India, explained.
Bullet fragments recovered in Gadchiroli district, Maharashtra, following a Naxal attack (Satish Bate/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)
A communist insurgency in India has confoundedly persisted for decades.
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India’s Naxals: Why do they fight?India’s Naxals: Why do they fight?
A degree from a well-known engineering college in 1970s and ‘80s India served as a stepping stone towards a financially secure and respectable, if staid, life. That was not to be for some students of the Regional Engineering College in Warangal, a small city in south-central India.
As revolutionary fervour, indigenous and imported in equal parts, swept through the country’s educated middle-class youth, they joined a fledgling communist insurgency, which went on to become a recurring headache for the Indian state for more than half a century.
One of those rookie engineers, Nambala Keshava Rao, was killed by security forces in May. His death marks a pivotal moment in the history of India’s Naxalite movement, once described as the “greatest internal security threat” to the country. New Delhi assesses, with good reason, that Naxals are facing extinction, the elimination of a key leader being the coup de grâce.
Near its peak, around 2008, the Naxal insurgency had spread across nine states in eastern, southern and central India.
And yet, why they continue to persist in the first place is something of a mystery.
Could be it poverty? As two economists concluded from a detailed empirical analysis in 2017, the causal links between underdevelopment and Naxalism are anything but straightforward.
Could it be language and ethnicity? Near its peak, around 2008, the Naxal insurgency had spread across nine states in eastern, southern and central India, a veritable babel; Naxals came from upper and lower caste Hindu families and diverse tribes alike.
Could it be the political and social orientation of the country? Over the past 60 years – the rough span of the Naxal insurgency – the Indian state has experimented with socialism, state capitalism, left-style populism, liberalism, and conservative nationalism. Naxals apparently find all of them disagreeable.
The most important clue in demystifying the longevity of the Naxalite movement is its strongly ideological nature. It keeps going through sustained cultivation of an internally consistent belief system and supporting narratives that continue to find purchase for a variety of socio-economic reasons. It is the siren song of uncompromising and radical solutions to problems, real and imagined, that draw educated youth to the movement, not the problems themselves.
Consequently, when it comes to Naxals, political psychology and the emerging discipline of political neuroscience are excellent analytical guides.
A villager at Markegaon village, scene of a 2017 shoot out between police and Naxals in the region of Gadchiroli (Satish Bate/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)
In a landmark study of the Naxalite movement, the anthropologist Alpa Shah interrogates the motivations of the most committed adherents of Naxalism she encounters during her field research; men who, like Rao, had spent years, if not decades, waging an increasingly unwinnable war against the state.
Shah’s account makes it plain that the insurgents sorely lack a theory of victory, clear political goals that must be unambiguously achieved through strategic use of force. While criminality – in the form of extortion and protection payments – is a motivating factor for many Naxals, it too does not fully explain the story. Instead, in Shah’s telling, abstract notions of class struggle, social and economic justice, and tales of communist revolutions animate adherents, especially its upper-caste, educated leadership. They not only help the insurgents interpret the world around them and act accordingly, but also furnish a shared vocabulary. Ideology cements in-group ties amid tremendous hardship and significant personal sacrifices.
While for the rest of the world, the Indian society’s “feudal” nature would only be debated in sophomoric late-night bull sessions, for the Naxals it is an existential issue. To wit, agriculture accounts for only a little more than 18 per cent of India’s GDP, provides livelihoods for a minority (albeit a large one), and the country is urbanising rapidly. Therefore, some Naxals rightly apprehend that the entire movement, premised on an eventual large-scale rural uprising, is becoming moot, or worse, has been so for some time.
The extent to which arcane blinkers shape the Naxal worldview became clear in a secret memorandum the insurgent leadership had circulated in August last year, which identified “postmodernism” as one of the reasons behind eroding support. Meanwhile, Indian security forces eliminated some 300-odd Naxals last year alone, while the once-Naxal-hub Andhra Pradesh – Rao’s birthplace – became, by per capita income, one of the fastest growing Indian states.
But all this is not to argue that Naxals have been mostly talk and little action. They have been responsible for around 12,000 deaths (including that of more than 4000 civilians) over the past 25 years. But what is interesting is how most acts of Naxal terrorism resemble “propaganda of the deed” where the objective is “to galvanise … before offering an internally legitimate narrative”, as three experts of the phenomena noted in a 2008 RUSI report. After all, killing a significant number of security personnel in sporadic attacks – a common Naxal play – is sure to draw significant retribution, especially from a determined, numerically and materially superior adversary. Therefore, other than as spectacle for the wider world, and rousing the rank and file, they serve no meaningful political purpose.
Such is the causative power of ideological thinking.
District Reserve Guard personnel in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh state, in March, with authorities waging an offensive against the last vestiges of its Naxalite rebellion (Jalees Andrabi/AFP via Getty Images)
The global resurgence in extreme ideologies over the past decade or so has had a sole happy corollary, namely, a corresponding resurgence in insightful research in political psychology. A recent book by the neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod fleshes out a research program where commonalities between diverse ideologies – independent of political orientation – are teased out to reveal the underlying physiological, psychological and social bases of inflexible political convictions, the “epigenetics of extremism”, as she terms it.
As Indian policymakers commit themselves to ending the Naxal insurgency once and for all by next March, they would do well to pay heed to a key claim Zmigrod makes.
In her analysis, ideologies are the brain’s way of developing shortcuts that allow us to cope with an unpredictable world as well as create and strengthen social bonds, “to understand the world and be understood back”. A defining characteristic of ideological thinking is that it renders the mind resistant to the Bayesian template, where new evidence does not necessarily lead to rethinking of conclusions, or is processed in a way as to leave the conclusions intact. For Naxal ideologues, Indian society has hardly evolved over the past 50 years, economically or politically. As strange as it may seem, that has been a fundamental source of their allure.
The irony of course is that we are particularly susceptible to ideological thinking in times of great churn. And India is certainly amid one. It is quite likely that the Naxal insurgency, in its current form, will end, sooner rather than later. But it could yet be resurrected.
About the author
Abhijnan Rej
Abhijnan Rej is an Indian researcher and writer, the founder of Tarqeq Research LLP and has published extensively on Asian security and geopolitics.
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