Rebels armed with bows and arrows now threaten an India with highly unequal economic development.

The front-page headline in newspapers across India on Wednesday (October 28) morning screamed in big, bold type: “Naxalites hijack Rajdhani Express; five-hour drama just 175km from Kolkata, drivers abducted and released.”

Mercifully, the armed insurgents did not hurt anyone; and before the police could arrive on the scene, they melted away into the nearby forests. But the seizure of the Bhuvaneswar-New Delhi Rajdhani Express in broad daylight near a way station, Jhargram, in West Bengal, was enough to put the authorities on notice about the huge challenge posed by the Naxalites/Maoists to the Indian state.

Armed with bows and arrows, some 300-odd tribals ambushed the premier train on Tuesday afternoon, while raising slogans for the release of their comrade and leader of the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities, Chhatradhar Mahato. He was arrested last month from the insurgent-infested village of Lalgarh in West Midnapore district of West Bengal.

Two police officers posing as journalists from a Western television channel had taken him by surprise. A long-time crusader against corruption and extortion of tribal people, Mahato was engaged in organising villagers to fight “the corrupt system”.

However, the police had a totally different take on his activities. They claimed he had been extorting money from villagers and had amassed sizable personal assets, including a life insurance policy for US$200,000.

There was no denying that he had radicalised tribals in a number of villages, inspiring them to fight for their rights and to challenge corrupt civil, police and land officials.

Some believed that the trainjacking was inspired by the decision of the Marxist CPI-led government in West Bengal a few days earlier to free the abducted police inspector in exchange for the release of 21 suspected Maoists from police custody.

The Maoists had attacked a police station in West Midnapore district in West Bengal on October 20, killing two policemen and taking officer-in-charge Atindranath Dutta hostage. A couple of days later, the government agreed to swap 21 suspected Maoists for Dutta.

The decision was widely criticised as surrendering to the outlaws, although a senior state government official justified it by arguing that India was a “soft state”, and had earlier released terrorists to free hostages of the Indian Airlines plane hijacked to Kandahar. However, West Bengal chief minister Buddhadev Bhattacharjee vowed not to give in to Maoist blackmail in the future.

What made the authorities’ task of eliminating the Maoist menace more difficult was the undeniable fact that different political parties at different times had relied on them to bolster their electoral prospects.

The Maoists started out some 30 years ago as allies of the ruling Left Front. However, the failure of the CPI (M)-led government to alleviate the grim misery of the poor alienated them.

They soon targeted the state government. Indeed, Mahato was a supporter of the railway minister Mamta Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress. After the train ambush, CPI (M) leaders blamed Banerjee for the incident.

But the incident is a small peep into the huge problem that confronts the Indian state. Following the train ambush, the authorities identified 140 railway stations and 96 trains passing through Naxal-affected areas as vulnerable to such at-tacks. As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said, the “biggest threat” to India came from Naxalites/Maoists dominating some 160 of the 600-odd districts in the country.

Following a series of incidents in recent months, in which the Maoists killed police and paramilitary personnel and issued death threats to several central and state leaders, Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram undertook to eliminate the menace. Reportedly, a 20,000-strong anti-Naxalite force was undergoing special training in a remote garrison in the north-east.

A number of intellectuals and well-to-do persons publicly pleaded the Maoist cause, arguing that they were the true friends of the marginalised and dispossessed, engaged in organising them to ensure that they got their due from the Indian state. A representative view of the Maoist-friendly intellectuals came from celebrated author Arundhati Roy.

She said that “economic interests keen to displace poor tribals from their forest lands so that these could be exploited for rich natural resources were behind the move to declare war on the Maoists... If I was a person who was being dispossessed, whose wife had been raped, who was being pushed off his land, I would say that I am justified in taking up arms.”

Earlier, a number of intellectuals had sought the release of a couple of Maoist ideologues. Among those arrested was the scion of a prosperous Parsi family who was undergoing treatment for cancer under a false name in New Delhi.

Human rights activists and others sympathetic to the Naxalite cause have long argued that livelihoods of the poor were snatched by the government in collusion with the moneybags who exploit rich mineral resources without ensuring relief and rehabilitation of the displaced from their traditional homes. But Chidambaram says the Maoists were an impediment in the path of development, since they do not allow the government to build roads and dig wells in lands occupied by the tribals.

All in all, insurgency has its roots in poverty. Social and economic inequities, coupled with an uncaring state which fails to take the fruits of progress and development to the majority in far-flung rural districts, serve as the most hospitable ground for breeding armed “revolutionaries”.

Even the so-called trickle-down effect of speedy economic growth, following the liberalisation and reforms of the 1990s, is yet to be felt by marginalised people. Although the central government suspects a foreign hand in the supply of arms and ammunition to the insurgents, many are not convinced about the use of force to wean them away from Naxalism.

Instead, the solution to the huge problem of insurgency lies in faster economic development with an increased outlay for the Naxal-affected districts.