Paramilitary units' barracks flanked by checkpoints follow one after another for miles along the forest road. It's a disturbing monotony of fortified camps, camouflaged sentry boxes, and police officers on the lookout. And then, suddenly, the forest clears to make way for a space where the hazy outlines of thatched houses appear. This is Silger, a remote village in Bastar, a region located away from the main roads, in the heart of the jungles of central India.
In a shack by the roadside, a 22-year-old man named Raghu was sitting under a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi. Dressed in a black jacket and red shirt, he welcomed his visitors with these unambiguous words: "The local authorities do not care about us, so we will continue the struggle. It will not be violent: We will continue to fight by dancing and speaking. Our fight will be with our bodies and our tongues."
It was a rather dreary winter's afternoon. The sun struggled to pierce the mist from which the outlines of tall trees rose, stretching their branches towards an invisible sky. It was a fitting atmosphere for this strange and troubled region: Bastar, whose population is mostly composed of Adivasis people – India's Indigenous people – is also the last bastion of a Maoist guerrilla war that dates back over half a century. The Adivasis, who are among the poorest and most marginalized peoples in the country – accounting for about 8% of the 1.4 billion Indians – make up the bulk of the insurgency's strike force in the region.
The guerrillas are led by a Maoist core from other parts of India, often intellectuals from the educated circles of the Hindu upper castes. As elsewhere in the world, where revolutionary movements once opted for the Maoist guerrilla warfare strategy to drive their ideas among the poorest, the Indian Maoists owe their success to [the former Chinese leader's] "theorization of the role of the peasantry in the revolutionary struggle," British anthropologist Alpa Shah, an expert on the Adivasis, explained in her book Nightmarch: Among India's Revolutionary Guerrillas (2018). Their motto? "From the masses to the masses," Shah continued, quoting a Maoist refrain. In their official texts, the rebels explain that their goal is to overthrow the "semi-colonial and semi-feudal state" and establish a parallel authority by guaranteeing equality for all.
Constant 'discrimination'
Raghu is an Indigenous person, but he is not a Maoist; at least not a guerrilla. He fiercely denies being part of the movement. "The Maoists? No, we have no contact with them, no one sees them in the region," he insisted. This is a blatant lie: Independent experts, police officers and local journalists all agree that although the guerrilla movement is losing momentum, shaken in recent years by the blows of the security forces, hundreds of (Maoist) Communist Party of India fighters – an organization that is clearly banned – continue to roam Bastar's jungles and those of some neighboring states.
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