Naxal Shadow over upcoming Jharkhand Elections

By Deepak Parvatiyar

November 4, 2014

Naxals influence politics in Jharkhand in more ways than one.

On the one hand, their boycott calls mean that elections are invariably held under the shadow of terror in the state; on the other hand, contradicting their boycott call, they even sponsor their supporters as candidates in the electoral fray!

Consider the elections for the 16th Lok Sabha earlier this year — The outlawed naxal outfit Communist Party of India (Maoist) had supported the independent candidate Mahadev Rabinath Pahan, a cousin of a zonal Maoist commander Kundan Pahan who carries a reward of Rs 10 lakh on his head, from the Khunti Lok Sabha constituency.

Naxal-Supported Candidates, Common Feature of Jharkhand Polls

In the 2009 general elections, a former  Maoist central committee member Kameshwar Baitha, who faced 53 criminal cases in various courts including those of killing of 17 PAC jawans and divisional forest officer. He was lodged in a Bihar jail, contested and won as a Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) candidate from the naxal-infested Palamu (reserved) constituency of the state. In the 2014 general elections though, he left the JMM and contested as a Trinamool Congress candidate after he was denied a BJP ticket.

Neither Pahan nor Baitha could win elections this time but wasn’t their candidature by itself a powerful statement of the Maoist’s interference in the politics of the state ?

Baitha included, there have been cases where the political parties blinked for the Maoists and provided them their party symbols to contest elections in Jharkhand. On February 3 in 2011, the Bihar police had arrested a Maoist, Prithwiraj Hembrom alias Pouluce Hembrom, in the state for his involvement in over half a dozen cases of terror. He was believed to have chopped ears and nose of many villagers suspecting them to be police informers, in Giridih (Jharkhand) in 2005. Hembrom too had contested the 2010 state assembly elections, but from Chakai (Bihar) on a Bahujan Samaj Party ticket!

Political Parties’ Nexus with Naxals

A study by the Bureau of Police Research and Development of the Union Home Ministry about a couple of years ago titled Social, Economic and Political Dynamics in Extremist Affected Areas, pointed out that in Jharkhand, “all political parties have been accused of nexus with the extremists for electoral gains”.

The report suggests that the naxals do have enough clout on the electoral process in the state and do have a track record of disrupting elections. Their formidable presence, despite the electoral defeats of the candidates backed by them, cannot be ignored by political parties.
Not only that the Naxals have the destructive capabilities that they demonstrated time and again by blowing up schools, trains and rail lines as well as government buildings, they do have enormous presence at the grassroots in the state. Dr Sanjay K Jha, in his published research paper of 2005, Naxalite Movement in Bihar and Jharkhand, had suggested that the Naxalites  were “capable of influencing the election process in some 54 of the 81 Assembly constituencies” in Jharkhand then.

Today, reports suggest that 22 of the 24 Jharkhand districts are in the grip of the naxals and they have ‘liberated’ many zones where there is no presence of the state government!

Quite understandably, despite their poll boycott calls, the naxal groups do use their influence to support candidates or political groups considered sympathetic towards them. This does, therefore, explain why even the outgoing JMM-led coalition government too was, as reports suggest, sympathetic towards the Maoists.

No Decline in Vote Percentage in the State

Besides, the powerful naxal-politician-bureaucrat-contractor collusion further explains why despite the naxals’ boycott calls and violence, there is never a decline in vote percentage in the state. The following figures do corroborate this fact :

- Even as the Parliamentary Election of 2004 was marred by naxal violence in Jharkhand, the worst affected districts such as Hazaribagh, Singhbhum, Palamu and Lohardaga witnessed between 49-60 per cent turnout while the state too registered an impressive 55 per cent voting.
- A jailed naxal commander Ramlal Oraon alias Veer Bhagat even contested as an Independent in the 2004 parliament election from Chatra where some of the worst-affected Assembly segments witnessed their highest turnout in two decades then!  Though he lost, he had mustered over 51,000 votes without even “splurging on campaigns or interacting with voters”.

Naxals, Involved in Mining and Extortion

Why should the Naxals, who publicly despise the parliamentary democracy as it is considered by them to be an exploitative system, participate in elections?

A television report of April 2010 did throw ample light on this phenomenon. According to the report the lure of money has made naxals dump their ideology, to emerge as a dreaded mining mafia in Jharkhand.

Jharkhand has over 40 per cent of the country’s mineral reserve and the report had then claimed that while the Naxalites were involved in a “multi-crore” mining scam, they were also involved in an extortion business estimated at around a whopping Rs 2000 crore in the state since all contractors had to pay 5-10 per cent of the project cost to them as ‘protection money’.

But won’t the naxals continue to wield their authority in the absence of any concerted effort by the political establishment to deal with the issue? After all, in Jharkhand, the Naxalite problem does have a definite socio-political context!