Red alert

If someone talked about the creation of a ?Compact Revolutionary Zone? a decade ago, the general reaction would have been either a suppressed guffaw or a roll of the eyes.

If someone talked about the creation of a ‘Compact Revolutionary Zone’ a decade ago, the general reaction would have been either a suppressed guffaw or a roll of the eyes.

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The Naxal menace, we would be patiently told, is a peripheral problem, more an irritant in a thriving democracy than a serious threat to the nation. With a litany of Naxal attacks being conducted across the country, however, the threat has not only become palpable, but is deeply worrying. The figures paint a bleak picture. If terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab and the Northeast cumulatively affected about 5 per cent of India’s population, Naxal terrorism has come to affect about 35 per cent of our citizens. The belt of violence, too, stretches across many states, being interlinked to each other. So, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) aim of establishing a ‘continuous revolutionary base area’ to advance the ‘people’s war’ in India isn’t a pie in the sky anymore; it seems an ominous possibility.

And yet, governments — both at the Central and affected states— seem to be convinced that Naxal terror will go away when gunshots are fired regularly in the air. The reasons for this dangerous apathy is three-fold. One, despite the rhetoric of prioritising the concerns of rural India, successive governments have paid scant attention to the violence regularly unleashed by the Maoists on our villages and small towns. The media, too, seem to think that rural India is beyond the pale of concern, justice and the law. Two, there is still hesitation about whether to deem Naxals as full-fledged ‘terrorists’ or not. A ‘social justice’ tag is vaguely attached to Maoists, whereby they are perceived by many to be misguided youths frustrated by a non-sympathetic State. That, alas, applies to terrorists of all hues and ideologies and can be trotted out to legitimise all acts of terror. Third, there is the notion that the Naxal menace is not as bad as it seems. Their acts are explained (away) as violence that is expected before elections, or, even worse, as desperate acts conducted by forces literally fighting for survival. Whether it’s the siege of towns like R. Udaygiri in Orissa and Jehanabad in Bihar, or the hijacking of a train in Jharkhand, or the rising death toll across the countryside, Naxal terrorism is gaining ground, not losing steam. The quicker the authorities of the State come around to accept this fact, the better the chances of thousands of Indians escaping violence and death unleashed in the name of class struggle.