First-Order Counterinsurgency in India
There was a very interesting article in the Times over the weekend about India’s decision to step up efforts to combat a growing Maoist insurgency centered in the state of Chattisgarh, but now spreading to surrounding areas as well:
Or one piece of it. India’s Maoist rebels are now present in 20 states and have evolved into a potent and lethal insurgency. In the last four years, the Maoists have killed more than 900 Indian security officers, a figure almost as high as the more than 1,100 members of the coalition forces killed in Afghanistan during the same period.
If the Maoists were once dismissed as a ragtag band of outdated ideologues, Indian leaders are now preparing to deploy nearly 70,000 paramilitary officers for a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign to hunt down the guerrillas in some of the country’s most rugged, isolated terrain.
I don’t know much of anything about the subject other than what’s in the article. It did, however, serve as a reminder that there’s a difference between this kind of situation and the kind of thing that tends to go under the term “counterinsurgency” in the American context. What India has is an insurgency. So the insurgency is being fought by India, which is trying to counter the insurgency.
A lot of what makes the Afghanistan situation problematic is that we’re not there providing assistance to an Afghan government’s counterinsurgency strategy. Instead, we seem to be trying to coerce/cajole the Afghan government into adopting what we think of as a sound approach. That’s a tricky needle to thread.
19 Responses to “First-Order Counterinsurgency in India”
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November 2nd, 2009 at 9:48 am
The phrase you’re looking for is “unified command”. One of the essentials of successful COIN. Not something the US has managed – it hasn’t even managed a successful unified US command, what with the CIA, SOCOM and ISAF all fighting their different wars.
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:08 am
India too has it’s share of lack of unified command and that kind of allowed this Maoist problem to fester for long. It all started with Communist parties in Eastern states first – Bihar, West Bengal, Orrisa, Assam and up to the Southern State of Andhra Pradesh. Local Left governing political parties where sympathetic to these Maoist factions initially, but infighting made them further radical. Center government wanted it cheap – so it left the mopping business to State governments who were politically too involved to get to the root.
Now that the problem has become big and threatening prosperity of Urban India; Center Government is realizing that it needs to get involved more. The current Home Minister, an accomplished and competent Politician P. Chidambarum is leading the charge with Central government forces. But there too Indian PM Dr. Singh has indicated that they will be restrained in using actual Armed forces in this fight.
Watch for a willy politician called Mamata Banerjee, who would be compounding this fight under the pretext of caring poor people. She is from West Bengal, highly erratic, and currently a sober partner of Congress Party at the Center. But her goal is to dislodge Communists from West Bengal and towards that end fight against Maoists is just one more theater of action to deal with.
But then interests of local politicians crisscrossing unified agenda to deal with insurgents is a common feature and this insurgency in India is no exception.
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:17 am
India will never solve the problem of Maoist insurgency, even if she throws the entire Indian Army at it, until she does something about rural poverty and land reform. Those problems were dealt with to a certain extent in the South (where, outside Andhra, there aren’t any Maoists), but continue to be very acute in the North.
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:45 am
What’s the appeal of Maoism in this day and age?
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:52 am
4: same as it was in China in 1945, Anthony – get rid of the zamindars and the shroffs, and distribute land to the downtrodden peasants. Hector’s spot on here. Being a landless tenant farmer is an awful position.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:02 am
If we had even half a brain, rather than attempting some sort of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan by propping up Karzai, conducting our never-ending War on Drugs, and attempting to transform mountain tribesmen into Midwwestern suburbanites, we would be conducting an insurgency of our own. A good guy insurgency.
But noooooo!
We prefer instead a high tech sinkhole based on outmoded tactics and strategy so we can feel “patriotic” and blame the inevitable failure on hippies rather than to face up to our own incompetence and stupidity.
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:23 am
As Hector suggests, it’s not some weird roll of the dice that puts Maoist insurgencies in some parts of India and not others, or parts of Italy or Kansas for that matter. Maoism, which is a figure of fun for us, is an immensely attractive and empowering ideology for very poor rural people.
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:44 am
Umesh gets it right. The spread of Maoists in West Bengal, which implemented land reform under Communists, shows that there is no easy connection between poverty and violence. Maoists, in any event, operate more in the tribal belt than in areas with landless tenant farmers. Tribals already have land; their concerns are about the lack of governance, or the lack of rights over their land.
Development is great, but can’t happen right now under the threat of violence. Security operations and development need to happen together.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:06 am
India is a fascinating country to study. The appeal of the Maoists I think has been explained well by those above, but also there should be some discussion of the Keralan gov. which is “communist” in a loose sense of the term. It’s also one of the most stable southern states, and claims the highest literacy in all of India (and from my experience the claim appear true).
So communists in India have been relatively successful in some places, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that many of the poorest rural states of India have communist insurgencies. States like Chattisgarh haven’t seen much progress in the last 200 years. They’re largely ignored by the central government until the unrest is so disruptive that they have to send in the army to massacre angry, starving, and perhaps misguided farmers/peasants.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:32 am
What’s the appeal of Maoism in this day and age?
I think the point is that the structure of Indian politics since independence has relegated the Bengali and Dravidian elements to a peripheral status. This is very far from my area of expertise, but back in the 1940s there was a significant pro-independence but non-Gandhian, non-Congress movement in Bengal, but for whatever reason post-independence politics has been mainstream Congress, with a base in the huge north-central states, against the Hindu nationalists. Meanwhile, the poorer and maybe more rural (?) Bengali and Dravidian states were receptive to Chinese-backed parties, but there was a split at some point with the Communists who are an organized party and have power in a couple of places orienting Soviet and the rural insurgency aligning with Maoists. The term for this is “Naxalite,” so you can look it up if you care.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:37 am
Tribals already have land; their concerns are about the lack of governance, or the lack of rights over their land.
If you don’t have rights over your land, you don’t really have land… And, contra Thorfinn, they’re very active in areas with landless tenant farmers (though these areas do also have some tribal populations).
If we had even half a brain, rather than attempting some sort of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan by propping up Karzai, conducting our never-ending War on Drugs, and attempting to transform mountain tribesmen into Midwwestern suburbanites, we would be conducting an insurgency of our own. A good guy insurgency.
Sounds like Blowtorch Bob Komer and his Revolutionary Development Support efforts…
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Wait, evolved into a potent and lethal insurgency?
Yglesias, I recall that some of these Maoists have been conducting a potent and lethal insurgency for longer than either of us have been alive.
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:31 pm
OK Matt, you can’t say this but we can. What NATO is doing in Afghanistan is properly COCOIN, and that is indeed delicate and ultimately doomed. We need to start cutting deals. We should have started a long time ago. It would save a vast deal of pointless suffering for them and our military families.
November 2nd, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Re: India is a fascinating country to study. The appeal of the Maoists I think has been explained well by those above, but also there should be some discussion of the Keralan gov. which is “communist” in a loose sense of the term. It’s also one of the most stable southern states, and claims the highest literacy in all of India (and from my experience the claim appear true).
That’s very true- most of the Indian Communists took the parliamentary, Eurocommunist route, and accomplished a lot of good in Kerala and to some extent in West Bengal. I don’t think they have much in common with the Maoists other than they both call themselves communists. Kerala does have the highest literacy (as well as high education levels in general), and good health statistics as well. They carried out some extensive land reform in the 1950s which is part of the reason they never had insurgency problems.
November 2nd, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Hector is spot on. But I’d add that Kerala also benefits from a lot of tourism. It has beautiful beaches, lush rainforests, and a very diverse culture. Tourism is great for developing an economy because it inherently brings in outside money. It also provides a lot of low level service jobs that pay well enough that their families can do better than just tread water. Your hotel doorman doesn’t make great money, but enough to send his kid to a good school. His son has a decent shot of going to college and becoming an engineer. The son of a subsistence farmer probably won’t go to any school at all, and he certainly won’t become an engineer.
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:05 pm
And how many thousands of peasants have Indian security forces killed? Tens of thousands, as far as I know.
The spread of Maoism there is more a direct result from their willingness to steal land from the poorest and give it to rich companies to develop.
If some thugs came and burned down your house and farm and the local magistrate said they were allowed to do so… Do you think you would not fight back?
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Let’s not forget that the Maoists in Nepal just won. That’s emboldened the cause.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:06 pm
@Hector,
If the successful land reforms in Kerala kept away Maoists, why didn’t land reforms in Bengal? Bad governance there ruined what was once one of the richest parts of India, and is contributing to a raging Maoist insurgency.
The story in Kerala is more complicated than you make out. The state was doing well before the Communists came, and neighboring districts which share a common culture, but not a history of Communist rule, have similarly high rates of education. The state’s economy is very dependent on remittances from abroad.
The lack of land reform is a pressing issue, but it’s not why tribals in Chattisgarh or Jharkhand or Andhra are rising up, or why farmers in West Bengal are either.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:19 pm
Re: Hector is spot on. But I’d add that Kerala also benefits from a lot of tourism.
Fostert,
I’m not sure about that. It is true that as Thorfinn says, Kerala does benefit from remittances from Malayalis working in the Persian Gulf countries (and to some extent in Britain and the US as well). It’s also true that the monarchy of Travancore, prior to independence, did prioritize education and that the caste system in Kerala was weaker than in the North. So the answer to why Kerala has done fairly well for itself isn’t limited to having a CPIM government. Nevertheless, I do think that the successive CPIM governments did help, and that through prioritizing land reform, equality, women’s rights, literacy, and health care they did accomplish a lot of good for that state.
I also disagree with you about tourism in general- I’d rather see developing countries investing in agriculture, manufacturing and education rather than in tourism. But my dislike of tourism as an economic activity is tangential to this thread, so I’ll not say more.
Thorfinn,
The CPIM may not have done a bang up job in W. Bengal, but it’s certainly a h*ll of a lot better off than next door Bihar. The influx of 10 million destitute Bangladeshi refugees from the genocide in 1971, and plenty more refugees from the insurgencies in Assam and the Northeast, and lots of rural migrants to the cities, did not help the stability or prosperity of the state.