India: an arc of insurgency

India's high-powered economic growth in the 2000s has been as impressive if not quite as sustained as China's; equally, its results have been most beneficial to the urban middle-classes in the country's urban centres rather than to the rural poor. A striking and largely unexpected feature of these years, however, has been the continued and increasing vigour of the rebellion by the Naxalite guerrilla movement (see Ajai Sahni, "India and its Maoists: failure and success", 20 March 2007).

The Naxalite rebellion, named after one of the original villages involved (Naxalbari in West Bengal) originated in 1967. Its political leadership developed its ideology and strategy from Maoism, though its appeal to its militants and supporters may often have owed more to its defence of their rights and interests rather than to its propaganda. In any event, it was long regarded as being more a persistent but barely effective irritant rather than a serious threat - until a few years of surprisingly rapid expansion; to the extent that India's prime minister Manmohan Singh described the Naxalites in April 2006 as "the biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country".

Indeed, a detailed analysis by PV Ramana finds that the rebels are active in 185 districts in seventeen out of India's twenty-eight states (see "Red Storm Rising", Jane's Intelligence Review, June 2008). The government has imposed legal measures against the Naxalites' political leadership and actions seen as in support of it, as have states most affected by the movement (such as Chhattisgarh); but these have often proved ineffective or counterproductive.

Much of the reporting of incidents of violence in India has focused on armed attacks on urban centres, such as the bombings in Mumbai, Bangalore, Jaipur, Ahmendabad, and other cities (see Ajai Sahni, "India after Ahmedabad's bombs", 29 July 2008). Some analysts highlight the relative poverty of Indian Muslims as a systemic factor that contributes to India's social instability (see Pankaj Mishra, "Violence runs through this 'stable' India, built on poverty and injustice", Guardian, 7 August 2008)

A by-product of this attention is the comparable neglect of the Naxalite rebels, whose rural bases in an expanding "red belt" in eastern India and support from great numbers of people in marginalised and poor communities has made them both less accessible to media attention and less high-profile as a topic of investigation (see Suhas Chakma, "India's war with itself", 2 April 2007).

The remoteness of the movement from the lives of urban Indians is diminishing, however, for a significant trend in the Naxalites' thinking is the evolution of a more cohesive national strategy. An important development in this respect was the merging of several Naxalite groups into the Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-M) in 2004. This enabled it to evolve a central strategic direction, valuable for a movement that had hitherto been very dispersed.

The new strategy has as one of its elements a targeting of India's economic infrastructure. In July 2008, for example, Naxalite paramilitaries blew up a stretch of railway track on the Patna-Howrah route; they then waited until it had been repaired and destroyed it again at another site on the same route. All this despite a large security presence less than a mile away.

This focus on vulnerable points of the modern economy's network is facilitated by India's rapid urbanisation; it is also aided by the authorities' inability to ensure consistent supplies of basic services - oil, electricity, transport links - to many of India's people. The combination of an expanding economy and failures of delivery leaves an economy such as India's with very little margin for error in terms of underlying support. The Naxalite insurgents appear to have recognised this.

In addition, the enormous expansion of megacities such as Mumbai and Kolkata has been marked by massive settlements of new arrivals living in precarious conditions and working in the informal economy. The political activists in and around such communities can find a ready response among at least a section of this population, especially when they emphasise the acute divisions of wealth and poverty in modern India.

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