Nearly six decades after Naxalbari, the balance sheet is stark. The movement redistributed no land, overthrew no government, and built no lasting institution. Ironically, it ruined the lives of local people by cutting them off from their basic needs.
The best ability of Indian refineries is that they can switch between Gulf crude, Russian Urals, and Venezuelan heavy oil. They were built with deep conversion capacity, with units that crack the heavy, sulphur-laden bottom of the barrel into clean diesel and petrol.
Why is India delaying or taking so much time to make this deal possible? There is no single answer to that, but if we put the pieces together, India’s go-slow approach starts to make sense and more like a strategy. It rests on five calculations.
According to the Henry Venn documents from Xavier’s own correspondence, royal orders were lobbied for and issued: “Punish every Brahmin who would oppose the preaching of the Gospel.” This was not metaphorical. The Portuguese in Goa physically attacked and killed Brahmins.
By the 1931 census, the separation was formally complete. Tribal communities were officially listed as a religion separate from Hinduism across British India. Sixty years of work. Six censuses. Six different names for the same manufactured category. The legal identity vacuum was now fully established on paper.
You can suppress an armed uprising with police and courts. You cannot suppress six thousand people who have found their God again without anyone’s permission. That is what truly terrified the Church about Birsa Munda: not his bow and arrow, but his ability to make his people feel whole without a missionary’s approval.
A separate district magistrate and police committee has been tasked with proactively reaching out to students living in PGs, hearing grievances, and building a database, an implicit admission that no such database currently exists.
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