Sudeep Chakravarti

A surprisingly well written and well researched account on the subject.

The book starts with some detailed maps and statistics regarding the people’s war movement in India and ends with "the urban perspective plan 2004" of CPI (Maoist) attached as an appendix. The amount of organisation and how widespread the movement is, is both revealing and scary.

A travelogue rather than a history as the author himself claims, but still he manages to give us a brief historical and ideological perspective regarding the movement since the Naxalbari.

The author does a good job of exposing the amount of state exploitation, poverty, rampant corruption, caste violence and little or no justice in rural India. Something the ruling classes and the middle classes of urban India chose to ignore.
The interviews with Maoists, Maoist sympathisers, bureaucrats, and security personnel provide a lot of insight into the current situation.

The future?
Peace seems unlikely as the Naxals are dedicated to the Maoist ideology and the path of protracted armed revolution, while the state seems determined to ignore the reality and go ahead with their unregulated neoliberal policies leading to further alienation and destitution.
… (mehr)