(A version of this article first appeared in The Leaflet.)

 A year ago on March 24 2020, the Modi regime, in the name of curbing the Covid-19 pandemic, imposed a sudden and total three-week lockdown with a mere four-hour warning. The lockdown lasted nine weeks. Millions of migrant workers, left stranded, walked home, suffering starvation, heat waves, accidents, and many dying along the way. For India’s economy, already staggering under the Modi regime’s 2016 demonetisation blow, the draconian lockdown was a virtual death blow.     

Ever since the naming of  Left political leaders in chargesheets followed by the arrest of student activist Umar Khalid, criticisms and condemnations of the Delhi Police’s “riots probe” have intensified. In addition to students, intellectuals, activists, citizens across India, even former senior police officers wrote to the Delhi Police Commissioner expressing distress at the biased manner in which the police was conducting its “probe”.

This review of the book Bloomsbury withdrew after an outcry, has been prepared by a  voluntary  citizens’  collective of academics and activists, anchored by Karwan-e-Mohabbat, Anhad and Muslim Women’s Forum. We publish excerpts from the introduction to the detailed review.

Part - II

A Preliminary Appraisal

“… Naxalbari is alive and will remain alive because this is built on the foundation of Marxism-Leninism and that of Mao. We know there are many barriers before us, many difficulties, treason, upheavals but Naxalbari shall live on. … Naxalbari is not over and will not be over.                                                               -- Charu Mazumdar, 1969