The same charge can be levelled against Arundhati Roy and other critics of the anti-Maoist offensive in India. Their view is that the government is waging a war against its own people, who have taken up arms in anger and desperation after many years of exploitation. They want the government, therefore, to negotiate with the Maoists, especially since they “have not been defeated”, as a Bangalore-based newspaper has said. Imbued with a romantic vision of the Maoists as the only saviours of the close-to-nature tribal way of life, these pro-Maoist activists rail against a supposedly rapacious government in league with greedy capitalists.

In their eagerness to support the Maoists, these intellectuals, including media personnel, virtually approve of the longstanding objective of the communist revolutionaries, which is to overthrow the state and establish a proletarian dictatorship. Given this basic aim, talks with them cannot but lead to a dead end since there cannot be a compromise between parliamentary and people's democracies. It has been suggested that since New Delhi can negotiate with secessionists in Kashmir and the north-east, why cannot it enter into a dialogue with the Maoists? The answer is that the talks in Kashmir and elsewhere revolve round the question of concessions, viz. greater autonomy, within the parameters of the Indian constitution, and not beyond it.

This is one of the reasons why the negotiations with the Naga militants are stalled because of their insistence on “sovereignty”. It is the same with the Maoists. Since they cannot be expected to accept the “bourgeois” constitution, it will not serve any purpose by sitting at a table with them. But the ideological divergence between democratic and totalitarian concepts is not the only difficulty in engaging the Maoists. What is even more important is the fact that they represent no one but themselves.

It is true that they have been able to set up bases in tribal areas. But there is nothing to suggest that they have done so by winning them over ideologically. Whatever Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought was taught to the tribals must have been gobbledygook to them. The only one of Mao Zedong's dictums which they may have appreciated was that power grows out the barrel of a gun. It is through coercion and an initial pretence of being on their side in their daily struggle for existence, which enabled the Maoists to establish themselves in the tribal hinterland.

The government's failures in this respect are, of course, obvious. For a start, it never thought that the Left extremists would be able to survive the crushing blow which they received during the first phase of their movement, which began in Naxalbari in 1967. Apart from fake encounters, the arrests of thousands of Naxalites and their brutal treatment in jail, which was noted by Amnesty International, went a long way towards decimating the movement.

Although the Naxalites shifted their base to Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh, which Charu Mazumdar thought would be the Yenan of India, the movement continued to suffer from debilitating splits. As Sumanta Banerjee recounts in his book, India's Simmering Revolution, 13 Naxalite groups met in 1981 to explore the possibility of unity, but failed. The differences were mainly over the question of open and underground activity, with some of the smaller groups favouring Mazumdar's line of “annihilation of class enemies”.

It was only the unity of the People's War Group and the Maoist Communist Centre in 2004 which aided the process of recovery. But even this could have been stymied if the government had not been oblivious of the manner in which these two groups were combining their forces. The government had apparently been blinded by its earlier success to note this menacing development. To make matters worse, India had one of its worst home ministers at this time who brushed aside all reports of the Maoist depredations by saying that more people died in road accidents than in Maoist attacks.

It wasn't his failures on the Maoist front which finally led to Shivraj Patil's removal, but the Mumbai mayhem of 26/11. His successor, P. Chidambaram, is evidently more efficient. But he, too, seems to have underestimated the threat posed by the Maoists and overestimated the capacity of the police and paramilitary forces to counter them. After the Dantewada tragedy, it has been finally been realized that more rigorous training is necessary to deal with the Maoists, along perhaps with air support to locate their hiding places. (IPA Service)