South Asia Citizens Web

“A spectre is haunting South Asia—the spectre of Maoism,” the Financial Times rather melodramatically announced in April 2006, reporting that the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, had described Maoist guerrillas as “the single greatest threat to Indian national security”.1 The scale of the Maoist-led insurgency in rural India has surprised and alarmed ruling classes for whom Marxism-Leninism was supposed to have been safely confined to the dustbin of history after 1989. The Indian Maoists have also become a subject of discussion on the left both in India and internationally. In particular, a recent article by the writer and campaigner Arundhati Roy describing her visit to a Maoist-controlled area attracted much controversy.2

In the following piece, the Indian Marxist scholar and activist Jairus Banaji offers a much more critical analysis of Indian Maoism than Roy provided.

Five years ago, when the proposed National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) was a subject of fierce controversy, Bunker Roy compared the attitude of the government to that of a dog who crosses a road half-way, can’t decide whether to go forward or backward, and gets run over. This enlightening image applies again today, in the context of the proposed National Food Security Act (NFSA).

Undergraduates who have wrestled with the question, what is a historical fact, have got a break. A very high authority has said historical facts do not matter. One of the instructive episodes in the recent Ayodhya judgment of the Allahabad High Court has been the straightforward abandonment of the historical mode of reasoning on the issues before the court and the nation.

A HLRN press release on forced evictions and human rights violations due to the 2010 Commonwealth Games held in New Delhi

Though there are adequate laws to deal with the growing phenomenon of encounter killings all over the country, an obvious decline in social, political and institutional mores appear to create acceptance for it