Revolutionary movements rarely end heroically, a point underscored recently by India’s interior minister, Amit Shah. In the Indian parliament on March 30, he declared the country “Naxal-free,” referring to the end of a decades-long Maoist insurgency rooted in some of India’s poorest forest regions. Such claims risk mistaking the end of insurgency for resolution. More often, these endings mark a transition, leaving Indigenous communities to develop new ways of engaging with the state.
Latin America knows this pattern well. Peru after the fall of the Shining Path and Colombia after the FARC show that the end of guerrilla warfare produces not clarity but a political vacuum. When the gun no longer claims to speak for the dispossessed, a harder question emerges about how popular politics survives.
That question, long familiar in Latin America, now confronts India. In the post-Maoist moment, insurgency recedes while development advances under militarized protection, forcing Indigenous communities to reinvent politics without romanticizing either violence or the state.
Naxalism, named after a 1967 peasant uprising in the village of Naxalbari, spread across a forested belt of central and eastern India often called the Red Corridor. This region is home largely to Adivasis, the country’s Indigenous tribal communities who have long faced land dispossession, state neglect, and exploitation by extractive industries. Landscapes of Extraction and Resistance For decades, Maoists claimed to represent India’s Adivasis and the full range of their grievances. These grievances included land alienation under forest and mining laws and the expansion of extractive industries across central India. They also reflected the steady erosion of protections such as the Forest Rights Act. Gram sabhas—the bodies of rural self-governance—were routinely bypassed for mining and infrastructure projects, and police camps often appeared in front of schools and hospitals. The 2006 killings at Kalinganagar , the displacement caused by Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh, and the Dongria Kondh’s resistance to Vedanta’s mining in the Niyamgiri hills revealed a deeper pattern. Development was enforced through coercion, dissent was reframed as insurgency, and Indigenous territorial claims were treated as obstacles to growth.
That pattern persists. In Odisha, tensions have recently escalated around proposed bauxite mining at Sijimali hill, spanning Rayagada and Kalahandi districts, where tribal villagers have resisted attempts to build a road to a mining site. On April 7, police fired tear gas to disperse protesters, and clashes left several personnel injured. The episode illustrates how extractive expansion continues to collide with Indigenous land claims.
In districts such as Bastar, Dantewada, and Gadchiroli, the state has been viewed less as a guarantor of rights than as a paramilitary presence. However imperfectly, Naxalism provided a language of resistance to this dispossession.
Yet, like many guerrilla movements, it gradually transformed armed struggle from a negotiating tactic into a substitute for political voice, leaving behind militarized landscapes shaped by both revolution and counterinsurgency. After the Guns Fall Silent Today, insurgencies like the Naxalites in India and the FARC in Colombia are in retreat, but their decline has exposed rather than resolved the Indigenous question. What remains is familiar. Extractive projects continue to be justified as development, while militarization intensifies alongside deforestation. Tragically, symbolic inclusion without territorial security persists. Indigenous communities are no longer championed by guerrillas, but neither are they meaningfully empowered by the state.
Latin America has lived through this before. After armed conflict, Indigenous movements across the region faced similar dilemmas. Electoral democracy expanded and human rights discourse proliferated. Multicultural recognition entered constitutions. Yet land continued to be appropriated and forests cleared. Truth commissions in Guatemala and Peru later documented the realities of counterinsurgency. Villages were destroyed, civilians were displaced, and indigeneity was treated as a security threat. The disappearance of guerrilla movements did not bring emancipation. It simply shifted the terrain of struggle.
India’s counterinsurgency has been no less brutal, only less visible. Entire Adivasi villages have been emptied and relocated, while state-backed militias fractured communities. Sexual violence, arbitrary detention, and the criminalization of forest-based livelihoods became routine. Unlike Latin America, however, India has seen no comparable public reckoning. There have been no truth commissions and no national accounting, allowing counterinsurgency to be absorbed into development policy rather than critically examined.
Recent debates within India’s Left point to a deeper failure behind Maoism’s defeat. The problem was not only military but political. By treating guerrilla warfare as an end in itself, the movement foreclosed the creation of durable institutions of popular power such as local governance and mass organizations. When retreat came, it was not strategic but depoliticizing, with former cadres absorbed into state rehabilitation programs oriented more toward surveillance than political reinvention. Guerrilla movements that mistook armed struggle for politics left Indigenous communities institutionally exposed once the guns fell silent.
In this post-insurgent landscape, the figure of Rigoberta Menchú, the indigenous activist in Guatemala who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, remains politically relevant, not simply as a moral icon but as a theorist of survival after revolutionary failure. Her politics did not emerge through armed struggle or electoral incorporation, but from defeat, genocide, and displacement. It took the form of testimonio , a politics of voice, memory, and collective presence when formal institutions had collapsed. As scholars such as John Beverley argue , its force lies not in perfect factuality but in how truth is produced when official histories fail.
Here the contrast with Naxalite politics becomes sharper. In its later phase, Maoism reduced revolution to militarism and substituted vanguard command for mass consultation. Menchú’s politics moved in the opposite direction, from secrecy to public articulation and from armed guardianship to collective self-representation. Her nonviolence was not an abstract ethical stance but a strategy forged after the collapse of armed possibilities.
This distinction matters in India, where Mahatma Gandhi is often invoked as a universal answer to political violence. Gandhian ethics, though radical, did not emerge from Indigenous lifeworlds as much as from upper-caste liberal traditions. Structurally, they resemble Latin America’s progressive criollo traditions. Adivasi movements have drawn on Gandhian techniques, but their struggles over land and livelihood cannot be reduced to ethical universalism.
As scholars of Adivasi politics argue , indigeneity is not a cultural identity awaiting recognition but a political condition shaped by land alienation, extraction, and state power. India’s Chipko movement, where women embraced trees to prevent deforestation, belongs to the same lineage as Amazonian resistance to oil pipelines and Andean struggles against mining. Latin America has been more successful in translating this relationship into global political language through concepts such as Pachamama , plurinationality, and buen vivir , which have shaped constitutions and international debates. Reimagining Indigenous Politics The experience of Bolivia under Evo Morales illustrates both the possibilities and the limits of Indigenous power after insurgency. Morales showed that Indigenous movements could enter the state and reshape national narratives. Yet his government also revealed how deeply extractivism structures political economy, even under Indigenous leadership.
India now faces a comparable risk. Indigenous leaders such as Draupadi Murmu, Hemant Soren, and Mohan Majhi hold high constitutional office, and Indigenous languages receive increasing recognition. Yet displacement continues, and forests are steadily lost. India has delegated tens of thousands of hectares of forest land for mining and infrastructure over the past decade, with central Indian states among the most affected. During Hemant Soren’s tenure, tensions around coal expansion and land rights have underscored how development imperatives continue to drive deforestation in Adivasi regions.
For India, Latin America is not a distant story but a mirror reflecting a political moment. Both regions have confronted the questions of what comes after insurgency and how Indigenous politics can remain collective and territorial when armed struggle loses legitimacy and the state offers inclusion without transformation. Menchú’s legacy suggests one answer. It points to a politics rooted in testimony, land, and survival rather than vanguardism or technocracy. This is not a retreat but a reconfiguration of struggle that demands patience and the rebuilding of political voice from below.
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