THE Naxalite movement is at last raising serious alarm. This is a movement that has been around for over 40 years ever since Charu Mazumdar raised the banner in Naxalbari. A generation of young idealist middle-class youth in the late 1960s was lost as it abandoned its studies and joined the pied pipers of the Maoist revolution. Then there was a reaction and after much police action, the movement seemed to have died down. Now with the beheading of a police officer, it seems India is waking up to the Naxalite problem.

For too long there has been a complacent attitude regarding fighting these forces. There has been sentimentality for the Maoist’s Left attitudes. After all, it seems if you can live with the CPI and the CPM comfortably, the CPI-ML is only a slightly distant cousin and soon these idealistic people will come to their senses and start fighting elections. The roots of the love for the Left go back decades into India’s colonial past. Jawaharlal Nehru was seduced by the charms of the USSR after he attended an anti-Imperialism conference in Brussels in the late 1920s Then in the mid-1930s, Stalin launched the Popular Front, which made the Leninists seem like mild reformers. Much sentimentality about Leninists originates since then. The Congress has a soft attitude about things modishly left, which is why even as the Maoists murder and intimidate, there are the usual clichés that we need development as well as force to defeat the Maoists.

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