The operation in Lalgarh was by and large successful, but not complete as we want to arrest all top Maoists leaders”. Needless to point out, the top guy in the MHA boasted about something which is essentially vacuous. Not a single top ranking leader has been arrested in ten months thereafter. Venkateswara Reddy a k a Telugu, arrested in March this year, masqueraded as one of the most-wanted leader of Maoists' Andhra Pradesh region by the joint forces and the DGP of West Bengal Bhupinder Singh but Dipak does not feature in the CPI(Maoist) press release, captioned — “CPI(Maoist) Party Cadre: Leaders, Martyrs, Those Imprisoned, and Memorials”, available on the net. Eight Maoists were killed by CRPF at Salboni on June 16, but no leader was among the dead.

The joint forces, the police and para-military cops including COBRA and Grey Hound contingents, were first deployed on June 18 last year in the Lalgarh area and then gradually penetrated into the entire 300 square kilometre-stretch of what is known as Jangal Mahal. From that day onwards, Section 144 remains clamped in the entire zone. Free movement of people remains blocked. People there — mostly Adivasis have been facing state repression, leave alone inter-village communication and people-to-people-contact. Jangal Mahal in a sense is a barrack, said a senior lecturer of sociology at Vidyasagar University in Midnapur.

In a recent interview to a Bengali news monthly, the CPI(Maoist) general secretary Ganapathy snapped fingers at the massive deployment of para-military forces to combat (read wipe out) the Naxalites. “Police force in each of those states are more than national police force of several European states. In Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh is anywhere between seven and eight lakh police forces have been deployed. Of these, between 2.5 and three lakhs are directly targeted against the people”. Maoists mostly operate in Adivasi-dominated areas. The population of Adivasis is estimated at eight lakhs. So on an average, for every Adivasi, there is one police man.

But Pillai brands Maoists as 'fascists' and accuses them of killing innocent people for 'flimsy reasons', in justifying the policy statement of MHA that the joint forces “will be there as long as it is required and if necessary may be up to two years'. He claimed that after being under the grip of Maoists for eight months, Lalgarh and its adjoining areas in Paschim Medinipur district were limping back to normalcy and civil and police administration started functioning normally.

The reality is just the opposite. Forces translating OGH into a sanguinary reality arbitrarily detained three journalists and three civil society-activists at Lalgarh for long hours, after being picked up at Mathurapur village in Salboni police station area. The newspersons were released. But Dr Nisha Biswas, scientist at the CSIR-outfit Central Glass and Ceramic Research Institute, Behala college teacher Kaniska Chowdhury and fiction-writer Manik Mandal were not released on the plea that they violate provisions under Section 144. Paschim Medinipur SP Manoj Verma claimed that they went there at the invitation of Maoists and the outlawed Pulisi Santras-Birodhi Janaganer Committee (People's Committee against Police Atrocities- PCPA), apart from participation of PCPA, including presence in public courts. “We are also trying to find out if they had brought financial assistance for the Maoists from Kolkata”. The police are at home in fabricating criminal charges. During the Singur agitation, two-and-a-half year old girl Payel Bag was arrested on charges of attempt to murder.

First of all, how could three persons violate Section 144 of CrPc? Secondly, when was PCPA banned? Thirdly, is presence in a public court for trial of members of outlawed organizations or participation in rallies or meeting of PCPA when it was not banned a cognizable offence? Fourthly, is the detention of journalists on the plea of interrogation a reflection of 'limping back to normalcy', that too ten months after the imaginary assurance? Fifthly, what is the logic of detention on hypothesis that the three might be carrying fund for the Maoists? All this vouchsafes the description - barrack situation.

True, some 230 members and supporters of CPI(M) and their mass organisations - some of CPI were killed by Maoists. Most of them, claims the Maoists, were notorious having unleashed atrocities against the Adivasis or worked as police-informers while the Left Front leaders refute the accusation stating that they were innocents and commoners. The MHA is committed to pay compensation of Rs three lakhs to each of the next of kins of victims of Maoist violence. But what about 60 poor Adivasis, gunned down by the joint forces, with no evidence of involvement in Maoist campaign? The Union government is silent about this, not to speak of CPI(M) or LF leaders. The LF government exhibits simply contempt against these hapless 60. The list is longer now. Over 20,000 inhabitants have fled the place after the Lalgarh experiment began and there is no trace of over 8000 of them.

Pillai proved his acumen in containing insurgency in the North-East. “He knows the North-East like the lines on his right palm”, a former principal secretary of Assam told a group of friends at an informal luncheon get-together in Kolkata a few years back. But the tonality of Maoist spread is very different from secessionist posture of ULFA, NSCN factions etc for whom terrorism was a business and luxurious life style of their leaders.

Pillai's Lalgarh Laboratory shows signs of utter failure. It is time that Pillai and his boss P Chidambaram, undertake a self-critical review and think of a genuinely pro-Adivasi - not pro-corporate - alternative in order to weave eight lakh Adivasis into the mainstream through a series of dialogues taking civil society activists into confidence.

But all this may be a wishful thinking as the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described Naxalism as the 'greatest internal threat', although the UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi appears to have a different approach. (IPA)