ABSTRACT
There is an ongoing debate on the issue of Urban Maoism (read Urban Naxal) in India. At a time when the activities of the Maoists (violent or otherwise) have been confined to little pockets of Central and Eastern Indian states, the nature and the intent of the debates around urban Maoism merit scholarly interventions. The debates around the issue of urban Maoism are mainly engaged through two critical positions: one that believes in the existence of the urban Maoists who, according to the votaries of this position, are necessarily working against the Indian state, and the second position that rejects the first one and terms it as a manufactured narrative with a motive to target the dissenters and genuine opposition to the government. Stepping away from these two contrarian and competitive positions, this paper intends to reason with the more significant issues of Maoists’ urban movement and the ongoing urban Maoism debate. In this process, the paper deals with the critical aspects of the Maoist movement in India and attempts to investigate the status of urban Maoism. In the first part, the paper engages with the idea of the urban movement within the larger Maoist revolutionary framework. In doing so, it highlights the process through which there has been a shift favoring the dominance of the urban intellectuals over the Maoist movement. The second part of the paper engages with the status of the urban movement of the Maoists and the threat perception it poses to the state. The last section investigates the intent and the process through which successive governments use the issue of urban Maoism as an instrument of effective rhetoric that helps them further the latter’s interests.
