A DOZEN men, women and boys, some no older than 15, milled about their rough tents as twilight fell in a remote forest clearing. Some were in lungyis and T-shirts; others wore fatigues, with bolt-action Enfield rifles slung on their shoulders and bandoleers around their waists. Comrade Vijja, a burly man with a bottlebrush moustache, sat with some of his troops around a cooking fire, sipping sweetened tea. He sounded...

A fact finding team of many civil society organizations has reported widespread occurrences of murders, tortures and cases of police atrocities in Chhattisgarh in the name of combating Naxalism. It is also being alleged that in the name of their own security, journalists are being stopped from going to so called “combat zones” where security forces have launched an Operation Greenhunt to flush out armed Maoists.  Fifteen members of the...

BARSUR, India — At the edge of the Indravati River, hundreds of miles from the nearest international border, India effectively ends. Indian paramilitary officers point machine guns across the water. The dense jungles and mountains on the other side belong to Maoist rebels dedicated to overthrowing the government. “That is their liberated zone,” said P. Bhojak, one of the officers stationed at the river’s edge in this town in the...

If there is one sector that is visibly the intersection of backroom politics, crony capitalism and serious threats to India’s internal security, it is mining. The business of resource extraction has always had its own peculiar economic logic: modern, yet dependent on the land; high-tech, yet somehow, indefinably, with feudal overtones. These anomalies have traditionally been recognised by economists, who categorise mining as the only “industrial” component of the primary,...

In their own manner, Indian Maoists have worked out the rationale of what they are doing. The grisly serial murders they are indulging in are, in the first instance, intended to warn god-fearing men and women in the areas they are entrenched in to behave and not act as police informers. Should their instructions be infringed, retribution would be swift and merciless. The brutal killings, specifically of CPI(M) cadre and...