The Naxalite movement is most often pictured in remote forest districts — Bastar, Jharkhand, the Red Corridor. Vivek Agnihotri argues that this picture is incomplete. The movement sustains itself because of what he calls Urban Naxals: educated professionals embedded in universities, media organisations, NGOs, and civil society who provide ideological cover, recruits, propaganda, and funding to groups classified among the world's top terror organisations.
Agnihotri defines Urban Naxalism as a coordinated effort to achieve through violence what cannot be achieved through democratic means, carried out not by fighters in the field but by those who legitimise the violence from air-conditioned offices. The book examines how this support network operates — amplifying the People's War Group and similar outfits while presenting itself as human rights advocacy. Prime Minister Modi's characterisation of Urban Maoists — "they live in AC surroundings, move around in big cars, and their children study abroad, but they ruin the lives of our poor Adivasi youth here through remote control" — frames the central accusation.
The book names India's internal security establishment's own designation of Naxalism as the country's leading internal threat, and asks what the urban infrastructure behind that threat actually looks like.
Who are Urban Naxals or Urban Naxalites? Urban Naxals are educated people in academia, media, NGOs and urban civil society in India who support violent insurrection against the State. They are often motivated by a violent-Left ideology and seek to achieve their objectives via coordinated violence rather than by democratic means. While the Naxalite movement is often associated with remote tribal areas, Urban Naxalism is a phenomenon in cities and urban centers. Urban Naxals act to amplify and normalize the violent Naxal movements such as the "People's War Group", names among the top ten terror groups in the world, and act as recruiters, propagandists and sources of funds. Naxalism is named as the leading internal security threat to India. 'Urban Maoists live in AC surroundings, move around in big cars and their children study abroad, but they ruin the lives of our poor Adivasi youth here through remote control': PM Modi 'Urban Naxals plotted to kill the PM, huge arms procurement planned' says police
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