Naxalites: India's Insurgency

Naxalite penetration in eastern IndiaVia a headlines blurb from The World and I, an online magazine:  Naxalites, an insurgent movement that dates from the 1960's, now has spread across an area of India that comprises 13 states and approximately one quarter of the total area of that nation.
The Naxalites are an indigenous Maoist movement in eastern India that is gaining strength, by some estimates having doubled in just the last two years. Wikipedia describes it as follows:

Naxalite is an informal name given to revolutionary communist groups that were born out of the Sino-Soviet split in the Indian communist movement. The term comes from the Naxalbari, a small village in West Bengal, where a leftist section of CPI(M) led by Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal led a militant peasant uprising in 1967, trying to develop a "revolutionary opposition" in order to establish "revolutionary rule" in India. Mazumdar greatly admired Mao Zedong of China and advocated that Indian peasants and lower classes must follow in his footsteps and overthrow the government and upper classes whom he held responsible for their plight.

As is typical of many terrorist organizations, the Naxalites have a reputation of providing some services to their poor constituency and providing law and order where it is largely absent or completely corrupt in rural areas.

Some cadres are taught to read and write as well as handle arms, so that, in the absence of any government-sanctioned administration, the Naxalites become both the executioners of "class enemies" and the providers of water.

 Like the "day care centers" that redeemed Osama bin Laden.


Solldier killed by Naxalites and grieving relatives
Basically, they are running a protection racket.  They are sheltered and fed by sympathetic villages and threaten those that aren't so friendly.  In the meantime, they are also violent and terroristic in India and are providing training and supplies to the Nepalese insurgents.  India has not, by most observations, really put its all into stamping the Naxalites out nor into addressing the root cause of their growing popularity, which is the  growing disparity in education and income in India.  Parts of India and the Indian economy are booming but the Naxalites are gaining where  "modernity has left people behind."

see also: Messing Up with Naxalites (South Asia Analysis Group)