Tropic of Chaos (22 page)

For years, the Greyhounds conducted search-and-destroy operations in the forest belt of northern Telangana, and they still do. Sometimes they confront armed
dalam
(the cadre) in firefights. More often, they kill unarmed guerrillas and civilian supporters.
⁴⁶
Aided by a network of paid informants, tribal irregulars in service to the state, and former Naxals who have switched sides, the Greyhounds spent half a decade combing the hills, mapping both the physical and social terrain, observing the comings and goings of activists, learning the social networks in the villages, and then—in the style of the US Army's Operation Phoenix in South Vietnam—breaking the key social links between the guerrillas and the people. That is to say, they killed both the
dalam,
the armed cadre, and the unarmed
sangam,
or activists. The strategy continues, though not as intensely. Always, when the dead are displayed to the press—blood smeared and dirty, laid out, two or three at a time, on reed mats—the Greyhounds ascribe the assassinations to self-defense. The euphemism describing the killings is always the same. They are “encounters” or accidental collisions between armed bandits and the forces of order. In the Red Corridor, this is the nomenclature of state terrorism.
⁴⁷

The zenith of Naxalite activity in Andhra Pradesh occurred in October 2003, when the chief minister of the state, N. Chandrababu Naidu, was
visiting the famous Venkateswara Temple to attend part of a Hindu festival. As his convoy left the temple, a series of six remote-controlled claymore mines lifted the earth beneath the vehicles in a deafening shock of linked explosions. The minister's bulletproof ambassador car was mangled and flipped off the road. But, to the credit of Hindustan Motors' retrofitting, Naidu survived with only light wounds to the face and chest. His driver and four other members of the legislative assembly, however, were very badly hurt. The assailants were cadre of the outlawed People's War Group (PWG), one of the largest and oldest Maoist parties in India.

“The attack on Naidu shows that there really is no alternative but to revive dialogue and peace talks between the PWG and the government,” said one of the Naxals' aboveground spokespeople, the popular left-leaning folk singer Gaddar, who uses only one name.
⁴⁸
Indeed, the attack was one of the Naxals' most spectacular assaults yet, not because of its size but because of its target; they had almost decapitated a state government. The
Political and Economic Weekly
lamented the implications:

After the bombing against Chief Minister Naidu, the police in Andhra Pradesh turned up the heat. Naidu's government reopened negotiations with the PWG. (Talks had been under way starting in June 2002, but a massive attack on a bus full of police ended them.) The police were ordered to pull back and the rebels were implored to do likewise. “We have
reports that squads are roaming in villages with arms. We are requesting them not to move around with weapons,” said Andhra Pradesh's home minister.
⁵⁰

Initial talks were conducted via emissaries, one of them a famous Naxalite writer, Varavara Rao, who gave me his account on a hot afternoon in Hyderabad. “The government was not serious,” said the old writer. “They were using the talks to research the Naxal networks.” By 2005, Varavara Rao himself had been arrested, accused of murdering policemen. As the hammer of the state was descending again, he told the press, “The Congress is like sweet poison. While the TDP [regionalist party] government always ruled out talks with us, the Congress is talking of peace but killing revolutionaries in stage-managed encounters.”

The Andhra Pradesh cease-fire and those in other states were ultimately part of a ruse, a larger strategy to flush out the underground networks of the PWG so as to liquidate and jail them. The federal government had finally begun promulgating a three-pronged counterinsurgency: strengthened intelligence at the state level; sustained, intelligence-driven police repression; and accelerated economic development in Naxal-affected areas. Between 2003 and 2005, over fifteen hundred casualties were reported every year from
each
of the eleven states affected by Naxalite violence. Just over three hundred police were killed during that time.
⁵¹

The Naxalite violence in Andhra Pradesh peaked just after 2005.
⁵²
Ultimately, the Greyhounds proved too much for the Naxals of Telangana; the Maoists fell back into the forest of Chattisgarh and there multiplied. In that province, police had developed a force of civilian vigilantes, called the Salva Judum, which in the local Gond dialect means “peace march.” Initially an organic self-defense organization, the Salva Judum was co-opted by the state. Participation became mandatory, and this “third force” became an armed auxiliary of police repression.
⁵³

The new paramilitaries include many former Naxals and, in this regard, resemble the civil patrols of the Guatemalan counterinsurgency or the
early paramilitaries in Columbia.
⁵⁴
In January 2009, the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee reported that one “encounter” in Chattisgarh was actually a massacre of eighteen tribals by armed Salva Judum backed up by police.
⁵⁵
Critics say the government-sanctioned vigilantism of the Salva Judum has forced more than fifty thousand people into roadside refugee camps.
⁵⁶

India's internal war is a stark example of the catastrophic convergence. Poverty made worse by neoliberalism meets counterinsurgency and repression meets climate-driven ecological crisis. If the monsoons fail or hit too hard, the Maoists, the Greyhounds, and the Salva Judum all threaten to play an increasingly destabilizing role in the coming years. They are precisely the types of centrifugal, unaccountable, violent criminogenic forces that insurgency and counterinsurgency leave in their wake to degrade the already battered social fabric. Total war at the grass roots—now the preferred response to social crisis and violent chaos—releases political sepsis that produces devastating corruption, anomie, trauma, and pathology—none of which are useful in confronting climate change.

The Naxals are only one source of instability. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was correct when he called India “fissiparous.” Despite the strong win of the Congress Party–led coalition in the 2009 elections, the country's parliamentary politics are defined by fiercely independent regional political parties and locally powerful charismatic leaders.
⁵⁷

Across rural India, social tensions are intense. There is spasmodic intercommunal violence between Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. Mass migration of Bangladeshi Muslims into Hindu-dominated regions of India is fueling religious nationalism in both communities. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the
Hindutva
fanatics, traffics in cryptofascist Islamophobia. Meanwhile, Pakistan sponsors Muslim terrorist groups, and in the northeast armed secessionists are fighting for an independent state of Assam. Across the rugged dry north, social banditry continues, and in the growing megacities, like Delhi, criminality is on the rise. These problems wait on the horizon of Indian history, threatening to grow much worse as climate change intensifies.

In the cities of the south, the information technology and business process outsourcing boom has produced a class of new billionaires.
⁵⁸
Yet, the Indian political leadership cannot, or will not, deliver electricity, water, basic health care and education to the majority of the population. According to the United Nations' new multidimensional poverty index, more poor people live in eight Indian states than in all of sub-Saharan Africa.The Indian ruling classes need to wake up, or climate change will destroy them. How should India fight the Naxals? By adapting to climate change with economic redistribution, social justice, and sustainable development.

The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. But what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.

—
ALEXANDER HERZEN
,
on the failure of the 1848 revolutions

 

 

 

T
HE BLACK POLICE helicopter floated above Rio. Ahead of us loomed the huge mountaintop statue of Christ, arms outstretched to the city; below us lay the long, wide expanse of Ipanema Beach. Inland from the posh neighborhoods on the water rose abrupt mountains of solid rock topped by lush jungle. Stacked up haphazardly along these steep slopes were the favelas, the densely packed unplanned neighborhoods of the poor and working classes.

If the contrast of white beaches and dark mountains defines Rio's postcard-perfect geography, it is the surreal inequality of luxury condos overlooked by impoverished slums that defines Rio's social landscape. Originally built by squatters from the rural northeast and named for a hardy weed of that region, the poverty- and crime-plagued favelas are the open sore on Rio's welcoming smile.

To live in a slum that looks down on a wealthy beach community is a provocation of unique intensity. This contrast makes Rio the geographic embodiment of “relative deprivation.” Sociology reveals that absolute deprivation, poverty alone, does not cause violence. Rather, it is deprivation experienced
in relation
to the status of others, or in relation to what could be, should be, or once was, that hurts the most and drives crime, rebellion, and violence.
¹
Thus, relative deprivation destroys the social cohesion within communities.
²

The police were giving me an airborne tour of this strange geography and explaining how they manage it with violence and about their new offensive against the favela gunmen. As we approached Favela Vidigal, the pilot steered the chopper out over the water in a wide defensive arc. Vidigal is “hostile,” under the control of the Comando Vermelho (CV), one of Rio's gangs known to shoot at police helicopters. The cocky young pilot, wearing a blue jumpsuit and dark shades, made sure to point out three freshly patched bullet holes near its tail rotor just before we took off. Damage the tail rotor, and the chopper spins out of control.

In October 2009, favela gunmen shot down a police helicopter during a daylong firefight between two rival gang factions and the police. Three officers were killed and four were badly injured. Twelve civilians were also killed, and in the surrounding area young men firebombed ten buses. A year later it happened again: police raids killed thirteen, and then gang members burned fifteen buses during four days of violence.
³

Indeed, the gangs of Rio run the favelas and the city's retail drug trade. Inside the communities they carry machine guns openly as if they were the police, tax local economic activity as if they were the revenue service, and operate informal courts and mete out punishment as if they had a legal code. Steal a cell phone? Get shot through the hands and feet. Snitch someone out? Expect execution.

Roughly the size of New York, Rio has a murder rate six times higher. In 2009 about five thousand people were slain here. The police enter the favelas only for short and brutal raids—arriving at night in armed columns to ransack, torture, and kill. In most slums, they have not established police stations. According to a 2009 Human Rights Watch report, the Rio
constabulary kills more than eleven hundred people every year. Only four Rio police officers have been convicted of abuses in the past decade. But Rio's cops face other risks: almost ninety died in the line of duty in 2009.

If that weren't enough, now a third source feeds the violence: off-duty police, firefighters, and prison guards have formed militias to check the gangs. These vigilantes can be just as criminal as their enemies. In 2008 such militias even tortured journalists from the city's biggest newspaper. The situation increasingly looks like a low-intensity war.