Re: Thirteen Indian states meet as panic begins to spread over Maoist rebellion
I think this was accepted and point made many days before in this thread itself.....
By the way nothing wrong in mentioning it again......
Re: Thirteen Indian states meet as panic begins to spread over Maoist rebellion
India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently described Maoist rebels as the biggest single internal security threat the country has ever faced.
In the first of three reports, the BBC’s Jill McGivering spent three days travelling with Maoist fighters in the jungles of the central state of Chhattisgarh to find out why they have taken up arms.
We travelled by jeep in pitch darkness for about 10 hours through the jungle, led by a succession of different guides. Finally, we stopped and were led to a small clearing.
A flickering torch lit up the faces of about 30 or 40 young fighters, standing in line shoulder to shoulder, most dressed in military fatigues, all carrying guns.
Most of them seemed very young, certainly still in their teens. Some wore military boots, others wore flip-flops, some were simply barefoot.
Each one shook my hand, then raised their fist in a clenched salute with the words: Lal Salaam! Which means: Red Salute!
That night the monsoon rains broke. We were lying on the jungle floor on simple plastic groundsheets.
As the rain grew heavier, the Maoists hastily marched us to a nearby house, several one room mud-brick huts set round a mud yard. We lay on the floor of one of these with the chickens.
Red Corridor
The next day started at 0500 with roll call. Then we watched about 20 members of the platoon as they were put through their paces by a commander - first exercise, then military drill.
They practised firing positions, standing, sitting and crouching and crawling on their stomachs through the undergrowth.
Their guns were a mixture. Most had wooden shafts and long single barrels. They had made some of them themselves in the camp, they said.
Others were the same old-fashioned Enfield rifles still used widely by the Indian police, taken perhaps during a raid on a police post.
Maoist militants, known here as Naxalites, have been fighting in India since the late 1960s. Until recently, they have basically been in pockets in the jungles in India’s poorest states.
More recently there has been more unity between these groups.
Analysts talk now about the emergence of the Red Corridor, a great swathe of Maoist militancy which stretches all the way from the border with Nepal, south through India to the sea.
Later I was introduced to a senior Maoist commander, Gopanna Markam, a veteran of 25 years with the guerrilla force. I asked him how he would describe what he was fighting for.
“We’re fighting for a new democratic revolution in this country,” he said.
“People are hungry, there’s nothing to eat. They have no clothes. They have no jobs. We want development for the people. That’s why people are coming to this fight.”
Successful ‘revolutions’
I asked him about the Maoist groups in Nepal who may lay down their arms and join the democratic process.
At first he was cautious. The official response was still being determined by the leadership, he said, who would issue a statement in due course.
But events in Nepal were being watched closely, he said - adding that the changes there were giving them hope. “We hope that revolution is successful,” he said, “so that will be an example all over the world because there is a big propaganda that socialism is finished. But Nepal we’re hoping will show the way.”
The language used by the commander to talk about his ideology, and the Maoist ambition of capturing the country’s cities and overthrowing the Indian state, was littered with Mao’s phrases and terms, an echo from 40 years ago.
Attempts since then to discredit some of Mao’s thinking or challenge his ideas were, the commander told me, just a result of revisionism. Mao’s theory is universal, he said. The Chinese Revolution was a success.
Later, I sat with a more junior member of the platoon, a 26-year-old woman called Jaymati who joined the Maoists eight years ago. Her face was stern as she described why she had left her family for this nomadic life as a jungle guerrilla.
She had grown up seeing the fight for the poor going on around her, she told me, so she thought she should join it.
Even if she wanted change in her society, I asked, didn’t she think there was a way of achieving that peacefully, without killing and violence?
She seemed impassive. “There’s a lot of exploitation of poor people,” she said, “and the only way is to make them powerful, to make them the ruler. People who create trouble for poor people, they should be dealt with. They should be finished. They should be eliminated.”
Certainly violence in Chhattisgarh is steadily escalating. The number of people killed there, according to government figures, has doubled each year in the last few years. Most of the dead are civilians.
Re: Thirteen Indian states meet as panic begins to spread over Maoist rebellion
The other India
Friday June 02 2006 11:25:11 AM BDT
‘Across India, from West Bengal to Orissa, to Jharkhand, to Chhattisgarh, to
Andhra Pradesh, the Maoist movement has become very, very strong. It’s an
armed struggle. It’s taking over district after district. The administration
cannot get in there. And the government’s response to that is to do what was
done in Peru with the Shining Path, which is to set up armed defence
committees, which is really creating a situation of civil war. .the Maoists
are fighting on two fronts. One is that they are fighting a feudal society,
their feudal landlords. You have, you know, the whole caste system which is
arranged against the indigenous people and the Dalits, who are the
untouchable caste. And they are fighting against this whole corporatisation.’
Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! interview Arundhati Roy
This is an abridged version of the interview from the rush transcript of the
Democracy Now! programme held in Firehouse studio in New York on May 25.
Re: Thirteen Indian states meet as panic begins to spread over Maoist rebellion
'Across India, from West Bengal to Orissa, to Jharkhand, to Chhattisgarh, to Andhra Pradesh, the Maoist movement has become very, very strong. It's an armed struggle. It's taking over district after district. The administration cannot get in there.
Re: Thirteen Indian states meet as panic begins to spread over Maoist rebellion
^ source?
Re: Thirteen Indian states meet as panic begins to spread over Maoist rebellion
^
It’s from the post above by Abdali, but I have google the link for you.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/23/1358250&mode=thread&tid=25
Re: Thirteen Indian states meet as panic begins to spread over Maoist rebellion
Thanks for the link.
Re: Thirteen Indian states meet as panic begins to spread over Maoist rebellion
She has gone from a normal sane person to an ultra leftist ideology.
Whatever she says is pure fiction just like her book.:D.
She writes well though.
Re: Thirteen Indian states meet as panic begins to spread over Maoist rebellion
terribly interesting how silly billy's posts on rebellions in india are from a totally antipodal stance to his posts on the balochi and FATA revolts in pakistan. :D
Re: Thirteen Indian states meet as panic begins to spread over Maoist rebellion
Maoism has been there since ages.. Interestingly, Mao himself would have been surprised seeing his popularity to this day- it is such a defeated ideology.. I hate communists.. largely poor, dissatisfied and disgruntled workers, peasnants and anyone trying to express their frustation by killing harassing ppl who worked hard to make their fortune..
Re: Thirteen Indian states meet as panic begins to spread over Maoist rebellion
Maoist attacks leave eight dead in eastern India
Maoist rebels have killed eight people including three policemen and a former rebel commander in two separate attacks in eastern India. Hours after the attacks late Monday in the neighbouring states of Bihar and Jharkhand, the federal government renewed a call to the outlawed guerrillas to give up their arms and enter talks with the government. Scores of rebels attacked a police station and killed two guards and an inspector in Bihar’s Tankuppa county, not far from one of Buddhism’s holiest pilgrimage sites, the Press Trust of India quoted police as saying Tuesday. Outnumbered police and the Maoists exchanged more than 2,000 rounds of gunfire in the fighting, in which a civilian also died. The rebels dynamited the police station after overrunning it. **Police said they were hunting for the rebels, who enjoy wide support among low-caste Hindus in impoverished Bihar. **
Meanwhile, in next-door Jharkhand, the Maoists killed four more people including a former guerrilla leader and two of his relatives, police in the state capital Ranchi said. Armed Maoists attacked the home of their former leader Chottu Ganju in Latehar district and shot him dead. They also murdered his brother and sister-in-law. A civilian was killed elsewhere by rebels late Monday, police said. Home Secretary V.K. Duggal renewed New Delhi’s offer of talks with the outlawed insurgents. But “unless they shun violence, no talks are possible,” Duggal said in the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh, which is also in the grip of the leftwing insurgency. Duggal insisted the rebellion was waning in most of the 15 of 29 states where the Maoists are active. “However Maoist violence in (the central state of) Chhattisgarh has shown an upsurge and there is a need for intensified efforts to control the menace,” he said.
**The Maoists – who have taken control of 10 of Chhattisgarh’s 16 impoverished districts – say they are fighting for the rights of the poor and landless farmers. **
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific/view/217190/1/.html
Re: Thirteen Indian states meet as panic begins to spread over Maoist rebellion
Suspected Maoist rebels have killed at least 26 villagers in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, authorities say.
The villagers belonged to a voluntary people’s movement which resists the Maoists and is backed by the state government, reports say.
Police say 23 people were wounded in the attack in Dantewada district.
Thousands have died in Maoist campaigns across central and southern India in the past 30 years. Maoists say they are fighting for the rights of the poor.
Senior district official KR Pisda told the BBC the casualties in Sunday night’s incident were expected to rise.
The police said the rebels targeted local people taking part in a civil militia called Salwa Judum, supported by the state government and launched one year ago to fight the Maoists.
The rebels attacked some government-run camps for villagers and burnt down over 100 huts in the Arabor area, police said.
Twenty three villagers have been kidnapped by the rebels, a senior police official said.
The government set up the camps after the authorities launched an operation against the rebels whom they accuse of killing and kidnapping villagers.
The police say more than 50,000 people live in the camps - mostly tribes people from 600 villages.
The BBC’s Faisal Mohammed Ali in Delhi says the incident has raised concerns about the civil militia campaign, because of which local people have been frequently targeted by Maoists in recent months.
The militants are known as Naxalites after the district where their Maoist-inspired movement was born in the late 1960s.
They say they are fighting for the rights of indigenous people and the rural, landless poor.
They have become so powerful in some districts they run their own parallel administrations and justice systems, our correspondent says.
Nearly 6,000 people have been killed in violence linked to Maoist rebels in several southern and eastern states over the past 20 years.
The rebels are pressing for the creation of a communist state comprising tribal areas in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa, Bihar and Chhattisgarh.
The Indian government believes there may be 10,000 armed Maoist rebels in India, correspondents say. Nine Indian states have been affected by rebel violence.
Re: Thirteen Indian states meet as panic begins to spread over Maoist rebellion
I strongly believe that Maoist revolution will gain momentum and would overwhelm India in the next five decades. This is unstoppable. The reason is pretty clear. A big chunk of Indian population is poor and thoroughly exploited by corrupt administration. There is a huge gap between haves and have nots. The revolution which started in China on a small scale around 1930 became too big in the late 1940s and the whole country fell. Now Nepal is almost under the belt of similar revolution. India is not very far. As long as classes exist such revolutions cannot be stopped.
Re: Thirteen Indian states meet as panic begins to spread over Maoist rebellion
^^ Yup, its already toppled the monarchy in Nepal, India is probably there next target. I wonder though what their exact political objectives are?