Apr 07 2010
The Origins of India’s Maoist Rebellion
An attack by Maoist rebels in the Eastern Indian state of Chhattisgarh resulted in the deaths of 76 policemen. According to officials more than 500 Maoist guerrillas, known as Naxalites, were involved in a carefully planned trap that involved sophisticated weapons, grenades, and improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The death toll from the incident was the largest in the 43 year history of the insurgency. Claiming to speak on behalf of India’s poor and exploited, the Naxalites derive their name from the West Bengal state of Naxalbari where they originated, and have a presence in at least 20 out of India’s 28 states. The Indian government has promised a strong response with Home Minister Gopal Pillai pledging to “hunt everyone down.” Last year the government launched an aggressive campaign dubbed Operation Green Hunt in the northern and eastern strongholds of the Naxalite rebels. Yesterday’s attack is speculated to be a response to that campaign. Thousands of people including rebels, law enforcement officials, and innocent civilians, have been killed over the years in clashes between the Indian government and the Maoist rebels.
GUEST: Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History, Professor and Director of the International Studies Program at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. He is the author of a dozen books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World
Vijay Prashad recommends the following sources of information:
- Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country by Sudeep Chakravarty
- Economic and Political Weekly, online at www.epw.in.
4 Responses to “The Origins of India’s Maoist Rebellion”
Vijay Prashas is a supporter of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which is a governing (pro-capitalist) party in several Indian states. They have been at the forefront of counter-insurgency, on behalf of the Indian federal state and the oligarchs who treat the people of India like their slaves.
Why don’t you bring on someone who can actually speak about the Maoists without lying? Prashad is a running dog of the parties that hurt, impoverish and humiliate the people. His lefty jargon is about as real as Obama’s.
Listening to this again, I will reiterate that Vijay Prashad supports the violence of the Indian state against the people. He is not a pacifist. And further, his lying is straight from the mouth of RAW, for example in tying the Maoists to the Tamil Tigers. Leaving aside the Tigers, he does not mention that the discussion is to use the “Sri Lanka model” to massacre people wholesale.
Prashad has blood on his hands. If you have integrity, you should have people who can speak to what the Maoists actually believe and not what professional mouth pieces of the Indian state distort it to be.
One further example: the 76 soldiers killed by the Maoists were COUNTER-INSURGENCY troops HUNTING MAOISTS TO MURDER THEM.
Yet no one would know this listening to your program.
news is digested on the Maoist movements at
http://southasiarev.wordpress.com
and also
http://revolutionaryfrontlines.wordpress.com/
Vijay is LYING about the most basic facts of the political positions of the Communist Party of India (called Maoist).
When Vijay says “democratic space” he means the right of his corrupt friends to sit in parliaments brokering the lives of the people. That isn’t democracy. It’s corruption and treason.
It is hypocritical for Prasad to laud Arundhati Roy’s work with those displaced by the Narmada Dams. The party of which he is a spokesperson consistently derided the anti-dam movement when it was in full swing. I should know, I was there. The CPI(Marxist) has, until very lately, been quite reactionary on issues of displacement and dispossession, which it had, until last year, defined as a ‘necessary cost’ of ‘development’.