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National Geographic : 2015 Apr
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84 national geographic • April 2015 born. Local people told me that he had been slain in a gun battle not long after our meeting. Only by reading the inscription on the stone did I learn the real identity of the insurgent with many names: Lalesh. The Naxalites’ war always began where the road ended. Everyone said so. Manas boasted to me that it had been six years since he had seen a paved road. The police, the political officers, the paramilitaries, the Adivasi tribes, the poorest local farmers, and the Naxalites themselves: It was the one thing they agreed upon. There always came a point out there in those jungles of India’s infamous Red Corridor— Maoist model of agrarian revolution. From then on, Maoist militants were known as Naxalites. Their sanctuary became the 35,600-square- mile forest of Dandakaranya, which loosely translates from Sanskrit as Jungle of Punish- ment. Straddling parts of several states, in- cluding Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh, Dandakaranya afforded the Naxalites a citadel of sorts: Abujmarh, a jungle within a jungle, one of the last of India’s uncharted territories. Beneath the area’s dense canopy of vegetation, rugged hills and valleys are bisected by streams that rage as torrents during the rainy season, forbidding terrain for any unwelcome stranger. Death came in many ways in that jungle. The Naxalites killed police and paramilitaries with roadside bombs and ambushes. The police killed the Naxalites in “encounters,” the vernacular en- compassing both firefights and targeted killings. Suspected government informers were tried in people’s courts and killed with axes or knives, leading to a surge in the homicide rate not re- flected in the conflict’s official casualty count of more than 12,000 dead across two decades. The first Maoists, middle-class communist radicals from the state of Andhra Pradesh, ar- rived in Abujmarh in 1989, fleeing a crackdown by local authorities. The movement might have died out altogether then, its ideology wither- ing in the sweaty heat. Yet Abujmarh proved an elixir to the Maoist revolutionaries. Here in the depths of the jungle, they found a natural new constituency among the Adivasi tribes. The term Adivasi means “aboriginal” or “original settler” in Sanskrit, and the Adivasis are officially classified as members of Scheduled Tribes, defined by the Indian Constitution as indigenous groups given some form of recogni- tion under national legislation. They number 84 million—6.8 percent of India’s population—and are concentrated most heavily in and around Dandakaranya. It would be simplistic to describe the Nax- alite movement as solely Adivasi. Its organiza- tion’s cadres include not just members of India’s Scheduled Tribes but also middle-class students, as well as Dalits—the so-called Untouchables of Government informers were tried in people’s courts and killed with axes or knives. foremost among them in the states of Chhat- tisgarh and Jharkhand—where the road began to give up the struggle against the thrust of veg- etation, against the rain and the heat, where the last heavily fortified police station marked the farthest reach of central and state authority in a heave of tangled razor wire and bunkers. Then it stopped. After the end of the road? Then you were into another world, undeveloped India, Naxalite ter- ritory: a land of parallel authority, communism, people’s courts, armed cadres, and IEDs. The Naxalites took their name from Naxalbari, a village in West Bengal where in May 1967 an abortive peasant uprising against landowners took place and a police inspector died in a hail of arrows. The bloodshed christened an amorphous, fragmented movement, loosely inspired by the Area with significant insurgent violence or presence Site of major Maoist attack State boundary Coalfields 0mi 75 0km 75 Dandakaranya INDIA NEPALCHINABayofBengalCHHATTISGARHCHHATTISGARHCHHATTISGARHJHARKHANDJHARKHANDJHARKHAND Patna Naksalbari (Naxalbari) Nagpur Kanker Chennai (Madras) Kolkata (Calcutta) Varanasi Bangalore (Bengaluru) Bhubaneshwar Raipur Ranchi Bokaro Vishakhapatnam Hyderabad KaranpuraValleyAbujmarh
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