The Gondi (Gōṇḍī) or Gond people, who refer to themselves as "Kōītōr", are an ethnolinguistic group in India. Their native language, Gondi, belongs to the Dravidian family. They are spread over the states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, and Odisha. They are listed as a Scheduled Tribe for the purpose of India's system of reservation.
Alluri Sitarama Raju was an Indian revolutionary who waged an armed rebellion against the British colonial rule in India. Born in present-day Andhra Pradesh, he was involved in opposing the British in response to the 1882 Madras Forest Act that effectively restricted the free movement of adivasis in their forest habitats and prevented them from practicing their traditional form of agriculture called 'podu', which threatened their very way of life. Rise in discontent towards the British colonial rule in the backdrop of the non-cooperation movement (1920–1922) led to the Rampa rebellion (1922–1924) in which Alluri Sitarama Raju played the major role as its leader. Mustering combined forces of tribals and other sympathizers to the cause, he engaged in guerilla campaigns against the British forces across the border regions of present-day Andhra Pradesh and Odisha states in India. He was given the title "Manyam Veerudu" by the local people for his exploits.
The Adivasi are heterogeneous tribal groups across the Indian subcontinent. The term is a Sanskrit word coined in the 1930s by political activists to give the tribal people an indigenous identity by claiming an indigenous origin. However, the Government of India officially does not use the word Adivasi, instead use Scheduled Tribes and Janjati as defined by the Constitution of India. Most of those Adivasi groups are notified as the Scheduled Tribe for the provision of Indian constitution.
The Tea-garden community is a term for a multiethnic, multicultural group of tea garden workers and their descendants in Northeast India. They are primarily concentrated in the modern state of Assam, where they have been notified as Other Backward Classes (OBC) and are loosely referred to as Tea Tribes. They are the descendants of peoples from multiple tribal and caste groups brought by the British colonial planters as indentured labourers from the regions of present-day Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh into colonial Assam during the 1860-90s in multiple phases to the newly established tea gardens. They are primarily found in districts with a large concentration of tea estates, such as Upper Assam districts of Tinsukia, Dibrugarh, Sivasagar, Lakhimpur, Santipur and Udalguri, and Barak Valley districts of Cachar and Karimganj. The total population is estimated to be around 7 million, of which an estimated 4.5 million reside in residential quarters built inside 799 tea estates spread across tea-growing regions of Assam. Another 2.5 million reside in the nearby villages spread across those tea-growing regions. They speak multiple languages, including Sora, Odia, Assam Sadri, Sambalpuri, Kurmali, Santali, Kurukh, Kharia, Kui, Chhattisgarhi, Gondi and Mundari. Assam Sadri, distinguished from the Sadri language, serves as lingua franca among the community.
Salwa Judum was a militia that was mobilised and deployed as part of counterinsurgency operations in Chhattisgarh, India, aimed at countering Naxalite activities in the region. The militia, consisting of local tribal youth, received support and training from the Chhattisgarh state government. It was outlawed and banned by a Supreme Court court order but continues to exist in the form of armed auxiliary forces, District Reserve Groups, and other vigilante groups.
Kondapalli Seetharamaiah was a senior communist leader and Maoist organizer in India.
The Tsundur Massacre refers to the killing of several Dalit people in the village of Tsundur, Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh, India, on 6 August 1991. 8 Dalits were massacred by Reddy men with the alleged help of the police. When a young graduate Dalit youth was beaten because his feet unintentionally touched a Reddy woman near a cinema hall, the Dalits of the village supported him. As a result, Dalits were socially boycotted by the Reddy landowners of the village. Many Dalits have lost their livelihood as they depend on the daily wages by working in the paddy fields of the Reddys. The significance of this atrocity was Dalits collectively fought to gain legal justice by invoking SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act 1989.
Madia Gonds or Madia or Maria are one of the endogamous Gond tribes living in Chandrapur District and Gadchiroli District of Maharashtra State, and Bastar division of Chhattisgarh State India. They have been granted the status of a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups by the Government of India under its affirmative action or reservation programme. The Madia Gonds are strongly affected by Naxal activities. The Madia Gond use the self designation Madia, and call the area where they live Madia Desh. They speak the Madia dialect of Gondi. The shifting agriculture of madia is known as jhoom.
A study mentions living megalithic practices amongst the Madia Gonds. One of the findings of The Bench Mark Survey done in 1997–1998: 91.08 per cent of Madia Gond families lived Below Poverty Line.
The Naxalite–Maoist insurgency is part of an ongoing conflict between left-wing extremist groups and the Indian government. The Naxalites are a group of communist supportive groups, who often follow Maoist political sentiment and ideology.
The Naxalite–Maoist insurgency is part of an ongoing conflict between Left-wing extremist groups and the Indian government. The insurgency started after the 1967 Naxalbari uprising and the subsequent split of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) leading to the creation of a Marxist–Leninist faction. The faction splintered into various groups supportive of Maoist ideology, claiming to fight a rural rebellion and people's war against the government.
Komaram Bheem (1901–1940), alternatively Kumram Bheem, was a revolutionary leader in Hyderabad State of British India from the Gond tribes. Bheem, in association with other Gond leaders, led a protracted low intensity rebellion against the feudal Nizams of Hyderabad in the eastern part of the princely state during the 1930s, which contributed in the culmination of the Telangana Rebellion of 1946.
The April 2010 Dantewada Maoist attack was an 6 April 2010 ambush by Naxalite-Maoist insurgents from the Communist Party of India (Maoist) near Chintalnar village in Dantewada district, Chhattisgarh, India, leading to the killing of 76 CRPF policemen and 8 Maoists — the deadliest attack by the Maoists on Indian security forces.
The Singareni Karmika Samakya is a militant trade union of coal miners in the Singareni coal fields. Sikasa is allegedly linked to the Communist Party of India (Maoist). Vishwanath is the secretary of Sikasa.
The Radical Youth League (RYL) is a frontal organisation of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), a Naxalite group, mainly operating in Andhra Pradesh.
Adilabad district is a district in the northern area of Telangana, India. It is known as the gateway district to South and Central India. The district's headquarters is the town of Adilabad.
The Gunjala Gondi lipi or Gunjala Gondi script is a script used to write the Gondi language, a Dravidian language spoken by the Gond people of northern Telangana, eastern Maharashtra, southeastern Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh. Approximately a dozen manuscripts in the script were recovered from Gunjala, a Gond village in Adilabad district of Telangana, by a team of researchers from the University of Hyderabad, led by Professor Jayadheer Tirumala Rao. The script and preliminary font were unveiled in early 2014.
Podu is a traditional system of cultivation used by tribes in India, whereby different areas of jungle forest are cleared by burning each year to provide land for crops. The word comes from the Telugu language.
On 17 July 2019, eleven people were killed in a massacre in Ubbha village, Sonbhadra district, in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The Gond tribals had refused to vacate land claimed by the village headman, Yagyadutt, who belonged to the dominant Gujjar community. Their resistance to his attempts to take their land led Yagyadutt to bring in goons and fire on the Gonds. The next day, the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Commission of Uttar Pradesh asked the state government to invoke Gangster Act against the accused. The incident quickly gained national outrage as an example of caste-based killings and was taken up by the opposition as an example of the "Jungle Raj" of the Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government in the state.
The New Peace Process is an initiative of a conglomerate of tribal and non-government support groups and individuals, with the aim of bringing a negotiated settlement to the 50-year-old Maoist insurgency in Central India. Bastar Dialogues are a series of activities that started in mid 2018 by the New Peace Process to initiate a dialogue between the Naxalites and state security forces to restore peace in Central India.
