#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #FRANCE #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) #France, UCL AL #331 - Culture, Read: Shah, "The Book of the Insurgent Jungle, Diving into Naxalite Guerrilla Warfare in India" (ca, de, it, fr, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political

Science, Alpa Shah, after winning the complicity of the local population, came
into contact with the Naxalite guerrillas. This account of his stay in their
ranks is an opportunity to discover the story of a rarely mentioned armed
struggle, of an unrecognized egalitarian and anti-capitalist movement, which has
nevertheless been agitating India for more than fifty years. ---- Alternating the
episodes of her journey with other information, in particular on the origin of
the movement, she paints a portrait of the members of the guerrillas whom she
rubs shoulders with during the few nights spent traveling with them, on foot and
in complete darkness, during a journey of 250 kilometres. At the time of India's
independence, the Indian Communists split into pro-Russians and Maoists. The
success of Maoism in the countries of the South can be explained by the
centrality granted by Mao to the peasantry in the revolutionary struggle and the
association he established between capitalism and foreign imperialism.

After the insurrection started in West Bengal in 1967, in the city of Naxalbari,
which gave its name to the movement, the countryside was populated by armed
brigades and cultural troops, until the takeover of 3,000 villages in which the
land was redistributed to the poor. The repression was brutal. Many young people
from the middle class and the bourgeoisie left their homes and their studies to
join the struggle.

In the 1980s, the movement spread to the plains of Bihar and took hold among the
Dalits, the untouchable caste, to free them from their subservience to the
dominant classes. At the end of the 1980s, he retreated into the forests of the
highlands of central and eastern India, mobilizing the most discriminated people
: the Adivasis, descendants of the inhabitants of the territory before the Aryan
invasions of the 2nd millennium before our era, totally excluded from the caste
system, but representing 104 million people, or 8.6% of the population, some of
whom are still hunter-gatherers, nicknamed "jungli".

In a country whose society is often perceived as the epitome of hierarchical
order, these forest communities stand out for their fairly egalitarian values and
the dignity and pride with which they carry them, in contrast to the hierarchical
caste society. Plains. It was among them that the Naxalites found new
sympathizers from the 1990s and consolidated their armies. Alpa Shah explains how
they created a parallel state with parastatal institutions.

Thanks to the personal account of his expedition with the guerrillas and the
memories of his long stays with the Naxalites, it makes accessible, without
losing rigour, a considerable amount of historical and sociological information.
This French translation can only help to discover this little-known struggle.

Ernest London (UCL Le Puy-en-Velay)

Alpa Shah, The Book of the Insurgent Jungle, Diving into the Naxalite guerrillas
in India, Editions of the last letter, May 2022, 362 pages, 24 euros.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Lire-Shah-Le-Livre-de-la-jungle-insurgee-Plongee-dans-la-guerilla-naxalite-en
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