SUMMARY
One-sided violence by the Peoples’ War Group (PWG) has been carried out in the context of this group’s armed struggle against the Government of India (see Government of India - PWG. This struggle has been characterized by the group as a fight against a bourgeois and oppressive state and the group has not only targeted civilians and government forces, but also government institutions. Maoist terminology is most often used to explain the motives behind the one-sided violence.
PWG is known to have targeted wealthy landlords in India’s rural areas, designating these as being ‘class enemies’ according to their reading of Maoist ideology. Landlords have also been executed after being charged and found ‘guilty’ in so-called ‘kangaroo courts’; the judicial system set up by PWG in areas they control.
A second type of targets are police informers and collaborators; suspected or real. Individuals accused of collaborating with the police and security forces are branded as ‘class traitors’, and oftentimes murdered for that reason, sometimes after trials in the aforementioned ‘kangaroo courts’.
PWG has also used one-sided violence against voters and election workers, since they oppose parliamentary democracy and prefer a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Several one-sided incidents have also been motivated by what PWG terms ‘protests’, in this context killings in order to show resistance towards legislation or other government activities.
Geographically, PWG's one-sided violence has been concentrated on their stronghold areas of Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, and Jharkhand states.
PWG first became active as a one-sided actor in UCDP data in 1990, when the one-sided violence resulted in at least 25 civilian deaths. The threshold was reached in October when the group killed 47 civilians through setting fire to a train; apparently with the motive of staging a protest for more rights for the lower castes. In 2004 the group merged with the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) to create the Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI–Maoist), and from that year one-sided activity by PWG is coded as being carried out by CPI–Maoist.
