The intimacy of insurgency: beyond coercion, greed or grievance in Maoist India

Abstract

The Maoist movement has been presented as one of the most powerful forces of resistance against policies of economic liberalization in India. This paper explores how and why the movement has spread in recent years. Analysing beyond theories explaining insurgent action in terms of coercion, greed or grievance, the article draws on long-term ethnographic research in a Maoist guerrilla zone to explore an important aspect of mobilization that has been underplayed to date in the literature: the relations of intimacy which develop between the mobilizing forces and the people in the area of struggle. The paper shows how bonds of family and kinship, exchange and its expectations, caste and its manifestations are crucial for understanding the social dynamics of revolutionary mobilization. Moreover, it suggests that the relationship between ideology and political organization is significant in shaping the kinds of relations of intimacy developed, and that in turn this can explain the reach of the organization. In the Indian case, the paper thus compares the spread of the Maoists with competing political organizations in their guerrilla zones – the Indian State and the Hindu right. Just as relations of intimacy may help explain why people support and join radical movements, the paper suggests that their conflictual relationship with revolutionary subjectivity may also become the Achilles’ heel of such movements, explaining why people distance themselves from, leave and betray them, leading in part to their decline.

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