The age of grand ideological coups died when the Berlin Wall fell and Deng Xiaoping sold socialism with stock options. – Ravi Shankar
There was a time when the Naxalite was more than a rebel with a cause, but the most dangerous idea in India. A whisper in JNU corridors, a surreptitiously exchanged pamphlet on a Calcutta tram, a teacher who vanished into the forests of Bastar. The image was romantic, even seductive: privileged young men and women, often from elite universities, giving up comfort and kin to fight for landless labourers and adivasis under Mao’s blood-red flag. They spoke of revolution in lyrical tongues. They carried revolvers and the Little Red Book. That time is gone. Late last week, security forces shot Naxal general secretary Basavaraju and left the Maoists without a leader for the first time in decades.
Revolutions are passé now—museum pieces in fatigues. The age of grand ideological coups died when the Berlin Wall fell and Deng Xiaoping sold socialism with stock options. China’s Communism today is less Mao, more Meituan: surveillance over slogans, control over conviction. And yet, deep in India’s forests, a few ragtag guerrillas with AK-47s and grenade launchers still recite from a decades-old script—hoping to ignite a revolution in a country busy upgrading to 5G. They are not philosopher-warriors quoting Marx under moonlight. Their war is not against oppression, but for survival. What remains of the insurgency is a sclerotic movement waging war against a world that no longer exists. Its language “class enemy” and “bourgeois state” feels lifted from a yellowing 1972 samizdat pamphlet. Their targets are policemen, forest contractors, or railway tracks, but their slogans have stopped echoing. Because India changed.
Smartphones light up even the darkest bastis. Aadhaar has woven a biometric net through villages. IT training centres are opening in Telangana’s interiors. A new aspirational nation has sprouted, not in Lutyens’ Delhi, but in government schools with cracked walls and dreams in English. The Maoists are not speaking to this generation. Instead they collect levies from tendu leaf contractors and gravel miners. They ban elections in revolution’s name but enforce extortion through fear. They attack school buildings, disrupt telecom towers, kill sarpanchs, and burn buses. Once the protectors of tribal dignity, they sabotage the very roads and clinics meant to serve the people. Mao’s ghost isn’t guiding them anymore. It’s haunting them.
The contradiction is bitter: the movement that began as an uprising against exploitation has, in many places, become a parallel system of drugs and duress. Local populations in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand often fear both sides: the police and the Naxalites. The Maoist cadre today is often composed of kidnapped minors, hardened forest-born fighters, and ideologues too deep in the game to walk away.
The future of resistance in India is not guns in the forest, but voices of conscience raised in the courtroom, viral videos on WhatsApp, and cartoonists defying FIRs. The battlefield has shifted from the jungle to the social media feed, the gram sabha, the RTI query. Mao famously said, “A revolution is not a dinner party” but nobody will throw a party for his abandoned anachronistic acolytes. Their evolution is now a protection racket, and a war of attrition waged on schoolchildren, nurses, and forest guards. A revolution must evolve, or it fossilises. This is why the Maoist insurgency feels past its sell-by date. Our era is tone-deaf to its belief. The logic of revolution made sense when the state is brittle and binaries are clear. But now, transformation is nimble, networked, and non-linear. Revolution, in short, was built for the 20th century. The 21st needs something smarter. – The New Indian Express, 1 June 2025
› Ravi Shankar is an author, columnist and editor in New Dehli.
Filed under: india | Tagged: communist guerrillas, CPI (M), maoist movement, naxalism, naxalite–maoist insurgency | Comments Off on Dead ideologies don’t make good guerrillas – Ravi Shankar
