The coyness with which Indian politicians desist from publicly describing Naxalites as terrorists is telling. But ask them privately, as I have of many, and a surprisingly large number of them have no compunction in saying that “encounters are the only way to deal with them.” These anonymous endorsements for dispensing summary justice by way of staged “encounters” — where police and paramilitary forces are encouraged to gun down suspects in cold blood — also speak volumes about political correctness in the largest democracy on earth.

India has long been called a “soft state” when it comes to taking hard headed decisions in the national interest — that is, taking those decisions in time, well before years of festering brings the country to the brink of calamity. After years of the central government pretending that Naxalism was a state level problem, we are now at that brink nationally. In large swathes of the country today, the writ of the state has been replaced by that of the Naxals, who collect taxes, hold trials, issue punishment (including executions), recruit and operate a standing army, and are deeply dedicated to overthrowing the six-decade old Republic of India.

It is, of course, the failure of the republic to improve the lives of hundreds of millions of Indians that created the conditions for Naxalism to grow in the first place. This original sin has underpinned the guilt-ridden response of many liberals. Naxalism is not a law and order problem, goes the argument; it is a socio-economic one. The reality, of course, is that it is both. The tragedy is that the debate on how to deal with Naxalism invariably treats the problem as one or the other — that is, either a law and order problem, to be dealt with harshly, or a socio-economic problem, to be tackled with dialogue and development — when what is probably required is to do both.

... contd.