Who are Naxalites and what are their aims and demands?
Answered by:Rakesh Iyer, taken from Quora
Thanks for the A2A. This will be a pretty long answer, because I will be trying to present multiple perspectives on Naxals/Maoists and Naxalism/Maoism.
I would add one thing though to the point added for the answer which is collapsed: yes, you can get answers on Wikipedia, but the advantage of asking such a question on Quora is that one can get different perspectives on the same issue, which Wikipedia may or may not offer.
So let's answer the questions in a systematic manner:
Naxals or Naxalites (or Maoists) are terms used to refer to militants who believe in the ideology of Communism (or Maoism) and operate in various parts of India, mostly in those having large forest cover. The term "Naxalite" or "Naxals" comes from the village named "Naxalbari" which is in West Bengal (Siliguri subdivision of Darjeeling district), which is where a violent uprising of laborers was organized by a section of the then Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M) under the leadership of mostly three people: Kanu Sanyal, Charu Mazumdar and Jangal Santhal. This uprising took place in the year 1967.
The reason why this particular uprising started, is of course hardly discussed or looked at among Indian politicians or even the other organs of the Indian state, be it the police (especially in West Bengal) or among the Congress party or rulers who then ruled the state. The violent uprising though was not against the Indian state. Because of the Permanent Settlement revenue system introduced by the Britishers once the East India Company established its rule in West Bengal, a large number of zamindars/landlords were created who owned large tracts of land, but were hardly involved in cultivation of crops and agricultural activities themselves. They instead employed a large number of laborers and also tenant farmers/sharecroppers (i.e. people who didn't own your land but who would organize agricultural activity on your land, in lieu of which he/she will get a part of the total produce). The sharecroppers would in turn employ agricultural laborers in many cases, who would be paid a pittance because in most cases the sharecropper would hardly get much of the total agricultural produce from the land, and whose own tenure was not secure. Moreover, the sharecropper could be evicted at any moment from the land, because he/she did not own the land. This happened both under the Britishers, and continued once India became independent using the loophole present in the Land Reforms Act of India (1955), which stated that sharecroppers had permanent use rights on land leased out to them under certain conditions, but these rights could not be claimed if the landlord wanted to take the land back for personal cultivation. Using this route, many landlords used to evict sharecroppers/tenant farmers regularly and keep them on a leash, with the local administration working to the benefit of the landlords themselves.
The Naxalbari violent uprising was thus directed at ensuring land reforms, which in simple terms, meant re-distribution of agricultural land equally among all those engaged in agricultural production, particularly among the landless (both sharecroppers and also agricultural laborers), since land was seen as the basis of wealth of the zamindars who in most cases were absentee landlords-cum-goondas who controlled the local machinery of the state (local administration and also local police).
One should also try and read on the conditions under which the local people (and a substantial section among them were tribals) functioned as laborers and sharecroppers. There were regular complaints of women being molested and even raped by landlords or relatives/family members of landlords. Another issue was that the sharecroppers had to take loans from landlords at exorbitant rates of interest and forgery had been done in many cases so as to ensure that sharecroppers were always in debt and were thus hardly getting any share of the total agricultural produce which almost always went entirely to the landlord. Combined with all this, any protest by the sharecropper against the "injustice" being unleashed by the landlord was met with violent counter-reaction by the landlord using local thugs, also combined with local police which almost always acted at the landlord's behest.
However, one should remember that this was not necessarily a fight against the existence of the Indian state, it was a movement more to ensure equal distribution of land (in a way, wealth) among all. So it was a Communist movement, but not necessarily directed against the Indian state or to overthrow it. The slogan of the Naxalbari uprising was "land to the tiller".
However, the Naxalbari rising was met with a strong reaction by the police. The trigger was on 25 May 1967 when in Naxalbari, 9 adults and 2 children were killed when police fired on a group of protesters who were demanding their right to crops grown on a particular piece of land. In another case, a sharecropper was killed by landlord's men when he was making a similar demand as well. Once the police was seen as supporting the landlord, the local tribals and also other people decided to counter-attack the police along with the landlords, with one such attempt on 24 May 1967 leading to a police inspector being killed by tribal arrows.
And this changed the direction of the movement in many ways.
i) First, Mao Zedong, the major leader of the People's Republic of China (PRC), became the ideological powerhouse of the movement as it was alleged that he asked Indian peasants and also tribals and the landless to revolt against the Indian state and the Indian governments which were only acting for the upper class.
ii) Second, a section of India's urban elites started getting attracted to the movement rapidly, particularly in West Bengal where it later emerged that not only were college students joining Naxalism or even supporting it (both in violent and non-violent ways) but also arms for Naxals were supposedly being manufactured in workshops of Jadavpur University, a famous university in West Bengal. Charu Mazumdar's writings, left a deep impression on students both in schools and even in colleges which led to many students leaving their education behind and joining Naxals in their violent uprising. In fact, Presidency College in Kolkata was considered the hotbed of Naxalism and even St. Stephen's College was alleged to one such hotbed in Delhi.
iii) Third, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) split, with a faction going with Sanyal and Mazumdar believing that violence and a revolution led by peasants is the only way to tackle the upper-class/bourgeoisie, and since the entire Indian state was one which worked only to protect the interests of the upper class, it was high time that a revolution was organized to overthrow not just the local police but the very foundations of the Indian state also and change its very nature from being "capitalist" to "socialist" or "communist", a state for the Indian proletariat. It worked as an underground group working towards a violent revolution which killed individual members of upper classes in the attempt of establishing a socialist/communist Indian state.
The reaction by the then Congress government, led by Siddhartha Shankar Ray as Chief Minister of West Bengal, was horrendous. Torture was the route employed by police all across Bengal. Anybody suspected of being a Naxal was just tortured, irrespective of whether the person practiced violence or not, irrespective of whether the person was male or female (females, both Naxal cadres or even innocent women, were raped in many cases multiple times and tortured by males, arrested by male policemen in many cases which today is considered a violation of fundamental rights thanks to Supreme Court strictures), irrespective of whether there was evidence against the person concerned or not, and irrespective of whether the person had links with Naxals or not. Many innocents, and even the cadres of CPI(M) who had split from Mazumdar-Sanyal faction and worked alone, had been arrested and tortured. The torture was even more extreme during the period of Emergency declared in 1975 which continued till 1977. Several activists who opposed the Emergency, be it of whichever ideology (Naxals, RSS activists, even non-violent political activists of the stable of People's Union of Civil Liberties and various others who were not part of any formal organizations) were arrested and either lost their lives or tortured so severely that they became physically disable or mentally disabled in many cases. Fundamental rights of protest and speech were thrown to the winds allegedly in the name of countering Naxalism.
The Naxals thus suffered severe losses during the Emergency period in particular, due to the repression unleashed. When Naxals and other political activists alleged that human rights of Naxals and many political prisoners had been violated repeatedly, the state's response was that when it was fighting an enemy who had no norms of democracy or civility, then human rights and moral science could not be the basis of tackling the enemy. Later, the Naxals apparently split and that led to fragmentation of the movement just before the Emergency as well. Also, the violent uprising also failed because the people being recruited as Naxals were not necessarily those committed to its ideology but in many cases those who had a motive of revenge in personal life and used the guns acquired to achieve personal goals and ambitions, showing one of the possible reasons why Gandhi always discarded the use of gun in fighting those whose injustice is to be resisted. Another issue was that spies were recruited mistakenly in many cases by Naxals as workers, who in turn collaborated with governments to finish off the movement. Mazumdar was himself arrested and died apparently of a heart attack, although it has been alleged repeatedly that he died on account of state torture. Also, many of the so-called upper class people who joined Naxalism also suffered torture and then surrendered or gave up before the authorities, either because they were not themselves as committed as Sanyal and Mazumdar were, or because of the extent of torture suffered which made them useless combined with the anxieties of their parents who had sufficient political reach to protect their children. The local tribals and innocents though, did not have such power so as to save them.
Once the Left government came to power in Bengal in 1977 and land reform (at least partially) was initiated as "Operation Barga" in 1978, a major grouse or reason for why Naxalism originated, was partially solved. But Naxalism was to return, if not in Bengal, then in Andhra Pradesh.
One of the major issues during the Naxal movement was that with Mazumdar gaining upper hand and forming the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR) in May 1968 along with other units of Naxals in states like Orissa (today Odisha), Bihar (includes today's Bihar and Jharkhand) and even to an extent in Punjab, some other major such groups or factions were alienated, not just those in Bengal, but also those outside Bengal, such as those in Andhra Pradesh. In fact, the issues were initially mostly regarding the strategy to be pursued: while Mazumdar believed that the best strategy was to have the revolution by identifying the enemies within upper class and eliminating them individually, the faction in Andhra Pradesh led by T. Nagi Reddy and that in West Bengal led by Kanhai Chatterjee is said to have said that mass agitations should be used as the precursor and only once these have attained a level, should any uprising, violent or non-violent, be employed against the upper classes. The result was that while AICCCR rejected this and formed Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) or CPI(M-L), CPI(M) from which this was formed rejected this ideal of violent uprising of the split faction and also did take to violent repression of the Naxals if required. The Chatterjee faction then went on to form the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) from where came the use of the word "Maoists" to represent Naxals also, although they did represent different factions.
Mazumdar's death led to huge factionalism within the group, with splinters and re-splinters forming, much to the delight of historians of India like Ramachandra Guha, all justified in the name of course-corrections and being true to Communist/Marxist/Maoist ideologies. For example, as Guha pointed out in his later lectures, there were all kinds of groups: one being pro-Marx, pro-Trostky and pro-Mao while another being anti-Mao, anti-Marx but pro-Trotsky and pro-Lenin. And one could try out all such types of permutations and combinations, with many of the ground soldiers associated with such groups possibly having no idea of the similarities and differences in views of Marx, Trotsky, Mao, Lenin and others considered as father-figures in Communism or Marxism. In fact, Kanu Sanyal even said that parliamentary democracy is the best way to fight the bourgeoisie and hence joined the mainstream democratic politics of India.
The splits continued during the 70s end and 80s, with a major faction under the leadership of Kondapalli Seetharamiah forming the People's War Group (PWG) in Andhra Pradesh and another major faction under N. Prasad in Bihar forming CPI(M-L) (Unity Organization). All of these did have differences in ideology but more closely, they had differences in strategies of how to supposedly establish a proletarian state in India. While PWG believed that mass action was required, both violent and non-violent and building mass organizations in that regard, Seetharamiah himself believed in restricting the work to "annihilation of class enemies", the group under N. Prasad wanted to wage "people's war against the government", and this later led to splinters and re-splinters of all kinds within Bihar along with existence of MCC.
What all this meant at the strategic level was that while CPI(M-L) joined parliamentary democracy and even won in Bihar, others like PWG and MCC (the two major Maoist/Naxal groups) were out there to undertake violent crimes against both police (particularly in Andhra Pradesh where PWG used to massacre police officers, and in return the police used to torture both Naxal cadres and suspected Naxal sympathizers, many of whom may also have been innocent and not guilty as well as fake encounters of suspected and confirmed Naxals, thereby violating human rights) and also against landlords (particularly in Bihar where unlike in other states, it was not so much tribals but Dalits who were foot soldiers of Maoists and had been oppressed by upper castes under the caste system which has prevailed in India for centuries). While PWG and police were therefore involved in gang-wars and fake encounters and vicious murders of each other's supposed leaders in Andhra Pradesh, the Maoists were involved in murders of upper castes which in turn led to renegade groups of upper castes like the Ranvir Sena taking shape in Bihar, which used to massacre Dalits in the name of revenge against the Maoists. And one should remember the rulers of Andhra and Bihar at this point. While Lalu was known for legendary disorder and lack of rule of law in Bihar, Chandrababu Naidu and his party Telugu Desam Party (TDP) was regularly accused of using Naxals to first come to political power in Andhra Pradesh legislature and then dumping or discarding them once they came to power.
This was going on for quite some time. The Naxals and Maoists then turned into one in the year 2004, precisely September 2004, when attempts being made since the past to combine all existing splinter groups into a single formation finally bore fruit and the People's War Group and Maoist Communist Centre, along with other formations, joined together to form one single organization: the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) or CPI(M), and this is different from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) which fights parliamentary elections in India.
An important feature of the multiple groups had been that while the groups claimed to fight in particular for sections considered the most downtrodden within the Indian society, namely the Dalits/Scheduled Castes and the tribals/Scheduled Tribes, the leadership of these groups mostly consisted of upper class, and mostly upper caste who had in many cases, left away possible lives of luxury and better lifestyle to live among the very poor and undertake mass insurrection against Indian state. Therefore, there was a substantial difference in the demography of the foot soldiers who were mostly Dalits and tribals, and the composition of the leadership of the Naxals. This has been used by Indian state and also those opposing Naxals for their violence, though Naxals have always rejected this by stating that they all support equality and have never discriminated against the Indian state.
The 2004 merger led to an escalation of violence and also in regions where violence was being unleashed. A favorite strategy of both PWG and MCC was to develop two kinds of centres or areas: areas which were liberated from the Indian state through continuous acts of violence fighting the Indian state, and areas where Maoists or Naxals escaped to and which were islands of peace, to be used for congregations or meetings but not attacked by them. So for example, regions in undivided Madhya Pradesh (Madhya Pradesh + Chhattisgarh) were to be used for secret meetings and congregations, while Andhra Pradesh and Bihar witnessed violence. (Bihar was then undivided as Bihar + Jharkhand).
With the merging of all Naxal and Maoist factions into one group, this led to a major change: while continuous attacks by Andhra police along with attacks by a specialized anti-Naxal force called the Greyhound formed by Andhra government led to alleged fake encounters and deaths of Naxal leaders, substantial developmental activities led to people of the region dumping Naxals to an extent as well, which led to a demise of Naxal activity in most of Andhra Pradesh, especially Telangana. It is alleged that Naxals today support the formation of Telangana only because their experience in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh suggests that it is far difficult for smaller states to organize enough financial resources and muscle power to tackle Naxals, and so they can be successful in a smaller state like Telangana as opposed to a larger state like Andhra Pradesh. Telangana supporters though have refused such reasons and termed them as excuses used by anti-Telangana activists and politicians who don't want to give justice to Telangana.
The reason why I bring this is because PWG was certainly strong in Telangana where its leadership and cadre was substantially wiped out (and most surprisingly considering that the YSR government of Andhra in 2004 had used Naxals to win elections and then called them for a peace process, which was suddenly cancelled in 2005 and their leaders and many cadres were killed in the open, which led to a substantial loss in strength of PWG). It has also been alleged repeatedly that at least in Andhra Pradesh, local politicians used Maoists as goons or local thugs to regularly win elections in return for financially supporting Maoists, either out of fear or also out of the need to win elections continuously and thereby get chance to seek more rents through other activities.
Once PWG and MCC were merged, the stage shifted from Andhra to Dantewada district in Chhattisgarh, which had seen Naxal activity but not to the extent seen since 2006. Naxals had been present in Chhattisgarh region for quite long and also were responsible for ensuring that tendu-leave collectors were able to get decent wages and female tendu-leave collectors were not harassed by their managers or contractors, by ensuring mass agitations. However, the threat of violence escalated sharply, considering that Naxals had now gained substantial strength in regions of Chhattisgarh which were not only densely forested and had a high concentration of tribals, but were also rich in mines of major minerals: iron ore, manganese, magnesium, coal and aluminium in particular.
The Naxals alleged that the central and state governments were only interested in treating tribals as a use-and-throw substance who would be kicked out of the forest land they have lived on since generations, in the name of developing the entire country, and they would not get any share of the profits earned but would instead lose the lone source of livelihood they possess. The Naxals also stated that considering the history of the Indian state which has been oppressive of tribals and has always stopped tribals from having any sort of control over resources which they have owned and lived with since long, and how tribals were never given education or proper health facilities but always used and thrown away when the work got over, the Indian state would never be interested in their development but instead, the so-called Indian developmental model would even lead to the extinction of tribal culture and tribals themselves. A similar sort of situation was also seen in Orissa where the Biju Janata Dal state government was accused by Naxals of helping industrialists and bourgeoisie while tramping on the rights of the downtrodden tribal community who have only suffered since independence. The Naxals also pointed out that tribals in many places which had mines of minerals below them, had been thrown out of their land in the name of development and had been never rehabilitated or compensated adequately. Worse, many tribal regions had never seen a properly functioning school or any government project. Moreover, any non-violent protest of tribals was met with violence by the Indian state in the name of fighting Naxalism and acting in the interest of the nation, thereby suggesting that the existence of the Indian state was itself not in the interest of the tribals and they should join the fight in overthrowing the state structure itself.
Meanwhile Manmohan Singh in 2006 declared Left-Wing Extremism (LWE), a new formal term for Maoists, as the single biggest challenge to the existence of the Indian state. And in Chhattisgarh, the Leader of Opposition from Congress party, Mahendra Karma, introduced "Salwa Judum" (meaning: Purification Hunt in Gondi language), where tribals armed with guns were engaged as Special Protection Officers (SPOs) to tackle the foot soldiers of Naxalism, who were also tribals. The Salwa Judum movement led to a major escalation of violence and increase in casualties in Dantewada district in Chhattisgarh, which the Naxals claimed as the major centre of their liberated area in India, which the Indian government refers to as the "Red Corridor". The Chhattisgarh government supported Salwa Judum, but SPOs, most of whom were not adults but around 16-18 years old (who could never become policemen as per police rules), combined with Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), were supposed to target Naxals. The reality though turned out to be far grim: villages were looted, villagers were treated as suspected Naxals and beaten and tortured in the name of extracting information and "teaching a proper lesson", women were raped and some forced to undertake prostitution and worse, cattle and poultry farms were looted and eaten up. Many villagers, particularly in liberated areas, had been forced to hide in the forests to escape the raids of Salwa Judum activists and SPOs, even though neither they supported Naxals nor the state action being perpetrated onto them. As one such villager confessed to Ramachandra Guha "Hum dono ke beech me pis gaye hain" (or in English: We are stuck in the middle of two forces: Naxals and the Indian states, and in deep shit).
The Naxals and Salwa Judum used to attack each other with even more ferocity, with several Salwa Judum SPOs having lost not only their lives but some with their bodies cut to pieces as well. Not only this, Naxals further introduced terror in areas controlled by them so that nobody dare become a spy for the government. Many people were assassinated by Naxals and even by Salwa Judum in the name of being a spy for the "enemy".
The Salwa Judum was finally banned by the Supreme Court in a landmark judgement in 2011, for violating human rights and the Constitution itself. It still continues as the state government has employed the same SPOs and formed an army in the name of Maa Danteshwari (a famous temple in Chhattisgarh), All these are strategic blunders because those who lost their lives at the hands of Salwa Judum activists and were uprooted from their own villages to declare themselves as being anti-Maoist, were far more likely to become Maoists than if their lives had remained untouched in the first place, and moreover, these were not well-equipped in the first place to tackle Naxals, nor were they an ideological buffer to Naxalism also.
But meanwhile, the government unofficially introduced "Operation Greenhunt", a coordinated operation across several states (Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal among others), to tackle Naxalism using the idea of first conquering an area and then making it a peace island which would be developed properly. This strategy was thoroughly criticized by Ajai Sahni who said that Maoists would easily target a place which was supposed to be conquered by CRPF and then developed, and the forces would be sitting ducks unless the entire region was sought to be cleaned. He also questioned the strategy since it was extremely difficult to separate the innocent villagers from the Naxals in Naxal-controlled areas, particularly since there was no Naxal army in uniform and the foot soldiers were as poor and similar looking as the innocent native tribals. Also, not all tribals were Maoists, and since the forces would be operating in areas with a lot of pressure and the threat of death looming large in their own minds, it was quite likely that they may kill innocent tribals out of suspicion or fear which will only trigger anger and generate sympathy or possible support for Maoists. Deeper psychological problems in the minds of CRPF would further lead to even rapes of women being justified in the name of controlling "Red Terror" as Naxalism is often referred to as, which would be useful for Maoists to further their own propaganda. Moreover, CRPF batallions are never trained to tackle Naxal violence but to instead tackle riot situations, which are quite different and difficult circumstances, and to re-train them would not be so easy. Plus the fact that it was quite difficult to follow Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in many areas simply because it was not plausible, that the terrain was inhospitable and in addition to Maoists malaria and other insect-caused diseases were also major problems, and that Maoists had a better knowledge of the terrain and ground support which CRPF did not have at all, as well as poor administrative capabilities of the state and dubious functioning of the state authorities which had a role to play in the building up of the problem to begin with, were all issues which CRPF could not tackle on their own.
The hopeless exercise of fighting Naxals through the idea of Salwa Judum and/or Operation Greenhunt has been shown to all through continuous massacres by Naxals of CRPF jawans, almost as if CRPF men were sitting ducks for Naxals. If it was not the Chintanalar massacre of 76 CRPF men in 2010, it was the capture of Collector of Sukma District in Chhattisgarh in 2012, or even the murder of Mahendra Karma who initiated Salwa Judum, in our current year, 2013.
And not to forget, when an attempt was being made to have peace talks between Maoists and the Central government, the man supposed to talk peace from the Maoist side, named Azad, was killed in a suspicious encounter by the Andhra police and the Maoists declared that they are not interested in a peace process any more. Azad interestingly wanted peace (or so he claimed) not because the Maoists wanted peace, but because the tribals deserved peace from the conflict between them and the Indian state, accusing the Indian government and its forces of treating the Indian Constitution like a toilet paper and not respecting it at all.
Kidnappings and ambushes are all a part to declare the intent of war on the Indian state or to get their own supporters released. But the real idea is to actually overthrow the Indian state.
Now let me add a few more paragraphs on my own views.
Firstly, not all tribals are Naxals, nor are all Naxals necessarily tribals, though there is a substantial part of intersection among the two, ie.. many Naxals are tribals and a substantial section among tribals is Naxal.
Secondly, most foot soldiers of Naxal groups are tribals, but they may not know what we mean by the Indian state. For them, the oppressive part of state structure is the patwari or the forest guard who does not allow them to cut branches of trees in forests, to live with forests, or to collect forest produce and sell them at reasonable wage rates, which they had been doing before the British came to India to regulate forests and which Indian government has been doing since Independence. They want their control over the forests while ensuring the sustainability of these forests, which they have been doing since generations. The tribals may not care about the Indian parliament, they may not care about their development or presence/absence of schools, hospitals or even others, but they do care about their dignity.
In other words, they have joined Naxalism not because they may want development but haven't got it (otherwise, most parts of the country which don't have Naxalism but remain underdeveloped would also have seen Naxalism or some such movement in the last 60 years). It is because they feel their dignity has been attacked or under threat due to actors belonging to Indian state. But they don't know what a state is, leave alone what the Indian state is. They attack the local police and landlords and also the forest guard or arms of the Indian state who oppress them in their day-to-day lives. If the Indian state just boycotts their development, they may not really go to war with the state. But because the Indian state wants the ores and mineral resources, the tribals feel their dignity and livelihood is in trouble and they are not going to be involved in the process of development, and so it's important for them to resist these projects because they will lose everything and gain nothing, while others talking of development will gain everything.
Many people who join Naxals may be doing so not necessarily because they believe in Naxal ideology or Maoism, but because they have suffered at the hands of the government or the police (fake encounters of Naxal cadres or loss of livelihood or family members in various ways or even loss of land etc. due to land being given away in the name of development) and so they think Naxalism is the only way to get justice. Many may have taken up guns to satisfy their own personal ambitions and motives which may be totally irrelevant to the ideology and motives of the whole movement/group. And there may be others who may be spies. So everyone may not be joining the movement for the same motive or believing in the same thing.
Third, the Indian state has certainly failed in solving basic issues of the tribals. Tribals have been living on forests for generations. Moreover, we have failed in addressing core issues for Dalits also: caste discrimination and treating Dalits as not being equal to upper castes in our society. Our state actors have unleashed atrocities or not fought against atrocities unleashed on these sections of the society, and these sections have perceived an attack on their dignity and violence as a way to counter it. We have not implemented the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas Act since long. Even the Forest Rights Act meant to give legal rights to tribals over forest land has seen very tardy implementation since its time of passage in 2006. And the idea of taking approval from gram sabha in tribal areas prior to construction of any development project in the area has been thrown to the winds both by the public and private sector in the name of development and high growth rates.
Fourth, the state of institutions (public in particular) and their functioning in the areas dominated by Naxalism, both before and after the emergence of Naxalism, has been nothing short of a disaster. Not only are those functioning on behalf of the state seen as supporting the rich and acting against the interests of the poor and the downtrodden, many a times they are themselves seen as unleashing atrocities in the name of personal vendetta on the downtrodden as well, particularly those indulging in non-violent protests either through fake encounters or sustained torture. Many institutions like schools and primary health centres have hardly functioned, with doctors not reporting at all. It's not that Naxals have not at all allowed schools and hospitals to functions, but they do want Naxal ideology to be taught in schools and also Naxal cadres to be treated in PHCs. Naxals have not stopped functioning of MGNREGA or Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in areas controlled by them either. However, the central government has accused Naxals of stopping developmental activity, which for the government somehow almost always means building of roads, which Naxals have stopped so as to make it difficult for Central forces to tackle the Naxals.
So while one can understand why roads are not being built, it is difficult to explain why schools, primary health centres and MGNREGA can't function properly if it can reduce problems of Naxal areas. This is also helping Naxals to gain tribals' trust more and more by themselves indulging in development schemes of various kinds.
One should however remember that Naxals are not some friends of the poor or Robin Hoods who are fighting against the rich. The Naxals believe like Mao that power flows from the barrel of the gun and so they can keep killing their enemies, which is against democratic culture which is the most important for the poor's voice to be heard, as opposed to a communist dictatorship which was there in USSR and hit the poor the most. Moreover, the Naxals have been known to brook no dissent and even kill dissenters in their kangaroo courts termed "people's courts" or Jan Adalat. Also, Naxals have been known as extortionists who have extorted money from rich industrialists so as to allow them to conduct mining or manufacturing against whom they claim to fight on behalf of the tribals. And moreover, Naxals have also formed alliances with political parties of all kinds and hues to help them win elections and gain favors such as reduced operations against them or money bags at other times.
So Naxals are not as evil as the state shows them to be, nor as great as they want themselves to be seen. They are somewhere in the middle. Both parts combine to form the entire truth.
Solution to Naxalism is something I would rather say somewhere else though, considering that this answer is way long in itself.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nax...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nax...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sal...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apr...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per...
http://www.outlookindia.com/arti...
http://www.outlookindia.com/arti...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lis...
http://www.ipcs.org/pdf_file/iss...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ope...
http://www.outlookindia.com/arti...
I would add one thing though to the point added for the answer which is collapsed: yes, you can get answers on Wikipedia, but the advantage of asking such a question on Quora is that one can get different perspectives on the same issue, which Wikipedia may or may not offer.
So let's answer the questions in a systematic manner:
Naxals or Naxalites (or Maoists) are terms used to refer to militants who believe in the ideology of Communism (or Maoism) and operate in various parts of India, mostly in those having large forest cover. The term "Naxalite" or "Naxals" comes from the village named "Naxalbari" which is in West Bengal (Siliguri subdivision of Darjeeling district), which is where a violent uprising of laborers was organized by a section of the then Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M) under the leadership of mostly three people: Kanu Sanyal, Charu Mazumdar and Jangal Santhal. This uprising took place in the year 1967.
The reason why this particular uprising started, is of course hardly discussed or looked at among Indian politicians or even the other organs of the Indian state, be it the police (especially in West Bengal) or among the Congress party or rulers who then ruled the state. The violent uprising though was not against the Indian state. Because of the Permanent Settlement revenue system introduced by the Britishers once the East India Company established its rule in West Bengal, a large number of zamindars/landlords were created who owned large tracts of land, but were hardly involved in cultivation of crops and agricultural activities themselves. They instead employed a large number of laborers and also tenant farmers/sharecroppers (i.e. people who didn't own your land but who would organize agricultural activity on your land, in lieu of which he/she will get a part of the total produce). The sharecroppers would in turn employ agricultural laborers in many cases, who would be paid a pittance because in most cases the sharecropper would hardly get much of the total agricultural produce from the land, and whose own tenure was not secure. Moreover, the sharecropper could be evicted at any moment from the land, because he/she did not own the land. This happened both under the Britishers, and continued once India became independent using the loophole present in the Land Reforms Act of India (1955), which stated that sharecroppers had permanent use rights on land leased out to them under certain conditions, but these rights could not be claimed if the landlord wanted to take the land back for personal cultivation. Using this route, many landlords used to evict sharecroppers/tenant farmers regularly and keep them on a leash, with the local administration working to the benefit of the landlords themselves.
The Naxalbari violent uprising was thus directed at ensuring land reforms, which in simple terms, meant re-distribution of agricultural land equally among all those engaged in agricultural production, particularly among the landless (both sharecroppers and also agricultural laborers), since land was seen as the basis of wealth of the zamindars who in most cases were absentee landlords-cum-goondas who controlled the local machinery of the state (local administration and also local police).
One should also try and read on the conditions under which the local people (and a substantial section among them were tribals) functioned as laborers and sharecroppers. There were regular complaints of women being molested and even raped by landlords or relatives/family members of landlords. Another issue was that the sharecroppers had to take loans from landlords at exorbitant rates of interest and forgery had been done in many cases so as to ensure that sharecroppers were always in debt and were thus hardly getting any share of the total agricultural produce which almost always went entirely to the landlord. Combined with all this, any protest by the sharecropper against the "injustice" being unleashed by the landlord was met with violent counter-reaction by the landlord using local thugs, also combined with local police which almost always acted at the landlord's behest.
However, one should remember that this was not necessarily a fight against the existence of the Indian state, it was a movement more to ensure equal distribution of land (in a way, wealth) among all. So it was a Communist movement, but not necessarily directed against the Indian state or to overthrow it. The slogan of the Naxalbari uprising was "land to the tiller".
However, the Naxalbari rising was met with a strong reaction by the police. The trigger was on 25 May 1967 when in Naxalbari, 9 adults and 2 children were killed when police fired on a group of protesters who were demanding their right to crops grown on a particular piece of land. In another case, a sharecropper was killed by landlord's men when he was making a similar demand as well. Once the police was seen as supporting the landlord, the local tribals and also other people decided to counter-attack the police along with the landlords, with one such attempt on 24 May 1967 leading to a police inspector being killed by tribal arrows.
And this changed the direction of the movement in many ways.
i) First, Mao Zedong, the major leader of the People's Republic of China (PRC), became the ideological powerhouse of the movement as it was alleged that he asked Indian peasants and also tribals and the landless to revolt against the Indian state and the Indian governments which were only acting for the upper class.
ii) Second, a section of India's urban elites started getting attracted to the movement rapidly, particularly in West Bengal where it later emerged that not only were college students joining Naxalism or even supporting it (both in violent and non-violent ways) but also arms for Naxals were supposedly being manufactured in workshops of Jadavpur University, a famous university in West Bengal. Charu Mazumdar's writings, left a deep impression on students both in schools and even in colleges which led to many students leaving their education behind and joining Naxals in their violent uprising. In fact, Presidency College in Kolkata was considered the hotbed of Naxalism and even St. Stephen's College was alleged to one such hotbed in Delhi.
iii) Third, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) split, with a faction going with Sanyal and Mazumdar believing that violence and a revolution led by peasants is the only way to tackle the upper-class/bourgeoisie, and since the entire Indian state was one which worked only to protect the interests of the upper class, it was high time that a revolution was organized to overthrow not just the local police but the very foundations of the Indian state also and change its very nature from being "capitalist" to "socialist" or "communist", a state for the Indian proletariat. It worked as an underground group working towards a violent revolution which killed individual members of upper classes in the attempt of establishing a socialist/communist Indian state.
The reaction by the then Congress government, led by Siddhartha Shankar Ray as Chief Minister of West Bengal, was horrendous. Torture was the route employed by police all across Bengal. Anybody suspected of being a Naxal was just tortured, irrespective of whether the person practiced violence or not, irrespective of whether the person was male or female (females, both Naxal cadres or even innocent women, were raped in many cases multiple times and tortured by males, arrested by male policemen in many cases which today is considered a violation of fundamental rights thanks to Supreme Court strictures), irrespective of whether there was evidence against the person concerned or not, and irrespective of whether the person had links with Naxals or not. Many innocents, and even the cadres of CPI(M) who had split from Mazumdar-Sanyal faction and worked alone, had been arrested and tortured. The torture was even more extreme during the period of Emergency declared in 1975 which continued till 1977. Several activists who opposed the Emergency, be it of whichever ideology (Naxals, RSS activists, even non-violent political activists of the stable of People's Union of Civil Liberties and various others who were not part of any formal organizations) were arrested and either lost their lives or tortured so severely that they became physically disable or mentally disabled in many cases. Fundamental rights of protest and speech were thrown to the winds allegedly in the name of countering Naxalism.
The Naxals thus suffered severe losses during the Emergency period in particular, due to the repression unleashed. When Naxals and other political activists alleged that human rights of Naxals and many political prisoners had been violated repeatedly, the state's response was that when it was fighting an enemy who had no norms of democracy or civility, then human rights and moral science could not be the basis of tackling the enemy. Later, the Naxals apparently split and that led to fragmentation of the movement just before the Emergency as well. Also, the violent uprising also failed because the people being recruited as Naxals were not necessarily those committed to its ideology but in many cases those who had a motive of revenge in personal life and used the guns acquired to achieve personal goals and ambitions, showing one of the possible reasons why Gandhi always discarded the use of gun in fighting those whose injustice is to be resisted. Another issue was that spies were recruited mistakenly in many cases by Naxals as workers, who in turn collaborated with governments to finish off the movement. Mazumdar was himself arrested and died apparently of a heart attack, although it has been alleged repeatedly that he died on account of state torture. Also, many of the so-called upper class people who joined Naxalism also suffered torture and then surrendered or gave up before the authorities, either because they were not themselves as committed as Sanyal and Mazumdar were, or because of the extent of torture suffered which made them useless combined with the anxieties of their parents who had sufficient political reach to protect their children. The local tribals and innocents though, did not have such power so as to save them.
Once the Left government came to power in Bengal in 1977 and land reform (at least partially) was initiated as "Operation Barga" in 1978, a major grouse or reason for why Naxalism originated, was partially solved. But Naxalism was to return, if not in Bengal, then in Andhra Pradesh.
One of the major issues during the Naxal movement was that with Mazumdar gaining upper hand and forming the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR) in May 1968 along with other units of Naxals in states like Orissa (today Odisha), Bihar (includes today's Bihar and Jharkhand) and even to an extent in Punjab, some other major such groups or factions were alienated, not just those in Bengal, but also those outside Bengal, such as those in Andhra Pradesh. In fact, the issues were initially mostly regarding the strategy to be pursued: while Mazumdar believed that the best strategy was to have the revolution by identifying the enemies within upper class and eliminating them individually, the faction in Andhra Pradesh led by T. Nagi Reddy and that in West Bengal led by Kanhai Chatterjee is said to have said that mass agitations should be used as the precursor and only once these have attained a level, should any uprising, violent or non-violent, be employed against the upper classes. The result was that while AICCCR rejected this and formed Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) or CPI(M-L), CPI(M) from which this was formed rejected this ideal of violent uprising of the split faction and also did take to violent repression of the Naxals if required. The Chatterjee faction then went on to form the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) from where came the use of the word "Maoists" to represent Naxals also, although they did represent different factions.
Mazumdar's death led to huge factionalism within the group, with splinters and re-splinters forming, much to the delight of historians of India like Ramachandra Guha, all justified in the name of course-corrections and being true to Communist/Marxist/Maoist ideologies. For example, as Guha pointed out in his later lectures, there were all kinds of groups: one being pro-Marx, pro-Trostky and pro-Mao while another being anti-Mao, anti-Marx but pro-Trotsky and pro-Lenin. And one could try out all such types of permutations and combinations, with many of the ground soldiers associated with such groups possibly having no idea of the similarities and differences in views of Marx, Trotsky, Mao, Lenin and others considered as father-figures in Communism or Marxism. In fact, Kanu Sanyal even said that parliamentary democracy is the best way to fight the bourgeoisie and hence joined the mainstream democratic politics of India.
The splits continued during the 70s end and 80s, with a major faction under the leadership of Kondapalli Seetharamiah forming the People's War Group (PWG) in Andhra Pradesh and another major faction under N. Prasad in Bihar forming CPI(M-L) (Unity Organization). All of these did have differences in ideology but more closely, they had differences in strategies of how to supposedly establish a proletarian state in India. While PWG believed that mass action was required, both violent and non-violent and building mass organizations in that regard, Seetharamiah himself believed in restricting the work to "annihilation of class enemies", the group under N. Prasad wanted to wage "people's war against the government", and this later led to splinters and re-splinters of all kinds within Bihar along with existence of MCC.
What all this meant at the strategic level was that while CPI(M-L) joined parliamentary democracy and even won in Bihar, others like PWG and MCC (the two major Maoist/Naxal groups) were out there to undertake violent crimes against both police (particularly in Andhra Pradesh where PWG used to massacre police officers, and in return the police used to torture both Naxal cadres and suspected Naxal sympathizers, many of whom may also have been innocent and not guilty as well as fake encounters of suspected and confirmed Naxals, thereby violating human rights) and also against landlords (particularly in Bihar where unlike in other states, it was not so much tribals but Dalits who were foot soldiers of Maoists and had been oppressed by upper castes under the caste system which has prevailed in India for centuries). While PWG and police were therefore involved in gang-wars and fake encounters and vicious murders of each other's supposed leaders in Andhra Pradesh, the Maoists were involved in murders of upper castes which in turn led to renegade groups of upper castes like the Ranvir Sena taking shape in Bihar, which used to massacre Dalits in the name of revenge against the Maoists. And one should remember the rulers of Andhra and Bihar at this point. While Lalu was known for legendary disorder and lack of rule of law in Bihar, Chandrababu Naidu and his party Telugu Desam Party (TDP) was regularly accused of using Naxals to first come to political power in Andhra Pradesh legislature and then dumping or discarding them once they came to power.
This was going on for quite some time. The Naxals and Maoists then turned into one in the year 2004, precisely September 2004, when attempts being made since the past to combine all existing splinter groups into a single formation finally bore fruit and the People's War Group and Maoist Communist Centre, along with other formations, joined together to form one single organization: the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) or CPI(M), and this is different from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) which fights parliamentary elections in India.
An important feature of the multiple groups had been that while the groups claimed to fight in particular for sections considered the most downtrodden within the Indian society, namely the Dalits/Scheduled Castes and the tribals/Scheduled Tribes, the leadership of these groups mostly consisted of upper class, and mostly upper caste who had in many cases, left away possible lives of luxury and better lifestyle to live among the very poor and undertake mass insurrection against Indian state. Therefore, there was a substantial difference in the demography of the foot soldiers who were mostly Dalits and tribals, and the composition of the leadership of the Naxals. This has been used by Indian state and also those opposing Naxals for their violence, though Naxals have always rejected this by stating that they all support equality and have never discriminated against the Indian state.
The 2004 merger led to an escalation of violence and also in regions where violence was being unleashed. A favorite strategy of both PWG and MCC was to develop two kinds of centres or areas: areas which were liberated from the Indian state through continuous acts of violence fighting the Indian state, and areas where Maoists or Naxals escaped to and which were islands of peace, to be used for congregations or meetings but not attacked by them. So for example, regions in undivided Madhya Pradesh (Madhya Pradesh + Chhattisgarh) were to be used for secret meetings and congregations, while Andhra Pradesh and Bihar witnessed violence. (Bihar was then undivided as Bihar + Jharkhand).
With the merging of all Naxal and Maoist factions into one group, this led to a major change: while continuous attacks by Andhra police along with attacks by a specialized anti-Naxal force called the Greyhound formed by Andhra government led to alleged fake encounters and deaths of Naxal leaders, substantial developmental activities led to people of the region dumping Naxals to an extent as well, which led to a demise of Naxal activity in most of Andhra Pradesh, especially Telangana. It is alleged that Naxals today support the formation of Telangana only because their experience in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh suggests that it is far difficult for smaller states to organize enough financial resources and muscle power to tackle Naxals, and so they can be successful in a smaller state like Telangana as opposed to a larger state like Andhra Pradesh. Telangana supporters though have refused such reasons and termed them as excuses used by anti-Telangana activists and politicians who don't want to give justice to Telangana.
The reason why I bring this is because PWG was certainly strong in Telangana where its leadership and cadre was substantially wiped out (and most surprisingly considering that the YSR government of Andhra in 2004 had used Naxals to win elections and then called them for a peace process, which was suddenly cancelled in 2005 and their leaders and many cadres were killed in the open, which led to a substantial loss in strength of PWG). It has also been alleged repeatedly that at least in Andhra Pradesh, local politicians used Maoists as goons or local thugs to regularly win elections in return for financially supporting Maoists, either out of fear or also out of the need to win elections continuously and thereby get chance to seek more rents through other activities.
Once PWG and MCC were merged, the stage shifted from Andhra to Dantewada district in Chhattisgarh, which had seen Naxal activity but not to the extent seen since 2006. Naxals had been present in Chhattisgarh region for quite long and also were responsible for ensuring that tendu-leave collectors were able to get decent wages and female tendu-leave collectors were not harassed by their managers or contractors, by ensuring mass agitations. However, the threat of violence escalated sharply, considering that Naxals had now gained substantial strength in regions of Chhattisgarh which were not only densely forested and had a high concentration of tribals, but were also rich in mines of major minerals: iron ore, manganese, magnesium, coal and aluminium in particular.
The Naxals alleged that the central and state governments were only interested in treating tribals as a use-and-throw substance who would be kicked out of the forest land they have lived on since generations, in the name of developing the entire country, and they would not get any share of the profits earned but would instead lose the lone source of livelihood they possess. The Naxals also stated that considering the history of the Indian state which has been oppressive of tribals and has always stopped tribals from having any sort of control over resources which they have owned and lived with since long, and how tribals were never given education or proper health facilities but always used and thrown away when the work got over, the Indian state would never be interested in their development but instead, the so-called Indian developmental model would even lead to the extinction of tribal culture and tribals themselves. A similar sort of situation was also seen in Orissa where the Biju Janata Dal state government was accused by Naxals of helping industrialists and bourgeoisie while tramping on the rights of the downtrodden tribal community who have only suffered since independence. The Naxals also pointed out that tribals in many places which had mines of minerals below them, had been thrown out of their land in the name of development and had been never rehabilitated or compensated adequately. Worse, many tribal regions had never seen a properly functioning school or any government project. Moreover, any non-violent protest of tribals was met with violence by the Indian state in the name of fighting Naxalism and acting in the interest of the nation, thereby suggesting that the existence of the Indian state was itself not in the interest of the tribals and they should join the fight in overthrowing the state structure itself.
Meanwhile Manmohan Singh in 2006 declared Left-Wing Extremism (LWE), a new formal term for Maoists, as the single biggest challenge to the existence of the Indian state. And in Chhattisgarh, the Leader of Opposition from Congress party, Mahendra Karma, introduced "Salwa Judum" (meaning: Purification Hunt in Gondi language), where tribals armed with guns were engaged as Special Protection Officers (SPOs) to tackle the foot soldiers of Naxalism, who were also tribals. The Salwa Judum movement led to a major escalation of violence and increase in casualties in Dantewada district in Chhattisgarh, which the Naxals claimed as the major centre of their liberated area in India, which the Indian government refers to as the "Red Corridor". The Chhattisgarh government supported Salwa Judum, but SPOs, most of whom were not adults but around 16-18 years old (who could never become policemen as per police rules), combined with Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), were supposed to target Naxals. The reality though turned out to be far grim: villages were looted, villagers were treated as suspected Naxals and beaten and tortured in the name of extracting information and "teaching a proper lesson", women were raped and some forced to undertake prostitution and worse, cattle and poultry farms were looted and eaten up. Many villagers, particularly in liberated areas, had been forced to hide in the forests to escape the raids of Salwa Judum activists and SPOs, even though neither they supported Naxals nor the state action being perpetrated onto them. As one such villager confessed to Ramachandra Guha "Hum dono ke beech me pis gaye hain" (or in English: We are stuck in the middle of two forces: Naxals and the Indian states, and in deep shit).
The Naxals and Salwa Judum used to attack each other with even more ferocity, with several Salwa Judum SPOs having lost not only their lives but some with their bodies cut to pieces as well. Not only this, Naxals further introduced terror in areas controlled by them so that nobody dare become a spy for the government. Many people were assassinated by Naxals and even by Salwa Judum in the name of being a spy for the "enemy".
The Salwa Judum was finally banned by the Supreme Court in a landmark judgement in 2011, for violating human rights and the Constitution itself. It still continues as the state government has employed the same SPOs and formed an army in the name of Maa Danteshwari (a famous temple in Chhattisgarh), All these are strategic blunders because those who lost their lives at the hands of Salwa Judum activists and were uprooted from their own villages to declare themselves as being anti-Maoist, were far more likely to become Maoists than if their lives had remained untouched in the first place, and moreover, these were not well-equipped in the first place to tackle Naxals, nor were they an ideological buffer to Naxalism also.
But meanwhile, the government unofficially introduced "Operation Greenhunt", a coordinated operation across several states (Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal among others), to tackle Naxalism using the idea of first conquering an area and then making it a peace island which would be developed properly. This strategy was thoroughly criticized by Ajai Sahni who said that Maoists would easily target a place which was supposed to be conquered by CRPF and then developed, and the forces would be sitting ducks unless the entire region was sought to be cleaned. He also questioned the strategy since it was extremely difficult to separate the innocent villagers from the Naxals in Naxal-controlled areas, particularly since there was no Naxal army in uniform and the foot soldiers were as poor and similar looking as the innocent native tribals. Also, not all tribals were Maoists, and since the forces would be operating in areas with a lot of pressure and the threat of death looming large in their own minds, it was quite likely that they may kill innocent tribals out of suspicion or fear which will only trigger anger and generate sympathy or possible support for Maoists. Deeper psychological problems in the minds of CRPF would further lead to even rapes of women being justified in the name of controlling "Red Terror" as Naxalism is often referred to as, which would be useful for Maoists to further their own propaganda. Moreover, CRPF batallions are never trained to tackle Naxal violence but to instead tackle riot situations, which are quite different and difficult circumstances, and to re-train them would not be so easy. Plus the fact that it was quite difficult to follow Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in many areas simply because it was not plausible, that the terrain was inhospitable and in addition to Maoists malaria and other insect-caused diseases were also major problems, and that Maoists had a better knowledge of the terrain and ground support which CRPF did not have at all, as well as poor administrative capabilities of the state and dubious functioning of the state authorities which had a role to play in the building up of the problem to begin with, were all issues which CRPF could not tackle on their own.
The hopeless exercise of fighting Naxals through the idea of Salwa Judum and/or Operation Greenhunt has been shown to all through continuous massacres by Naxals of CRPF jawans, almost as if CRPF men were sitting ducks for Naxals. If it was not the Chintanalar massacre of 76 CRPF men in 2010, it was the capture of Collector of Sukma District in Chhattisgarh in 2012, or even the murder of Mahendra Karma who initiated Salwa Judum, in our current year, 2013.
And not to forget, when an attempt was being made to have peace talks between Maoists and the Central government, the man supposed to talk peace from the Maoist side, named Azad, was killed in a suspicious encounter by the Andhra police and the Maoists declared that they are not interested in a peace process any more. Azad interestingly wanted peace (or so he claimed) not because the Maoists wanted peace, but because the tribals deserved peace from the conflict between them and the Indian state, accusing the Indian government and its forces of treating the Indian Constitution like a toilet paper and not respecting it at all.
Kidnappings and ambushes are all a part to declare the intent of war on the Indian state or to get their own supporters released. But the real idea is to actually overthrow the Indian state.
Now let me add a few more paragraphs on my own views.
Firstly, not all tribals are Naxals, nor are all Naxals necessarily tribals, though there is a substantial part of intersection among the two, ie.. many Naxals are tribals and a substantial section among tribals is Naxal.
Secondly, most foot soldiers of Naxal groups are tribals, but they may not know what we mean by the Indian state. For them, the oppressive part of state structure is the patwari or the forest guard who does not allow them to cut branches of trees in forests, to live with forests, or to collect forest produce and sell them at reasonable wage rates, which they had been doing before the British came to India to regulate forests and which Indian government has been doing since Independence. They want their control over the forests while ensuring the sustainability of these forests, which they have been doing since generations. The tribals may not care about the Indian parliament, they may not care about their development or presence/absence of schools, hospitals or even others, but they do care about their dignity.
In other words, they have joined Naxalism not because they may want development but haven't got it (otherwise, most parts of the country which don't have Naxalism but remain underdeveloped would also have seen Naxalism or some such movement in the last 60 years). It is because they feel their dignity has been attacked or under threat due to actors belonging to Indian state. But they don't know what a state is, leave alone what the Indian state is. They attack the local police and landlords and also the forest guard or arms of the Indian state who oppress them in their day-to-day lives. If the Indian state just boycotts their development, they may not really go to war with the state. But because the Indian state wants the ores and mineral resources, the tribals feel their dignity and livelihood is in trouble and they are not going to be involved in the process of development, and so it's important for them to resist these projects because they will lose everything and gain nothing, while others talking of development will gain everything.
Many people who join Naxals may be doing so not necessarily because they believe in Naxal ideology or Maoism, but because they have suffered at the hands of the government or the police (fake encounters of Naxal cadres or loss of livelihood or family members in various ways or even loss of land etc. due to land being given away in the name of development) and so they think Naxalism is the only way to get justice. Many may have taken up guns to satisfy their own personal ambitions and motives which may be totally irrelevant to the ideology and motives of the whole movement/group. And there may be others who may be spies. So everyone may not be joining the movement for the same motive or believing in the same thing.
Third, the Indian state has certainly failed in solving basic issues of the tribals. Tribals have been living on forests for generations. Moreover, we have failed in addressing core issues for Dalits also: caste discrimination and treating Dalits as not being equal to upper castes in our society. Our state actors have unleashed atrocities or not fought against atrocities unleashed on these sections of the society, and these sections have perceived an attack on their dignity and violence as a way to counter it. We have not implemented the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas Act since long. Even the Forest Rights Act meant to give legal rights to tribals over forest land has seen very tardy implementation since its time of passage in 2006. And the idea of taking approval from gram sabha in tribal areas prior to construction of any development project in the area has been thrown to the winds both by the public and private sector in the name of development and high growth rates.
Fourth, the state of institutions (public in particular) and their functioning in the areas dominated by Naxalism, both before and after the emergence of Naxalism, has been nothing short of a disaster. Not only are those functioning on behalf of the state seen as supporting the rich and acting against the interests of the poor and the downtrodden, many a times they are themselves seen as unleashing atrocities in the name of personal vendetta on the downtrodden as well, particularly those indulging in non-violent protests either through fake encounters or sustained torture. Many institutions like schools and primary health centres have hardly functioned, with doctors not reporting at all. It's not that Naxals have not at all allowed schools and hospitals to functions, but they do want Naxal ideology to be taught in schools and also Naxal cadres to be treated in PHCs. Naxals have not stopped functioning of MGNREGA or Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in areas controlled by them either. However, the central government has accused Naxals of stopping developmental activity, which for the government somehow almost always means building of roads, which Naxals have stopped so as to make it difficult for Central forces to tackle the Naxals.
So while one can understand why roads are not being built, it is difficult to explain why schools, primary health centres and MGNREGA can't function properly if it can reduce problems of Naxal areas. This is also helping Naxals to gain tribals' trust more and more by themselves indulging in development schemes of various kinds.
One should however remember that Naxals are not some friends of the poor or Robin Hoods who are fighting against the rich. The Naxals believe like Mao that power flows from the barrel of the gun and so they can keep killing their enemies, which is against democratic culture which is the most important for the poor's voice to be heard, as opposed to a communist dictatorship which was there in USSR and hit the poor the most. Moreover, the Naxals have been known to brook no dissent and even kill dissenters in their kangaroo courts termed "people's courts" or Jan Adalat. Also, Naxals have been known as extortionists who have extorted money from rich industrialists so as to allow them to conduct mining or manufacturing against whom they claim to fight on behalf of the tribals. And moreover, Naxals have also formed alliances with political parties of all kinds and hues to help them win elections and gain favors such as reduced operations against them or money bags at other times.
So Naxals are not as evil as the state shows them to be, nor as great as they want themselves to be seen. They are somewhere in the middle. Both parts combine to form the entire truth.
Solution to Naxalism is something I would rather say somewhere else though, considering that this answer is way long in itself.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nax...
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http://www.outlookindia.com/arti...
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lis...
http://www.ipcs.org/pdf_file/iss...
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http://www.outlookindia.com/arti...
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