Jairam Ramesh's speech on Naxalism. |
Sardar Patel Memorial Lecture organised by Prasar Bharati,
TITLE---- FROM TIRUPATI TO PASHUPATI: SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE MAOIST ISSUE .
I am not just privileged but also truly humbled to be part of this prestigious lecture series launched a half century and six years ago by none other than C. Rajagopalachari. Many distinguished personalities have preceded me and this makes me feel all the more honouredto be here this evening.
To say anything about such an indomitable colossus as Sardar Patel, one of our FoundingFathers, would be gratuitous. Often referred to as the “Iron Man” and as the “Bismarck of India”, he was part of the triumvirate which dominated the Indian National Congress and indeed the Indian political landscape for almost three decades. Using this imagery of the trinity, one of his well-known biographers B. Krishna wrote :"Gandhi represented Brahma-the creator and inspirer. Nehru reflected Vishnu’s soft, gentle looks, a nobility of character and humanism that transcended barriers of caste and creed. And Patel proved, like Siva, the destroyer and unifier-the builder and consolidator of Modern
On his death on December 15th, 1950, Nehru made an emotional statement in Parliament and described his departed comrade-in-arms as “the builder and consolidator of the new India, a great captain of our forces in the struggle for freedom...one who gave us sound advice in times of troubles as well as in moments of victory, a friend and colleague on whom one could invariably rely,, a tower of strength which revived wavering hearts when we were in trouble”. The Cabinet Resolution of December 16th, 1950, drafted by Nehru himself, spoke of his “magnificent talents and abounding energy, his matchless courage, inflexible sense of discipline and genius for organisation”.
Sardar Patel's contributions go beyond being the cartographer of immediate post-Independence
Today,
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The topic of my lecture is “From Tirupati to Pashupati: Some Reflections on the Maoist1Issue”. The title comes from the popular image in the media that a “liberated” Red corridor is sought to be created extending from Andhra Pradesh to
The phenomenon of Naxal violence has been studied by official committees from time to time. I recall that in the early 1980s, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sent a team headed by the-then Member-Secretary of the Planning Commission to conduct field-level studies ofNaxal-affected areas in
More recently, three years ago the Planning Commission published the report of its 17-member expert group on development challenges in extremist-affected areas. And what a group this was. It had all the people you would want for such an exercise, people who have spent a life time thinking, speaking, writing and working on this subject—people like DebuBandopadhyay, S.R. Sankaran K. Balagopal, B.D. Sharma, K.B. Saxena, Ram Dayal Munda,Dileep Singh Bhuria and Sukhadeo Thorat to name just eight of them. As was only to be expected, the report of this group was extraordinarily detailed. It gave the historical, political, social and economic context to the issue, reviewed government efforts to deal with the problem and recommended a number of key policy and programme measures and changes to vastly and visibly reduce, if not totally eradicate, the effects of Left-wing extremism in different states. Running into 95 pages, this report may lack the lyrical beauty and sheer poetry, misleading though it may be, of Arundhati Roy’s now famous 33-page essay inOutlook magazine3 but for sheer comprehensiveness and depth of analysis and for showing a practical way ahead it has no peers.
Please permit me to inject a personal note here. As a student of
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Before I go any further on the development route, I wish to pause and reflect on something that the Union Home Minister has so forcefully said on more than one occasion, quite in contrast to his predecessor who described the Naxals as “our wayward and misguided younger brothers” (and I should add increasingly sisters) who have to be gently persuaded and cajoled to give up the cult of violence and wanton killings. Both in Parliament and outside, the present Home Minister has said that on the basis of material gathered from captured left-wing extremist groups, it is unequivocally clear that their objective is the violent overthrow of the Indian state and that their basic ideology is a complete rejection of parliamentary democracy as enshrined in our Constitution. Knowing the Home Minister as I do, I can attest to the fact that he believes very much in the “developmentalist” approach, the strategy and approach advocated, for instance, by the expert committee of the Planning Commission to which I referred earlier. But he does raise a fundamental point that should not be brushed aside summarily. Of course, the Indian state has confronted many groups in the past that reject its very basis and rationale. And in many cases, these very groups that have fought the might of the Indian state for years have finally come around and become a peaceful part of our polity. I might recall here that in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections,Kameshwar Baitha, a top Naxal leader, contested and won on a Jharkhand Mukti Morcha(JMM) ticket from Palamau in Jharkhand. Some weeks back in Kolkata the Union Home Minister reiterated that the Centre is ready for unconditional talks with Maoists and all that it is demanding that they stop violence without necessarily giving up their ideology, surrendering their arms or even disbanding their militias and armies. I cannot think of a fairer offer than this.
It is my good fortune to have two outstanding IAS officers working with me now, both have had the misfortune of being abducted by the Naxals. One was kidnapped in 1987 inRampachodavaram in
What is clear is that we need a two-track approach--one that deals with the leadership of the Naxals, who wish to overthrow the Indian state and the other, which focuses on the concerns of the people they pretend/claim to serve. There is clearly a need to recognise tribal populations as victims--first of state apathy and discrimination and then of the Naxal agenda. My firm belief is that a complete revamp of administration and governance in tribal areas, especially in central and eastern
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The Union Government has identified 60 districts in seven states that are affected by left-wing extremism. Of these, 15 are in Orissa, 14 in Jharkhand, 10 in Chattisgarh, 8 in Madhya Pradesh, 7 in Bihar, 2 each in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh and 1 each in
When you look at these 60 districts on a map of
First, an overwhelming majority of these districts have substantial population of tribal communities.
Second, an overwhelming majority of these districts have significant area under good quality forest cover.
Third, a large number of these districts are rich in minerals like coal, bauxite and iron ore.
Fourth, in a number of states, these districts are remote from the seat of power and have large administrative units.
Fifth, a large number of districts are located in tri-junction areas of different states.
Let me make a couple of observations based on personal experience on each of these characteristics.
On the size of administrative units, recently on a visit to Chattisgarh I discovered that the size of some blocks (like Conta in Dantewada district and Orchha in Narayanpur district andOrgi in Surguja district) was equivalent to the size of some districts in some other states and indeed equivalent to the size of some other states themselves. Given poor connectivity and infrastructure to begin with, this is a huge handicap to contend with by administrators.Rationalisation of administrative units is entirely within the domain and powers of state governments. The Chattisgarh government has very recently decided to create five more districts in the Naxal-affected regions of the state and this is a good step.
On the tri-junction nature of these districts, Debu Bandopadhyay, one of the key administrators responsible for land reforms in
Realising the need for smaller units accompanied by a broader pan-state approach to dealing with the administrative aspect is an important first step to deal with the problem. But the real challenge is how do you transform administration in tribal areas so as not only to give people a sense of participation and involvement but, more fundamentally, to preserve and protect their dignity”? How do you prevent or address their continued victimisation, first by the state and now by the Naxals? Empowering the tribals, who are essentially victims, by giving access to basics, by giving them what is theirs by right and by securing their livelihoods is, to my mind, an absolute undiluted must4. Here, issues related to land ownership and land alienation must receive over-riding priority.
On the minerals issue, the Union Cabinet has very recently approved the repeal of the Mines and Minerals (Regulation and Development) Act, 1957 and its replacement by a new law. This new law will establish a District Mineral Foundation in each of the mineral-rich districts into which will flow every year an amount equal the royalty paid (for minerals other than coal) and equal to 26% of net profits as far as coal is concerned. This works out to something like Rs 10,000 crore annually at present rates to be distributed across the mineral-rich districts which could each get close to Rs 180-200 crore per year. These additional resources are to be used for local infrastructure development and for the welfare of the communities impacted by mining activities. The new law also provides for the approval of local communities before mining concessions are granted and when mine closure plans are implemented.
On the forests dimension of the Naxal-affected districts, I took five major initiatives when I was at the MoE&F. First, state government-executed physical and social infrastructure works requiring less than 5 hectares each of forest land were exempted from the approval processes of the Forest Conservation Act, 1980 as also the need for compensatory afforestation.Second, amendments were approved to Section 68 of the Indian Forest Act, 1927 that not only raise the monetary limits to which offences could be compounded but also ensure that local forest officials can lodge cases only after the written consent of the gram sabha. Third, a beginning was made in Menda-Lekha village of Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra to transfer control of the transit pass book for bamboo—the most important NTFP (non-timber forest produce)—from the forest department to the gram sabha5. Fourth, an expert review of the implementation of the Forest Rights Act, 2006 was initiated along with the Ministry of Tribal Affairs and specific reform measures identified including a sharper focus on the recognition and granting of community, as opposed to just individual rights. Fifth, the idea of a Central minimum support price (MSP) for 12 major items of NTFP, coupled with the removal of all purchase monopolies, was taken up with the Planning Commission and the Finance Ministry. These initiatives must be taken forward. More than anything else, I firmly believe that a completely transformed forest administration lies at the very core of an effective anti-Naxal strategy.
Regarding the tribal nature of the Naxal-affected districts, much has been said about the pivotal role that the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 (known popularly as PESA, 1996) can play in fulfilling the aspirations of people in a manner by which they are fully involved and empowered. However, even after fifteen years, the Act has yet to be translated into reality primarily because of the reluctance of the states and also because of the reluctance of the Centre to invoke its provisions to take on a more direct and active (and activist) role in Schedule V areas. There continues to be considerable divergence of opinion on whether “consultations” with the gram sabha as envisaged in the legislation is adequate or whether there should, in fact, be “prior informed consent” before the start of development projects. Furthermore, I am convinced that implementing PESA in an environment where the local administration is dominated by disinterested and always-ready-to-leave non-tribal personnel will just not have any positive impacts. The technical and organisational capacity ofpanchayati raj institutions has to be built up urgently.
One important administrative innovation introduced by the Central government in these 60 districts is to give untied funds to a troika comprising the Collector/District Magistrate, the Superintendent of Police and the District Forest Officer. In 2010/11, Rs 25 crore was released to each district and in 2011/12 another Rs 30 crore will be released. The idea is that the triumvirate representing the face of the Indian state as it were would be in a position to identify critical developmental works that could taken up and completed quickly so that the people begin to see the government in a completely new light. These works cover ashram schools, anganwadi centres, drinking water schemes and roads. This has spurred unprecedented development activity in these districts and it is interesting to note that none of the works taken up so far have been the target of Naxal attacks. This initiative should continue on an expanded scale but the challenge will be to give a role to elected representatives and local elected institutions in the selection and execution of works without, of course, losing its essence—which is flexibility and speed of execution.
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In my current ministerial assignment, I consider the PMGSY to be the single-most important rural development intervention that can significantly transform the ground-level situation in the LWE-affected districts. This is not to minimise the importance of other programmes but the PMGSY stands apart. The first target of Naxals is roads, that is why PMGSY works are severely lagging in the LWE-affected districts. Some innovations have been made to maximise the involvement of local contractors, for instance. But there have been frequent instances of these contractors being killed. Some degree of security cover bypara-military agencies like the CRPF will be essential to expedite PMGSY works. But we have a long way to go.
There are 25 districts out of the 60 LWE-affected districts where the expenditure levels are lower than the overall national average. And within these 25, there is a core of 10 districts where expenditure levels are lower than the average for the LWE-districts themselves. These to me appear to be the districts where Naxal activity is most intense. These ten districts areBijaipur, Narayanpur and Dantewada in Chattisgarh, Gadchiroli in
We have estimated that in order to complete all PMGSY works covering habitations with a population of 250 to 500 in these 60 LWE-affected districts about Rs 15,000 crore will be needed. Another Rs 19,000 crore will be needed to complete road connectivity to habitations with population less than 250. In addition, we will need additional funds to complete small and minor bridges (unlinked with PMGSY roads per se) which have an importance of their own in these LWE-affected districts. I am optimistic that these resources will be forthcoming—the challenge really will be to ensure project completion in the next three-four years at most. We need a renewed sense of urgency and a “get it done” attitude. And we are battling huge odds. One small bridge—the 1 km Gurupriya bridge—that is crucial to fighting Naxalismin Malkangiri district in Orissa has been talked about for almost three decades and it still remains to be constructed.
Along with PMGSY, I consider interventions to ensure the speedy settlement of land-related disputes to be high priority in the LWE-affected districts. In many places, the ability of the Naxal cadres to mete out “instant justice” has given them a foothold and acceptance amongst the people at large. Here I recall my personal experience some years back. When I first went to Adilabad in 2004, I met a feisty Gond lady called Mankubai whose land had been usurped by outsiders and she had been fighting her case with the government and with the judiciary for over two decades. I immediately mobilised some young lawyers who, working under the aegis of the state government’s Society for the Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP), were able to get Mankubai’s land restored to her. That experience is still fresh in my memory and that is why I am now proposing to support the establishment of paralegal assistance centres in all the LWE-affected districts. These centres would document all cases of land alienation and work for the restoration of lands to their rightful owners, mostlytribals.
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The might of the Indian state is in the Naxal-affected areas. 71 battalions of central para-military forces, amounting to some 71,000 personnel, have been deployed. They have a vital role to play in backing the state police and in developmental activities. The Collector of LWE-affected Balaghat in Madhya Pradesh told me recently how the presence and approach of the CRPF in the area had a considerable psychological impact enabling villagers to come out in large numbers to seek employment under MGNREGA. But let us be clear, para-military and police action cannot and should not be the driving force. The driving force has necessarily to be development and addressing the daily concerns of the people, of people who have every reason to feel alienated. Massive reform of the police and the forest administration at the cutting edge is the need of the hour. A more humane policy of land acquisition with focus on effective rehabilitation and resettlement (R&R) is the need of the hour. I think it was WalterFernandes the noted sociologist who estimated that over 50 million people in central and eastern
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So where do we go from here? Let us not underestimate the seriousness of the threat we are faced with. I, for one, do not believe that a "developmentalist" strategy alone, so eloquently advocated by the Planning Commission’s Expert Group, will do. I also do not believe that a strategy based on the primacy of para-military and police action will yield long-term results. The two must go hand-in-hand deriving strength from each other. We are combating not just a destructive ideology but are also confronted with the wages of our own insensitivity and neglect, especially in so far as the central Indian tribal population is concerned. Simply put, we need to rise above partisan political considerations and set aside old Centre versus state arguments and work concertedly to restore people’s faith in the administration to be fair and just, to be prompt and caring, to be prepared to redress the injustices of the past, and to be both responsible and responsive in future. Only then will the tide of Naxalism be stemmed.
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I started by paying tribute to Sardar Patel's enduring achievements. Let me end by recalling two other dimensions of his personality, which somehow have not received the attention they deserve. First, was his sense of fairness. He was tough and uncompromising but, at the same time, large-hearted. Nothing captures this better than his exchange with the Nawab of Bhopal who wrote to him in August 1947: "I do not disguise the fact that while the struggle was on, I used every means in my power to preserve the independence of my state. Now that I have conceded defeat, I hope you will find that I can be as staunch a friend as I have been an inveterate opponent". Patel's reply was quick: "I do not look upon the accession of your state as either a victory or defeat for you. It is only right and propriety that have triumphed at the end, and in that triumph you and I have played our respective roles. Second, was his devastating sense of humour. He comes across as a stern, serious, and single-minded individual, which he undoubtedly was. But he had a deadly wit as well, perhaps surpassed only by Sarojini Naidu in that remarkable generation of men and women. The distinguished diplomat K.P.S. Menon records in his autobiography a discussion that took place in 1950 on Goa in which Sardar Patel wanted quick action saying that it was just two hours work to liberate it from Portuguese rule but Nehru resisted the suggestion saying that it would create international complications. Menon reports that Sardar Patel remarked to a friend that Nehru was proving himself to be not merely the political heir of Mahatma Gandhi but a lineal descendant of Gautama Buddha! And those of you who think that only Nehru was his target, consider this gem from
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Naxalism : Internal Security Problem in India
India at The Large Hadron Collider
India at The Large Hadron Collider A Backgrounder | ||
The accepted view today is that the Universe started with a gigantic explosion called the "Big Bang". For fractions of a second after the Big Bang, the Universe consisted of the most elementary constituents of matter interacting with each other through other particles which are carriers of different kinds of forces existing in nature. And, the carriers of all forces in Nature are "bosons", named after the famous Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. The behaviour of these elementary particles is described today by a mathematical model called the Standard Model. According to Standard Model, all particles acquire mass through their interaction with another particle called the Higgs particle (also popularly called the "God Particle" in the Media), named after the British physicist Peter Higgs. The Higgs particle is again a boson. It is a matter of pride for us that bosons play such an important part in the evolution of Universe and, perhaps, also in the ultimate fate of the Universe.
Physical situations similar to what existed at fractions of a second after the Big Bang are experimentally created in laboratories through collision of particles or nuclei. That is the primary intellectual reason why high energy particle accelerators are built. The Standard Model has been tested with considerable precision in accelerator experiments so far and has come out with flying colours. The only missing link has been the Higgs Boson. Unfortunately, the Standard Model does not predict the mass of the Higgs Boson. As the Model continued to have excellent agreement with experimental observations, the anxiety to find the Higgs Boson also kept growing, especially because it plays such an important role in the structure of the Standard Model. All accelerators in the past continued with their search and put bounds on its possible mass.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) was planned with the special aim of detecting the Higgs particle if its mass was below 1000 GeV. CERN, as a result of two experiments has recently reported discovery of a new particle, expected to be the long sought after Higgs particle.
The Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST) of the Government of India are organizing a one-day National Meet on "
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN
LHC is the most ambitious project undertaken by CERN so far. The LHC is a giant particle accelerator buried underneath the ground, 27 km in circumference and crossing through
LHC as an example of Mega Science
Facilities such as the LHC, by virtue of their resource requirements, technical complexity of building, and the gigantic efforts required in carrying out and analyzing the data produced by the experiments, fall into the class of research facilities which are commonly called now as "Mega Science Facilities". The outstanding questions in Particle Physics today are at a length scale which require particle probes at extremely high energies. The physics questions that it tends to answer belong to the sub-nuclear length scales or to very early stages in the evolution of the Universe (picoseconds to microseconds after the Big Bang). Such high energy probes are produced at particle accelerators like the LHC which are multi-billion dollar facilities. These are no more affordable for individual nations and, hence, international consortia engage in building and managing such facilities. Technologically, such facilities are engineering marvels pushing the technology frontiers to their extreme in wide range of engineering disciplines. All of this requires that the best in the world pool not only their financial resources but also their intellectual resources to build such facilities. The coordination among scores of research laboratories spread all over the globe and participating in such efforts is remarkable.
Such facilities have a long list of very useful technological spin-offs – the World Wide Web being one of them. WWW was invented at CERN in connection with previous generation experiments at the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider facility.
The need, challenges and benefits of engaging in such "Mega Science" pursuits will be discussed during the Meet.
History of CERN-India Collaboration – the run-up to LHC
The history of Collaboration between CERN and
Indian Contributions towards building up of LHC
The in-kind contributions that
Indian Contribution to the CMS Experiment
One of the leading experiments/detectors at CERN is the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) Experiment/Detector. This is one of the two experiments at LHC which have led to the discovery of a new resonance, expected to be the much sought after Higgs Boson. This experiment will also probe into some other fundamental issues in physics, namely, physics beyond the Standard Model like supersymmetric particles; detailed properties of the top quark; search for new heavy gauge bosons; possible quark and lepton substructure, and so on.
5 Indian institutions have been are participating in this experiment: TIFR, BARC,
Towards hardware of the CMS Detector, the Indian groups have already contributed the Hadron Barrel Outer Calorimeter (HO-B) and the Silicon Strip based Pre-shower Detector (PSD) of the endcap electromagnetic calorimeter. In addition, the Indian groups have significantly contributed towards development of software, analyses strategy from early days of CMS and, finally, physics analyses of data. Frequent presentations of scientific results on behalf of CMS collaboration by Indian scientists in international conferences also indicate the significant role being played by the Indian scientific community in the overall functioning of CMS. The members of Indian collaboration have also been assigned CMS-wide coordination roles. At present, Indian scientists are also deeply involved in collection of data, monitoring and certification of data as well possible improvement in the performance of various detector subsystems.
Indian Contribution to the ALICE Experiment
Apart from accelerating protons, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will also accelerate and collide heavy ions, e.g. Pb ions with a centre of mass energy of 1150 TeV.
The collision of such ultra-relativistic heavy ions is predicted to produce a new phase of strongly interacting matter at extremely high energy densities, called the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP). This phase of matter is also believed to have existed in the very early Universe. Search for QGP is an important goal at LHC. The ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) Experiment is the only dedicated experiment at LHC which will search for QGP.
8 Indian institutions are participating in this experiment: VECC and SINP, Kolkata, IOP,
On the hardware side, the Indian groups have built a Photon Multiplicity Detector (PMD) and some Tracking Chambers for the Forward Muon Spectrometer. The Indian groups have also developed a special chip for the Forward Muon Spectrometer, called the MANAS chip.
In addition, the Indian groups have participated in development of software, experimental runs and, finally, in the physics analysis of data.
Indian Contributions to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG)
The 4 experiments at LHC, viz. ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb, detect subsidiary particles generated during the collision of particle beams. The number of interactions among protons when the proton beams collide every 50 nano-second is almost thousand million. A major detector like CMS has about 10 Million electronic channels to collect information of the collision. Through judicious choice the data archival rate is reduced by many orders of magnitude and finally about few Giga bytes of data is stored for subsequent analyses in detail. In the heavy operation, each collision is expected to generate up to 2000 subsidiary particles, which is observed through 180,000 channels. The total data generation amounts to about 8-10 Petabytes (1000, 000 Gigabytes) in a year of experiment time.
CERN has used very effectively the technology of Grid Computing to carry out physics analysis with this voluminous amount of data. This has been possible due to the availability of high speed networking over large distance. The basic principle is to store, manage, monitor and make available data to a collaborating scientist at anytime, anywhere in the world. Effective use of this technology is partly responsible for quick results from the experimental runs so far. The WLCG is a tiered structure of distributed computing resources used by all scientists working at the LHC.
Indian scientists at BARC have developed and deployed a number of software projects successfully in collaboration with IT Division, CERN. They have developed important software tools like GRIDVIEW and SHIVA.Gridview is a tool that is used by the WLCG/EGEE communities to visualize various functional metrics of the grid. The members of the Gridview team in Computer Division are seen as experts in availability and reliability and are acknowledged for their experience in developing and running the very large Terabyte scale databases used by Gridview. SHIVA is a software tool for implementing problem tracking systems for software projects. In addition, all groups in the CMS and ALICE Experiments have utilized the WLCG for simulations and for analyzing the physics data.
This research has also been jointly funded by DAE and DST on 50:50 basis.
Total Investments so far
The investments in LHC-related activities since 1996 (i.e. over 15 year period) will be approximately Rs. 400 crore.
Impact of
It will not be an exaggeration to say that
Finally, as a result of our efforts and investments,
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