Maoism, a Recalcitrant Citizenry and Counterinsurgency Measures in India

India has unfriendly neighbours and yet there is hardly a significant external threat since the 1999 Kargil war involving Pakistan. What is dubbed as the biggest internal security threat to India is the left-wing-extremist movement that has spread to the majority of the Indian provinces in recent years. Also identified as the Maoist insurgency, it has ideologically inspired a large section of India’s tribal population who, so far, remain left out from the mainstream politics. This is not merely a law-and-order problem, as was usually construed by the major security agencies in the past, but an outcome of the India’s planned development strategies which failed to bring about uniform economic growth cutting across regions. Left-wing extremism is thus a contextual response to historical wrongs that the Indian state has committed by being indifferent to the poverty-stricken masses around the country. This is now recognized by the policy makers in India, who seem to have evolved an appropriate strategy by seeking to fulfil, on a priority basis, the basic human requirements of the disempowered sections of the population. The article thus argues that the threat to India’s internal security is far more complex and cannot thus be addressed meaningfully by coercion alone; it requires a well thought out pro-people socio-economic programme, which needs to be applied regardless of class, clan and creed.