Naxalites are "the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country." India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
India and China, are both more of a risk to us as sources of instability than they are as sources of competitive economic risk as cohesive states. These countries are in close proximity to the fragmentation of the state into zones controlled by primary loyalties (ethnic, religious, ideological, gang, family, etc.) throughout Asia and prime candidates for economic and social chaos due to the ongoing inability of the state to provide buffers against the pressures of globalization.
In India's case, in addition to ongoing and exceedingly diverse ethnic insurgencies in locations like the oil rich Assam, there is a budding Maoist insurgency (covered by John Lancaster of the Washington Post). This description of manufactured primary loyalty sounds familiar (which creates loyalty in opposition to the state):Once dismissed as little more than an irritant, the Maoist movement is gaining ground in this country of more than 1 billion people, feeding off anti-government hostility in some rural areas and highlighting the uneven nature of India's unprecedented economic boom. Analysts say the movement consists of about 10,000 regular fighters, with several hundred thousand supporters. The rebels are known as Naxalites, after the eastern town of Naxalbari where the movement began in 1967.. the rebels draw strength from "deprived and alienated sections of the population" and "are trying to establish 'liberation zones' in core areas where they are dispensing, or claiming to be dispensing, basic state functions."This conflict between paramilitary and guerrilla does too:
He's 30 years old, speaks English and is conversant in the language of e-mail and the Internet. Friendly and self-confident, he could be a manager in a call center, or perhaps a software engineer on one of India's gleaming high-tech campuses. But "Comrade M," as he asks to be called, prefers a different line of work: waging war on the Indian state... "They're absolutely ruthless killers," a senior Chhattisgarh security official, B.K.S. Roy, said by telephone from the state capital, Raipur. "I've never seen this kind of brutality in my life before, the way they strike and kill Salwa Judum members. They're hacked to death, heads severed from bodies...." "They come into villages, beat up men, rape women," she (a Naxalite) said of the paramilitaries. "I don't feel bad at all about killing them...." Comrade M, the university graduate and a squad leader, said the rebels typically laid ambushes for "our friends in khaki uniform" using mines triggered by camera-flash devices.Of course, we will eventually see seemingly proto-state movements (which cannot in the current environment expand beyond very limited boundaries since the same forces that are dissipating the nation-state work against proto-states too) like these develop innovative off-shoots and and more importantly cooperative arrangements with fellow travelers (in that they share a desire to hollow out India) that fully embrace global guerrilla methods. These newer groups will increasingly incapacitate the state by undermining essential services supplied to functional cities. I suspect they will be successful.