India is home to one of the world's most ambitious social programmes - a jobs guarantee that gives every rural household the legal right to paid work. Launched in 2005 by a Congress party government, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) entitled every rural household to demand up to 100 days of paid manual work each year at a statutory minimum wage. This mattered in a country where 65% of 1.4 billion people live in rural areas and nearly half rely on farming, which generates insufficient income, accounting for just 16% of India's GDP. Providing unskilled public work across all but fully urban districts, the scheme has become a backbone of rural livelihoods, cushioning demand during economic shocks. It is also among the world's most studied anti-poverty programmes, with strong equity: over half of the estimated 126 million scheme workers are women, and around 40% come from "scheduled castes" or tribes, among the most deprived Indians The ruling Narendra Modi government, initially critical and later inclined to pare it back, turned to the scheme in crises - most notably during the Covid pandemic, when mass return migration from cities to villages sharply drove up demand for work. Economists say the scheme lifted rural consumption, reduced poverty, improved school attendance, and in some regions pushed up private-sector wages. Last week, the government introduced a new law that repeals and rebrands the scheme. The programme - renamed MGNREGA in 2009 to honour Mahatma Gandhi - has now dropped his name altogether. While the renaming drew the political heat, the more consequential changes lie in what the new law - known as G RAM G for short - actually does. It raises the annual employment guarantee from 100 to 125 days per rural household. It retains the provision that workers not given jobs within 15 days are entitled to an unemployment allowance. Under the original scheme, the federal government paid all labour wages and most material costs - roughly a 90:10 split with the states. Funding will now follow a 60:40 split between the federal government and most states. That could push states' contribution to 40% or more of total project cost. The federal government keeps control, including the power to notify the scheme and decide state-wise allocations. States remain legally responsible for providing employment - or paying unemployment allowances, even as the central government allocates $9.5bn for the scheme in the current financial year, ending next March. The government frames the reforms as a modernised, more effective, and corruption-free programme aimed at empowering the poor. "This law stands firmly in favour of the poor, in support of progress, and in complete guarantee of employment for the workers," says federal agriculture minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. Critics - including opposition parties, academics, and some state governments - warn that capping funds and shifting costs to states could dilute a rare legal right in India's welfare system. "It is the culmination of the long-standing drive for centralisation of the scheme under the Modi government. But it is more than centralisation. It is the reduction of employment guarantee to a discretionary scheme. A clause allows the federal government to decide where and when the scheme applies," Jean Dreze, a development economist, told me. Prof Dreze says the increase to 125 guaranteed workdays per household may sound like a major revamp, but is a "red herring". A recent report by LibTech India, an advocacy group, found that only 7% of rural households working on the scheme received the 100 days of work in 2023-24. "When the ceiling is not binding, how does it help to raise it? Raising wage rates, again, is a much better way of expanding benefits. Second, raising the ceiling is a cosmetic measure when financial restrictions pull the other way, " Prof Dreze notes. These and other concerns appear to have prompted a group of international scholars to petition the Modi government in defence of the original scheme, warning that the new funding model could undermine its purpose. "The [scheme] has captured the world's attention with its demonstrated achievements and innovative design. To dismantle it now would be a historic error," an open letter, led by Olivier De Schutter, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, warned. To be sure, the scheme has faced persistent challenges, including underfunding and delays in wage payments. West Bengal's programme, for example, has faced deep cuts and funding freezes since 2022, with the federal government halting funds over alleged non-compliance. Yet despite these challenges, the scheme appears to have delivered measurable impact. An influential study by economists Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus, and Sandip Sukhtankar found that the broader, economy-wide impacts of the scheme boosted beneficiary households' earnings by 14% and cut poverty by 26%. Workers demanded higher wages, land returns fell, and job gains were larger in villages, the study found. But many say the scheme's durability also underscores a deeper structural problem: India's chronic inability to generate enough non-farm jobs to absorb surplus rural labour. Agriculture has consistently lagged behind the broader economy, growing just 3% annually since 2001–02, compared with 7% for the rest of the economy. Critics such as Nitin Pai of the Takshashila Institution, a think-tank, argue that the scheme cushions distress but does little to raise long-term rural productivity, and may even blunt incentives for agricultural reform. "With [the scheme] we're merely treating a serious underlying malaise with steroids," said Mr Pai in a post on X. The government's Economic Survey 2023–24 questions whether demand under the scheme truly mirrors rural hardship. If that was the case, data should show higher fund use and employment in poorer states with higher unemployment, the survey says. Yet, it notes, Tamil Nadu, with under 1% of the country's poor, received nearly 15% of the scheme's funds, while Kerala, with just 0.1% of the poor, accounted for almost 4% of federal allocations. The survey adds that the actual work generated depends largely on a state's administrative capacity: states with trained staff can process requests on time, directly influencing how much employment is provided. Despite these anomalies, the case for the scheme remains strong in a country where many depend on low-income rural work and where the deeper challenge is the lack of quality employment. Even headline figures on rising labour participation in India can be misleading: more people "working" does not always mean better or more productive jobs. A recent paper by economists Maitreesh Ghatak, Mrinalini Jha and Jitendra Singh finds that the country's recent rise in labour force participation, especially among women, reflects economic distress rather than growth-driven job creation. The authors say the increase is concentrated in the most vulnerable forms of work: unpaid family helpers and self-employed workers, who have very low productivity and falling real earnings. "The recent expansion in employment reflects economic distress leading to subsistence work, rather than growth-driven better quality job creation," they say. The evidence suggests people are driven into subsistence work by necessity, not drawn into better-quality jobs by a stronger economy. This ensures that the world's largest jobs guarantee scheme will remain central to the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of Indians - whether the revamped version will strengthen it or undermine its impact remains to be seen. Source of the article

Orwell’s allegory didn’t make it to the screen exactly as he wrote it. One of the most celebrated books of the 20th century, George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a biting critique of totalitarianism. Published shortly after the end of World War II, the novella tells the story of farm animals who revolt against their human owner—only to see their rebellion corrupted from within. Beneath its barnyard setting, the fable is a pointed allegory for how the promise of the 1917 Russian Revolution descended into the tyrannical reign of Joseph Stalin. In his essay, Why I Write, Orwell admitted, “Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.” Upon its release on August 17, 1945, in England, the satirical novel quickly sold out its initial print run of 4,500 copies. When it hit American shelves in August 1946, it sold over half a million editions in its first year alone, according to Mark Satta, associate professor of philosophy and law at Wayne State University. Though reception to the story's satire was mixed, the book got the attention of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As Cold War tensions gripped the United States, the American government was searching for anti-Soviet propaganda to spread across the world. Animal Farm’s effective plot and messaging made it the perfect material to aid their battle against Stalin and his regime. The CIA wanted to bring Animal Farm to a much wider audience, reported The New York Times, by covertly backing a movie adaptation that downplayed the source material’s attacks on capitalism and amplified its opposition to communism. “It was perceived as having a simple story that would be accessible to families, children and people of all educational levels,” says Tony Shaw, the author of Hollywood's Cold War. “They wanted to make it clear to ordinary people that communism is a danger to you.” Behind the Scenes The CIA likely began to think about adapting Animal Farm shortly following Orwell’s death on January 21, 1950. After undercover agents bought the film rights from his widow Sonia Orwell, Louis de Rochemont—the filmmaker behind the monthly theatrical newsreels The March Of Time—was hired as an intermediary between the production and intelligence agency.  Rather than using an American animation company, the CIA hired Halas and Batchelor, run by a U.K.-based husband-and-wife team. “They didn’t use Hollywood because they wanted some distance. Using a British company made it look less like American propaganda,” explains Shaw. During this era of Joseph McCarthy's infamous communist accusations in Hollywood, the CIA also harbored suspicion towards American film companies. There was a belief that some individuals in Hollywood could not be trusted to keep the CIA's involvement a secret, says Shaw. Meanwhile, Halas and Batchelor had produced around 70 war information and propaganda films for the UK’s Ministry of Information and War Office during World War II.  Changing the Story Under orders from the CIA, de Rochemont told screenwriters Philip Stapp and Lothar Wolff to change various elements of Orwell’s plot to make its anti-Communist message clear. “They simplified the book and got rid of characters and elements that were very critical of capitalism,” says Shaw. This included making the character of Snowball the pig, who represented Leon Trotsky, much less sympathetic and more fanatical.  The biggest alteration was the conclusion. While the book ends in a pessimistic fashion, the movie finishes with the animals rallying together and triumphantly storming the farm against their new oppressors—the pigs who became indistinguishable from the humans they replaced. “They revolt and smash it down,” says Shaw. “This, to my reading, is a clear case of the CIA telling the people living under communism to revolt.” Despite its government-backing, when the movie finally hit cinemas in the US and UK in January of 1955, it underperformed. Unlike Orwell’s book, which was snuck behind the Iron Curtain, the film wasn’t distributed or spread around the Soviet Union. However, the adaptation did eventually find an audience in South America, where over the next few decades the U.S. government would aid coups in Brazil, Chile, the Dominican Republic and Ecuador to prevent the rise of communism. “Its other target would have been these developing countries, where power was up for grabs by the mid-'50s into the 1960s. That’s where the Cold War could have been won or lost," says Shaw.  The movie was also used as an educational tool in both Great Britain and the United States. Until the conclusion of the Cold War in 1991, it was regularly shown in schools to teenagers as a cautionary tale about the dangers of communism.  Culture the CIA Propagated  Animal Farm wasn’t the only piece of culture the CIA used in its covert fight against the Soviet Union. After learning that Stalin highlighted how racially divided the United States was to undermine its image of freedom, the CIA encouraged film studios to “insert a number of Black characters into films,” says Shaw. From the 1970s onwards, the CIA also helped to promote rock music in the Soviet Union and East Germany, all with the intention of destabilizing the Eastern bloc. While it’s impossible to quantify the impact culture had on the ultimate downfall of the Soviet Union, historians over the last two decades have analyzed what people bought, listened to and watched in the lead-up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.  “I don't think it's any doubt that American propaganda played a critical role in helping the West win the Cold War,” says Shaw. “The amount of effort the American government put into film and culture tells us that they thought they were getting some reward and that it worked.” Source of the article

India’s Maoist guerillas have just surrendered, after decades of waging war on the government from their forest bases On 6 April 2010, a company of India’s central paramilitary soldiers came under attack from Maoist guerrillas in the central-eastern state of Chhattisgarh. The Maoists, who had turned this region into their stronghold, had laid a trap. With little training and scant knowledge of the Amazon-like jungle, the Indian soldiers found themselves ambushed. They fought back, but they could not escape the ambush. Seventy-five soldiers and a state policeman accompanying them were killed. Never before had the Indian forces suffered so many casualties in a single incident, not even in Kashmir, where, for more than 20 years, they had been fighting a protracted battle against Islamist extremists. As the body bags of the soldiers reached their native places in different parts of India, a deep sense of anger generated among people who till recently had only a vague idea about who these Maoists were, and even less about the hinterland that the Maoists had turned into a guerrilla zone. Since the mid-2000s, the Maoists had grown in strength, launching audacious attacks against government forces and looting police armouries and declaring certain areas as ‘liberated zones’. Their operations ran in a contiguous arc of land, from Nepal’s border in the east to the Deccan Plateau in the south – an area the Maoists called Dandakaranya or DK, using the name in its historical sense. This is a region where India’s indigenous people, the Adivasis, lived; it also holds valuable minerals and other natural resources in abundance. The Indian state wanted control over the natural resource wealth, but the Maoists were proving to be an obstacle. Then, in 2009, the then prime minister Manmohan Singh called them India’s ‘greatest internal security threat’. On the morning of the attack in 2010, I’d landed in a part of DK, in a city a three-hour car ride from the edge of a town beyond which was a forest ruled by Maoists. From there, if one started walking, one would, without getting on to a motorable road, reach the spot of the Maoist ambush. There would be only a sprinkling of tiny hamlets, inhabited by Adivasis, who thought of Maoists as the ‘government’. Beyond that, they had very little idea of life outside, least of all the blitzkrieg of ‘India Shining’, a political campaign by a previous government (the conservative BJP), which had in spirit continued to exist as a cursor to economic optimism. The scrawny man – I’ll call him ‘A’ – who came to pick me up from the railway station on his battered motorcycle was a former Maoist. He was also a Dalit, the so-called ‘lower-caste’ people at the bottom of the Hindu caste system, who, like the Adivasis, have been historically maltreated in India. He lived in a slum and had been recruited in the 1980s, along with several others in the city, by a woman Maoist. After a few years, ‘A’ had quit the party to raise a family. Life outside had been harder than inside the forest. For people like ‘A’, it was difficult to come out of the poverty and bitterness that came with their ascriptive status in the caste system. He struggled with odd jobs, and in the night drank heavily and sang resistance songs by the yard to temporarily rid himself of the bile. People had begun to talk of a ‘trillion-dollar economy’, while in some areas the poor would still die of hunger I’d spend a day or two in that city and then travel towards the edge of the town, from where a Maoist sympathiser would pick me up from a stipulated spot. After a bike or jumpy tractor ride, followed by a walk of several hours, contact with a Maoist squad would be established. From there, I would travel with them, sometimes for weeks, from one hamlet to another, crossing rivers and hills, evading bears and venomous snakes, hoping that, once I returned, I wouldn’t be gripped by a fever, which could indicate malaria, endemic in these areas. Twelve years earlier, my own history had prompted my interest in Kashmir and the Maoists. My family belonged to the small Hindu minority in Kashmir – the only Muslim-majority state in an otherwise Hindu-majority India. In 1990, we were forced to leave, as Islamist extremists began targeting the Hindu minority. In a few months, the entire community of roughly 350,000 people was forced into exile. For journalists, though, that expulsion was not very newsworthy. As the Indian forces began conducting operations against militants, resulting in brutal clampdowns and sometimes excesses against civilians, Kashmir became a dangerous place. But, for journalists, it turned into a harbinger of awards, of grants and fellowships. I decided to go away from Kashmir, not at first by design, but by a chance trip to the guerrilla zone. I had barely travelled beyond Delhi, just a few hundred miles south of Kashmir. But, as I began exploring the mainland further, I ended up in hinterland areas where India’s poorest of the poor lived. In the new India, where people had begun to randomly drop into conversations terms such as ‘trillion-dollar economy’, these areas still remained where the poor would die of hunger. What I saw in my journeys into rural India came as a revelation; in contrast, my own exile, of leaving a modest but comfortable home and instead facing the humiliation of living in a run-down room in exile in Jammu city, seemed bearable. Maoists weren’t yet receiving a lot of attention. The prime minister Singh’s pronouncement about Maoists was more than 10 years away, so it was difficult to convince editors to cover them, but I persisted, mostly because I felt that I was receiving a real education, one that a journalism school would never offer. In these years, the lack of government interest in the Maoists was an advantage – one could travel easily to DK without invoking the suspicion of the security apparatus. When I said goodbye to ‘A’ and headed into the forest from where DK began, I knew I’d have to be more cautious. I had avoided spending more than a few hours in the city where we’d met; a hotel reservation could give me away, and the police would put me under surveillance. By the afternoon of the next day, I was in a Maoist camp, under a tarpaulin sheet, meeting, among others, Gajarla Ashok, a Maoist commander, and another senior leader, a woman called Narmada Akka. Like most of the Maoist leadership, they both came from urban areas. These leaders had been teachers, engineers, social scientists and college dropouts, moved by the idea of revolution. They had come to DK with the same dream of establishing an Indian Yan’an (the birthplace of the Chinese communist revolution). But the core of Maoist recruitment came from the Adivasis, and before that from the working class and peasantry among Dalits and other ‘backward’ communities. The Maoists had decided to enter Chhattisgarh and its adjoining areas (which comprised DK) in the early 1980s. That was their second effort to bring about a revolution. An earlier attempt had been made in a village called Naxalbari in West Bengal, in the late 1960s. Peasants, who tilled the fields of landlords and received only a minuscule proportion of the harvest, rose against the iniquity of their small share. The rebellion was inspired by members of the mainstream Communist Party of India, who had begun to grow disillusioned with their organisation. This questioning had also taken place in other parts of the world. In France, for example, during the May 1968 Leftist student protests, the postwar Left came to be seen as an obstacle to real social transformation. What do we win by replacing ‘the employers’ arbitrary will with a bureaucratic arbitrary will?’ asked the Marxist thinker André Gorz. A similar sentiment had been expressed almost 40 years earlier by an Indian revolutionary, Bhagat Singh, whom the British then hanged in 1931 at the age of 23. In a letter to young political workers a month before his hanging, Singh warned that the mere transfer of power from the British to the Indians would not suffice, and that there was a need to transform the whole society: You can’t ‘use’ him [the worker and the peasant] for your purpose; you shall have to mean seriously and to make him understand that the revolution is going to be his and for his good. The revolution of the proletariat and for the proletariat. Singh’s prescription proved to be right. Even as the prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, whose commitment to social justice could not be doubted, took over from the British in 1947, the poor and the marginalised communities like the Dalits and Adivasis continued to remain outside the welfare circle of his five-year plans. Feudalism did not go away. Land reforms to break up the feudal concentrations of wealth and power were initiated, but the rich and the powerful also found means to circumvent the law. The rich quickly joined politics, and the police acted as their private militia. As recently as 2019, a survey by the Indian government revealed that 83.5 per cent of rural households owned less than one hectare of land. The government’s Planning Commission figures (1997-2002) put the landless among Dalits at 77 per cent, while among the Adivasis it was 90 per cent. The government’s National Sample Survey in 2013 revealed that about 7 per cent of landowners owned almost half of the total land share. Small guerrilla squads began to indulge in ‘class annihilation’, killing hundreds of landlords In the 1960s, these disillusioned communists felt that the Communist Party of India had grown complacent and corrupt, and that its leaders were ‘conscious traitors to the revolutionary cause’. They made their case in long papers and articles full of communist jargon in publications like Deshabrati, People’s March and Liberation. The essence of their indictment was that the poor and the working class had been let down by the parliamentary Left. In 1969, these breakaway communists formed their own party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), which announced its aim to unite the working class with the peasantry and seize power through armed struggle. They sought help from China, which was quick to offer it, calling the uprising ‘a peal of spring thunder’. Some of the men inspired by Mao travelled to China through Nepal and Tibet, receiving political training from Mao’s associates. The Maoist message spread from Naxalbari to other parts of India, like Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab and Kerala. Inspired by its main leader, Charu Majumdar, small guerrilla squads began to indulge in ‘class annihilation’, killing hundreds of landlords and their henchmen, policemen and other state representatives. ‘To allow the murderers to live on means death to us,’ Majumdar declared. Liberation, the party’s mouthpiece between the years 1967-72, is full of reports of killings of landlords, and how land and other property they owned had been ‘confiscated’ by peasant guerrillas. In practice, however, ‘class annihilation’ proved counterproductive. On the streets of Calcutta (today’s Kolkata), for example, naive men from elite colleges would roam around with crude bombs and even razors with which they attacked lone policemen. Nonetheless, in the late 1960s, the Naxalbari movement inspired thousands of bright men and women from elite families studying at prestigious schools. They said goodbye to lucrative careers and made the feudal areas, where the poor faced the utmost oppression, their workplace. Beginning in July 1971, a brutal government response killed hundreds of Indian Maoists, probably including their leader Majumdar; he died in police custody in 1972. Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, popularly known as KS, was one of those dissatisfied with the shape that the parliamentary Left had taken in India. He was a school teacher in Andhra Pradesh, which had a long history of feudalism and communist struggles. In the state’s North Telangana area, bordering Chhattisgarh, for example, feudal customs of slavery like vetti were still being practised decades after India became free. KS, a former member of the Communist Party of India, had not lost all hope, and decided to join hands with Majumdar’s line. But before he could restart, he decided the Maoists needed a rear base, just like Mao had urged, for the guerrillas to hide in the forest. The other amendment to Majumdar’s line was with regards to the formation of overground organisations to further the cause of revolution, something that Majumdar had strongly opposed. In 1969, KS sent a young medical student to a forest area in North Telangana to explore the possibility of creating the rear base. But in the absence of any support, the lone man could not achieve anything and had to return. In the mid-1970s, KS sent yet another man, this time a little further inside, into Chhattisgarh. Spending a few months inside, the man, who had acquired basic medical training, started treating the poor tribals. But, again, how much could one man or two do? So, he returned as well. So KS made another change in strategy – he took the Maoists out of the shadows and founded a few organisations that, on the surface, were civic associations, but were meant to further the Maoist ideology. Prominent among these was the Radical Students Union (RSU), launched in October 1974. Along with a cultural troupe, Jana Natya Mandali, young RSU members began a ‘Go to Village’ campaign on KS’s instructions. In this campaign, the young student radicals and ardent believers in the armed struggle would try to make villagers politically ‘conscious’. The ‘Go to Village’ campaign enjoyed some initial success, attracting students and other young people from working-class backgrounds. Hundreds of young people in universities and other prestigious institutions in Andhra Pradesh left their studies and vowed to fight for the poor. Fourteen students from Osmania University in what was then Andhra’s capital, Hyderabad, joined; 40 from other parts of the state joined the Maoist RSU. The Maoists’ ‘Go to Village’ campaign found fertile ground in the town of Jagtial, in the state’s Karimnagar district. There, as across Andhra, people celebrate the festival Bathukamma, which includes theatre performances in villages that were home to landlords from the dominant castes. The caste segregation of the villages was complete: the landlords lived in the village centre, while the Dalits lived on its periphery. But now in Jagtial, the Dalit labourer Lakshmi Rajam took the performance to the Dalit quarters. Another Dalit man, Poshetty, occupied a piece of government-owned wasteland, which would usually be in the landlords’ control. These acts enraged the landlords, who killed both these Dalit activists. As the Maoists pushed on, the state retreated, and the Adivasis began to exert their rights over the forest On 7 September 1978, under the influence of the Maoists, tens of thousands of agricultural labourers from 150 villages marched through the centre of Jagtial. The march was led by two people, one of them Mupalla Laxmana Rao, alias Ganapathi. He came from Karimnagar itself and would become KS’s closest confidante, later taking over from him to become the Maoist chief. The other was Mallojula Venkateshwara Rao, alias Kishenji, a science graduate, who would prove to be an efficient leader and military commander. The Jagtial march rattled some landlords so much that they fled to cities. The poor also decided to boycott the landlords who would not agree to any land reforms. Services that the poor provided – washer men, barbers, cattle feeding – were denied to the landlords. This strike led to further backlash from landlords, as reported by the respected Indian civil rights activist K Balagopal. From these village campaigns, KS decided to move ahead and try to create a guerrilla zone where armed squads would mobilise peasants and contest state power. In June 1980, seven squads of five to seven members entered the hinterland – four of them in North Telangana, two in Bastar in Chhattisgarh, and one in Gadchiroli in Maharashtra, an area where the Adivasis lived. They were mostly food-gatherers, and their life had remained unchanged for hundreds of years. Abundant mineral wealth lay in the land under where the Adivasis lived, but they lacked even basic modern services like education and healthcare. Petty government representatives like forest guards would harass the Adivasis for using resources like wood, citing archaic forest laws. At first, the Adivasis did not welcome the presence of the Maoists. However, before long, a kind of alliance between them developed, where the common enemy now was the state. As the Maoists pushed on, the state retreated, and the Adivasis began to exert their rights over the forest. In many areas, the feudal landlords were served ‘justice’ like Mao had dictated. In 1980, the Swedish writer Jan Myrdal visited the Maoists, and one of the comrades told him of an incident from North Telangana, which Myrdal recounts in his book India Waits (1986). A notorious rowdy there had instilled fear among the people on behalf of his master, a landowner. He raped a washer-girl. In shame, she jumped into a well and drowned herself. When the Maoists came to know of it, four of them, till recently students, called him out in the bazaar. When he arrived, the rebels caught him with a lasso, cut off his hands and nailed them to a wall inside a shop. The rough vigilante justice inspired more young people to join the Maoists: men like Nambala Keshava Rao, a graduate of the much-respected Warangal engineering college, and Patel Sudhakar Reddy, who held a master’s degree from Osmania. It also brought in young women like Maddela Swarnalata and Borlam Swarupa. Swarnalata came from a poor Dalit family and was recruited through the Radical Students Union. In the early 1980s, she’d taken part in clashes against Right-wing student groups, especially the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad. The police would follow her and pressurise her into revealing details of her comrades who had already gone underground. Soon it became impossible to avoid arrest, so she too went underground, joining a Maoist squad, before dying in an encounter with the police in April 1987. Meanwhile, Swarupa had become active through campaigns with farmers’ groups for a better price for their crops. The Maoist leadership placed her as a labourer in a biscuit factory in Hyderabad, in order to recruit among workers there. Once she’d been exposed, Swarupa was asked to shift to the guerrilla zone, where she became the first woman commander, leading a squad in North Telangana, until she was killed in an encounter in February 1992. One of the prominent features of the Maoist movement is the way it attracted women to its fold. For women from the working class, who led difficult lives under a patriarchal mindset, joining the Maoists felt like a liberation. Recruits to the Maoists often attracted their friends, siblings and other family members to join too. Doug McAdam, professor of sociology at Stanford University in California, has written about this ‘strong-tie’ phenomenon, in which personal connections draw people into ‘high-risk activism’ of violence. In Bastar and elsewhere, the Maoist guerrillas targeted people and agencies they considered exploiters. For example, they started to negotiate better rates for the collection of tendu leaves, used in the manufacture of local cigarettes, which was a lucrative business. But along with that, they also started to take cuts from businessmen for running their organisations. The Norwegian anthropologist Bert Suykens, who has studied the tendu leaf business, called it a joint extraction regime. The Maoists also began to extort a levy from corporate houses involved in mining in these areas, as well as from government contractors. In the process, they deviated from their promise – of returning the forest to the Adivasis, and of helping the poor. They spent most of their time running their organisation and launching attacks against government forces. In her research in central Bihar in 1995-96, the Indian sociologist Bela Bhatia concluded that the Maoist leaders ‘have taken little interest in enhancing the quality of life in the villages.’ In fact, these leaders regarded development ‘as antagonistic to revolutionary consciousness,’ she wrote in 2005. In the meantime, the Indian state was growing impatient with the Maoists. In 2010, a London-based securities house report predicted that making the Maoists go away could unlock $80 billion of investment in eastern and central India. New Delhi began preparations for a large-scale operation to get rid of them. But, before that, the extraordinary arrest in 2009 of the Maoist ideologue Kobad Ghandy in Delhi heightened political interest in the insurgents. Special police agents from Andhra Pradesh had managed to locate Ghandy, who had been living in a slum using fake identification. He came from an elite Parsee family in Mumbai; his father was the finance director of Glaxo; he had studied with India’s political dynasts at the elite Doon School, and had then gone to London to pursue further education as an accountant. In the UK, he was introduced to radical politics, and returned to Mumbai in the mid-1970s, where he met Anuradha Shanbag, a young woman from a family of notable Indian communists and a student of Elphinstone College in Mumbai. Shanbag and Ghandy were both drawn to Maoism, fell in love and married. Soon afterwards, in 1981, they met KS in Andhra Pradesh and shifted to a slum area in a city where Shanbag recruited my friend ‘A’ and others. In 2007, Shanbag was promoted to the Maoist Central Committee, a rare accomplishment for a woman. A year later, however, she died from complications due to malaria she had contracted in a guerilla zone. After Ghandy’s arrest in 2009, rumours arose that he had been sent to work among the labourers as part of the Maoists’ urban agenda. His arrest became a hot topic in Delhi circles: for the first time, it sparked interest in the Maoist movement among people who did not bother to read a newspaper beyond its Fashion section. Ghandy’s abandonment of his elite background to fight for the poor created a wave of empathy for the Maoist movement. Around the time of his arrest, I got a rare opportunity to meet the Maoist chief, Ganapathi. The meeting happened by chance. Through some overground sympathisers, he had learnt that I was in a city close to the guerrilla zone in which he was then hiding. By this time, state surveillance was at its peak, and the Maoist leadership was extremely cautious of any contact with outsiders. Ganapathi in particular barely met anyone except his commanders. After days of travel through the guerrilla zone, I was allowed to record our conversation on a digital device provided by his men. After Ganapathi left the area, I transcribed the interview, but even that I was not allowed to carry with me. A month later, I received the transcript through one of his overground workers in Delhi. As part of its anti-Maoist operation, the government began to push infrastructure A few months later, in 2010, while I spent time with the Maoist leaders Gajarla Ashok and Narmada Akka in their camp, I sent a questionnaire to Ganapathi. His reply came a few weeks later, in which he made mention of the importance of work in urban areas: ‘If Giridih [a small town in the east] is liberated first, then based on its strength and on the struggles of the working class in Gurgaon [now Gurugram, a satellite city close to Delhi where most multinational corporations have their offices], Gurgaon will be liberated later. This means one is first and the other is later.’ It was a tall order. There were innumerable problems in cities, including poverty. But with the liberalisation of the 1990s, middle-class insularity had made most people oblivious of the suffering of others. The Maoists wanted to make inroads through slums and labour unions, but did not find enough reception. The curiosity and empathy the Maoists generated among ordinary people in cities soon dissipated. The conservative BJP, which was rising to national power, relentlessly used Kashmir to rouse Hindu sentiment in mainland India. In the first decade of 2000, Islamist radicals targeted mainland India, creating friction with the Muslim minority. The Indian Parliament had come under attack in 2001; Mumbai city faced a terrorist attack in 2008. Between these, many Indian cities like Delhi, Hyderabad, Varanasi and Jaipur were targeted with bomb blasts, killing scores of people. At the same time, the overground sympathisers of the Maoist movement began hobnobbing with separatist elements from Kashmir and India’s Northeast, which had a long history of secessionism, and these potential alliances stirred controversy. This resulted in a backlash against Maoist sympathisers, and a new term was coined for them: ‘urban Naxal’. Hindu nationalism was on the rise in India and, in the coming years, this term would become a ruse for the government to suppress all activism, resulting in the incarceration of civil rights activists like the human rights lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj. What also did not help is the number of body bags – of forces killed in Maoist ambushes – going to different parts of the country. As part of its anti-Maoist operation, the government began to push infrastructure – primarily roads and mobile/cellphone towers – in the Maoist-affected areas. It led to further entrenchment of state forces, which also weakened the Maoists. Their leaders who were in hiding in cities began to be hunted down. The new roads and phone towers were welcomed by rural people. The Maoists began killing Adivasis on suspicion of being police informers. This violence alienated Adivasis, and others too. Earlier, the Maoists would visit a village in the night and slip away. Even if their presence was reported, it was of no use to security forces because the information would reach them quite late. But now, with cellphone networks, the people could call immediately, leading to encounters between the Maoists and state security forces. Since about 2020, the decline of India’s Maoist movement has been rapid. The Maoist commander Ashok – whom I had met in the forest in 2010 – surrendered in 2015. One of his brothers had already died in an encounter. Meanwhile, Akka was arrested in 2019 in Hyderabad where she was seeking treatment for cancer; she died in a hospice three years later. The government raised a special battalion of Adivasis, which included surrendered Maoists, to hunt down the Maoists. It started getting big results. In May this year, Nambala Keshava Rao, who had taken over as the Maoist chief from Ganapathi in 2018, was killed in a police encounter. A few weeks later, another of Ashok’s brothers, a senior commander, was also killed by police. The entire Maoist leadership, barring a few, has been wiped out. Ashok has, of late, joined the Indian National Congress Party. ‘A’ has not been in touch in the last few years, ever since some of his friends were arrested as ‘urban Naxals’. A friend of his told me the other day that he has stopped interacting with people. A month ago, a friend in Gurugram told me of an incident where he lives. His local Resident Welfare Association had put a cage in their park, with a banana inside it to lure marauding monkeys in the vicinity. A few hours later, they found that the banana had been consumed by someone and the peel left outside the cage. It made me imagine how hungry that person would have been, most likely a poor worker. The friend sent me a screenshot of the residents association’s WhatsApp group. ‘Check the CCTV,’ someone had written. The Maoists have completely surrendered now, asking the government to accept a ceasefire. A statement released this September, purportedly by part of the Maoist leadership, apologises to people, saying that, in the process of revolution, the leadership made several tactical mistakes, and that the ceasefire was now important to stop the bloodshed. What those mistakes are, the letter wouldn’t say. As anti-Maoist operations go on with even more rigour, a handful of those still inside the forest will ultimately surrender or be killed. How history remembers them is too early to say; but it is a fact that, had it not been for them, the much-needed focus on the hinterland of DK would not have been there. However, to the man in Gurugram who stole the banana, and to the man in Giridih, who doesn’t even have a banana in sight, it means nothing. Source of the article