June 13, 2025 • 58 mins
Inside India’s Fight Against Naxalism | Is This the End of Red Terror? | Ft. Sandeep Unnithan
In this deep-dive episode of In Our Defence, veteran defence journalist Sandeep Unnithan joins host Dev Goswami to unpack India’s decades-long battle with Left Wing Extremism (LWE) — often called Naxalism or Red Terror — and the recent decisive push to eradicate it by March 2026.
Dev and Sandeep explore the evolution of the Naxal movement from its origins in Naxalbari in 1967 to its spread across India’s infamous “Red Corridor”, and the multi-pronged strategy that has brought the insurgency to its lowest levels in decades.
Key topics include:
The historic neutralisation of CPI (Maoist) General Secretary Basavaraju in Operation Black Forest
The spike in encounters and surrenders in 2024–25
Why counter-insurgency in jungles is as deadly — and complex — as high-tech border warfare.
Why the Indian Army was never deployed against Naxals — and what could have happened if they had.
The role of urban intellectual support in sustaining the movement — and why that’s now faded.
This episode is an eye-opening look at one of India’s longest-running internal conflicts, now seemingly entering its final phase. Tune in.
Produced by Garvit Srivastava
Sound mixed by Rohan Bharti
In this deep-dive episode of In Our Defence, veteran defence journalist Sandeep Unnithan joins host Dev Goswami to unpack India’s decades-long battle with Left Wing Extremism (LWE) — often called Naxalism or Red Terror — and the recent decisive push to eradicate it by March 2026.
Dev and Sandeep explore the evolution of the Naxal movement from its origins in Naxalbari in 1967 to its spread across India’s infamous “Red Corridor”, and the multi-pronged strategy that has brought the insurgency to its lowest levels in decades.
Key topics include:
The historic neutralisation of CPI (Maoist) General Secretary Basavaraju in Operation Black Forest
The spike in encounters and surrenders in 2024–25
Why counter-insurgency in jungles is as deadly — and complex — as high-tech border warfare.
Why the Indian Army was never deployed against Naxals — and what could have happened if they had.
The role of urban intellectual support in sustaining the movement — and why that’s now faded.
This episode is an eye-opening look at one of India’s longest-running internal conflicts, now seemingly entering its final phase. Tune in.
Produced by Garvit Srivastava
Sound mixed by Rohan Bharti
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is India Today Podcasts. Welcome to Season three of
Another Defense, the podcast that takes you inside the world
of conflict. I'm your host, Deve Goswami, and every week
I sit down with experts and retired officers from the Army,
Navy and Air Force to decode all things to do
(00:21):
with India security and explore what it truly means to serve.
Get ready for stories of strategy, sacrifice and strength. This
is in our Defense. Welcome to Another Defense. India's borders,
whether along with the China or Pakistan, are relatedly quiet
(00:42):
for the last couple of weeks, but there's a war
that's raging inside, a war that's been raging for over
five decades now. Cluxialism, maoism, red terror, leftist extremism, you
call it whatever. This all fits into what the Government
of India officially calls left being extremism, and of India
has said that this left wing extremism will be eliminated
(01:04):
by March to zero two six. Funny deadline to have.
It's like the end of the financial end the water
sort of thing. But what we've seen in the last
few weeks is a sport. Last few months actually is
a sport in encounters that's led to surrenders of several
actualtes or eliminations in encounters, and to sort of decode
(01:25):
that and help us understand what's happening right now in
the war against left wing extremism and what's been happening
in the last few years and what we can expect
in the upcoming months is with me, Hey, they're good.
Good to be back once again. A topic I think
Sande that you must have spent almost your entire career
(01:45):
covering in bits and pieces of the parts of my career,
but substantial part of part of your career, because I
think the problem is such, the problem that India has
faced with this is such uh, And that's exactly why
I'm going to actually ask you to give us a
crash course into the history of left being extremism in
India because we were discussing this is before we began recording.
(02:06):
You met me in the capitala downstairs and you asked
me whether this topic gets a lot of traction online.
And when we in the media talk traction, what we
mean basically is whether we get to readers interest into
subject matters like these, And had said that Honestly speaking,
it's not as much as you would expect with some
other very very popular topics for many obvious reasons that
(02:27):
the two of us know about. So, which is exactly
why I want you to sort of explain to our
listeners and viewers what is left wing extremism, how it
sort of took shape and evolved? Now I know it
began in West Bengal. Nor in West Bengal, in a
village called Naxcel Naxlebury, which is where the word Naxilism
comes from, Naxlebarry, which was basically a farmer's movement, a
(02:50):
farmers uprising. How did we start from there? Which was,
if I'm not wrong, in nineteen sixty seven decades later,
where you had what was known as the Red Corridor
that spanned West Bengal, chats Got Bihar, parts of Dark
more than a dozen Indian states, exactly exactly. Yeah, So
give us an overview of how did it begin from Naxalbari,
(03:13):
how did it reach the peaks it did before we
kind of dive into what's happening right now with India's
fight against and mission to end it.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Absolutely, they've a good question and great to be back.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Now. The thing is that you have to understand the
thing about naxialism or Maoism, whatever you call it, left
wing extremism, is that this is an ideology. You know,
it is not something about peasants who being discriminated suddenly
you know, picked up arms and challenged the might of
the state. All of this can be traced back to
(03:46):
the revolutions in Russia and in China, specifically China, because
the MAOIs in India are actually more heavily influenced by
Mao Zidong. What he did in China in the twenties
and the thirties and finally captured power in China nineteen
forty eight. He expelled the nationalists, and the Chinese Communist
Party still rules until some time. The Chinese were actively
(04:08):
supporting all of these revolutionary movements all across the world,
and you had all of these leftist guerrilla movements, whether
it's a Shining Path in South America, you have the
you know, the Philippines Red movements there in Cambodia. So
all of these are actually all far left militant groups
(04:29):
who overthrow, who advocate the overthrow of the ruling government.
And this is also what the Maos of India plan
to do when they began their insurrection in West Bengal Naxalbaria.
As you mentioned, the plan was to overthrow the state
and to establish red rule exactly the way Chairman Mao
(04:51):
had done. So it is an ideology and this ideology
has remained in one form of the other. Now it's
come in several waves. Now, you had these movements in
Telangana in nineteen forty six when you had an uprising.
There were genuine reasons for that, the kind of operation
of the villagers and all was but it was pretty
(05:12):
devastating for people over there in what was then the
Nizam's territories nineteen forty six, where you had peasants uprisings
and a lot of you know, communists movements were across
the countryside in India. One of like I mentioned in Telangana,
you had investment all Kerala. Of course they formed a
(05:33):
government there so that you can say the revolutionary power
was converted into electoral power. And it was an unusual
thing that you had the first communist government in Kerala
in using an elected democracy, you know, parliamentary democracy to
come to power. But you had all of these little
fringe movements in the countryside, flickering in Telangana. In and
(05:56):
A Pradesh, of Courseesh was undivided in those days. And
then West Bengal. The uprising in Naksalbari in nineteen sixty
seven was crushed very brutally by the force of the state.
By nineteen seventy two it was completely wiped out. It
was the government, it was the police, the paramilitary and
(06:17):
even the Indian Army. Not much as spoken about this,
but the fact is that the Indian Army did not
want while it was focused on East Pakistan, did not
want this insurgency in its backyard. So which is why
I have spoken with General Jacob who was then the
Chief of Staff of the Eastern Command, and he said
that they proceeded to act against the Maos the Naxals
(06:39):
with brute force and that uprising was crushed brutally. And
then in two thousand and four, what you have is
all of these remaining groups, which is the Maoist communist
center in Bihar, the peoples who are group of Adhdesh,
the complete die hard leftist MAOIs revolution. They met somewhere
(07:01):
in the middle in the jungles of Chatti's Gud, and
they formed this party called the CPI MAOIs Communist Party
of Indian MAOIs. And low and behold, they started controlling
large tracts of land in areas where the state was absent,
completely missing, like in the forests of dante Vada and
Chatti's God. You have this place called Abujmard, which is
(07:23):
which means impenetrable forest, like four thousand kilometers of forest,
which which had never been you know, surveyed even in
the times of the British. It is completely unsurveyed territories.
And all of the Maos when there, they established their
bastions there and lo and behold. By two thousand and six,
just two years after this unification of all of these
(07:45):
fringe groups into the CPI MAOIs, you had what was
called the Red Corridor stretching from Nepal right down to
Andhra Pradesh. So they used to call it the Pashupati
to Tirupathi Corridor, almost a dozen Indian states, and it
was also called a Compact Revolutionary Zone, which allowed for
free movement of men and material across this corridor.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
It was literally like a.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Corridor, you know, an expressway for the Maos to move freely,
and they controlled at that point more than one hundred
and fifty Indian districts. They had a presence in all
of these districts. Right out of the six hundred or
so Indian districts they controlled almost one hundred hundred and fifty.
They had a presence in all of these districts. They
were very strong. They had a guerrilla army of more
(08:29):
than ten thousand carters. That's almost a division sized force.
And you know, when I was here in India today
in twenty ten, we received the most bloodshilling account of
a massacre in Dante Vada in Chattis Guard where an
entire company of the CRPF were massacred. Now a company
(08:53):
is one one hundred plus troopers. Seventy six of them
were murdered. They were encircled by the Maos who came
in large numbers, one thousands. So they had these fighting
formations which they used to call the battalions, which are
actually companies. But they could a mass mass and they
moved like regular militaries. They were not like guerrillas in
(09:14):
that sense. They would mobilize, they would move march encircles
and they encircled an entire crp of company and they
massacred them with utter brutality. I remember, you know, flying
down there, we went there, took us almost a day
to reach that place where the survivors were pulled out.
They were just about eight survivors from that massacre, and
(09:35):
most of them were shaking when they were describing this
thing of literally hundreds of mouse converging and you know,
literally shooting them like you know hens in a coop.
They were encircles, surrounded and killed. So that was the
military power of the mouse at their peak, somewhere in
the mid twenty tents, which is just about six years
after they'd formed the CPI mouse, and you had the
(09:59):
none other than the Prime of India. It's moment seeing
in two thousand and six April two thousand and six,
I still remember that where he says that they are
the gravest internal security problem for India. And at that time,
let's not forget that you had a situation in Jamun Kashmir,
a very active situation there. You had militancy, you had.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Cross bordered terrorism.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
We were two years away from Mumbai, but you already
had a couple of very high profile attacks in Mumbai
ninety three and of course two thousand and six, and
here was a Prime minister saying that, look, they are
the biggest internal security threat. And in a sense they
were far more potent because they were in the They
are what is called a heartland insurgency, which is in
(10:41):
the heart of your country, in the middle of India.
They're not a rim land insurgency, which is something around
the borders, which you can mean, you know, you can contain,
you can put your military there, you can you know,
seal the border. What do you do with an insurgency
that's burning in your in the middle of your country.
So those were very dark times then where we actually
(11:01):
thought it's going to take a while to get all
of this under control. And this was in areas where,
like I mentioned, the state had no presence. There was
no one going there. There was surveyors there, there were
no roads, there was no electricity, there was nothing. So
this was the void that the Maoist chose to incubate
their movement and they used to run. They would run
(11:23):
these liberated zones. They would provide the services, they would
run schools, they would run hospitals, they would hold courts
where they would administer justice. So it was like a
state within a state, and things began to change. I
feel after that massacre in twenty ten, when suddenly you
woke up just four years after what the Prime Minister said,
(11:44):
the Home Ministry said, look, we have a serious problem, gentlemen,
so let's get moving and do something about it. And
which is when they started expanding the paramilitary force. So
the CRPF, the BSF, all of them started to be
expanded till a time that they were almost half a
million strong. A lot of them were deployed in Chatti's Gut.
(12:06):
They helped the state government, you know, they bolstered the
state government capacity to fight the mouse and they got
There's a friend of mine, a very interesting man, Brigaded
Buson Ponver who as a nineteen seventy one war veteran,
he was at the jungle Warfare school in Aranti, and
I still remember in two thousand and five he was
literally airlifted and brought into Churchi's gut and he set
(12:28):
up this college of jungle warfare in the middle of nowhere.
And I Si is a very exceptional man. I mean
at the time when people play golf and you know,
have a nice beer in the afternoon. You had Brigadive
Pon were riding a horse in the middle of nowhere,
you know, and building this college of Jungle.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Warfare's officer who helps it trained the cobra inso of
the CRPF.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Well, no, actually the he trains the police units. The
cobras they have their own training. So he was doing
it more for the state police formations and all that,
so he helped greatly. So I mean, yeah, what I
said was that what I meant to say is that
it is an all of government effort, the center, the states.
All of that happened, and then of course twenty ten
you had that very horrible massacre when the entire Congress
(13:11):
leadership was wiped out, Jiramgati massacre as it's called, where
they literally again they carried out a massacre. Was it
twenty eleven I think or not ten, but it was
after twenty ten where they surrounded and massacred the Congress leadership.
I think it was twenty thirteen if I'm not mistaken.
Memories failing me, but this was the MAOIs at their peak.
(13:34):
They were, you know, completely in control of Central India.
That red corridor was a reality, and I think what
emboldened them was the fact that you had a very
successful uprising in Nepal. You had the Maos of Nepal
who had beaten back the state and they in fact
(13:54):
then finally came out of hiding and they became a
political party, and of course they're now in power in Nepal.
So I think that's where the Mouse also got, you know,
a boost for their thing. Of course, they didn't believe
in the political process. They plan to fight it from
the you know, just like Mao had done. That they
would surge from the forests into the countryside and from
(14:17):
the countryside into and finally encircle the cities and then
take power. They plan to capture power. But I think,
if my memory serves me right again, is in the
twenty forties they wanted to raise the flag of the
Mouse in Beli.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Right, to sort of extent on that point, before we
come to what's happening in the present day. Fighting nux
lights at the tactical level, how different is it compared
to your regular army operation. And the reason I asked
that is because on this podcast I happen to talk
a lot about wars involving armies. We talk about you know,
(14:54):
long reach missiles, fighter jets, submarines, warships, high ting equipment.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Ah.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
But the fight against naxialism sort of I think goes
under appreciated, not just on this podcast but also generally
widely speaking in the media because I don't want to
use that word, but I think it's less glamorous, you know,
if you can, if you can see if you can
call it that. Let's take the example of operations, and you know,
after that you had all these fancy s afrat image
to sort of you know, for people to play around
with and sort of talk about, Casey, that's what the
(15:21):
strike happened. You don't really see that really happening happening
with the with the fight against axtualism, which I think,
based on what you've described and what I've read, is
equally if not more dangerous and deadly. So when it
comes to fighting carders of nexill and naxialism, when it
comes to fighting a unit of Naxillites, what is it
(15:43):
like for the troops who are engaged in how dangerou
is it? Dangerous is it? And how does it compare
When I said, like a normal army operation.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
So very good question, Dave. And you know, my sense
is that it's the way the mouse fight.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
They train like regular militaries or militias. I've seen their
you know, literature, We've got some captured literature which I
helped translate, and then to study their tactics and all that.
These tactics are just like regular military. They believe they
are a military. They are the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army,
(16:21):
so they are the military wing of the CPI MAOS
and they trained, their organized, They drill exactly the way
regular militaries do. So it's not like in j and
K where you have you know, terrorists operating in small
teams two terrorists or four terrorists. Here, they are organized
like a regular military. They have battalions which they call
(16:45):
they have battalions which actually companies, right, the one hundred
plus strong battalions, and they you know, they move like
regular armies. They're very disciplined, they have good marksmen. They'd
train exactly like regular army units do so, which is
(17:05):
why I remember when I was interviewing the survivors of
that horrible massacre in twenty ten, what if the survivors
told me this and that's still stuck in my mind today,
even after fifteen years, is that I said, you know,
why didn't you guys form up and fight these guys
when they were you know, I mean, that's of course
a lay person's view, but you know, what he said
(17:27):
to me was that when the firing began, the CRP
of guy told me the survivor that see, we were
deployed in j and K now we had seen militant
attacks over there. We thought they'd shoot and then they
would run away. And he said, then the firing just
kept intensifying and intensifying, and then numbers grew. Then we
realized we'd all been surrounded from all sides. And then
(17:50):
there was panic and they ran and they you know,
and that's how they all were massacred. Normal thing is
that when you come under fire, immediately take positions, You
dig in or you take cover, and then you return
the fire. And you know, company is a very very
powerful thing. A company can dig in and protect itself
for a week, two weeks even so, here is a
thing of not appreciating how the maos were trained. They
(18:11):
were trained exactly like regular militaries, and they were training
to encircle and then fight, and a lot of emphasis
given on marksmanship and all of that thing. So I
think the beginning early years were really deadly for the
police and the paramilitary and the capfs, where they didn't
understand how the maose train and how they moved. And
(18:34):
Plus the other challenge is that they're not outsiders. They're
not coming in from Pakistan or Afghanistan or something. They're
all locals. So in a sense they are locals who've
been brainwashed with an idea, ideologically brainwashed and their tribals
they're all sons of the soil. They know the forests
better than the policemen or the paramilitary guys were brought
(18:56):
in from all over the country, and for them the
jungle is a strange place. But for the mouse gilla
over there, he is from that place. He knows that village,
he's prepared to fight. Whereas and you know, knowing the
thing being from that particular for ut that's a big
disadvantage for the paramilitary forces, for the police force, and
(19:18):
which is why it has taken us this long, almost
two decades to come to where we are today in
twenty twenty five. And I think that was the big
learning that they said, it's a slow fight, it's not
going to happen overnight. So you had to actually employ
this strategy which has been used in every counterinsurgency scenario
(19:41):
in the world, starting from the Malay insurgency in the
nineteen fifties, which is clear, hold and build, which means
that you enter a place, you clear the area of
the MAOIs or the insurgents. You hold that territory, you built,
build bases, You reach out to the people. You ensure
(20:03):
that the maos are not able to move them like
as Chairman Moose had, move like a fish among water.
You know, maos are supposed to gila are supposed to
move among the people the way a fish moves in water.
So you're supposed to impede his movements by this clear
hole built strategy, which is what the whole ministry then did.
And you know, there was a lot of pressure on
(20:25):
the army they back in twenty ten. I know because
there's a friend of mine who was handling this deployment
of the from the Northern Command of the Indian Army
because they wanted the Rushtia rifles to deploy into Chatti's gut,
and there was so much pressure on the army, but
the army resisted. They said, no way are we going
to deploy into the Chatti's gut, because then it becomes
(20:47):
a black hole. Because you send one sector of the
ARA over there, the following year, there will be a
second sector, there will be a third sector, and before
you know it, the Indian Army will be deployed in
the northeast, in the north, in the center, everywhere. So
that is a very very wise decision the army made
at that time. I think not enough credit is given
(21:08):
to them where they said, no, we are not going
to deploy and fight the this is a police and
a paramilitary and a CAPF operation. You should only deploy them.
And I think that is a very good decision because
can you imagine this thing, because then it just becomes
unind the army is not really fighting on the borders,
but they're also fighting in the heartland. So it's a
(21:29):
big challenge. And I think what we're seeing around us
today fifteen years later, after that massacre, fifteen years later,
it's been a slow and a steady climb and a
very successful on one of that against the mouse and
the Red Terror right.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
I would not turned toward an event that took place
in May this year, an event that was supposed to
be a trigger actually for this episode, but then I
think we had something else to discuss, so we sort
of pushed this topic down. On May twenty one, if
I'm not wrong, there was an encounter in chat this
Gadah in which twenty seven Maoists were killed. Among them
(22:07):
was the General Secretary of CPI, Maoist Bassa Raju. Yeah,
I want to focus only on this person right now
before we expand into the larger fight against against Turnaxilism.
This the Government of India said was the biggest kill
in the last forty years.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Why the first time that a Mao's chief has been killed.
There have only been two chiefs so far. There was
Ganpati before him. Yes, and you have this gentleman who
was killed in May. And it's very significant because if
you have managed to kill the leader of the Maoist
movement uh and the leader is is heavily guarded, the
(22:47):
most protected. Of course, Ganpati took voluntary retirement and he
stepped aside and he asked for A Basavaraj to take
over from him. Bassavaraj is a hardcore military ops guy.
He's from Undhra Pradesh, like the entire mouse upper echelons. Now,
(23:10):
he was trained by the LTT, believe it or not,
in the jungles of Chatti's Guard, not Chatika, I think
in the jungles of Andhra Pradesh where the LTT had
come down in somewhere in the late eighties and they
trained a few Maoist garters. Then they were called the
People's War Group in using IED's improvising IDs improvised explosive devices,
(23:32):
and Basavarajo is one of those people's he's an explosive expert.
So it was that LTT training in the late eighties
that helped the MAOIs perfect a whole range of explosives,
and they've improved, you know, improved on those i DS
making till the time that they could blow up even
armored personnel carriers, heavily protected vehicles, bulletproof vehicles and mine
(23:56):
protected vehicles. So there've been numerous such instances. So Bassavaj's
killing was really significant because the MAOIs that I've spoken
with surrendered MAOIs of course in captivity. They said that
the chief at that time it was Gunpati. He always
travels and he's protected heavily guarded. He has a very
(24:17):
crack team of MAOIs protecting him. Is a detail of
about twenty twenty five bodyguards at all times, and I
believe that the people who were killed with Bassavaj were
were his bodyguard detailed and they probably died fighting when
they were cornered. So this is a very very significant
blow that for the first time you've gone and you've
(24:39):
killed the leader. And today we don't know who the
leader of the mouse are. It's been almost a month
since Bassavaraj is killing. There are at least three names
that are doing the rounds of possible successors. But given
the fact that the utter disarray in the MAOIs rangs today,
that after they've been decapitated, so to speak, there's no
(25:01):
communication from them about who the leader is. And they
are also the very hierarchical organization. If you've studied them
that you see how they are driven by the Central Committee,
which at one point fifteen years back was fourteen members
or so. It then came down to about fifteen members
and today I believe there are just about four members
left in the the Central Committee, which is one of
(25:24):
the top most decision making bodies of the MAOIs. They
are about four of them. Gunpati of course, the former
leader is there, but he's really old and he's getting
he's not in great health. You have someone called Tippiri
Tripati whose house I've been to in karim Nagara district.
And you have Kishenji's younger brother, Malojula Vinugopal Rao, who's
(25:50):
Kishenji was this very famous Maoist leader who was gunned
down in West Bengal of all places, very very bright
and upcoming and a very hardcore mouse leader who was
ambushed and killed in an operation in West Bengal. So
it's now down to these three old men, three or
four and the fourth. So one of them could be
(26:13):
the next Maos chief. Nobody really knows, but you know,
it's it is a leadership that is really old. Uh,
it's aging. And this is the problem of the mouse
that they've not found young carters. They've not found young leaders.
At one point in the seventies and the eighties, when
(26:35):
there was a lot of revolutionary fervor, used to find
a lot of carters coming in. But today the only
new carters are coming in are the tribals, and there
is a certain hierarchy in the Mouse that all the
top leaders are from ah Pladesh. Even today, the three
leaders that I mentioned are the four leaders I mentioned,
three are from and Pladesh. All three incidentally are from
(26:58):
kareem Nagar. This is a district that I visited about
eleven years back just to find out why is it
that fifty percent of the Mause central compantee comes from
one district of then undivided and Pladesh. But the foot
soldiers are all the tribals, but they never allow the
tribals to command the movement. Yes, the tribals are always
(27:19):
the foot soldiers. The officer krter is all andre Telugu.
They speak Telugu. And it's very interesting. When I've seen
some of these videos that the Mouse have shared of
encounters with the police forces, you will see two languages
being you know used. You'll have Telugu people shouting orders
in Telugu and people shouting in Gondhi. So it's two
(27:40):
languages there. So but now it's now come down to
literally there back to the wall twenty twenty five. There,
that revolutionary corridor has become you know, a dead end.
Now it's just a couple of square kilometers in Chatti's
goad and you know it. As you said the financial
(28:03):
year ending match thirty first, twenty twenty six, the government
wants to close the case on the CPI mouse.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Yeah, kind of ironic what you said about the hierarchy
for a people's movement, for there to be a hierarchical
like that. So yeah, talking about the government's mission to
end naxialism, I have some numbers, just some rough numbers.
So according to the Government of India in twenty ten,
there were one twenty six districts affectedly by nxialism. This
(28:31):
number has come down by over eighty percent thirty eight
in April two zero two four. Violence has declined from
one nine hundred incidents in twenty ten, which was the
highest in the history of naxialism, to around three seventy
five in twenty twenty four, which is a drop of
around eighty one percent. Now, I haven't been able to
collate the numbers for the last let's say a year
(28:51):
or so, but empirically speaking, because I work in the
media and I come across news reports and I come
across headlines, sometimes I give those auditions. I can tell
it to you for a fact that I have seen
more inputs and more headlines of Naxles as a surrendering
or being killed in encounters in the last year e
and a half or so, especially in the starting a
few months or of this year. What's really happening something
(29:12):
on the ground And a very naive question, if I
may or a silly question. This seems very easy now.
You know, every other day you have an encounter where
you have a next number of Knaxles being either killed
or you know, surrender or be arrested. If it was
so easy, then what was it? What was making it
so difficult in the past.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Well, you know, the fact is that the presence of
the security forces has gone up enormously for fifteen years.
Back in twenty ten, Abujumart was an area that nobody
went into. It was like the no go zone right
and Brigade upon Ver used to call us that nobody
has been there in ages. It's like one part of
India that has been completely unsurveyed outside of that one island,
(29:54):
Sentinel Island where you have the last centeniaries living. I
didn't think there was any part of it India that
was unsurveyed, but Abujmad was one such place. The MAOIs
were there, the entire central committee, the leadership is there.
And today what you have is something like two hundred
forward operating bases that the police and the paramilitary and
the capfs have built into this Abujmad and roads have
(30:18):
come up there. The Border Roads Organization is building thousands
of kilometers of roads criss crossing the forest areas. So
you have telecommunication towers coming up, mobile phone connectivity has
gone up, roads communication. When all of this comes up,
then the security forces are able to operate very easily
through the linked and breadth of this red corridor, and
(30:40):
the Maos are encircled, and then you have informants coming
up right when you have presence there, presence translates into
intelligence gathering. You have villagers coming up and volunteering. Look
there is this MAOIs leadership here, or there's a camp
over there. So I suspect that a lot of these
(31:00):
recent successes have to do with a lot of ground intel.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
That's coming in.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
And plus there's an exodus of mouse cards. As you mentioned,
last year there were some nine hundred odds surrenders and
this year there've been something like seven hundred surrenders in
the last five or six months, which is devastating for
a leadership, for a movement that's built on Carter's Their
fighting strength is from ten thousand plus fifteen years back,
(31:25):
it's down to just about fifteen hundred people, which is
just a little more than a battalion. So right now
they're in survival mode. Their leaders are scattered. There's no
clarity on who the next leader is, so it's every
man unto himself and they possibly all they can do
now is to carry out a couple of ied attacks,
(31:46):
delay Harry, distract all of that. But it's just the
writings on the wall for them. It's just another couple
of months. And this is what you will see now
is mopping up operations where they're already in the heartland
of the mouse. They have nowhere else to go. There
is no border that they have taken cross and run,
and a lot of states are already starting to plan
what they plan to do with all these forces that
(32:08):
they've raised to fight the Mouse, which may not be
needed from twenty twenty six onwards. So there are some
forces which have converted them into anti communal forces, and
you know those kinds of things. That are going on.
But it's the end of the road for the mouse.
And it's not very unusual what's going on with them,
because you know they're at the end of the day.
You cannot go on fighting endlessly. When your carters don't
(32:31):
see this movement going anyway, then like any other movement,
they start deserting in droves, like any other political party
or any movement which just fighting without any clear goals.
That the goals are nowhere close to be achieved to
being achieved. And plus all of the things that you
promised them, which was development and peace and prosperity. Now
(32:54):
the government is bringing. Yes, the government is bringing the
fruits of economic progress down to the people. It's pulling
people out of poverty. Un let's we can argue about
this all day, but the fact is that a road
can transform the lives of people like nothing else in
this country. A good road will mean access to health,
(33:15):
to education, It can bring in, you know, relief, it
can uplift the lives of people. And that is what
has happened in all of these areas. And when that happens,
you see a lot of people moving away from the
part that the maos promise or that thing of oppression.
So when the fruits of you know, development start reaching
(33:36):
the grassroots, that's when you see a kind of transformation. Today.
Why are they not getting any recruits because every recruit
either wants to be part of some state government scheme
or a central government scheme, always looking for a job, right,
So when that happens, the movement collapses. And this has
happened across the world. People join movements out of livelihood,
(33:57):
not so much for ideology. It's the leadership that drives this.
Because of ideology, they build up this thing of you know,
victim mood and that you've been oppressed and you've been
you know, uh suppressed, and you're being exploited and all
of that. But when the people see for themselves the
fruits of that progress reaching them, when they see all
your the government schemes, the free food and you know,
(34:17):
all of those dolls that are being given out, which
is a very good thing to think. It's ever happened
in the history of humanity where half a billion people
are being given free food. I mean, that's a big achievement.
When all of these things happen, the movements start collapsing.
And that's exactly what's happening to the mouse? It's been
a generation, you know, and every gerrilla movement, if you
look at it, it has its peaks and it's truffs.
(34:40):
And today I think the mouse are in that truck.
It's twenty years they've been fighting and now it's time
to wrap.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
Up, right, we'll talk more on this topic, but after
a quick trick.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
What is the coolest back of the two thousands?
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (34:53):
For me, it was the Pulse Pulse one say also
two hundred that no?
Speaker 1 (34:59):
Actually no? What else? Other? So the CBC was the coolest.
What else could you have?
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Piero Pharo that's one motorcycle. That's one motorcycle from TVs
which was so underrated. Hero Honda sleek. Why do you
always pick the most eighties?
Speaker 1 (35:20):
What is that pic? What is ALEX hundred? ALEX hundred
came in nineteen.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
What are you talking about?
Speaker 1 (35:28):
My uncle uh booked a hero Honda CD hundred s
S in the eighties. Yes, that's a fourth row.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
Yes, no, yes, he booked a CD hundred s S
late eighties. I'm talking about eighty six eighty seven.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
ESD created the enthusiast in India at some level or
maybe at a very big level.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
Yes, I think so. What about the pulser one thirty
five ls.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
That that was that that at the gene.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
Welcome back. Something we've been talking about the fight against
actualism in terms of the military aspect of it, as
not military military, but in terms of the use of
force when it comes to using police and paramilitary forces,
stuff like that. I want to briefly also touch upon
the politics of it because I think this topic is
such that even though this podcast is about defense and
(36:26):
it's about you know, the militaries, but the topic of
left wing extremism cannot be talked about without the politics
of it because, like you said, the way to fight
this is, like you said, to clear, hold and build, right,
So your forces can only do the clearing bit of it,
and perhaps the holding bit of it. They can clear
a place of the an axillies present over there, they
(36:47):
can sort of secure the paraphter to hold it, but
the building has to be done by the governments with
the district administration, which is where the politicians come in. Also,
this problem is something that spanned several states, so you
have the in displace state disputes. This problem is something
that spanned several government at the center, so you have
different parties in the rule. I don't want to right
(37:08):
now do sort of a blame analysis of you know,
Party A or Party B was better, Party eight did
that wrong? That is right, But I want your perspective
of what you've seen over the course of a career
in terms of how important was the politics of it
all to this movement and perhaps the mistakes we made
(37:28):
because of the politics of it all.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Well, I think the biggest mistake, if you asked me there,
was that we began economic liberalization so late in the day,
and it should have happened much before. We should probably
have been in the seventies. You probably wouldn't have even
seen the mouse movement pick up, you know. So we
(37:50):
were late in the game as far as liberalization went,
and we moved only when there was no other alternative.
We tried everything, including socialism, and by ninety one the
coffers were empty, and that's when they decided that we
had to look at another path of development, which is
now the only path as far as any political party
(38:10):
is concerned. And today I can take a bet on
this that even if in the unlikeliest of scenarios, which
is the Left Front coming to power in Delhi. They
will continue the economic reforms that have been started in
nineteen ninety one. They have no option but to do
that because the kind of the fruits of development that
(38:33):
liberalization has delivered to India, the unchaining and the unleashing
of the animal spirits of Indian entrepreneurs, could not have
been possible in any other situation. And that is the
larger political framework that I'm looking at when you're looking
at this Maoist problem. And to see an example of
(38:56):
a country that has not liberalized itself, that has not
created a middle class, a vibrant middle class, you just
have to look across the western borders at Pakistan, which
has not had any kind of liberalization, which has not
had any green revolution.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
Which has never felt the need to do that.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
They are still today, after almost eighty years of being
around as an independent country. They are still feudal and
in parts a tribal country which is ruled by a
very crooked elite, which is a robber baron elite, as
used to say in the West, the robber barons. The
(39:32):
robber barons are the Pakistan military. Right. So there is
this example, and you have India's example, where we are
trying to do all the right things because you know,
how much ever people may score at it, the first
lines of the constitution are we the people right? So
that has been the guiding force as long. You know,
(39:52):
as far as any political party goes, they may not
be fully committed to it, or they may not have
the political power to come out themselves fully to it,
but by and large you see a very large percentage
of the political parties looking at doing things that will
benefit the people. And in this case, the fact that
you did not bring in the infrastructure that was needed
(40:16):
in all of these places. You did not build the schools,
you did not build the hospitals, you didn't bring the
roads or the infrastructure. I think those were the biggest
feelings that we as a nation have inflicted on ourselves
that you know in the year just about ten years back,
remember they when the first UPI started to be popularized.
(40:40):
You had in one page you had the government ads
telling people how to build toilets and how to use toilets,
and on the next page you're asking them how to
use the UPI.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
You know, the.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
Patms and you know the bar pays and all that
So this is the kind of gap that you have
to actually cover that you not only have to build
your tokil heads, but you have to also get people
onto a digital economy. So that's the kind of gap
that we've not been able to build over the last
couple of years. But now I think things are changing.
There's a pace of reform that's accelerating. And it's not
(41:19):
just any political party, it's all political parties have taken
this conscious decision from ninety one onwards that they may
differ on the way that liberalization has to be brought
in or you know, how it has to be done,
but everybody agrees to the last member of Parliament that
this is the only way out. And I think that is,
(41:40):
to my mind, the only political argument that you can
make for the fact that the Maoists were as powerful
as they were at one point, that the fruits of
India's progress and prosperity had not reached the most distant,
you know, parts of the country. The last man is
the line, you know that was that the last mine
(42:02):
in the line was clearly the tribals of central India.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Right. One more point on the topic of the factors
behind the decline, in nuxialism in India is the civil
society support for the longest time, and this especially during
the time and I was sort of growing up, I
saw a lot of support when it came from urban centers.
You had lawyers, activists, not support from them for the movement.
(42:28):
These days you have a pegerative term to describe them.
I don't want to use that. But you've also seen
that support winding GWS. Is that the term you're looking for?
Speaker 2 (42:36):
Overground workers?
Speaker 1 (42:37):
No, not really, I was looking for something to do
with urban The world happened urban axl Yes, yes, right right,
I said it. They yeah, but yeah, but you've also
seen that support winding over the years. What do you
think has contributed to that? And uh, parallelly to sort
of take your point of what you just described right
(42:59):
now forward, has the support also declared on the ground
in the bridges as well?
Speaker 2 (43:03):
Yeah? Absolutely, And you know, if you're looking at it,
like I mentioned in the beginning that this was essentially
a battle of ideologies where you have the left parties
they profess a certain ideology. You have the far left
that professes another ideology. The left parties, the CPI the
CPN they want to bring in power, but through electoral means. Yes, right,
(43:27):
they the CPI mouse say that we want a violent
overthrow of the state through force of arms. That's the difference,
and that tells you how one side is prepared to do.
The maos hold the CPI, and the CPI am in
utter contempt. They say, these are you know, they're compromised
because they're part of the political mainstream. Right. So it
(43:51):
is it is basically an ideological battle. And you will
have communists of all shades. You will have you know,
uh communists or overground workers who are in academia, intelligency,
in the media, all of those things, and they will
be the maoist that the far left guys who are
actually there in the fields or in the jungles of Chatis.
(44:14):
So you had very clear, very very very bright individuals
like Kobad Gandhi, he and his wife an Rada, who
were you know, they're very very bright, intellictuals who were
middle class and upper middle class even who gave everything
up and moved into the forests because they believed in
the movement and they said this is the only way
(44:35):
to bring about change. So it is literally a battle
of ideologies and I think the turning point was in
nineteen ninety one when you saw the Soviet Union, which
was the found of that ideology, the leftist ideology, collapse,
and between ninety one and two thousand you saw communists China,
(44:56):
which feared the same thing would happen to them. They
had to They were at a crossroads, and they figured out,
what do we need to do. Now do we also
become market oriented? But if we become market oriented, then
you know, we might cease to exist because we cannot
be communist and capitalists at both at the same time.
But they've managed to do that. That's the most incredible thing.
(45:17):
I think in post the Second World War, the most
astounding transformations of our country has happened in China, which
is the communist dictatorship at the same time is a
capitalist paradise. If you look at it, It's never happened
anywhere in the history of the world. So I think
the Chinese in that sense, they studied this what happened
(45:38):
to the Soviet Union, and they figured that the Soviets
bankrupted themselves because they started spending a whole lot of
their thing on the military. The Chinese said, we're not
going to make that mistake. We will become economically strong first,
then we will become militarily strong. So you have Chairman
Maos well being shopping not Chirman Mao deannger being talking
(46:02):
about hide your strength and bide your time. And then
those four developments that China must do, the last of
which was the military aspect, which Chi Jinping is now
pushing in the last decade or fifteen years or something.
So China built itself into this economic behemoth which it
is today. By the end of this decade, they say
China is going to account for fifty percent of global manufacturing.
(46:25):
I mean that is they've become a manufacturing superpower, whether
you look at automobiles or you know, fifth generation and
sixth generation fighter aircraft, warship, submarines, all of that. They've
pretty much got it in a very very compressed timeframe
of just about less than half a century. So it
(46:45):
was actually a battle of ideologies, and I think the
MAOIs were a simple They were a bit simple minded
folk where they thought that what Mao did in nineteen
forty eight, we can do in India in twenty two
thousand and four or two thousand and fourteen or twenty
(47:05):
twenty four times change. You know, try showing someone today
in twenty twenty five a movie that was shot in
nineteen forty eight. I mean, I've had trouble in my
previous organization trying to get my colleagues to watch Cerguliu
in Westerns. And they would say, I saw it because
you asked me to watch it. But such a slow movie,
(47:26):
I said, but it's a classic. It's like Segulione, mix
cinematic classics. So try and get someone today to watch
a movie that's shot in nineteen sixty eight, even if
it's a classic, one of the spaghetti westerns. They say,
for me, so, why do you think ideology that's you know,
dates back to the nineteen thirties and the forties and
all it's going to work nearly a century later. So
I think they are complete bunch of misfits. They didn't
(47:50):
read the room, they didn't read the country. And India
is moving in a certain way and the Maoists are
not part of that. So, I mean, the beauty of
India is that we are a land of multiple ideologies.
You can have all kinds of ideologies, uh, and you
known yet be part of the mainstream. So I think
it's only a matter of time now before the Maos
(48:11):
give up their ideologies and just joined the mainstream.
Speaker 1 (48:15):
Yeah, I guess so. Apart from the the governments in
the state's efforts, it's also as much as that it's
a natural slow death per se for the movement. All right.
A couple of last points. UH. One is something that
you talked about earlier on this episode and something that
I had in my notes anyway to talk to you about.
Was this time under the Upa government when the government
briefly flirted with the idea of uh calling in the military,
(48:39):
calling in army and I didn't I don't remember about
the army as much as as I do about the
Air Force, where there was a serious talk about using
Air Force helicopters to bomb the jungles where there were
next lights. Never ended up happening, thank god, Thank God
asked that. So with the benefit of hindsight now when
you look back at that time when this sea and
(49:01):
this was a very very seriously but I remember that
this debate was happening. What do you think would have
happened if India had gone down that path? And I'm
not just talking logistics. I'm not talking about the army's
challenge or for the challenge of maintaining the borders and
also having to have this battle in there in the
center of your country. But I'm talking about the very
idea of your own military fighting your own people on
(49:24):
its own land. And this becomes even more significant if
you think about the fact that we're talking about this
when in the US you have an apprate, or when
you have a protest happening in Los Angeles, where the
US President has ordered Marines, which is one of the
four arms of the US military, to be deployed in
the city to quell those protests. So what do you
think would have happened if we have done well?
Speaker 2 (49:43):
I mean they firstly, I mean we're very different from
the Americans, right right. And secondly, I mean, like I
said before, one of the best things that the military
did was to stay out of this conflict. They said, look,
it's not our battle. Do not deploy us for this.
We are not meant for fighting insurgencies in the heartland.
The air Force was brought in there was, but only
(50:05):
for logistics. Yes, there was an argument that they should
be used to as gunships, helicopter gunships and to shoot
the moose. But the point again is that how can
you tell who a maoist is from the air? Everyone
looks the same. I mean, if you were just to
do target acquisition is going to be a problem because
you see a large body of people in the ground.
(50:27):
You would end up doing the same kind of mistakes
that the United States made in Afghanistan where they've massacred
wedding parties, you know, just based on the fact that
their sensors picked up this huge group of people in
a village who they thought to be were you know,
planning some kind of a military offensive or there was
some girilla gathering or something like that, and they would
just go and bomb and machine gun them. You would
(50:49):
end up doing that to your own citizens, because you know,
at the end of the day, they are our own people, right.
They may be a tribal or they may be villagers,
or they may stay in some of the most remote
and inaccessible part of the country, but at the end
of the day, they are our own people, and you
can't unleash the air force and the military on them.
All you can do is to send people on the ground. Police.
(51:11):
Of course, the police didn't have the capabilities then they
didn't do. Now, you can send the police, you can
send the paramilitary, but you certainly can't send the army,
and god forbid, the air force against your people. And
the Indian Air Force has deployed just once in the
northeast in the nineteen sixties, but that was it. We've
never deployed the air force after that because you would
(51:33):
end up making horrible mistakes. You would end up massacring people.
Because these are weapons of war. They meant to kill
large numbers of soldiers, to destroy fortifications and do all
of that thing. If you use them against tribals, I mean,
the most vulnerable of India's people. You can't tell firstly
from the air who are tribalist and who are soldier.
(51:53):
A moost guerillais everyone looks the same and most of
the time they don't even wear those uniforms obvious reasons,
and because that's how guerrillas operate, right They merged amongst
the people and they operate. So it's in hindsight it
is one of the best decisions that we made, never
not to deploy the military and all this it had
to be fought in the way it has been fought
(52:15):
in the last fifteen years slow intelligence based ground operations
where you clear old build you bring in the roads,
you slowly search, you take in, you take losses. There
have been a lot of security forces who have died,
thousands of them in fact, in the last fifteen years.
But that's the only way to do it, because what
(52:37):
would have happened if you had deployed, say large forces,
You possibly would have you know, brought those areas under control,
but you would have also probably created a new generation
of maos with a kind of bombing and the you know,
staffing that.
Speaker 1 (52:52):
You would have done then exactly. I think what people
sometimes argue had the US has done when it comes
to it's terrorism, because it's kind of bobbing they've carried
out that it's in Afghanistan or Iraq. That's kind of
led to that sentiment staying and led to more radicalizations.
Speaker 2 (53:07):
Well, the US is up against ideologies again, and they've
not won any war if you look at it, even
the Gulf after Gulf Storm one, which was in nineteen
ninety one. The US has never won any war. And
look what happened in Afghanistan where you went into destroy
al Qaeda and then you ended up fighting the Taliban,
and then you ended up, you know, into a nation
(53:28):
building which was never your original goal, and you ended
up staying there for twenty years, and all you did
was to replace Taliban one point two with Taliban two
point two. You know, it's as crazy as that. So
insurgencies are very complex phenomena, and especially if it is
a state that is fighting its own people, then it
becomes all the more complex. And this is I think
(53:52):
something that the Indian state has done very well since
nineteen forty seven, our model of not employing heavy weaponry,
for instance in Kashmir, except very very rare occasions, nothing
other than you know, a recoil less you know, a
car Gustaf has been used, which is in eighty four
(54:12):
mm rocket propelled round. Nothing else has been used. No
artillery has been used, no gunships have been used. With
that very rare exception of the hill Kaka Sarvinash in
two thousand and three, very very few instances have happened
for the military force to be used. But that's the
(54:33):
way to fight insurgency. You can either do that this
way or you can do it the way the Americans,
like you just mentioned, you know, you go all gung
ho and you deploy gunships and you know, attack captas
against the tribals.
Speaker 1 (54:47):
Right, So one final quick point, we're running short of time,
so we'll just quickly wrap this up. Keeping everything in
mind of what you've just said the whole episode, the
whole everything that you've said over the course of this episode,
is it then practically possible at all to overthrow any
government of India except for the election.
Speaker 2 (55:06):
Overthrow government in India, you mean, the central governments. It's
next to impossible because for overthrowing a government, you would
have to fight the military, you'd have to fight the paramilitary,
all of that thing. So it's not as easy as
that that in the old days you could march on
to capitals and seize it and stuff. Year it's nothing
(55:28):
like that. I mean, you could possibly move into Delhi
and capture a few suburbs. How long are you going
to hold it? You know, so a country like India
can't be you know power you can overthrow, you know,
an elected government. You possibly could do it in the
United States, you know, which is what we've seen in
(55:52):
Capital in a few years back. You could just you know,
hold the entire Capital hill hostage and you know, have
a civil war kind of movement there. But the United
States is a very it's a very interesting case study
of what happened in the past. If we look at it,
where this thing of the right to bear arms and
(56:17):
militias and all being created, that is something that it's
a bit unsettling for a country to allow such large
numbers of people to carry infantry weapons around, but that's
the way the United States was formed. I mean, it
is a country that was born through force of arms,
and it was a country that again once again resolved
(56:40):
its differences through force of arms. So it's a very
violent it has a very violent history. In our case,
we're generally a very pacifist lot, peace loving lot. We've
just seen one very very violent phase of nineteen forty seven,
which is our birth as a nation state, and after
(57:01):
that we've never seen the kind of blood letting We've
possibly seen it in phases and insurgencies, in terrorist movements
in Punjab and Jamun Kashmia and of course the Maoist insurgency.
We're tens and thousands of Indians have been killed. But
in the long run, I think we are a civilizational
state and there is a sense that you know, we
(57:21):
have been here for five thousand years, so you know
that common joke is that you say twenty years, MAOIs
had their you know, peak and their trough in twenty years.
What's twenty years and five thousand in a five thousand
year civilization, which it's nothing. It's a blip. It's a
little blip like that. So that's the kind of thing
that we've been So I think it comes from being
the status quist part. They're very happy where we are.
(57:44):
We don't want any more territory than we already caught.
We are not you know, a disruptor in that sense.
We don't want to capture any country or overthrow any other.
We are very happy with the way we are. I
think that is India civilizational course.
Speaker 1 (58:01):
We learned there. Then, thanks and the great Chat has
always had a lot of fun on this on this
episode with you.
Speaker 2 (58:06):
Thanks very much, Stave, good to be back with you.
Speaker 1 (58:09):
That's it then for this FIE's episode. For more tune
in next week till then, stay safe and not cross
any boundaries that passport by
This is India Today Podcasts. Welcome to Season three of
Another Defense, the podcast that takes you inside the world
of conflict. I'm your host, Deve Goswami, and every week
I sit down with experts and retired officers from the Army,
Navy and Air Force to decode all things to do
(00:21):
with India security and explore what it truly means to serve.
Get ready for stories of strategy, sacrifice and strength. This
is in our Defense. Welcome to Another Defense. India's borders,
whether along with the China or Pakistan, are relatedly quiet
(00:42):
for the last couple of weeks, but there's a war
that's raging inside, a war that's been raging for over
five decades now. Cluxialism, maoism, red terror, leftist extremism, you
call it whatever. This all fits into what the Government
of India officially calls left being extremism, and of India
has said that this left wing extremism will be eliminated
(01:04):
by March to zero two six. Funny deadline to have.
It's like the end of the financial end the water
sort of thing. But what we've seen in the last
few weeks is a sport. Last few months actually is
a sport in encounters that's led to surrenders of several
actualtes or eliminations in encounters, and to sort of decode
(01:25):
that and help us understand what's happening right now in
the war against left wing extremism and what's been happening
in the last few years and what we can expect
in the upcoming months is with me, Hey, they're good.
Good to be back once again. A topic I think
Sande that you must have spent almost your entire career
(01:45):
covering in bits and pieces of the parts of my career,
but substantial part of part of your career, because I
think the problem is such, the problem that India has
faced with this is such uh, And that's exactly why
I'm going to actually ask you to give us a
crash course into the history of left being extremism in
India because we were discussing this is before we began recording.
(02:06):
You met me in the capitala downstairs and you asked
me whether this topic gets a lot of traction online.
And when we in the media talk traction, what we
mean basically is whether we get to readers interest into
subject matters like these, And had said that Honestly speaking,
it's not as much as you would expect with some
other very very popular topics for many obvious reasons that
(02:27):
the two of us know about. So, which is exactly
why I want you to sort of explain to our
listeners and viewers what is left wing extremism, how it
sort of took shape and evolved? Now I know it
began in West Bengal. Nor in West Bengal, in a
village called Naxcel Naxlebury, which is where the word Naxilism
comes from, Naxlebarry, which was basically a farmer's movement, a
(02:50):
farmers uprising. How did we start from there? Which was,
if I'm not wrong, in nineteen sixty seven decades later,
where you had what was known as the Red Corridor
that spanned West Bengal, chats Got Bihar, parts of Dark
more than a dozen Indian states, exactly exactly. Yeah, So
give us an overview of how did it begin from Naxalbari,
(03:13):
how did it reach the peaks it did before we
kind of dive into what's happening right now with India's
fight against and mission to end it.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Absolutely, they've a good question and great to be back.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Now. The thing is that you have to understand the
thing about naxialism or Maoism, whatever you call it, left
wing extremism, is that this is an ideology. You know,
it is not something about peasants who being discriminated suddenly
you know, picked up arms and challenged the might of
the state. All of this can be traced back to
(03:46):
the revolutions in Russia and in China, specifically China, because
the MAOIs in India are actually more heavily influenced by
Mao Zidong. What he did in China in the twenties
and the thirties and finally captured power in China nineteen
forty eight. He expelled the nationalists, and the Chinese Communist
Party still rules until some time. The Chinese were actively
(04:08):
supporting all of these revolutionary movements all across the world,
and you had all of these leftist guerrilla movements, whether
it's a Shining Path in South America, you have the
you know, the Philippines Red movements there in Cambodia. So
all of these are actually all far left militant groups
(04:29):
who overthrow, who advocate the overthrow of the ruling government.
And this is also what the Maos of India plan
to do when they began their insurrection in West Bengal Naxalbaria.
As you mentioned, the plan was to overthrow the state
and to establish red rule exactly the way Chairman Mao
(04:51):
had done. So it is an ideology and this ideology
has remained in one form of the other. Now it's
come in several waves. Now, you had these movements in
Telangana in nineteen forty six when you had an uprising.
There were genuine reasons for that, the kind of operation
of the villagers and all was but it was pretty
(05:12):
devastating for people over there in what was then the
Nizam's territories nineteen forty six, where you had peasants uprisings
and a lot of you know, communists movements were across
the countryside in India. One of like I mentioned in Telangana,
you had investment all Kerala. Of course they formed a
(05:33):
government there so that you can say the revolutionary power
was converted into electoral power. And it was an unusual
thing that you had the first communist government in Kerala
in using an elected democracy, you know, parliamentary democracy to
come to power. But you had all of these little
fringe movements in the countryside, flickering in Telangana. In and
(05:56):
A Pradesh, of Courseesh was undivided in those days. And
then West Bengal. The uprising in Naksalbari in nineteen sixty
seven was crushed very brutally by the force of the state.
By nineteen seventy two it was completely wiped out. It
was the government, it was the police, the paramilitary and
(06:17):
even the Indian Army. Not much as spoken about this,
but the fact is that the Indian Army did not
want while it was focused on East Pakistan, did not
want this insurgency in its backyard. So which is why
I have spoken with General Jacob who was then the
Chief of Staff of the Eastern Command, and he said
that they proceeded to act against the Maos the Naxals
(06:39):
with brute force and that uprising was crushed brutally. And
then in two thousand and four, what you have is
all of these remaining groups, which is the Maoist communist
center in Bihar, the peoples who are group of Adhdesh,
the complete die hard leftist MAOIs revolution. They met somewhere
(07:01):
in the middle in the jungles of Chatti's Gud, and
they formed this party called the CPI MAOIs Communist Party
of Indian MAOIs. And low and behold, they started controlling
large tracts of land in areas where the state was absent,
completely missing, like in the forests of dante Vada and
Chatti's God. You have this place called Abujmard, which is
(07:23):
which means impenetrable forest, like four thousand kilometers of forest,
which which had never been you know, surveyed even in
the times of the British. It is completely unsurveyed territories.
And all of the Maos when there, they established their
bastions there and lo and behold. By two thousand and six,
just two years after this unification of all of these
(07:45):
fringe groups into the CPI MAOIs, you had what was
called the Red Corridor stretching from Nepal right down to
Andhra Pradesh. So they used to call it the Pashupati
to Tirupathi Corridor, almost a dozen Indian states, and it
was also called a Compact Revolutionary Zone, which allowed for
free movement of men and material across this corridor.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
It was literally like a.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Corridor, you know, an expressway for the Maos to move freely,
and they controlled at that point more than one hundred
and fifty Indian districts. They had a presence in all
of these districts. Right out of the six hundred or
so Indian districts they controlled almost one hundred hundred and fifty.
They had a presence in all of these districts. They
were very strong. They had a guerrilla army of more
(08:29):
than ten thousand carters. That's almost a division sized force.
And you know, when I was here in India today
in twenty ten, we received the most bloodshilling account of
a massacre in Dante Vada in Chattis Guard where an
entire company of the CRPF were massacred. Now a company
(08:53):
is one one hundred plus troopers. Seventy six of them
were murdered. They were encircled by the Maos who came
in large numbers, one thousands. So they had these fighting
formations which they used to call the battalions, which are
actually companies. But they could a mass mass and they
moved like regular militaries. They were not like guerrillas in
(09:14):
that sense. They would mobilize, they would move march encircles
and they encircled an entire crp of company and they
massacred them with utter brutality. I remember, you know, flying
down there, we went there, took us almost a day
to reach that place where the survivors were pulled out.
They were just about eight survivors from that massacre, and
(09:35):
most of them were shaking when they were describing this
thing of literally hundreds of mouse converging and you know,
literally shooting them like you know hens in a coop.
They were encircles, surrounded and killed. So that was the
military power of the mouse at their peak, somewhere in
the mid twenty tents, which is just about six years
after they'd formed the CPI mouse, and you had the
(09:59):
none other than the Prime of India. It's moment seeing
in two thousand and six April two thousand and six,
I still remember that where he says that they are
the gravest internal security problem for India. And at that time,
let's not forget that you had a situation in Jamun Kashmir,
a very active situation there. You had militancy, you had.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Cross bordered terrorism.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
We were two years away from Mumbai, but you already
had a couple of very high profile attacks in Mumbai
ninety three and of course two thousand and six, and
here was a Prime minister saying that, look, they are
the biggest internal security threat. And in a sense they
were far more potent because they were in the They
are what is called a heartland insurgency, which is in
(10:41):
the heart of your country, in the middle of India.
They're not a rim land insurgency, which is something around
the borders, which you can mean, you know, you can contain,
you can put your military there, you can you know,
seal the border. What do you do with an insurgency
that's burning in your in the middle of your country.
So those were very dark times then where we actually
(11:01):
thought it's going to take a while to get all
of this under control. And this was in areas where,
like I mentioned, the state had no presence. There was
no one going there. There was surveyors there, there were
no roads, there was no electricity, there was nothing. So
this was the void that the Maoist chose to incubate
their movement and they used to run. They would run
(11:23):
these liberated zones. They would provide the services, they would
run schools, they would run hospitals, they would hold courts
where they would administer justice. So it was like a
state within a state, and things began to change. I
feel after that massacre in twenty ten, when suddenly you
woke up just four years after what the Prime Minister said,
(11:44):
the Home Ministry said, look, we have a serious problem, gentlemen,
so let's get moving and do something about it. And
which is when they started expanding the paramilitary force. So
the CRPF, the BSF, all of them started to be
expanded till a time that they were almost half a
million strong. A lot of them were deployed in Chatti's Gut.
(12:06):
They helped the state government, you know, they bolstered the
state government capacity to fight the mouse and they got
There's a friend of mine, a very interesting man, Brigaded
Buson Ponver who as a nineteen seventy one war veteran,
he was at the jungle Warfare school in Aranti, and
I still remember in two thousand and five he was
literally airlifted and brought into Churchi's gut and he set
(12:28):
up this college of jungle warfare in the middle of nowhere.
And I Si is a very exceptional man. I mean
at the time when people play golf and you know,
have a nice beer in the afternoon. You had Brigadive
Pon were riding a horse in the middle of nowhere,
you know, and building this college of Jungle.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Warfare's officer who helps it trained the cobra inso of
the CRPF.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Well, no, actually the he trains the police units. The
cobras they have their own training. So he was doing
it more for the state police formations and all that,
so he helped greatly. So I mean, yeah, what I
said was that what I meant to say is that
it is an all of government effort, the center, the states.
All of that happened, and then of course twenty ten
you had that very horrible massacre when the entire Congress
(13:11):
leadership was wiped out, Jiramgati massacre as it's called, where
they literally again they carried out a massacre. Was it
twenty eleven I think or not ten, but it was
after twenty ten where they surrounded and massacred the Congress leadership.
I think it was twenty thirteen if I'm not mistaken.
Memories failing me, but this was the MAOIs at their peak.
(13:34):
They were, you know, completely in control of Central India.
That red corridor was a reality, and I think what
emboldened them was the fact that you had a very
successful uprising in Nepal. You had the Maos of Nepal
who had beaten back the state and they in fact
(13:54):
then finally came out of hiding and they became a
political party, and of course they're now in power in Nepal.
So I think that's where the Mouse also got, you know,
a boost for their thing. Of course, they didn't believe
in the political process. They plan to fight it from
the you know, just like Mao had done. That they
would surge from the forests into the countryside and from
(14:17):
the countryside into and finally encircle the cities and then
take power. They plan to capture power. But I think,
if my memory serves me right again, is in the
twenty forties they wanted to raise the flag of the
Mouse in Beli.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Right, to sort of extent on that point, before we
come to what's happening in the present day. Fighting nux
lights at the tactical level, how different is it compared
to your regular army operation. And the reason I asked
that is because on this podcast I happen to talk
a lot about wars involving armies. We talk about you know,
(14:54):
long reach missiles, fighter jets, submarines, warships, high ting equipment.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Ah.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
But the fight against naxialism sort of I think goes
under appreciated, not just on this podcast but also generally
widely speaking in the media because I don't want to
use that word, but I think it's less glamorous, you know,
if you can, if you can see if you can
call it that. Let's take the example of operations, and you know,
after that you had all these fancy s afrat image
to sort of you know, for people to play around
with and sort of talk about, Casey, that's what the
(15:21):
strike happened. You don't really see that really happening happening
with the with the fight against axtualism, which I think,
based on what you've described and what I've read, is
equally if not more dangerous and deadly. So when it
comes to fighting carders of nexill and naxialism, when it
comes to fighting a unit of Naxillites, what is it
(15:43):
like for the troops who are engaged in how dangerou
is it? Dangerous is it? And how does it compare
When I said, like a normal army operation.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
So very good question, Dave. And you know, my sense
is that it's the way the mouse fight.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
They train like regular militaries or militias. I've seen their
you know, literature, We've got some captured literature which I
helped translate, and then to study their tactics and all that.
These tactics are just like regular military. They believe they
are a military. They are the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army,
(16:21):
so they are the military wing of the CPI MAOS
and they trained, their organized, They drill exactly the way
regular militaries do. So it's not like in j and
K where you have you know, terrorists operating in small
teams two terrorists or four terrorists. Here, they are organized
like a regular military. They have battalions which they call
(16:45):
they have battalions which actually companies, right, the one hundred
plus strong battalions, and they you know, they move like
regular armies. They're very disciplined, they have good marksmen. They'd
train exactly like regular army units do so, which is
(17:05):
why I remember when I was interviewing the survivors of
that horrible massacre in twenty ten, what if the survivors
told me this and that's still stuck in my mind today,
even after fifteen years, is that I said, you know,
why didn't you guys form up and fight these guys
when they were you know, I mean, that's of course
a lay person's view, but you know, what he said
(17:27):
to me was that when the firing began, the CRP
of guy told me the survivor that see, we were
deployed in j and K now we had seen militant
attacks over there. We thought they'd shoot and then they
would run away. And he said, then the firing just
kept intensifying and intensifying, and then numbers grew. Then we
realized we'd all been surrounded from all sides. And then
(17:50):
there was panic and they ran and they you know,
and that's how they all were massacred. Normal thing is
that when you come under fire, immediately take positions, You
dig in or you take cover, and then you return
the fire. And you know, company is a very very
powerful thing. A company can dig in and protect itself
for a week, two weeks even so, here is a
thing of not appreciating how the maos were trained. They
(18:11):
were trained exactly like regular militaries, and they were training
to encircle and then fight, and a lot of emphasis
given on marksmanship and all of that thing. So I
think the beginning early years were really deadly for the
police and the paramilitary and the capfs, where they didn't
understand how the maose train and how they moved. And
(18:34):
Plus the other challenge is that they're not outsiders. They're
not coming in from Pakistan or Afghanistan or something. They're
all locals. So in a sense they are locals who've
been brainwashed with an idea, ideologically brainwashed and their tribals
they're all sons of the soil. They know the forests
better than the policemen or the paramilitary guys were brought
(18:56):
in from all over the country, and for them the
jungle is a strange place. But for the mouse gilla
over there, he is from that place. He knows that village,
he's prepared to fight. Whereas and you know, knowing the
thing being from that particular for ut that's a big
disadvantage for the paramilitary forces, for the police force, and
(19:18):
which is why it has taken us this long, almost
two decades to come to where we are today in
twenty twenty five. And I think that was the big
learning that they said, it's a slow fight, it's not
going to happen overnight. So you had to actually employ
this strategy which has been used in every counterinsurgency scenario
(19:41):
in the world, starting from the Malay insurgency in the
nineteen fifties, which is clear, hold and build, which means
that you enter a place, you clear the area of
the MAOIs or the insurgents. You hold that territory, you built,
build bases, You reach out to the people. You ensure
(20:03):
that the maos are not able to move them like
as Chairman Moose had, move like a fish among water.
You know, maos are supposed to gila are supposed to
move among the people the way a fish moves in water.
So you're supposed to impede his movements by this clear
hole built strategy, which is what the whole ministry then did.
And you know, there was a lot of pressure on
(20:25):
the army they back in twenty ten. I know because
there's a friend of mine who was handling this deployment
of the from the Northern Command of the Indian Army
because they wanted the Rushtia rifles to deploy into Chatti's gut,
and there was so much pressure on the army, but
the army resisted. They said, no way are we going
to deploy into the Chatti's gut, because then it becomes
(20:47):
a black hole. Because you send one sector of the
ARA over there, the following year, there will be a
second sector, there will be a third sector, and before
you know it, the Indian Army will be deployed in
the northeast, in the north, in the center, everywhere. So
that is a very very wise decision the army made
at that time. I think not enough credit is given
(21:08):
to them where they said, no, we are not going
to deploy and fight the this is a police and
a paramilitary and a CAPF operation. You should only deploy them.
And I think that is a very good decision because
can you imagine this thing, because then it just becomes
unind the army is not really fighting on the borders,
but they're also fighting in the heartland. So it's a
(21:29):
big challenge. And I think what we're seeing around us
today fifteen years later, after that massacre, fifteen years later,
it's been a slow and a steady climb and a
very successful on one of that against the mouse and
the Red Terror right.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
I would not turned toward an event that took place
in May this year, an event that was supposed to
be a trigger actually for this episode, but then I
think we had something else to discuss, so we sort
of pushed this topic down. On May twenty one, if
I'm not wrong, there was an encounter in chat this
Gadah in which twenty seven Maoists were killed. Among them
(22:07):
was the General Secretary of CPI, Maoist Bassa Raju. Yeah,
I want to focus only on this person right now
before we expand into the larger fight against against Turnaxilism.
This the Government of India said was the biggest kill
in the last forty years.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Why the first time that a Mao's chief has been killed.
There have only been two chiefs so far. There was
Ganpati before him. Yes, and you have this gentleman who
was killed in May. And it's very significant because if
you have managed to kill the leader of the Maoist
movement uh and the leader is is heavily guarded, the
(22:47):
most protected. Of course, Ganpati took voluntary retirement and he
stepped aside and he asked for A Basavaraj to take
over from him. Bassavaraj is a hardcore military ops guy.
He's from Undhra Pradesh, like the entire mouse upper echelons. Now,
(23:10):
he was trained by the LTT, believe it or not,
in the jungles of Chatti's Guard, not Chatika, I think
in the jungles of Andhra Pradesh where the LTT had
come down in somewhere in the late eighties and they
trained a few Maoist garters. Then they were called the
People's War Group in using IED's improvising IDs improvised explosive devices,
(23:32):
and Basavarajo is one of those people's he's an explosive expert.
So it was that LTT training in the late eighties
that helped the MAOIs perfect a whole range of explosives,
and they've improved, you know, improved on those i DS
making till the time that they could blow up even
armored personnel carriers, heavily protected vehicles, bulletproof vehicles and mine
(23:56):
protected vehicles. So there've been numerous such instances. So Bassavaj's
killing was really significant because the MAOIs that I've spoken
with surrendered MAOIs of course in captivity. They said that
the chief at that time it was Gunpati. He always
travels and he's protected heavily guarded. He has a very
(24:17):
crack team of MAOIs protecting him. Is a detail of
about twenty twenty five bodyguards at all times, and I
believe that the people who were killed with Bassavaj were
were his bodyguard detailed and they probably died fighting when
they were cornered. So this is a very very significant
blow that for the first time you've gone and you've
(24:39):
killed the leader. And today we don't know who the
leader of the mouse are. It's been almost a month
since Bassavaraj is killing. There are at least three names
that are doing the rounds of possible successors. But given
the fact that the utter disarray in the MAOIs rangs today,
that after they've been decapitated, so to speak, there's no
(25:01):
communication from them about who the leader is. And they
are also the very hierarchical organization. If you've studied them
that you see how they are driven by the Central Committee,
which at one point fifteen years back was fourteen members
or so. It then came down to about fifteen members
and today I believe there are just about four members
left in the the Central Committee, which is one of
(25:24):
the top most decision making bodies of the MAOIs. They
are about four of them. Gunpati of course, the former
leader is there, but he's really old and he's getting
he's not in great health. You have someone called Tippiri
Tripati whose house I've been to in karim Nagara district.
And you have Kishenji's younger brother, Malojula Vinugopal Rao, who's
(25:50):
Kishenji was this very famous Maoist leader who was gunned
down in West Bengal of all places, very very bright
and upcoming and a very hardcore mouse leader who was
ambushed and killed in an operation in West Bengal. So
it's now down to these three old men, three or
four and the fourth. So one of them could be
(26:13):
the next Maos chief. Nobody really knows, but you know,
it's it is a leadership that is really old. Uh,
it's aging. And this is the problem of the mouse
that they've not found young carters. They've not found young leaders.
At one point in the seventies and the eighties, when
(26:35):
there was a lot of revolutionary fervor, used to find
a lot of carters coming in. But today the only
new carters are coming in are the tribals, and there
is a certain hierarchy in the Mouse that all the
top leaders are from ah Pladesh. Even today, the three
leaders that I mentioned are the four leaders I mentioned,
three are from and Pladesh. All three incidentally are from
(26:58):
kareem Nagar. This is a district that I visited about
eleven years back just to find out why is it
that fifty percent of the Mause central compantee comes from
one district of then undivided and Pladesh. But the foot
soldiers are all the tribals, but they never allow the
tribals to command the movement. Yes, the tribals are always
(27:19):
the foot soldiers. The officer krter is all andre Telugu.
They speak Telugu. And it's very interesting. When I've seen
some of these videos that the Mouse have shared of
encounters with the police forces, you will see two languages
being you know used. You'll have Telugu people shouting orders
in Telugu and people shouting in Gondhi. So it's two
(27:40):
languages there. So but now it's now come down to
literally there back to the wall twenty twenty five. There,
that revolutionary corridor has become you know, a dead end.
Now it's just a couple of square kilometers in Chatti's
goad and you know it. As you said the financial
(28:03):
year ending match thirty first, twenty twenty six, the government
wants to close the case on the CPI mouse.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Yeah, kind of ironic what you said about the hierarchy
for a people's movement, for there to be a hierarchical
like that. So yeah, talking about the government's mission to
end naxialism, I have some numbers, just some rough numbers.
So according to the Government of India in twenty ten,
there were one twenty six districts affectedly by nxialism. This
(28:31):
number has come down by over eighty percent thirty eight
in April two zero two four. Violence has declined from
one nine hundred incidents in twenty ten, which was the
highest in the history of naxialism, to around three seventy
five in twenty twenty four, which is a drop of
around eighty one percent. Now, I haven't been able to
collate the numbers for the last let's say a year
(28:51):
or so, but empirically speaking, because I work in the
media and I come across news reports and I come
across headlines, sometimes I give those auditions. I can tell
it to you for a fact that I have seen
more inputs and more headlines of Naxles as a surrendering
or being killed in encounters in the last year e
and a half or so, especially in the starting a
few months or of this year. What's really happening something
(29:12):
on the ground And a very naive question, if I
may or a silly question. This seems very easy now.
You know, every other day you have an encounter where
you have a next number of Knaxles being either killed
or you know, surrender or be arrested. If it was
so easy, then what was it? What was making it
so difficult in the past.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Well, you know, the fact is that the presence of
the security forces has gone up enormously for fifteen years.
Back in twenty ten, Abujumart was an area that nobody
went into. It was like the no go zone right
and Brigade upon Ver used to call us that nobody
has been there in ages. It's like one part of
India that has been completely unsurveyed outside of that one island,
(29:54):
Sentinel Island where you have the last centeniaries living. I
didn't think there was any part of it India that
was unsurveyed, but Abujmad was one such place. The MAOIs
were there, the entire central committee, the leadership is there.
And today what you have is something like two hundred
forward operating bases that the police and the paramilitary and
the capfs have built into this Abujmad and roads have
(30:18):
come up there. The Border Roads Organization is building thousands
of kilometers of roads criss crossing the forest areas. So
you have telecommunication towers coming up, mobile phone connectivity has
gone up, roads communication. When all of this comes up,
then the security forces are able to operate very easily
through the linked and breadth of this red corridor, and
(30:40):
the Maos are encircled, and then you have informants coming
up right when you have presence there, presence translates into
intelligence gathering. You have villagers coming up and volunteering. Look
there is this MAOIs leadership here, or there's a camp
over there. So I suspect that a lot of these
(31:00):
recent successes have to do with a lot of ground intel.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
That's coming in.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
And plus there's an exodus of mouse cards. As you mentioned,
last year there were some nine hundred odds surrenders and
this year there've been something like seven hundred surrenders in
the last five or six months, which is devastating for
a leadership, for a movement that's built on Carter's Their
fighting strength is from ten thousand plus fifteen years back,
(31:25):
it's down to just about fifteen hundred people, which is
just a little more than a battalion. So right now
they're in survival mode. Their leaders are scattered. There's no
clarity on who the next leader is, so it's every
man unto himself and they possibly all they can do
now is to carry out a couple of ied attacks,
(31:46):
delay Harry, distract all of that. But it's just the
writings on the wall for them. It's just another couple
of months. And this is what you will see now
is mopping up operations where they're already in the heartland
of the mouse. They have nowhere else to go. There
is no border that they have taken cross and run,
and a lot of states are already starting to plan
what they plan to do with all these forces that
(32:08):
they've raised to fight the Mouse, which may not be
needed from twenty twenty six onwards. So there are some
forces which have converted them into anti communal forces, and
you know those kinds of things. That are going on.
But it's the end of the road for the mouse.
And it's not very unusual what's going on with them,
because you know they're at the end of the day.
You cannot go on fighting endlessly. When your carters don't
(32:31):
see this movement going anyway, then like any other movement,
they start deserting in droves, like any other political party
or any movement which just fighting without any clear goals.
That the goals are nowhere close to be achieved to
being achieved. And plus all of the things that you
promised them, which was development and peace and prosperity. Now
(32:54):
the government is bringing. Yes, the government is bringing the
fruits of economic progress down to the people. It's pulling
people out of poverty. Un let's we can argue about
this all day, but the fact is that a road
can transform the lives of people like nothing else in
this country. A good road will mean access to health,
(33:15):
to education, It can bring in, you know, relief, it
can uplift the lives of people. And that is what
has happened in all of these areas. And when that happens,
you see a lot of people moving away from the
part that the maos promise or that thing of oppression.
So when the fruits of you know, development start reaching
(33:36):
the grassroots, that's when you see a kind of transformation. Today.
Why are they not getting any recruits because every recruit
either wants to be part of some state government scheme
or a central government scheme, always looking for a job, right,
So when that happens, the movement collapses. And this has
happened across the world. People join movements out of livelihood,
(33:57):
not so much for ideology. It's the leadership that drives this.
Because of ideology, they build up this thing of you know,
victim mood and that you've been oppressed and you've been
you know, uh suppressed, and you're being exploited and all
of that. But when the people see for themselves the
fruits of that progress reaching them, when they see all
your the government schemes, the free food and you know,
(34:17):
all of those dolls that are being given out, which
is a very good thing to think. It's ever happened
in the history of humanity where half a billion people
are being given free food. I mean, that's a big achievement.
When all of these things happen, the movements start collapsing.
And that's exactly what's happening to the mouse? It's been
a generation, you know, and every gerrilla movement, if you
look at it, it has its peaks and it's truffs.
(34:40):
And today I think the mouse are in that truck.
It's twenty years they've been fighting and now it's time
to wrap.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
Up, right, we'll talk more on this topic, but after
a quick trick.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
What is the coolest back of the two thousands?
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (34:53):
For me, it was the Pulse Pulse one say also
two hundred that no?
Speaker 1 (34:59):
Actually no? What else? Other? So the CBC was the coolest.
What else could you have?
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Piero Pharo that's one motorcycle. That's one motorcycle from TVs
which was so underrated. Hero Honda sleek. Why do you
always pick the most eighties?
Speaker 1 (35:20):
What is that pic? What is ALEX hundred? ALEX hundred
came in nineteen.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
What are you talking about?
Speaker 1 (35:28):
My uncle uh booked a hero Honda CD hundred s
S in the eighties. Yes, that's a fourth row.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
Yes, no, yes, he booked a CD hundred s S
late eighties. I'm talking about eighty six eighty seven.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
ESD created the enthusiast in India at some level or
maybe at a very big level.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
Yes, I think so. What about the pulser one thirty
five ls.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
That that was that that at the gene.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
Welcome back. Something we've been talking about the fight against
actualism in terms of the military aspect of it, as
not military military, but in terms of the use of
force when it comes to using police and paramilitary forces,
stuff like that. I want to briefly also touch upon
the politics of it because I think this topic is
such that even though this podcast is about defense and
(36:26):
it's about you know, the militaries, but the topic of
left wing extremism cannot be talked about without the politics
of it because, like you said, the way to fight
this is, like you said, to clear, hold and build, right,
So your forces can only do the clearing bit of it,
and perhaps the holding bit of it. They can clear
a place of the an axillies present over there, they
(36:47):
can sort of secure the paraphter to hold it, but
the building has to be done by the governments with
the district administration, which is where the politicians come in. Also,
this problem is something that spanned several states, so you
have the in displace state disputes. This problem is something
that spanned several government at the center, so you have
different parties in the rule. I don't want to right
(37:08):
now do sort of a blame analysis of you know,
Party A or Party B was better, Party eight did
that wrong? That is right, But I want your perspective
of what you've seen over the course of a career
in terms of how important was the politics of it
all to this movement and perhaps the mistakes we made
(37:28):
because of the politics of it all.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Well, I think the biggest mistake, if you asked me there,
was that we began economic liberalization so late in the day,
and it should have happened much before. We should probably
have been in the seventies. You probably wouldn't have even
seen the mouse movement pick up, you know. So we
(37:50):
were late in the game as far as liberalization went,
and we moved only when there was no other alternative.
We tried everything, including socialism, and by ninety one the
coffers were empty, and that's when they decided that we
had to look at another path of development, which is
now the only path as far as any political party
(38:10):
is concerned. And today I can take a bet on
this that even if in the unlikeliest of scenarios, which
is the Left Front coming to power in Delhi. They
will continue the economic reforms that have been started in
nineteen ninety one. They have no option but to do
that because the kind of the fruits of development that
(38:33):
liberalization has delivered to India, the unchaining and the unleashing
of the animal spirits of Indian entrepreneurs, could not have
been possible in any other situation. And that is the
larger political framework that I'm looking at when you're looking
at this Maoist problem. And to see an example of
(38:56):
a country that has not liberalized itself, that has not
created a middle class, a vibrant middle class, you just
have to look across the western borders at Pakistan, which
has not had any kind of liberalization, which has not
had any green revolution.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
Which has never felt the need to do that.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
They are still today, after almost eighty years of being
around as an independent country. They are still feudal and
in parts a tribal country which is ruled by a
very crooked elite, which is a robber baron elite, as
used to say in the West, the robber barons. The
(39:32):
robber barons are the Pakistan military. Right. So there is
this example, and you have India's example, where we are
trying to do all the right things because you know,
how much ever people may score at it, the first
lines of the constitution are we the people right? So
that has been the guiding force as long. You know,
(39:52):
as far as any political party goes, they may not
be fully committed to it, or they may not have
the political power to come out themselves fully to it,
but by and large you see a very large percentage
of the political parties looking at doing things that will
benefit the people. And in this case, the fact that
you did not bring in the infrastructure that was needed
(40:16):
in all of these places. You did not build the schools,
you did not build the hospitals, you didn't bring the
roads or the infrastructure. I think those were the biggest
feelings that we as a nation have inflicted on ourselves
that you know in the year just about ten years back,
remember they when the first UPI started to be popularized.
(40:40):
You had in one page you had the government ads
telling people how to build toilets and how to use toilets,
and on the next page you're asking them how to
use the UPI.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
You know, the.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
Patms and you know the bar pays and all that
So this is the kind of gap that you have
to actually cover that you not only have to build
your tokil heads, but you have to also get people
onto a digital economy. So that's the kind of gap
that we've not been able to build over the last
couple of years. But now I think things are changing.
There's a pace of reform that's accelerating. And it's not
(41:19):
just any political party, it's all political parties have taken
this conscious decision from ninety one onwards that they may
differ on the way that liberalization has to be brought
in or you know, how it has to be done,
but everybody agrees to the last member of Parliament that
this is the only way out. And I think that is,
(41:40):
to my mind, the only political argument that you can
make for the fact that the Maoists were as powerful
as they were at one point, that the fruits of
India's progress and prosperity had not reached the most distant,
you know, parts of the country. The last man is
the line, you know that was that the last mine
(42:02):
in the line was clearly the tribals of central India.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Right. One more point on the topic of the factors
behind the decline, in nuxialism in India is the civil
society support for the longest time, and this especially during
the time and I was sort of growing up, I
saw a lot of support when it came from urban centers.
You had lawyers, activists, not support from them for the movement.
(42:28):
These days you have a pegerative term to describe them.
I don't want to use that. But you've also seen
that support winding GWS. Is that the term you're looking for?
Speaker 2 (42:36):
Overground workers?
Speaker 1 (42:37):
No, not really, I was looking for something to do
with urban The world happened urban axl Yes, yes, right right,
I said it. They yeah, but yeah, but you've also
seen that support winding over the years. What do you
think has contributed to that? And uh, parallelly to sort
of take your point of what you just described right
(42:59):
now forward, has the support also declared on the ground
in the bridges as well?
Speaker 2 (43:03):
Yeah? Absolutely, And you know, if you're looking at it,
like I mentioned in the beginning that this was essentially
a battle of ideologies where you have the left parties
they profess a certain ideology. You have the far left
that professes another ideology. The left parties, the CPI the
CPN they want to bring in power, but through electoral means. Yes, right,
(43:27):
they the CPI mouse say that we want a violent
overthrow of the state through force of arms. That's the difference,
and that tells you how one side is prepared to do.
The maos hold the CPI, and the CPI am in
utter contempt. They say, these are you know, they're compromised
because they're part of the political mainstream. Right. So it
(43:51):
is it is basically an ideological battle. And you will
have communists of all shades. You will have you know,
uh communists or overground workers who are in academia, intelligency,
in the media, all of those things, and they will
be the maoist that the far left guys who are
actually there in the fields or in the jungles of Chatis.
(44:14):
So you had very clear, very very very bright individuals
like Kobad Gandhi, he and his wife an Rada, who
were you know, they're very very bright, intellictuals who were
middle class and upper middle class even who gave everything
up and moved into the forests because they believed in
the movement and they said this is the only way
(44:35):
to bring about change. So it is literally a battle
of ideologies and I think the turning point was in
nineteen ninety one when you saw the Soviet Union, which
was the found of that ideology, the leftist ideology, collapse,
and between ninety one and two thousand you saw communists China,
(44:56):
which feared the same thing would happen to them. They
had to They were at a crossroads, and they figured out,
what do we need to do. Now do we also
become market oriented? But if we become market oriented, then
you know, we might cease to exist because we cannot
be communist and capitalists at both at the same time.
But they've managed to do that. That's the most incredible thing.
(45:17):
I think in post the Second World War, the most
astounding transformations of our country has happened in China, which
is the communist dictatorship at the same time is a
capitalist paradise. If you look at it, It's never happened
anywhere in the history of the world. So I think
the Chinese in that sense, they studied this what happened
(45:38):
to the Soviet Union, and they figured that the Soviets
bankrupted themselves because they started spending a whole lot of
their thing on the military. The Chinese said, we're not
going to make that mistake. We will become economically strong first,
then we will become militarily strong. So you have Chairman
Maos well being shopping not Chirman Mao deannger being talking
(46:02):
about hide your strength and bide your time. And then
those four developments that China must do, the last of
which was the military aspect, which Chi Jinping is now
pushing in the last decade or fifteen years or something.
So China built itself into this economic behemoth which it
is today. By the end of this decade, they say
China is going to account for fifty percent of global manufacturing.
(46:25):
I mean that is they've become a manufacturing superpower, whether
you look at automobiles or you know, fifth generation and
sixth generation fighter aircraft, warship, submarines, all of that. They've
pretty much got it in a very very compressed timeframe
of just about less than half a century. So it
(46:45):
was actually a battle of ideologies, and I think the
MAOIs were a simple They were a bit simple minded
folk where they thought that what Mao did in nineteen
forty eight, we can do in India in twenty two
thousand and four or two thousand and fourteen or twenty
(47:05):
twenty four times change. You know, try showing someone today
in twenty twenty five a movie that was shot in
nineteen forty eight. I mean, I've had trouble in my
previous organization trying to get my colleagues to watch Cerguliu
in Westerns. And they would say, I saw it because
you asked me to watch it. But such a slow movie,
(47:26):
I said, but it's a classic. It's like Segulione, mix
cinematic classics. So try and get someone today to watch
a movie that's shot in nineteen sixty eight, even if
it's a classic, one of the spaghetti westerns. They say,
for me, so, why do you think ideology that's you know,
dates back to the nineteen thirties and the forties and
all it's going to work nearly a century later. So
I think they are complete bunch of misfits. They didn't
(47:50):
read the room, they didn't read the country. And India
is moving in a certain way and the Maoists are
not part of that. So, I mean, the beauty of
India is that we are a land of multiple ideologies.
You can have all kinds of ideologies, uh, and you
known yet be part of the mainstream. So I think
it's only a matter of time now before the Maos
(48:11):
give up their ideologies and just joined the mainstream.
Speaker 1 (48:15):
Yeah, I guess so. Apart from the the governments in
the state's efforts, it's also as much as that it's
a natural slow death per se for the movement. All right.
A couple of last points. UH. One is something that
you talked about earlier on this episode and something that
I had in my notes anyway to talk to you about.
Was this time under the Upa government when the government
briefly flirted with the idea of uh calling in the military,
(48:39):
calling in army and I didn't I don't remember about
the army as much as as I do about the
Air Force, where there was a serious talk about using
Air Force helicopters to bomb the jungles where there were
next lights. Never ended up happening, thank god, Thank God
asked that. So with the benefit of hindsight now when
you look back at that time when this sea and
(49:01):
this was a very very seriously but I remember that
this debate was happening. What do you think would have
happened if India had gone down that path? And I'm
not just talking logistics. I'm not talking about the army's
challenge or for the challenge of maintaining the borders and
also having to have this battle in there in the
center of your country. But I'm talking about the very
idea of your own military fighting your own people on
(49:24):
its own land. And this becomes even more significant if
you think about the fact that we're talking about this
when in the US you have an apprate, or when
you have a protest happening in Los Angeles, where the
US President has ordered Marines, which is one of the
four arms of the US military, to be deployed in
the city to quell those protests. So what do you
think would have happened if we have done well?
Speaker 2 (49:43):
I mean they firstly, I mean we're very different from
the Americans, right right. And secondly, I mean, like I
said before, one of the best things that the military
did was to stay out of this conflict. They said, look,
it's not our battle. Do not deploy us for this.
We are not meant for fighting insurgencies in the heartland.
The air Force was brought in there was, but only
(50:05):
for logistics. Yes, there was an argument that they should
be used to as gunships, helicopter gunships and to shoot
the moose. But the point again is that how can
you tell who a maoist is from the air? Everyone
looks the same. I mean, if you were just to
do target acquisition is going to be a problem because
you see a large body of people in the ground.
(50:27):
You would end up doing the same kind of mistakes
that the United States made in Afghanistan where they've massacred
wedding parties, you know, just based on the fact that
their sensors picked up this huge group of people in
a village who they thought to be were you know,
planning some kind of a military offensive or there was
some girilla gathering or something like that, and they would
just go and bomb and machine gun them. You would
(50:49):
end up doing that to your own citizens, because you know,
at the end of the day, they are our own people, right.
They may be a tribal or they may be villagers,
or they may stay in some of the most remote
and inaccessible part of the country, but at the end
of the day, they are our own people, and you
can't unleash the air force and the military on them.
All you can do is to send people on the ground. Police.
(51:11):
Of course, the police didn't have the capabilities then they
didn't do. Now, you can send the police, you can
send the paramilitary, but you certainly can't send the army,
and god forbid, the air force against your people. And
the Indian Air Force has deployed just once in the
northeast in the nineteen sixties, but that was it. We've
never deployed the air force after that because you would
(51:33):
end up making horrible mistakes. You would end up massacring people.
Because these are weapons of war. They meant to kill
large numbers of soldiers, to destroy fortifications and do all
of that thing. If you use them against tribals, I mean,
the most vulnerable of India's people. You can't tell firstly
from the air who are tribalist and who are soldier.
(51:53):
A moost guerillais everyone looks the same and most of
the time they don't even wear those uniforms obvious reasons,
and because that's how guerrillas operate, right They merged amongst
the people and they operate. So it's in hindsight it
is one of the best decisions that we made, never
not to deploy the military and all this it had
to be fought in the way it has been fought
(52:15):
in the last fifteen years slow intelligence based ground operations
where you clear old build you bring in the roads,
you slowly search, you take in, you take losses. There
have been a lot of security forces who have died,
thousands of them in fact, in the last fifteen years.
But that's the only way to do it, because what
(52:37):
would have happened if you had deployed, say large forces,
You possibly would have you know, brought those areas under control,
but you would have also probably created a new generation
of maos with a kind of bombing and the you know,
staffing that.
Speaker 1 (52:52):
You would have done then exactly. I think what people
sometimes argue had the US has done when it comes
to it's terrorism, because it's kind of bobbing they've carried
out that it's in Afghanistan or Iraq. That's kind of
led to that sentiment staying and led to more radicalizations.
Speaker 2 (53:07):
Well, the US is up against ideologies again, and they've
not won any war if you look at it, even
the Gulf after Gulf Storm one, which was in nineteen
ninety one. The US has never won any war. And
look what happened in Afghanistan where you went into destroy
al Qaeda and then you ended up fighting the Taliban,
and then you ended up, you know, into a nation
(53:28):
building which was never your original goal, and you ended
up staying there for twenty years, and all you did
was to replace Taliban one point two with Taliban two
point two. You know, it's as crazy as that. So
insurgencies are very complex phenomena, and especially if it is
a state that is fighting its own people, then it
becomes all the more complex. And this is I think
(53:52):
something that the Indian state has done very well since
nineteen forty seven, our model of not employing heavy weaponry,
for instance in Kashmir, except very very rare occasions, nothing
other than you know, a recoil less you know, a
car Gustaf has been used, which is in eighty four
(54:12):
mm rocket propelled round. Nothing else has been used. No
artillery has been used, no gunships have been used. With
that very rare exception of the hill Kaka Sarvinash in
two thousand and three, very very few instances have happened
for the military force to be used. But that's the
(54:33):
way to fight insurgency. You can either do that this
way or you can do it the way the Americans,
like you just mentioned, you know, you go all gung
ho and you deploy gunships and you know, attack captas
against the tribals.
Speaker 1 (54:47):
Right, So one final quick point, we're running short of time,
so we'll just quickly wrap this up. Keeping everything in
mind of what you've just said the whole episode, the
whole everything that you've said over the course of this episode,
is it then practically possible at all to overthrow any
government of India except for the election.
Speaker 2 (55:06):
Overthrow government in India, you mean, the central governments. It's
next to impossible because for overthrowing a government, you would
have to fight the military, you'd have to fight the paramilitary,
all of that thing. So it's not as easy as
that that in the old days you could march on
to capitals and seize it and stuff. Year it's nothing
(55:28):
like that. I mean, you could possibly move into Delhi
and capture a few suburbs. How long are you going
to hold it? You know, so a country like India
can't be you know power you can overthrow, you know,
an elected government. You possibly could do it in the
United States, you know, which is what we've seen in
(55:52):
Capital in a few years back. You could just you know,
hold the entire Capital hill hostage and you know, have
a civil war kind of movement there. But the United
States is a very it's a very interesting case study
of what happened in the past. If we look at it,
where this thing of the right to bear arms and
(56:17):
militias and all being created, that is something that it's
a bit unsettling for a country to allow such large
numbers of people to carry infantry weapons around, but that's
the way the United States was formed. I mean, it
is a country that was born through force of arms,
and it was a country that again once again resolved
(56:40):
its differences through force of arms. So it's a very
violent it has a very violent history. In our case,
we're generally a very pacifist lot, peace loving lot. We've
just seen one very very violent phase of nineteen forty seven,
which is our birth as a nation state, and after
(57:01):
that we've never seen the kind of blood letting We've
possibly seen it in phases and insurgencies, in terrorist movements
in Punjab and Jamun Kashmia and of course the Maoist insurgency.
We're tens and thousands of Indians have been killed. But
in the long run, I think we are a civilizational
state and there is a sense that you know, we
(57:21):
have been here for five thousand years, so you know
that common joke is that you say twenty years, MAOIs
had their you know, peak and their trough in twenty years.
What's twenty years and five thousand in a five thousand
year civilization, which it's nothing. It's a blip. It's a
little blip like that. So that's the kind of thing
that we've been So I think it comes from being
the status quist part. They're very happy where we are.
(57:44):
We don't want any more territory than we already caught.
We are not you know, a disruptor in that sense.
We don't want to capture any country or overthrow any other.
We are very happy with the way we are. I
think that is India civilizational course.
Speaker 1 (58:01):
We learned there. Then, thanks and the great Chat has
always had a lot of fun on this on this
episode with you.
Speaker 2 (58:06):
Thanks very much, Stave, good to be back with you.
Speaker 1 (58:09):
That's it then for this FIE's episode. For more tune
in next week till then, stay safe and not cross
any boundaries that passport by
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