Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerillas
by Alpa Shah
(Hurst, £20)

FOR decades the Naxalites, a movement made up of middle-class, well-educated revolutionaries and the poor, have been engaged in a long struggle against the highly militarised Indian state and its policy of exploitation and discrimination against the Munda Adivasi people.

Alpa Shah's Nightmarch is a fascinating insight into a war going on in one of the world’s largest democracies and she literally went out in the field to research it. In the remote forests and hills of Jharkhand in India, she lived with the tribal people in a village of mud houses with no electricity or running water.  

It was, she writes, “A good base from which to understand, from the grassroots, the virtues and limits of the various attempts at addressing poverty and inequality — whether it was by international development agencies or by grassroots social movements.”

Donning her fatigues she joined the communist guerrillas, the Naxalites, on a 250-mile trek through the hills and forests of eastern India where, in 2008, the Indian government launched its Operation Green Hunt counter-insurgency policy, putting  thousands of troops into the area surrounding the Adivasi hills.  

Journalists and human rights activists were jailed if they tried to get into the guerilla areas or report on the government’s human rights abuses and Shah was one of the few outsiders and the only woman who took part in the Naxalite trek.

“Hunted ruthlessly by the state, we had to march in the safety of the darkness — all under cover of night and without the light of a torch to avoid drawing attention to ourselves,” she recalls.

The war is largely unreported in the West, perhaps because the revolutionary nature of the communist guerillas is too challenging to the dominant political ideology in Britain and Europe.   As Shah comments, the Naxalites  “strive for a utopian human community, devoting their lives to fight together, when the circumstances were so set clearly against them.”