Maoists are not enemies of the state

The Maoist problem in India seems to be a riddle without solution. Most people appear to have the perception that the Maoist menace is something that should be put down with brute force by the Government. They view the Maoists as terrorists who take pleasure in killing innocent citizens; they are the bad guys and should be treated as such.

While the above might be true - and I don't condone their methods - I think the mainstream India media needs to relate their side of their story as well. Outlook is one mag that has been trying to do this through Arundhati Roy (although people need to have a PhD in English literature to understand her articles ) for some time now. We also need to try and understand the reason they have taken up arms. After all, nobody starts a civil war for fun.

Successive Indian Govts have been consistently insensitive to the needs and difficulties of the rural Indians in their quest to sate the needs and address the difficulties of urban Indians. In the name of building factories, townships and big dams, millions and millions of the poorest Indians have been displaced from the lands they have been traditionally occupying for centuries. In the name of letting greedy mining companies set up shop in the rural hinterland, lakhs of people have been literally chased out of their homes - sometimes at gunpoint.
Every single time, it is the poor who get trampled.


Problems afflicting the educated middle class and affluent Indians gets a disproportionate amount of attention. A handful of people died at the hands of Kasab in Mumbai. This was covered on the front pages of every single newspaper in India over several weeks. Farmers have been committing suicides by the thousands in the Vidharba region of Maharashtra. Sadly, this gets a only a few centimeters of news space.

Hundreds of well-to-do software professionals lost their jobs when the Satyam fiasco broke out. Bowing to public pressure, the Govt of India itself had to step in and consider bailing the company out. Lakhs of textile workers and lakhs of daily wage labourers employed in the jewellery industry in Surat and elsewhere lost their jobs in the midst of the recession. Nary a whisper about their plight in the media.

Since the liberalisation started in the early nineties, the policies adopted by the Governments at power in the Center (including the BJP led one) have a distinct capitalist hue as against the totally socialist trend seen earlier. Editorials and economists have cried themselves hoarse about the 'benefits' this trend has brought to India. But the 'benefits' have not started to percolate to the masses below the so called poverty line (at least not as much as we would have liked). So there is this huge section of have-not people in India which has been seeing this other section move from strength to strength while they themselves have been continually deprived (or continually been kept deprived). In other words development and progress is skewed across the different sections of the social fabric. We don't a rocket scientist to figure out this causes frustration and heart burn.


Disgruntlement and restlessness builds up. It was only a matter of time that an organized movement by this disgruntled lot started. We now have a name for it - the Moaist movement.

So does the Government need to go back to its socialist ways ? Maybe not. So does the Government need to go back to its pre-liberalization ways ? Definitely not. All it needs to make sure is that progress is inclusive. Ah, that's easier said than done !

The point I'm trying to make here is that we should not automatically jump to the conclusion that the Maoists are enemies of the state. The Government needs to engage them in talks rather than try to suppress the movement by brute force. It may be successful in the short term but, for sure, the problem will crop up again.