Memo to the future

Take a body count. Even as the circumstances in which 11 Central Industrial Security Force men were killed in the Nalco siege in Orissa were being confirmed,there came news of Naxal attacks elsewhere: two CRPF men killed on Wednesday; 10 policemen and five election officials on the day after. That’s 28 officials in four days — more than the entire number of policemen killed in the Mumbai attacks. That’s more than what the security forces sustain fighting terrorists and insurgents in Kashmir and the North-east. Yet these numbers aren’t even a blip on the national radar.

These are the consequences of government strategy that tries to fight Naxalites on the cheap. It took the Mumbai attack to impose some semblance of accountability on the office of the Union home minister; but there has been little indication from the Centre that any corrective has been put in place for Shivraj Patil’s waffling on Naxalites. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has in the past asserted that Naxalism was the single biggest internal security threat that India faced; but this fight has,essentially,been bequeathed to the government that takes office in May. Recall: when the entire Naxal leadership was surrounded in the Andhra forests,early on in the UPA government’s tenure,it was a call from New Delhi that saved them. Some states have been less cavalier; human rights activists may rightly demand that charges of excesses be investigated,but at least the Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh governments have taken the threat seriously. Not so Naveen Patnaik’s Orissa. His government’s survival strategy is to sit back and ask for Central forces as a show of commitment — whether against hoodlums in Kandhamal or against Maoists elsewhere. The unprecedented circumstances of the Nalco attack,which involved 300 armed persons,indicate a failure of local intelligence that demands explanation.

While terrorism attacks India at its strongest (pluralism,democracy),Naxalites attack India at its weakest (inability to provide basic governance). But those who confuse sympathy for a cause with sympathy for its proponents,are wrong; India’s Naxalites are cold-blooded murderers who,like armed left-wing militias elsewhere,exploit poverty for what is often little more than grubby extortion money. We’ve seen the consequences of the Patil-Patnaik approach. It is hoped that the new Central and Orissa state governments that will take office a month from now act differently.