April.06 : How long it would take the country to beat back the menace posed by armed Naxalite groups is a matter of conjecture. The Union government and its proactive home minister, P. Chidambaram, believe that the trouble could die out in two or three years.

 More to the point, however, the ideology that sustains the Maoist groups has to be demonstrated to be bankrupt if real respite from this backward and violent tendency is to be gained. It needs to be established that — contrary to the propaganda disseminated by the Maoists — the State cares for its people enough to insist on delivering the basic ingredients of development that human beings must have in order to mark progress. In a nutshell, this is the message that the rural poor gave Mr Chidambaram during his bold foray into Maoist territory at Lalgarh in West Bengal — the scene of armed confrontations and blood-letting in recent times — on Sunday. What emerged from the home minister’s interactions with the people of Lalgarh is scepticism that the government will deliver on its promises as similar assurances made in the past have proved to be vacuous. To his credit, Mr Chidambaram seems to have grasped this. He also detected hope. He noted that the people were aware that it is only the government that could offer development goods, not the Naxalites. The latter can only offer confrontation and violence, whatever the nature of the promises they make. The Maoists had given a general strike call to protest against the home minister’s visit to the area. Clearly, the appeal for a bandh was ignored as the poor people came forward to talk to the high government representative. They did not boycott him.

The home minister’s Lalgarh sojourn can be seen as a morality play in three acts. These involve the Naxalites themselves, the people of the area, and the government of West Bengal, which appears to be wholly clueless in dealing with the situation that has turned progressively volatile in recent years. In the Naxalite den, Mr Chidambaram chose to call them “cowards” who did not possess the nerve to engage in a dialogue with the government. He should have completed the thought and clearly stated that they were fearful of talks as a reasoned conversation would expose them as being hollow. As for the people, by not shunning the home minister’s overture for an interaction they showed they were ready to walk the few steps toward normality provided genuine hope lay at the other end. The protagonist of the last act is the state government. Throwing them a challenge, Mr Chidambaram said: “The buck stops with the chief minister.” This would have stung Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, but being an intellectual he would recognise the truth of the assertion. Not so the Marxist manadarins of Alimuddin Street, the state party headquarters in Kolkata. CPI(M) politburo member Biman Bose trotted out he lame excuse that political life (and development) could not be sustained in the Naxal regions in the atmosphere of violence that the Maoists have assiduously established. It is pathetic to hear this from a top leader of a party that has run the state for three decades in the name of the people, seeking to distinguish its own record from that of “bourgeois” parties. To have done justice to the theatre he crafted, Mr Chidambaram’s play should have had one more acts — concerning the Trinamul Congress, whose leader Mamata Banerjee has left the impression of being in cahoots with the Maoists to discomfit the state government. It would have been better by far if her party had propagated the path of development different from what the ideologues of the Maoists and the Marxists describe. The home minister might have made bold to bring this out.