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Analysis: India's Internal Terror Troubles

Council on Foreign Relations

March 5, 2007
Prepared by: Carin Zissis

While Kashmir and al-Qaeda-linked terrorism garner front-page play around the world, India's own internal terrorism problem tends to be off the radar of most American news outlets—or, at best, warranting a postage-stamp-sized wire story (NYT) buried at the bottom of an inside page. Yet terrorism-related deaths in the contested territory of Jammu and Kashmir dropped threefold since 2002, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal report. Violence related to Maoist extremism in India, however, defies New Delhi’s counterterrorism efforts. In April 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the leftist insurgency “the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country.” A new Backgrounder on terrorism in India explores the Maoist insurgency.

Maoist extremists, known as Naxalites for the West Bengali village of Naxalbari where they held their first revolt in 1967, emerged as a renewed militant force in 2004 when various factions aligned in a loose coalition. Bolstered by advances of Maoists in Nepal, the Naxalites are increasingly active in a swath of territory called the “red corridor” running across thirteen states in central and south India.

A report by the New Delhi-based Asian Center for Human Rights documenting the Naxalite rise from the “periphery to mainstream” (PDF) in 2006 estimates the insurgency has as many as ten thousand recruits. Chhattisgarh, an impoverished state where the extremists take refuge in deep forests and reportedly set up local councils that collect taxes from the population, experienced the highest rate of Naxalite-related violence last year. Nearly four hundred people died in clashes between Maoist forces and a controversial paramilitary group called Salwa Judum caused the forcible displacement of more than 43,700 people.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2007 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.