WikiLeaks and the Indian Maoists

Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks has bagged a whopping deal of £1.1 million to pen down his autobiography.

This goes to show the kind of impact the revelations of WikiLeaks have had, with diplomatic circles across the world thrown into a tizzy. Among the many countries affected, the USA bore the maximum brunt. India was not spared either.

One rather under-reported leak by the global media pertains to India’s low-intensity civil war which is predominantly rural based. The reasons were obvious as the ‘scoop’ was not even remotely associated with America’s War on Terror.

Moreover, unlike the other ‘leaks’, this particular one did not portray the obvious. Rather, to the consternation of many analysts, WikiLeaks divulged that the Indian Maoists are “not dependent on support from outside India”. Moreover, it divulged that they are “moving towards a more unified command system”. The latter, however, was more in conformity to standard perceptions about the insurgent group.

Much of this emanates form a cable sent by the American Embassy in New Delhi on 18 April 2006 to the State Department in Washington, and now released by WikiLeaks. The cable also clearly mentions that “the Indian Government believes the Nepalese Maoists sold arms to the Indian Naxalites”.

However, in the same document, the Indian government is quoted saying that Indian Maoists do not maintain any ‘operational’ links with their Nepalese counterparts. Nonetheless, it does not deny ‘commercial’ links like arms sales between the two insurgent groups.

As per the leaked cable, the Indian government assured the American embassy officials in New Delhi that it does not provide any logistical aid to the Nepalese Maoists, though it is contrary to popular beliefs in Kathmandu.

Now, this is news for analysts and that too something which is not quite believable. The reasons may be enunciated in a nutshell.

One, are ‘business’ deals like arms sales not enough to corroborate the fact that there may be deep-rooted links between the two groups, more so when they have similar ideological moorings.
 
Two, the Indian strategic community, media and even officials from GoI have in the past repeatedly pointed to the collusion between Indian and Nepalese Maoists as well as help being received by the Indian ultras from across the border.

For instance, on November 9, 2010, PV Ramana, in an article written for the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), threw considerable light on the linkages between Indian and Nepalese Maoists.

He took cognisance of a media report of November 6, 2010 to assert that the Indian embassy in Kathmandu wrote to the Foreign and Home Ministers, as well as to the Foreign and Home Secretaries of Nepal, claiming that two commanders of the People’s Liberation Army of the Nepalese Maoists had signed a secret agreement with three leaders of the CPI (Maoist) of India. And according to that agreement, the Nepalese Maoists would impart political and military training to the Indian rebels. Further, those media reports also stated that about 300 Indian rebels have already been trained inside Nepal.

Ramana took the aid of annual reports from the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to attest linkages between the two revolutionary groups. In the article, he quotes an interesting comment (dated July 4, 2006) by then Union Home Secretary VK Duggal: “There is no physical link between Maoists in Nepal and India. However, there is an ‘ideological’ (emphasis added) link.”

And if this comment is bluntly compared to the leaked cable, it turns out to be quite puzzling. What is the perceived link? Is it ‘ideological’ or ‘business-like’? Incidentally, the WikiLeaks disclosure stokes more confusion as according to it; the Indian government has nullified ‘ideological’ links between the two concerned groups.

In another reportage (November 11, 2009), Siddharth Srivastava for Asia Times Online wrote that high-level Indian government sources point towards growing evidence of foreign support of the Maoist rebels. Among the ‘outside forces’ at work are remnants of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). His report claimed that the LTTE were sharing their expertise with the Maoists in hit-and-run tactics and jungle warfare.

Srivastava quoted Home Secretary GK Pillai that “The Chinese are big smugglers ... suppliers of small arms. I am sure that the Maoists also get them”. And, then, there is the recent proclamation of the Director General of Police of Chattisgarh on alleged links between the Lashkar-i-Taiba and the Indian Maoists.
Thus, the actual situation can be gleaned from the plethora of information circulating around, in face of the Indian government’s ambiguity in asserting anything substantial about the foreign support being enjoyed by the Indian Maoists.

In the same leaked document, much to the discomfiture of the Indians, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao has been quoted as accepting that India had provided monetary incentive to the Nepalese Maoists. However, such a ‘leak’ has been outrightly rejected by CP Gajurel, senior leader of the Unified Maoists’ Party of Nepal.

In this regard, it has to be appreciated that when the top Nepalese Maoist leader Baburam Bhattarai has had his education in India, when India’s Red Corridor shares a contiguous border with Nepal and when the ultimate objective of both Maoist parties (tactical differences notwithstanding) is to overthrow the parliamentary democracy by waging a people’s war; then it appears highly irrational that they are de-linked from each other.

Furthermore, with the espousal of the right to self-determination by the Indian Maoists, they naturally are driven towards the different separatist groups in the North-East and Kashmir. In addition to this, recent reports have corroborated that the Indian Maoists have set up direct liaison with insurgents in the North-East at least as far as arms procurements are concerned.

Yet, amidst all the hype generated by WikiLeaks, one needs to be really cautious. What WikiLeaks merely indicates is that the Indian government has not conveyed anything regarding ‘foreign help’ for the Indian Maoists to the US Embassy in New Delhi. Simply speaking, the GoI may not yet possess cogent documents to indict any party. Hence, in this regard, a literal interpretation of the WikiLeaks’ ‘documents’ may lead to a strategic miscalculation.
 
Dr Uddipan Mukherjee obtained his doctoral degree from TIFR (Dept. of Atomic Energy, India) and writes on security issues

(The views expressed in the article are that of the author and do not represent the views of the editorial committee or the Centre for Land Warfare Studies).