Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [72]
Initial talks were conducted via emissaries, one of them a famous Naxalite writer, Varavara Rao, who gave me his account on a hot afternoon in Hyderabad. “The government was not serious,” said the old writer. “They were using the talks to research the Naxal networks.” By 2005, Varavara Rao himself had been arrested, accused of murdering policemen. As the hammer of the state was descending again, he told the press, “The Congress is like sweet poison. While the TDP [regionalist party] government always ruled out talks with us, the Congress is talking of peace but killing revolutionaries in stage-managed encounters.”
The Andhra Pradesh cease-fire and those in other states were ultimately part of a ruse, a larger strategy to flush out the underground networks of the PWG so as to liquidate and jail them. The federal government had finally begun promulgating a three-pronged counterinsurgency: strengthened intelligence at the state level; sustained, intelligence-driven police repression; and accelerated economic development in Naxal-affected areas. Between 2003 and 2005, over fifteen hundred casualties were reported every year from each of the eleven states affected by Naxalite violence. Just over three hundred police were killed during that time.51
Sowing Chaos
The Naxalite violence in Andhra Pradesh peaked just after 2005.52 Ultimately, the Greyhounds proved too much for the Naxals of Telangana; the Maoists fell back into the forest of Chattisgarh and there multiplied. In that province, police had developed a force of civilian vigilantes, called the Salva Judum, which in the local Gond dialect means “peace march.” Initially an organic self-defense organization, the Salva Judum was co-opted by the state. Participation became mandatory, and this “third force” became an armed auxiliary of police repression.53
The new paramilitaries include many former Naxals and, in this regard, resemble the civil patrols of the Guatemalan counterinsurgency or the early paramilitaries in Columbia.54 In January 2009, the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee reported that one “encounter” in Chattisgarh was actually a massacre of eighteen tribals by armed Salva Judum backed up by police.55 Critics say the government-sanctioned vigilantism of the Salva Judum has forced more than fifty thousand people into roadside refugee camps.56
India’s internal war is a stark example of the catastrophic convergence. Poverty made worse by neoliberalism meets counterinsurgency and repression meets climate-driven ecological crisis. If the monsoons fail or hit too hard, the Maoists, the Greyhounds, and the Salva Judum all threaten to play an increasingly destabilizing role in the coming years. They are precisely the types of centrifugal, unaccountable, violent criminogenic forces that insurgency and counterinsurgency leave in their wake to degrade the already battered social fabric. Total war at the grass roots—now the preferred response to social crisis and violent chaos—releases political sepsis that produces devastating corruption, anomie, trauma, and pathology—none of which are useful in confronting climate change.
The Naxals are only one source of instability. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was correct when he called India “fissiparous.” Despite the strong win of the Congress Party–led coalition in the 2009 elections, the country’s parliamentary politics are defined by fiercely independent regional political parties and locally powerful charismatic leaders.57
Across rural India, social tensions are intense. There is spasmodic intercommunal violence between Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. Mass migration of Bangladeshi Muslims into Hindu-dominated regions of India is fueling religious nationalism in both communities. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindutva fanatics, traffics in cryptofascist Islamophobia. Meanwhile, Pakistan sponsors Muslim terrorist groups, and in the northeast armed secessionists are fighting for an independent state of Assam. Across the rugged dry north, social banditry continues, and in the growing megacities, like Delhi,