Naxalism in India, History, Ideology and Reasons to spread

Naxalism in India

This term ‘NAXALISM’ has been derived from the name of a village in West Bengal where sign of its initial existence were found. It began around 1960 in the west Bengal and areas near to it as an armed rebellion movement against the landlords which has now converted as a tool to fight against the ruling government. They are highly influenced by Maoist ideology in though which they believe to capture the state power through a combination of armed insurgency, mass mobilization and strategic alliance.

Naxalism in India: Reasons

• Resentment among tribal communities – Their resentment was against everything which interfered in their ways. Be it landlords or britishers before independence or the ruling government post independence. As the development projects led to their massive displacement and a complete change in their way of living made them discontented towards government.
• Socio-economic Gap – There is a large gap between mainstream India and the areas belong to tribal communities. They remain deprived of basic amenities and facilities even the basic education. Lack of education and lack of jobs makes it easy for such group to join more and more people. They do not feel belonged to the country as other Indian citizens and that’s why it become an easy option to join such rebellious group.
• Role of Government – It has been used as a political tool to get the advantages by the politicians and the lack of coordination between state and center government has somewhere played a role in aggravating the situation rather than making it better.

Naxalism in India: Steps Taken by Government

Since independence government has been trying hard to make the situation better and various steps has also been taken like –

• GREYHOUNDS is a special team that has been raised in 1989 to deal particularly with the Naxalites and then one of the biggest operation to deal with left wing extremism (LWE) was launched in 2010. It was codenamed as “OPERATION GREEN”. It proved to be successful as it led to the decreased number of naxal affected areas.
• CRPF (central reserve police force) has been notching up successes in anti-Naxal operations since its formation in 1939.
• Several other major operations have also been started by government, time to time in order to secure and develop the area like ‘RELIEF AND REHABILITATION POLICY’, which was focused to bring the naxal affected tribal population into mainstream and recently launched scheme, ‘ASPIRATIONAL DISCTRICTS POROGRAMME’  which will specifically focus on tribal areas and on working rapidly to improve their situation for progress and the development.

Though the number of naxal affected areas has been reduced at a large scale still it has a lot of areas where specific improvement is required. Proper work needs to be done to bring them into mainstream by working on ground level through community based programmes as it is actually a sorry state for a nation to fight against people of their own country. Government needs to play a larger role by not just launching the scheme but also taking their follow-ups and assuring the effective implementation. Coordinated role of state and center government has the potential to eradicate the hatred and animosity from the hearts of these people and it can lead to a peaceful situation of those areas.