The core of India’s problems is simple dishonesty, falsification, dereliction. How can there be a consensus on assessments and strategies when the first response to stress is a fudging of facts?
Unsurprisingly, pure cacophony has followed once again after the most recent major Maoist outrage, the killing of 44 persons – 16 Security Forces (SF) personnel and 28 civilians – at Chingavaram in the Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh, on May 17, 2010. Carrion feeders in the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) now circle around the increasingly hapless union home minister, P. Chidambaram, even as the opposition brings out its knives. That none of the nation’s luminaries has a single constructive idea to offer, beyond the vacuous slogans – ‘developmental solution’ and ‘political solution’, ‘two-pronged’ and ‘multi-pronged’ approaches – while others scream for the deployment of the Army and the Air Force, can only consolidate the reputation for articulate incompetence that the best and the brightest in India’s Parliament, government and ‘civil society’ have rightly acquired.
While the media and the political establishment bring a hysterical focus on the Maoists and the state’s sorry ‘strategies’ only in the wake of the most dramatic incidents, the reality of Maoist violence has been altogether relentless. 468 persons have already been killed in Maoist violence this year (ICM data till May 23, 2010), including 167 SF personnel and 193 civilians. The year has already witnessed 22 major incidents (each accounting for three or more fatalities). Seven of these have recorded fatalities in the double digits:
This follows on at least 998 fatalities in 2009 (392 civilians, 312 SF personnel and 294 Maoists), and including at least 88 major incidents.
What is missed in all this passionate promotion of paralysis is that, from the localized insurgencies of the past, India has now come to a stage where nearly half the country is afflicted, in different measure, by chronic conflict variables. 223 districts, according to the home minister’s 2009 estimate, are affected, in various degrees, by Maoist activities; another 20 districts by the Pakistan-backed proxy war in Jammu & Kashmir; and some 67 districts by the multiple insurgencies that trouble India’s Northeast. That adds up to 310 districts out of a total of 636. In addition, terrorist attacks have targeted urban centres across the length and breadth of the country. Though individual movements may rise and fall, evidently, there is no ‘bell curve’ here – rather, a steadily rising trajectory of disorders.
Another widely articulated sentiment is the contention that rising Maoist violence and mass killings are ‘acts of desperation’. Attempts have been made to reinforce this position by a number of media plants suggesting that the Maoists are on the verge of a split because of ‘ideological differences’ and wrangles over jurisdiction and the sharing of booty. The unsettling reality is, the dramatic Maoist attacks witnessed over the past months are far from the ‘acts of desperation’ the more vacuous among our political leaders would have us believe. These are manifestations of the strategic confidence and tactical capability of the rebels, on the one hand, and of strategic and operational infirmity of the state’s Forces, on the other. As the Maoists expand and consolidate areas of activity and influence, these attacks will become more frequent and lethal, pushing the already over-extended capacities of the security establishment towards a breaking point.
Again, speaking at the All India Conference of Directors and Inspectors General of Police at Delhi on September 16, 2009, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh indicated that the Police-population ratio for the country was 145 per 100,000. This is a figure that has been rattling around since a report of the Bureau of Police Research & Development (BPR&D: Data on Police Organisations in India) was published in June 2006, and is selectively projected whenever the Government wants to demonstrate its ‘achievements’. The far more reliable annual compendium, Crime in India, published by the National Crime Records Bureau is given the go-by. NCRB’s latest report, Crime in India – 2008, however, records that the Police-population ratio for the whole country stands at just 128 per 100,000, marginally up from 125 per 100,000 in 2007. The MHA may, of course, have even more recent data, but it is improbable, given the numbers of recruitments known, that a single year could have pushed the ratio up from 128 to 145. Significantly, BPR&D data for 2007 claims a Police-population ratio of 153 per 100,000.
How can two departments of the same MHA fail to reconcile their data on so fundamental an index? Who is feeding falsehoods and fabricated figures to the highest offices of the land? How can a country not even get its basic statistics right?
Ajai Sahni is Executive Director, Institute for Conflict Management and Editor, South Asia Intelligence Review.