ABSTRACT
Can an insurgent movement be termed a popular movement? Or can we also find popular sources of insurgency? Insurgency in the eyes of the State is supposedly a determined act by a minority, a group with resolve, and there is no ‘democratic’ basis to insurgent acts, if by democracy we mean votes, parliamentary confabulations, etc. Indeed, this was the unwritten and unacknowledged question that haunted the established Left as well as the Left-liberal intelligentsia and administrators in the late sixties and early seventies of the last century. They had termed the Naxalbari movement as extremist, anarchist, and sectarian. One can understand their point of view. Yet given that the movement spread so rapidly, engulfed large chunks of the country in that dangerous decade (1965-75), the Left remained silent with embarrassment to the question. What was beneath such a quick spread, what were the popular roots, and what were the historical and political resources that the Naxalites were drawing upon from the past? What gave them legitimacy as a movement of the people, who had perhaps gone wild, and in the eyes of the established Left were destructive, dangerous, and harmful for an orderly growth of politics? What was the nature of the dangerous decade? These are difficult questions. The answers are
as much historical as political. This book is only a partial answer to these enquiries.
