Maoists Are Not For Development

Consensus on Maoist
Problem, not on Solution


By Vinod Varshney


There is political consensus in India that Naxalism is a big threat to the development process and liberal democratic system of the country. But consensus eludes on implementable solutions. A few believe that naxal violence should be dealt with force first and then only can development follow, while others say development process in tribal areas should be speeded up first, and yet another emerging opinion is that the problem can be eradicated only if police action and development activities take place simultaneously and vigourously.

Pranab Mukherjee, the central finance minister asserted in a seminar “Red Corridor And Development” organized thursday by Nai Dunia, a multi-edition Hindi newspaer that naxalite violence was truly an internal security problem, and not just a law and order issue, therefore the centre and state according to the constitution should act together to combat the meance while Arun Jaitly accused the Central Home Ministry for trying to dub the problem as of law and order to be tackled by states. He cautioned intellectuals not to romanticize maoist slogan that power comes from the barrel of gun and took a dig at the widespread perception that lack of development was the sole reason for spread of naxalism. He said that they wanted to capture power by guns.  


Several speakers in the seminar including the NDA supremo Sharad Yadav underscored the fact that the economic development in tribal areas had remained grossly neglected. According to him 2-3 % of the national GDP was based on the resources of the tribal areas which traditionally belonged to them, but they remain neglected in the fruits of growth and development. The worst part of the problem is that tribals have no voice and the society which benefitted from the economic development based on their resources is least concerned about them.


He lamented the changed attitude of the political parties in recent years.” Earlier people like Baleshwar Dayal and ThakKar Bapa and even from the BJP used to go among them and had become their voice, now no political party goes among them. NGOs do go but their job seems to get money from their funders and criticize politicians.


Aruna Sharma, DG Doordarshan drew attention to the fact that the money allocated to each district is as much as Rs 1200 crore, but it remained unused to the extent of seventy percent. This means tribal areas remain perenially under-developed and an entire generation of tribals have to miss the opportunity.


She disagreed with the labour-oriented Bihar model to tackle the under-development of tribal areas. She said that requirement was for infrastructure. Unit cost of infrastructure there would no doubt be costly, but governments should be ready to spend this extra money. 


D.M. Mitra, a security specialist delineated the shift of Naxalism since 1970s which has now retreated to Jungles. He described under-development as an enabling factor for Naxalism, "but no one should be in the wrong impression that the Maoists are for development; they are basically against the liberal democracy." 
"State agencies do not reach amidst tribals, thus they remain segregated from the development and technology so much so they are still in the hunters and gatherers stage of civilization. Government personnel run away from tribal areas at the first available opportunity, sometimes citing their sickness or by taking help of unions and courts and nothing can be done about it."

The situation got worsened by downsizing the bureaucracy by 30 percent so much so at many places only one BDO remains to look after three blocks. He suggested government personnel who work in the tribal areas should be given special incentives as cost of deprivation.

Dr Raman Singh, the Chief Minister of Chattisgarh, a  state troubled with maoist-violence painted a different picture of the problem. He said tribals today were victims of maoists, and terrorized by Maoists they were running away from their traditional habitats . This situation has led to the rise of Salwa Judum (public force) to counter their violence.

He also pointed out how governments had not bothered to heed to the advice of the Supreme Court that companies working in tribal areas should spend 20% of their profits for the development of the area, which currently is only 1-2 percent.  

He gave details of how Maoist extracted some Rs 500-600 crore each year and have acquired sophisticated weapons including ant-helicopter guns and mine detecting equipments. This could not be the handiwork of tribals, but only of forces inimical to India. "This is  not a law and order problem, but an internal security problem of the country. To defeat them there is need to train the police in gorrila warfare."

He criticized intellectuals who often raise an MNC bogey in the Bastar region whereas the fact was only public sector companies like NMDC, SAIL and CMDC were involved in mining activities in this tribal area.

Hindi Shall Grow Globally

New Fortunes for Hindi
By Vinod Varshney

Hindi has started earning new fortunes. Whether it is China, Russia or the US, any country which wants to do serious business with India considers Hindi strategically important. No wonder then special programs of learning Hindi have started in the largest and the second largest economies of the world i.e. the US and China.

In the cold war era the USSR had showed immense love for Hindi, but after the Nine Eleven terrorist attack, the US listed Hindi as a crucial language for America. The Republican President George Bush further upgraded its need and had once declared his government's intention to recruit Hindi teachers.

Now we hear that highly reputed Wharton School of Business is starting a joint degree program in international management, the MBA/MA Lauder Program, which would give students a chance to learn Hindi. In fact Hindi would be one option out of nine important world language including Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

This MBA/MA program is designed to prepare future business leaders of international grade. Students mindful of the fact that economy of India is going to be third largest in the world within next two decades would certainly realize the utility of learning Hindi. The program will emphasize cross-cultural and advanced-level language training. 
Hindi is Spoken in America

Hindi is not an unspoken language in America.Thanks to a very large number of Indians in America, there is a good number of Hindi speakers as well. The 2000 census showed that there were 317,057 Hindi speakers in the United States. We would have to wait for the outcome of the 2010 US census, but it is estimated that their number must have reached to half a million by now. In 2006, 1,946 higher education students were studying Hindi and pretty large number of students studying it in grades K-12.

Though craze for English is increasing in India but nobody can ignore the fact that within India more than half a billion people speak Hindi and as many as 800 million people understand Hindi.

Hindi can be learnt very fast if proper IT tools are developed, but inspite of India imparting IT enabled services to so many countries, Hindi has not been able to attract sufficiently the Information Technology for its advancement. Programs of the Ministry of Information Technology are too inadequate.

American Library Launches Hindi Books Initiative

Shashi Shekhar viewing Hindi Books

American Library To Wait
for Hindi e-Books 

 Vinod Varshney

In English-crazy India American Library has started Hindi Books’ initiative. Though the initiative is a micro drop in the ocean of English books as the first tranche is just fifty books, but as the collection would increase, this year itself it is expected to go up to one thousand, it would definitely have an impact on better understanding of American life, politics and economy by Indians.

Kala Anjan Datta has big plans

Currently Hindi books will not be available as e-books which is going to be a new trend as they have not been made available in digital form by the publishers. Whenever this happens, US library would also be able to extend e-books facility for Hindi also, tells Kala Anjan Datta, the Director of the Library. Currently some fifty thousand English titles are available as e-books in the American Library.

Datta also tells that Hindi is the first of the Indian languages initiative; the American Library would also start Tamil, Bengali, Marathi and Gujarati initiatives in respective zones. There are four branches of the library at four places Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai.

Lydia learns Hindi on a daily basis

The initiative was inaugurated Friday by Shashi Shekhar, the Chief Editor of Hindustan. Excerpts of two books were read out by two Americans who had learnt Hindi only recently. I had an opportunity to have heard Hindi spoken by Japanese, Russian, Italians and Spaniards in the past and I found pronunciation of these two jolly Americans much better, but not sure if they had rehearsed the text several times.

Lydia Berassa of Texas read out portions of President Barrack Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope”. Hearing the audition for some ten minutes I could feel that perhaps Obama has been able to pour his heart and soul in his book. His prose is poetic and now I plan to read the book before Obama comes to India in November this year.

Lydia looked immensely cheerful having learnt Hindi. She is still practicing and learning on a daily basis and may be after two three years her accent would be as natural as of any Indian from Lucknow or Bhopal.
John Fer read out a portion of Hillary Clinton’s book “It Takes a Village”. Hillary’s prose is not that poetic but it is revealing of real America, a country of biggest GDP in the world currently living with some 9 percent plus rate of unemployment.

John learnt Hindi in 6 months

General perception of America in India is shaped by its awesome GDP and very high per capita income. But many Indians do not know that America also has its own share of poor people, which Hillary has candidly discussed in her book. This gives a picture of how programmes evolve and become a national policy in the US.

John Fer as cheerful as Lydia told me about how he learned Hindi within six months. He had already learned Nepali before this for eight months. For quick learning of Hindi he gave credit to his teacher C.K. Arora, a Voice of America journalist.

John finds TV of great help in learning Hindi. He views BBC Hindi and NDTV for getting to know Hindi’s natural flavour.