Urban Naxals: The Making of Buddha in a Traffic Jam

by Vivek Agnihotri

These front organizations are the offshoots of the parent Maoist party, which maintains a separate existence to escape legal liabilities. These Front Organizations (FOs) carry out a two-pronged communication attack—propaganda and disinformation. They raise funds for the insurgency and assist cadres in legal matters. These FOs are also used to provide safe houses to underground cadres and shelter to fugitives. They bring intellectuals into their fold who provide an intellectual veneer to the illegal, unconstitutional, and inhuman violence in the Naxal movement. In effect, these intellectuals present this beastly and gruesome reality in a sanitized, romantic, and palatable packaging for which the media and its urban audiences have a weakness. Such FOs exist in twenty out of the twenty-nine states of India. They are seeping into the strategically sensitive north-eastern states of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh.