Guerrilla warfare

The Leftist Maoist movement takes root among India's rural poor. Branded as ruthless killers, they seem confident their Red revolution will succeed.

He's 30 years old, speaks English and is conversant in the language of e-mail and the internet. Friendly and self-confident, he could be a manager in a call centre, or perhaps a software engineer on one of India's gleaming high-tech campuses. But "Comrade M", as he asks to be called, prefers a different line of work: waging war on the Indian state.

Armed with a battered Lee-Enfield rifle that he laughingly describes as "senior to me", the university graduate in an olive-drab uniform with a red star on the breast was one of about 30 Maoist guerrillas encountered recently in the remote Bastar Forest in east-central India.

Drawing recruits and support from indigenous tribespeople known as adivasis, the ragtag band of young men and women is part of a larger revolutionary movement whose audacious, if anachronistic, goal is to replace India's parliamentary democracy with a communist system straight out of Chairman Mao Tse-tung's Little Red Book.

Once dismissed as little more than an irritant, the Maoist movement is gaining ground in this country of more than 1 billion people, feeding off anti-government hostility in some rural areas and highlighting the uneven nature of India's unprecedented economic boom. Analysts say the movement consists of about 10,000 regular fighters, with several hundred thousand supporters. The rebels are known as Naxalites, after the eastern town of Naxalbari where the movement began in 1967.

During the recent encounter with the rebels in the state of Chhattisgarh, a visitor witnessed a rally of at least 2,000 tribal supporters, many armed with axes and bows and arrows, gathered next to a concrete plinth topped with a hammer and sickle. The rally took place in a stand of tall trees about six hours' walk from the nearest paved road.

The Maoist commander in the area, who goes by the name Kosa, said the movement had not been deterred by the triumph of capitalism in China and other formerly communist countries.

Ups and downs

"When a scientist doesn't get the desired results from an experiment, he doesn't just abandon the experiment," he said. "Every movement has its ups and downs. There are defeats as well as victories. We should learn from the failure of Maoism in China and move ahead."

Following a long period of relative quiet, the Naxalites in the past several years have expanded their presence to 13 of India's 28 states, according to official estimates, spurring talk of a "red corridor" extending from Nepal, which is battling a Maoist insurgency of its own, down through the wooded heartland of central and southern India. The Maoist rebels in India and Nepal have acknowledged ideological ties, and security officials suspect logistical collaboration as well.

Equipped with homemade bombs and rifles looted from police stations, the Indian rebels have staged increasingly bold attacks, such as seizing a passenger train for 12 hours in the eastern state of Jharkhand in March. They function in some remote districts as a parallel government, complete with makeshift courts and police. Their violent tactics have turned parts of Chhattisgarh, among other states, into virtual no-go areas for the government, thwarting plans for corporate mining operations in forests that many adivasis regard as their own.

Last month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described the Naxalite movement as "the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country" - no small claim in a nation with many insurgencies, including the long-running rebellion in Kashmir.

In Chhattisgarh, the Naxalite movement has found abundant recruits among adivasis angered by police harassment, dismal or non-existent government services and collusion between corrupt officials and criminals engaged in illegal logging. According to government data, 165 people died in Naxalite-related violence last year, and the bloodletting has continued: Last month, Naxalite rebels abducted 50 members of a pro-government militia called the Salwa Judum, then murdered 13 of them by slitting their throats, police said.

"They're absolutely ruthless killers," a senior Chhattisgarh security official, B.K.S. Roy, said by telephone from the state capital, Raipur. "I've never seen this kind of brutality in my life before, the way they strike and kill Salwa Judum members. They're hacked to death, heads severed from bodies."

Roy said the Naxalite movement's numbers were growing in Chhattisgarh, where the state last year set up a school to train police in jungle warfare and counterinsurgency tactics. "A thousand commandos are already ready for operations," Roy said. "We want a big striking force."

Naxalites' methods

Human rights monitors have also criticised the Naxalites' methods, accusing them of forcible recruitment, extortion and the abduction and killing of "class enemies" and villagers suspected of colluding with the state. At the same time, they have denounced members of the Salwa Judum, which means "Peace Initiative", as vigilantes who rape, torture and kill villagers thought to be sympathetic to the rebels.

Contacted through intermediaries, the Naxalites agreed to meet a foreign reporter and several Indian journalists in the heavily forested Bastar district, where the rebels maintain a large presence. Youthful Naxalite supporters met the visitors at a prearranged point and guided them into the woods.

Winding through dry, scraggly forests, the route occasionally passed clusters of grass-roofed huts, many with crude animal pens fashioned from tree branches. The hike eventually ended in the rebels' camp, which was littered with weapons, sleeping rolls and solar panels for charging batteries. Fighters greeted their guests with a handshake and a "red salute" - a clenched fist raised to the temple.

They were under the command of Comrade Kosa, a swashbuckling figure with a warm, if wary, manner and a folding-stock Kalashnikov assault rifle. Members of the group asked to be identified only by first names.

In honour of their guests, the rebels had erected a small bamboo enclosure decorated with hand-painted slogans such as "Down With Salwa Judum" and "Stop Corrupting Adivasi Culture to Make it Market Culture Under the Guise of Tourism." Uniformed cadres sang a song that included the line " America and Japan are big exploiters of this country."

Joining the movement

The rank and file was made up mostly of adivasis, several of whom said they joined the movement out of anger towards local authorities.

One adivasi rebel, Neela, said she was radicalised at the age of 12, when police arrested her father for illegally clearing a small patch of land and imprisoned him for three years.

A broad-faced woman with a ready smile, the 25-year-old Naxalite said she spoke only her local tribal dialect when she joined the movement a decade ago. Fellow cadres taught her how to read and speak Hindi, she said, and eventually she joined the movement's military wing. A member of a nine-person squad who carries a walkie-talkie and a single-shot rifle, Neela said proudly that she had taken part in 10 military operations, including one in which a mine was detonated beneath a vehicle carrying paramilitary troops. Four of them died, she said.

"They come into villages, beat up men, rape women," she said of the paramilitaries. "I don't feel bad at all about killing them."

Comrade M, the university graduate and a squad leader, said the rebels typically laid ambushes for "our friends in khaki uniform" using mines triggered by camera-flash devices.

Military operations aside, the Naxalite rebels also engage in small-scale development projects, such as digging wells and small reservoirs and training villagers in rudimentary health care, according to Kosa and his aides. They maintain an active political and propaganda wing, publishing a newsletter and holding rallies.

At the massive forest gathering, women from a Naxalite cultural troupe swayed and sang. Then Kosa and several other speakers addressed the crowd over a makeshift public address system powered by car batteries. Watching from the sidelines, Neela, the Naxalite foot soldier, said she had "complete confidence" that the revolution would one day succeed.

"I don't know about a guaranteed time frame," she said, "but I know it will happen."