The persisting drives of the government for development of large industries in backward areas have resulted in isolating the tribal population and the farmers who face multiple displacements. With Malkangiri and Naxalbari foci, discuss the corrective strategies needed to win the Left Wing Extremism (LWE) doctrine affected citizens back into mainstream of social and economic growth.

Displacement and the LWE story

• Large industry in backward districts often needs land, forest, and water; tribals under Fifth Schedule, PESA, and Forest Rights Act were meant to have a say that projects skip in practice.
• Multiple displacement means a family loses land to a dam, then to a mine, then to a colony, with cash that does not replace a commons, a burial ground, or a podu plot.
• Police camps and roads that arrive only with the project look like occupation, not like a school.
• The LWE doctrine uses this grievance: the State is a comprador of industry; the squad is the alternative government in the forest.

Naxalbari focus

• The 1967 uprising was about tenancy, eviction, and food, not about a steel mill; the lesson is that agrarian justice is the original mainstream.
• North Bengal later saw both decline of classic Naxalism and new distress (tea, land, identity). The corrective is still record of rights, tenancy security, and non-violent politics, not forgetting why the spark caught.
• Treating every land protest as a Maoist plot repeats the error that pushed peasants to the extreme in the first place.

Malkangiri focus

• Malkangiri’s cut-off villages, poor connectivity, and tribal majority made it a logistics and ideology base for LWE, including the Jagan–Chitrakonda-type geography of water and forest.
• Security operations without boats, bridges, hostels, and land titles recapture ground by day and lose it by night.
• Industry and plantation promises that ignore gram sabha consent will refill the squad’s narrative even after a surrenders ceremony.

Corrective strategies

• Security with law: professional police and CAPF, but encounters and camps must not become a second displacement; prosecute criminal Maoist violence and also security excess.
• PESA and FRA in letter: community forest rights, gram sabha consent for land, and rejection of fake consultations.
• Land and rehabilitation: one-time fair compensation is not enough; land-for-land, shares in project revenue, and a ban on serial eviction of the same household.
• Small and local growth before mega plants: irrigation for the plot they still hold, NTFP value, minor forest produce companies, fisheries, and skill for youth in the block, not only a distant ITI.
• Roads, mobile, bank, and resident doctors as citizen rights, not as a mining offset brochure.
• Education and hostels that do not strip language and land, so the next generation can choose the mainstream without shame.
• Surrender and rehabilitation that is real: land, stipend, and protection from both cadres and stigma.
• Political space: panchayats and parties must be allowed to work; a vacuum is the doctrine’s oxygen.
• Integrated Action Plan / development packages should be audited by villagers, not only by a district photo file.
• Do not flood a Fifth Schedule block with a single private enclave that imports labour and exports ore; that is isolation by design.

Way forward

• The 2015 National Policy and Action Plan line is right if it is practised: clear, hold, develop, with develop meaning rights.
• Measure success as closed anganwadis reopened and titles granted, not only as insurgents killed.
• Malkangiri needs connectivity and consent; Naxalbari’s memory needs land reform honesty. Both need the State as a fair landlord, not as a broker for the next plant.