In a forested stretch of Vidarbha east of where Asha and her husband had grown up, many citizens had stopped believing the government’s promises about improving their fortunes. Deprived of their land and historical livelihoods by large-scale corporate and government modernization projects, they’d helped revive a forty-year-old movement of Maoist revolutionaries. Employing land mines, rocket launchers, nail-bombs, and guns against capitalism and the Indian state, the guerrillas were now at work in roughly one-third of India’s 627 districts, including an underdeveloped swath of central and
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