NIGHTMARCH - ALPA SHAH

Read this one due to its carrying an endorsement from the David Graeber, peace be upon him, as well as being about a topic I’ve been interested in since living in India. It was shocking, when living in Kolkata, to see how much communist and communism are part of the regular political landscape there. Obviously, due to purges and a massive century+ long suppression campaign, legally and otherwise, the United States doesn't have communist politicians or political movements, let alone Communist guerrillas, since the murders and suppression of the Panthers, a self-described Maoist organization, in the 60’s and 70’s. There’s something similar happening here in Japan where I currently live, where there is a large and legal communist party, but that’s a story for another time. Either way, India, as the world’s largest democracy, has a sizable communist movement that both holds political power in some areas, especially in Bengal, as well as an ongoing armed uprising in “tribal,” or, Adivasi, regions. The Naxalites, an armed Maoist group, who’s name comes from the village Naxalbari in West Bengal where the Naxalbari uprising of 1967 occurred, were perhaps the trendiest armed Left-Wing (in the West, I don’t mean this to insult them, only to point out how fleeting Western Leftist attention spans can be) movement between the Zapatists, from the late 90’s, early 2000’s, and the Kurds, in the mid 2010’s until today. There are dozens of books about the Naxalites and their movements, including a famous one from Arundati Roy, but this one struck me as the most embedded and comprehensive. Shah had spent over a year living in the region working with and studying the various tribal peoples in the region, and was at first skeptical of the Naxalites, assuming they were a sort of violent protection racket, before slowing getting to know them and eventually joining them to live for a time and take a multiple day night march through the jungle with them. They have to walk at night, given the Indian State’s ongoing efforts to hunt down and kill them, and Shah seems to have been in actual danger during this time. The book toggles between an accounting of the march and the people she meets and conversations she has with various rebels and villagers they encounter and deeper more theoretical passages about the morality of their violence and gender roles within the revolution and whatnot. I found this very enlightening and illuminating. The march stuff was exciting and not overly dramatic, I never felt like she was over or understating the stakes, and the theoretical stuff was really interesting. The book includes and interesting rundown of Maoism and its effects on the world, a striking critique of gender and class roles within the Naxalite movement (many of the leaders are upper caste folks who abandoned their families to live underground) and the ways they seek to correct these forces, the effects of Capitalist globalization on this region and the the tribal peoples therein, a political history of India and its shortcomings, and dozens of other topics. I personally found the counter-insurgency strategy employed by the Indian state to be very Phoenix Program-y. The Indian government will go around, capture Maoist leaders, torture them, kill them and then stage to body to make it look like they were killed in a shootout with the state. Additionally, the state seems to arm and assist (and create) vigilante groups, often made up of former Maoists or greedy locals, like Salwa Judum, to hunt down and kill the Naxalites, while doing things like raping and murdering villigages seen as being symptathic. In the end I was incredibly inspired by these groups, it seems so hopeless, I admire their commitment to a better world. 67 Maos