FORTUNES OF INDIA:Dispossessed villagers have an open ear for left-wing extremism, writes Mary Fitzgeraldin Chhattisgarh

RAMESH WAS an illiterate teenage orphan when he joined the ragtag army that came to his village preaching Maoist revolution. During his years in the jungle he learned to read, write, and fire a gun.

Ramesh says he left his cadre only because he wanted to start a family with a fellow Maoist. The couple now live quietly with their young daughter not far from where, in April, their former comrades ambushed and killed almost 80 paramilitaries - the deadliest attack in a dirty war fought out far from the high-tech companies and Bollywood glamour of boom India.

"The life of armed struggle is no longer for me," Ramesh says, showing an old photograph of him and his wife posing with guns. "But I still believe in the ideas behind it. Who could disagree with fighting on behalf of the poor for a more equal society?"

Just a decade ago, India's Mao-inspired rebels, often called Naxalites after their predecessors who staged an uprising in the West Bengal village of Naxalbari in the late 1960s, had all but faded away. Today, they have a

presence in 223 districts spread throughout 20 of India's 28 states and boast more 10,000 active fighters, with an estimated 100,000 in reserve.

Since 2006, prime minister Manmohan Singh has repeatedly declared the Maoists, who have carved out a so-called "red corridor" across central and eastern India, the country's greatest internal security threat. This year alone, the conflict has claimed the lives of almost 900 people, many of whom were civilians.

As the violence escalates - with the Maoists now turning to tactics including beheading and bombing - the debate over how to tackle this growing insurgency has become bitterly polarised. Confronting the Maoist problem means confronting difficult questions over the nature of development in India - and who benefits from it most.

It is not surprising that "left-wing extremism" - to use Delhi's euphemism - gained momentum during the same decade that witnessed India's economy growing to unprecedented, and dangerously lopsided, levels.

And it is little coincidence that the pockets where the Maoists now hold most sway are also those that contain the country's deepest seams of minerals. Beneath the dense forest that blankets much of Chhattisgarh, a remote state considered the epicentre of the Maoist resurgence, lies one-fifth of India's iron ore plus huge reserves of coal, tin and bauxite - an irresistible trove for the country's industrial titans and foreign investors.

What has played out in Chhattisgarh and other mineral-rich yet impoverished states like it over the past 10 years represents the ugly face of India's boom. The clash between often disastrously mismanaged industrialisation and the traditional agrarian way of life as practised by indigenous tribal people known as adivasishas resulted in the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of villagers.

"Development is the most hated word among these people, because in its name they have lost their land, their resources and their dignity," says Rajendra Sail, a lawyer and activist in Chhattisgarh.

In such circumstances, it is not difficult to understand, as several government commissioned reports have concluded, why an ideology promising land and liberation might take seed in isolated villages where the writ of the state has long been absent.

"These people are the poorest of the poor. They have been denied their land rights, their forest rights, and their human rights. Some of them feel that unless and until you challenge the might of the state with guns, it will not listen," says Swami Agnivesh, a social activist who has attempted to mediate between the Maoists and the government.

To counter Maoist influence in Chhattisgarh, a state-sponsored militia known as Salwa Judum (the name translates as "purification hunt" or "peace mission" depending on who you ask) emerged in 2005. What resulted was a spiral of revenge attacks, as each side laid waste to villages suspected of supporting the other.

"It has been a reign of terror," sighs Markam Iria, who fled to one of several displacement camps after the Maoists killed both his father and uncle. "The problem is there appears to be no end in sight."

The clearing of villages that just happen to straddle prime mining territory has led some activists to suspect a murky nexus between state-backed security operations and efforts to tap resources. As the situation becomes increasingly tense, anyone who questions the current development narrative in Chhattisgarh runs the risk of being branded a Maoist sympathiser.

"There is a full spectrum of resistance but the government wants to simplify the picture and reduce all the colours to one," says Binayak Sen, a paediatrician and civil rights activist who was detained for two years after he was accused of helping Maoists. More than 20 Nobel laureates supported an international campaign for his release.

"We must have a process by which the people's voices can be heard in the processes of economy and development," Sen says. "We can never be at peace if such large sections of the population are being ground underfoot."

As the conflict grinds on, with the Maoists now ironically funding their campaign by extorting road contractors and mining companies as well as collecting taxes from villagers, the authorities have struggled to agree on how best to confront the insurgency. Some insist the Maoists should be snuffed out by force. Late last year the government deployed thousands of extra security personnel throughout the worst-hit regions, but to little avail.

Others argue that any strategy must include an effort to address local grievances exploited by the rebels. Many, like BK Ponwar, a retired brigadier who runs a Chhattisgarh training centre established to teach police to "fight a guerrilla like a guerrilla" as its slogan boasts, believe the response must incorporate both security and development. "I tell my men that many of the Naxals are simply misled people who have taken up arms," he says. "We must wean them off."

The government frets that the Maoists, who have attacked railway lines, roads and other infrastructure, are deterring development and frightening off investment. Last month India's tough-talking home minister Palaniappan Chidambaram attempted to assuage the concerns of skittish investors, telling them he was confident the government would soon be able to regain control of territory where the Maoists currently run what effectively amounts to a parallel administration.

Both sides have at different stages indicated a readiness to begin peace talks, but there is much distrust of the other's true intentions. In July, Maoist leader Cherukuri Rajkumar, alias Azad, was shot in what authorities described as an "encounter killing" just as he was apparently about to open negotiations through the mediation of Swami Agnivesh. Amid widespread scepticism over the circumstances surrounding Azad's death, the possibility of talks now seems ever more remote. Swami Agnivesh insists there is no other way. "If [ the Maoists] continue the way they have been doing, and the state continues repressing them the way they have been doing, then it will be never-ending violence and counter-violence," he says. "It is time to say stop this madness. The guns should stop and the talks begin."

This series was supported with a grant from Irish Aid's Simon Cumbers Media Fund



