Villagers flee from their homes after authorities sent hundreds of soldiers to try and reclaim a large area captured by Maoist rebels at Bhattpur in West Midnapore 138 kilometers west of Calcutta, India, Sunday, June 21, 2009. At least 11 officers were killed when their vehicle went over a land mine planted by suspected Maoist rebels in the nearby state of Chhattisgarh in eastern India, police said. —AP/File photo

MONSOONS play a big role not only in the upkeep of food security in South Asia; they are also an important factor in the region’s military strategies.

If we had relentless rain instead of periodic drought the chances of war breaking out would be substantially reduced. There would be more prosperity to share than to fight for and the perennially overcast skies would make the movement of tanks and warplanes an uncertain enterprise if not an outright deterrent. After all, the military strategy in Kashmir is based on the quantity of its winter snowfall.

Monsoons have been the backbone of an entire community of tribespeople straddling the dense forests of central India’s Chhattisgarh state and in their neighbourhood. Since the region rests on a vast reservoir of untapped minerals, powerful Indian corporates have been drooling over the treasure trove.

However, the local people are resisting the advances. Their leaders include Gandhian pacifists. A few have picked up arms and joined a rag-tag army of guerrillas who mostly share a common ethnicity but are known in national parlance as Naxalites, a popular synonym for Maoists, which happens to be just as loose a definition in the Indian context. It’s all too confusing. Anyway the Maoists are now a banned group.

Their activities are reported mostly to highlight attacks they carry out against police convoys that carry the mandate to hunt the guerrillas. Not much is known about the other side of the picture. What, for example, keeps the Maoists going? And what about the fate of the tribespeople caught in the crossfire? Civil rights groups visit the region occasionally, but they do so at personal peril. Prof Amit Bhaduri, who retired as an economics teacher at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, led one such team to Chhattisgarh.

Reports of abuse, including rape and indiscriminate killings, evidently carried out by state-backed vigilantes, led Prof Bhaduri to the police chief in Chhattisgarh who turned out to be one of his former students. His group expressed the desire to travel into the Maoist-controlled area on the other side of the Indrawaty River, which divides the territory between the vigilantes of Salwa Judum and guerrilla-controlled areas. Prof Bhaduri’s fawning former student said they could go, but the police would be obliged to shoot them.

The Bharatiya Janata Party rules the state though the vigilantes have the backing of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Congress party. Prof Bhaduri listened to the police officer’s determined advice and thus neither he nor the team was able to know really what was happening on the other side of the divide, which he believes should be brought into the public domain for an informed debate.

Going by the findings of the report released by Human Rights Watch on Tuesday, Indian police in any case need to be reined in. The report echoes the comments of a celebrated former head of a high court, Justice Anand Narain Mulla, who described Indian police in a judgment as ‘the biggest organised group of criminals’. That was decades ago. Tuesday’s 118-page report, Broken System: Dysfunction, Abuse and Impunity in the Indian Police, documents a range of human rights violations committed, including arbitrary arrest and detention, torture and extrajudicial killings.

Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch, observed that while India was modernising, its police continued to use their old methods: abuse and threats. ‘It’s time for the government to stop talking about reform and fix the system,’ he declared.

His report is based on interviews with more than 80 police officers of varying ranks, 60 victims of police abuses and numerous discussions with experts and civil society activists. The stakes are high for the corporate world and, therefore, naturally for the government which is closely identified with it.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said that the Maoists pose the most serious threat to India’s security. In order not to be ignored, he said this a few days after the horrific attack on Mumbai last November. The prime minister also said subsequently that nobody should be allowed to prevent the exploitation of the nation’s resources for public good, a signal that a bloody confrontation was looming.

The Indian Express reported last week that the government would introduce the army into the fray, which includes a new brigade headquarters in Raipur, capital of Chhattisgarh.’ The stage is being set for the military, particularly the Rashtriya Rifles (RR), to join counter-Naxalite operations,’ the newspaper reported. Raised in 1990 to fight counter-insurgency in Kashmir, the 80,000-strong RR has been operating on a temporary mandate under the Indian Army. ‘Before this mandate expires in September, the ministry of defence is moving the CCS (cabinet committee on security) to allow RR to be deployed nationwide for counter-insurgency operations.’

According to the Express a total of 231 security personnel have been killed by Naxalites this year – over 10 times the casualties in J&K and the northeast put together. It doesn’t say how many civilians both sides have killed and how many have been uprooted from their homes by the police.

The other key decisions taken to beef up the looming battle includes an army brigadier who has been deputed to the home ministry to advise on the operations. Some paramilitary units fighting the Maoists will be de-inducted and trained in guerrilla warfare with select army infantry units Talks with the Indian Air Force for the ‘evacuation’ of special forces behind Maoist lines in armed helicopters is part of the strategy, the report said.

A group of senior and respected civil rights activists met in Delhi on Tuesday to try to prevent what they fear could be a massacre. They urged both sides to heed the following: ‘Put people’s security and welfare above everything else and ensure they are free of fear from the government and the Maoists. Initiate a judicial process to hold accountable and bring to justice those guilty of violations, including extra-judicial killings.’ The monsoons in Chhattisgarh are expected to end in September. That’s about all the time there is for a last chance to salvage an agreeable peace deal. How many would be helplessly praying in the deep and inaccessible recesses of the forests that the monsoons would never go.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com