Maoists in India

Maoism once again on the Agenda

T.G. Jacob

It is now more than four decades since the armed peasant uprising took place in the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal, which was subsequently taken up in different parts of the country, the most notable of which was the mass peasant uprising in Srikakulam of Andhra Pradesh and Bhojpur in Bihar. Both these uprisings sustained for a couple of years, but were ultimately eliminated by the state forces. State repression was a major factor in the decimation of the Maoists in this earlier phase, but other factors also played significant roles in this process. The premature formation of the party, CPI (M-L), by the group of breakaway revolutionaries from the CPI (M) led by Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal, and the imposition of the line of “annihilation of class enemies” through small squad actions isolated the newly formed party from the peasant masses; this in turn resulted in the splintering of the party into a number of groups. By the time urban guerilla actions started in Kolkata the party had already been infiltrated by lumpen elements, which greatly facilitated its demise as a political movement. At the same time, the term Naxalite had achieved a permanent place in the political lexicon of the sub-continent.

Initially, when armed peasant struggle broke out in the Terai region of West Bengal Peking Radio and other official print media in China hailed it as “spring thunder over India.” Though this initial enthusiasm cooled down considerably within a short time this initial endorsement gave a certain amount of legitimacy to the emerging Maoist movement as a revolutionary movement. The Chinese turned a blind eye to the many programmatic confusions and inconsistencies formulated by the Maoists in India. When Charu Majumdar formulated the class analysis for India as a whole as semi-feudalism and semi-colonialism what it seemed to imply was that the Indian class structure and Indian industrialization were on the same level and had the same nature as prevailing in pre-revolutionary China. This was by no means realistic. When Mao made the class analysis of the Chinese countryside he was talking about the China of the 1930s; and when Majumdar spoke about India, it was the India of the 1970s. This blatant ideological dependency reached its peak when he pronounced that “China’s Chairman is our Chairman.” When a delegation under the leadership of Souren Bose, a top leader of the Indian Maoists, was sent to Peking in 1972 to hold discussions with the Chinese leadership, they were made to wait for more than a month, and even then Mao did not meet them. But they managed to meet and discuss with Chou En-lai and Kang Shen, and the minutes of this meeting unambiguously show the strong disapproval of the Chinese Communist Party concerning the extravagant formulations of the Indian ‘Maoist’ leadership. But nothing serious was done to rectify the rampant confusions among the Indian ‘Maoists.’

Moreover, the Indian ‘Maoists’ recklessly rejected the two most basic formulations of both Lenin and Mao: firstly, that any revolutionary movement can hope to succeed only if a detailed study of the actual concrete nature of the contradictions facing them is done; and that the strategy of united front necessitates changes in the strategy and tactics of revolution. The Indian ‘Maoists’ right from the beginning were dogmatic to the extreme, which directly contradicts the basic Maoist position of a dynamic approach. This raises the question of how far the ‘Maoists’ understood the cardinal positions of Mao himself. There is little doubt all these flaws and innumerable others together helped in the whipping out of the Maoist movement in its first phase. The internal emergency repression saw thousands of Maoists killed and the rest put in jails.

The second phase of the Maoist movement came up after the repeal of the emergency regime of Indira Gandhi and her electoral defeat. The emergency regime had clearly ignited an acute awareness about civil and democratic rights among the intelligentsia of the country, and in the process of large-scale release of political prisoners the Maoists were the last sections to be released. They started regrouping and in this regrouping process some groups characterized the earlier leadership as ‘left adventurist and dogmatic,” which they alleged was responsible for the splintering and collapse of the movement as a whole. Unity efforts were launched, but without any immediate impact. Some smaller groups did merge here and there but this was simply not enough to resurrect the movement. At the same time, the People’s War group in Andhra Pradesh and the Maoist Communist Centre in the Bihar-Bengal border areas started to make their presence felt, and subsequently these two relatively bigger groups succeeded in merging the two to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist), and it is this party that is now considered to represent the Maoist movement in the country. It is this group that is currently making news waves throughout the country

Their area of operation is interesting. They are mainly operating in the central Indian belt, which is also the homeland of the Adivasi communities. The belt is massive and stretches from Maharashtra in the west to southern Bengal, Orissa and northern Andhra Pradesh in Eastern India. This belt is not only the hub of numerous tribal communities, but is also forested and very rich in mineral deposits: High grade iron ore, abundant deposits of coal, manganese, aluminum, bauxite, and a number of other strategic natural resources including hard wood are found here. And these tribals were victims of dispossession since the days of Emperor Ashoka’s Kalinga war. Modern colonialism by the British did the same. Post-colonial independent India continued the colonial policy because all of them seem to believe that the tribals are disposable people, who can easily be sacrificed on the altar of “development” With the opening up of the economy to neo-liberal global and Indian economic interests this process of dispossession has assumed ever greater urgency for the dominant economic interests. Whether it is the question of the Tatas, Mittals, Posco, or the Salim group, the goal is to grab the habitats of the tribals and the wealth lying under them. In Kalinganagar in Orissa, the police shot and killed 14 Adivasis and injured hundreds to facilitate a steel plant of the Tatas. The struggle against Posco, South Korean steel major, is an ongoing one. Singur and Nandigram are well known stories. It is this heightened exploitation of the original inhabitants that is resulting in the development of a war-like situation.

It is a fight over resources leftists, rightists or centrists, all are united on the issue of “development” at the cost of the people. They are all upholders of the same model of neo-liberal development. It is in this background that the Maoists have stepped up their militant activities. And as they believe in armed confrontation to achieve their goals the governments, both at the central and State levels, are trying to precipitate a military solution to the “Naxalite problem.” And it is quite possible that civil society elements who are asking for a political solution can also be targeted. But the reality is that the so-called Naxalite problem is the result of a developmental model, which makes the common people aliens in their own land. The stake-holders are the national and international big businesses, and the governments are interested in growth rates and royalties. Whose growth is it, anyway?

The coming days are bound to be a severe test for the Maoists and their supporters. It will not only be a test militarily, but also ideologically. How much positive and negative lessons they have learned from their own past will certainly emerge as a very vital question.