ABSTRACT
The history and geography of all hitherto existing society, to amend an oft-quoted line from the Communist Manifesto, is the history and geography of class struggle (Marx and Engels 1977, 108). Peasants have often been important protagonists in the class struggles occurring in the newer post-colonial societies of Asia, as well as the older ones in Latin America. In India, the Naxalite movement, so called because it started in the Naxalbari region of West Bengal province, is one such peasant struggle. Since its inception in the late 1960s, the Naxalite movement has undergone scalar transformation: from a local fl are-up to a regional, and some would say, national-scale, movement. It exists, to some degree of intensity, in a quarter of India’s 600 districts, covering 40% of the country’s geographical area. The prime minister recently called the Naxalites the single biggest national security threat.
