ISAS Insights

The ambush of a convoy of cars returning from a political rally and the murder of 27 people on 25 May 2013 in Chhattisgarh state in central India brings together various threads that make up "the Maoist movement" that has been an intermittent feature of rural life for 50 years. The list of victims makes this clear. Among the dead were the leader of the Congress Party in Chhattisgarh state, Nand Kumar Patel, and Mahendra Karma. Karma was the architect of the Salwa Judum, a controversial and bloody movement of anti-Maoist vigilantes begun in 2005 and later declared illegal by the Indian Supreme Court. Not surprisingly, Karma was high on the Maoists' hit list. Among the wounded is V C Shukla, 83, from an old Congress family and the reviled Minister of Information and Broadcasting during Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's 1975-7 "emergency".