A strategy out of touch with ground reality

Another mass killing, this time the result, principally, of a bungled Maoist operation, brings the focus back on India’s enveloping vulnerabilities and the state’s directionless impotence in the face of what is not only, as prime minister Manmohan Singh has repeatedly emphasised, India’s greatest internal security challenge, but evidently one that is rapidly escalating. It is crucial to recognise, at the outset, and despite the ill-informed hysteria about Maoists ‘targeting’ civilians in the train incident at Sardiha, and in the attack on a bus at Chingavaram, that the Maoists do not, in fact, engage in indiscriminate operations - though it may be useful as propaganda to demonise them as an ‘Indian Taliban’, and despite the fact that they do systematically use terror to further their “people’s war”. What the Sardiha incident demonstrates, however, is that, if the Maoists were, in fact, to engage in indiscriminate killings, the state would have little or no defence.

Significantly, the railway minister had recently disclosed in Parliament that there were 58 incidents of attacks by Maoists against the Railways in 2009, up from 30 in 2008 and 56 in 2007.

According to partial data recorded by the South Asia Terrorism Portal, there have already been 26 such attacks in 2010, though no fatalities have been recorded this year in any incident preceding Sardiha.  

The loss of lives in the Sardiha incident, and in the seemingly endless chain of Maoist attacks that preceded it, is certainly distressing, but the strategy discourse in India is even more so, because it promises only worse to come. Far from a strategic crystallization in the face of the escalating violence over the past months, the waters have been muddied even further by the sheer mendacity and corruption of the political discourse on response.  

From the ministry of home affairs (MHA), a diversionary demand for a ‘wider mandate’  has sought to deflect attention from the strategic incoherence and infirmity of its operations over the past seven months - and from its relentless bragging about these operations for months preceding their launch. It is useful to recall, here, the MHA’s farcical claim on its then-proposed ‘clear, hold and develop’ ‘strategy’, in October 2009: “We hope that literally within 30 days of security forces moving in and dominating the area, we should be able to restore civil administration there.”

Having escalated the conflict without thinking things through, with disastrous consequences, the MHA now appears to be planning a further escalation, with as much lack of forethought.  

Home minister P Chidambaram has, however, come under focused attack from within his own Government and Party, as well as from a triumphal Opposition, who can barely suppress their glee at his obvious discomfiture.  

Given the evident and demonstrable failure of what the MHA had been projecting as its “strategy” for the past more than a year, an intense debate on the subject would certainly appear desirable. What we currently have in establishment circles, however, is a deeply politicised conflict of slogans, and not a debate on competing strategies. Even now, everything is being articulated in general terms of the ‘law and order approach’, or ‘political approach’ or ‘developmental approach’, with no attention whatsoever to the capacities available to secure the invariably fantastical objectives of each of these, or to the conditions prevailing on the ground. Yet these various ‘strategies’ are advocated with mulish certitude, even if there is little evidence to back their efficacy, or to reconcile them with the availability of congruous human and material resources.

A strategy is not a belief system or ideological construct. Unless it incorporates a clear definition of objectives, a quantifiable calculus on how these are to be secured, and the acquisition and deployment of the necessary capacities, no projection, approach or proposal can rightly be called a strategy. By this clear criterion, India has no strategy to deal with the Maoists.

Ajai Sahni is executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi