A part of the Sardar Patel Memorial Lecture delivered in the national capital on Tuesday by union minister for rural development Jairam Ramesh is reproduced below:

I am not just privileged but also truly humbled to be part of this prestigious lecture series launched a half century and six years ago by none other than C. Rajagopalachari. Many distinguished personalities have preceded me and this makes me feel all the more honoured to be here this evening.
To say anything about such an indomitable colossus as Sardar Patel, one of our Founding Fathers, would be gratuitous. Often referred to as the “Iron Man” and as the “Bismarck of India”, he was part of the triumvirate which dominated the Indian National Congress and indeed the Indian political landscape for almost three decades. Using this imagery of the trinity, one of his well-known biographers B. Krishna wrote: "Gandhi represented Brahma-the creator and inspirer. Nehru reflected Vishnu’s soft, gentle looks, a nobility of character and humanism that transcended barriers of caste and creed. And Patel proved, like Siva, the destroyer and unifier-the builder and consolidator of Modern India". And in keeping with the modern-day Brahma’s predilections, the destruction was peaceful. During his visit to India in 1955, Nikita Khrushchev is reported to have expressed his amazement at the Sardar’s accomplishments by remarking “You Indians are an amazing people. How on earth did you manage to liquidate princely rule without liquidating the princes?”

On his death on December 15th, 1950, Nehru made an emotional statement in parliament and described his departed comrade-in-arms as “the builder and consolidator of the new India, a great captain of our forces in the struggle for freedom...one who gave us sound advice in times of troubles as well as in moments of victory, a friend and colleague on whom one could invariably rely,, a tower of strength which revived wavering hearts when we were in trouble”. The Cabinet Resolution of December 16th, 1950, drafted by Nehru himself, spoke of his “magnificent talents and abounding energy, his matchless courage, inflexible sense of discipline and genius for organisation”.  

Sardar Patel's contributions go beyond being the cartographer of immediate post-Independence India. He had a profound impact on our constitution as well as chairman of the advisory committee on fundamental rights, minorities and tribal and excluded areas in the constituent assembly. Granville Austin in his classic history of the making of the Indian constitution writes: "Nehru and Patel were the focus of power in the (Constituent) Assembly....The blend in the Constitution of idealistic provisions and articles of a practical, administrative and technical nature is perhaps the best evidence of the joint influence of these two men". None other than Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar himself acknowledged this influence in his famous speech in the constituent assembly on November 25th, 1949 when he said, "It is because of the discipline of the Congress party that the drafting committee was able to pilot the constitution in the assembly with the sure knowledge as to the fate of each article and each amendment. The Congress party is, therefore, entitled to all the credit for the smooth sailing of the draft constitution in the assembly”. 

Today, India is the largest milk producer in the world and has seen a White Revolution captured memorably in Shyam Benegal’s Manthan. Not many know that it was on entirely on Sardar Patel’s bidding that the  Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers' Union  was set up in 1946 under the chairmanship of his lieutenant Tribhuvandas Patel. This was then to spawn the Amul cooperative movement under Dr. V. Kurien's leadership in Anand.   

The topic of my lecture is “From Tirupati to Pashupati: Some Reflections on the Maoist  Issue”. The title comes from the popular image in the media that a “liberated” Red corridor is sought to be created extending from Andhra Pradesh to Nepal and cutting across the very heart of India. This has been described by the prime minister to be India’s most serious internal security challenge and by the home minister to be even graver than the problem of terrorism. Armed communist insurgency is something that the nascent Indian nation-state of which Sardar Patel was the home minister confronted in Telangana even as the Constituent Assembly was debating the architecture of our republican democracy founded on adult suffrage and positive discrimination in favour of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. The modern-day Maoists see themselves as legatees of this uprising , which Sardar Patel dealt with firmly but sensitively.

The phenomenon of Naxal violence has been studied by official committees from time to time. I recall that in the early 1980s, then prime minister Indira Gandhi sent a team headed by the-then member-secretary of the planning commission to conduct field-level studies of Naxal-affected areas in Bihar and Andhra Pradesh and recommend solutions both for the centre and the states to adopt. The author of this report is, incidentally, now our prime minister. The recommendations were many but the main point made was that urgent and long-festering socio-economic concerns of the weaker sections of society must be addressed meaningfully if the influence of Naxal groups is to be countered effectively. 

More recently, three years ago the planning commission published the report of its 17-member expert group on development challenges in extremist-affected areas. And what a group this was. It had all the people you would want for such an exercise, people who have spent a life time thinking, speaking, writing and working on this subject—people like Debu Bandopadhyay, S.R. Sankaran, K. Balagopal, B.D. Sharma, K.B. Saxena, Ram Dayal Munda, Dileep Singh Bhuria and Sukhadeo Thorat to name just eight of them. As was only to be expected, the report of this group was extraordinarily detailed. It gave the historical, political, social and economic context to the issue, reviewed government efforts to deal with the problem and recommended a number of key policy and programme measures and changes to vastly and visibly reduce, if not totally eradicate, the effects of Left-wing extremism in different states. Running into 95 pages, this report may lack the lyrical beauty and sheer poetry, misleading though it may be, of Arundhati Roy’s now famous 33-page essay in Outlook magazine  but for sheer comprehensiveness and depth of analysis and for showing a practical way ahead it has no peers.

Please permit me to inject a personal note here. As a student of India’s political dynamics I have always had an intellectual interest in this subject, but over the last seven years, my involvement has grown and has become increasingly more direct. First, since 2004 when I became a Member of Parliament from Andhra Pradesh, I have used my MPLADS funds mostly in Adilabad, Warangal and Khammam—three Naxal-affected districts--to strengthen women’s self-help group organisations and reduce the trust deficit between tribal communities and the civil administration. Second, between June 2009 and July 2011 as minister in charge of environment and forests it fell on me to bring about changes in forest policy and administration since this has been identified as a key factor in dealing with the issue of Naxal violence. Third, since July 2011 as minister in charge of rural development covering key programmes like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY), watershed management, drinking water supply, housing, social assistance and modernisation of land records, an opportunity has been afforded to me to address the development deficit in the Naxal-affected areas that the 17-member Planning Commission expert group so tellingly identified.

Before I go any further on the development route, I wish to pause and reflect on something that the union home minister has so forcefully said on more than one occasion, quite in contrast to his predecessor who described the Naxals as “our wayward and misguided younger brothers” (and I should add increasingly sisters) who have to be gently persuaded and cajoled to give up the cult of violence and wanton killings. Both in parliament and outside, the present home minister has said that on the basis of material gathered from captured left-wing extremist groups, it is unequivocally clear that their objective is the violent overthrow of the Indian state and that their basic ideology is a complete rejection of parliamentary democracy as enshrined in our constitution. Knowing the home minister as I do, I can attest to the fact that he believes very much in the “developmentalist” approach, the strategy and approach advocated, for instance, by the expert committee of the planning commission to which I referred earlier. But he does raise a fundamental point that should not be brushed aside summarily. Of course, the Indian state has confronted many groups in the past that reject its very basis and rationale. And in many cases, these very groups that have fought the might of the Indian state for years have finally come around and become a peaceful part of our polity. I might recall here that in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, Kameshwar Baitha, a top Naxal leader, contested and won on a Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) ticket from Palamau in Jharkhand. Some weeks back in Kolkata the union home minister reiterated that the centre is ready for unconditional talks with Maoists and all that it is demanding that they stop violence without necessarily giving up their ideology, surrendering their arms or even disbanding their militias and armies. I cannot think of a fairer offer than this.

It is my good fortune to have two outstanding IAS officers working with me now, both have had the misfortune of being abducted by the Naxals. One was kidnapped in 1987 in Rampachodavaram in East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh along with S.R. Sankaran and kept captive for four days. The other was held hostage for nine days in Malkangiri district of Orissa. Both the officers are very strong advocates of the S.R. Sankaran approach of development and sensitive governance in tribal areas. But in my continuing conversations with them, two things have emerged. One, the Naxals are exploiting the tribals and two, the tribals themselves want peace, not war. The Naxals are using the tribal areas and issues for their tactical purposes. The terrain and the forests suit them for guerrilla warfare. They have spread their terror and ensured that the developmental activities are obstructed. The tribal cause, which the Naxals espouse, is only a mask to further their own agenda. The Malkangiri incident is a clear message from the tribals of the region that they want development and not Naxal terror.  

What is clear is that we need a two-track approach--one that deals with the leadership of the Naxals, who wish to overthrow the Indian state and the other, which focuses on the concerns of the people they pretend/claim to serve. There is clearly a need to recognise tribal populations as victims--first of state apathy and discrimination and then of the Naxal agenda. My firm belief is that a complete revamp of administration and governance in tribal areas, especially in central and eastern India, is the pressing need of the hour. Andhra Pradesh has attempted to do this through its ITDA (Integrated Tribal Development Agency) model but much more needs to be done. We must also come to grips with the sad reality that affirmative action programmes like reservations have had a very marginal impact on the welfare of the central and eastern Indian tribal communities. ...

Read the entire text of Ramesh's speech in the attachment.
Read the report on the minister's speech