Left wing extremism: Re-examining challenges for development and governance in the Scheduled Areas

The Naxalite Movement in India, also referred to as Left wing extremism (LWE) in the official parlance, have had pre-occupied the discourse of development-governance in the Scheduled Areas of Peninsular India. The principal State agency tasked with internal security, the Ministry of Home Affairs, has squarely put the blame on Naxalites for any underdevelopment and lack of governance in these regions. On the other hand, several scholars have questioned such discursive constructs, that of a terror-wielding Naxalite and a victimised-impoverished adivasi, which would pave way for ‘counter’ insurgency operations in the region. These scholars, instead, blame the State functioning and functionaries to have caused profound grievances amongst the adivasis, from which Naxalite is only a manifestation. This chapter goes beyond these projected oppositional entities to explore the fluidity between the adivasis, Naxalites and the State, and how these fluid interactions have shaped the processes of development and governance in the Scheduled areas of eastern and central India. It raises important questions on the traditional understanding of development and governance as state’s monopolistic project, and rather argues for conceptualizing them as a complex set of doings between different actors. The chapter draws inputs from fieldwork in Jharkhand, and the secondary sources are used either to substantiate or explore new insights.