Institute For The Future

Maoists on the Streets of Mumbai? Coming Soon

BusinessWeek Asia is reporting some genuine news for me - about the growing threat of India's home grown Maoist insurgency, the Naxalite movement, that is starting to bubble over after decades of simmering in the remote countryside. Now that Maoists have overthrown the Nepalese government:

 

"Officials at the highest levels of government are starting to acknowledge the scale of the Naxal problem. In May a special report from the Planning Commission, a government think tank, detailed the extent of the danger and the "collective failure" in social and economic policy that caused it. The report comes five months after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh shocked the country with a candid admission: 'The Naxal groups…are targeting all aspects of economic activity…[including] vital infrastructure so as to cripple transport and logistical capabilities and slow down any development. [We] cannot rest in peace until we have eliminated this virus.'"

 

BW picks this up because to date, the Naxalites have mostly focused on the most obvious symbols of capitalist industry in India's vast countryside - mines and steel plants:

 

"The appearance of mining crews, construction workers, and truckers in the forest has seriously alarmed the tribals who have lived in these regions from time immemorial. The tribals are a minority—about 85 million strong—who descend from India's original inhabitants and are largely nature worshippers. They are desperately poor, but unlike the poverty of the urban masses in Mumbai or Kolkata, their suffering has remained largely hidden to outsiders and most Indians, caught up as they are in the country's incredible growth. The Naxalites, however, know the tribals well and have recruited from their ranks for decades."

 

But as more than one peasant revolt has done in the past, this one appears to be migrating to the cities:

 

"According to the Institute for Conflict Management, the Naxalites are now planning to penetrate India's major cities. Ajai Sahni, executive director of the Institute, says they are looking to encircle urban centers, find sympathy among students and the unemployed, and create armed, "secret, self-defense squads" that will execute orders. Their targets are the two main industrialized belts that run along the east and west coasts.

 

That's an ambitious plan, but the Institute estimates there are already 12,000 armed Naxalites, plus 13,000 "sympathizers and workers." This is no ragtag army. It is an organized force, trained in guerrilla warfare. At the top, it is led by a central command staffed by members of the educated classes. The government also fears the Naxalites have many clandestine supporters among the urban left. The police have recently been rounding up suspected allies in the cities."

 

This makes me wonder, how quickly the current economic instability is going to expose the thinness of stability in a lot of the world's newer market economies.

 

Full story "In India, Death to Global Business"