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MEDIA FARM: THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TRIVIALIZED: NAXALITES

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1358928640naxalism in punjab

Most people think of communism as a relic of the past. The word conjures images of the cold war, the Cuban missile crisis, and the McCarthy trials. This understanding of communism that has been passed down to us by our culture ignores an enormous amount of nuance and detail. Communism has had a different face in every nation it emerged in.

In some places, the revolution is not over.

In 1967, keeping track of the Communist parties in India was not an easy. From the tangle of forming and dissolving parties and coalitions—and the arcane bundle of acronyms that went with them—emerged a Maoist resistance movement that has since its birth in a village in West Bengal lead to the reported deaths of six thousand people. The Indian government recently declared them India’s greatest internal security threat. Though the revolution is fought by a menagerie of factions with as a many ideologies, they are often called either Naxalites, after Naxalbari, the village the current revolution kicked off in.

Calling the revolution Maoist without qualifications is misleading.

It’s comforting to think of the situation as a sovereign government ferreting out mad ideologues from its wild areas, but the Naxalites are only the most recent iteration of a conflict that has been going on for hundreds of years. There is a reason most of the conflict has been in remote rural areas: beyond the agrarian land disputes that are the bread and butter of Maoist revolutionaries, there are still tribal communities in India, referred to as the Adivasi. Many Adivasi communities lacked the foresight to settle in areas that were not rich in iron or bauxite, and thus they’ve become the targets of industrial mining conglomerates that have a lot of pull with governments. Within India’s borders, it is estimated that thirty million people have been internally displaced: many of them as a result of “development.”

Now guess how much the Adivasi have profited from the mineral wealth of their land. Exactly.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvUVzvt_jtg

An Adivasi woman.

Much to the chagrin of western capitalism, the route to liberation many of them have decided on is Mao’s version of communist class conflict. The Naxalites cannot be criticized for lack of ambition: officially, they aim to topple the Indian government and replace it with a communist one.

The Naxalites have a long history of tribal rebellion to draw on: the Adivasi have been rising up intermittently since the British occupation, and perhaps before. The legacy of these rebellions is apparent: when the Indian government builds schools in Adivasi homelands, they make them octagons of concrete, so that soldiers can fire out of them in any direction. When they aren’t teaching the children, of course. Several humanitarian organizations have been aghast when the Naxalites have destroyed these schools:

many of them failed to mention that in this case, the line between school and bunker was intentionally left blurry.

The Indian government has used tactics that are familiar to anyone who has studied how colonial powers deal with indigenous peoples in their campaign against the Naxalites: right-wing militias like the Salwa Judum who use rape as a tactic and torch villages. The Naxalites are still fighting,

soldiers on one of a thousand battlefields in the war between humanity and progress.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyL7IzI6pEM


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