Identification of Spaces of Political Violence in Purulia District, West Bengal: A Geospatial Discourse

Political ideology is a basic sub-structure of any human society. Political ideology brings the structure of the government which runs the country and any administrative area. In a country like India, where democracy prevails, electoral politics play a crucial role in mass population behaviour control. The occurrence of political violence in India and in the state of this country is a very common phenomenon, and as a state of India, West Bengal is not an exception to it. Purulia district having very complex geographical and socio-demographic characteristics makes the culture of political violence a very complicated one. The Maoist legacy of Jungle Mahal prevails in this district. To unveil the spatiality of political violence in the Purulia district is the main objective of this current study. The main focus of this paper is to identify the politically vulnerable areas using quantifiable geospatial techniques which are supported by the social physics approach. Finally, this paper tries to uphold the role of geospatial techniques in crime mapping in terms of organized crimes like political violence. A systematic literature review helped to identify the suitable methodologies for the analysis. Hot spot mapping, mean centre identification along with the centroid method, and spatial interpolation by ordinary Kriging are some methods which have been used for the analysis part.