ARUNDHATI ROY ON MAOIST NAXALITES

FROM LENIN'S TOMB

Arundhati Roy is to be investigated by police in Chhattisgarh over her "links" with Maoist insurgents, who recently killed seventy-six Indian paramilitaries. This is a backlash by the BJP-controlled state in response to an article that she wrote for Outlook magazine, which detailed her encounters with Maoist insurgents in Dantewada, central India, where the ambush was staged. The Maoists are among the forces resisting the capitalist takeover of rural India and growing in influence due in part to the failures of the Left Front in West Bengal and to state repression meted out to the communities they operate in - though they are far from alone. In a sympathetic piece, Roy argues that the Maoists are being forced into violence by the state, pushed into a situation where strategies of non-violence are guaranteed to fail. Watch her interview on Indian television here (wherein she castigates the "empty condemnation industry", something we are all very familiar with):