As Maoism reaches dead end, vulnerable tribals face an uncertain future

EP Unny’s edit page cartoon in The Indian Express of November 24 is striking. It shows a man standing, and a woman sitting on the ground with a child in her lap, at the intersection of two arms of a giant X, with a lamp post by their side. Tribal belt almost NaXal-Mukt, says the caption, echoing the Home Minister, who has been spearheading an intensive drive to end Left Wing Extremism in the country.

In 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh labelled Left Wing Extremism as the single biggest internal security challenge, thwarting development in India. He forged a two-pronged strategy to address the challenge, the prongs being development and security measures. The creation of a CoBRA wing within the Central Reserve Police Force specifically to target Maoists had created much unease within sections of the Congress party and the liberal citizenry.

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Crimes against tribal people have been increasing of late. The crimes recorded against members of the Scheduled Tribes, according to the National Crime Records Bureau, increased 29 per cent in 2023 over the previous year.

What will happen to indigenous people?

The Maoists might have been looking after their own interests more than those of the tribal people, and hindering State efforts to extend the scope of governance and development to their habitats, but they also raised a voice of protest against acts of injustice against the tribals.

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With the physical elimination of Maoists and the surrender of key leaders, one useful layer of insulation from settled folk violence disappears. What happens next to this subaltern group, being pushed further to the margins with every viksit step the nation climbs, clearing forests for mines, roads, timber, and new farmland, and pushing tribal folk off their traditional habitat?

The cartoon reflects the complexity

The cartoon is a comment on Maoists, their political role, the state, and the challenges of social development in a complex, multi-tiered society like ours. Reflexively, it is a comment on the cartoon itself, as commonly understood.

Cartoons are seen as drawings that evoke humour. This cartoon on Maoists challenges this notion. There is nothing remotely funny about that drawing. What the cartoonist meant to convey is, of course, his to know. What the newspaper reader gets from the cartoon is up to her. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder — so is pathos, empathy, concern, anger, disgust, anxiety, or any other emotion or virtue evoked by the cartoon. Once a creator has released his work into the wild, its denizens decide what it stands for; the creator cannot complain if it signifies things he did not mean it to.

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The arms of the X at whose intersection the couple is placed point in four different directions, because the lines end in arrowheads. The streetlight at the centre suggests that the intersection of the lines stands for a physical location, a crossroads. A cross resting on its side, its arms diagonal rather than vertical and horizontal, normally stands for something cancelled, crossed out.

Valid perspective on art

The caption connects the cross with what is being crossed out: Maoists. The couple and their child are static, their expression bemused more than anything else. Where will they go, where can they go? There is no clarity on the fate of tribal people once the government liberates them from Left Wing Extremism.

The job of a cartoon is not so much to raise a smile as to provoke reflection and thought. In that sense, the cartoon plays the same role as a newspaper leader, a comment that is meant less to perform the task of thinking and forming an opinion on behalf of the reader than to guide the reader to engage with the problem dealt with, offering one valid perspective.

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Such editorial cartoons are not funnies, the term newspapers applied to the cartoon strips they used to carry in early 20th century America, but a visual comment that makes use of the drawing and the attached caption to critique some part or the other of the lived reality of the reader, tweaking the reader’s imagination and capacity to appreciate allusion, besides the magic of lines that tease the imagination rather than directly represent. These cartoons compel serious contemplation of the problem they focus on.

History of the emergence of Maoists

Maoists have their roots in the Naxalbari peasant revolt of 1967, in which the police shot and killed 11 people. The local leadership of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) thought the party was wrong to not seek armed revolution in this situation, and along with some other leaders who shared this disenchantment with the CPI(M)’s ‘parliamentary illusions’ and preferred to follow Mao’s advice that the peasant masses should wage a people’s war, split away from the party to form a new CPI (Marxist-Leninist).

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The CPI(ML) cadre did stage attacks on landlords in several parts of the country, but their targets were often leaders of the CPI(M), which they accused of class betrayal.

The party split many times, based on ideology and leadership identity. In the face of tough policing, they retreated to the jungles and became champions of tribal rights, in theory, and controlled regimes of tribal areas that extracted tribute from economic operators in these areas.

Splits and combinations continued apace until finally most factions combined and formed the CPI(Maoist). One faction, the so-called CPI(ML) Liberation, decided to give up armed struggle and join electoral politics.

When FRA gave hope

The Forest Rights Act (FRA) 2006 was a major step forward in tackling the Maoist problem via development, by giving tribal people certain rights to the land they inhabited and used, to forest produce, and to decide if certain development activities could be given the go-ahead after sufficient compensation was given to the tribal people displaced by such development activity.

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The project to mine bauxite in Odisha’s Niyama Giri mountain was nixed after the project developer failed to win the approval of the primitive tribal group that saw the mountain as a deity.

Maoism at a dead end

With the change in government in 2014, the FRA lost its teeth. Forest and environmental clearance became centralised operations rather than being blessed by the affected local communities. The development and rights prong of tackling Left Wing Extremism got bent, and, at the same time, the security prong grew in strength and sharpness, leading to 320 acknowledged killings of Maoist fighters since October 2024 and the high-profile surrender of some Maoist leaders. Maoists have reportedly asked for time to surrender en masse.

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Violent struggle against the state brings retribution, not revolution; that much is clear. It is key for parties that champion the subaltern to work within the framework of democracy. But those prepared to work for the welfare of tribal people would have worked with Maoists, sought their help, and given them help in specific circumstances. If the government proposes to crack down on anyone it sees as carrying a Maoist taint, that would be counterproductive.

Maoism is at a dead end. The tribal people Maoists sheltered and sheltered behind are at a crossroads. Which way to move ahead should be a concern for the larger society. India needs coal for power generation, and minerals besides. The well-being of tribal populations in the forest lands that might need to be mined cannot be allowed to be buried under the mounds of earth thrown up by giant excavators.

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