ABSTRACT
Bhojpur, a district in south Bihar, is now considered as one of the main rural bastions of Maoism in India. In reality, however, it had been chosen by the planners of the Intensive Area Development Project (IADP) under the overall sweep of the Third Five Year Plan as one of the districts in India for the Green Revolution. Its main consideration: the presence of the British-built Sone Canal. While the benefits of the IADP turned Sahar — the model block of Bhojpur — prosperous, it also triggered off disenchantment among the lower castes and resentment among the rich, upper castes. Dovetailed with the rise of the Socialists in Bhojpur, the banks of the Sone bred Maoism. In short, only a decade (1967-1977) was enough to turn the ‘Haryana of Bihar’ into the ‘Naxalbari of Bihar’. The chapter, ‘For Reasons of State’, extracted from Kalyan Mukherjee and Rajendra Singh Yadav’s “Bhojpur: Naxalism in the plains of Bihar”, records the attempts by the state government, landlords and the Sarvodaya to stamp out the rural insurgency in its plains.
