The largest security threat to India
Mamoona Ali Kazmi

A Big portion of Central India that runs from Gadchhiroli in Maharashtra to Abujmarh in Chhattisgarh has become India’s Achilles Heel as the Naxals are getting more and more hold of the area. The Naxals or Naxalites are waging a violent struggle on behalf of landless labourers and tribal people against landlords. They are fighting oppression and exploitation to create a classless society. They are engaged in violent activities as retaliation to the violence perpetrated by the Security Forces. They make the laws, and implement them. The state and its mechanisms are simply off the radar in these parts of India. Naxals also intended to support all the freedom movements of India including Kashmir and Northeast. They are engaged in successful guerrilla warfare due to popular support as well as are getting sophisticated training and have access to modern weapons.
For India the Naxal problem has become grave than the insurgencies in Kashmir and North East. The discriminatory policies of the Indian government are responsible for the whole situation. Instead of tackling the issue through peaceful means, the Indian government is heavily dependent upon security forces and paramilitary troops to counter Naxalite violence. As violence begets violence, same is happening in Central India. The more the State governments rely upon coercive measure the more the situation becomes worse.
Naxalites are becoming more and more efficient. This is a result of different factors. Firstly, the unification of the Maoist Communist Center and the People’s War Group, the two main factions involved in the armed insurgency, has changed the face of struggle from scattered localized cells to more unified force operating in the Central India, commonly known as red corridor. The Naxals are no more following the hit-and-run strategy. Now they identify specific targets and hit them precisely with impunity. The Naxals also intended to support struggles’ of nationalities that demand a separate state for their development. Kashmiris and various nationalities of the North East such as Assamese, Nagas, Manipuris and Tripuris, have been long waging an armed struggle against the Indian Government for their right to self-determination including the right to secede from the so called Union of India.
Secondly, the Naxalites are more organized and have sophisticated weapons. According to official figures the armed Maoist cadres estimate at about 10,000 and over ground workers to be around 45,000. According to a recent report prepared by Indian Intelligence Bureau (IB) Naxals are acquiring new lethal weaponry besides upgrading their military bases and expertise by forming six regular armed companies. IB report highlighted that while earlier 162 districts were affected in 14 states, now 182 districts are affected in 16 states. The recovery of rockets and grenades launcher dyes in Bhopal is indicative of the fact that Naxals have gained expertise in making lethal weapons. The Naxals are also acquiring their land mine manufacturing techniques from LTTE. Their main source of weaponry is weapons snatched from the police, security forces, civilians and private companies. They also source their weapons from other militant organizations, smugglers, gun dealers, and illegal arms manufacturing units besides pilferage arms and explosives from ordinance factories. The CPI (Maoist) has a budget of no less than Rs 60 crore for carrying out its armed struggle during 2007-09. And of that, Rs 42 crore is earmarked for arms, ammunition and explosives, Rs 2 crore for intelligence gathering. The remaining amount is allocated for transportation, computer training, propaganda and transportation.
Naxals in India now model themselves on the Indian army, from training manuals to undercover training. The manuals translated into Hindi from Telugu by the security forces give a chilling insight into People’s Liberation Guerilla Army (PLGA) planning military skills and motives. This is very similar to the training of a Jawan or even a JCO. The PLGA’s basic military courses begin with handling automatic weapons, compass and map reading, defensive and attack formations. The manual analyses Naxal operations since 1997 and suggests means to increase enemy casualty. It discusses how to collect intelligence, stalk the enemy, and lay an ambush and attack. It also instructs how to retreat when attacked, regroup later using coded communication and how to raid protection installations.
The fighting forces of Naxals are divided into three categories. The primary force is of extremely well trained personnel who spearhead any attack with superior weapons. The secondary force forms the bulk of a large group with less sophisticated weapons. And in the last, there is people’s militia comprising farmers, labourers and others. Naxals have over 80 training camps, each training between 200 to 300 people at any point of time. There are 84 training camps which are operating in several states such as Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and Jharkhand. Bastar region in Chhattisgarh has become an epicenter of Naxal activity. PLGA is running four training camps in the region where about 1,500 to 2,000 cadres are getting training in carrying out attacks and planting explosives.
Lastly, the Naxalites have peoples support. The use of generator sets to light up the target area before carrying out their attack highlights Naxals’ efforts to distinguish their targets i.e. security forces and SPOs from the local villagers. This effort of Naxals helps them to mobilize hundreds of fighters despite the large-scale presence and deployment of paramilitary and anti-Naxal Forces. Most of them might have even been taking shelter in urban areas with the help of unarmed sympathizers whose number could be anywhere between 50,000 and 70,000 across the country.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh admitted that 160 districts across the country are slipping out of the government control. He reiterated that the Maoist problem has assumed proportions bigger than militancy in Jammu and Kashmir and insurgency in Northeast India due to its sheer spread and organized linkages. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, while speaking at a meeting of Chief Ministers of 13 Naxal affected states said, “It would not be an exaggeration to say that the problem of Naxalism is the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by the country”.
The Naxalites’ threat is the real and ever increasing menace, which at the moment has no remedy with the Government of India. Naxal threat is no longer confined to the jungles. Naxalites have plans to take their war to urban centers. They have plans to strike in the industrial belts of Bhilai-Ranchi-Dhanbad- Kolkata and Mumbai-Pune-Surat-Ahmedabad and take their battle into the heart of India.
The Indian prime Minister has desired the Naxal affected states to raise more police force on war footings to tackle the ever-increasing Naxal peril, but in all reckonings, it will not yield any positive result, as a socio-political problem is being contemplated to be resolved with military means. Growing insurgency in the Naxal affected areas is just emerging as the greatest challenge posed to the stretched out Indian security apparatus. Ironically India, which is interfering into the internal matters of the other countries, is unable to handle its own internal situation. Since the turmoil affected areas form the Indian hinterland, it can not even deploy its Cross-Border-Terrorism thesis to explain the Indigenous revolt. The situation is further exacerbated by the fact that Indian army is showing extreme reluctance to get involved in the situation; already having extended itself through counter-insurgency operations in the Jammu and Kashmir and the North East. Indian Paramilitary Forces and the State police are therefore bracing themselves for a long hot violent summer.

Bush in heavens-I
Fidel Castro Ruz

IN this reflection I will go by the news received from different sources, including international cable services, –without specifically recognizing any of them as the information source, but strictly abiding by the text of the news— books, documents, the Internet, and even questions asked to well-documented sources. There is a big hustle and bustle everywhere, as if we lived in a mad house. Our very well-known characters continue on their hectic tour. After visiting Brazil and Chile, Condoleezza flew to Moscow to sound out the new President. She wants to know his mind. She travelled with the chief of the Pentagon. With a dislocated arm after a fall on February, he said: “With a broken arm, I won’t be nearly as difficult a negotiator.” A typically Yankee joke. You may figure out the effect this had on the proud ears of a Russian, whose people suffered the loss of so many millions of lives in their struggle against the Nazi hordes which claimed for vital space –what we could call today cheap oil, raw materials, and guaranteed markets for surplus goods.
We have known of the adventures of McCain and Cheney in Baghdad; one of them hopes to become head of government, and the other, being already the deputy head of government, issues more orders than his boss. They were both welcomed with the most unexpected and violent predictions. They devoted less than two days to that, enough time to flood the world with sinister forecasts. Bush was delivering speeches in Washington while the prices of gold and oil were sky-rocketing. Cheney didn’t stop. He rushed for the Sultanate of Oman -774,000 oil barrels per day in 2005 and 780,000 in 2004. Last year Oman revealed its plans to invest 10 billion dollars during the next five years to increase its oil production to 900,000 barrels per day and reach the figure of 70 to 80 million cubic meters of gas per day. This is what the Sultanate authorities reported on January 15, 2007.
Cheney, accompanied by his family, sailed on board of the Sultan’s yacht “Kingfish I” on a fishing tour nearby the maritime boundaries between Oman and Iran. How bold! Nobel awards should also be given to those super-brave who run the risk of death or mutilation after a sumptuous private lunch with a fishbone stuck in the throat. The absence of the owner of the luxurious yacht spoiled the hero’s party. McCain doesn’t stop either. He jumps into a helicopter to move around the territory where the Israeli soldiers, while chasing Palestinian leaders, continue to kill women, children, teenagers and youth in the West Bank with the use of sophisticated technical means. The Republican candidate is an expert on that. He travelled to Jerusalem and there he promised to be the first to recognize that whole city as the capital of Israel, which the United States and Europe turned into a sophisticated nuclear power, whose satellite-guided missiles could fall in Moscow, more than 5000 kilometres away, in a matter of minutes.
There will be no oil or gas producing State that Cheney would not visit before he returns to attest to the happiness of the world before the President of his country. Bush, for one, speaks on the 17th for one reason, then on the 18th for another reason, and on the 19th to mark the beginning of his fantastic war. Cuba, as it was to be expected, has not ceased to be at the crosshairs of his invectives. In the midst of the chaos created by the empire, wars become inseparable sidekicks. It’s been five years since the beginning of the Iraqi war. Profound thinkers have estimated the amounts of persons who have been affected, and have calculated that this war’s total cost amounts to trillions of dollars. Four thousand army soldiers have lost their lives; for every soldier that is killed thirty more are wounded due to the kind of war that is being waged. White phosphorous and cluster bombs are the feed that nurtures this war on a daily basis. Anything goes, except for living.
Cheney and McCain compete with one another, one of them as the father of the creature, the other as the stepfather. They both meet with heads of State and exact compromises: oil and gas production should be increased, with the use of Yankee technology, Yankee inputs, and Yankee weapons from the industrial military complex. Yankee military bases should be allowed. From Jerusalem, McCain jumps into London to talk with Gordon Brown. Before that, while speaking in Jordan, he made a mistake and asserted that Iran, a Shiite country, was helping to train Al Qaeda, a Sunnite organization. It’s all the same to him; he didn’t even apologize for his mistake. Cheney jumps into Afghanistan. The war waged by NATO and the Yankees has turned the country into the largest opium exporter of the world. The USSR had worn itself out and plunged into a similar war. Bush launched his first belligerent blow there, supported by NATO. They are doing all that needs to be done to convene two parallel meetings: one to discuss the fight on terrorism and a NATO meeting.
One thing is certain: Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General, and Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO’s top official, will meet with Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan on April 1, 2 and 3 in Bucharest to participate in the Trans-Atlantic Forum to be held in that city. At the same time there will be a conference convened by the GMF (the German Marshall Fund of the United States), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Romania, and Chatham House which will gather a great number of strategists and politicians to address topics of vital interest for NATO. According to the GMF Chairman, the conference will be attended by 9 Heads of State, 24 Prime Ministers and ministers, and 40 presidents of research institutions from Europe and the Americas, which make up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) which dissolved Tito’s Yugoslavia and carried out the war in Kosovo. Anyone could understand that any similarity with the interests pursued by the Yankee imperialism is a mere coincidence.

(To be continued)






Taiwan’s election and grand Chinese peace
JonathanO Power

IN THE Chinese government’s eyes it has two rebellious provinces on its plate — Tibet and Taiwan — and both are in a volatile state. In Tibet protestors are clashing with police and soldiers. In Taiwan there is no occupation but 1,000 Chinese missiles are pointed at its heart. The Tibetans, by and large, no longer try and argue for independence, but even the notion of autonomy is not acceptable to Beijing. In marked contrast, while confronting Taiwan and its significant independence movement, the Chinese offer autonomy as long as Taiwan will accept sovereign rule from Beijing. At the moment, however, there are no takers, neither in the outgoing government of President Chen Shui-bian’s Democratic Progressive Party, which likes to talk about independence and membership of the UN, nor in the opposition party descended from the Nationalists of China, settled by a retreating General Chiang Kai-shek, which for historical reasons has a soft spot for “One China”.
During the eight years of Chen’s rule Taiwan’s China debate has matured at a fast rate. Chen may not have won many converts to his independence line (which is supported by about 30 per cent of the voters) but he has undoubtedly shifted the terms of the debate. He has persuaded the electorate that they must never kow tow to China. At the same time they have been convinced by the opposition that Taiwan should not provoke China. In broad terms it might seem that this is just the policy of the status quo. Neither independence nor union. In many aspects this is so. But it is not the same status quo as eight years ago — it is both more independent (not independence) minded and more conciliatory.
Looked at this way, now that the Nationalists’ leader Ma Ying-jeou has won the presidency, the relationship between Beijing and Taipei is becoming not just more mature, but healthier and less confrontational. As Ma says it could go on like this for 50 years before union is seriously discussed. Intellectuals in Taiwan have always hoped for a consensus on a long timetable because by then democracy may have arrived in China itself. Maybe Beijing by then would countenance a loose confederation, rather like Britain had until relatively recently with what it called its “Dominions”, Australia and Canada. There is much to suggest that in Beijing the tea leaves are being read in a similar way. Despite Chen’s continuous stream of provocative remarks and policy suggestions, President Hu Jintao is as conciliatory as a communist leader can be, much more low key in his approach than his predecessors.

—Khaleej Times