In 2016, the Naxalite movement was rated the third most deadly terrorist group in the world, after ISIS and the Taliban, according to data collected by the US Department of State. It operates across parts of India and follows an extreme Leftist ideology influenced by Maoism. The Naxalites have been involved in deadly violence from the 1960s up until 2021, when thirty security officers were killed when they attempted to attack a Naxalite camp. From 2002-2006 over three thousand people had been killed in Naxalite-goverment conflicts. The South Asia Terrorism Portal tallies over 11,000 killings due to Maoist insurgencies in India from 2000 – 2022, of which close to 4,000 were civilians. Notable attacks include a jailbreak in 2005, where 250 Naxalite prisoners were released, and the Dantewada Ambush in 2010, in which 75 Indian paramilitaries were killed. They also kidnapped and foreign citizens and an Indian politician and held them for ransom.
Since the 1950s, the Soviet Union had built relationships within India. To some Indians, disaffected by post-colonial India’s failure to address the inequalities within liberated India, communist ideology held a significant appeal. The Naxalite movement gained its name from an event which took place in 1967. A peasant uprising in the village of Naxalbari, in West Bengal, which galvanised the political sentiments of middle-class students. A landowner and his thugs beat up a peasant who was ploughing his own field. This event expressed the tensions of a peasant class dealing with bonded slavery, destitution, displacement and food shortages. An uprising ensued, in which local peasants reappropriated territory which had been captured using force. Naxalbari was inhabited by members of the Adivasi group, an indigenous, tribal population of India. The Adivasi make up 8.6% of India’s population overall. The uprising provided the impetus for a new political movement to address these issues. Peasant uprisings in agrarian India were not new, but the Naxalabari risings inspired students from Calcutta and communist cadres who joined the peasants in their insurrection.
The Naxalite movement is funded by ‘taxes’ upon mining works within their territory, protection rackets and the cultivation and trade of opium. Its firearms are almost entirely stolen from the police, army and other opposing forces. Some of the Adivasi have also used bows and arrows. There are cultural tensions between the Adivasi and doctrinaire Leftists who disapprove of their tribal customs, which includes brewing wine and beer, and relative freedom for women. Further, the Adivasi’s horticultural lifestyles did not fit into the Marxist models of class struggle that the cadres operated under. However, the militants showed themselves, at least initially, to support the indigenous peoples, as well as dalits and scheduled castes. Areas of conflict intersect with the Dandakaranya forest, which spreads across West Bengal, Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, and Maharashtra. This forest contains deposits of mineral resources, such as bauxite, iron ore, and uranium. Millions of indigenous peoples inhabit this forest.
The Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) was formed on the anniversary of Lenin’s birth a few years later in 1969. This, and other leftist parties, provided the organisational force behind a political movement across India. The Naxalites challenged the influence of colonialism, feudalism and casteism in India. They planned to seize power through an agrarian uprising. For the next 50 years, the Naxalite movement had a profound impact upon Indian politics, subsuming several extreme Left groups, and holding a presence in 16 of India’s 29 states. One wing, the People’s Liberation Guerilla Army was particularly militant, organised into platoons, companies and battalions. In the late 1980s, they developed the so-called ‘Red Corridor’ which at its most expansive spanned east, central and southern India, running along the Tibetan border. This was developed to provide a base territory for guerrilla warfare, with the intent of overthrowing the state.
The state responded with punitive measures, pushing through three laws which came into effect in 1970, and in 1971 Indira Gandhi targetted the insurgents directly: hundreds were killed and two thousand imprisoned. In 1972, the leader of the Naxalite movement was arrested, and died in custody. This did not dent the momentum of the popular movement which spread widely across much of India, becoming more militant.
In 1979, the Naxalites developed a strategy to develop zones of guerrilla warfare to spread their campaign. The Naxalites were deeply embedded into the communities. They worked within the structures of village communities to develop political consciousness, and politically mobilised through the existing structures of government for a minimum wage and accountability for government employees. Due to their commitment to their cause, the corrupt and dysfunctional system they challenged, and the use of songs and performances to engage with villagers their ideology spread. With a focus on land rights, they expressed the concerns of a rural populace facing exploitation for their material resources. This included challenging exploitative landlords. They built a political structure which included wings for peasants, women and children, and developed agriculture within their region, creating a ‘state within a state.’ The Professional Revolutionaries were a specific cadre, often drawn from middle-class and educated background. As Alpa Shah noted by 2018, these Professional Revolutionaries were increasingly middle-aged and older, and their children, educated in cities far from the jungles of the Red Corridor were reluctant to return. For young people from the local area, joining the Naxalite movement could express teenage rebellion against the strictures of village life.
Whilst putting a great deal of effort into development, the Naxalites also bombed school buildings to prevent their use by opposing forces, which left children with no education unless they left their villages. Some children were recruited into support roles for the organisation, exposing them to danger. Some local Naxalite organisations have been found to be meting out summary and violent justice in kangaroo courts, and were corrupt and exploitative of the villagers to line their own pockets. More broadly, the Naxalites commitment to ‘armed struggle’ also frequently prevents peaceful means of resolving human rights violations and mediating disputes. Their disdain for democratic processes may have impeded peaceful methods of resolving the friction in the region.
The Naxalite resistance obstructed capitalist exploitation of the region’s resources. An increasingly neo-liberal economy had deepened the immiseration of marginalised populations. The region of Bastar, for instance, which had previously escaped the attention of both the colonial and Indian governments, became identified as a resource due to the discovery of rich mineral reserves, as well as significant natural resources within its forested regions. While resources were removed from these regions, few infrastructural or financial benefits accrued to the people; instead many were dispossessed from their ancestral lands. From 2000 onward, the region became the object of attention from Indian and transnational corporations, who dealt with the Indian government to extract these resources. This involved the displacement of villagers and razing of their villagers. For instance, two tribes in Odisha saw near 11,000 of their villagers displaced by the Rengali Dam project in 1985. From 1987, the Naxalite movement focussed upon developing communities in their region through organising collective labour and distributing resources to villagers. The movement expanded, with a particularly significant development being a merger with a Maoist group in 2004. Mao’s focus upon the ‘peasant revolution’ chimed more readily with the Indian experience than forms of communism which focussed upon an urban proletariat, finding appeal. From this point on, the terms Naxalite and Maoist began to be used interchangeably to describe this movement.
This expansion triggered vicious counterinsurgency measures. In 2005, the Salwa Judum, a militia opposing the Naxalite movement was founded in Chhattisgarh – their name meaning ‘purification hunt.’ In the two years after their formation, Salwa Judum militiamen were responsible for at least 537 deaths – likely a small fraction of the true figure – and razed well over 5,000 houses. Many members of the Salwa Judum were disaffected former Naxalites. These vigilante movements became increasingly aggressive, including adopting rape as a weapon of war. The local justice system were unable to prevent vigilante groups, and some of the populace fled to camps for their own safety – or were forced into them.
From 2008, however, the Salwa Judum’s influence began to diminish. In 2009, the government launched a formal attack upon the Naxalites at a national level, called ‘Operation Green Hunt.’ This comprised an collaboration of police forces in affected areas, including the Indo-Tibetan Border Police. This coincided with a period of good shortages. Towards the end of the year there was a wave of killings across several villages in the Konta region. In 2011, the Salwa Judum was officially disbanded, after it was deemed to be illegal by the Indian Supreme Court. Despite being outlawed, vigilante groups made up of former members of the Salwa Judum continue to challenge the Naxelites in the regions of Bastar and Dantewadar.
In 2010, deaths due to Naxalite attacks reached peaked at over a thousand. Since then, increased employment in the mining industry has relieved some of the financial hardship which drew people into the movement, and the so-called ‘Red Corridor’ has decreased in size. The area of concern for Naxalite attacks is focussed on two regions: Dandakanarnya-Chhiatisgarh-Odisha, and the area of Jharkand-Bihar and West Bengal. The influence of student activists on the movement has declined. The movement has become more insular, focussing more closely on indigenous rights than broader political goals, and the levels of violence have reduced commensurately. Mainstream human rights groups have pushed through legislation to support the Adivasi and scheduled castes in 2006 and 2013, reducing tensions in the region. After the election of Narendra Modi and the populist Hindutva movement in 2014, attitudes to minorities and opposition to the state have hardened, and the Salwa Judum have become even more significant. Modi has announced further development of industry in the Naxalite area, and there is potential for this to reignite tensions between developers and the indigenous population.
While the Naxalite movement has been framed as problem in terms of law and order, and, to a lesser degree, as a result of the impoverishment of the area, the clash of interests between central government and corporations and indigenous peoples of India remains at the heart of the issue. For capital, both the indigenous peoples and the militants are seen as barriers to India’s economic boom. Whether this is expressed through the ideology and organisational structures of the Naxalite movement or in other ways, it will remain a source of contention and political friction in an already divided nation.