The openMovements series invites leading social scientists to share their research results and perspectives on contemporary social struggles.
Nahrendra Modi. Copyleft. Some rights reserved.During the summer months of 2018, the term “urban Naxals” began circulating in the Indian public sphere. Coined by third-rate film-maker and Hindu nationalist hatemonger Vivek Agnihotri in his extraordinarily cringeworthy book Urban Naxals: The Making of Buddha in a Traffic Jam, the neologism is intended to designate city-based supporters of the Maoist rebels that have been waging a stubborn guerilla war against the Indian state since the late 1960s.
The story that goes along with the term is that India’s big cities are infested with leftist and left-liberal intellectuals and activists who provide the Maoist insurgents in the so-called Red Corridor with a treasonous infrastructure of ideological and practical support. As such, they are enemies of the state, and should be rooted out in the name of the security and prosperity of the Indian nation. “Urban Naxals stay in cities and have luxurious lives, their children are well-educated,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed in a speech recently, “but they remote control the lives of Adivasi (tribal) children and destroy their lives.” “Urban Naxals stay in cities and have luxurious lives, their children are well-educated,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed in a speech recently, “but they remote control the lives of Adivasi (tribal) children and destroy their lives.”
