/Tag: Naxalites

The Continuing Tragedy of the Adivasis


The Hindu

In the summer of 2006, I had a long conversation with Mahendra Karma, the Chhattisgarh Congress leader who was killed in a terror attack by the Naxalites last week. I was not alone—with me were five other members of a citizens’ group studying the tragic fallout of the civil war in the state’s Dantewada district. This [...]

THE THOUSAND BINAYAK SENS


The Telegraph

Last week, the Supreme Court granted bail to Binayak Sen, the doctor and civil rights activist who had been sentenced to life imprisonment by a court in Raipur on the charge of sedition. Dr. Sen was charged with being a Naxalite sympathizer, and of acting as a courier for the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The [...]

RECONCILING THE MAOISTS


The Telegraph

Soon after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) was banned. This was in part because Gandhi’s murderer, Nathuram Godse, had once been a member of the RSS; and in part because RSS leaders played a crucial role in the polarization of Hindu-Muslim relations that led to that tragic event. [...]

THE HONEST LEFTIST


The Telegraph

In a recent lecture, delivered in Mumbai in memory of Nani Palkhivala, the Home Minister, Mr P. Chidambaram, attacked ‘left-leaning intellectuals’ and ‘human rights groups’, who in his view ‘plead the naxalite cause ignoring the violence unleashed by the naxalites on innocent men, women and children.’ ‘Why are the human rights groups silent?’, asked the Home [...]

HOW NOT TO FIGHT EXTREMISM


Hindustan Times

In the spring of 1990, a great Indian patriot, the liberal jurist V. M. Tarkunde, led a team of independent citizens on a study tour of the Kashmir Valley. Many cases of police and army excesses were reported to them: beatings (sometimes of children), torture (of men innocent of any crime), extra-judicial (or ‘encounter’) killings, and [...]