In wrestling, the sweat-bodied opponents fighting it out under the glare of blinding spotlights always seem oblivious to the unruly audience. Their eyes are transfixed into each other’s, concentrating to pick up the slightest cue on the opponent’s next move. Their focus is wholly on winning that 120-second round. However, there is an essential third person in the ring they are tuned into – someone whose sharp whistle blows call the shots determining when they start, stop or pause.

Once the wrestling begins the referee circles around the opponents – closely observing their moves, making sure they stick to ground rules. At the slightest foul play, the whistle is blown and animated hand gestures communicate to the accused the ground rules being violated. And so, the referee protects not only the contest, but also the values that the sport serves: competition and fair play.

India’s Maoist or Naxalite conflict has no referee and its leaders have lost track of the values they are fighting for. Even worse, their ‘wrestling ring’ is made of people and their livelihoods and they are getting trampled in the fray. Swept up in the show, very few of the wrestlers, audience and media notice the ‘collateral damage’. And these are the same people each side claims to represent.

The last time someone tried to play referee, it was in the form of the Committee for Concerned Citizens (CCC). In 1997, when Andhra Pradesh was reeling under its widespread Maoist conflict, thousands of families were trapped in the crossfire. That’s when a group of professors, intellectuals, former bureaucrats and journalists got together to create the CCC. Led by former Tripura chief secretary SR Sankaran, a man well-known for his integrity and for being an astute mediator, the CCC had one goal: to stand for the people, their hopes and aspirations, and to act as an impartial referee between the governments and the Maoists. For seven years the CCC equally condemned the Maoists and the government for their brutalities, constantly forcing both parties to bring down violence.

It also pulled the parties to the bargaining table, and though the talks did not lead to a mutual solution, it led to several long ceasefires, during which villagers regained normalcy in their day-to-day lives. The CCC was not perfect, but surely there is room for another referee like it, especially now, to pick up from where they left.

After the May 25 Maoist attack on a Congress convoy in Chhattisgarh, which killed 27 people, including several senior Congress leaders such as Mahendra Karma, architect of Salwa Judum, and VC Shukla, the government sent 2,000 paramilitary forces to the state to sanitise the area as well as approved more drones, ammunition and surveillance by the Indian air force. More recently, the centre decided to support Andhra-style Greyhounds-like operations in all Maoist-affected states and launch a massive coordinated offensive. Such retaliation may seem logical but we cannot lose sight of our values. With each paramilitary personnel, drone, and air attack, the chances of accidental and deliberate harm to the innocent local residents increases.

The Salwa Judum experience, later banned by the supreme court in 2010, has only taught us that ‘sanitisation’ means burning homes and imprison innocent tribals on false charges and ‘intelligence gathering’ means raping women and killing family members to extort
information. Is this what governments and the Maoists stood for when they entered the ring?

It is in these desperate times that we need someone to remind the combatants that they are both claiming to fight for the people, to whom they owe protection, development, and a say in their affairs.

What makes an effective referee? Learning lessons from CCC experience
A former member of the CCC, Anant Maringanti, who was also a journalist with the Indian Express at that time, recounts how the group came up with the idea of asking both parties to chalk out ground rules that they could adhere to.

“We told both of them that they have to be accountable according to their own norms and values and we helped  create some of those rules of engagement,” he says.

The CCC was an effective referee because its legitimacy was compelling, and its voice tireless, impartial, and always for the people. In early 2002, egged by CCC, the Maoists agreed to stop using landmines to attack the police because that put locals at risk of being used as human shields by the police.

Simultaneously, the government agreed to lift the ‘wanted’ price on the heads of Maoist leaders because it only encouraged instances of police torturing locals to extract information on their movement.

CCC’s membership and its initial actions helped set the importance of the movement a class apart. The CCC members came from all walks of life – journalists, bureaucrats, activists, professors. They were educated, had ties with both camps, and were united in letter and spirit.

In contrast, Swami Agnivesh’s venture into Bastar in 2010 lacked the impartiality and legitimacy of the CCC. No one person can hold the parties accountable.
The CCC’s legitimacy grew as their actions and words consistently upheld the highest ideals shared by people on all sides. They did not just talk about the people’s plight; they spent five years touring the conflict belt, meticulously recording concerns of village residents. When the combat was harming the people, they fearlessly took both sides to task. When the media focused on casualties and retaliation (as is happening today), the CCC used its journalistic connections to remind everyone about the costs to the people. Their intentions were transparent and honourable, and their words were backed with action.
Importantly, the CCC used itself as a face-saver for both parties to bring a ceasefire. By creating a “people’s voice” space for itself, the CCC could legitimately demand protection and development for the people. The government or the Maoists, who would never agree to ceasefire terms put forth by the other for fear of losing face, now had an excuse. It was, after all, for the sake of the people that they relented to put down their weapons.

But the CCC ultimately had to give up when ceasefires broke down after the 2004 talks and both parties resumed their original positions, refusing to meet another time to build on previous agreements.

But where had the CCC gone wrong?
One of the reasons might just be that although the committee spent years touring conflict areas and had a perfect understanding of people’s concerns, they didn’t spend enough time getting to know the core interests of the government and the Maoists. One of the criticisms the CCC faced was that although the issues for discussion were agreed upon by both sides, the list of topics turned out to be skewed to the Maoists’ interests. For instance, a significant portion of the Andhra talks in 2004 was centred on the tribal interests of gaining equity through land redistribution.

While the government went along with this agenda, it might have been wiser for CCC to not just assume that the government was there to address Maoist concerns but that it needed to place its own concerns on the table. The government was pressured to attend the talks but did it have any real incentive to search for peace? And how genuine was the Maoist participation? The CCC needed to spend more time figuring these things out before initiating the talks. 
Other reasons were simply that the committee did a far better job policing both sides than in conducting peace negotiations, which seemed like less familiar turf for them. Better training or roping in veteran mediators might have helped. They didn’t build the same trust with the parties, especially the government, as they had with the local villagers, thus beginning the talks on a shaky ground.

A former CCC member recounts an interesting anecdote: before the talks collapsed in 2004, the CCC met the then Andhra Pradesh chief minister, YS Rajasekhar Reddy, impressing upon him to adhere to the commitments made by the government at the negotiating table. YSR angrily retorted, “Who are you people anyway?” reminding the CCC that while they could limit the actions of the combatants, they didn’t have the trust or the legal standing to do anything more.

It is not always the right time for peace
The final, and more difficult to swallow, possibility is that it may simply have not been the right time for such negotiations. The sad reality is that most parties will continue to fight as long as they believe it has better outcomes for them than peace.

A war mindset understands that the war will end when the costs of continuing it become unbearable, at which point a peace deal (including surrender) can be negotiated. Such an outlook, however, ignores the potential benefits of conflict. Mining, extortion and other profitable ventures can proceed without bureaucratic hassles and oversight. Arms can be sold. People who might be unimportant in peace may become leaders in war, and conflict is a great distraction from other political and domestic problems.

If peace negotiations are to start, the parties must believe that war is no longer more beneficial.
Unfortunately, the situation is similar today. After the recent attacks and the follow-up escalations of the conflict between the Maoists and the government, the sad thing is, there are very few people in mood for negotiations right now. Revenge, face-saving and the reminder of one’s ability to inflict harm on the other side are the primary thinking points right now. The centre is thinking that reinstating an Andhra-style counterinsurgency operation across all states will bring a total victory.

Perhaps they would succeed in wiping out the Maoist leadership. But are we prepared to witness the bloodshed of thousands of our innocent fellow citizens in the process? From the successful long-term ceasefire deals struck in the northeast, we know that cooperation can work even with “enemies”.
On the other hand, countries that have succeeded in quelling similar conflicts through the use of paramilitaries, like Colombia, often find that the paramilitaries become more of a problem than those they defeated.

The UN has estimated that approximately 80 percent of all killings in Colombia’s civil conflict have been committed by paramilitary Death Squads, 12 percent by leftist guerrillas, and the remaining 8 percent by government forces.

The successor groups of the demobilised paramilitaries, according to a report by the International Crisis group, have moved to take control of the drug industry in Colombia and are the greatest source of violence in the country today.

Until India, as a nation, arrives at this realisation, and wants to make peace with peace, someone has to referee the combat and keep the conflict-affected people’s voice front and centre. This is why we need a new CCC.

Building a new CCC
There are three things that a new and improved CCC could do today. First, it needs to choose its membership very carefully. When the stakes are high, individual organisations and people are too easily branded as sympathetic to one side or another. Neutrality is not an option here. Instead, the committee must include individuals who can legitimately speak about the interests of the government, the Maoist factions or the conflict-affected communities. In other words, each group must feel that it is represented by strong and skilful voices on the committee. How else can they know whether the new CCC is considering each perspective equally or not?

Furthermore, the committee needs to have active communication channels to each of the constituencies, including the various communities. It needs to keep the top command on each side informed and constantly check their understanding of each group’s perspectives. This does not mean following their orders, especially since some leaders may not be sure that they want the new CCC to succeed, but it does mean making the best faith effort to respect the various concerns and showing when and how that has  been done.

While taking up their role as the “voice of people”, choices about who those “people” are need to be made carefully by the diverse members, who will also act as a check to make sure such reporting is done without bias. The new CCC would have to then document their concerns and better their own understanding, independently, on what ground realities people in the conflict zones live under today. When, and only when, the committee has established itself as an impartial and legitimate player, should it consider how it might support efforts to create conditions for peace while still maintaining its referee role.

One method might be to support small development projects in the conflict belt. This will not be an easy task. When a conflict has lasted a long time, it is easy for all involved to forget what cooperation and peace feel like. They may not even believe it is possible. Peace needs to be relearned, and it can only be done through experience. There are actors who have experience of working with conflict-affected communities, but such work is almost impossible if the communities are a warzone. Here, a new CCC might be able to negotiate local ceasefires and other limited cooperation that will enable such development.
Such development is not easy given the ongoing violence, mistrust, complex and uncertain political machinations and alliances and the murky motivations of many players. And so, what is to be done must be designed with the specific actors in each area and only after significant and careful dialogue and analysis to understand the local situation and its relations to the broader conflict.

The committee should not seek to do such development itself nor should it seek to mediate peace negotiations now and in future. Its role must remain clear and it is unlikely it will have the necessary expertise for either activity.

If and when the parties are ready to talk about peace, it can help identify experienced and impartial mediators and support their activities. However, it should never jeopardise its role as referee and voice for the conflict-affected people. This role is too vital.

Given India’s shrinking space for civil society interventions in the Maoist conflict, individual voices are unlikely to have an impact. Individuals such as BD Sharma, Swami Agnivesh, Prof Haragopal, Nandini Sundar and Arundhati Roy, all well meaning, have at different points intervened and brought fresh thinking about how to resolve this conflict. But they do not have the weight and legitimacy that the CCC had. They, and others, need to come together to form a collective of referees to remind both parties of ground rules and of the hopes and concerns of the people caught in between. For now, this is the only fair chance we have of restraining a war we are gearing up to wage upon ourselves. 

Authors:
Fuller teaches negotiation at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

Mohan is an independent journalist and researcher.