India's Maoist insurrection, affecting almost a third of the country's 604 districts, has claimed around 450 lives this year -- a modest toll so far.
Yet the events in the impoverished tribal-dominated Lalgarh in West Bengal have produced prominent publicity in India. That is partly because West Bengal, where the Maoist insurrection was born out of the Sino-Soviet split in the communist movement in 1967 in the village of Naxalbari (hence their nickname: Naxalites), has hitherto been resistant to it. This is in turn a result of the strict village-level control exerted by the Communist Party of India-Marxist CPI(M), whose leftist coal....