Getting there

On 13 September 2011, Union Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh announced a brave initiative called the Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellows Scheme. The Ministry of Home Affairs has identified 60 districts as Left-Wing Extremism (LWE) affected areas, in lieu of which the PMRDF plans to ‘deploy’ around 180 Fellows comprising of working professionals from private organizations and fresh graduates from fields of law, management and medicine to assist the District Collectors in better civic administration for the Maoist/Naxalite ‘infested’ areas.

The Ministry of Rural Development plans on rewarding the Fellows handsomely. For the 2 year contractual agreement that the Fellows will be working in these areas, each will be paid Rs. 65,000 per month for the first year and Rs. 75,000 the next.

Besides waking up late to the developmental agenda for these zones, the MRD’s official website makes no secret of the fact that PMRDF is launched with the hopes of weaning the influence of the Naxalites amongst the tribal villagers. It’s a tough task to eliminate from public memory the fact that the Naxalites re-distributed more than 3,00,000 acres of forest land amongst the tribal villagers in Dandakaranya(covering parts of Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh) over the course of their revolution.

I’m not skeptical about the PMRDF. If anything, my respect for Jairam Ramesh has notched higher every time he has walked the tight-rope of sustainable development with a lot of sensitivity to its ramifications on human rights. As Union Minister for Environment and Forests he protected the villagers of Orissa from Posco’s forced land acquisitions, prevented large-scale environmental degradation and displacement of the Kondhs in Orissa due to unbridled mining and saved the people of India from a harmful, genetically modified brinjal. For all that and more, the people ought to be proud of Ramesh for steering our ‘growth-story’ in the right direction.

But I have serious misgivings about the success of PMRDF. The timing couldn’t be more wrong.

Due to the pressure exerted by various groups of human rights activists and public intellectuals, the Home Minister had earlier maintained that the Government is always ready for ‘peace talks’. After several overtures on behalf of the Naxalites to drop weapons and come to the table, the Home Ministry had a sudden change of heart and went in an over-drive with “rendering the Naxalite movement headless”. With fake encounters of two senior politburo members, Cherukuri Rajkumar and Koteswara Rao (alias Kishanji), not only has the Government lost all its credibility, but also an opportunity to mediate with the “gravest internal security threat” toIndia. And if the CPI (Maoist) Central Committee’s latest press release after Kishanji’s encounter is anything to go by, the Naxalites consider Jairam Ramesh a collaborator of the Home Minister’s agenda too.

In such a climate of hostility, the PMRDF is nothing short of a suicide-mission. It’s alright to say that the working professionals and graduates who’ll be employed in these conflict-zones have squat to do with the decades of dispossession suffered by the tribals and are coming in as Good Samaritans, and thus we must expect, nay, demand immunity for them from the violence prevalent in the LWE affected areas. In the event that they’re caught in the cross-fire between the State and the Naxalites, it would be arrogant to support the Government’s plan for on an all-out offensive on the Naxalites. (Just a thought – Can the Indian State be so callous that the PMRDF has been engineered in a fashion to sway public opinion in the government’s favour in the event of guerilla attacks?)

This is war. You don’t start re-building the battleground right in the middle of the war. I hope that the 180 individuals who’ll be selected for the Fellowship know what they’re getting into. I personally love this idea of committing two years of your life in an exercise of nation building the way Gandhi saw village-level independence and be handsomely paid for it too; when was the last time fresh graduates felt so valued in a government job then a private one? But I don’t see myself going there anytime soon. As long as this ‘threat’ persists, which even Jairam Ramesh identifies as a socio-economic crisis emerging out of government apathy for decades, it is not only dangerous, but also insensitive to tread on this path considering the degree of distrust between the tribal villagers and the government. Never the less, I would be the happiest person if proven wrong, to see the civil administration successfully ‘winning hearts and minds’ of our tribal communities. Until then, if you’re heroic enough to participate in the PMRDF, you might as well buy yourself some Life Insurance. It’s just good sense.

My two cents: Chidambaram and Ganpathy really need to sit down over a bowl of ant chutney and have a heart-to-heart.

(The descriptions Naxal and Maoist are used inter-changeably in the article. The Maoist struggle as we know it today, has its origins in 1960s Naxalbari, a small village in Darjeeling, Paschimbanga.)