1.The Maoist/Naxalite movement in India has two distinct phases. The first phase of this movement was heralded by the outbreak in Darjeeling district of West Bengal in 1966-67 and ended with the internal emergency in 1975. This first phase was marked by the establishment of a dual system of political power in several areas in the country where the communist militants organized the poor and landless peasantry in the fight against feudal relations of power in the countryside in an overall social system that was considered as semi-feudal and semi-colonial. This phase also included a theoretically ill articulated but unprecedented youth rebellion in Calcutta with weaker variations in other urban centers. Though the movement could be militarily smashed by the mid 1970s it remained a potent ideological stream and force which enabled its resurrection from scratch in the post emergency regime(s). Thus it can be seen that the declaration of internal emergency, the countrywide suspension of democratic rights and the subsequent repeal of the emergency regime did not become a cut off point in the case of the Maoist movement. On the other hand, the Maoist movement itself precipitated the imposition of an autocratic regime under Indira Gandhi because the Maoists were the most uncompromising opponents of the ruling social system. For the Maoists, suppression of democratic rights during the emergency rule did not mean any qualitative difference in the nature of externalities because they were outside the ambience of constitutionally guaranteed democratic and civil rights simply because they did not accept the constitution but instead worked towards overthrowing the existing institutions through armed struggle.
It was in the process of attempting to comprehend the complexities of the Indian reality that a large number of youth, including myself, got polarized to the Maoist stream during the late 1960s and early 1970s. On the global level it was the period of fresh thinking and strong anti-war currents. there was a great flood of optimism regarding positive shanges in the world and the youth in India was an intrinsic part of this wave. I came to Maoism as part of this wave, which was clearly rooted in objective contradictions on a worldwide scale.
2. It was during the post emergency period that many Maoists/groups started serious rethinking about the basic theoretical postulates of the movement. This spirit of enquiry was part of the reorganization process. The global background of disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union, and the repudiation of Mao’s theory of socialist construction in China had its significant impact in the development of this spirit of enquiry. In India the Maoists had already split into a multitude of small and big factions, which made ideological unity a necessary condition for reorganization. What we see during the 1980s is that a certain level of ideological openness came into being contrary to the earlier existing ideas on ideological “purity” and dogmatism enthroned as methodology. Open organs like Vanguard and Mass line came into being apart from large number of publications in the States’ languages. Debates, criticisms, counter-criticisms became regular features of these publications. On the whole a positive, creative atmosphere came into existence among the Maoists.
It was in this background that a Maoist organization (Re-organization committee later renamed Central Re-organization committee) publicized an exhaustive document called “Towards a New Phase of Spring Thunder”, which was essentially a document conceived as a ad hoc basis for re-organizing the CPI(ML). This was followed by two books named “Kerala: A Backward Economy on the Neo-colonial Track”, and “India: Development and Deprivation – Neo-colonial Transformation of the Economy in a Historical Perspective”. Both these studies were attempts to redefine the class structure of the country which means the class character of the state. For the first time in the history of Indian political economy neo-colonialism as an analytical category was projected to comprehend the Indian reality. Neo-colonialism which was considered as both qualitatively and quantitatively different from semi-colonialism, semi-feudalism marked a departure from the Maoist program. It was in fact a negation of the accepted Maoist analysis of the Indian reality. This was the realm of consciousness in which I found myself during the 1980s. This consciousness had “concrete analysis of the concrete conditions” as the declared goal and breaking the established intellectual idols turned out to be the way forward.
3. Involvement was mainly in the field of media and other publications. As a member of Mass line editorial team activism on democratic rights and anti-imperialist issues was certainly an important part of life. The political conditions in Delhi were such that, in the wake of the dethroning of Indira Gandhi and her coterie, democratic rights issues and anti-imperialist issues found street expressions. Political refugees from Iran, Afghanistan, Palestine, Burma galvanized the conditions further and it was not rare that mass demonstrations could be organized with the same people against the US, Russian and Chinese embassies on international political issues. An international anti-imperialist community could express itself on the streets. I still vividly remember one such demonstration attended by a few thousands of Sikhs, who came from Punjab among others, which was escorted by helicopter gunships. Those days anti-imperialism became the working principle. We were putting on show anti-imperialism of the neo-colonialism variety. Simultaneously we were propagating about the changed relations and mode of production in the countryside. Our leaflets were getting reprinted worldwide and Maoist big posters started making their appearance on the walls of the streets of Calcutta after a long gap.
4. After I left the organized Maoist movement (or it left me {?}) a very small group based in JNU started a publishing enterprise called Odyssey. We knew that the CPI and CPI-M had suppressed the party documents in their ambitious project of publishing the history of the CPI through its documents and had blacked out the whole crucial period from mid-1930s to late 1940s. The prime issues addressed during that period were nationality question, Quit India movement and WW-II. We considered this attitude as a typical Ostrich syndrome which shows utter contempt for the people. Myself, K Venu and P. Bandhu performed a smuggling operation lasting many days and obtained the suppressed documents. Odyssey published these documents with fairly lengthy introductions in two volumes. This was my first intervention to expose the duplicity ingrained in the history of the communist movement in the country. Much later, around 2010, I decided to write a full length book on the various prominent instances of duplicity. That was how the new book “Left to Right” was produced. By that time it had become clear to me that the problems of the communist movement in India can be traced to intellectual imbecility and the resultant philosophical/methodological dependency is common to all streams of the movement including the Maoist one. So I expanded the scope of the book to cover the Maoist movement too.
5. (sorry, the question is a bit too hypothetical)
6. It is a way out of the innate crises of production and reproduction of capital that makes the capitalist/imperialist world system adapt to new forms of accumulation of capital. That was how direct colonialism gave way to indirect colonialism operated through the twin weapons of market and technology and which at the same time enormously hikes the needs of capital to overcome the crises of its own creation or go under. This transformation period of classical capitalism/imperialism into neo-colonialism was characterized by incessant wars between the capitalist nation states climaxed by two World Wars. The fight for colonies and markets resulted in these wars and the futility of holding on to vast territories of the globe physically became all too evident. Neocolonialism as world system management emerged as the concrete alternative after the II WW and now it has come to such a level that wars, although localized ones, remained an inevitability and the range of avenues of super-profit making now encompasses areas like natural calamities, starvation deaths, killer drugs, security systems like torture and concentration camps, created environmental calamities like warming process. Development has become a cliché to hide all this ugliness. The free market theories of Milton Freedman never remained static, compelled by systemic compulsions it was always evolving. Since the conclusion of the II-WW the militarization of national economies has gone ahead at great speed with global capital the biggest agent of this process. The weapons industry is probably the most dynamic of all industries which also means that super-profits rules the game.
India started earnestly on its path of imperialist globalization without much delay after 1947. The first major macro intervention of this kind was the “green revolution” through which India became a great market for global chemical industry and its technology. The mass killer Union Carbide entered India in this fashion. Of course, we are nowhere near the end of the process. Newer and newer sectors of the economy are day-by-day increasingly getting integrated to global capital and its needs. The process is creating ever more acute contradictions like mass displacements and ghettoisation of large numbers of poor people and increasing poverty and incredible disparities. This is directly linked to the “growth story”.
The growth, as you mentioned, is the growth of GDP. But the growth of the GDP can very well happen without growth of employment and income. So it becomes identical with growth of the corporate sector and its majors. That is why while the corporate sector and its majors are growing renowned political economists like Prof Amit Bhaduri say that the face of India that you don’t want to see is the actual India. It is the face of the vast majority of Indians. It is the face of the vast slums, and impoverished countryside, it is the face of the dispossessed millions of undernourished children.
7. Narendra Modi’s brand of fascism is only one, though prominent, version of fascism. It can be more correctly called communal fascism which considers the minority communities as the “other”. But to identify this communal fascism with fascism in toto will be an oversimplification of the reality. The “development” model that is being pushed with all force contains this communal fascism and currently the communal fascists are the most vocal of the apologists of this model. That is why the phony expression “Gujarat model’ is propagated by the communal fascists. This model is based on the hearty willingness of the government there to completely surrender to corporate capital. If a corporate house asks for a thousand hectares of land to start an industrial complex the government is more than ready to hand over a thousand and five hundred hectares of fertile land. But we have to keep in mind that the communal fascists are not the only political force in the country serving the model. Other political forces like the social democrats, regional parties and centre-right groupings like the Congress are all for this ‘development model”. Hence isolating communal fascists for fighting against fascism can be unreal and hence counter-productive/wrong. Political incidents like Nandigram and Singur underscores this position. Any number of Nandigrams are currently existing in this country.
8. By the time the CRC [Central Reorganisation Committee, Marxist-Leninist] was dissolved there was nothing much to dissolve. It had become groups involved in group fights. What I mean is that there was nothing to withdraw from. At the same time the CRC did play a role in initiating fresh thinking among the Maoists. But that role lasted only less than a decade. Mathiayazhakan’s death and the resultant discussions on democracy in communist parties happened more outside the CRC than inside. When I left CRC it was because I could not see anything positive, intellectually or humanely, in continuing in that organization and, moreover, there are much better things to do with life.
[Published in Madhyamam Weekly, 24 March, 2014, under the title: "Fascism comes in many Forms"]