consider India’s Maoist insurgency a grave and urgent threat, the evidence keeps mounting. On Tuesday April 6th several hundred Maoist guerrillas attacked a convoy in a forest in eastern Chhattisgarh state, killing 76 paramilitary policemen. This was reckoned to be the worst loss in the history of a stuttering, four-decade-long conflict.
It was also an emphatic response from the rebels to the central government’s latest offer of peace talks. Encouraged by an ostensible Maoist ceasefire proposal, India’s home minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, has repeatedly declared the government ready to talk—provided the insurgents first lay down their arms. On April 4th, on a visit to Lalgarh, a Maoist-infested area of West Bengal, one of six eastern states most affected by the insurgency, Mr Chidambaram asked, “Why do they not come for talks by just shunning violence?” There seems to be little prospect of this.
With roots in a 1967 peasant uprising in the West Bengali village of Naxalbari—hence their name, Naxalites—the Maoists have recently grown more potent. They have an estimated 14,000 full time fighters and loosely control a broad swathe of central and eastern India, albeit in jungle areas where the state is hardly present. India-wide, they are considered to be found in over a third of the country’s 626 districts. Last year 998 people were killed in Maoist-related conflict. With almost 300 killed this year, it could be even bloodier.
Three main factors explain the Naxalites’ rise. Since merging their two main factions in 2004—to form the Communist Party of Indian (Maoist) under Muppala Lakshmana Rao, known as “Ganapathi”—they have minimised the internal conflict that always plagued them. Second, many festering grievances among the tribal communities who live in India’s poor eastern states have provided them willing hands. And rapid economic growth there, especially in mining, has given the Naxalites new targets for extorting cash, from both foreign and state-owned mining companies.
The official response to this has been pitifully weak. Despite calls to action from the central government—in 2006 the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, described the insurgency as the “single biggest internal-security challenge” India had ever faced—most state governments, though primarily responsible for law and order, have hardly stirred. Complacency is partly to blame: until recently few state-level politicians seemed to share Mr Singh’s grave assessment. Political expediency also plays a part: Shibu Soren, chief minister of Maoist-wracked Jharkhand, won an election last year with the guerrillas’ support and is predictably reluctant to fight them.
Perhaps most worrying, with the exception of Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal, the worst-affected states are also among India’s least capable. Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand were founded in 2000 as off-cuts from two of India’s poorest states. Chhattisgarh’s most notable counter-insurgency ploy, arming an anti-Maoist tribal militia, known as Salwa Judum or Peace March, was predictably a violent failure: displacing over 50,000 villagers and acting as a recruiting sergeant for the Maoists. Yet, to be generous, it was at least partly a response to the inadequacy of the state police.
For the same reason, Mr Chidambaram is now deploying an additional 15,000 centrally trained troops to the worst-affected states, taking the total to around 75,000. Yet, for a vast area home to 450m people, this is still a tiny force. Moreover, properly trained state-level officers, who know the local language and conditions, have a much better counter-insurgency record. The clearest example is in Andhra Pradesh where, through a combination of improvements in policing and generous development schemes, the insurgency has been greatly weakened in recent years.
To achieve similar results, other states will in the end have to take similar measures. After all, the latest slaughter in Chhattisgarh shows how hapless outsiders can be. Most of the dead men came from Uttar Pradesh and were killed by cunningly placed land mines after they rushed to take cover from the Maoists’ opening attack. As Mr Chidambaram said, “They seem to have walked into a trap.”
