Dreams of a Maoist India

NB: Over the past two decades I have written many commementaries on Indian Maoism, of which this one carries an inverted resonance with the article below. ‘Inverted’ because had the Naxalite movement organised a non-violent mass campaign in defence of the labouring poor, it would have achieved historic successes. It is a tragedy that the doctrinal blindness of Indian communism – of which Naxalism was only one current – has always come in the way of it’s self-avowed goals. It is also a human tragedy of immense dimensions, given the thousands of lives lost. What could have been and what actually transpired – such are the questions which the comrades could ask themselves, There are several more posts beneath this fine article, the latest a comment on the character of contemporary Indian politics. DS

India’s Maoist guerillas have just surrendered, after decades of waging war on the government from their forest bases

Rahul Pandita

On 6 April 2010, a company of India’s central paramilitary soldiers came under attack from Maoist guerrillas in the central-eastern state of Chhattisgarh. The Maoists, who had turned this region into their stronghold, had laid a trap. With little training and scant knowledge of the Amazon-like jungle, the Indian soldiers found themselves ambushed. They fought back, but they could not escape the ambush. Seventy-five soldiers and a state policeman accompanying them were killed.

Never before had the Indian forces suffered so many casualties in a single incident, not even in Kashmir, where, for more than 20 years, they had been fighting a protracted battle against Islamist extremists. As the body bags of the soldiers reached their native places in different parts of India, a deep sense of anger generated among people who till recently had only a vague idea about who these Maoists were, and even less about the hinterland that the Maoists had turned into a guerrilla zone.

Since the mid-2000s, the Maoists had grown in strength, launching audacious attacks against government forces and looting police armouries and declaring certain areas as ‘liberated zones’. Their operations ran in a contiguous arc of land, from Nepal’s border in the east to the Deccan Plateau in the south – an area the Maoists called Dandakaranya or DK, using the name in its historical sense. This is a region where India’s indigenous people, the Adivasis, lived; it also holds valuable minerals and other natural resources in abundance. The Indian state wanted control over the natural resource wealth, but the Maoists were proving to be an obstacle. Then, in 2009, the then prime minister Manmohan Singh called them India’s ‘greatest internal security threat’….

https://aeon.co/essays/the-rise-and-now-fall-of-the-maoist-movement-in-india

Rahul Pandita is the author of Hello, Bastar: The Untold Story of India’s Maoist Movement (2011) and the novel Our Friends in Good Houses (2025), among others.

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Permanent Spring: Indian Maoism and the Philosophy of Insurrection

Naxalites should lay down their arms and challenge the ruling class to abide by the Constitution

As Naxalism Fades, Adivasi Futures Still Stand on Precarious Ground

What I learned from G. N. Saibaba

Closing the Circle (Frontier, August 2012)

Closing the Circle (E-Book)

The Red Sunset: Analysing the Decline of the CPI (Maoist)

Annihilation – 50 years of Naxalbari

Yesterday once more – 50 years after Naxalbari