In May 1967, an abortive peasant uprising in an obscure place called Naxalbari, on the northern tip of West Bengal, gave rise to the present Naxalite movement, now also referred to as the India's Maoist movement. The term 'present' is used in this context because there had also been an earlier phase, during which the Maoist model of agrarian revolution was for the first time adopted as a concept by Indian communist revolutionaries. From 1946 till 1951 in Telengana, in what is today part of Andhra Pradesh, communists led an armed agrarian uprising that freed peasants from feudal landlord rule, ultimately leading to the formation of 'liberated zones' governed by a gram raj system of village soviets in large tracts of the area.
At a time when news of the growing success of the Mao Zedong-led Chinese revolution was filtering into India, a document prepared in May 1948 by the communist leaders of the uprising stated in unequivocal terms: "Our revolution in many respects differs from the classical Russian revolution, but to a great extent is similar to that of the Chinese revolution. The perspective likely is … that of … dogged resistance and prolonged civil war in the form of agrarian revolution, culminating in the capture of political power by the Democratic Front." This first Maoist experiment in Telengana came to an end in 1951 with the withdrawal of the armed struggle by the Communist Party of India, which decided to join mainstream parliamentary politics. This decision was taken partially due to a promise made by the then-ruling Congress party to implement land reforms and put an end to the feudalism still rampant in the countryside.
But while the Indian communists kept their part of the bargain by refraining from armed actions, the Indian state proceeded to turn its back on these promises, eventually allowing the continuation and even consolidation of the rule of feudal landlords in rural India. After twenty years of this, in 1967 radical sections among the communists decided to resume the armed struggle and renew their Maoist foundations. Although the uprising at Naxalbari that they led that year was crushed within just a few months, it inspired a new generation of communist revolutionaries to launch an armed movement in different parts of India – which, despite frequent reversals, continues unabated to this day.
According to official figures, the Maoists today are in effective control of a long 'corridor' of forests and plains, stretching from the Nepali border in Bihar through Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra in the west, Orissa in the east, and Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in the south. This area is twice the size of India's other two insurgency-affected areas, the five states of the Northeast and Jammu & Kashmir. More importantly, the population inhabiting this stretch is five times greater than the other two regions. Little wonder, then, that Manmohan Singh, at a conference in New Delhi in July 2006, described the Maoist 'threat' as India's "single biggest internal security challenge."