Extremist Violence and Life of the Indigenous People inside Red Corridor in India

Abstract

India’s mineral-rich districts in and along the so-called Red Corridor are the abode of the country’s poorest of the poor indigenous people. It is no surprising that these people are mostly illiterates and have been suffering from severe malnutrition. For the last four decades or more, the region has been extremely affected by the extremist violence led by the Maoists vis-à-vis the counter-insurgency programme of the state. The people, mostly tribals, living in the midst of the two embattling forces operating across the region are now bewildered. They are losing many of their socio-cultural distinctiveness. The paradoxes between the Maoist ideology and acts made the indigenous groups worry of about the contradictions between the projected aspiration and apparent result of the extremist violence. In the course of time, they are found to distancing themselves from the movement and adopt a survival strategy based upon the revival of their ethnic consolidation. With a case study of Junglemahal in Southern Bengal, the present study observes that stronger the elements of ethnic consolidation, lesser the possibility of engaging with the extremist violence.