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MIGRATION HAS TRANSFORMED LEICESTER FROM A DULL PROVINCIAL MARKET TOWN INTO THE VIBRANT CAPITAL OF ASIA IN BRITAIN

, senior officials from 12 states, including chiefs of police, met in the Indian capital at the invitation of India's home minister. In what the press called an 'historic decision', they agreed to set up joint interstate forces to 'facilitate coordinate and synergise anti-Naxalite operations across state boundaries'. Less than one year later, in his National Day speech on 15 August, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh linked Naxalism and terrorism as the two main threats to India's security. Some months earlier, he had gone further, calling the Naxalites 'the single biggest internal challenge ever faced by our country'. While terrorist attacks on India's cities-such as that in Mumbai in July this year-or the long-running war in Kashmir make headlines around the world, much less is heard of the Maoist movement that operates deep in the tribal forests of India from Andhra Pradesh in the south, through neighbouring Orissa, into Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Maharashtra, Bihar and up through West Bengal to the borders of Nepal. Now, with the government making a concerted move on the rebels, news of their activities is taking on a higher profile at home and abroad. One thing is certain: the 'climate of accommodation and dialogue' the government in Delhi had favoured in recent years is definitely over. From its origins in the peasant rising in the Naxalbari-hence its namedistrict of West Bengal in 1967, the Naxalite movement has travelled a long way and gone through many metamorphoses. Forty years ago, in the heady optimism of the revolutionary 1960s, it was young men from the educated middle classes who dropped out of university to join a movement dedicated to breaking the stranglehold of traditional landlords and liberating the land for the despised dalits and tribals who sat deep at the bottom of India's social trough. Back then, they terrorised the villages north of Calcutta, now Kolkata: no one travelled without a gun in the glove compartment of the car and the drawing rooms of Ballygunge thrilled to tales of women's ears sliced off complete with gold earrings as they travelled to the country for the weekend. They raided remote village thanas (police stations) to build their arsenal and held travellers to ransom to fill the coffers. More than one urban middle class parent secretly contributed to funds and paid lip-service to the 'Maoist revolution of India'. Today, Naxalite membership is drawn dominantly from that same rural dispossessed. They have seen little change in their status, despite Naxal dominance in certain remote forest areas of the above states for over a generation, and India's

Costa-Gavras is one of a select band who have made political cinema into big box-office and stayed independent on the way. Films like Z, Missing and Betrayed, each of which tackled a hot political issue of their day, would, he thinks, have some difficulty getting through the US studio system today. Z (1969), a powerful indictment of the rule of the Colonels in Greece, and banned for many years in that country, is shown regularly today in memory and warning. Missing (1982), a big budget, big star movie, brought the horror of the disappeared in 1970s Latin America to a huge US audience. Betrayed (1989), a fiction built round disturbing factual material supplied by an unsuspecting FBI, was, say commentators, prophetic of the rise and rise of America's right-wing militias. At a time when mainstream political cinema is all but dead in the USA, the Greek film-maker, who is as much at home in Paris as in the studios of Paramount or Gaumont, draws the lines between propaganda, politics and the militant tendency; and points to the current political horizon

Behind the recent massacres In Algeria lies a darker struggle: war between the rival clans of the military government, one now in a marriage of convenience with the armed wing of the banned Islamic Salvation Front, the other fighting to ensure its for survival behind a democratic facade