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From Naxalbari to Chhattisgarh
Even as the Naxalite/Maoist movement continues to haunt the Indian state, its future is not secure, for Mao’s revolutionary strategy for China of the 1920–40 period is no longer applicable in today’s India. The movement has, however, unwittingly acted as a catalyst of progressive reform in rural India. A post-Maoist revolutionary strategy is, nevertheless, long overdue.
A peasant uprising in May 1967 in an obscure corner of the north- eastern tip of West Bengal, called Naxalbari, triggered off a movement that has continued to haunt the Indian state for the last 50 years. Although the uprising was crushed by the police within a few months, from then on, nothing could ever be quite the same in India. The burning embers under the bodies of those who were cremated (the peasant protestors killed by the police, who are still revered as martyrs in the historiography of the Naxalbari movement), sparked fires in other parts of the country. As, some years later, a Hindi poet from North India was to express the mood of solidarity with the name of Naxalbari:
…This simple word of four syllables
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