India’s Red Stain: Explaining the Indian Government’s Ineffective Response to the Maoist-Naxalite Insurgency Since 1967
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Since 1967, the Maoist-Naxalite movement has grown from a local peasant rebellion to a violent insurgency that operates in more than 10 of India’s 28 states and is widely considered to be the single biggest threat to India’s internal security. For more than four decades, as Naxalite violence has killed an estimated 15,000 Indians, the government has failed to address the driving motivation of the insurgency, allowing the movement to spread geographically and increase its violent threat. Most of what has been written about the Naxalites offers only partial or murky explanations of India’s failure to effectively address the violence. This thesis examines the nature of the Naxalite movement since its inception and analyzes the response of the government over time to answer the question: What accounts for India’s failure to effectively address Naxalite violence from 1967 to the present? It concludes that India consistently adopted the wrong strategy at the wrong time toward the insurgency, and that it did so due to a combination of three factors: the shifting nature of the movement; inherent inefficiencies in center-state relations; and the presence of other security challenges on the nation’s agenda. India is increasingly the focus of global attention, as its economy today grows at a rate second only to that of China. Yet, its advancement is still constrained by the same socio-economic grievances that inspired the Naxalites in 1967. The study concludes with the implications relevant for current and future Indian policymakers to consider in adopting a strategy against the threat posed by the Maoist-Naxalite insurgency.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 13, 2011 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Banerjee, Devin |
|---|---|
| Advisor | Crenshaw, Martha |
Subjects
| Subject | Center for International Security and Cooperation |
|---|---|
| Subject | CISAC |
| Subject | India |
| Subject | Naxalite movement |
| Subject | Communist Party of India |
| Subject | insurgency |
| Subject | policy |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Banerjee, Devin. (2011). India’s Red Stain: Explaining the Indian Government’s Ineffective Response to the Maoist-Naxalite Insurgency Since 1967. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/vk937zp8359
Collection
Stanford University, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies, Theses
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- Contact
- devin.banerjee@gmail.com
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