Maoists are terrorists, don’t spare them

Participating in a debate on Maoist violence at a television studio in south Delhi last Sunday, I was stunned by the naivete (at best) if not an appallingly indulgent attitude (at worst) of some of the participants who insisted on making the most asinine statements in the mistaken belief that they were being profoundly wise. One of them was Professor Hargopal who refused to criticise the Maoists for being what they are: Plunderers, extortionists and mass murderers. He insisted that instead of decimating those who are waging war on the Indian state, “we should bring about moral pressure on the Maoists and legal pressure on the Government”. He also made the fantastic claim that Maoists are not in the business of kidnapping. Obviously, he is either ignorant of facts or is intent upon suppressing them lest those whom he seeks to protect are exposed as being no better than terrorists of other hues.

A third point was made by another panellist, and enthusiastically endorsed by many others, that Maoists cannot be equated with jihadis — such assertions are no different from the bunkum peddled by Prof Hargopal and his jholawallah ilk who take an indulgent view of hideous crimes committed by terrorists (whose ideological persuasion is immaterial). It’s absurd to draw a distinction between Maoists and jihadis, not the least because, as my friend Ajai Sahni, an expert on security issues, put it, “Getting killed by a Maoist bullet is as bad as getting killed by a jihadi bullet.” But such specifics are wasted on those who refuse to read the writing on the wall and are determined to portray ruthless killers as ‘Gandhians with guns’. Debating the issue with them is really as meaningless an exercise as trying to patiently explain to the likes of Teesta Setalvad why a break at Kanke would do them a world of good.

Nonetheless, Prof Hargopal, who has in the past been the preferred choice of Maoists to negotiate deals with irresolute State Governments (most notably the Government of Odisha) for reasons that do not merit elaboration, needs to be told that his claims are not founded in reality. Kidnapping civilians, officials and public servants is now a routine affair for Maoists, as routine as terrorising tribals, destroying schools and health centres, blowing up telecommunication towers, killing security forces personnel, using women comrades as sex slaves who are subjected to unimaginable perversity to satiate the filthy desires of those who pose as revolutionaries, and killing innocent people to enforce their diktat.

According to the Union Ministry of Home Affairs, which alone appears to be mindful of the threat posed by the Red terrorists to our internal security, Maoists have kidnapped 1,554 people in the past four years. Some of the kidnapped people were released in exchange of Maoists facing trial; others were swapped for cash. As many as 328 of them were killed in cold blood, many of them after being tried in kangaroo courts called “jan adalats” or people’s courts. Last year’s kidnapping of R Vineel Krishna, the then District Collector of Malkangiri in Odisha, was only one such incident. He was released after Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik agreed to free Maoists who were in jail facing trial for their crimes. Interestingly, Divya alias Wallasi, a Maoist ‘area commander’ who was recently arrested during a joint combing operation, and believed to have masterminded Krishna’s abduction, was among the killers of 36 policemen who were attacked while crossing Balimela reservoir on the Andhra Pradesh-Odisha border.

News has just come in that Maoists have kidnapped the Collector of Sukma district in Chhattisgarh. They attacked the convoy of Alex Paul Menon, a Tamil Nadu cadre IAS officer, killed his two bodyguards, and took him hostage. The fate of BJD MLA Jhina Hikaka, kidnapped by Maoists in Odisha, remains unknown. His abductors say that he is still alive and will face trial in a people’s court — the crimes for which he will be tried remain a mystery because he is known to be a popular tribal leader who is dedicated to the socio-economic uplift of his people.

With each passing day, the Maoists are getting increasingly emboldened as a pusillanimous Indian state wrings its hands in despair. Instead of declaring all-out war on Maoists, we continue to twiddle our thumbs and calculate potential losses. There are cautionary voices that urge restraint lest more security forces personnel are killed in counter-insurgency operations. That’s hogwash. Security forces are meant to fight those who threaten our Republic, our democracy and our freedom. In that fight, lives will be lost and blood will flow. This is not to suggest that the lives of our security forces are expendable, or that they can be sacrificed without any concern on the altar of belligerent extremism, but to underscore the fact that the Indian state’s success in overcoming several challenges to the nation’s unity and integrity have not been without the loss of lives — of security forces personnel, of civilians and of those waging war on the state.

Public memory being notoriously short, few would recall the terrible price that had to be paid to put down insurgency in the North-East, or restore peace in Punjab. Young officers and jawans in the prime of their lives are routinely killed while fighting terrorists in Jammu & Kashmir or while preventing jihadis from crossing the Line of Control into India. If we must shed tears, we should do so for all our men in uniform who have laid down their lives for their country and their people, and steel our resolve to avenge their deaths by exterminating the practitioners of violence, no matter what the shade of their evil ideology or their purported cause.

No purpose, however, would be served if the state were to take recourse to either senseless bravado or a bull-headed response to grisly blood-letting by the Maoists, irrespective of whether the victims of their butchery are civilians or security forces. The state must move stealthily, it must strategise with absolute clarity about what it seeks to achieve, and, most important, it must adopt tactics that will enable the security forces to outmanoeuvre the insurgents at every step. There will be errors of judgement, there will be mistakes and there will be slip-ups. Those strategising and fighting the war on Red terror will have to learn from the experience of counter-insurgency operations till now and recalibrate their tactics accordingly. Once that is done, the Government must stay the course and press on till the objective of ridding India of those who wish to supplant our democracy with a totalitarian state no different from Pol Pot’s regime is achieved. Liberty comes attached with a price tag and we should be willing to pay the price, no matter how high.