It is a tragic day for the country that virtually the entire state leadership of one of its top political parties should be wiped out in a violent Naxalite attack, as we saw on Saturday. Such an incident had not taken place in the nearly 50-year-old history of the Naxalite movement in India which originated in West Bengal and is veritably defined by its propitiation of the cult of violence.
But it is not enough to say, as top national figures — including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Chhattisgarh’s BJP chief minister Raman Singh — have done, that the deadly Maoist attack at Darbha Ghaati in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar district on Congress leaders in the Naxal-infested tribal belt was an attack on democracy. In a fundamental way, the dastardly incident really drives home to us that state and Central governments have failed to get anything resembling a decent anti-Maoist strategy off the ground after many years of trying.
We routinely pay the price for this. These failures typically degenerate into a slanging match between a state police force and the CRPF. Inquiries are ordered but its findings are not made public, although left-wing extremism has become a key national concern. Basic operational procedures are disregarded.
The proximate political reason for the brutal and massive assault — in which powerful landmines and bullets were used — is that state Congress leaders had sunk their long-running factional feuds and taken a conscious decision to go into the Maoist-dominated impenetrable tribal areas in a bid to puncture the “pro-people” claims of the insurgents with an alternative narrative of development. It was a concerted effort. Even the old veteran, the debonair Vidya Charan Shukla, now over 80, had teamed up with former factional foes to join the party campaign preceding Assembly polls due in a few months. Mr Shukla has taken three bullets in his abdomen.
Given the wider picture, it will be shortsighted to be seduced by the notion that the Congress group was targeted because of the presence of senior party leader Mahendra Karma (shot dead at point-blank range), who had started the (now outlawed) Salwa Judum movement which drew tribal youth away from the stranglehold of the Maoists and turned them on the Naxals themselves. Saturday’s attack was really a message to mainstream parties not to venture into interior tribal villages where the Maoists hold the people hostage.
The security environment does appear to have been deficient for a large political group travelling through ungoverned spaces dominated by armed extremists. But this is not the occasion for partisan sparring between the Congress and the BJP. This is a time to present a united face to the Maoists.