Changing face of Maoist threat
SECTIONS OF ULTRA-LEFT GROUPS ALLEGEDLY JOINING FORCES WITH BACKWARD CASTES
Former prime minister Manmohan Singh had once stoked a debate when he identified the threat from Maoist insurgents as the biggest challenge to India’s national security.
Even without getting into the merits of such a claim, one can still say this with a fair bit of certainty that given the trail of bloodshed left behind by this ultra-left group in its quest for a “socialist revolution” in India in the last 50 years, the challenge posed to the nation’s security apparatus is indeed formidable.
Earlier this year, police from the western city of Pune arrested five people — from different cities across the country — for their alleged role in fomenting caste-based violence. Pune police and the Intelligence Bureau had alleged that those arrested in nationwide raids — Varavara Rao, Sudha Bharadwaj, Gautam Navlakha, Vernon Gonsalves and Arun Ferreira — were associated with ultra-Left Naxalite and Maoist organisations. They were charged with direct involvement in inciting members of the Dalit (backward caste) community to stage violent protests against the state administration in Maharashtra in January this year.
The authorities also linked those arrested to a reported plot to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The arrests of these five accused, termed as “urban Maoists”, were connected with the arrests of five other suspects in June this year who, according to the investigators, were involved in organising a public meeting just a day before caste-based violence rocked Bhima-Koregaon in Maharashtra. It was alleged that those arrested had exhorted members of the Dalit community to stage violent protests.
The terms “urban Maoists” or “urban Naxalites” have often been loosely used to refer to members and sympathisers of ultra-Left Naxalite organisations such as Communist Party of India (Maoist) — a banned outfit — and Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) or CPI (M-L).
However, according to some political analysts, apart from a partial consolidation of the anti-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) vote, these “urban Maoists” are unlikely to have any major electoral impact in the immediate future.
“Urban Maoists can help mobilise pro-Dalit sentiments and that can reflect poorly on the BJP in certain pockets of India in the 2019 Lok Sabha election. But to say that Maoists-Naxalites pose a threat to India’s federal structure would be an overstatement,” Debasis Bhattacharya, a former CPI (M-L) member-turned-journalist, told Gulf News from Kolkata.
In India, historically, a section of the Left-leaning intelligentsia, particularly on the campuses of some renowned universities and higher-education institutions, has often been found to have harboured a sympathy for ultra-Left ideologues.
In that sense, the term “urban Maoist” is neither new nor is the trend unheard-of. Yet, what has been worrying law-enforcement authorities in recent months is an offshoot of this ultra-Left sympathy that has apparently set out to find common cause with disgruntled elements within the backward caste communities.
The prime target of this “urban Maosist’-Dalit combine is the ruling dispensation at the Centre, led by the BJP. Keeping this new contagion in mind, a consolidation of the Dalit and backward caste vote in next year’s Lok Sabha election cannot be ruled out.
If opposition parties led by the Congress can join forces with the Dalit sentiment, then BJP is likely to feel the heat at the hustings.
But Bhattacharya still believes that these “urban Maoists” can only have a limited appeal in the current context. Numerically, too, they are hardly formidable, he reasoned. “Unlike the Soviet Union in 1917 or China in 1949, India is certainly not going through a revolutionary struggle right now,” he explained.