Response

Reflections on Civil Liberties, Citizenship, Adivasi Agency and Maoism: A Response to Alpa Shah
Nandini Sundar
Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University, India

Critique of Anthropology 33(3) 361368 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0308275X13491040 coa.sagepub.com

If Alpa Shah had her way (Shah, 2013), civil liberties and democratic rights platforms in India, currently speaking in the name of citizenship or the people (e.g. Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), Concerned Citizens Committee (CCC); Peoples Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), Independent Peoples Tribunal for Environmental and Human Rights (IPT)) would abandon their pretensions and instead give themselves names such as Committee for the Recognition of Maoist Love and Marriage (CRMLR) or Union for the Promotion of the Sacral Parha Polity (UPSPP), and be in a much better position to advance the cause of the adivasis, in conjunction, of course, with suitably re-educated Maoists. In her article (CofA 33:1:2013), Shah covers three broad themes: The rst pertains to the civil liberties movement in India; the second concerns villager support for Maoists, and the third bears on the way Maoists create political consciousness and citizenship in their own areas. The rst two are not original, though poor citation gives this impression, while her comments on the third border on the incoherent. With respect to the civil liberties movement, Shah argues, rst, that public understanding of adivasi involvement with Maoists is too dependent on the writings of left leaning civil liberties activists and scholars. Second, these liberal activists reduce villagers to helpless victims sandwiched between the Maoists and the State; third, their writings portray adivasi support for the Maoists as born out of state decit; fourth, she asserts that the concept of citizenship that civil liberties activists rely on is alien to the adivasis of central and eastern India, and that this perspective is both limiting and may actually be inimical to adivasi interests because it reduces the space for the Maoist political project.
Corresponding author: Nandini Sundar, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University. Email: nandinisundar@yahoo.com

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Instead, Shah claims that adivasi villagers are attracted to the Maoists because of kinship ties and friendship, and that this discovery is one of the most signicant analytic departures from which one might understand the Maoist movement. As for the Maoists, Shah says that they have few intellectual resources to help them think through the relationship between indigeneity and class struggle, and there is no serious scholarship devoted to these issues in adivasi areas to help them do so. Consequently, the Maoist strategy of mobilizing to hold the state accountable in order to show up its failures, is actually counterproductive since it creates a desire for state action. Given that the Maoists want to establish their own state, this betrays a limited imagination. Against this she suggests that the Maoists look at the traditional parha system for models, in which (in theory), traditional headmen settle disputes, redistribute land etc. on behalf of and at the behest of an egalitarian, consensual village community. I shall address each of these themes, using Shahs sub-headings. I have been conducting ethnographic research on adivasi India for the past twenty three years, and have been working on the Maoist issue since 2005, when the government started a counterinsurgency campaign (Salwa Judum) masquerading as a peoples movement in the region where I had conducted Phd research in the early 1990s. Between 2005 and 2007, in the district of Dantewada (formerly part of Bastar in Chhattisgarh) over 5000 homes were burnt and looted, thousands of citizens were killed and hundreds raped during joint operations conducted by police, security forces and civilian youth armed as special police ocers. About 50,000 people were forced into camps controlled by the Salwa Judum leaders and police, while equal numbers ed to neighbouring states or into the forests near their villages. About half the villages in the district were directly aected. Against the drone of helicopters, patrolling by vigilantes and ocial paramilitaries, Maoist retaliatory violence and general lawlessness, throughout the region the eects were evident. In 2009, the Salwa Judum was replaced by a conventional COIN campaign conducted through security forces and combing operations, widely referred to as Operation Green Hunt, which is ongoing. The story would be familiar to anyone who has worked on guerilla movements in Latin America, and is the background to the civil liberties activism Shah refers to.

Citizenship as invoked by civil liberties activists in India

Shah claims that it is in the context of the Indian Government-Maoist war that the concept of citizenship has gained a particular currency; hence the prominent usage of the term in the names of civil liberties groups. This is simply wrong: using the language of citizenship is part of a more general history of peoples movements and civil liberties in India, represented, for example, in the Nagrik Ekta Manch (Citizens Unity Platform) (formed in 1984 after the anti-Sikh massacres) and the Mumbaibased Citizens for Justice and Peace (formed in the aftermath of the Gujarat Muslim pogrom in 2002).

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The villagers of Chhattisgarh themselves invoke a keen sense of betrayed citizenship. As the villagers of Korcholi wrote impassionedly in a letter in 2007 that then became a part of the litigation records before the Indian Supreme Court: Going to the police does not help as the ocers do not listen to the villagers. The frightened villagers of Gangaloor, Cherpal and Bijapur, seeing the Salwa Judum, have ed into forests . . . . . Why is this happening in our country, why is this happening in Chhattisgarh. Why has the Chhattisgarh administration been running this? Has our Chief Minister been elected only for this? Shahs particular target is the Independent Citizens Initiative (ICI), where, she argues, the term Independent was adopted to dene the activism as oating above the interests of both the government in power, the revolutionaries, and the people in the revolutionary zones. An endnote here tells us that her insights (were) gained from spending time with . . . . some of the activists whose positions are addressed here. As a member of the Independent Citizens Initiative, I do not know how Alpa Shah came by this insight, but I can safely assert that the term Independent in this case was chosen because all the previous fact-ndings on the Salwa Judum were associated with existing political organizations - like the Communist Party of India (CPI), the Human Rights Forum (HRF), or PUCL and PUDR (Peoples Union for Democratic Rights) - and we were a group of individuals, unaliated to any organization or to each other in any permanent sense. Having been part of the PUDR, PUCL et al. fact-nding team which visited Dantewada in November 2005 (PUDR et al., 2006), I felt that what was happening in the region was so terrible that it needed greater public visibility than provided by the civil liberties groups who are often dismissed as Maoist fronts and the other ICI members readily agreed. It is true, however, that groups such as the Concerned Citizens Committee (CCC) or HRF in Andhra Pradesh (and by extension the temporary ICI) do see themselves as autonomous of the state and the revolutionaries, though never of the people in the revolutionary zones. For this, it is important to understand the history of the civil liberties movement (see essays in Singh, 2009). Currently, the human rights movement in India is divided into two broad categories: in the rst are the groups who dene themselves explicitly as human rights, civil liberties or democratic rights organisations, and in the second are left political parties (which ag particular violations) and issue-based movements centred on caste or gendered discrimination, land rights, etc. Within the rst category there are two further divisions: the funded NGOs like Human Rights Watch and the much older voluntary civil liberties and democratic rights movement. Within this last, there are further divisions, but the most relevant for the purposes of this discussion concern dierences about how to treat non-state violence, especially of the Maoist variety. While this matter has riven many groups across the country, the clearest formulation of position comes from Andhra Pradesh where the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee (APCLC) originated as a front of the Naxalites in the 1970s. In 1998, the Human Rights Forum (HRF) split from

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APCLC for reasons both of eectiveness (the need to be independent and be seen as such) and morality (the need to recognize the violence of non-state actors), even as it recognized the transformative power of the Maoists, and the sacrice of its leaders. The Concerned Citizens Committee (CCC), which was a grouping of well-known and committed citizens in Andhra Pradesh, was not a human rights group as such, but a pressure group aiming to create a democratic space for citizens in the midst of state repression and insurgent counter-violence. It worked for over a decade to bring about peace talks. The ICI, though part of this tendency, provided a temporary and minimalist common platform; regardless of our individual political views we were agreed that outsourcing law and order to vigilantes was not constitutional. Advancing the Maoist agenda was never the ICIs brief; just as it is not the concern for the lawyers, including a former attorney general, who have been ghting the Salwa Judum case pro-bono in the Supreme Court for seven years. But the Rule of Law and the Constitution are their concern. As the socialist thinker Ram Manohar Lohia pointed out as far back as 1936, people who may not believe in a particular cause may still believe in the need for civil liberties and fundamental rights. And while radicals may be skeptical about their activities, the need for such legal safeguards is greatest precisely when the status quo is under attack. (Lohia, 2009 (1936): 20910). Most importantly, in the context of Shahs article it is pointless to counterpose civil liberties or legal narratives to an ethnographic perspective these are dierent genres, designed to express quite dierent functions. Even as one recognizes that public support lies with the insurgents, it is quite possible and indeed absolutely necessary to argue for the immunity of civilians in a civil war and to separate them from combatants (see the International Red Cross advisory on what constitutes direct participation in hostilities).

Citizenship in Maoist areas? or The Sandwich theory examined

The next matter to be discussed concerns the question of villagers autonomy from the Maoists and the state. Shahs critique of the notion that the villagers are apolitical victims caught between these forces is hardly original. This has been articulated as the sandwich theory, and to describe someone as a sandwich theorist is a radical term of abuse in the internecine wars of left activists (D Souza, 2010). If all villagers are solidly behind the Maoists, any questioning of the Maoists can be portrayed as unjustied and reactionary, especially if it comes from establishment gures like those in the ICI. It is interesting that even as Shah holds the ICI and its members out as exemplars of the sandwich view, she does not cite anything we have actually written. In my article on grouping in northeast India which clearly applied also to the Chhattisgarh context (Sundar, 2011), I noted that At best, when governments or analysts want to make a distinction between people and insurgents, they portray people as uncommitted; and likely to support whichever side has more power. People may often

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describe themselves as pawns caught in the conict between two more powerful forces, but this is often mere playing to the gaze of a human interest story driven media or the depoliticised practices of humanitarian intervention. What both of these do is deny people their rights as citizens or political beings (the right to support any ideology they choose). Shahs argument that the Maoist ability to develop long-term support. . . .is because unlike the Indian state, the party is socially embedded is tautological to say the least. To have long term support is to be socially embedded and gain local cadre. The feeling that the insurgents are our own people is not unique to the Maoists, but is a given in places such as Kashmir, Punjab, Sri Lanka or any situation where there is mass insurgency and not just terrorist action. This is precisely why governments resort to propaganda about insurgency-as-isolated-terrorism and why they practise strategic hamletting to wean away by force and collective punishment the public support that insurgents enjoy, even if they may couch it as winning hearts and minds. And further, this is precisely why grouping often fails as a strategy: The basic premise that grouping would serve to separate the general population from the insurgents, was sociologically mindless, if nothing else. The national workers or underground army were the husbands, brothers, and sons of those in camp how could they not have helped them? (Sundar, 2011). What we need to illuminate as anthropologists is not simply the fact that the Maoists are socially embedded through kinship ties, but how the movement originates, is sustained or dissipates under certain conditions. The Maoists are not a social club, but a political party, however familial in some features of organization. If kinship was explanation enough, how does one account for the fact that the Maoists have undercut the parliamentary Communist Party of India (CPI) which is the only party in Bastar to be led by adivasis themselves, and which is equally locally embedded, with kinship ties to all sides? Before the Maoists enforced an electoral boycott, all these areas voted for the CPI. Kinship ties may explain why individuals join the Maoists now for personal as against ideological reasons - but it does not explain why entire villages began supporting them initially in the 1980s. In Chhattisgarh, that explanation is based in their role in distributing forest land, settling villages, raising tendu leaf prices, and driving out the police and forest guards, using their guns. Nor does kinship stand up to counterinsurgency it is not uncommon in Chhattisgarh to nd one sibling with the Maoists and the other working as a special police ocer. Shah gives us no sense of where her research was located in Jharkhand, the number and nature of informants, etc. A nuanced analysis that seeks to explain the strength of the Naxalite movement in any particular area needs to take into account several factors. These include the specic socioeconomic context; the nature of stratication; the specic political history of the area (in terms of the alternatives that exist in the form of parliamentary parties and social movements); the issues of agency that explain why certain individuals join the Naxalites and others do not; Maoist and state ideology, geographical factors such as the

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suitability of the terrain for guerilla struggle, as well as the logic of state repression, and Maoist militarization. Against the view that being sandwiched or being only on the insurgent side exhausts the possibilities, my experience shows that people want both the Maoists and the state but for dierent reasons. They need open parliamentary parties and civil liberties groups who can help them when they get arrested, as well as a party like the Maoists who can help them keep their land. There are also dierences between regions in terms of support. There are areas, for example, where the Maoists long ago helped people occupy land, and others where they have arrived more recently; they have more support among Gonds who form the core of their cadre than among other more cautious communities. While they move freely in interior villages, people in villages close to police stations are more circumspect in their support. Finally, peoples allegiances change over time, in response either to repression or new opportunities. People may consciously chose to be neutral, or to portray themselves as such depending on the context - but this is an active not a passive exercise of moral and strategic agency. Above all, because the party is so embedded it is important to ght for peace and talks, and for the un-banning of the Maoists. The alternative is to accept the governments militarist approach which will mean large scale bloodshed for civilians and the killing of Maoist leaders, many of whom have inspiring biographies of struggle. To ask for peace when neither of the two armed sides wants it, is not na ve, but is the hopeless activity of those who see history repeating itself. Saroj Giri, whom Shah quotes approvingly, writes that we need more Dantewadas, more Lalgarhs, more Naxalbaris (Giri, 2010: 111). These are important moments of resistance, but in Lalgarh today, the Maoist leader Kishenji is dead, and all the local cadre have been arrested or joined the ruling Trinamool Congress to save themselves.

Maoist notions of Citizenship

Of all sections in this article, it is the questionable treatment of adivasi political practices and the Marxist notion of class versus community that makes one wonder if Shah has understood anything about Maoist ideology or practice, or even the implications of her own eldwork. Based on the evidence in her own book, In the Shadows of the State (Shah, 2010), the parha is hardly a sacral polity, but is deeply implicated in a politics of self-interest, division, corruption, and is patriarchal to boot. Moreover, the whole parha system in Jharkhand has been the subject of intense debate among dierent shades of political activists, from indigenist NGOs who have tried to revive it in its secular form, to the Hindu chauvinist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) which has tried to promote federations of traditional headmen as bearers of an authentic adivasi culture as against a Christianised elite. The Maoists themselves have dismissed it as vestiges of a feudal structure (see Sundar, 2011, 2009).

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In Bastar, a large part of the support base for the Salwa Judum came from traditional headmen whom the Maoists had displaced through their local governments, and whose land they had redistributed. Further, the parganas in Bastar, like those in Jharkhand, are not untouched remnants of some traditional adivasi polity, but have been codied and transformed by the colonial and post-colonial state (see Sundar, 2007, 2009). Perhaps Shah does not think my work constitutes serious scholarship but one wonders about her own scholarship if she simply refuses to engage with any of the other scholars, like Surajit Sinha, K. Balagopal, Kaushik Ghosh, Archana Prasad to name just a few, who have worked on political systems, class, agrarian structure and feudalism in adivasi India, or the debates among Maoists themselves on class structure among the adivasis (in Bastar this debate took place around 1987). A nal comment on citizenship. The terms commonly used to claim citizenship are adhikar or haq (rights). No-one anywhere uses nagrik swatva. And people do not have to use this language to be engaged in citizenship claims. In Jharkhand, where there is a long history of involvement in politics from the Birsa rebellion (1900) to Jaipal Singhs Adivasi Mahasabha (1940s) to more recent demands for statehood, forest protection, mobilization against land acquisition and mining, it is unlikely that people have no sense of larger democratic processes. Democracy is as much about peoples struggles as electoral representation. Jharkhand has a long history of integration into the world economy through migration to the Assam tea gardens, mining and timber extraction, as well as, increasingly, recruitment to the army, and work as domestic labourers in Indias metropoles. As the essays in Sundar 2009 showed, through an analysis of the colonial era land tenure acts that govern Jharkhand, and which were co-shaped by popular resistance, these are hardly stateless societies, though the predominant version of the state may be brutal and callous. Alpa Shah will respond in the next issue.

References
DSouza R (2010) Sandwich Theory and Operation Green Hunt. In: Sanhati Selections. Kolkata: Sanhati, pp. 125136. Independent Citizens Initiative (2006) War in the Heart of India. New Delhi: ICI. Giri S (2010) The dangers are great, the possibilities immense: On the current political struggle in India. In: Sanhati Selections. Kolkata: Sanhati, pp. 103124. Lohia RM (2009 [1936]) The Concept of Civil Liberties. In: Singh UK (ed.) Human Rights and Peace. New Delhi: Sage, pp. 203219. PUDR, PUCl et al. (2006) When the State Makes War on its Own People. Delhi: PUDR. Shah A (2010) In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India. Durham: Duke University Press. Shah A (2013) The Tensions over Liberal Citizenship in a Marxist Revolutionary Situation. Critique of Anthropology 33(1): 91109. Singh UK (ed.) (2009) Human Rights and Peace. New Delhi: Sage. Sundar N (2007) Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar, 1854 2006, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2nd edition.

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Sundar N (2009) Legal Grounds: Natural Resources, Identity and the Law in Jharkhand. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Sundar N (2011) Interning Insurgent Populations: The Buried Histories of Indian Democracy. Economic and Political Weekly, February 5, 2011, XLVI No. 6, pp. 4757. Sundar N (2011) The Rule of Law and Citizenship in Central India: Post-colonial Dilemmas. Citizenship Studies 15 (34) July 2011: 419432.

Authors Biography Nandini Sundar is Professor of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University. Her published writings on the Maoist issue are available at nandinisundar.blogspot.com