ABSTRACT
Bastar has become the centre of India’s war on adivasis; the aboriginal people who make up about 8 per cent of the population. Why India is waging such a war can only be understood in the context of neoliberal extractivism and its relationship with the Indian capitalist class and state apparatus. Extractivism is an age-old process that the colonial power used for the exploitation of marginalised people and their resources. Although the extractive dynamics have changed, what remain intact are the plunder, violence and enclosure of the commons. Drawing from Nandini Sundar’s The Burning Forest: India’s War in Bastar (2016), this chapter critically examines the motives and methods of the Indian state’s war on adivasis, alongside the indomitable resistance of adivasi-Maoists.
