By Simon Robinson/Southern Chhattisgarh
The news came crackling over the radio, the voice fading in and out as the sound waves bounced through the wooded hills and valleys of central India to the camp where the militants — and a TIME photographer and myself — lay down to sleep. Earlier that day in May, a raiding gang of some 300 Maoist insurgents had attacked a plant belonging to Indian steel giant Essar, the radio news program declared. More than 50 trucks and pieces of heavy machinery had been destroyed. The commander of the unit in the camp that night, Deva, a boyish-looking man of just 24 or 25 (he wasn't quite sure), allowed a smile to spread across his face for a moment. His comrades-in-arms against the government of India and the companies that drive its booming economy had struck again. That, he said, should answer my question about whether the Maoist insurgents went easy on some mining companies in the area so as to force them to pay protection money and bribes instead. "If the public wants to teach a lesson to Essar, then we'll teach them a lesson," said Deva.
You've heard of rich India and poor India, a land of high-tech workers and slum dwellers alike. This is a story about a third India that exists at the nexus of the two, which feeds off the excesses of the country's new wealth and preys on its most vulnerable. It is the story of the Naxalites, a Maoist insurgency that has grown from the margins four decades ago to become, in the words of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, "the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country." It is a tale of ideology and mafia-like thuggery, a conflict born in a vacuum of government inaction, and fueled by official mismanagement and corruption. And it is the story of the millions caught in between.
A Turn to the Left India is no stranger to violent rebellion, as the decades-long struggle in Kashmir attests. But the separatist conflict there and low-level insurgencies in the country's remote northeast grind on at the periphery, driven by groups agitating to break away. The Maoists, like their ideological brothers in Nepal who recently took power through elections, are different. They want to overthrow the government in New Delhi and install a new one, and they have taken their fight to the geographic heart of the country, to the scrubby woodland and remote, poor villages that blanket a huge chunk of central India. The would-be revolutionaries trace their roots back to 1967, when a group of activists split away from India's mainstream Communist Party and initiated a peasant uprising in the West Bengal village of Naxalbari. The Naxalite movement grew quickly and attracted landless laborers and student intellectuals, but a government crackdown in the 1970s broke the group into myriad feuding factions. By the 1990s, as India began to liberalize its economy and economic growth took off, violent revolution seemed more quaint relic than threat.
No longer. The Naxalite resurgence began in 2004 when the two biggest splinters of the original movement — one Marxist and one Maoist — set aside their differences and joined to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The combined force — which Indian government security officials and independent analysts now estimate at between 10,000 and 20,000 armed fighters plus at least 50,000 active supporters — has quickly consolidated power across great swathes of India's poorest regions. The central government, which lists the Naxalites as a banned terrorist group, says that 11 of India's 28 states are now affected in one way or another by the insurgency. Nongovernment organizations put the number of affected states even higher. The rebels tax local villagers, extort payments from businesses, abduct and kill "class enemies" such as government officials and police officers, and stop aid getting through to people caught in the cross fire.
The militia's strikes have grown more daring. In March last year, some 400 Naxalites surrounded a police camp in southern Chhattisgarh, lit the camp up using powerful lights and generators and lobbed grenades and petrol bombs for more than three hours, killing 55 people. Last December, in the same area, a single Maoist overpowered a jail guard and set free 294 inmates, including 15 senior Naxalite fighters. In February this year, more than 100 insurgents laid siege to three police stations, a police outpost, a police training school and a government armory in the state of Orissa, killing 13 policemen and a bystander and hauling off hundreds of rifles, semiautomatics, light machine guns, pistols and ammunition. Not a single Maoist was killed. Include government security forces, civilians and the Naxalites themselves, and the conflict killed 837 people in 2007, enough to make it deadlier than the Kashmir conflict for the first time ever. "It's absolutely a growing threat," says Ajai Sahni, executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi and a keen observer of the re-emergence of the Naxalites. "You can't escape that fact."
Ripe for Revolution A recent — and extremely rare — trip into a Naxalite zone in the state of Chhattisgarh shows just how much control the Maoists have in India's neglected heartland. After weeks of negotiating, I received word from a senior commander there that cadres from the area would escort a photographer and me into the field to meet a rebel unit. After an early morning, two-hour motorbike ride along dirt roads south of the town of Dantewada, across rivers where women beat their clothes against rocks and through villages full of thatched and terracotta-roofed huts, scrawny chickens and children with distended bellies (a classic sign of malnutrition), we set off by foot deep into the forested hills.
The people there don't just live on the edge of Indian society — they live beyond it, in a void that successive governments in New Delhi have neglected for decades. In this part of the country, far removed from the famed call centers of modern India, there are no roads, no power, no running water, no telephones and no officials to answer pleas for help.
The inhabitants of these villages are known as Adivasis, or "original dwellers." Most Indians call them tribals, a category that doesn't even register in India's complicated caste pecking order but stands outside it. The British colonial rulers treated Adivasis as encroachers on the very land they had occupied for generations, a legal absurdity that India's current government has only recently corrected. Adivasis are entitled to reserved places in universities and government jobs but they remain among India's poorest and most marginalized. In village after village on our journey, the only visible sign of a government presence was an occasional well with metal hand pump.
Born in the hills he now fights from, Deva — he gave just one name — is an Adavasi like most of the insurgency's foot soldiers. Naxalite commanders have historically come from the movement's educated ranks and often speak English. Deva speaks only Gondi, a local tongue. If he has a second language it is the strange, religious-like discipline of Maoism. Our conversations were punctuated with long silences as he turned questions over in his head before answering them, often with a slogan or a long monologue that sounded torn from the small collection of books and newspapers that his unit read and reread and then teach to local villagers. He began learning Maoism at eight, he said. Two of his five siblings are also Maoist fighters. They had a good childhood, helping their father farm rice and hunt in the forests. There was no school in his village and so he and his siblings attended classes given by rebel soldiers who had moved into the area. What they taught made perfect sense to him. "For thousands of years we have been here but we don't have rights and the government does nothing for us: no health, no education, no services. They don't come here," Deva said. "At the same time they don't respect us. They say they can give out rights to this land to mining companies and they have the power to do that. We say, No."
There's no denying the insurgency has prospered in areas of official neglect. In a paper he presented to Parliament two years ago, Home Minister Shivraj Patil said that "Naxalites operate in [a] vacuum created by [an] absence of administrative and political institutions." The Naxalites, Patil said, "take advantage of the disenchantment prevalent among the exploited segments of the population" to "offer an alternative system of governance which promises emancipation ... through the barrel of a gun."
Domestic Violence That textbook description of how an insurgency works was on show in the village we visited — a small collection of huts Deva and his unit of 130 men and women use as an occasional base as they constantly shift around the hills. There, as elsewhere, the Naxalites run a parallel administration, complete with tax collectors, a school and very basic health facilities. Late in the afternoon, seven women militants dressed in tunics and red sashes danced and sang for gathered villagers, preaching the benefits of Maoism, railing against exploitative mining companies and chanting about the evils of New Delhi. Dozens of young kids listened intently. In a mock training drill put on for the visiting reporters, the same kids watched uniformed insurgents practice creeping through thick jungle and assume various attack positions. "Our prime mission is to awake the public and then revolution will happen automatically," a squad commander named Bhima told me.
But Maoism's methods are no gentle wake-up call. India's Naxalites have taken to heart Mao Zedong's maxim that "the seizure of power by armed force, the settlement of the issue by war, is the central task and the highest form of revolution," killing and abducting enemies and using coercion and force to win support among the very same villagers they claim to be liberating. To protest state "exploitation," the Maoists regularly order farmers in their regions to stop growing food or to raise the sale prices for certain items. Farmers who defy such bans have been summarily executed, say human-rights groups such as the Chhattisgarh-based Forum for Fact-Finding Documentation and Advocacy.
Naxalites also regularly terrorize village folk and warn them not to move to government-controlled areas. On our trip into the hinterland it was impossible to ask villagers whether they were happy with the Maoist presence or not. But a few days earlier, in a camp for people displaced by the conflict about 20 miles away, Miriyam Joga, 41, could barely contain his rage. A relatively successful farmer, Joga had owned a few dozen goats and 27 oxen in the southern Chhattisgarh village of Punpalli until a Naxalite raid three years ago. "They said if I leave my village then they will cut me like this," he said, tilting his head back and drawing his finger across his throat. "But I was feeling that they might murder me anyway so I left. They took my animals and now I have nothing."
The Battle to Fight Back To boost the numbers and quality of new recruits and to rearm and retrain existing police officers, New Delhi has massively increased funding over the past few years. But much of this money — 45% last year — goes unspent and coordination between state police and the better-equipped and better-trained paramilitary units sent by the central government to help in the worst-hit areas is weak. "Often, our forces are not even called out [by the state police]," complains A. P. Maheshwari, inspector general of operations for the Central Reserve Police Force in New Delhi. (India's Home Minister agreed to be interviewed for this story but repeatedly canceled appointments with TIME.)
The central government has begun training state police in jungle warfare at a new college in Chhattisgarh. More than 6,500 police officers have learned better shooting skills, how to move in thick forest, how to survive on bush food and how to take on enemy fighters in hand-to-hand combat. But the flamboyant head of the college, Brigadier B.K. Ponwar says that no matter how much police officers improve their skills, the key remains winning the support of the masses. "Look at Iraq," he says. "I tell my students that their most important objective is to win people's hearts."
That would be easier if not for the emergence in Chhattisgarh three years ago of a civil militia known as Salwa Judum, which means either "peace mission" or "collective hunt" depending on who's doing the translating. The movement's backers say it developed spontaneously when local villagers grew tired of the Naxalites' brutal mafia-like tactics. Chhattisgarh police then appointed thousands of young men, some of them still teenagers, as "special police officers," supplied them with weapons and pushed them to fight the Maoists. Human-rights groups say the special police officers use many of the same tactics as the Naxalites, including extrajudicial killings. The Salwa Judum movement has also forced at least 60,000 people out of their villages (to prevent the Naxalites from recruiting them) and into temporary camps: sad, cramped settlements that are quickly taking on the air of permanence.
The Salwa Judum movement has worsened the situation, draining the countryside of potential informants and convincing thousands of people that the Indian state really is as bad as the Naxalites say it is. A central government committee has recommended closing the camps and disarming the special police officers, whom India's Supreme Court recently termed illegal. Salwa Judum supporters say the criticism is proof of how widespread sympathy for the Naxalites is. "Should we stop fighting terrorism?" asks Chhattisgarh opposition leader Mahendra Karma, a member of the Congress Party and a strong backer of the militia. "Even [Mahatma] Gandhi had his dissenters, and Salwa Judum, which is a peaceful movement, is facing attacks by those motivated by political ideology."
Government security officials and independent observers say the Naxalites have begun to reorganize along more formal military lines. The rebels still use bows and arrows, knives and ancient rifles, but have begun to stock up on machine guns, land mines and mortars, and are building increasingly sophisticated roadside bombs. Based on documents seized in the past year, Indian intelligence agencies estimate that Naxalite Inc. now has an annual budget of $250 million, much of which comes from extorting road contractors and mining companies, and from taxing hundreds of thousands of poor villagers. That money, analysts say, is funding the Maoists' efforts to improve their reach into — and ability to strike — urban areas.
Class war is still an unlikely dream, however. Yes, Maoist rebels recently won power in neighboring Nepal. But the Indian state is more powerful and sophisticated than Nepal's defeated monarchy. (The rise of Nepal's Maoists has actually split opinion among their Indian brothers: some believe that the Nepalese group sold out by participating in elections, while others argue it is a legitimate tactical move toward revolution.) And in India's rowdy democracy, the entire political spectrum from far right to the mainstream Communist Party of India have called for the Maoists to be destroyed.
Until that happens, the Maoists will continue to bleed India. "We want every person in India to have equal rights and the Maoist flag flying in New Delhi," Deva told me in his camp, a small group of cadres gathered around him, nodding as he spoke. How long will that take? I asked. A few of his men giggled. "We cannot say," Deva replied. "But in our life we will do whatever is possible." It is a sentiment that captures both the enormity of the Maoists' aims and the huge challenge New Delhi faces in the years ahead.
With reporting by Madhur Singh/Kanker
The news came crackling over the radio, the voice fading in and out as the sound waves bounced through the wooded hills and valleys of central India to the camp where the militants — and a TIME photographer and myself — lay down to sleep. Earlier that day in May, a raiding gang of some 300 Maoist insurgents had attacked a plant belonging to Indian steel giant Essar, the radio news program declared. More than 50 trucks and pieces of heavy machinery had been destroyed. The commander of the unit in the camp that night, Deva, a boyish-looking man of just 24 or 25 (he wasn't quite sure), allowed a smile to spread across his face for a moment. His comrades-in-arms against the government of India and the companies that drive its booming economy had struck again. That, he said, should answer my question about whether the Maoist insurgents went easy on some mining companies in the area so as to force them to pay protection money and bribes instead. "If the public wants to teach a lesson to Essar, then we'll teach them a lesson," said Deva.
You've heard of rich India and poor India, a land of high-tech workers and slum dwellers alike. This is a story about a third India that exists at the nexus of the two, which feeds off the excesses of the country's new wealth and preys on its most vulnerable. It is the story of the Naxalites, a Maoist insurgency that has grown from the margins four decades ago to become, in the words of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, "the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country." It is a tale of ideology and mafia-like thuggery, a conflict born in a vacuum of government inaction, and fueled by official mismanagement and corruption. And it is the story of the millions caught in between.
A Turn to the Left India is no stranger to violent rebellion, as the decades-long struggle in Kashmir attests. But the separatist conflict there and low-level insurgencies in the country's remote northeast grind on at the periphery, driven by groups agitating to break away. The Maoists, like their ideological brothers in Nepal who recently took power through elections, are different. They want to overthrow the government in New Delhi and install a new one, and they have taken their fight to the geographic heart of the country, to the scrubby woodland and remote, poor villages that blanket a huge chunk of central India. The would-be revolutionaries trace their roots back to 1967, when a group of activists split away from India's mainstream Communist Party and initiated a peasant uprising in the West Bengal village of Naxalbari. The Naxalite movement grew quickly and attracted landless laborers and student intellectuals, but a government crackdown in the 1970s broke the group into myriad feuding factions. By the 1990s, as India began to liberalize its economy and economic growth took off, violent revolution seemed more quaint relic than threat.
No longer. The Naxalite resurgence began in 2004 when the two biggest splinters of the original movement — one Marxist and one Maoist — set aside their differences and joined to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The combined force — which Indian government security officials and independent analysts now estimate at between 10,000 and 20,000 armed fighters plus at least 50,000 active supporters — has quickly consolidated power across great swathes of India's poorest regions. The central government, which lists the Naxalites as a banned terrorist group, says that 11 of India's 28 states are now affected in one way or another by the insurgency. Nongovernment organizations put the number of affected states even higher. The rebels tax local villagers, extort payments from businesses, abduct and kill "class enemies" such as government officials and police officers, and stop aid getting through to people caught in the cross fire.
The militia's strikes have grown more daring. In March last year, some 400 Naxalites surrounded a police camp in southern Chhattisgarh, lit the camp up using powerful lights and generators and lobbed grenades and petrol bombs for more than three hours, killing 55 people. Last December, in the same area, a single Maoist overpowered a jail guard and set free 294 inmates, including 15 senior Naxalite fighters. In February this year, more than 100 insurgents laid siege to three police stations, a police outpost, a police training school and a government armory in the state of Orissa, killing 13 policemen and a bystander and hauling off hundreds of rifles, semiautomatics, light machine guns, pistols and ammunition. Not a single Maoist was killed. Include government security forces, civilians and the Naxalites themselves, and the conflict killed 837 people in 2007, enough to make it deadlier than the Kashmir conflict for the first time ever. "It's absolutely a growing threat," says Ajai Sahni, executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi and a keen observer of the re-emergence of the Naxalites. "You can't escape that fact."
Ripe for Revolution A recent — and extremely rare — trip into a Naxalite zone in the state of Chhattisgarh shows just how much control the Maoists have in India's neglected heartland. After weeks of negotiating, I received word from a senior commander there that cadres from the area would escort a photographer and me into the field to meet a rebel unit. After an early morning, two-hour motorbike ride along dirt roads south of the town of Dantewada, across rivers where women beat their clothes against rocks and through villages full of thatched and terracotta-roofed huts, scrawny chickens and children with distended bellies (a classic sign of malnutrition), we set off by foot deep into the forested hills.
The people there don't just live on the edge of Indian society — they live beyond it, in a void that successive governments in New Delhi have neglected for decades. In this part of the country, far removed from the famed call centers of modern India, there are no roads, no power, no running water, no telephones and no officials to answer pleas for help.
The inhabitants of these villages are known as Adivasis, or "original dwellers." Most Indians call them tribals, a category that doesn't even register in India's complicated caste pecking order but stands outside it. The British colonial rulers treated Adivasis as encroachers on the very land they had occupied for generations, a legal absurdity that India's current government has only recently corrected. Adivasis are entitled to reserved places in universities and government jobs but they remain among India's poorest and most marginalized. In village after village on our journey, the only visible sign of a government presence was an occasional well with metal hand pump.
Born in the hills he now fights from, Deva — he gave just one name — is an Adavasi like most of the insurgency's foot soldiers. Naxalite commanders have historically come from the movement's educated ranks and often speak English. Deva speaks only Gondi, a local tongue. If he has a second language it is the strange, religious-like discipline of Maoism. Our conversations were punctuated with long silences as he turned questions over in his head before answering them, often with a slogan or a long monologue that sounded torn from the small collection of books and newspapers that his unit read and reread and then teach to local villagers. He began learning Maoism at eight, he said. Two of his five siblings are also Maoist fighters. They had a good childhood, helping their father farm rice and hunt in the forests. There was no school in his village and so he and his siblings attended classes given by rebel soldiers who had moved into the area. What they taught made perfect sense to him. "For thousands of years we have been here but we don't have rights and the government does nothing for us: no health, no education, no services. They don't come here," Deva said. "At the same time they don't respect us. They say they can give out rights to this land to mining companies and they have the power to do that. We say, No."
There's no denying the insurgency has prospered in areas of official neglect. In a paper he presented to Parliament two years ago, Home Minister Shivraj Patil said that "Naxalites operate in [a] vacuum created by [an] absence of administrative and political institutions." The Naxalites, Patil said, "take advantage of the disenchantment prevalent among the exploited segments of the population" to "offer an alternative system of governance which promises emancipation ... through the barrel of a gun."
Domestic Violence That textbook description of how an insurgency works was on show in the village we visited — a small collection of huts Deva and his unit of 130 men and women use as an occasional base as they constantly shift around the hills. There, as elsewhere, the Naxalites run a parallel administration, complete with tax collectors, a school and very basic health facilities. Late in the afternoon, seven women militants dressed in tunics and red sashes danced and sang for gathered villagers, preaching the benefits of Maoism, railing against exploitative mining companies and chanting about the evils of New Delhi. Dozens of young kids listened intently. In a mock training drill put on for the visiting reporters, the same kids watched uniformed insurgents practice creeping through thick jungle and assume various attack positions. "Our prime mission is to awake the public and then revolution will happen automatically," a squad commander named Bhima told me.
But Maoism's methods are no gentle wake-up call. India's Naxalites have taken to heart Mao Zedong's maxim that "the seizure of power by armed force, the settlement of the issue by war, is the central task and the highest form of revolution," killing and abducting enemies and using coercion and force to win support among the very same villagers they claim to be liberating. To protest state "exploitation," the Maoists regularly order farmers in their regions to stop growing food or to raise the sale prices for certain items. Farmers who defy such bans have been summarily executed, say human-rights groups such as the Chhattisgarh-based Forum for Fact-Finding Documentation and Advocacy.
Naxalites also regularly terrorize village folk and warn them not to move to government-controlled areas. On our trip into the hinterland it was impossible to ask villagers whether they were happy with the Maoist presence or not. But a few days earlier, in a camp for people displaced by the conflict about 20 miles away, Miriyam Joga, 41, could barely contain his rage. A relatively successful farmer, Joga had owned a few dozen goats and 27 oxen in the southern Chhattisgarh village of Punpalli until a Naxalite raid three years ago. "They said if I leave my village then they will cut me like this," he said, tilting his head back and drawing his finger across his throat. "But I was feeling that they might murder me anyway so I left. They took my animals and now I have nothing."
The Battle to Fight Back To boost the numbers and quality of new recruits and to rearm and retrain existing police officers, New Delhi has massively increased funding over the past few years. But much of this money — 45% last year — goes unspent and coordination between state police and the better-equipped and better-trained paramilitary units sent by the central government to help in the worst-hit areas is weak. "Often, our forces are not even called out [by the state police]," complains A. P. Maheshwari, inspector general of operations for the Central Reserve Police Force in New Delhi. (India's Home Minister agreed to be interviewed for this story but repeatedly canceled appointments with TIME.)
The central government has begun training state police in jungle warfare at a new college in Chhattisgarh. More than 6,500 police officers have learned better shooting skills, how to move in thick forest, how to survive on bush food and how to take on enemy fighters in hand-to-hand combat. But the flamboyant head of the college, Brigadier B.K. Ponwar says that no matter how much police officers improve their skills, the key remains winning the support of the masses. "Look at Iraq," he says. "I tell my students that their most important objective is to win people's hearts."
That would be easier if not for the emergence in Chhattisgarh three years ago of a civil militia known as Salwa Judum, which means either "peace mission" or "collective hunt" depending on who's doing the translating. The movement's backers say it developed spontaneously when local villagers grew tired of the Naxalites' brutal mafia-like tactics. Chhattisgarh police then appointed thousands of young men, some of them still teenagers, as "special police officers," supplied them with weapons and pushed them to fight the Maoists. Human-rights groups say the special police officers use many of the same tactics as the Naxalites, including extrajudicial killings. The Salwa Judum movement has also forced at least 60,000 people out of their villages (to prevent the Naxalites from recruiting them) and into temporary camps: sad, cramped settlements that are quickly taking on the air of permanence.
The Salwa Judum movement has worsened the situation, draining the countryside of potential informants and convincing thousands of people that the Indian state really is as bad as the Naxalites say it is. A central government committee has recommended closing the camps and disarming the special police officers, whom India's Supreme Court recently termed illegal. Salwa Judum supporters say the criticism is proof of how widespread sympathy for the Naxalites is. "Should we stop fighting terrorism?" asks Chhattisgarh opposition leader Mahendra Karma, a member of the Congress Party and a strong backer of the militia. "Even [Mahatma] Gandhi had his dissenters, and Salwa Judum, which is a peaceful movement, is facing attacks by those motivated by political ideology."
Government security officials and independent observers say the Naxalites have begun to reorganize along more formal military lines. The rebels still use bows and arrows, knives and ancient rifles, but have begun to stock up on machine guns, land mines and mortars, and are building increasingly sophisticated roadside bombs. Based on documents seized in the past year, Indian intelligence agencies estimate that Naxalite Inc. now has an annual budget of $250 million, much of which comes from extorting road contractors and mining companies, and from taxing hundreds of thousands of poor villagers. That money, analysts say, is funding the Maoists' efforts to improve their reach into — and ability to strike — urban areas.
Class war is still an unlikely dream, however. Yes, Maoist rebels recently won power in neighboring Nepal. But the Indian state is more powerful and sophisticated than Nepal's defeated monarchy. (The rise of Nepal's Maoists has actually split opinion among their Indian brothers: some believe that the Nepalese group sold out by participating in elections, while others argue it is a legitimate tactical move toward revolution.) And in India's rowdy democracy, the entire political spectrum from far right to the mainstream Communist Party of India have called for the Maoists to be destroyed.
Until that happens, the Maoists will continue to bleed India. "We want every person in India to have equal rights and the Maoist flag flying in New Delhi," Deva told me in his camp, a small group of cadres gathered around him, nodding as he spoke. How long will that take? I asked. A few of his men giggled. "We cannot say," Deva replied. "But in our life we will do whatever is possible." It is a sentiment that captures both the enormity of the Maoists' aims and the huge challenge New Delhi faces in the years ahead.
With reporting by Madhur Singh/Kanker
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