The government of India recently aired half-page advertisements in the newspapers, featuring corpses with boxed names and a declaration that “Naxals are nothing but cold-blooded murderers”. Around the same time, the home minister began to talk about an imminent counter-insurgency operation in Chhattisgarh and other states. This, the home minister explained, was the government’s concerted response to the violent challenge posed by the Naxals to state authority. As a token of the seriousness of the state, he revealed that the paramilitary forces involved in the action would be allowed to call upon the special operations units of the Indian Army and the helicopters of the Indian Air Force for logistical support.
Tough act: Can the anti-Naxal campaign force rebels in Chhattisgarh to surrender? AP
The advertising campaign, the home minister’s bid to prepare us for the intensity of Operation Green Hunt, the reports that some 75,000 paramilitary personnel had been mobilized, suggests an operation planned on an unprecedented scale. For perspective it’s useful to remember that the current strength of Nato forces in Afghanistan is just under 100,000 soldiers. The deployment indicates that the government of India sees the Naxalite insurgency in Chhattisgarh and elsewhere as a menace comparable to the terrorism of the Taliban and its sponsorship of jihad. This is consistent with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s much-quoted statement that violent, Left-wing insurgencies are “the gravest threat to India’s internal security”.
This should remind us that large counter-insurgency operations in India have so far been confined to India’s borderlands and directed against secessionist movements: Punjab, Kashmir and the North-Eastern states are cases in point. Operation Green Hunt, on the other hand, is to be staged in central India in a poor, rural, landlocked province surrounded by six other states.
The government of India argues that large parts of Chhattisgarh, indeed scores of districts spread over a dozen states, have, in fact, seceded from India; that Operation Green Hunt is needed precisely to reassert the first responsibility of any state, its sovereign control over its territory.
Also Read Mukul’s previous Lounge columns