Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 215
crested into the early 1970s only to collapse in a round of
lethal repression, crushing defeats, disillusionments, and
major world-system shifts-and the way forward had to
be reconsidered. Nevertheless, the array of militant groups
shorthanded as Naxalite has reemerged from decades of
quiet persistent growth throughout the "red corridor:' a
north-south axis through the central forested areas from
Nepal to Andhra Pradesh. A merger of the major militant
factions in 2004 produced the CPI (Maoist)-which the
prime minister and home minister have repeatedly called
India's greatest internal security threat (except when it's the
Muslims, as the joke goes).
The CPI(M) has remained the dominant party and a
relatively significant force in electoral politics. It held power
in the provinces of West Bengal and Kerala for over thirty
years, and at several junctures was an influential player in
national coalition politics. Adept in the pragmatic compromise
required in the game of parliamentary power, it favors
industrialization above all-which ironically has put it at
odds with the further Left and its own rural constituency,
especially given harsh recent conflicts around acquisitions
of agricultural land for industrial projects.
It also identifies itself as the only true and representative
voice of the Left. Yet critics had been challenging the
CPI(M)'s attempts to claim its own institution and party
line as synonymous with the Left itself for many years. As
was the case worldwide, the critiques and correctives applied
by the New Left to the Old Left tended to tilt it in
more antiauthoritarian, flexible, and intersectional directions-which
is to say, more anarchistic elements would be