India: Nazariya Magazine – The Death of Journalist Mukesh Chandrakar

We hereby share an article published by Nazariya Magazine.

Journalist from Bastar, Mukesh Chandrakar, who was murdered for reporting on the corruption in public construction projects

Nazariya Magazine – The Death of Journalist Mukesh Chandrakar and What Will Happen in Amit Shah’s New India on 31st March 2026


“Union Home Minister Amit Shah has claimed that Bastar, which has been in the grip of Maoism for four decades, will be liberated by March 31, 2026. How will this happen? By developing the area. And development will happen only when the area is covered with a network of roads to ensure basic facilities reach the village. Hence, the focus is on building roads. But Bastar is perhaps the only area where apart from sand, gravel and asphalt, roads are irrigated with the blood of jawans, and now even of journalists.” (Sharma, S (a), 2025). These are the words of Bastar Talkies’ Vikas Tiwari, one of the few remaining journalists in Bastar region of Chhattisgarh where Indian Union Home Minister Amit Shah claims to be waging an “all out war” against the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and its People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA). Tiwari is referring to the recent murder of Mukesh Chandrakar, whose Youtube channel Bastar Junction provided on-ground reports from Bastar’s Dandakaranya forests, particularly the Abhujmaad hills which is the centre of Maoist resistance in the country.

True to form, some media outlets jumped to presume that this was the doing of the Maoists, a rumour which was swiftly dispelled by the journalists of Bastar who held a press conference to clarify that it was instead the work of a big government contractor Suresh Chandrakar (a cousin of the reporter). While some initial claims tried to make this matter a family dispute, it has now become clear that the murder occurred because Mukesh Chandrakar had exposed the poor construction quality of a recently built road in Bijapur district in a report for the NDTV news agency which was released on 25th December 2024. This forced the government to conduct an inquiry into the matter since the state was paying money to the contractor Suresh Chandrakar to build these roads. Few days later, on 3rd January 2025, Mukesh Chandrakar’s body was found in a septic tank in Chattanpara Basti, Bastar, with some of his organs removed from his body. Chandrakar was brutally slaughtered by this contractor and his goons for essentially throwing light upon the dirty going abouts between the state and its corrupt nexus with contractors who get paid to carry out the “developmental projects” for the state and big corporations. Chandrakar’s murder has thrown light upon the remaining journalists in Bastar’s battleground, such as the above mentioned Vikas Tiwari who are continually facing an emerging threat upon their lives with the looming threat of contractor-raj in Bastar. Would it surprise one to learn that the contractor was previously a member of the Indian National Congress, but recently jumped ship to the Bharatiya Janata Party and had visited Chhattisgarh Deputy Chief Minister Vijay Sharma’s official residence just days prior to this incident? (Sharma, R, 2025). But for students of Bastar’s recent history, what is happening right now is a farcical repeat of old history.

Journalists in Bastar have never been truly safe and while the state has tried hard to pin this blame on the Maoists, it has always been the state which is the aggressor and a violator of the nominal rights guaranteed in the Indian Constitution. Hence, Amit Shah, who has declared his goal of total annihilation of the Maoists to construct “Naxal-mukt Bastar” in the brahmanical Hindutva fascist BJP’s “New India/Viksit Bharat” is claiming that this is all to restore peace and harmony in Bastar and to bring development to the region. Carl von Clausewitz summed it best, “the conqueror is always a lover of peace; he would prefer to take over unopposed.” His proclaimed deadline to end CPI (Maoist) in India is 31st March, 2026. What will this Naxal-mukt Bastar mean for the people of not just Bastar but for the rest of the country, including journalists like Mukesh Chandrakar?

Since the very first Maoist squads arrived in Bastar, the struggles undertaken by the Adivasi peasants have been against thekedars (contractors) who represent the big landlords in the region. Anti-feudal democratic struggle in the region became the basis of red power in Bastar, with the first movements led by the erstwhile CPI (ML) People’s War being against the big landlords who controlled the tendu leaf trade. Gathering of these leaves, which are used for making the traditional beedi cigarette, and their sale was historically controlled by the big landlords among the Adivasis, who emerged with the arrival of feudal production relations among the Adivasi tribes of central India. The exploitative practices of these big landlords and their strong nexus with the Indian state’s Forest Department and its paramilitary caused great strife to the Adivasi peasants as their traditional lands were continuously being occupied by the government for mining activities. The big landlord contractors would aid the imperialist and comprador bureaucratic capitalists in procuring land from the peasants and rope in the paramilitary to do it by force, whenever needed. At the same time, they would pay little to the peasants engaged in the tendu leaf collection work as well as the traditional Mahua flower (used for making an alcoholic drink) gathering work. These early struggles led to sweeping advancements in the conditions of the Adivasi peasantry and their growing tilt towards Maoism. Looking at it purely economically, the success of these movements was such that the leaf picking rate, which was 1 Rupee per 1000 leaves in most places, rose by 50 paise per leaf! Social changes also emerged with this, as it was predominantly women who were engaged in this work and faced great sexual harassment from Forest Department officials and contractors regularly. With these movements, the women were emboldened to retaliate.


It was the anti-feudal struggle which demolished these semi-feudal relations and led to the establishment of Revolutionary People’s Committees (RPCs) and subsequently the Janathana Sarkars as a form of an embryonic form of dual power and people’s state in this region, based on anti-imperialist anti-feudal lines [Author Note: You can read more about Janathana Sarkars and their overall impact in Issue 4 “Stop War on the People of Bastar” of Nazariya Magazine]. These forms of people’s state then mete out harsh regulations against the government contractors, which led to most of them leaving Bastar. Martyred CPI (Maoist) Politburo and Central Committee Member, Koteswara Rao Kishenji in an interview with the Mint, explained how the Maoists kept a check on the big landlords, “we impose fines on rich peasants and charge 2-5% levy on government contractors. We punish corrupt landlords and drive them out from the village. The properties that we seize from them, such as farm equipment and cattle, are used for village development in places where we run a parallel administration. But we don’t charge anything from people’s pay from NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), or (from) contractors building infrastructure such as roads and schools for the poor” (Rao, 2009).

The Indian state and its Goebbelsian propaganda repeatedly propagate a line of equating Maoist violence upon big landlords, contractors and state informants with their brutalities against the Adivasi peasantry and many liberal-minded intellectuals, journalists and members of civil society have done the same, with the worst like the ruling class intellectual Nandini Sundar propagating the notorious “sandwich theory” to make the Adivasi peasants seem like hapless, politically incapable sheep being slaughtered by the Maoists and the Indian state. But Lenin precisely explained the logic behind this violence, “one cannot hide the fact that dictatorship presupposes and implies a ‘condition’, one so disagreeable to renegades (such as Kautsky), of revolutionary violence of one class against another … the ‘fundamental feature’ of the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat is revolutionary violence.” Just as the ruling class and its dictatorship, exercised via the Indian state, metes out white terror to silence dissent and curb the politics of the oppressed and exploited masses of India, the people’s organs of state power will mete out revolutionary violence against the ruling class to defend the political gains of the people against counter-revolutionary violence of the ruling class.

When the contractors and big landlords of Bastar, backed by the state, rallied the lumpen elements of the region to form the Salwa Judum fascist militia in 2005 to carry out large-scale village burnings, rapes and murders of the Adivasi peasants, the armed people’s resistance in the region was the only thing stopping the complete annihilation of the gains of people’s struggles in the region, including the above mentioned social and economic movements. Martyred CPI (Maoist) Central Committee member and Spokesperson, Cherukuri Rajkumar Azad said, “if they really bother about the escalating violence and sincerely wish to put an end to it, they should question the government as to why it was setting up more and more special anti-Naxal commando forces and spreading terror in the adivasi-inhabited regions; why it is recruiting the local adivasis into the anti-Naxal police force and making them into cannon-fodder in the war against their very people; why it is setting up informers from the poor tribals by threatening them or bribing them with huge sums of money…

…They should ask where is the law & order problem from the Maoists who had actually stopped the illegal felling of forest trees, stopped the exploitation by the forest officials, forest contractors, timber smugglers, government bureaucrats, police officials, money lenders, non-adivasi landlords who had taken over tribal land against the provisions of the Indian constitution. They should ask themselves whether Maoists had done good or bad by securing a massive increase in the rate for plucking tendu leaves, cutting bamboo, laying roads, selling the minor forest produce and so on. And they should expose and oppose the conspiracy of the government in sending massive repressive force armed with the most sophisticated weapons against the Maoists.”

The people’s enemy, Mahendra Karma, a feudal landlord who was responsible for the genocidal Salwa Judum, who was killed by the Maoists in an act of “popular justice”

It should then not come as a logical surprise that whenever fascist violence has increased in Bastar, while the state rushes to promote the notion of equating state violence with revolutionary violence, it uses this as a garb to justify fascistic violence of contractors, big landlords and their lumpen goons upon the people. Mahendra Karma, the face and founder of the Salwa Judum, was a big landlord whose entire family was one of the foremost contractors involved in the tendu leaves trade in the region. His Salwa Judum pushed him to the status of Leader of Opposition in the Chhattisgarh Vidhan Sabha during the same period. Right after the Salwa Judum, began Operation Green Hunt which saw the space for journalists eroding entirely in Bastar, highlighted with the killing of journalist Hemchandra Pandey by the Indian state’s paramilitary, while he was interviewing the aforementioned Azad.

In periods of fascistic violence, the ruling class in these regions are emboldened to show their true faces. The fascistic violence and the white terror unleashed by the ruling classes is wholly intended to weaken the revolutionary movement, create fear among new revolutionaries and their sympathizers and push the people into passivity to preserve their class rule. Since the coming of the brahmanical Hindutva fascist BJP government in 2014, this model is slowly being implemented all over the country, first in areas where national liberation struggles were the sharpest. The killings of journalists like Gauri Lankesh at the hands of fascist goons became possible during this period. In Bastar, big landlords became so emboldened so as to form smaller Salwa Judum-like lumpen gangs to harass journalists, such as Malini Subramaniam, to compel them to leave Bastar so that these gangs (which later became the state-sanctioned paramilitary District Reserve Guards) could carry out all forms of fascistic atrocities upon the people with no one to witness and report on these matters.

This is all in service of foreign finance capital, in the end, to pave the way for the attempt at valorization of capital, which is the end goal of imperialism at a world scale. While progressive journalists have been able to analyze the symptoms of this problem, they must understand that it is not merely under the garb of killing Maoists that all of this is conducted. Rather, it is the killings of Maoists which ensures that exploitation and oppression returns in Bastar. People’s resistance exists to defend the organs of people’s power and the gains they have historically made through class war, which in the course of anti-feudal struggle include democratic rights. In a country like India where the task of democratic revolution has not been completed, it is the people’s class struggle and their organs of power such as the Janathana Sarkars which also ensure that progressive, democratic-minded intelligentsia and intellectuals can boldly carry out their professional tasks. By attacking and weakening the people’s revolutionary movement, the nominal advantages gained by this section of the petite bourgeoisie also wither away.

Sadly, liberal-minded journalists who are starting to gain the consciousness of understanding the nature of the state’s narrative continue to be plagued by identitarian politics and fail to understand the importance of Janathana Sarkars and RPCs as organs of people’s power and thus make conclusions like this: “the state has steadily wrested the advantage in the war by recruiting local Adivasis in the police force as District Reserve Guards. Unlike paramilitary troopers from faraway places who are unfamiliar with the terrain and culture, these locals have lived in the jungle and know the ways of the insurgents. They are able to fight a guerilla war more effectively. Ultimately, what matters in any insurgency is which side the local population picks. The recruitment of the DRGs showed a section of Adivasis is now willing to fight on behalf of the state. But, if the state uses them to unleash indiscriminate violence on unarmed people, it risks undoing the gradual gains it had made. At the end of the day, the escalating violence in Bastar is consuming Adivasi lives.” (Sharma, S (b), 2025)

This is a ridiculous conclusion which seems to have ignored the existence of Adivasi fascist militias formed to serve the state like the Salwa Judum and its later successors like the Vikas Sangharsh Samiti prior to the DRG. The journalist then follows up by bemoaning the death of 8 DRGs and their drivers who were annihilated by the Maoists in the first week of 2025 when they were coming from a supposed encounter having killed Maoists. Unable to realise the class nature and the difference between people’s resistance, best represented by the Maoists in the region, and state violence meted out by the DRG, the liberal intelligentsia ignorantly, and rather foolishly, aid the state in its endeavors. This excerpt is part of a larger article which largely opposes the state’s practices in Bastar but sadly, this is the extent of the quality of journalism surrounding Bastar. One must ask why journalists like Subranshu Choudhary, whose pockets are filled to the brim with money from Bill Gates’ Microsoft Research and is known for his vitriolic anti-people rhetoric, continues to live in the region and has never been attacked by the Maoists while others who don’t even express any sympathies with the Maoist cause but merely report upon the activities of contractors, big landlords, comprador and imperialist companies as well as the state are driven out of Bastar or slaughtered like Hemchandra Pandey or Mukesh Chandrakar.

If you are an individual like me, who is seeing the withering space for journalists in the country, Naxal-mukt Bastar in Modi’s Viksit Bharat is an India where even nominal democratic rights will be completely withered away. In Amit Shah’s imagination of Bastar after 31st March 2026, the foreign imperialist and Indian comprador bureaucratic bourgeois corporations will rule the land, contractor raj and landlord terror in saffron garb will return to the land. Amit Shah’s dream will be a nightmare for the people of India where imperialist loot, exploitation and feudal oppression run amock with no people’s organized resistance to fight back. Yet, it is clear that Shah’s dream will remain purely in the realm of his rhetoric, given the unyielding resistance offered by the people of Bastar even during this period of heightened violence. For the rest of us, sitting at the fence and not understanding the difference between the side of the people and the side of the ruling class, how it will impact the rest of us and recognizing our anti-fascist responsibility during this period is an essential task. There is a reason the fascists rush to label everyone an urban Naxal, since the apex of people’s politics is represented by Naxalism i.e Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. In times when even Rahul Gandhi can be labelled a Maoist, the rest of us must fall in line and take the side of the people. We will have to, or ultimately perish as Amit Shah and Modi have their way with our country and its peoples.

Submission by Namita Thapar, aspiring journalist

https://nazariyamagazine.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/the-death-of-journalist-mukesh-chandrakar-and-what-will-happen-in-amit-shahs-new-india-on-31st-march-2026-e28093-nazariya-magazine.pdf

REFERENCES

Sharma, S. (a) (2025, January 13). The murder of a journalist and the forgotten Maoist war in Bastar. Scroll.in. https://scroll.in/article/1077830/the-murder-of-a-journalist-and-the-forgotten-maoist-war-in-bastar

Sharma, R. (2025). Chhattisgarh journalist killed after report on corruption: All we know. Business Standard. https://www.business-standard.com/india-news/chhattisgarh-journalist-mukesh-chandrakar-killed-corruption-contractor-125010500373_1.html

Koteshwar Rao. (2009, June 15). Interview with Koteshwar Rao, a member of the Politburo of Communist Party of India (Maoist): “Mainstream politics not for us,” says Koteshwar Rao. Indian Vanguard. https://indianvanguard.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/interview-with-koteshwar-rao-a-member-of-the-politburo-of-communist-party-of-india-maoistmainstream-politics-not-for-us-says-koteshwar-rao/

Sharma, S.(b) (2025, January 13). The murder of a journalist and the forgotten Maoist war in Bastar. Scroll.in https://scroll.in/article/1077830/the-murder-of-a-journalist-and-the-forgotten-maoist-war-in-bastar

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