India's Scourge

[Dale_M]

I have been amazed by this long running insurgency, not on the borders of India, but which controls territory well inside the country. I first became aware of it in the late 1980s. It doesn’t get much attention in the US media, but, then, it doesn’t seem to get too much attention from the Indian government either.

The unrest in Kashmir and the threat of jihadists may be just as urgent, but the Maoists have proved to be more resistant to political and military pressure. Since 2006, nearly 4,000 people have died in Maoist violence — 990 so far this year. Besides the human toll, the Naxal rebellion is significant on two counts: its durability and momentum when Maoism most everywhere else, even in China, is extinct — and the incongruity of it thriving in a country that is otherwise seen, at home and abroad, as a nation on the move.

Over the years, various left-leaning parties have taken up the grievances of India’s peasants and other lower castes, successfully bringing them into mainstream politics. Such groups may be just as poor as tribals, but they now rarely become Maoists. In tribal areas, on the other hand, no party is as well-organized as the Maoists. It is often said that the Red Corridor, the Maoist-affected area that stretches diagonally across central and eastern India, overlaps the map of the country’s poorest districts. In truth, it more closely coincides with the tribal map of India, says Christophe Jaffrelot, a political scientist at the Center for International Studies and Research at Sciences Po in Paris, who has been studying India’s poorest states for 25 years. “This is the key issue,” Jaffrelot says. “Maoism has become a tribal phenomenon.”

time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2026792-3,00.html

Neither the government, nor the rebels, seem to be doing much to help the people of that area. Roughly 4000 sq. km are totally controlled by the Naxalites, an area which has no government presence - its a “no go” zone. A wider area has a government presence by day, but is controlled by the Maoists after dark. They are estimated to have 20,000 well trained fighters and a militia of 100,000.

The government of India may be getting serious about the rebellion, since it may be deterring foreign investment in the country.

 

[Kadaveri]

It’s getting plenty of attention from the Indian government, a couple of years back the Prime Minister called the Naxalites ‘India’s greatest ever security threat’, and after he said that India’s stock market actually went up as certain interests got excited because they knew major repression is coming. India has been conducting a vicious military campaign against adivasi (tribal people) in India who live in the ‘Red Corridor’, where there are huge bauxite and iron ore reserves in the mountains which the Indian state and corporations are trying stripmine, destroying the indigenous people’s homeland. The Indian state has formed militias/terrorist groups like the Salwa Judum to repress the population, carrying out massacres, raping women, burning down villages etc, and the people are resisting with some success.