Author: Gautam Siddharth
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: November 22, 2005
Picture this town in the heart of Middle India: One-horse Jehanabad is covered under winter fog and a haze from the smoke of burning wood and charcoal from mud and brick ovens. There is no electricity - there has been a power cut - and most townsfolk are finishing their chores.
The streets are deserted with only the stray paan gumti open, it's front lit under a compressed kerosene lamp called, after a brand, Petromax. Through the misty darkness about 1,000 armed men march in stealthily. They head straight towards the Jehanabad Jail, take it under their control, identify and shoot nine 'upper-caste' prisoners, set free 389 'lower caste' inmates and disappear under the cover of darkness from whence they had arrived.
The darkness in Jehanabad is literal as well as figurative. For several years now, even averagely informed members of civil society have been describing the ongoing anarchy in Bihar, and parts of Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh, as underscoring the 'failed state'. It's to describe places where the power and majesty of the state has long eroded, and it is a subject of ridicule or pity or both. The state here also stands for nostalgia, a reminder of some mythical-sounding golden era. So let's not be mistaken: The Ambedkarite state that is god has not just failed; in these parts, it is in a deep coma from where resuscitation is only theoretically possible. In that sense, the storming of Jehanabad sounds the first warning bell.
Clearly, Jehanabad ought not to be seen as a mere violent punctuation in the democratic process - Bihar is undergoing its second Assembly election this year - but as a phenomenon designed to create further contempt for the state in the minds of the 'great unwashed' of the hinterland.
The attack could have taken place after the election process or even before it. That it happened at a time when the state's presence was supposedly most overwhelming - its district headquarters and tehsils are buzzing with officials and electoral activity; its voting constituencies resembling armed garrisons - must not be forgotten. The period of the election is also, vitally, the state's constitutionally mandated attempt at the renewal of whatever legitimacy it is left with in these parts. The importance of the Maoist rebels selecting such a time to assert their superior strike force, therefore, must not be lost on us.
But already we are showing signs of repeating our old mistakes: Of relegating Jehanabad to the recesses of memory. That is what we did when the guerrillas of People's War held Koraput, in Orissa, under siege for an entire day on February 6, 2004. Why is it that we do not mention 6/2 and 13/11 in the same breath as 29/10 or 14/12 - the latter two being the dates on which terrorists struck Delhi, Parliament in the first instance and shopping markets in the second? Agreed, there are broad differences between Islamist jihad and Left wing terror.
But then as assaults on society and polity, both are equally debilitating and, therefore, dangerous. One hits at the core values of our multi-religious, secular society while the other strikes at the democratic order. Both spread death and fear.
At the same time the somewhat larger question is what does the state do. How, indeed, is it supposed to address the issue of red terror which is holding back development of the areas by killing investments - whether in infrastructure, education or health?
The Government has confounded its way into a bind: It says, if it adopts strong-arm methods, cracks down with an iron fist, it is told the problem is sociological and that the issue needs more careful handling. If, on the other hand, it announces ceasefires or removes the ban on the rebels or even agrees to talk to them, it is told it is going soft. Post-Jehanabad, however, there should not be any more moments of self-doubt. If legitimacy of the state yields to force, howsoever misguided and infantile, if the state forsakes certain moral absolutes that govern our universe, only darkness will descend, making it impossible to distinguish between right and wrong.
The state must take the siege of Jehanabad as the first sign of its own rot and begin to heal itself. The state, under which the venal thrive, cannot end the corruption of ideas that Maoism represents. The state that allows the bigger criminals and terrorists to roam free, cannot - it is, indeed, in that event, constitutionally incapable of it - nab the smaller variety. Catch and punish a few big sharks and the piranhas will fall in line.
That is the challenge before the leadership - whether of the UPA or the NDA. Finance capital on which the state is carved must then take justice - economic, social, and political - first and foremost to the scores of Jehanabads in India. The reformed state must strike at the half-baked peddlers of revolution-consciousness that are opposed to parliamentary democracy - howsoever flawed - and any type of reform that results from such a polity.
Unless the state does justice by the poorest and the most backward regions of the country, the problem of Maoist violence will not end. Only when such a reformed state takes development to the poverty-stricken regions of the country, when it takes information and the internet - the delightfully abstract enemies of ideological warfare - to Kalahandis and Prasanaths, will the forces of darkness, that those who struck Jehanabad represent, be sent back to its cave. The Naxalites have effectively struck against the development of democratic grassroots leadership, which is the crux of the problem.
The state - and its feudal order's - blunders of the past are returning to haunt its present as well as future. It must begin woth correcting its historical mistakes. To paraphrase Sun Yat Sen: Well-organised nations count votes out of ballot boxes. Badly organised nations count dead bodies on their own killing fields.