Urban Naxalism : Naxalism’s Strength

After a short power struggle a person from Shaoshan in Hotan province came into power and formed the People’s Republic of China. When there was economic stagnation, he came up with two ambitious projects. The great leap forward and the cultural revolution. Both these failed because of Draconian laws. The first focused on increasing agricultural production by exploiting the citizens and the second focused on changing the history of the nation where he destroyed the cultural sites and targeted the rich people of the country. Therefore, he justified the violence of the poor by saying that power flows from the barrel of a gun. Thus, the deep state policy of China was made in the 1960s.

India at that time was a very young Nation which was working with a socialistic approach. Being a very large Nation there were certain places where the vacuum was created by misgovernance and misadministration. Therefore, some people asked for their rights and protested and for the first time violence broke out in 1967 in a village Naxalbari in West Bengal and they also justified their act by following Chinese deep state policy of power flows from the barrel of gun. Since then, the government has been fighting with naxalism and after great efforts naxalism finally is on its last leg.

This was only possible by the multipronged approach followed by the security forces in which both the iron fist as well as the velvet glove was used to tackle naxalism. As part of a soft approach both the security forces as well as the administration came up on the same platform where the surrenders were accepted and the naxals were allowed to live a normal life. Under the roshni scheme the skills of the tribals were raised and they were allowed to live a dignified life. On the other side the naxals who were not ready to accept the change were made to follow a hard approach in which there was integration of the state police force with the central armed police force and their major leaders were killed.

Despite being on the last leg still naxalism is not eradicated because of the support by urban naxalism. Urban naxals are the educated people who may be journalists, students, writers, run NGO etc living in India who support violent extremism against the state. Their task is to run propagandas and facilitate the mobilisation of people and persuade them to join the movement. Whenever the government brings some infrastructural development projects they bring up issues like displacement of tribals, cooperative exploitation, violation of human rights etc. They may write a book in which they may portray security forces as exploiters aur any project by government as exploitative to the tribals and radicalise people in the cities. These acts of theirs also tarnish India’s image in various international platforms. The irony is that these people live in posh cities with annual packages in lacs and enjoy the facilities of the corporate sector and then preach equality.

It is easy for the government or the forces to deal with naxals but difficult to deal with urban naxals. So, it becomes the duty of citizens to not follow their ideology and trust the government and the security forces which are capable to tackle any kind of threat.