Author: Gautam Navlakha Publisher: Penguin UK ISBN: 8184756542 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 207
Book Description
A report from the epicenter of the Naxalite war In its war against the Maoists, it is the Indian state that usually gets to tell its side of story. But official explanations are not meant to convey truth. Most often they attempt to cover up the reality and obscure it. The claim that only one warring side has the right to propagate its views whereas the other does not because they are projected as ‘enemy’ is questionable when we know there are two sides to any conflict and where both sides comprise our own people. In this situation of internal war, not satisfied with the knowledge offered by books and documents, Gautam Navlakha went into the heart of Bastar to get to know the Maoists first hand. This book is an account of the fortnight he spent in the guerilla zone where the Maoists run their people’s government, the Jantana Sarkar. His enquiry unflinching and his perspective critical but partisan, Navlakha succeeds in the difficult task of making the demonized human, laying bare the heartland of rebellion.
Author: Alpa Shah Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022659047X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 357
Book Description
Winner of the 2020 Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Book Prize Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize Shortlisted for the New India Foundation Book Prize Anthropologist Alpa Shah found herself in an active platoon of Naxalites—one of the longest-running guerrilla insurgencies in the world. The only woman, and the only person without a weapon, she walked alongside the militants for seven nights across 150 miles of dense, hilly forests in eastern India. Nightmarch is the riveting story of Shah's journey, grounded in her years of living with India’s tribal people, an eye-opening exploration of the movement’s history and future and a powerful contemplation of how disadvantaged people fight back against unjust systems in today’s world. The Naxalites have fought for a communist society for the past fifty years, caught in a conflict that has so far claimed at least forty thousand lives. Yet surprisingly little is known about these fighters in the West. Framed by the Indian state as a deadly terrorist group, the movement is actually made up of Marxist ideologues and lower-caste and tribal combatants, all of whom seek to overthrow a system that has abused them for decades. In Nightmarch, Shah shares some of their gritty untold stories: here we meet a high-caste leader who spent almost thirty years underground, a young Adivasi foot soldier, and an Adivasi youth who defected. Speaking with them and living for years with villagers in guerrilla strongholds, Shah has sought to understand why some of India’s poor have shunned the world’s largest democracy and taken up arms to fight for a fairer society—and asks whether they might be undermining their own aims. By shining a light on this largely ignored corner of the world, Shah raises important questions about the uncaring advance of capitalism and offers a compelling reflection on dispossession and conflict at the heart of contemporary India.
Author: Bidyut Chakrabarty Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317668057 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 263
Book Description
Left radicalism in India was rooted in the nationalist movement and was set in motion in the 1920s with the formation of the communist party. The communist movement manifested itself differently in each phase of India’s political history and Communism continues to remain a meaningful alternative ideological discourse in India. This book examines left politics in India focusing on its rise, consolidation and relative decline in the present century. Left radicalism in India is a distinct ideological phenomenon which is articulated in two complementary ways: while the parliamentary left remains social democratic in character, its bête noire, the left wing extremists, continue to uphold the classical Marxist, Leninist and Maoist notion of violent revolution. By concentrating on the nature and also activities of these two versions of left radicalism, this book is a thorough study of the phenomenon. The author analyses the states of Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura and presents a variety of case studies of communist movements. He argues that the political power of the left parties depends on the degree to which they have built organizational strength, political hegemony and a broad social base through legal and extra-parliamentary struggles. An in-depth study of socio-economic circumstances that remain critical in conceptualizing radical extremism, Left Radicalism in India will be of interest to those studying Indian Politics, South Asian History, Development Studies and Global Politics.
Author: Sumantra Bose Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 067472819X Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 349
Book Description
A nation of 1.25 billion, India is the world's most diverse democracy. Drawing on his extensive fieldwork and experience of Indian politics, Sumantra Bose tells the story of democracy's evolution in India since the 1950s and describes the challenges it faces today: from poverty and inequality to Maoist revolutionaries and Kashmir secessionists.
Author: Santosh Paul Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000059235 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 199
Book Description
This book presents the raging debate on one of the most brutal political realities that India has confronted in recent years: the rising conflict between Maoist insurgent groups and the Indian State. With some of the finest writings on the subject, it brings together articles and interviews from leading authors, politicians, journalists, intellectuals, filmmakers and legal practitioners. The volume straddles between two apparently irreconcilable perspectives: (a) the view that the Maoist movement threatens the very core of democratic foundations, and should be perceived as a violent law & order situation justifying severe retaliatory measures, and (b) the counterview where Maoists are fiercely defended as revolutionaries and comrades of resistance, and the movement seen as the last-ditch struggle by those who have been abandoned over years by the State in its developmental process. The essays probe whether armed struggle is avoidable, whether the desperate desire for peace has simply been overtaken by political ideologies, and whether an inclusive developmental State policy may help restore faith in its democratic ethos. The book will be of interest to academics and students of politics, sociology, social anthropology and law. It will also be extremely useful to social workers, policymakers, politicians, bureaucrats, as well as the general reader.
Author: Stuart Corbridge Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317610458 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 198
Book Description
As India emerges as a major economic power, producing dollar billionaires rising at the rate of 17 per year, more than 800 million Indians eke out a living on less than two dollars a day. This book takes the reader to the underbelly of the Indian boom, an India that is not shining but is struggling to survive. From the Indo-Soviet Bhilai Steel Plant in Chhattisgarh, where an aristocracy of labour is increasingly being replaced by a more vulnerable contract labour force, we move to the banks of the Hoogly River. Here, Norwegian shipping companies exploit a precarious labour force that is as vulnerable to the vagaries of global finance and its crisis as the elderly, especially women and wage-workers, who live in the slums of Chennai. Also in Tamil Nadu, but this time in Tiruppur, we find that the garment and textile industries boom has nurtured new regimes of debt bondage among industrial workers. Though public concern about the vulnerability in which poor people find themselves has resulted in new nation-wide schemes framed in the language of rights, we find in Bihar and Madhya Pradesh that the practical workings of these schemes are dependent on the regional political systems in which they are enmeshed. We end in the belly of the Maoist-inspired Naxalite insurgency, denounced by the Indian government as the country’s greatest security challenge, where the poor are being mobilised to rise against the injustices of the Indian state. This book was originally published as a special issue of Economy and Society.
Author: Gita Dharampal Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 1479806013 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 344
Book Description
Modern Indian studies have recently become a site for new, creative, and thought-provoking debates extending over a broad canvas of crucial issues. As a result of socio-political transformations, certain concepts—such as ahimsa, caste, darshan, and race—have taken on different meanings. Bringing together ideas, issues, and debates salient to modern Indian studies, this volume charts the social, cultural, political, and economic processes at work in the Indian subcontinent. Authored by internationally recognized experts, this volume comprises over one hundred individual entries on concepts central to their respective fields of specialization, highlighting crucial issues and debates in a lucid and concise manner. Each concept is accompanied by a critical analysis of its trajectory and a succinct discussion of its significance in the academic arena as well as in the public sphere. Enhancing the shared framework of understanding about the Indian subcontinent, Key Concepts in Modern Indian Studies will provide the reader with insights into vital debates about the region, underscoring the compelling issues emanating from colonialism and postcolonialism.
Author: Alf Gunvald Nilsen Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108759017 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 334
Book Description
In Adivasis and the State, Alf Gunvald Nilsen presents a major study of how subalternity is both constituted and contested through state-society relations in the Bhil heartland of western India. The book unravels the historical processes that subordinated Bhil Adivasi communities to the everyday tyranny of the state and investigates how social movements have mobilised to reclaim citizenship. In doing so, the book also reveals how collective action from below transform the meanings of governmental categories, legal frameworks, and universalising vocabularies of democracy. At the core of the book lies a concern with understanding the dialectics of power and resistance that give form and direction to the political economy of democracy and development in contemporary India. Towards this end, Adivasis and the State contributes a sustained and nuanced Gramscian analysis of hegemony in order to interrogate the possibilities and limits of subaltern political engagement with state structures.
Author: Gautam Navlakha
Author: Alpa Shah
Author: Bidyut Chakrabarty
Author: Bidyut Chakrabarty
Author: Sumantra Bose
Author: Santosh Paul
Author: Stuart Corbridge
Author: Gita Dharampal
Author: Dilip Hiro
Author: Alf Gunvald Nilsen