Green Comrades: An Eco-Marxist Assessment of Select Texts on the Maoist Insurgency in Contemporary India

Over the past few decades, Maoists, armed Left-wing extremists, have been active in underdeveloped regions of eastern, central, and southern India, forming a vast area known as the Red Corridor. The Maoists claim to fight for the subalterns’ rights over “jal, jungle, aurzameen” (water, forests, and land) and mineral wealth, aiming to seize State power through armed insurgency and mass mobilization. Dense forests and rugged terrains in the Red Corridor facilitate their guerilla tactics and prolong their low-intensity insurgency. This paper attempts to argue that the Maoists’ determination to live in and secure forests, exert claim over the natural resources available in their regions, and vehemently resist, even with the means of violence, any sort of usurpation of their area by the state/capitalists, comply, to a certain extent, with the ideology of eco-Marxism that holds capitalism as the root cause for ecological degradation. The study draws on three texts contextualizing the Maoist insurgency in contemporary India: Jangalnama: Travels in a Maoist Guerilla Zone (2010) by Satnam, Walking with the Comrades (2011) by Arundhati Roy, and Red Blooms in the Forest (2013) by Nilima Sinha.