Don't fly war planes

Gods come from the skies in gaudy chariots. Aliens come in cool flying saucers. But when one comes in angry fighter planes, it is, without a doubt, the enemy.

Across cultures and countries, aeroplanes and helicopters have a strong association with the unknown, the other. When airplanes unleash bullets and bombs, it certainly is not your people, it is the enemy.

Which is why the Indian State should not fly its war planes over Dantewada or any Maoist territory, however big the provocation, even if a savage bunch has just massacred 77 cornered keepers of the law.

India must remember that aerial attacks on its own people could be the beginning of the end. The great miracle of diversity that is India is in grave danger of coming apart, and by sending planes to bomb its own people, the State will quickly, irrevocably begin a tragic surgery upon itself.

It is easier to reconcile being forced to kneel and shot in the head by your own government than to be bombed from the skies. Israel made that mistake, and has never walked away from the amputation table. Pakistan has been making that mistake too. Just the other day, hundreds of Pakistanis were killed by their own drones in the bloody, dust-blown Northwest. Pakistan will never be a nation again, if it ever was.

Last week's massacre, for all the outrage it evokes, cannot be fully blamed on Home Minister P Chidambaram, although he should move much faster on our internal defence systems.

The growth of red terror is the larger failure of the Indian State. It allows the rich to get richer, while the poor don't even have social safety against wanton price rise or gruelling medical bills. It allows loan sharks, police teams and upper caste militias to come knocking, rape women in the household for evening recreation, and casually leave protesting men with bullets in their brains.

Imagine yourself in a remote village, with no money to re-pay the man who had given you a loan on absurd interest, waiting for his men to arrive after dark. The nearest police station is 50 km away, and the officials are drinking and raping buddies of the local loan sharks.

Farmer suicides don't happen because of crop failure, they happen because of paralysing fear. The Indian State has sown the seeds of terror across the countryside by allowing goon politicians, bloodsucking loan mafia, and very often, men in khaki to do as they want.

Today's Naxal movement -- unlike the one in romantic and rebellious '70s Kolkata -- has nothing to do with ideology. It is far more real, dangerous, determined. It arms an angry, silent, losing mass with guns.

Brainwashed terrorists don't come in a 1,000-plus killer mob. They are our own people angry to perverse lengths, drunk with the newfound power of the gun. Merely killing them will only spread the anger. The Indian government will first have to kill the terror, the inequality that stalked them to this insanity.

And bombing them from planes will only confirm to them and millions of others what they always suspected: India had never been on their side...it is an enemy nation.