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...

As the Union government prepares to launch an offensive on Maoist revolutionaries, I am reminded of three conversations that I heard or had in Chhattisgarh in the summer of 2006. The first took place in the state capital, Raipur, at the home of the leading Congress politician, Mahendra Karma. Karma was the begetter of the Salwa Judum, a vigilante army that has been responsible for a wave of killings, rapes...

In Maharashtra, where issues hurl themselves at you, the Opposition failed to mount a strong campaign on a single one of them. The front rows of the Mumbai-Nagpur flight are usually the province of the political class: MLAs to MPs, ministers and fixers. This time, though, quite a few of the occupants were celebrities: television and film stars, major and minor, middling and mediocre. It wasn’t the T-20 cricket match in...

REWA: Having struggled for the past five years for their land, mine workers of Khara village in Madhya Pradesh still do not know what they are fighting against—a feudal social system, a corrupt Forest Department, or their own fate? Khara village is a typical example of how feudal forces with tacit approval from the local administration still call the shots in most of rural India.Three years of drought and a barren,...