Indian Cabinet torn over sending fighter planes after the Maoist rebels - Times Online
May 18, 2010
Palaniappan Chidambaram, the Indian Home Minister, believes that air power is essential to defeat the Maoists
India faces a dilemma as it considers whether to deploy the air force against homegrown Maoist rebels after their latest bloody attack yesterday, this time on civilians as well as security forces.
P. Chidambaram, the hawkish Home Minister, believes that air power is essential to defeat the Maoists also known as Naxalites who have been fighting since 1967 and are now considered a greater threat than Jihadist groups.
The chief ministers of all of the worst-affected states also want air support against the rebels, who have a presence in 20 of Indias 28 states and control a corridor of jungle from the east coast to the Nepalese border.
Most security officials and experts agree, saying that Operation Green Hunt an unprecedented nationwide campaign launched last year with about 58,000 federal paramilitary troops is doomed to failure otherwise.
They cite yesterdays landmine attack, which killed 35 police and civilians on a bus in the central state of Chhattisgarh, and another ambush that killed 75 paramilitary police in the same area last month.
Yet Mr Chidambaram, for all his many talents, seems unable to convince his colleagues in the Cabinet, and the upper echelons of the ruling Congress party, including, it seems, the party leader, Sonia Gandhi.
He made that clear today in several television interviews, where he explained that he had been given a limited mandate to tackle the Maoists and was pushing for his remit to be expanded.
The main issue seems to be his colleagues reluctance to deploy the armed forces against their own people in such a vast area effectively admitting that there is a civil war raging across a third of Indian territory.
Even if the air force is limited to surveillance and logistics, as Mr Chidambaram suggests, they fear that it will soon end up carrying out airstrikes on the Naxalites, especially if its jets come under attack.
They rightly worry about civilian casualties not least because the air force is designed more for carpet bombing Pakistan than carrying out surgical strikes on tiny rebel encampments in the jungle.
They also worry that they would have to extend the unpopular Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which protects the armed forces from prosecution in Kashmir and the northeast, to much of the rest of the country.
There are, however, deeper reasons for their intransigence, chiefly a desire to appear pro-poor before local elections and an instinctive sympathy for left-wing politics which dates back to Jawaharlal Nehru, Indias first prime minister.
Mr Chidambarams strong-armed approach has come under increasing criticism in the past few months from a lobby of left-leaning intellectuals and artists, including the writer Arundhati Roy.
They say that the government should call off Operation Green Hunt and address the poor governance, corruption and poverty that drive landless labourers and poor farmers to join the Naxalites.
Mrs Gandhi added her voice to that lobby last week when she wrote an article in the Congress party journal calling for the Government to tackle the root causes of the conflict.
It was as close to outright criticism of Mr Chidambaram that she has ever come.
When the Cabinet discusses the issue this week, Mr Chidambaram will argue that the problem is indeed rooted in poor governance, corruption and poverty but those are problems that will take decades to resolve. The short and medium-term priority, he will say, is to prevent the Maoists from killing more police and civilians.
The idea of the Indian Air Force flying missions against its own people is understandably repellent, and should be considered only as a last resort, but after ignoring the Maoist threat for so long the Government may not have any choice.
