India - red corridor

The Naxalite movement thrives on disillusionment and disaffection. It collects unaddressed grievances and unredressed complaints and channelises them into anger against the “Indian State”. It tells rape victims, dispossessed tribals and bullied villagers that the target of their ire is not the local landlord, policeman or politician but that abstraction called the “State”. Indeed, beyond seductive dogma and the logic of the inevitability of armed struggle to upturn the status quo, it offers no positive solutions.The Naxal movement that we see today is a far cry and far removed from the Naxal movement that was born in the 1960s in Naxalbari, a remote area of West Bengal. What we saw then was the splintering of the Communists into radicals and moderates; what we are seeing now is abusing the barrel of the gun for furthering negative power politics.