Analysis: India fights ultras differently

NEW DELHI, Dec. 19 (UPI) -- India has decided to fight growing Maoist rebellion with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seeking report cards from the insurgency-hit states, which would be placed before the conference of the chief ministers slated to be held Thursday.

"The government's plan to fight Naxalism through development will be put to test during the chief ministers' conference on internal security on December 20, as report cards of 33 districts which have been identified as worst affected by Naxal terror would be discussed threadbare," said a top Interior Ministry official.

The chief secretaries of eight states marred by Maoist violence would unfold the comprehensive development plan they have prepared and the initiatives taken to ensure overall development in the past three months, the Interior Ministry said. An inter-ministerial group under the Interior Ministry in a recent report recommended that Singh seek report cards from the state government where 33 districts worst-affected by Naxal militancy are located. The additional secretary Vinay Kumar had chaired the interior ministerial group meeting called last week to review the overall situation in these districts.

The group said more than 20 percent of police stations in these 33 districts reported higher number of casualties on account of Maoist attacks. The Interior Ministry in a note sent to states concerned has asked them to come with the progress report of these districts before coming to attend the meeting. India's central Chhattisgarh and western Jharkhand states are badly hit by Maoist violence.

According to Interior Ministry figures among the 33 Naxal-marred districts 10 are in Jharkhand and seven in Chhattisgarh. These two states account for more than two-thirds of the 571 deaths due to Naxal violence till Oct. 31 this year. While working on the plan the group studied the reasons behind the expansion of Naxalism in the states. "We arrived at the conclusion that poverty and non-development of the regions were major reasons for the ultra getting footholds in the hunger-stricken and under-developed states," Kumar said.

The federal government has in the proposed development plan identified one district each in Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh in the new category for overall development on a priority basis to prevent the rebels from consolidating their base in the poverty-stricken areas. While six remaining districts belong to Bihar, five are in Orissa and two in Maharashtra. As per the proposed development plan the inter-ministerial group, which has been formed on Naxalism, will prepare various development schemes and programs for the affected states and districts and also monitor ongoing development works in other Naxal-affected districts. The rebels have a strong presence in 13 Indian states and the government says are focusing on the new block of 33. Currently, 165 districts in the country have some Naxal presence.

With a view to make the development plan as comprehensive as it could be, the government has included joint secretary-rank officers from the ministries of panchayati raj, rural development, tribal affairs, elementary education, health, forest, information and broadcasting, environment, women and child development and agriculture in the elite group. The group has also been interacting with the high-level state officials relating to security matters to keep a regular watch on the activities of the insurgents. The proposed plan suggests the federal ministries directly monitor all centrally sponsored development plans and programs in Maoist-hit states.

Meanwhile, banned guerrillas have called for spreading the insurgency to all states of the country while celebrating the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army week from this Sunday in Dantewara, one of the most affected districts of Chhattisgarh state. The rebels have pasted posters in the Bastar region, calling upon their cadres to take the war to all the corners of the country. The Maoist rebels have been waging an armed struggle against the Indian establishment to turn the country in to a Communist regime.

The rebels formed the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army in December 2000 in the memory of three of their Central Committee Members -- Shyam, Mahesh and Murali -- who they claimed were killed by Andhra Pradesh Police in fake encounters. Following the merger of the two Maoist groups into Communist Party of India (Maoists) on Sept. 21, 2004, the PLGA was converted into PLA and vowed to step up their armed struggle. The rebels said during the PLA celebration week they would specifically be targeting security forces, but of late they have started attacking strategic installations like telephone exchanges, railway stations and tracks and electricity towers.

The ultras held their 9th annual conference on the Jharkhand-Orissa border a few months back, where they passed a resolution vowing to free their comrades currently lodged in the jails of various militancy-hit states. In their attempt to get arrested rebels released, they successfully broke jails in three states and freed cadres.

"This congress resolves to strive to carry out every possible means to free our comrades from jails. With support from the masses, we had carried out historic actions such as the Jehanabad and Udaigiri jailbreaks," the resolution said.

The successive jailbreaks have caught the authorities napping, but the ultras were merely doing what they had promised to do a long time ago. The resolution is available with the federal Interior Ministry that it has circulated to all the Maoist-hit states. State governments have not taken any precaution despite having prior information from Sunday's jailbreak in Dantewara area of Chhattisgarh where ultras overpowered guards and freed 294 Maoists. In view of the growing Maoist threat to jails in Naxal-affected states, federal Interior Secretary Madhukar Gupta has written to all states on the need to increase security in prisons and address the problem of overcrowding.

The Naxal-affected states remain far from prepared to tackle Maoist violence. Indeed, a consistent feature across all the major Maoist-affected states is that they have extraordinarily poor policing capacities. "There is ample evidence that large proportions of the Central allocation for police modernization and up-gradation remain unspent or are being diverted or miss-spent. Utilization of funds has been particularly poor over the years in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand," said A B Mahapatra, director of the Center for Asian Strategic Studies, a non-governmental body working on issues relating to security and intelligence.

According to the Interior Ministry's Status Paper on Internal Security, the increase in casualties of civilians is mainly due to high violence levels in Chhattisgarh and to some extent in Jharkhand. "Chhattisgarh alone accounts for 49.30 percent of total incidents and 59.80 percent of total casualties in the current year," the paper noted. There is, however, no assessment of the reasons for the decline in violence in other states, where focused police action has resulted in decline in Maoist activities.

"There is reason to believe that the decline in violence is a Maoist decision, rather than any significant gain on the part of the state Forces. Maoist efforts are evidently and increasingly focused on political mobilization and consolidation over wider areas," said Ajai Sahani, executive director of the Institute of Conflict Management, a non-governmental think tank.