Conference: Maoism and the State of the Indian Left

Posted by onehundredflowers on February 13, 2011


This is a map of the "Red Corridor" where the Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-M) has predominant influence
This conference is being hosted by the South Asia Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The text below comes from their Facebook page. The event listing can be found here.

Maoism and the State of the Indian Left
Issues surrounding the CPI (Maoist) have acquired an important place in the political debates on contemporary India. By estimates of the Government of India, the Maoists have their presence in about 220 of 626 districts of the country. While the ruling dispensation, including most mainstream political parties, paint the Maoists, to use the famous expression of the current Prime Minister, as “the gravest threat to internal security”, the Maoists claim that they are fighting for the marginalized, poor and tribal populations.

Maoist presence is mainly concentrated in the forested regions of central-east India. The militarized Maoist movement – which does not contest elections unlike the mainstream Communist parties in India – and its predecessor, the Naxalite movement of the 1970s, claim to have given voice to the social, economic and political aspirations of the rural poor through their revolutionary opposition to the Indian state. Those sympathetic to the Maoists claim that Maoists have been successful in developing their movement in India in the era of economic liberalization, in contrast to the fate of the parliamentary Left in India, most notably the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which are increasingly faced with electoral decline in areas where they were once dominant. The parliamentary Left on the other hand, is critical of the Maoists. They consider them to be dogmatic and term their militarized strategy and tactics to be erroneous in the Indian context, which has high human costs and has no chance of success.

How do we understand these debates between the parliamentary Left and the Maoists in contemporary India? How are these debates related to the changing political economy of contemporary India? What do they reveal about the state of the Left in India today, as a whole? These are some of the questions that will be addressed in the course of this colloquium.

Speakers:

Sumanta Bannerjee
Independent Scholar and the author of In the Wake of Naxalbari: A History of Naxalite Movement in India

Gautam Navlakha
Leading Human Rights Activist, India

Prasenjit Bose
Research Unit Convener of Communist Party of India (Marxist)

Smita Gupta
Senior Fellow, Institute for Human Development, New Delhi India

Alpa Shah
Faculty, Goldsmith College, University of London

Vijay Prasad
Faculty
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut

Deepankar Basu
Faculty
University of Massachusetts at Amhurst

Auritro Majumder
Doctoral Student
Syracuse University

Remala Sen
Doctoral Student
Cornell University

Emmanuel Teitelbaum
Faculty, George Washington University

Dhruv Jain
Doctoral Student
York University

Shivaji Mukherjee
Doctoral Student
Yale University

Sergio Mukherjee
Doctoral student
University of Pennsylvania

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Thursday, March 17 · 10:00am – 6:00pm

McNeil Center for Early American Studies (University of Pennsylvania)
3355 Woodland Walk
Philadelphia, PA