Jamil Chughtai
History, like bad deeds, echoes back often in such a manner to give more shriller and even agonizing resounding; the same has started to reveal on India this time around. Being the state that has always fanned, funnelled and funded the separatists elements within almost all the neighbouring countries in the region, India is now experiencing a blatant face-off with a fresh surge in separatist movements in her very own ambits. The Maoist rebels’ attack on April 24 in Chhattisgarh killing 24 paramilitary commandos is the fresh alarm bell that must compel India to realize that she badly needs setting her own house in order, and that too very soon.
Historically, the Maoist insurgency is an ongoing conflict between Maoist groups, also known as Naxalites, and the Indian government. Maoist insurgency started as peasant uprising in 1967, and since then has cost thousands of lives in the rebel-dominated “red corridor” stretching through central and eastern India. The Naxalites operate in as many as 60 districts in India, mainly in the states of Karnataka, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal. In the West Bengal, the areas west of Howrah are fully dominated by the insurgents while Chhattisgarh is considered as the epicenter of the conflict.
The conflict took its present aggressive form after the formation of the CPI (Maoist) in 2004, a rebel group composed of the People’s War Group (PWG) and the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC). In January 2005 talks between the Andhra Pradesh State government and the Maoists broke down and the rebels accused authorities of not addressing their demands for a written truce, release of prisoners and redistribution of land. The ongoing conflict has taken over a vast territory (around half of India’s 29 States) with hundreds of people being killed annually in clashes between the Maoists and the government every year since 2005. The armed wing of the Naxalite-Maoists, called the Peoples Liberation Guerrilla Army, is estimated to have thousands of armed cadres who control territories throughout Bihar, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh States and are supported by the poorest of the rural population, especially the Adivasis. Following the strategy of rural rebellion and people’s war against the Indian government, they fight for improved land rights and more jobs for neglected agricultural labourers and the poor. The Naxalite-Maoist insurgency gained international media attention after the 2013 Naxal attack in Darbha valley that killed around 24 Indian National Congress leaders including the former State Minister Mahendra Karma and the Chhattisgarh Congress Chief Nand Kumar Patel. In Monday’s attack, Indian soldiers came under heavy fire when they were guarding road workers in the Sukma district of Chhattisgarh State which is a hotbed of insurgent activities of the Maoist who continued to wage guerrilla war from their jungle bases.
Insurgencies, revolts and rebellions have always been there in India but the intensity and gravity which these uprisings have attained of late are unprecedented. Presently, Republic of India is grappling with myriads of separatist and secession movements, and their underlying root causes are invariably to be found in political, socio-economic and religious despondencies. The scope and enormity of these conflicts depend upon the nature of the grievances, injustices and demands of the people. Besides high tempo separatist movements by the Kashmiris and Maoists, an estimated 30 armed insurgencies are sweeping across India, including those in Assam, Khalistan, North-East India, Tripura, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and Laddakh – reflecting an acute sense of public alienation on grave political, social, economic and religious grounds.
As if sitting on ready-to-erupt volcano of Kashmir uprising and equally critical insurgencies in rest of the republic were not enough, India under BJP and PM Modi still managed to invent yet another self-destruct button to precariously play with. The latest Indian idiosyncrasy pertains to attacks on meat shops and especially lynching and harassment of Indian Muslims on doubts of beef-eating. The ‘Bhartiya Gau Raksha Dal'(BGRD) are aggressively implementing their own set of cattle protection regimen all over India with incidents of lynching cattle traders, mostly from minority Muslim and Dalits. The BGRD members raid trucks carrying cattle, physically abuse the drivers, force-feeding them with cow dung and urine, and sometimes almost killing them without any intervention by law-enforcing authorities. One of the most notorious of all such incidents is the killing of Mohammad Akhlaq, a 52 year-old Muslim man from the village Bisara near Dadri, Uttar Pradesh by activists of local Gao Raksha outfits. This day-light murder was carried out over a rumour that the man and his family members have consumed beef. The most recent of such atrocities occurred in Una, Gujarat, where a group of cattle protectors stripped and publicly flogged four Dalit youths for skinning a dead cow, which the group claimed was killed by them; despite eye-witnesses’ confirmation that the cow was in fact killed by a lion. The incident caused a nationwide protests by Dalits and Rights groups.
On top of this all, the outcome of the recent elections in Uttar Pradesh is unfolding in an uncomfortable manner with Yogi Adityanath on the state’s driving seat. Instead of tackling the actual problems of the state such as non-existent law and order, general lack of sanitation, food adulteration, poor education, widespread prevalence of spurious medicines, shoddy conditions of hospitals, and insecurity of women; he merely preferred focusing on the “Meat”. In fact, what we are witnessing in the present India is an attempt at majoritarian consolidation, it is about the new identity politics that is being pushed by BJP based on its Hindutva ideology that ‘what a good Hindu is, and by implication, what a good Indian ought to be’.
