- Friday, April 26, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
INDIAN home minister Amit Shah on Sunday (26) urged the chief ministers of the country’s Naxal-affected states to prioritise the problem so that it can be resolved in a year’s time and sought a joint strategy to choke the flow of money to the extremists.
Naxals are a group of far-Left radical communists (also interchangeably called Maoists) who are at odds with the Indian government. There are belts in various states of India that the insurgents dominate, posing a security challenge for the authorities – both state and central.
Addressing the chief ministers, other ministers and top officials of 10 Indian states that are affected by the far-Left radical insurgents, Shah said the fight against the Naxals has reached its final phase and it needs to be accelerated and made decisive, an official statement said.
According to Shah, the second-most powerful man in the government of prime minister Narendra Modi, the death toll caused by Left-wing extremism violence came down to 200 last year.
Among the chief ministers who attended the meeting were Odisha’s Naveen Patnaik, Telangana’s K Chandrasekhar Rao, Bihar’s Nitish Kumar, Madhya Pradesh’s Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Maharashtra’s Uddhav Thackeray and Jharkhand’s Hemant Soren.
The chief ministers who did not attend the meeting are Mamata Banerjee of West Bengal, YS Jagan Mohan Reddy of Andhra Pradesh, Pinarayi Vijayan of Kerala and Bhupesh Baghel of Chhattisgarh. Their states were represented at the meeting by either a minister or senior officials.
Besides Shah, other central ministers like Ashwini Vaishnaw, Arjun Munda, Giriraj Singh and Nityananda Rai were present. Union home secretary Ajay Bhalla, director of India’s Intelligence Bureau (the country’s premier domestic-intelligence agency) Arvind Kumar and other senior civil and police officers were also present.
Only one of the above-mentioned chief ministers – Chouhan – belongs to Modi and Shah’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) while Kumar is an ally of the BJP.
On the occasion, Shah urged the chief ministers present to give priority to the problem of Naxals for the next one year so that a permanent solution could be found. It requires building pressure, increasing speed and better coordination, the home minister added.
He said it is very important to neutralise the Naxals’ source of income.
Sources said intensifying operations against the extremists and actions against their frontal organisations, filling up the security vacuum, choking the flow of funds and concerted action by the enforcement directorate and the National Investigation Agency and the police forces of various states were some of the issues that were discussed in detail at the meeting.
Incidents of left-wing extremist violence have come down by a whopping 70 per cent from an all-time high of 2,258 in 2009 to 665 in 2020. The number of deaths has also come down from 1,005 in 2010 to 183 in 2020. The area under Naxal influence has also come down – from 96 districts in 2010 to only 53 in 2020. Only 25 districts in the country account for 85 per cent of left-wing extremist violence in India.
Shah said there was no room for complacency, saying until left-wing extremism is completely uprooted, India will never see democracy spreading to the bottom nor will its underdeveloped areas see development.
“So, instead of being satisfied with what we have achieved so far, we need to increase the speed to get what is left,” he said.
Shah also spoke about various initiatives the government has taken in the Naxal-affected areas, in terms of building roads, improving telecommunication, bringing financial inclusion and providing quality education to youths.
