ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with the cultivation, enactment and enablement of resentment and how it is mobilised in counterinsurgency. The context is the Indian government’s war on Maoist guerrillas belonging to the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) (CPI-M) in the state of Chhattisgarh in central India. The chapter looks at two different instantiations of resentment, both of which have fuelled the Indian state’s counterinsurgency war. The two types of resentment are explored ethnographically through two different actors in the war against the Maoists: (i) urban or semi-urban non-tribal immigrants involved in vigilante activities and (ii) young (generally male) Adivasis conscripted as irregular members of the police or special police officers, many of whom are former Maoist guerrillas. Both kinds of actors occupy different structural positions and have different histories and relations with each other as well as with the Maoists—in each case, these inflect their resentment in particular ways.
