The crackdown on various activists and their branding as 'Urban Naxals' on Tuesday, 28 August , coincided with another development wherein once again, the term 'Naxalism' was at the centre of attention – this time at the prestigious Delhi University.

A few members of the DU's standing committee on academic matters reportedly raised objections to university professor Nandini Sundar's book Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar, 1854-2006 for supposedly “glorifying Naxalism”, and recommended its removal from the history department's reading list.

Alongside Sundar's book, another book found itself under the scanner – Archana Prasad's Against Ecological Romanticism: Verrier Elwin and the Making of an Anti-Modern Tribal Identity, with some committee members taking exception to it for "legitimising conversion of tribals to Christianity", reported The Times of India.

Lamenting this development as being "dictated by political reasons, rather than on academic grounds", Nandini Sundar – who has worked extensively on Chhattisgarh's Bastar – told The Quint: