Maoist leader Sudarshan survives assasination attempt

An attempt by the Andhra Pradesh police to abduct and murder senior Maoist leader, Sudarshan alias Srinivas in a fake encounter failed last week. The bullet meant for his brain ended up in his leg, and ridiculous stories have appeared in the media about this failed fake encounter, clearly the AP Police deserve an oscar for best screen play..

Top Maoist leader Sudarshan held

One of the Maoists freed in exchange for the 2011 release of Odisha collector R. Vineel Krishna has been held in Andhra after a day’s dramatic chase that saw him first jump off a police van and play a lunatic.

Sriramula Srinivas alias Sudarshan, 55, is also a key accused in the 2003 assassination attempt on former chief minister and Telugu Desam boss Chandrababu Naidu and in the murder of a state home minister, A. Madhav Reddy, three years earlier. Both attacks were landmine blasts.

Sudarshan, a native of Andhra’s Nalgonda district, is a central committee member of the CPI (Maoist) and said to be eighth in the hierarchy. He is also secretary of the rebels’ Andhra-Odisha Border Committee, blamed for the abduction of IAS officer and Malkangiri collector Krishna.

Sudarshan carried a bounty of Rs 20 lakh on his head, said A.V. Ranganath, the SP of Khammam, the district near the Odisha border where the chase began on Friday night and ended last evening.

Sudarshan was travelling in a Bolero with family members when the vehicle was intercepted and the rebel caught on Friday night on the basis of information that he had crossed over from Odisha for treatment.

Sudarshan was asked to get off the Bolero and made to sit in the solitary police van, with the SUV asked to follow on.

The Maoist was being brought to a police station in nearby Wyra town, around 245km from Hyderabad, when he jumped off the running vehicle and ran into a patch of maize fields along the road. The cops fired on him, injuring him in the leg, but he still managed to scamper away, police sources said.

In the melee, the Bolero also sped away and vanished into jungles near the spot. The vehicle had Sudarshan wife’s Vimala, also a senior rebel leader with a Rs 6-lakh bounty on her head, and their two daughters, the sources said.

Sudarshan spent the night in the fields, by when the police had intensified the search for him and circulated his photos in Wyra town and surrounding villages. The Maoist emerged from the fields yesterday morning, and pretending to be a mad man, threw stones at villagers to prevent them from getting close to him, the sources said.

However, the theatrics of disguise ended when some of the villagers tipped off the police last evening. Sudarshan also hurled stones at the police team that went to arrest him outside Wyra town but was eventually pinned down.

His bullet wound was nursed and he was brought under heavy security to Khammam town where a magistrate remanded him in judicial custody for two weeks. Police sources said he was likely to be brought to Hyderabad and lodged in the high-security central jail.

Sudarshan was arrested in Odisha after 38 Greyhounds — Andhra’s crack anti-rebel force — were killed in 2008 while crossing a reservoir at Balimela in Malkangiri. He was freed along with four others in exchange for the release of then collector Krishna in 2011. The rebel faces over 40 cases in Andhra and Odisha.

Andhra officers said many senior rebel leaders had crossed over to border towns in Andhra in recent months for treatment.

Source :

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1130325/jsp/nation/story_16712147.jsp

India's Silent War - Al Jazeera Documentary 2011

India's Silent War - Documentary on CPI(Maoist)

Imran Garda examines the 40-year war that has claimed thousands of lives but been largely ignored outside of India.

Duration : 47 Minutes

Language : English

First Telecast :  October 20, 2011 on Al Jazeera Network.

Documentary on Naxalite Maoist India


Link : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EW06kd_up8

A 40-year long civil war has been raging in the jungles of central and eastern India. It is one of the world's largest armed conflicts but it remains largely ignored outside of India.

Caught in the crossfire of it are the Adivasis, who are believed to be India's earliest inhabitants. A loose collection of tribes, it is estimated that there are about 84 million of these indigenous people, which is about eight per cent of the country's population.

For generations, they have lived off farming and the spoils of the jungle in eastern India, but their way of life is under threat. Their land contains mineral deposits estimated to be worth trillions of dollars. Forests have been cleared and the Indian government has evacuated hundreds of villages to make room for steel plants and mineral refineries.

The risk of losing everything they have ever known has made many Adivasis fertile recruits for India's Maoist rebels or Naxalites, who also call these forests home.

The Maoists' fight with the Indian government began 50 years ago, just after India became independent. A loose collection of anti-government communist groups - that initially fought for land reform - they are said to be India's biggest internal security threat. Over time, their focus has expanded to include more fundamental questions about how India is actually governed.

In their zeal for undermining the Indian government, Maoist fighters have torched construction equipment, bombed government schools and de-railed passenger trains, killing hundreds. In the name of state security, several activists who have supported the Maoists have been jailed and tortured. Innocent people have also been implicated on false charges. These are often intimidation tactics used by the government to discourage people from having any contact with the Maoists.

The uprising by Maoist fighters and its brutal suppression by the Indian government, has claimed more than 10,000 lives since 1980, and displaced 12 million people. Many of the victims are not even associated with either side. They are simply caught in the crossfire. And the violence is escalating as both sides mount offensive after counter-offensive.

Al Jazeera's Imran Garda travelled to the Indian states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal to get a secret glimpse into the world of the Naxalites and to meet with rebel fighters as well as those victimised by this conflict.

Source :

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeracorrespondent/2011/10/20111019124251679523.html

Red Alert - Watch Online- Bollywood film on Naxalites

Red Alert - The War Within is a  low budget Hindi movie made with a few talented actors by director Anant Mahadevan. The movie was released in 2010 and wasn't commercially successful at the box office.

The film claims to be loosely based on a true story. The movie however fails to give a realistic or convincing portrayal of the realities of the Maoist movement in India, also the film is replete with factual inaccuracies and has a very simplistic conclusion.

It is however an effort that can be appreciated, considering the fact that Bollywood does not usually focus much on this topic. Access to more funding and research would have helped the director in creating a better product.

Red Alert : The War Within : Watch Online 

Synopsis:

This is the true story of Narsimha, a farm labourer, who desperately needed money to fund the education of his children. He finds himself in the midst of Naxalites where his mission becomes a mere subset of a greater cause that the militant's pursue. From being a mere cook to actually training in weapons to being involved in shootouts and kidnapping, Narsimha himself in the thick of life he had never bargained for. A confrontation with the group leaders turns his life upside down; he is now on the run from both law and the militants.

Narsimha has to take one vital decision that could make or break him. But the decision ends in creating a conflicting situation that has him torn between conscience and survival. Red Alert- The War Within hurtles towards a cathartic end that blows apart a few myths about life and the complicated systems that engulfs it. Red Alert- The War Within is a volatile account of today's times...culled straight from today's torrid headlines

Starring:
Sunil Shetty
Vinod Khanna
Nasseruddin Shah
Sameera Reddy
Ayesha Dharker
Bhagyashree


Awards:
Director's Vision Award at 2009 Stuttgart Film Festival
Best Actor Award (Sunil Shetty) at 2009 SAIFF (South Asian International Film Festival)

Note : 
The full 2 hour movie with English subtitles can be viewed below. Click on CC for English subtitles. There is a 5 second time lag between dialogue delivery and subtitle display.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvw3V5_8s5Y

Jairam Ramesh on Naxalite-Maoist Movement of India

SARDAR PATEL MEMORIAL LECTURE

From Tirupati To Pashupati

Some reflections on the Maoist issue: the title of the lecture comes from the popular image in the media that a “liberated” Red corridor is sought to be created extending from Andhra Pradesh to Nepal and cutting across the very heart of India...

JAIRAM RAMESH

Text of the Sardar Patel Memorial Lecture (organised by Prasar Bharati) by the minister for rural development
I am not just privileged but also truly humbled to be part of this prestigious lecture series launched a half century and six years ago by none other than C. Rajagopalachari. Many distinguished personalities have preceded me and this makes me feel all the more honoured to be here this evening.

To say anything about such an indomitable colossus as Sardar Patel, one of our Founding Fathers, would be gratuitous. Often referred to as the “Iron Man” and as the “Bismarck of India”, he was part of the triumvirate which dominated the Indian National Congress and indeed the Indian political landscape for almost three decades. Using this imagery of the trinity, one of his well-known biographers B. Krishna wrote :"Gandhi represented Brahma-the creator and inspirer. Nehru reflected Vishnu’s soft, gentle looks, a nobility of character and humanism that transcended barriers of caste and creed. And Patel proved, like Siva, the destroyer and unifier-the builder and consolidator of Modern India ". And in keeping with the modern-day Brahma’s predilections, the destruction was peaceful. During his visit to India in 1955, Nikita Khrushchev is reported to have expressed his amazement at the Sardar’s accomplishments by remarking “You Indians are an amazing people. How on earth did you manage to liquidate princely rule without liquidating the princes?”

CPI Maoist organises medical camps in villages of Bihar, India

The Communist Party of India (Maoist) recently organised a six daylong medical camp for villagers in Parsawa village of Bihar. With the onset of monsoon, diseases like malaria and diarrhea grips the village, taking lives of almost 10-20 people every year.

Though, the Maoist insurgency has gripped nearly a third of the country, and is spreading into the interiors of 20 of India's 28 states, locals of this village are grateful to them for providing medical aid. Considered as one of the backward region, villagers complain of lack of proper medical facilities and doctors.

What Maoism and fascism have in common

The views expressed in the below article are those of the Author. Naxalrevolution does not endorse or adhere to the views or opinions expressed in the media articles posted on this website. This is purely an information site, to inform interested groups.

What Maoism and fascism have in common

By Jairus Banaji ( Know more about Jairus Banaji )

Jairus Banaji explores cultures of resistance that are hostile to democracy.

I’ll start with three meanings of democracy as I see it.  

1.Democracy in the sense of the formal framework of a constitutional democracy with the rights to freedom and equality, the right to life and personal liberty, to freedom of religion etc that it guarantees.  In the Indian Constitution these are the fundamental rights incorporated in Part 3 of the Constitution, under Articles 14–30.  

2. Democracy as a culture of resistance grounded in the constitutional rights given under my first meaning, including the Fifth Schedule protecting adivasi communities in the Scheduled Areas. India today is full of mass struggles and when labour movements are strong we can see what a culture of resistance means. 

And 

3, democracy as an aspiration for control. One can see the Communist Manifesto as a generalisation of democracy in this third sense (of the mass of workers aspiring to control their own lives, economically, politically and culturally) and as a culmination of democracy in both the previous senses.  Thus for communists (in Marx’s sense) the mass element in democracy is crucial, it is what defines democracy in its most complete sense and historical form.  

Now contrast this with cultures of resistance and/or struggles for control that are notgrounded in democracy in sense 1/. They involve an authoritarian vision of democracy, both in the sense that they set out to overthrow the existing democracy which is seen simply as a mask for the rule of capital or in the sense that they disregard the rights guaranteed by the Constitution on the grounds that no armed struggle can be waged while respecting those rights.  In contrast to all of the above, fascism targets democracy in all senses, seeking to overthrow democracy as such without pretensions of replacing it with any more complete form of democracy, as the Maoists claim to do with their notion of a ‘New Democracy’. What fascism and Maoism share in common is the goal of overthrowing an existing parliamentary democracy, though they seek to do so in very different ways (the right being driven by what Arthur Rosenberg called their ‘hatred of democratic government’). ¹  I’ll deal with both a bit later but first let me make another set of distinctions which you may find helpful.

In India we face the paradox of a constitutional democracy that is based on a repressive state apparatus. I call this a paradox because the exercise of repression violates numerous rights guaranteed under the Constitution, so that it generates a contradiction at the heart of the system. By repressive state apparatus I mean (to take the obvious examples) large-scale militarisation of the Indian state; the culture of encounter killings (that is, extra-judicial killings) that is specially rife in certain states like Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh; the shocking impunity that exists for politicians who instigate violence against minorities; and so on. All of these have become endemic features of our democracy. But how do we understand this paradox? On the left the traditional answer has been that this is what ‘bourgeois democracy’ is, there is no contradiction or paradox here, it’s the nature of ‘bourgeois’ democracy to promise more than it can offer.  

This is an essentialist argument in the sense that it constructs a model of a system and seeks to explain reality by the essential nature of that model. Frankly, I think it’s time to break with this orthodoxy because, to my mind, the expression ‘bourgeois democracy’ is really quite meaningless. I suggest it would be helpful (as we did with the different meanings of democracy) to draw a line between three things that are, especially on the left, often conflated, namely, capitalism, democracy and the state apparatus. As a historian I know at least this much -- that capitalism and democracy are not functionally related, not even historically, but systems in conflict. Capitalism seeks to limit democracy through its use of the state apparatus.  For the democratic left the crucial element of democracy lies in the ability of the masses to shape their lives through the political system, and that in turns requires mass organisations like unions, workers’ councils, and popular committees of the kind we saw in the recent upsurge in Egypt especially.  It is this ‘mass’ element in democracy that capital seeks to contain or subvert through its use of the state apparatus. Mass democracy presupposes a strong and well-organised labour movement, as well as a passion for freedom, that is, a culture where people are willing to fight for their rights, and it withers in conditions where capital is able, through the state, to decimate both of these.