“A Region Held Hostage: How Maoist Violence Stole the Future of Bastar”, India Narrative, December 03, 2025
“In the global imagination of revolution, Che Guevara stands as a conflicted, often distorted, symbol: a guerrilla who later governed, a militant who became a minister, a man who picked up the gun but also built schools, led land reforms, addressed the United Nations, and headed Cuba’s National Bank and Ministry of Industries. His afterlife in pop culture has been shaped by the photograph that captured his charismatic defiance, cigar in hand, asthma inhaler in pocket – an image that allowed the world to romanticise the revolutionary even when they disagreed with his methods.
Contrast this with the figure of Madvi Hidma, the elusive commander of the Maoists’ Battalion No. 1 in Chhattisgarh. There is no charismatic portrait, no mystical aura, no political programme beyond violence. His legacy is not one of statecraft or reform but of terror, ambushes, massacres, and the systematic destruction of the very institutions that keep a society alive. He held no administrative role, instituted no policy, drafted no roadmap for tribal welfare. When he died in an encounter on 18 November 2025, there were few protests in Maoist circles, but outside that echo chamber, he left behind no cult of admiration, only a trail of blood and one of the worst development records in India.
And yet, ironically, it is not the people of Bastar, those who suffered his violence, who romanticise Hidma. It is the urban, privileged, often English-speaking youth scrolling on Instagram and debating in university cafeterias who project revolutionary purity onto a man whose actions ensured that an entire region remained trapped in medieval levels of poverty and fear…….”
Read full article at indianarrative.com
