Maoist struggle: background

Maoists have left a very strong presence in Bihar or, one may say, in the whole of the country during their four decade-old armed struggle since the movement started in 1967 in India as a peasant rebellion from the village of Naxalbari in an eastern state of West Bengal. Since then the insurgency which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has termed as the "biggest threat to internal security" has now spread to a large swathe of the eastern and central parts of the country. The rebels now claim to operate in 182 districts in India with Bihar, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Chhatisgarh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal being the worst affected States.

In Bihar, the Naxal movement formally started from Mushari village in northern Muzaffarpur district in 1968 when farmers sounded a bugle of revolt against the "corrupt system" and harvested the crops of the rich farmers. Later, it spread to several districts as slogans like "The power comes from the barrel of guns" and "Chinese Chairman is our Chairman" began emerging on the walls of the towns. However, the movement remained more or less redundant and hardly caught the attention of the common men until 1970 when Maoists started operation in Aurangabad district of Bihar under the banner of Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) after finding the area more suitable and fertile from the operational point of view. They carried out their first major operation on May 29, 1987, when they slaughtered 54 people, all belonging to an upper caste Rajput community, which gave them both national and international publicity. Soon thereafter, the government banned the MCC but the massacre established them as an emerging powerful, ferocious Naxal group in the country.

Here in Bihar, the Maoists operated with clinical precision and tried their best to win the heart of the "oppressed", dalit (downtrodden) class people by starting a series of welfare works for them and giving instant justice to the oppressed villagers by punishing the "accused" at their "kangaroo courts". In the 1990s, the Maoists launched a number of reformatory measures to link more and more villagers with their mass struggle and keep the flame of their "red revolution" burning. This began with the launch of special drive in the central Bihar region wherein the "thieves", "rapists", and others were tried at hastily-convened "kangaroo courts".