India: Maoists tap tribal rage

Photograph by Brian Sokol for TIME
Lost Villager Jimme Midiyami says her home was destroyed by security forces when they were hunting for Naxals

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The Hidden Fortress
Like the Taliban in the mountains of Afghanistan, India's Naxals take refuge in geography. Their biggest safe haven is the Dandakaranya, a vast, thinly populated forest that sprawls over the boundaries of five states, with its heart in Chhattisgarh. The Naxals went to the Dandakaranya about 25 years ago: the movement began in 1967 as a protest by landless peasants in Naxalbari and, for a while, was a fashionable cause taken up by idealistic college students until it was put down during Indira Gandhi's draconian Emergency from 1975 to 1977.

The Naxals resurfaced in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh in the 1980s, this time as a caste-based movement challenging the dominance of wealthy coastal communities over poor farmers in the interior. Andhra Pradesh lies just south of Chhattisgarh, so when security forces closed in on the rebels, they retreated into the forest, moving out of reach by crossing the state border. The Maoists set up a new base in the Dandakaranya and eventually found support among its indigenous groups: India's 85 million so-called tribals, who follow their own traditional religions, outside the Hindu caste system, and speak their own languages unrelated to Hindi.

Over the years, various left-leaning parties have taken up the grievances of India's peasants and other lower castes, successfully bringing them into mainstream politics. Such groups may be just as poor as tribals, but they now rarely become Maoists. In tribal areas, on the other hand, no party is as well-organized as the Maoists. It is often said that the Red Corridor, the Maoist-affected area that stretches diagonally across central and eastern India, overlaps the map of the country's poorest districts. In truth, it more closely coincides with the tribal map of India, says Christophe Jaffrelot, a political scientist at the Center for International Studies and Research at Sciences Po in Paris, who has been studying India's poorest states for 25 years. "This is the key issue," Jaffrelot says. "Maoism has become a tribal phenomenon."

Estimates of the Maoists' strength vary, but they are believed to have as many as 20,000 well-trained, armed fighters permanently assigned to roaming camps, and perhaps another 100,000 militia members who live in their own villages. Once the movement is established in a village, everyone is expected to be part of one of its clusters, or sangams the children's sangam , the women's sangam , the farmers' sangam and so on.

In theory, the sangams mobilize tribals politically, but in practice, their real advantage to the Maoists is military. Their core cadres move constantly through the roughly contiguous forested areas across central India, camping for two or three days at a time in villages that have no choice but to host them. They very rarely use mobile phones, communicating instead via human courier. This has made Maoist operations nimble their networks are now active in 20 of India's 28 states and nearly impervious to technical surveillance.

A People's Fight
On the ground in Dantewada, it is this human network, much more so than the terrain, that has made the fight against the Maoists so difficult. Mishra, the former police superintendent who now heads Chhattisgarh's anti-Naxal intelligence ops, vents his frustration: "First, the sangams will give the signal that the police party is coming. Then there will be the people's militia; they will also fire on you, they will try to distract you. And if you successfully negotiate them, then only you enter the third core, the Naxals. That happens very rarely." When the police do receive intelligence, it is often at least two days old it takes that long for an informer to reach a police station on foot. So when a police party goes out on patrol or on a mission, they are very vulnerable, as in that bloody April ambush.

E.N. Rammohan, a retired Indian Police Service officer who authored the report investigating that incident, says the police also lacked the support of the people in the village where they had camped the night before the attack. Officials believe this area was the likely source of a tip to the Maoists. Mishra says the only way to ensure his troops' security is strength in numbers. The Maoists control about 4,000 sq km of territory where neither police nor forest officials have any presence with just 1,000 full-time armed fighters, Mishra estimates. This no-go zone includes the village of Jagargunda, once a forest trading post and now the site of a camp for those displaced by the fighting. "Once in three months, I undertake a supply operation there," Mishra says. "I use around 1,000 men to secure a 60-km stretch of road."

Local support has been key for the Maoists, and it explains how they have been able to last so long. They arm themselves primarily by looting police stations in carefully-planned raids, overrunning a post with a swarm of several hundred people a few trained cadres plus village irregulars armed with knives, bows and arrows. The effectiveness of this strategy was demonstrated most spectacularly in the February 2006 attack on an iron-ore mine in Bacheli, 10 km from Gumiyapal. The Maoists entered the explosives depot by commandeering a food truck; once past the gate, a few armed fighters easily overpowered the guards. Over the next four hours, the rest of the 700-strong attacking party stole some 50 tons of explosives, carrying out the cardboard boxes one by one into the forest on stretchers tied to bamboo poles. They are still working through their stash. Since 2007, there have been 172 Maoist attacks in Chhattisgarh using IEDs, among them the May 17 bus bomb that killed the men returning from Gumiyapal.

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India's Scourge