Amit Shah, the Home Minister, has finally rung the temple bell to announce that the long, bloody night of Maoism is over. After 60 years of “protracted people’s war,” the Red Corridor, we are told, has been scrubbed clean of its hammer-and-sickle graffiti. On paper, it is a moment for a national victory lap. The dreaded Politburo is in tatters, the “People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army” has been reduced to a few bedraggled scouts hiding in the deepest thickets of Abujhmad, and the “Comrade Capitalists”—those middle-management revolutionaries who made a killing by blowing up the very roads they extorted money for—are either in the bag or in the ground. Or have ‘reformed’ and are working for a pittance in the mines or offices of the capitalists they had opposed for most of their lives.
For the average citizen, who has spent decades watching the evening news bring home the grim tally of IED blasts and ambushed CRPF patrols, this is a welcome relief. We must indeed congratulate the government for its “Zero Tolerance” resolve. For the first time since the Santhal peasants picked up bows and arrows in Naxalbari in 1967, the Indian state has reasserted its monopoly on violence in the hinterland. But before we break out the expensive sweets and declare a “Naxal-free” utopia, we might want to look at the potholes in our own backyard.
History is a cruel teacher, and in India, she usually repeats herself because we are too busy scrolling through glossier distractions to pay attention to the lesson. For a country obsessed with the real and imaginary glorious ancient past and fuming over the real and imagined historical grievances, there is little time to look back into the grey monotones of the recent past. The Naxalite movement wasn’t born in a vacuum or imported from a textbook in Beijing; it was the legitimate child of illegitimate neglect. It sprouted in the cracks of a semi-feudal system where the “common man”—usually a tribal with a parched throat and an empty stomach—was treated as an intruder on his own land. When Charu Majumdar penned his Eight Documents, he didn’t create the fire; he just provided the matchstick to a powder keg of agrarian despair and bureaucratic apathy. For decades, the movement thrived not because its ideology was flawless—Maoist economics is, after all, a recipe for shared poverty—but because the alternative offered by the “netas” and “babus” was often a glitzy promise that never left the air-conditioned corridors of Delhi or Raipur.
We have spent billions on the “Iron Fist,” and it has worked. Our elite CoBRA commandos and the local District Reserve Guards have done the heavy lifting, dismantling a labyrinthine insurgency that even the British, with all their colonial cunning, couldn’t fully map. But as the “Red Sunset” fades, we have to ask: have we pulled out the weeds, or just mowed the lawn? The state claims it has brought “Amrit Kaal” to the tribals, but if you look past the Bastar Olympics and the high-decibel cultural festivals, nothing much has changed for the better on the ground.
To the marginal farmer in Jharkhand or the displaced villager in Chhattisgarh, the “babu” who comes to acquire his land for a mining giant looks remarkably similar to the colonial revenue collector of a century ago. The name of the project changes, the truck’s logo changes, but the feeling of being an uninvited guest at a feast involving your own assets remains the same.
The movement collapsed partly because of its own putrid internal rot. It’s hard to sustain a “People’s War” when your commanders are busy skimming off the “levy” from coal trucks to buy property in the very cities they claim to despise. The “revolutionary” zeal was replaced by a parasitic extortion racket that blew up schools to keep children ignorant and destroyed roads to keep the state at bay. The common man, tired of being caught between the “sarkari” boot and the “comrade’s” gun, eventually walked away. But the vacuum left behind is not necessarily being filled by a benevolent, transparent administration. Instead, we see the same old “red-tape artists” and “pen-pushing gentry” returning to the liberated zones, often with a fresh appetite for the “pelf and power” that comes with managing billions in “reconstruction” funds.
The real danger, however, is not a revival in the jungles of Bastar, but a new kind of “Red Corridor” forming in the shadows of our glittering mega-cities. While we celebrate the end of an insurgency in the forest, we are ignoring the ticking time bomb in our urban slums. Our cities are being swallowed by ghettos of despair, where millions live in a “Venice of the Sewer,” watching the “Billionaire Raj” fly overhead in private jets. In this “cacophony of hypocrisy,” we have a demographic dividend of millions of educated, unemployed youth living in unlivable sprawl, where the only thing that grows faster than the GDP is the resentment of the “have-nots.”
If the root cause—this yawning chasm of inequality and the systemic alienation of the weak—is not addressed, the “ghost of Naxalbari” will simply find a new body to inhabit. It might not call itself Maoism next time; it might wear the mask of linguistic chauvinism, religious radicalism, caste pride, or a raw, nihilistic urban rage. The other alternative—a descent into the hellhole of narcotic despair—is even scarier. We have won the military battle, and for that, the state deserves its laurels. But a “Naxal-free” India is not just one without armed guerrillas; it is one where a citizen doesn’t need a gun to be heard by his own government. Unless we move beyond the “glossy” PR of sports festivals and address the “putrid” reality of land rights and wealth concentration, we are merely hoping that the fire we just extinguished won’t reignite in the very slums that prop up our shining economy. The sunset is beautiful, yes, but in the dark that follows, one must be careful not to trip over the same old stones of injustice.
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