Indian Defence Review

As defined, development is a process in which something passes by degrees to a different stage. It involves a process of becoming deeper and more profound. It is a progression from simpler to more complex forms – the growth of culture. In general parlance, it is an improvement from the past to the present, moving steadily to a better future. Development can always be good, provided it is perceived and accepted with a positive mindset. It occurs whenever and wherever there is a need for improvement in the existing system. With the inclusion of modern technologies, especially networking, the world has become one small piece of land and India is not away from the impact of globalisation and consumerism growing quickly everywhere. Children no longer stay in the shadows of their parents. They independently strive to achieve their goals through cut-throat competition. They have become altruistic and dreamers for a glamorous and glorious future.

Any development, be it any form, has some fallout. Resistance comes from different sections of society or from think tanks, which retards the growth. Some people are left behind in the race while others run so fast that they become the front setters. Those who are marginalised nurture anger and disappointment against others. A rift is, therefore, created between the rich and the poor. As development proceeds, consumerism increases and wealth gets amassed with some sections while the rest remain where they have been. The wealthy and the powerful indulge in scams and white-collar crimes, while the deprived and the poor adopt the criminal career. It is the middle class in our country that strives to do well, maintaining a balance between its rights and responsibilities, but there is no doubt that it remains under severe mental and economical stress.

If development is not equivocal, society is not completely empowered and progress has not touched everyone, and this is exactly what we are witnessing in India today. Home-grown terrorism is the result of it. Small factions of people in different parts of the country are often disrupting our country’s peace by imposing war on the government and taking innocent people to task. Lives are lost, and work comes for a moment to a halt. So, a modern India has in store problems emerging from casteism, regionalism, communalism, sectarianism and many others.

Aggression can be a symptom of many different underlying problems. It’s a polymorphic thing, a commonality for any number of different psychiatric conditions, medical problems and life circumstances. And so, at the very essence of treating aggression is first to find out what’s driving it. For a diagnostic approach, it is necessary to begin from the home where everything is shaping in an undesirable manner.

In India, the youths in their early to mid-twenties and the juveniles from the age of 10 years onwards are exhibiting aggression and their behaviour no longer conforms to the standards and established norms of Indian society. The age-old culture does not satisfy them. Rejection of any control, be it social or filial, is prominent among them. Violence is conspicuous in their personality characteristics. This is of course a global phenomenon, and this deterioration in the perceptions and attitudes of the present youths is generally explained by some people as all due to the generation gap. Researchers,1 while studying individual characteristics contributing to aggression, stressed that a number of individual characteristics have been shown to increase a child’s risk for aggressive behaviour. These include a difficult temperament as an infant, low intelligence, hyperactivity, impulsiveness and attention problems. Additionally, aggressive children frequently have poor social problem-solving skills: they often misinterpret other children’s behaviour as hostile, and they are often unable to find non-aggressive solutions to conflicts.

Home environment is equally responsible for the increase in aggression among youths. Some characteristics of the home environment can increase the risk that a child will eventually become involved in aggressive behaviour. Children and teens who come from homes where parents are coercive or manipulative with their children, provide little emotional support, do not monitor their activities or have little involvement in their children’s lives are at a greater risk for engaging in aggressive behaviour. The use of harsh punishments or inconsistent discipline has been shown to be related to aggressive behaviour in children. The relationships with peer groups and their negative effects also add as risk factors for teens. Because of their aggressive behaviour and lack of social skills, highly aggressive children are often rejected by their peers. This early rejection is predictive of later aggressive and violent behaviour. However, by the time they are teenagers, most aggressive youths are not friendless but have developed friendships with other teenagers with antisocial attitudes and behaviour. Friendships with antisocial peers can be an important predictor of aggressive behaviour and violence in the teenage years. Youth violence can take several forms: verbal, psychological and sexual forms of assault; gang violence; bullying; gender harassment and the use of child soldiers in armed conflicts.

The community from where the teenager comes matters immensely in moulding his or her personality. Poverty, joblessness, discrimination and societal acceptance of aggression all increase the risk of violence in the person. Besides exposure to violence, the availability of drugs, alcohol and firearms; extreme poverty and neighbourhood disintegration make things worse. All these factors cited in the studies are common to all countries, and India is no exception. The rate of increase in crime rate among the youths in India in recent years is shocking and painful. There is no remorse or empathy for the victims, be it a woman, a child or an elderly person. We note incidences of rape, murder and other heinous offences committed by juveniles, but the law of the land is unable to punish them because of their age. As a result, we find repeat offenders among youngsters and at one point of time, they join the bigger gangs of antisocial elements, who are committing crimes ranging from drug trafficking and organ trafficking to waging wars against the government by joining rebel groups. In all these incidents, the common factors are the intolerance and aggression among the youths, which are shaking the total fabric of the society of the country.

India, of late, is witnessing numerous home-grown insurgencies and rebel movements, which have posed a challenge to the system.

The Maoist insurgency, which had surged after the unification of the erstwhile People’s War Group (PWG) and the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) in September 2004 and had come to be regarded as the country’s “gravest internal security threat,” has also witnessed a dramatic decline in violence and fatalities. From a peak of 1,080 fatalities recorded in 2010, there was a near-halving, to 602 in 2011, and a further and substantial drop to 367 in 2012, but the figures are always conflicting as violence occurs frequently in a sporadic manner.

India’s prime minister identifies the Maoist (or “Naxalite”) insurgency as India’s “single biggest internal security challenge.” The insurgency today is severe in scale and violence, with 2,212 violent incidents in 2010 causing 1,175 casualties (713 civilian, 285 security force and 171 guerrilla), a 63% increase since 2008. Today, about 10,000–40,000 full-time insurgents wage a protracted people’s war to overthrow the Indian state across a vast “Red Corridor,” affecting 20 of India’s 28 states as reported by Vira in his article.2 It is clear that India has progressed rapidly, leaving behind widening gaps and discrepancies between rich and poor, town and country and upper castes and lower castes. Conditions for large swathes of rural India still compare with the worst of sub-Saharan Africa, and in many remote areas, the state has long been absent.

When India was under the British regime, the country was reeling under discrimination and injustice, which led to the historic freedom movement. Unfortunately, even when the country got free after a long struggle from the foreign hand, it could not overcome the shackles of inequality injustice and poverty, which is still mercilessly bleeding many remote and distant states in the country. This fight is of a different nature. Here, one poor and underprivileged joins the other unfortunate to fight their own countrymen for rights and justice. Therefore, this fight, though not unified, has a magnitude and is capable of disturbing the peace of the nation.

According to Eric Randolph, “People can put up with a great deal of structural violence in their lives particularly when it is all they have known. Instead, what tends to trigger acts of violent rebellion are specific flashpoints of injustice.” For the Adivasis and tribal people, there are plenty such flashpoints. India’s tribal people – in particular the Gonds of Central India – are under intense assault from state and private corporate interests and are being pushed off their forestlands by giant hydro, logging and mining projects for little compensation and rehabilitation. The Dalits, already the bottom rung of landless agricultural farmers, are similarly disproportionately impacted by the tumultuous changes of modernisation on the Indian countryside and discriminated against daily despite legislation. Tribal people make up the core fighting strength of the Maoist insurgency – their narrow 8 per cent share of the population is still sizeable, given India’s 1.2 billion people.

The Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE)3 is initiating a programme of research on inequality and poverty, with an initial focus on South Asia. Illuminating the processes of the persistence of poverty amongst some of the world’s most marginalised communities, in the next few years, research will focus on the underbelly of the Indian economic boom. The target of the study will be, for instance, Dalits and Adivasis, who account for a quarter of the subcontinent’s population, were historically considered so low as to be thrown outside the caste system as “untouchable” and “savage” and suffer from the greatest poverty. Research will ethnographically investigate, analyse and explain the transformations producing poverty amongst marginalised communities, why and how they affect some groups more than others and understand people’s creative responses to the conditions they find themselves in. It is hopeful that the study will envisage the depth of miseries of the disadvantaged groups who are imposing guerrilla warfare on the country and expressing their discontent with the policies of the government.

Kamal Davar4 has rightly said that the reasons for insurgencies are the lack of fair national policies in combating indigenous insurgencies; political differences between many states and the national government; woefully poor intelligence, especially at the ground level; ill-equipped, undertrained and poorly motivated police and central police forces; a lack of coordination among states and central security agencies and, above all, the total neglect of locally significant development and legal issues in the insurgency-infested regions.

The government at the centre belonging to any party has to be prudent and develop strategies to improve the conditions of the people living under the shadow of poverty and starvation in the remote areas of the country.

For long, the states infested with insurgencies have been absolutely apathetic and indifferent to the ongoing problem, and whenever there is an attack, the blame game starts, rather than the states trying to reach the root of the problem. In a recent incident at Bastar, where there was a highway ambush by the Maoists on 26 May 2013, the Times of India reports that there were at least 300 Maoists. On finding their prized catch, Mahendra Karma, founder of Salwa Judum, the rebels stabbed him mercilessly to death after showering him with bullets.5 Later, they danced with joy. The aftermath of the attack once again discloses various lapses, and the state’s security was seen in poor condition. While one party accuses the other for the holocaust, one interestingly overlooks the fact that among the 300-strong Maoists, many were women aged 18–20 years. Why these young women got engaged in this bloodbath can surprise many, but if the reasons are diagnosed properly, it can be explained that young men and women are joining the rebel forces not out of coercion but because they are frustrated and disillusioned.

Women have been the steering force in their homes, in driving out drug addicts from their vicinities and can also become key members in rebel groups, as witnessed in many countries. Their potency and motivation are matchless when they decide to do something. Today, the fear amongst the netas is so intense that they are seeking security against the threats of the Maoists. The Times of India of 15 June 20136 stated that netas from the Red zone seek cover, and the report mentions that all the requests have come in from the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal and Odisha. The question remains, is this a permanent solution to the unending and worsening situation? Should the government not think about talking to the leaders of the Maoists and developing a strategy that would bring both parties to the round table for a consensus decision?