Lord of the Red Corridor- Madvis Hidma Rs 40 lakhs bounty on Hidma
Look at the faces of the resting Naxal fighters in the cover photograph above. What do you see? Weather-beaten, battle-scarred, lean and emotion-less faces, their sensibilities deadened by survival tensions and battle fatigue. These are young people just past adolescence, fighting for a cause they believe in but with resigned fatalism etched into their personas betraying no hope or expectation they’ll survive for long, but damned if they are not going to give it their all before going down!
It is such youth who followed Che Guevara and Fidel Castro into the Sierra Maestre mountains in Cuba before springing the revolution on Fulgencio Batista’s military junta in 1959, and were part of the anti-colonial force of the FLN (Front de Liberacion Nationale) seeking freedom for Algeria. They constituted the sharp edge of the Viet Cong, undertaking the most dangerous missions against US MACV (Military Assistance Comma