Is India losing the fight against extremism,
specifically Naxalism, which Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh recently described as "the
greatest internal security threat"? Despite
spending a huge Rs 30,000 million on
anti-Naxalite operations, this seems to be the
case. Since 2005, more people have been killed in
Naxal-related violence than in Kashmir or the
northeast.

Naxalism has spread to more than 150 of India’s
600 districts. Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand have
replaced Andhra Pradesh and Bihar as the states
most affected by it. Between January 2006 and
June 2007, Chhattisgarh recorded 529 deaths in
Naxal-related violence. Yet, Chhattisgarh
provides terrifying lessons on how Naxalism
should not be fought by unleashing repression
against unarmed civilians, by instigating bandits
to target Naxalites, and by violating the
citizen’s civil liberties, even while
perpetuating gruesome injustices, especially
against the disadvantaged Adivasis (tribals) who
form a majority of the population of the
worst-affected districts.

This conclusion — drawn by social scientists,
jurists and civil liberties activists — was
reinforced during a visit I made to Chhattisgarh
last fortnight with Mukul Sharma, director of
Amnesty International-India. We went there to
express solidarity with Dr Binayak Sen, a noted
health activist, and general secretary of the
People’s Union for Civil Liberties-Chhattisgarh,
detained since May 14 under the draconian
Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 2004, and
Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, 2005
(PSA). We also wanted to investigate whether
Sen’s work warrants such harsh measures.

Besides capital Raipur, we toured parts of the
Dhamtari district, where Sen’s organisation,
Rupantar, has run a clinic for 10 years. Upon
talking to more than 20 people in villages, we
failed to find any evidence of Sen’s culpability
in inciting the public to extremism. Sen has been
doing exemplary voluntary work in the Gandhian
mould in providing primary and preventive
healthcare for people long deprived of access to
health facilities. There are no medical personnel
in the area, often not even a chemist within a
30-kilometre distance. The public is forced to
depend on quacks and corrupt, apathetic,
incompetent and usually missing government
employees.

Rupantar’s clinic in Bagrumnala village offers an
extraordinary range of services at nominal cost,
including rapid testing for the deadly falciparum
strain of the malaria parasite, which has saved
scores of lives. The clinic largely depends on
“barefoot doctors”, who give the public
invaluable advice on nutrition and preventive
medicine too. The clinic caters to villages in a
40 square kilometres radius. Its work is
irreplaceable. Its closure is bound to cause
preventable loss of life among some of the
poorest tribals of Chhattisgarh.

Everyone we talked to expressed gratitude towards
Sen for his role in empowering disadvantaged
people and his efforts to make them aware of
their rights — for instance, to water, housing
and healthcare. All of them see Sen as noble and
selfless. No one spoke of even the remotest sign
of his instigating people to extremism. However,
it’s not an aberration that Sen was detained
under the nasty PSA, which criminalises even
peaceful activity by declaring it "a danger or
menace to public order Š and tranquillity",
because it might interfere with or "tends to
interfere with the maintenance of public orderŠ“and encourages”disobedience to established law
and its institutions."

This extremely harsh preventive detention law
makes nonsense even of civil disobedience, a
cornerstone of India’s Freedom Struggle. It
should have no place in a democracy. Yet, the
state government has filed a 750-page
charge-sheet against Sen, liberally including
offences like sedition and "waging war against
the state". There’s a clear purpose behind this
monstrosity — to intimidate all civil rights
defenders through a horrible example. This isn’t
the first time in India that trumped-up charges
have been brought against innocents. But it’s
probably the first occasion when a civil
liberties defender has been explicitly targeted,
and that too, from a broad-church, inclusive and
politically unaffiliated organisation like the
PUCL, which has defended people of all
persuasions against state excesses.

Sen was victimised precisely because he formed a
bridge between the human rights movement and
other civil society organisations, and tried to
empower disadvantaged people. The state
government, whose very existence is premised upon
the rapacious exploitation of Adivasis and the
staggering natural wealth of Chhattisgarh —
whose primary function is to subserve the ’big
business’, forest contractors and traders —
cannot tolerate such individuals. If this sounds
like an exaggeration, consider this:

* One of India’s most creative trade unionists,
Shankar Guha Niyogi, who ignited a mass awakening
on social, cultural and economic issues in
Chhattisgarh, was brutally assassinated at the
behest of powerful and politically well-connected
industrialists in 1991. Those who planned and
financed the murder roam scot-free.

* Chhattisgarh has among India’s worst indices of
wealth misdistribution and income inequality.
Many of its cities, including Raipur, are booming
with ostentatious affluence, spanking new hotels
and glittering shopping malls.

* At the other extreme are predominantly tribal
districts like Dantewada, which are marked by
malnutrition, starvation deaths, and severe
scarcity of health facilities and of safe
drinking water. The tribal literacy rate here is
less than one-third the national average — 30
per cent for men and 13 per cent for women. Of
its 1,220 villages, 214 lack a primary school.

* Worse, 1,161 villages have no medical facility.
Primary health centres exist in only 34 villages.
At the worst is Bijapur, the district’s most
violent tehsil, where Naxalites gunned down 55
policemen in March.

* The difference in life-expectancy between
Kerala and tribal Chhattisgarh is a shocking 18
years. The two regions could well belong to
different continents.

* Chhattisgarh is extraordinarily rich in mineral
wealth, including iron ore, bauxite, dolomite,
quartzite, granite, precious stones, gold and tin
ore, besides limestone and coal. Its iron ore is
among the best in the world. This wealth has been
voraciously extracted. But it has produced no
gains for local people. The only railway line in
the state’s tribal south runs straight to
Visakhapatnam and carries ore for export to
Japan. Less than one-hundredth of the value of
the mineral returns to the state.

Naxalism has thrived in Chhattisgarh as a
response, albeit an irrational one, to this
system of exploitation, dispossession and
outright loot, along with the complete collapse
of the state as a provider of public services and
a relatively impartial guardian of the law. Yet,
to defend the system of exploitation, the state
is waging war against its own people through the
sponsorship of Salwa Judum (Peace Campaign), a
militia trained to kill and incite violence
against the Naxals. This is an extraordinarily
predatory organisation. Its violence has rendered
homeless almost 100,000 people, who now live in
appalling conditions in temporary camps. Salwa
Judum represents an unholy nexus between the
Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party,
buttressed by powerful entrenched economic
interests. Its atrocities only ensure that the
Naxalite problem will never be settled.

Chhattisgarh is getting polarised between “Red”
(Naxals) and “Saffron” (BJP). It’s also divided
between what Niyogi called mankhe gotiyar (the
human species) and baghwa gotiyar (the
bloodsucking clan), or the forces of human
compassion, and the forces of destruction. If the
Chhattisgarh government has proved bankrupt in
dealing with Naxalism, the centre fares no
better. By relying solely on brute force to fight
Naxalism, it is inviting disaster.