Naxalism never recovered in West Bengal, which is today governed by legal Marxist Communist parties. But it revived and spread widely in other eastern states, beginning in the 1980s, even before India’s liberated economy began to take off. The new Naxalism has little middle-class participation and no support from Beijing; it seems to be a genuine grassroots movement. Its cadres are recruited from the rural poor, the landless, from low-caste labourers oppressed by higher-caste landlords and above all from the so-called tribals or adivasis.

The adivasis are India’s aboriginal hill tribes – the subcontinent’s equivalent of Amazonian or North American Indians. Most are animists or Christians. They rank among India’s poorest inhabitants, have often been driven from their ancestral lands and say they are discriminated against by government officials. Certainly the hilly forested areas in which they live tend to be even worse served by the state than other parts of rural India: the schools lack teachers, government doctors don’t turn up to the clinics. Where there is education, it is often provided by Christian missionaries – or by the Naxalites. In some rural areas, villagers prefer the Maoists’ “people’s courts” to government ones, which can take years to resolve even simple cases.

The so-called Red Corridor stretches from the Nepalese border all the way to Tamil Nadu in the south and the easternmost parts of Maharashtra in the west. But it covers mostly rural jungle areas that are of little interest to tourists, and until recently, were of little economic significance. However, the large stretches of the country where Maoists are able to challenge or neutralise the authority of the state – 165 out of 602 districts – are of growing importance to Indian and foreign business. Several of the regions that have seen the fiercest fighting -between the Indian state and the Maoists are rich in iron ore, coal, bauxite and limestone – raw materials desperately needed by an expanding economy.