Naxalite insurgency threat to India’s nuclear assets

He Naxalite insurgency has crippled India to the extent that nearly 50 % of its geographical area is affected comprising approximately 220 districts in twenty states of India. They are especially concentrated in an area known as the “Red Corridor”, where they control 92,000 square kilometres and even pose a threat to India’s nuclear assets in the region. According to India’s intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, 20,000 armed cadre Naxalites were operating in addition to 50,000 regular cadres and their growing influence prompted Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to declare them to be the most serious internal threat to India’s national security. So great is their threat that the forthcoming Commonwealth Games being organized in New Delhi face the maximum danger from possible attacks and a number of participants have expressed reservations in their participation, quoting security threats. Although the Naxalite movement, which comprises far-left radical communists, supportive of Maoist political sentiment and ideology, who came into being because of deprivation and poverty, it was only a matter of time that Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, ISI would be blamed for the Naxalite movement. In the past too India finds it convenient to blame ISI for all its woes; so much so that once the ISI was squarely blamed for the onset of plague in some Indian states.
The Times of India story of August 16, titled ‘ISI-Naxal alliance to spell trouble’ implies that the recent arrests of six persons in Nagpur Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh police, aided by the central security agencies, have brought to the fore the move by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Naxalites to link up. The Times believes that the alliance was a fallout of their common hatred for India. The Daily Mail believes that exasperated by the beating that Indian security forces have taken at the hands of the Naxalites, they have now found it prudent to blame their favourite scapegoat, the ISI. Indian experts, in their hurry to find a link between the ISI and the Naxalites forget that the latter are a home grown movement, bred out of the impoverished masses, who became disillusioned by the successive Indian governments, who had been ignoring the downtrodden masses while claiming economic success, The classic case was during the BJP government, which till 2004 was harping on the tunes of “India Shining” claiming an extremely high growth rate. The truth was to the contrary where millions of Indian farmers, despite being growers, were forced into deprivation and poverty and were compelled to commit mass suicides. The bubble had to burst some time and the Naxalite picked up the cudgel for fighting for the rights of the downtrodden masses. Their movement attracted the underprivileged and oppressed masses, which spread the fire of rebellion beyond West Bengal and soon nearly half of India was engulfed in its flames. So far force, coercion and intimidation have failed to subdue the Naxalites. In the past Indian analysts were trying to find links between Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Naxals. When they failed to come up with any plausible evidence, they attempted to name Students Islamic Movement India (SIMI) as collaborators of Naxalites. Indian sleuths even produced “moles” that were willing to swear an oath regarding the links between the Islamists and the Naxals. When this clumsy effort ultimately backfired, they have “found” links with ISI. In the past too India has produced bogus evidence, planted on its own citizens, brutally murdered and presented as Pakistani “agents”. The world needs to take cognizance that India, being unable to rein its own home grown insurgents Naxalites, born and bred out of the failures of its government are now being shown to have an ISI nexus only to hide the incompetence of Indian security forces.

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Communist Party of India (Maoist)

Mamata Banerjee

Manmohan Singh

Independence Day

Andhra Pradesh

Pratibha Patil