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Military Assaults Against Revolutionaries
and the Masses in India



Prime Minister Manmohan Singh spins a tale
at the start of Operation Green Hunt.


      Like every country ruled by exploiting classes, India is quite willing to use its military against its own people. Indeed, throughout history that has always been one of the primary purposes of armies—to suppress uprisings by the masses.

      In October 2009, the reactionary Indian government began such a military campaign, called “Operation Green Hunt”, aimed (it said) against a Maoist insurrection, but actually aimed against a growing popular revolt of the rural masses, and especially the Adivasis, or tribal peoples, in the forested areas of east-central India. The CPI(Maoist), to be sure, led and organized this mass rebellion, but it was in fact a rebellion by the broad masses themselves involving tremendous numbers of people and enjoying very widespread mass support. The Maoists themselves are none other than a section of these masses. And it is against these masses as a whole that the vicious thrust of the military assault landed.

      Previous to Operation Green Hunt the ruling class in the tribal areas tried a campaign against the people by the Salwa Judum death squads organized locally. Then after the ultimate failure of that and also of Operation Green Hunt, and a pause to lick their wounds, the Indian ruling class engaged in another operation called “SAMADHAN-Prahar”. While, like the previous wars, this campaign led to tremendous harm and deaths to Adivasis, it also failed to wipe out the Maoists and their supporters. Now, once again, starting around 2022, the Indian rulers have launched yet another campaign in what seems to be their perpetual war against the Adivasi people: this time it is called “Operation Kagar”.

      In the articles and documents below we will try to report on this and other ruling class armed attacks on the people. Note that most of the older news articles here are from ruling class publications, and the reader will have to keep their capitalist class bias in mind and learn to “read between the lines”.

      [Note added on April 20, 2010:] The new International Campaign Against War on the People in India website (at http://icawpi.org) has a large number of articles and commentaries about Operation Green Hunt and related topics. Another excellent site is the Frontlines of Revolutionary Struggle at http://revolutionaryfrontlines.wordpress.com/.] As of that time, these were the best sites for keeping up to date on news and developments relating to such events and resistance struggles. For a number of years, BannedThought.net deferred to those sites for this sort of news. However, we will once again try to post documents and news items about the Indian ruling class attacks on its own people, if we see that not much information is easily available elsewhere.




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