constituted the first democratically-elected Marxist government in the country. The parliamentary left subscribes to a social-democratic philosophy, turning to the traditional democratic institutions of governance in
their quest to fulfill the Marxist-Leninist goal of establishing a classless society. The second, oppositional, strand is the revolutionary Maoist movement. This branch rejects parliamentary democracy as a means to altering class-relations, as they see the government as an elite organization dedicated to the status quo and age-old system of class exploitation. Drawing on ethnographic field work conducted in Orissa, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal, Chakrabarty provides a
contextual account of the rise, consolidation, and decline of these two types of left radicalism. He looks at how it is that left ideology has coexisted with free-market-oriented economic policies, as well
as the contexts in which more militant strands have taken root, particularly among the young in poorer districts.
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