Word: maoists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...longer. The Naxalite resurgence began in 2004 when the two biggest splinters of the original movement - one Marxist and one Maoist - set aside their differences and joined to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The combined force - which Indian government security officials and independent analysts now estimate at between 10,000 and 20,000 armed fighters plus at least 50,000 active supporters - has quickly consolidated power across great swathes of India's poorest regions. The central government, which lists the Naxalites as a banned terrorist group, says that 11 of India's 28 states are now affected...
...have grown more daring. In March last year, some 400 Naxalites surrounded a police camp in southern Chhattisgarh, lit the camp up using powerful lights and generators and lobbed grenades and petrol bombs for more than three hours, killing 55 people. Last December, in the same area, a single Maoist overpowered a jail guard and set free 294 inmates, including 15 senior Naxalite fighters. In February this year, more than 100 insurgents laid siege to three police stations, a police outpost, a police training school and a government armory in the state of Orissa, killing 13 policemen and a bystander...
...before answering them, often with a slogan or a long monologue that sounded torn from the small collection of books and newspapers that his unit read and reread and then teach to local villagers. He began learning Maoism at eight, he said. Two of his five siblings are also Maoist fighters. They had a good childhood, helping their father farm rice and hunt in the forests. There was no school in his village and so he and his siblings attended classes given by rebel soldiers who had moved into the area. What they taught made perfect sense...
...Naxalites also regularly terrorize village folk and warn them not to move to government-controlled areas. On our trip into the hinterland it was impossible to ask villagers whether they were happy with the Maoist presence or not. But a few days earlier, in a camp for people displaced by the conflict about 20 miles away, Miriyam Joga, 41, could barely contain his rage. A relatively successful farmer, Joga had owned a few dozen goats and 27 oxen in the southern Chhattisgarh village of Punpalli until a Naxalite raid three years ago. "They said if I leave my village then...
...Class war is still an unlikely dream, however. Yes, Maoist rebels recently won power in neighboring Nepal. But the Indian state is more powerful and sophisticated than Nepal's defeated monarchy. (The rise of Nepal's Maoists has actually split opinion among their Indian brothers: some believe that the Nepalese group sold out by participating in elections, while others argue it is a legitimate tactical move toward revolution.) And in India's rowdy democracy, the entire political spectrum from far right to the mainstream Communist Party of India have called for the Maoists to be destroyed...