Earlier this week I visited the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore to attend a lecture. The 101-year-old institution had been the target of a terrorist attack in Dec. 2005. I drove into the sprawling campus through one of its gates, stopped and asked the two guards there for the location of the lecture hall (they didn't know where it was) and spent the next hour or so freely exploring the place. I drove in and out of the campus a few times but not once did the sloppy guards at any of its gates inspect my car. I figured they were no longer expecting a terrorist attack. The few times my car was searched in this connection was in February when a security alert was sounded in Bangalore after the terrorist attacks in Pune. The guards at a multiplex mall near my home would insist on checking the boot of my car before letting me drive into the multistoried carpark. I figured they were expecting terrorists to hide their guns and bombs in the boot and nowhere else. More to the point, Indian police or private security guards are generally not up to the task of facing up to terrorists or armed insurgents. They'll simply go about the motions of doing the job, that darn low-paid nine-to-never-five thing about which they have much to carp about. Bluntly put, that's why Maoist insurgents managed to massacre 76 troopers of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) in the Mukrana forests of Dantewala district in Chhattisgarh, an eastern Indian state, on April 6. The platoon, returning from a patrol, obediently trudged into a minefield laid by the insurgents who then went on to ambush other troops that were rushed in as reinforcements. It was the largest one-day loss of paramilitary troops in the decades-long war against the Maoists. The disaster was caused by poor leadership, poor planning and poor training. Reporters who went to ground zero and managed to talk to the CRPF survivors, found more evidence of what's really behind what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has ominously described as “the biggest internal security threat” facing the nation. The deadly Maoist insurgency Singh was referring to has spread like cancer from 55 districts in nine Indian states in Nov. 2003 to 223 districts in 20 of the country's 28 states today. In 10 of these affected states, the Maoists (or Naxalites as they are called in India) reportedly control some 40,000 sq. km of territory. They are a well-trained and well-organized guerrilla force, equipped with sophisticated arms and having access to funds of much as $340 million (SR1.28 billion) annually, garnered through extortion, drugs, looting, ransom and robbery. But the evidence of “the gravest internal security threat” to India that the reporters found was not so much about the Maoists as it was about the pathetic Indian condition. For example, the ill-trained and ill-equipped CRPF troopers in their deep-forest camp have to venture out one by one beyond security lines every day with a mug of water to take a dump in the morning. There are no toilets in the camp. Sitting ducks. The camp has only three hours of generator-electricity a day. Troopers going home on furlough must walk some distance to a dirt road from where they have to catch a public transport bus full of perceived Maoist sympathisers for the long drive through Maoist-infested forest land to the nearest Maoist-threatened town. Sitting ducks. To top it all, the camp is periodically visited by privileged commandos who turn the whole place and its surroundings, including the nearby adivasi tribal villages already cowering in fear from the thought of displeasing the Maoists, into a boot camp. When these commandos, who get double what the troopers earn for taking the same risk, wind up and leave, the camp inmates have to start all over again to try and get back into talking terms with the tribals. And the rot goes far deeper than this. It goes all the way into the lackdaisical, corrupt system of governance that makes a mockery of any semblance of well-meaning action. Criminals are in parliament, in state legislatures, in rural municipalities, and in the police force. Even the judiciary is not above reproach. Judges have used Public Interest Litigation (PIL) to grant corporates mining rights in tribal areas, which is one reason why the Maoist insurgents have tribal sympathies. PIL has come to be known as Private Interest Litigation, Political Interest Litigation or Publicity Interest Litigation (if environmental reasons are cited to uproot adivasis from their forest lands). The indefensible Dantewala massacre has brought political parties of all shades together in rare unison to endorse a fight to the finish against the Maoists. The government's response, according to Home Minster P. Chidambaram, “will be police action to wrest control of territory that is now dominated by the Naxalites, restoration of civil administration and undertaking developmental activities – in that order.” But each point in his planned response is plagued by the pathetic Indian condition. There are very serious problems of inherent deficits, available resource configurations, administrative capacities, and overall sense of purpose. Chidambaram is a very able and efficient minister. But it is too far-fetched for him to expect his orders to be followed by the book any time soon down the chain of command and beyond the jurisdiction of the central government to the remotest administrative outpost in the Maoist-hit states. India's “gravest internal security threat” is not the Maoists as Prime Minister Singh has warned. It is the festering rot of the country's intrinsic, all-round trickle-down defect. – SG Feedback: [email protected] __
