Shobhan Saxena
A day after a CRPF platoon was wiped out by Maoists in Dantewada, the war arrived in Delhi. That was last month. Two groups of students — leftists opposing 'Operation Green Hunt' and Congress-BJP supporters backing the offensive — clashed on the JNU campus. Earlier, a peace march to Dantewada by 50 eminent citizens, including JNU chancellor Yash Pal and noted Gandhian Narayan Desai, was "busted" by some Congress and BJP workers, who attacked the "Maoist sympathizers".
Bullets are flying in Bastar, but another conflict — between the government and some civil society groups — is taking place in Delhi. When the rebels blew up a bus in Chhattisgarh this week, home minister P Chidambaram launched an attack on civil society organizations that were "getting in the way of the state's efforts to contain the rebels". The minister went on TV to say, "It is almost fashionable to be sympathetic to the Maoist cause."
Human rights activists have been locking horns with the government on the Maoist issue for some time but the debate has become so shrill it now seems almost as if the armed rebels are the third party in the war between the state and civil society. Are the battle lines so hard there is no room for debate any more? Is the space for civil society shrinking in India?
Supreme Court lawyer and human rights activist Prashant Bhushan says the government "wants this space to shrink". "Chidambaram has been saying he has a 'limited mandate' and he needs a 'bigger mandate' to tackle the Maoist issue. What they are planning is genocide of the tribals by the use of Air Force, etc and they don't want any criticism by the media and NGOs. That's why they are threatening civil society activists," he says.
Filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt, who has made a documentary on the tribals of Bastar, believes the government is applying the Bush Doctrine. "They are following the policy of 'if you are not with us, you are against us'. This is dangerous for democracy. I would advise the politicians to stop war-mongering," he says. "The government is trying to control dissent. I want to know where is the democratic space in this country."
The debate has existed from the Naxalbari uprising of the late 1960s. But it's only recently that it has become so heated. Arundhati Roy's 36-page essay on Maoists, whom she called "Gandhians with guns", may have acted as a trigger. On May 6, a few days after Roy's article appeared, the home ministry issued a statement saying that" some Maoist leaders have been directly contacting certain NGOs and intellectuals to propagate their ideology and persuade them to take steps which would provide support to the CPI (Maoist) ideology."
In an earlier statement the home minister had accused organizations such as the People's Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) and People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) of backing the Maoists' cause. "The government is interested only in military action," says Kavita Srivastava of PUCL. "They have been saying that the Army will not join the operations but the Army is already there in the battlefield running 20 jungle warfare schools for paramilitary forces. It's issues like these that the government wants to hide, hence the attack on civil society."
Activists may give the impression that the government has launched an all-out war on them, but politicians like Mani Shankar Aiyar, who has been openly critical of the government's military approach, believe that there is plenty of space for debate. "Compared to the kind of blind reliance on the gun that appeared to be building up in early April, I think there is much greater balance in the approach now, especially after the Prime Minister's National Panchayat Raj Day speech on April 24 in which he advocated the 'two-pronged' strategy of security and development, and the Congress President following this up with her emphasis on participative development in Congress Sandesh," says the Rajya Sabha MP. "It is a lacuna in our democracy that marginalized people need civil society activists to mediate between them and governmental authorities. Yet, the fact that a completely voiceless people is securing recognition is in itself encouraging."
The BJP has a totally different take on this as it doesn't trust some civil society groups. "Nobody is against a debate on the human rights issue, but we have to be careful about the NGOs who only raise this issue when Maoists are hit and keep quiet when the police and ordinary people are affected," says Nirmala Sitaraman, a BJP spokesperson. "We also have to be careful of the politics that is being played by the Congress on this issue. The situation is really alarming."
Indeed, the situation is alarming. But a clash between the state and civil society won't change the ground reality in the jungles of Dantewada.