Adivasis and the Naxalite Insurgency

Abstract

How and why have India’s indigenous people become entwined in the world’s longest running armed revolutionary movement? This lecture will explore the spread of India’s Marx, Lenin and Mao-inspired insurgency into the Adivasi forests of central and eastern India. It will look at the state’s brutal response to the rebels, casting them as terrorists, and encircling their miner-rich lands in counterinsurgency operations. It will show both the ways in which the Adivasis and the insurgency are undermined by state forces but also the unintended means through which the insurgency undermines its own aims but also sustains itself.