Daily Times

Besides the largest-in-the-world array of external conflicts, India is also home to the maximum-in-the-world internal conflicts. Ethno-religious fault lines play a predominant role in making a case for homegrown violence in India. The internal conflicts include separatist insurgencies plaguing the country since 1947. An estimated 30 armed insurgencies sweep across India, reflecting an acute sense of alienation of the people involved and sustained mainly by failure to attend to their grievances and human rights violations by the government. There are over 200 armed irregular guerrilla groups of which 68 are major terror outfits. A maximum of 34 armed groups are active in the state of Manipur.

Most of the Indian armed groups are homegrown organisations. It is another matter that India often propagates against the freedom struggle in Indian Occupied Kashmir but mostly sweeps under the carpet the structure and activities of organisations based on religio-political motivation. India has proscribed some 36 armed groups. According to the Jamestown Organisation (June 4, 2010), there are 100 more groups worth proscription. India considered such a case but subsequently deferred it due to the fear of being named a terror ground zero. Instead, it issued a ban list on 100 terror outfits from across the globe, which had no bases in India itself.

Separatism or independence from India is the key motivation for internal conflicts in most of the cases. The seven northeastern states, also referred to as the Seven Sisters, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Manipur, Tripura and Mizoram have powerful separatist movements spearheaded by some of the most violent armed groups, guided by sub-nationalist political organisations. Some of them also have governments in exile. The freedom struggle in Kashmir has been alive since 1947. A number of Sikh organisations are keeping the case of independent Khalistan alive both at home and abroad.

Separatist and autonomist movements exist in several other Indian states too. The most powerful and fiercest is the 47-year-old Maoist-Naxalite insurgency. Taking root in 1967 in the Naxalbari village of West Bengal, it spread across India. According to Global Research, a centre for research on globalisation (December 20, 2013), “Since then, the insurgency has spread like wildfire over 40 percent of India’s land area, encompassing 20 of the country’s 28 states, including 223 districts (up from 55 in 2003) out of a total of 640. The seven most affected Indian states in terms of fatalities are Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Orissa, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, in that order. These regions comprise the ‘Red Corridor’. About 10,000 people have been killed in the expanding civil war since 1980. The Maoists wield about 20,000 armed fighters and another 50,000 supporters. The Indian government complains that the insurgency has crippled economic activity in central and eastern India.” The Naxalite guerrillas are running a shadow government and courts in the areas under their control. Even the corporate groups and companies of national and international repute are paying taxes levied on them by the Naxalites in these areas. The outgoing Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, termed the Naxalite insurgency “the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by India”.

It is of note that the Sangh Parivar is chiefly responsible for Hindu extremism in addition to violence against non-Hindu communities in India. No wonder, driven by the ideology of Hindutva, the Sangh Parivar has to have a clear predisposition. That the Parivar is back on the throne of Delhi as a result of the 2014 election victory is neither a coincidence nor a political swap over. It bears evidence of a complete politico-ideological metamorphosis of Indian society, thereby pointing to the death of secularism. The Parivar cannot change itself or its dogmas. All that it can do is to transform India and its polity along theocratic lines. This squarely points to more conflict rather than peace. To quote Dorothy Thompson, a US Journalist (1893 to 1961), “Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict — alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence.” It remains to be seen whether the Parivar, with a simple majority in the 16th Lok Sabha, is able to pitch some workable alternatives to violence or be instrumental in breeding more violence.

The track record shows the opposite. Frankly, pro-Hindutva means being anti-Muslim. Juhapura with a population of 400,000, located in the new west zone of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, received the brunt in 2002, when over 2,000 Muslims were killed under the chief ministership of Narendra Modi, is reported to be in a state of shock. The followers of Hindutva mockingly call Juhapura “little Pakistan”. Alongside the Muslims of Gujarat and other states of India, the scheduled castes (SCs), the scheduled tribes (STs), the marginalised Christian communities of the northeast and the Muslims of Indian Occupied Kashmir are feared to endure the added wrath of the Hindutva forces, and thus internal conflicts will continue to burden the Sangh polity.

The writer is a PhD (Peace and Conflict Studies) scholar, author of Human Security in Pakistan (published 2013) and co-author of Kashmir: Looking beyond the Peril (published 2014)