India is a diverse country in the truest sense of the word; hence the problems that it faces as a country are as diverse and complex as its populace. On one hand, there are cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Bangalore which represent a fairly developed, educated, industrialized and economically strong zone of India, while on the other, there are country sides which are far flung from this developed belt, states like Imphal, Manipur, Orissa, Assam, dotted with innumerable villages which are mired with poverty. These pockets due to the chronic poverty, uneducatedness, lack of a formal law & order machinery and several years of dis-satisfaction with their local governance breeds hostility towards the government, thus spawning Maoism or the Naxal movement.

This lack of rural development and failed peace initiatives has been instrumental in giving more and more strength to the country's 40-year-old Maoist rebellion. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has in this context said, "the challenge of internal security is our biggest national security challenge today." He calls the Maoist threat 'the single-biggest security challenge India has faced since independence'. Moreover, the Indian government acknowledges there has been a dramatic increase in support for the Maoists in the last decade. About 10 years ago the rebels were active in just four states. Now security experts say they are entrenched in a vast eastern (Imphal, Manipur, Orissa, Assam) and central belt (Jharkhand, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh) that stretches across nearly half of India's 28 states up to country's border with Nepal. Known as the "red corridor," it includes India's poorest regions, where ethnic tribes and poor people live in intense poverty.

Rampant poverty, caste & class discrimination make insurgency a lucrative option to masses of desperate people with little chance of social advancement. These people are then mislead with communist doctrines and willed into violence by the miscreants.

The mountainous terrain of India is also conducive for hierarchal insurgents, because they allow them to build and consolidate centralized bases and control vast areas of rural environments-areas where the government cannot easily reach or exercise control over.

Widespread corruption in local Indian governments also contributes to the failure of outreach campaigns, due to which the control over the population is weakned, in this scenario, the guerillas can substantially derail the aid efforts.

• 1
• 2
• 3
• next page >>

---

Add your voice

Know something about What would be the most effective way for the Indian government to respond to the Maoist insurgency??
We want to hear your view. Write now!