Bihar naxal massacre: Don’t’ talk but listen in

The killing of 16 people in Bihar by the naxals, in what was a land dispute and nothing lofty by standards of the Mao-spouting and bullet-spitting red rascals, probably is the start of the next and more dangerous phase for the Indian nation.
The killing, if police is to be believed, was the naxal way of clearing up the social hierarchy that slot itself according to time, circumstances and opportunity.
With the arrival of Nitish Kumar as the doyen of Bihar politics, it is the Kurmis who have become the new Yadavs of Bihar. The Yadavs of course are feeling the pinch of the gradual alienation and frustration they feel with their messiah of the 90s Lalu Prasad Yadav.
The naxal operation was in support of the rat-eating Mushahars, a group that finds itself in the lowest rung of the caste hierarchy because of their fetish for catching, peeling, boiling and eating rats soaked in curry with fistfuls of coarse rice. As in any naxal operation, the end was cold-blooded and left dead bodies strewn all over for a shell-shocked and frightened village to wake up to.
The danger in only a militaristic solution to the fight now is the dismemberment of the so far monolithic People’s War, led by the 13 member Politburo, into a cesspool of individual warlords with small gangs of tribesmen to help them. What we saw in Central Africa especially Liberia, Sierra Leone, Congo and Rwanda, could be a reality in India. We have enough tribes, enough castes, more than enough problems of corruption and just not enough honest men in the system we call democracy or India to avert something like this if it were to become a reality. All this could just be the fodder for the dismemberment of the people’s war.
Tomorrow these warlords could block highways, blow up dams, lay siege to mines and forests, kill the ruling elite, declare entire swathes of tribal land independent and then dictate terms to the democratic class. Sadly some of this has already begun.
The time might not be ripe to talk to the naxals- because of their hatred for Indian democracy or the parties in it- but the time is definitely ripe for us to listen in.
What is it that we missed in our 60 years as a welfare state that the naxals picked up? Why are the tribals such ready fodder for the red rascals? Why have we failed with smiles when they are succeeding with the gun?
It is time to go full out into these tribal strongholds and develop them, even if it means suspending democracy in these areas for some time. It is time for Tribal Development Authorities to be carved out of states like Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Andhra and Bihar. A justice system within that of the current one but with quick disposal of cases, inculcating the saner and civil parts of tribal justice dispensation, has to bet set up in these places. Failure could mean the colour red would figure more prominently in the lives of every Indian, only that it wouldn’t be representing piety and gaiety as in the festivals of life, but the fear and shock villagers in Amosi in Bihar’s Khagaria district woke up with on that fateful day.