ABSTRACT
From a rebellion for land rights to a socio-political movement critiquing India’s state-led development paradigm and finally to a serious threat for country’s internal security, the Maoist movement has indeed come a long way. This Maoist journey has been the most unusual one as it travelled from an unknown village of Naxalbari in West Bengal to reach 509 police stations comprising 7,000 villages in 11 states, namely Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Tamilnadu, Karnataka and Kerala.1 The level of violence is significant in the affected districts of Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Maharashtra and Orissa. There are reports that the Naxals are fast targeting some regions in Uttaranchal and Haryana. As per the 2006 data, today 40 per cent of the country’s geographical area and 35 per cent of the country’s total population is affected by the problem of Naxal violence. This is no simple mathematics, as it implies that the problem of Naxalism is more acute than the problems in Kashmir and the north-east.2 During January and February 2007 the CPI (Maoist) conducted its Ninth Congress, signalling yet another phase in the cycle of Maoist insurgencies in India. For the Naxal leadership this came as a grand success since the Maoists were holding a unity congress after a gap of 36 years – their Eighth Congress was held in 1970. The Maoists claim that the Congress resolved the disputed political issues in the party through debates and discussions in which both the leaders and the led participated with mutual respect to one another.3 This claim is politically significant in two ways: not only does this formally recognize the prevalence of inter/ intra-organizational feuds among the ultra-radical outfits, it is also a persuasive testimony of the Maoist efforts to sort out differences through meaningful dialogues among themselves.
