hinterland. But some action is necessary.
To have the firepower and the cadres to kill 26 people in one attack without using explosives is not an easy task. It requires more sophisticated weaponry than employing country-made arms and demands a high level of training. Which means there must be camps and proper instructors that fashion a reasonably adept fighting machine. Even if one concedes that the CRPF soldiers (a paramilitary force) are not the best of the bunch involved in the attack and the melt away afterwards means there is a money trail and there is military strategy in play. Who is paying for this acumen?
Face it: You don’t get 26 kills with country-made weapons and India has to realise this is a well-organised force.
Whether their leaders are selling narcotics, robbing and intimidating villagers, taking their payoff purses from mining companies or marketing illegal hemp there is this money trail. The Home Ministry must follow it. The country has the military wherewithal to block supply routes to the core groups even if it calls for aerial surveillance.
There have to be at least a few thousand full-timers in the ranks of the Maoists to be able to plan and then execute an ambush with such ease and accuracy. Unless the country realises that with the blazing speed of information dissemination today it will not take another 10 years for this aggression to spread and the nascent movements in other states like Odisha, Bengal and Maharashtra could burgeon into becoming major strongholds for hostiles capable of huge damage.
The sort of banners and posters they place (policemen keep away
You don’t get 26 kills with country-made weapons and India has to realise this is a well-organised force
from the green hunt and try to be friends of poor. Police soldiers, do not obey orders of the senior officials, instead join the people’s army) are intimidating because they are followed by retribution, coercion and bloodspill.
There is nothing romantic about such people movements and their raucous call for a new order. These people are coldblooded killers and even though it is a prickly pear in that they are intrinsically countrymen, the fact is they have no scruples about killing their own.
The government must wake up to this rising camp and put forward a blueprint of action that brings an end to the bloodshed and allows the rural populations the right to live peacefully and without fear of retribution. If, in doing this, the rank and file of these Maoists can be made to feel they will get a fair deal this hydra-headed monster can be tamed.
India must see the Sukma massacre as a wake-up call not as a ‘one of those things’ incident in a nation where the huge majority have no idea of the enormity of the issue or how it can spread like the virus it is. Offering rewards for the leaders or sending in half-baked troops is not enough of an answer. The first step is nationwide awareness that there is a problem. Sukma should have sent shock waves through the country. Has it?