Naxalism

Of identities, of experiences, of struggle: Manoranjan Byapari's book, "Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit", translated by Sipra Mukherjee from Bengali, despite being an engrossing read, is not an easy book to review.
First published in print in National Herald On Sunday, dated 08-April-2018.
This review may be read online, here:
https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/reviews-recommendations/a-dalit-writers-journey-of-multiple-identities-and-struggles

The Indian Government has repeatedly described Maoist guerillas as the ‘biggest security threat to the country’, and Bastar in central India as the headquarters of the Maoists. This book examines what these labels have meant for some of India’s poorest citizens living through armed conflict, starting from 2005 when a government sponsored vigilante movement killed hundreds and drove thousands of villagers into camps to 2015-16 when nearly 200,000 paramilitary forces are slated to move in. It is not coincidental that Bastar has some of India’s biggest mineral reserves.

Based on extensive field visits, court testimonies, government documents, and an active participant role in the events that she writes about, Sundar tracks Indian democracy over a decade, chronicling the responses of political parties, the media, human rights activists  and the judiciary to the ongoing crisis.

This paper explores the Naxalite insurgency in India in terms of causal mechanisms that lead to the intensification of rural civil conflict by focusing specifically on grievance, mobilisation and government responses to rebellion. Realist theory is inadequate when analysing the causal factors of complex insurgencies and the mechanisms leading to their continuation. This case illustrates some aspects of intra-state conflict in a very large country, in terms of geography and population, and how the rebels have mobilised grievances at local level. New Delhi has addressed the conflict as both a development and a security challenge, and consequently has oscillated between repression and concession in its responses. This approach has resulted neither in reduction of grievances through adequate rural development, nor in consistent armed response to the Naxalite threat. Without a comprehensive and clear set of state responses, the violence is likely to continue.

This multi-methods thesis presents the hypothesis that revolutionary conflicts in federal democracies have unique characteristics that are distinguishable from other types of civil wars. To test this hypothesis, I examined how India’s federal framework and natural resource extraction policies
influenced local and national dimensions of the long-running Maoist conflict in central India. The relationship between mining, conflict and development was studied to explore how governments, insurgent groups, non-state actors and citizens acted in revolutionary conflict. I found that decentralization of political power to local elites encouraged policies that favored their personal gain, negatively affecting social cohesion, land rights and development schemes. This also encouraged companies in the conflict zone to use conflict-related loopholes within India’s federal democratic structures for corporate gain. Political prioritization of mining interests bolstered Maoist support in terms of ideological backing, funding, and recruitment, and increased violence and conflict intensity.
Grievances were rooted in the vertical inequalities that pro-mining policies created, and the Maoists capitalized on how mining activities exacerbated horizontal inequalities against Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe communities. The five articles that constitute this thesis assess these conflict dynamics from the micro- to macro- levels of analysis.

When an anti-Naxal movement called Salwa Judum began in 2005 in south-Chhattisgarh, the issues of tribals living in Bastar region became one of the important talking points in nationally. While the
movement was described as "spontaneous people's movement" and "peace mission" (Sundar, 2006, EPW) by the state government, the media and human rights organisations often dubbed it as state
sponsored armed vigilante movement (PUCL, 2006).

The movement started from a village called Kutru in west of Dantewada district (now in Bijapur district) allegedly over a dispute between few of the alleged ground level Maoists and the local villagers who wanted to contest panchayat elections. There are however many versions to it, which have been dealt in a separate chapter in this dissertation. The villagers then started organising themselves under a prominent politician, who was also at the forefront of a similar initiative in
1989-91 called Jan Jagran Abhiyan (People's Awakening Movement) (Sundar 2006, Colloquium paper).

The movement soon spread to other parts of the region and between 2005 and 2007, 644 out of 1153 villages in 6 out of total of 11 blocks in south-Bastar (Dantewada) district became part of it.

Officially, it led to displacement of 47,238 tribals to government run relief camps, while other estimates put the figure close to one lakh. In the violence that ensued, 412 people were killed and 348 were injured till January 2007 (Collector's memo, 2007).

During the same period, 6,930 children in the age group of 6-14 were living in these camps and were accommodated in schools specifically built for them in the camp premises. However, a lot many dropped out of school (Ibid). Additionally, according to a letter written by the Chairperson of National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), it was estimated that close to 40,000 children were out of schools in the region (Sinha 2010).

The latest census figures say that Bijapur has a literacy rate of 41 percent which is abysmally low when compared to the national average of 74 percent. Such is the condition that out of five children who enrol in class I, only one is able to reach till class VIII. These figures are significant because majority of population in the district comprises of people from Gond, Dorla and Halba tribe (DISE 2005-11).
This dissertation tries to minutely look at the historical processes which led to Salwa Judum becoming such a brute force against Naxals that their conflict led to destruction and closure of 189 primary and middle schools in Bijapur district affecting the education of 4,231 children. It further looks at impact of Salwa Judum on school education using grounded theory and also tries to find how children came to be recruited in armed groups by the state sponsored vigilante group called
Special Police Officers and in the armed cadre organised by Naxalites.
Interventions made by State to accommodate children caught in conflict in Residential Bridge Course Centres and Portable Cabins and their subsequent proliferation all across the district is discussed and the increase in enrolment of children to historical levels in analysed. They are then related to other barriers to tribal education and steps taken by the State to overcome those barriers.

A holistic picture is presented in the final chapter, which also tries to look at the various challenges being faced by the children today and the areas where interventions can be made to overcome them.

Mao Zedong’s articulation of his Theory of Three Worlds served as a Cold War alternative to U.S. imperialism and Soviet revisionism during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). This Maoist-styled Third World forged an ideological justification for establishing relations between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Maoist-sympathizing states, Marxist-Leninist parties, and individuals that were previously unaligned. This thesis argues that Mao Zedong Thought, or Maoism, became decoupled from the CCP’s own interpretations, and should instead be understood as a vocabulary for global Third World solidarity during the 1960s and 1970s. On the one hand, Maoism’s global appeal allowed the CCP to project the PRC as a leader for newly-independent states and organizations fighting against colonialization and imperialism. At the same time, Maoism was actively adapted by local actors outside the PRC to promote their own domestic political ambitions and to indicate their participation in a global movement that was facilitated through the language of Maoism.

This thesis examines two examples of how Maoism served as an ideological framework for the global Third World. First it explores how the CCP and the Black Panther Party leveraged their interpretations of each other’s struggles to advance their respective domestic goals within a global Third World context. Second, it considers the contrasting case of the Naxalite movement in India. While the Naxalites used Maoism to advance their local revolutionary agenda, the CCP initially encouraged the Naxalites as a means to support the CCP’s claims to lead the Third World, but then abandoned the Naxalites when those same ambitions could be realized by instead supporting the Indian state. Through these examples, this thesis indicates that although the CCP had a specific agenda for promoting Maoism internationally, Maoist discourse circulated beyond the CCP’s control, where it was adapted to local conditions and became a foundational grammar for a global Third World.

Studying and contrasting various literature, this paper examines and compares the ideologies and the everyday practices associated with the Naxal movement. It attempts to understand the people at the heart of the phenomenon and their experiences, and also explores the idea of war associated with different portrayals of this people.

"Opposing the neoliberal rhetoric of a shining middle-class India, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) has, since 2004, called for a New Democratic Revolution. Indian Maoists dismiss parliamentary democracy as a sham insofar as it fails to address the concerns and aspirations of the majority of its citizens, nearly four-fifths of whom live below two dollars a day. In their party programme, Maoists characterize the postcolonial Indian state as ‘reactionary’ and ‘autocratic’ and seek a ‘worker-peasant alliance’ to overthrow ‘imperialism, feudalism and comprador bureaucratic capitalism’ via an armed revolutionary struggle. The CPI (Maoist) politburo, which constitutes its ideological leadership, is thus supported by an underground People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The party’s long-term objective is to establish a ‘people’s democratic state under the leadership of the proletariat’ that will ‘guarantee real democracy for the vast majority of people while exercising dictatorship over a tiny minority of exploiters’.

The CPI (Maoist) is active mostly in eastern and central India, where human development levels rank among the lowest in the world, forest cover and rugged terrain facilitate guerrilla tactics and protracted low-intensity insurgency, and tribal and lower caste groups are preponderant. According to the Indian prime minister, Maoist rebels pose the greatest internal security threat to India since independence. In reality, however, Maoist cadres are estimated to be anywhere between 10,000 and 40,000 in a country of nearly 1.2 billion people, though this number does not include sympathizers and non-combatants. These thinly-spread cadres are concentrated chiefly in what journalists, policymakers, and scholars call the Red Corridor, running from the Nepalese border through the states of Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, and Andhra Pradesh. In these areas, regular elections are held, state and non-governmental organizations routinely participate in rural development, and state police and forest officials coexist with armed rebels and their rural supporters. Since 2005-06, the state has deployed paramilitaries to supplement state police forces in combating Maoist guerillas, which has intensified state-sponsored violence and led to widespread human rights abuses, yet it has been incapable of establishing anything akin to a monopoly of legitimate violence. Shared sovereignty is thus the norm, not the exception, as in other insurgent zones in India such as Kashmir and the northeastern frontier. This state of affairs also suggests that the everyday realities of Indian Maoism are somewhat different from its ideological self-image as a vanguardist revolutionary movement."

India’s remarkable economic development in the last 30 years has earned it the rank of the fastest growing democracy in the world. However, three major issues in the country have threatened its advancement on the international scene, its development and its national unity. These are: the Jammu and Kashmir conflict (as old as independent India itself), the separatist movements in the North Eastern states ( which date back to the early 1950s) and the Naxalite insurgency (which started in West Bengal in the late 1960s). The latter insurgency is the focus of this paper.

This chapter seeks to explore changing forms of Maoist mobilization in the plains of northern Telangana from the 1970s onwards. Bringing to view mutually constitutive relations between Maoist mobilization, the state and agrarian change, this chapter challenges the dominant view of the decline and collapse of the Maoists in northern Telangana.I argue that prevailing scholarly accounts leave unexplored patterns of mobilization and demobilization that are crucial to a comprehensive understanding of the Telangana case. Presenting empirical material in the form of oral historical narratives, I show that the disintegration of landlordism in the region profoundly affected the Maoist movement and gave shape to subsequent developments. This chapter thus seeks to show the value of centering regionally specific processes of state formation and agrarian political economies in analyses of Maoist trajectories in India.

This article explores the way in which the Indian state and the incipient Maoist state in central India mimic while repudiating each other.  As against theories of sovereignty which see it either as authored from below (contract theory) or scripted from above (domination), or irrelevant to the extent that subject and state are co-constituted by regimes of power (cf. Foucault), I argue that in civil war, the display and practical exercise of statehood and sovereignty is critical. However, this is primarily aimed not at putative citizens but at the enemy. I look at the way in which the Indian state impersonates guerilla tactics in order to fight the Maoists, and the way in which the Maoists mimic state practices of governmentality. Each side identifies its own ‘citizens’ through uniforms, lists of people killed, and inscribes its ‘territory’ with memorials to its martyrs.  For the presumed citizens of these mimetic states, however, it is precisely these markers of identity and legibility which make them more vulnerable. Membership of parallel regimes holds out both promise and precarity.

From Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Ranajit Guha, social thinkers mostly attempted to identify structures of domination reflecting on the tyranny of the powerful and narrating the aspiration of individuals to attain broad so- cial acceptance, economic achievements and status recognition. I now want to ask a rather off-beat question: do the leaders of Maoist movement and its student factions voluntarily discard their own status as member of "the elite" to join the armed revolution of oppressed sections or support them actively? This pre-fieldwork paper attempts to make sense of the pro-Naxalite commitments in selected contemporary Indian campuses in order to understand the meaning the youth give to their political affiliation. Through a discourse analysis of youth radical speeches, everyday conversations and party literature, I intend to comprehend how discursive affirmations of self-sacrifice, declassed conversion, ascetic devotion, cult for revolutionary martyrs, along with those of friendship, camaraderie and shared values provide the student with a new subjectivity in opposition to their high-status origin, constituting ultimately the base of their intellectual commitment to extreme-left ideals.

It has been a long association of over 40 years with him, during which the personal, political, intellectual and professional dimensions of our lives overlapped, intermeshed and, at rare occasions, even conflicted with each other. This tribute, therefore, reflects those intermeshing dimensions and may appear to be rather personal in some ways. When I heard the news of his death, I was in Moscow as a Visiting Professor at Moscow State University, and I felt miserable that there was no one there who knew him to whom I could talk about the emotional turmoil I was going through and share my sorrow and sense of loss. Writing this obituary is an experience of going through that turmoil again but with a difference that I have had ample opportunities now to talk to friends and colleagues who worked with him, and in that sense, it is also a therapeutic experience. Prof Bhalla, as my supervisor, taught me from scratch how to narrow down and frame a research question, how to read academic literature, how to report on and synthesise what is read, how to do econometric exercises on empirical data and how to analyse the econometric results and reach conclusions. He had my dissertation examined by another eminent economist Prof Y. K. Alagh and when it was awarded a first class/distinction mark, it was such a deep sense of satisfaction to find him looking even happier than I was. For a student, nothing is more satisfying than to realise that one's teacher is happy with one's efforts and performance. Prof Bhalla and his wife Sheila Bhalla (a Canadian whom he met while they were PhD students at the London School of Economics) joined the economics faculty at PU, Chandigarh in 1969. Many of us, their students, were at that time drawn towards the Maoist/Naxalite movement. We organised a condolence meeting to pay homage to Ho Chi Minh in September 1969 and the only faculty members who joined this meeting were the Bhallas. Until that time, we students did not know about their left-wing intellectual and political orientation. In a very silent way, we felt greatly encouraged by their participation in the condolence meeting. We soon came to know that Prof Bhalla was sympathetic to the Communist Party of India (CPI), and as the pro-Moscow CPI was ideologically hostile to Maoism, we were not sure how the Bhallas would view us. However, they did not even once criticise any left wing activity we students undertook. There came to develop an unsaid understanding between us that since the Left in general was weak in the university, we needed to support each other irrespective

Maoism has become a challenge for India’s internal security. The Communist Party of India (Maoist) is known as a party organisation for this foremost challenge. Now CPI (Maoist) has estimated 10,000 to 12,000 well-trained cadres which constitute guerrilla army and more than 50,000 members of several wings such as political, cultural and jan militia, ect. An organisation with such a big number of cadres demands huge money. This article deals with the following questions: How much is the annual turnover or budget of CPI (Maoist)? What are the basic sources to accumulate this money? How and where is this money spent?

Across the globe, we are seeing a popular shift of appeal from a liberal-humanitarian imagination of the world, or even a communist-socialist ideal, to one that is more conservative and often called 'right-wing populist'. In the ethnographic context analysed here, a utopian movement for revolutionary social change, led by Marx-Lenin and Mao-inspired Naxalite guerrillas, that once had a wide appeal in parts of India, is superseded by a more conservative utopian imagination of Hindutva forces. In exploring the Indian Maoist case, I suggest that dystopia is embedded within utopia. If those engaged in utopian social transformation seek to challenge prevailing ideology to transform people's actions, it is equally possible for their utopian imagination to retreat into ritual that not only bears little relevance to most people but may also be potentially harmful and pave the way for other ideals to become prevalent. In analysing this Indian case, the paper suggests that we develop an anthropological theory of praxis, one that deals not only with how imaginations to change the world become realised in practice, but also accounts for multiple competing imaginations and how and why some become prevalent over others in daily life, in a dialectical process of reflection and action.

Mulk Raj Anand’s The Sword and The Sickle (1942) narrates a historical uprising in Oudh in 1921–22. Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others (2014) alternates a story about the Naxalite peasant insurgency between 1967 and 1970 with one about a bourgeois family in Calcutta. An epilogue dated 2012 connects the historical movement to present Maoist insurgencies.

Through their literary strategies, both texts connect the local situation to broader national and international influences and also relate a story set in the past to the time in which the novels were written and published. These multiple layers mean that the question of “who speaks for the village?” is mediated by the reader and the framework they apply.

This article considers reviews of the novels written just after publication to examine the way in which they were sometimes read through their international frames—the relationship between colonial India and Britain in the case of The Sword and The Sickle—and discourses around terrorism in the case of The Lives of Others. These readings obscured some aspects of the narratives of the peasant. A comparison of the two novels brings to the fore the representation of the local economic and political problems faced by the peasants.

Jhadha Ghati attack, cadres of the Communist Party of India­Maoist (CPI­Maoist) killed at least 25 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel and injured another six in an ambush at Kalapattar in the Burkapal area of the Sukma District of Chhattisgarh on April 24, 2017. According to details available, an estimated 200­300 Maoists attacked the CRPF personnel who were out to provide protection for road construction work in the area. Though the CRPF claimed that "a considerable number of Maoists are believed to have been eliminated (in retaliatory action by CRPF men) as the tell­tale sign indicate from the ground," only one body of a Maoist fighter was recovered, in the night of April 27, " just 500 metres away from the spot where the gun battle had taken place ". The body was recovered during search operations in the area. The Maoists had also looted at least 21 weapons, ammunition and 22 bullet proof jackets from the possession of the slain CRPF personnel. On June 29, 2010, 27 personnel of the CRPF, including Assistant Commandant Jatin Gulati, were killed in a CPI­Maoist ambush in Narayanpur District of Chhattisgarh. The attack took place near a hilly stretch known as the Jhadha Ghati, three kilometres from the CRPF's Dhudhai base camp. However, the Maoist's worst ever attack targeting the SFs was at the Tarmetla village near Chintalnad in the Dantewada District of Chhattisgarh, on April 6, 2010, in which 75 CRPF personnel and one State Policeman were killed. Significantly, this area now falls under the Sukma District after the bifurcation of Dantewada. Among other recent major attacks in Sukma, the Maoists had killed 12 CRPF personnel and injured another four when they ambushed a road opening party in the forests near Kottacheru village under the Bhejji Police Station on March 11, 2017. The troops were part of a road clearing party that has been securing an under­construction road between Bhejji and Kottacheru. Maoists looted arms and ammunition from the slain CRPF personnel. According to partial data compiled by the Institute for Conflict Management (ICM), Sukma has accounted for at least 45 Maoist­ related deaths (four civilians, 38 SF personnel, three Maoists) during the current year so far (data till April 30, 2017). Out of 30 districts across six states from where such fatalities have been reported in 2017, Sukma recorded the highest number of killings at 45. Narayanpur District stands at a distant second with 17 fatalities (three civilians, one trooper, 13 Maoists) followed by 13 fatalities each in Bijapur (two civilians, four SF personnel, seven Maoists) and Dantewada (two civilians, two SF personnel, nine Maoists), all Districts of Chhattisgarh. Since January 16, 2012, the day Sukma was carved out of Dantewada as a separate District, a total of 1,947 fatalities (including 698 civilians, 482 SF personnel, 767 Maoists) have been reported from 82 Districts across 12 states (data till April 30, 2017). Out of these, Sukma alone has accounted for a total of 254 Maoist­related deaths (58 civilians, 123 SF personnel, 73 Maoists), i.e. 13.04 per cent of total fatalities, the highest for any single District in the country, followed by Bijapur (Chhattisgarh), 218; Gadchiroli (Maharashtra), 159; and Malkangiri (Odisha), 141. These were the only four Districts where fatalities reached into triple figures over this period. More worryingly, Sukma alone has accounted for 25.51 per cent of total SF fatalities during this period (123 out of a total of 482). Bijapur with 49 SF fatalities stands at a distant second. Though, the SFs have secured a positive SF:Maoist kill ratio of 1:1.59 across India, in Sukma it favours the Maoists, at 1.68:1. Out of the 37 Districts in the country from where fatalities in both these categories were reported, the kill ratio was in favour of the SFs in 18, was at par in four, and favoured the Maoists in the remaining 15. There were another 25 Districts from where only Maoist fatalities were reported. Four Districts recorded only SF fatalities. These numbers clearly suggest that Sukma, located in the Bastar Division of Chhattisgarh, the epicenter of Maoist violence in the country, is the final bastion for the Maoists. The District occupies an area of 5635.79 square kilometres, with a population of 250,159 (Census 2011), and shares its borders with the Maoist­infested Bastar, Bijapur and Dantewada Districts of Chhattisgarh to the north and west; the Malkangiri District of Odisha to the east; and the Khammam District of Telangana to the South. Some 3,500 square kilometres of Sukma, more than 75 per cent of its total area, are under forest cover. The forest cover, terrain and location of the District have given the Maoists a sustained advantage in their campaigns to establish disruptive dominance and evade action by SFs.

This article situates India’s Maoist insurgency within longer term processes of state expansion in the east and centre of the country. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s work on space, its core claim is that since the onset of colonialism the region has been produced as a peripheral area whose primary function has been as a zone of settlement and a source of natural resources. Consequently the state has been simultaneously thin and repressive, leading to the creation of an oppositional insurgent space in which the Maoist guerrillas are only the most recent and visible actors. Currently new patterns of hyper-state and hybrid state/insurgent spaces are emerging: the former structured around the forced relocation of entire populations into tightly controlled and regulated camps and the latter around an emergent system of dual authority in which the demarcation between official and insurgent governance is blurred.

IDSA Policy Brief Demonetisation is an important step in the fight against the finance of terrorism. However, it should neither be the first nor the last, if the interlinked threats of corruption, crime and the finance of terrorism have to be controlled.

This dissertation demonstrates the underlying causes of India’s Naxalite movement. Focussing on the role of subaltern communities in the conflict, it utilises the work of Alain Badiou to conceptualise the factors driving their engagement in the movement. Finding that their mobilisation is driven by a loss of agency brought about by the duel effects of structure and development and the caste system. Further to this this dissertation demonstrates that it is the movements status of an ‘event’ that guides its contemporary subjectivity and praxis. It is the adoption of such a position that allows the movement to mobilise subaltern communities through the development of intimacy and the reassertion of subaltern agency. This dissertations analysis then concludes with the claim that it is the aggregate of these factors that form the underlying causes of the movement.

Maoist Violence is a major problem being faced by the police in several districts of India. While different ways of tackling the problem are being discussed and experimented at various levels in different geographical areas, it seems proper to document and thus share my experience in dealing with the problem as the Superintendent of Police in Rohtas between the years 2008 to 2011.

Naxalism has its roots in socio-economic disparities prevalent within the State. However, the loss of life and property due to its extremist ways cannot be ruled out either. Salwa Judum formed in the year 2005, was hailed as an uprising of the villagers against the atrocities by the Naxals. But arming of the tribals by the State on the sly to fight the rebels resulted in an aggravated situation leading to heavy displacement of tribals. Salwa Judum resorted to the same violent measures o its own people, against which it was supposedly standing up. Where on the one hand its members talked of protecting the people from the Maoist atrocities, it resorted to killings and arson against whosoever it branded as a Maoist sympathizer.

This paper is a small attempt to look into State sponsored crime in the garb of peoples movement called Salwa Judum. The Chapters look into the spread of Naxalism in the region and the counter efforts made by the tribals.

Federations promise to provide autonomous,
representative governance that is flexible
enough to overcome potential internal
conflict resulting from the dual stresses of
governing diverse populations and power
overreach. India is the world’s biggest
federation but also hosts the most violent
revolution in modern history against a
federal state. Since 2004, 150,000 people
have been killed or displaced in the war
between the Communist Party of India-
Maoist and India’s government. Conflict
management efforts led not to resolution but
catastrophe across Andhra Pradesh,
Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand as state
responses contradicted each other and the
centre’s efforts. The differences illustrated
how institutional mechanisms of
decentralisation create, sustain and
otherwise alter internal revolutionary
conflicts that cross subunit boundaries.
Three unique characteristics come into play
when federal governments tackle
revolutionary conflict: picking from subunit
actions like policy buffets, exacerbation of
state–subunit fissures and empowerment of
local elites who put political self-interest
above conflict resolution.

The recent assessment by author Jan Myrdal that the Left-Wing extremist (Naxalite) movement in India is headed nowhere, is bound to come as a shot-in-the-arm for the Indian state. Coming from a man who has observed the movement from close quarters for a long time, and who is also known to be in close contact with several senior Naxalite leaders including its elusive general secretary Ganapathy, the assessment is as realistic as it can get. However, the fact remains that it is not ideology, but the potential to carry out violence, which sustains the movement and will do so for the foreseeable future. Accordingly, the state approach towards the threat must be predominantly oriented towards meeting the firepower of the extremists.

The human race has been brought to a standstill as governments around the world struggle to beat a microscopic peril: COVID-19. And while healthcare systems are overwhelmed by the daily increase in cases, and scientists are working around the clock to find a vaccine, State and non-State actors alike have taken upon themselves to politicize the pandemic, as counterproductive and costly as that is. Taking control of the narrative has unfortunately become a priority, as it is instrumental in shaping the future of a State in a post-pandemic world.

Exploration of the dilemmas of rural guerilla organization among India's landless poor (subaltern and tribal groups) during the continuing Naxalite movement. I argue that the 1960s leadership's "annihilation" project in particular (targeted assassination of landlords and wealthy peasants) raises questions of epistemic excess and epistemological difference that are not easy to resolve. How do these questions relate to the instrumentalization of affect (class hatred) as a tool of someone else's struggle?

Contribution to a book edited by Pradip Basu.

War, business, and democracy can intersect in complex ways. In India, mining companies operate throughout a warzone between the government and a Maoist insurgency. Mining companies promised that their activities would benefit local populations, but over-reliance
on the government to implement development initiatives eroded public faith. The
Maoists used the implementation gap to recruit fighters and build public support through an anti-state and anti-corporate ideology. While traditional political ecology interpretations often blame corporations alone for negative mining consequences, this article explores how governance failures can also act as conflict triggers in mining districts. Understanding the interrelation effects between these actors can enable a broader understanding of not only the Maoist conflict in India but also how the political ecology of war influences business and conflict dynamics in resource-rich but war-ridden developing states.