India's rising Maoist rebellion

The eastern Indian state of Orissa has outlawed membership in the militant Communist Party of India (Maoist) known as the Naxalites, escalating a 40-year-old conflict between the Indian government and Maoist rebels. [ Editor's note: The original version did not state the full name of the Naxalite party.]

The Associated Press reports that Orissa authorities announced the ban on Naxalite membership Friday. Prior to the ban, Orissa authorities could only arrest those Naxalites suspected of taking part in attacks.

The government decided to enact the ban because of fears the rebels are planning to kill more police and government officials, whom they accuse of colluding with landlords and rich farmers. The insurgents demand land and jobs for poor farm workers.

"We have intelligence reports that the rebels are planning more violence. Therefore, the state Cabinet decided to ban the organization," said Subhash Pani, the state chief secretary.

The Naxalites condemned the ban as antidemocratic, reports The Hindu.

"The ban is a brutal assault on the democratic rights of the people," the secretary of the party's State Committee, Sunil, said in a two-page statement. Stating that the Naveen Patnaik Government had been treating CPI (Maoist) and organisations such as the Chasi Mulia Samiti as 'virtually unlawful' outfits since long, the party said the ban had exposed the 'real character' of the 'so-called democratic system of the country.'

The Naxalites also announced that, starting Wednesday, they would barricade roads across Orissa in protest of the ban. The Press Trust of India reports that public transportation in part of the region has been completely halted, though "markets and other institutions were functioning normally."

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The ban protest comes on the heels of fighting between police and rebels. BBC reports that 13 suspected rebels were killed Thursday in two incidents in another eastern Indian state, Chhattisgarh.

The incidents are only the latest violent clashes between the Maoists and others, both villagers and the government, reports The Globe and Mail.

The Maoists -- sometimes called Naxalites, in reference to an armed uprising in the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal, from which the movement began in 1967 -- have maintained a low-level insurrection in India for nearly 40 years, organizing uprisings among landless workers, hijacking trains, mounting frequent attacks on police posts and industrial facilities, and murdering their political opponents. Their rebellion is gaining ground, expanding across 14 eastern and central Indian states, running all the way from the Nepal border in the north to the southern coast, and becoming a major Communist force intent on winning control of the Indian state through military means.

And the war is growing ever more deadly. More than 700 people, 500 of them civilians, were killed in raids, land-mine blasts and other incidents in 2005. Provisional data from the past four months suggest the death toll will be higher in 2006.

Ajai Sahni of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management told The Globe and Mail that the rising violence may indicate the Maoist threat to the Indian government has surpassed that of the Kashmir separatists. He notes, however, that "unlike the Kashmir issue, which we could blame on somebody else, this was entirely indigenous. It point[s] to state failures."

Voice of America reported that, in an April meeting with officials from states affected by the Naxalites, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the Maoist insurrection is the " single-biggest security threat" that India faces.

However, UPI reports that India has ruled out talks with the Naxalites until the rebels disarm. Instead, Interior Minister Shivraj Patil called on the affected states to boost the number of officers available to deal with the rebels.

One of the primary means by which the Indian government has dealt with the Naxalites is the "Salwa Judum" program. The Salwa Judum movement, started in June 2005, created and armed village militias to fight the Maoists in affected states, and was meant to be an innovative way to oust the Maoists from their rural territory.

However, a team of independent Indian citizens, including Ramachandra Guha of the Hindustan Times, investigated the effects of Salwa Judum in May and found that it had made the situation worse.

We found that far from controlling the conflict in Dantewara and Bastar, the creation of Salwa Judum had, in fact, intensified it. The killings had increased, on both sides. The Maoists were laying land mines and blasting bombs at citizens alleged to be supporters of Salwa Judum. On the other hand, tribals alleged to be sympathetic to the Maoists were having their homes burnt and their throats cut. There was a cycle of violence and counter-violence, of revenge and retribution, early anticipations of what might ��� if not tamed and checked ��� become a full-fledged civil war.

Since the Salwa Judum movement began, the law and order machinery has broken down and the violence has escalated. Our third and, in some ways, most depressing finding was that the burden of the conflict has been borne by the villagers, and by the tribals among them in particular. An atmosphere of fear and insecurity pervades the district. Families and villages are divided, one half living with or in fear of the Maoists, the other half in fear of or in roadside camps controlled by the Salwa Judum. Although exact figures are impossible to obtain, probably close to a thousand innocent civilians have been killed in the year since Salwa Judum began. Several thousand homes have been burnt and looted. And an estimated 40,000 people have been displaced.

Citizen peace committee member Kannabiran says the rebellion thrives on the support of those impacted by continuing underdevelopment.

"That is the understanding of the police - if you kill people, the movement will die," he explained. "The chemistry of this movement has not been understood by the police and they are not the persons who are to solve it. It is unfortunate it has been handed over to the police."

The federal government is also urging the states to deliver social justice and development to their poorest regions. But analysts say the growing strength of the Maoists indicates the message has not penetrated.

But while the Maoists stood up for the rural, tribal poor in the past, The Globe and Mail writes, they now are too focused on nationwide upheaval to help those for whom they claim to be fighting.

The tribal people of rural India need roads, schools and jobs. But the Maoists are committed to a full-scale Communist upheaval and radical redistribution of wealth, and believe that these incremental gains will never erase the gross inequalities of what they term India's "bourgeois comprador democracy."

"There is no dilution in the ideology," the Institute for Conflict Management's Mr. Sahni told The Globe and Mail. "There is absolutely no set of economic initiatives on the horizon that can give prosperity, dignity et cetera to 810 million people in rural India."

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