Dreams of a Maoist India https://aeon.co/essays/the-rise-and-now-fall-of-the-maoist-movement-in-india rAHU pANDITA
India’s Maoist guerillas have just surrendered, after decades of waging war on the government from their forest bases In her research in central Bihar in 1995-96, the Indian sociologist Bela Bhatia concluded that the Maoist leaders ‘have taken little interest in enhancing the quality of life in the villages.’ In fact, these leaders regarded development ‘as antagonistic to revolutionary consciousness,’ she wrote in 2005.
In the meantime, the Indian state was growing impatient with the Maoists. In 2010, a London-based securities house report predicted that making the Maoists go away could unlock $80 billion of investment in eastern and central India. New Delhi began preparations for a large-scale operation to get rid of them. But, before that, the extraordinary arrest in 2009 of the Maoist ideologue Kobad Ghandy in Delhi heightened political interest in the insurgents.
India’s Maoist guerillas have just surrendered, after decades of waging war on the government from their forest bases
(2014? )Hindu nationalism was on the rise in India and, in the coming years, this term would become a ruse for the government to suppress all activism, resulting in the incarceration of civil rights activists like the human rights lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj. What also did not help is the number of body bags – of forces killed in Maoist ambushes – going to different parts of the country.
As anti-Maoist operations go on with even more rigour, a handful of those still inside the forest will ultimately surrender or be killed. How history remembers them is too early to say; but it is a fact that, had it not been for them, the much-needed focus on the hinterland of DK would not have been there.