Crimson in the Green Hunt

Operation Green Hunt is what the Indian government calls it: a codename for a massive operation to counter the menace of left-wing activity in certain parts of India. It is a name that combines hints of green—which evokes the verdant forests that will be the theater of action—with the malevolence of a hunt. This left-wing “extremism” is interchangeably called Naxalism and Maoism. Naxalism, for an insurrection that erupted in a village called Naxalbari in northeastern India in 1967. Maoism, for the guiding philosophies of the principal actor in the fray today, the Maoist faction of the Communist Party of India.

Who are these people, these Naxalites, these Maoists? Who do they fight for? And why? And why this offensive by the government, which by many accounts will deploy more than 50,000 specially-trained troops who employ menacing monikers like COBRA (Commando Battalion for Resolute Action) and Scorpions? Where does the story begin and who are the key players?

At heart, this is a story of dispossession and exploitation. It is primarily a story of the exploitation of the tribal population of India, called the “adivasis” (which means “indigenous”), many of whom have traditionally lived in the forested belts of India.

It has not just been the lure of the forests and the forests’ products that have been the bane of the adivasis. It is also the fact that most of the tribal areas of India are mineral-rich. It is the “rich land of the poor,” as environmentalist and director of the influential Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi, Sunita Narain, put it recently in an opinion piece by that name.

These developments bring to the fore the rapaciousness of the process associated with the modern idea of development, which often considers some people expendable for a fabricated idea of “the greater common good.” Noted activist Arundhati Roy’s essay of the same name charted—through her example of dam building—how much havoc the process of development has caused. It is a well-known fact that approximately 40 percent of the land acquired for development projects in India belonged to adivasis. Recently, a committee composed of none other than officials of the Indian government acknowledged this fact.

The need to develop rapidly after India gained independence without paying adequate heed to the costs of such rapid development can be seen in the following idealistic and breathless rhetoric in the introduction to India’s Second Five Year Plan, 1956-1961—the Five Year Plans are the chief ways to guide development in segments of five years in India.

It is interesting to note that the same body that formulates the country’s Five Year Plans, the Planning Commission was set up an expert committee in 2006 on “Development Issues to deal with the causes of Discontent, Unrest and Extremism.” Its detailed report from 2008 highlighted the endemic inequalities in Indian society and the acute deprivation in the areas affected by Maoism.

As a response to this growing threat, the Indian government launched a counter-offensive christened Operation Green Hunt in 2009. However, a “hunt” in one form or another has been on for a while now. Since 2005, there has been an armed militia called Salwa Judum (“Purification Hunt” in the local language) in the state of Chattisgarh, comprised mostly of tribal people and blessed by the government that purported to take on the Naxalite menace. This has created a state of near civil war in that state, often pitting people within tribes against each other. There have already been several allegations from civil society groups regarding the targeting of innocent tribal people as part of the Operation Green Hunt—signatories to an appeal to the Indian government included Prof. Noam Chomsky of MIT.

The prominent author VS Naipaul wrote in his book of travels to India in 1990 that, “The liberation of spirit that has come to India could not come as release alone. In India, with its layer below layer of distress and cruelty, it had to come as disturbance...India was now a country of a million little mutinies.” There are big questions to answer for a country that, while proudly trumpeting seven-to-eight percent growth rates each year, also ranked 134th in the Human Development Index in 2009 report. A breathless—and often mindless—form of development at the cost of the voiceless and marginalized is equivalent to practicing a form of internal colonialism. The state must stop conducting a war against its own people. Let crimson not taint green in Indian forestlands.

Umang Kumar is a student at the Harvard Divinity School.