Green Hunt is Witch Hunt - Resist It

CHAPTER - I

Political Economy of Operation Green Hunt

The original and central arena of OGH is the forested regions spread over the states of Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh. These are extremely rich in mineral and forest resources – bauxite, iron ore, uranium, limestone, marble, dolomite, tin, graphite, coal, copper, gold, diamonds, corundum, beryl, alexandrite and fluorite, as well as teak, hardwood, bamboo, abundant water resources, wildlife and fish. The bauxite deposits alone have been estimated to be worth between US$2-4 trillion. Big mining companies and steel manufacturers like the Mittals, Jindals, Tata, Essar, Posco, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and Vedanta signed up MoUs with respective state governments to plunder these resources.

But these regions are also home to some of the oldest communities of India, whose land the corporates are preparing to grab, notwith-standing the fifth schedule of the constitution (which forbids the alienation of tribal land) and PESA (Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 (which empowers tribal panchayats with the authority to deny permission for mega projects, mining companies and industries in tribal areas. A Nandigram-like situation is thus building up in large swathes of adivasi homeland, the so-called Maoist corridor or MoUist corridor.

The real concern of the Indian ruling elite was expressed by the Prime Minister when he told parliament on 18 June, 2009, "If left-wing extremism continues to flourish in parts which have natural resources of minerals, the climate for investment would certainly be affected."

While OGH is usually taken to mean police/military repression, no less reprehensible is the economic terrorism of the Indian state. In a recent televised interview Dr Binayak Sen held the state guilty of genocide. “Everybody thinks that the word ‘genocide’ has to do with direct killing”, said he, “but the United Nations Convention’s definitions on genocide include the creation of conditions--mental and physical conditions – which would render the survival of these communities under question, and we already have a situation of chronic famine... this famine envelops, according to the National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau, which is a government organization, 33 percent of the people in this country who have a clinically demonstrable chronic under-nutrition. And that includes 50 percent of the Scheduled Tribes and 60 percent of the Scheduled Castes.”

“These communities”, he added, “have thus far survived because of a fragile and tenuous equilibrium that they have established with their ecosystem and which they are able to maintain because of their access to common property resources like land, water and forests.” Activities of the mining mafia will destroy this equilibrium and throw the original inhabitants of the land from the accursed frying pan to hell-fire.

Leading the state-corporate crusade against the adivasis is a man whose credentials make him the perfect choice for the job. PC Chidambaram was a non-executive director of Vedanta – a position from which he resigned the day he became finance minister in 2004. One of the first clearances he gave for FDI was to Twinstar Holdings, a Mauritius-based company, to buy shares in Sterlite, a part of the Vedanta group. Note that Anil Agarwal, CEO of Vedanta-Sterlite, has made a dramatic leap to the exclusive club of the world's billionaires and the UK's top ten richest people. A recent study showed him to be the second fastest wealth maker in Britain. Facilitating Agarwal's meteoric ascent is not only the current UPA regime's actions but also the NDA regime's brokering of Sterlite's takeover of the PSU BALCO in 2001.

The campaign in Bastar started way back in June 2005 in the shape of Salwa Judum, meaning "Purification (or Peace) Hunt" in the local Gondi language. It was India’s most scandalous PPP (where private stands for Tata, Essar and other business interests while public stands for the BJP-ruled Chhattisgarh state government and the Congress-ruled Union Government). The declared aim of the campaign is to eliminate Naxalite violence. But the past few years have been replete with evidences to suggest that the state is casting its net much wider and, to that end, arming itself to the teeth with new means of repression. The latter include: black acts like the UAPA; new contingents of special police/paramilitary forces like greyhounds; national networking of police stations and the proposed unique identification number for every citizen; importing American and Israeli expertise and hardware for terror-fighting and indigenous research for the same purpose. Recently the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has declared that it is developing a whole set of technologies and weapons systems, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), ground penetration radars, foliage penetration radars (to track movement of vehicles and people in jungles) etc. to help the fight against Maoists and other extremists. In official and corporate media parlance the terms Maoism and Naxalism are being used interchangeably and as an indefinitely expandable category that can include workers’ struggle for trade union rights (as in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu) or landless labourers’ agitation for promised homestead land (as in Mansa, Punjab) or anything/anyone else (like octogenarian Comrade Ram Naresh Ram, politburo member and the leader of our legislature party in Bihar; Comrade S Kumarasami, AICCTU president, polit bureau member of CPI(ML) and senior counsel in Chennai High Court) to suppress people’s struggles on basic issues and crush all voices of protest and resistance.

Whosoever is not ready to join this ‘coalition of the willing’ based on the “either with us or against us” doctrine, or dares question the wisdom of this approach, is being branded a Maoist sympathizer. Dr Binayak Sen was made to languish for two years in jail on this ground. Time and again Chidambaram has blamed intellectuals and the civil society, bracketing them all with Maoists. It is not just a case of branding; many are already being harassed, hounded out and persecuted in real life. The plight of Himanshu Kumar, a practising Gandhian whose Vanvasi Chetna Ashram in Bastar, Chhattisgarh, has been ransacked and razed to the ground, is a clear case in point. Fact-finding teams trying to make an independent assessment of the actual situation have all been debarred from visiting ‘conflict zones’ whether in Chhattisgarh or West Bengal.

Meanwhile, the UAPA is being invoked on a daily basis to arrest people across the country and we already have the first case of custodial death under UAPA when journalist Swapan Dasgupta, a UAPA detainee in CPI(M)-ruled West Bengal, was left to die without timely and proper medical care. Even the Supreme Court has admonished the Chhattisgarh government for its attacks on human rights activists in the name of tackling Maoism.

For and Against Talks: A Quick Recap

Since middle of last year, eminent intellectuals, activists and others have been repeatedly calling for peace through dialogue. “The Citizens’ Initiative for Peace”, for example, demanded that the government should first stop the offensive, and this should be reciprocated by Maoists, to facilitate a ceasefire. Amit Bhaduri and Romila Thapar on their parts have argued in favour of “An alternative form of intervention ushered in through a multi-lateral dialogue involving all the concerned parties ...." “Will the mindset from the past change?” -- The Hindu, Nov 8, 2009 In this connection it should be noted, however, that the question of involvement of democratic bodies or other stakeholders should arise only when the talks are not limited to the narrow confines of state-Maoist truce but covers the broader agenda of development, dignity and democracy.

An opposite position was aired by “Concerned Citizens on “Maoist” Violence”, which includes Prabhat Patnaik, Irfan Habib, Utsa Patnaik, Amiya Kumar Bagchi and others. They concentrated fire against Maoists while also criticising “acts of oppression committed by members of the exploiting classes or individuals in the state apparatus” (only individual errant members — not the ruling classes or the state as such!). On this premise they urged upon the state to “restore its presence and credibility in tribal areas whose interests it has largely been ignoring” (a social democratic endorsement of Rahul Gandhi’s comment that Maoism grows where the state fails!) and recommend dialogue “with those "Maoists" who are ready to give up the path of armed struggle”.

It is significant to note how easily and conveniently our renowned Marxist intellectuals forget that every state – even the so-called wel-fare state, which India is not -- is an instrument of class dictatorship of the rulers. It is one thing to mobilise the masses against divisive and communal forces or even anarchist activities for that matter, but to wage a joint campaign in collaboration with the ruling classes is a totally different proposition.

More recently, it was Buddhababu’s state terror on innocent adivasis in the wake of the Maoist landmine blast in November 2008 that triggered the latest phase of the Lalgarh movement, with the CPI(M) government then unleashing a vicious circle of escalating state repression and Maoist killings. Against this backdrop, it should not really come as a surprise that academics who are more concerned about Maoist violence than about state terror, should champion the statist logic of shock-awe-negotiate!

Taking this position another step forward, the CPI(M) Polit bureau issued a statement on the 16th of February calling for speeding up OGH, stressing the "necessity for better coordination between the state police and the Central paramilitary forces" and demanding that the "Central Government should ensure that joint operations begin across the border in Jharkhand, without delay." Not a word was uttered in favour of dialogue.

Some people often wonder if there can really be any ground for talks between the state which is bent upon ‘wiping out’ the Maoist insurgency and the Maoists who talk about overthrowing the state by violent means. The possibility of talks between the two sides has already been vindicated by the experience of Andhra Pradesh where the Maoist leadership and the Congress government had begun a process of open and official negotiations in 2005. Of course, the talks collapsed with the government unleashing a military crackdown accusing the Maoists of using the breather for amassing money and arms and ammunitions. The Maoists, on their part, had raised the agenda of land reforms, but devoid of any real land struggle on the ground or any network of peasant associations, they clearly had no effective means to pin the government down on this issue.

A repetition of the Andhra-type farce is certainly not what is desired by consistent democratic forces. War, we all know, is continuation of politics by other means. No one expects either the ruling classes or the Maoists to give up their ‘politics’, but whoever is concerned about the escalating military confrontation between the state and the Maoists and the expanding contours of Operation Green Hunt, must raise his or her voice for a cease-fire and for initiation of talks between the two warring parties. We do not have to take it upon ourselves to define the trajectory of such a non-military engagement though, that may well be left to evolve over a period of time through a political process.

Development, Democratic Space, and Beyond

Along with dialogue, development – the lack of which common sense regards as the root cause of “Naxalite/Maoist insurgency” – has figured as a major concern of pro-people forces. Even as the state spearheads and intensifies the military operation, the Central and state governments continue to wax eloquent on the development agenda and rationalise the military operation only in the name of development. In November 2009 we saw Manmohan Singh conversing with chief ministers to wean the tribals away from the Maoists. West Bengal Chief Minister Budhhadev Bhattacharya also met police and administrative officials of West Medinipur district and took them to task for utter failure of the grand development plans announced soon after the initiation of para-military campaign in Jangalmahal (Lalgarh and adjoining areas).The reply he got was that nothing could move until Maoists were flushed out. The PM too had endorsed this typical bureaucratic-militarist logic in his aforesaid meeting, but at the same time he identified what he considered to be the basic fault line: "There has been a systematic failure in giving the tribals a stake in the modern economic processes that inexorably intrude into their living spaces ... The alienation built over decades is now taking a dangerous turn in some parts of our country.”

How much is this concern for development worth? What are the ground realities? Conditions in tribal areas in West Bengal from Amlashol to Lalgarh are well documented. For Bastar in Chhattisgarh, let us hear from a rather unexpected witness: tough cop KPS Gill.

“Politics itself is an extortion network – more so now, in the name of development and industrialisation; land acquisitions and SEZs. When you have political leaders saying that development should be part of the response mechanism, ask them what they mean by development in Chhattisgarh. How does a good road affect a man who has no transport whatsoever? Of what use is the road for a tribal with two bare feet?... We are in a great, vicious circle of violence because today development is corruption driven. ...take Jharkhand, where you have a governor whose foremost achievement is corruption. I have always maintained that corruption and operations against organisations of this nature cannot go together. ...I know what the police officer in charge of Bastar was doing. He was taking Rs 35,000 per man to transfer them out of Bastar. This was in the knowledge of everyone. ...Property ownership is very very important, but the State can’t seem to find ways to give tribals property ownership in this huge forest.”

In this backdrop he believes that, “Operation Green Hunt is going to be a big failure. Who is the State hunting? And once an operation fails, it is a very difficult task to repeat it. This is what the American forces are facing in Afghanistan. We need to consider: do we want to be in a similar situation?”

Gill said all this in an interview to Tehelka Magazine (Vol 6, Issue 42, dated October 24, 2009). Is the recent emphasis on development an attempt to address the concerns of people like him?

The fact is, brute force and palliatives – or coercion and hegemony in Gramscian terms – have always and everywhere complemented each other in propping up oppressive regimes; only their relative proportions have changed over time and place. To look at the record of the present dispensation, the April 2008 “Report of An Expert Group to the Planning Commission” titled “Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas” argued that a socially responsible decentralised state could and should wean people away from the Naxalites/Maoists and provide the basis for negotiations with the Maoists. Many see Rahul Gandhi as an advocate of the developmentalist line in contrast to the Chidambaram style of spitting venom against Maoists/Naxalites. Recently, Digvijay Singh made big news by accusing Chidambaram of following a law and order approach. But it is patently clear that there is an overwhelming consensus among the ruling classes around Chidambaram’s line.

While seeking to crush the Maoist insurgency, bourgeois political leaders are also equally interested in utilising the Maoists in their bid for power. We have seen such examples in Andhra where both NTR and Rajsekhar Reddy have praised and used Maoists whenever necessary, in Bihar where Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar both would like to distance themselves from any overtly repressive approach, in Jharkhand where Shibu Soren has historically had a close rapport with the Maoists and in West Bengal where the bonhomie between Mamata Banerjee and Maoists is no secret. There is nothing surprising if Digvijay Singh now strikes a similar chord in the MP-Chhattisgarh region in his battle with the BJP. The Congress has no difficulty in reconciling and exploiting such ‘diversity of views’ while pressing ahead with Operation Green Hunt much as it has been combining the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and cease-fire agreements with insurgent groups in the North-East.

Instead of being duped and distracted by such clever political campaigns of the ruling classes, we must continue with our basic struggle for land and livelihood, justice and democracy, dignity and development; and as an important part of this broader movement we must also insist on an immediate end to all forms of state terror!

CHAPTER - II

The Indian State’s and the ruling class’ attempts to demonise Maoists as ‘terrorists’ must certainly be vigorously resisted by the revolutionary left as well as by democratic opinion. It must also be recognised that among Maoist ranks there are undoubtedly many committed and courageous activists, including those who have developed from among adivasi people, who have risked lives to work in remote and neglected areas. The debate we seek to take forward is not over the character or commitment of Maoist ranks; rather it is over the assessment of Maoist strategy, tactics and practice in the context of the Indian revolution as well as current political challenges.

Strategy and Tactics Messed Up

To begin with, let us hear what Maoists themselves have to say about their strategy and tactics.

According to the document Strategy and Tactics,

“In the concrete conditions of semi-colonial, semi-feudal India where bourgeois democratic revolution too has not been completed and uneven social, economic and political conditions exist, the objective conditions permit the proletarian party to initiate and sustain armed struggle in the vast countryside.

“... No peaceful period of preparation for revolution is required in India, unlike in the capitalist countries where the bourgeois democratic revolutions were completed and armed insurrection is the path of revolution.”

Now, “semi-colonial, semi-feudal” – is this an immutable category with a set prescription for revolution applicable equally to pre-revolutionary China and present-day India? Don’t you see the enormous changes in Indian countryside – let alone urban areas – since Naxalbari, not to speak of the differences with China as it was some 70-80 years back?

“... No peaceful period of preparation is required”! On what ground do you base this assessment? And how do you propose to work in towns, cities and easily accessible plain areas which have strong networks of the state, and where the masses, while engaging in ‘drab everyday struggles’, are not yet ready for an armed showdown with the state? You really have no answer to this, and that is why you do not and cannot work in these areas.

In your schematic understanding, nationwide armed insurrection is prescribed for countries which have completed the democratic revolution, and the path of protracted war for countries where this revolution has not taken place and which are characterised by strong feudal survivals, uneven development etc. Now, many -- though not all – of the latter features were present in Russia (e.g., democratic revolution was not completed before February 1917) but Bolsheviks went in for insurrection. Can’t you think of an Indian path of revolution which may have ingredients of revolutionary experiences in Russia, China and maybe other countries but based mainly on the present characteristics of Indian society and polity?

Your General Secretary says in an interview in Open magazine, October 2009, “...it is true that our movement is stronger in the forests than in the plains and urban areas. This focus is linked to our path … of protracted people’s war. ... But, it is not correct to say that we have ignored the plain areas.” Would you please tell us in which “plains and urban areas” you have a “movement”? Why can’t you honestly say that your party line of singular emphasis on armed struggle does not provide any scope for such work?

In your opinion “boycott of elections, though a question of tactics,” (this is your concession to old-fashioned Leninism) “acquires the significance of strategy in the concrete conditions obtaining in India” (here you develop Leninism to the higher stage of your Maoism!). In other words, permanent boycott in a permanent revolutionary situation! It is futile to engage in serious theoretical debates with you; however we must put the historical record straight.

First, Lenin showed in Left Wing Communism – An Infantile Disorder that the question of participation or boycott is in no way related to the “degree of reactionariness” (to borrow a phrase from Lenin) of a particular parliament. Incidentally, the Russian Duma, which the Tsar convened and disbanded at will and which was as a rule dominated by Black Hundreds and other reactionary elements (thanks also to the patently anti-poor curia system) was arguably much more reactionary and impotent than our parliament.

Second, Lenin showed in the above pamphlet as well as in numerous other works like Against Boycott that under normal circumstances participation is almost obligatory for communists. It should also be noted that, out of about a dozen occasions, Bolsheviks boycotted elections only twice: once correctly (1905) and on the other occasion (in 1906) it was a small tactical mistake (as Lenin reckoned later). On all other occasions, even during the high tide before November Revolution and immediately after (in the elections to Constituent Assembly), they participated.

Third, the argument that participation in elections and parliaments have led to degeneration of many parties invites the retort that espousal of armed struggle too is known to have had the same effect on many armed groups/parties in India and abroad. Blaming a particular form of struggle for degeneration betrays a very superficial way of looking at things and has nothing in common with Marxism-Leninism.

We know you are in no mood to listen to all this ‘revisionist’ logic. We also know what you actually do during election times. About that, later on.

In sum, the whole thrust of your strategy and tactics and therefore your activities is premised on the illusion that as in China during 1930s and 1940s, here too “armed revolution is confronting armed counterrevolution”. You visualise a permanent revolutionary situation. You do not know how to build approach roads to revolution, how to work patiently among the masses, taking their existing level of consciousness and activism as your point of departure and step by step raising that level through all forms of struggle, mainly extra-parliamentary but not excluding parliamentary forms, so as to gradually change the balance of class forces, which invariably gets reflected in people’s heightened consciousness and organisation, towards a mature revolutionary situation. You are ignorant of the essence of revolutionary tactics:

“Marxist tactics consist in combining the different forms of struggle, in the skilful transition from one form to another, in steadily enhancing the consciousness of the masses and extending the area of their collective action, each of which, taken separately, may be aggressive or defensive, and all of which, taken together, lead to a more intense and decisive conflict.” (Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 20, P 210)

Incapable of grasping such revolutionary dialectics of the proletariat in theory, Maoists can only indulge in petty bourgeois left opportunism in their practical activities, as we shall now see.

Maoist Boycott: Participation by Other Means

Lenin opposed “passive rejection, abstention, evasion of elections” and advocated “active boycott... as a declaration of open war against the old regime, a direct attack upon it”, immediately adding, “unless there is a broad revolutionary upswing, unless there is no mass unrest which overflows, as it were, the bounds of the old legality, there can be no question of the boycott succeeding.”"Against Boycott", Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 13

Really, there is no question of the boycott tactic succeeding – in a Leninist sense -- in conditions generally obtaining in present-day India. But our clever friends have found a way to claim success. They want us to believe that the passive abstention of a large section of the people from elections shows that their boycott slogan is correct, conveniently forgetting that people who do not go to the polling booths are not generally involved in any “broad revolutionary upswing”. Going by their logic, the weapon of boycott would seem to be more successful in those advanced capitalist countries where polling percentages are even lower!

However, to themselves they concede that the importance of Parliament and State legislatures as the seat of political power cannot be wished away and that they too have a stake in which party forms government. So they cannot avoid taking part in electoral politics. But they do so in their own distorted ways: indirectly, secretively, conspiratorially, usually by supporting one reactionary party against some narrowly conceived “main enemy” -- another reactionary or “revisionist” party.

This tactic-turned-strategy was most ‘successfully’ implemented in Andhra Pradesh in the 2004 assembly elections. They enforced one-sided boycott on TDP and BJP while canvassing in favour of Congress candidates and the ‘success’ lay in the fact that Chandrababu Naidu, whom they had earlier tried to eliminate by pure ‘Maoist’ means, was now removed from power by parliamentary means and a friendly Congress government installed. It is another matter though that after some apparent progress in the talks that ensued, the friend suddenly turned hostile and launched a repressive campaign even more ferocious than that of Chandrababu Naidu.

In Bihar, during the Lalu era Maoists were widely known as “RJD during the day and Maoists by night”. In many places they used to mobilise votes and manage booths in favour of RJD candidates while trying to damage the prospects of rival contestants, ML nominees in particular. Acting in collusion with the then ruling RJD and the local police administration, they attacked the CPI(ML) office at Paliganj, Bihar, in August 2004 -- barely 6 months before the February 2005 assembly elections -- killing five comrades in their sleep at the dead of night and officially justified the killings.

In Jharkhand, where the erstwhile MCC already had a long and nasty record of killing our comrades, CPI(Maoist) squads allowed themselves to be utilised by the ruling BJP and the notorious SP of Giridih in gunning down comrade Mahendra Singh during election campaign in January 2005.

Such examples in their stronger areas have been replicated even in West Bengal in a somewhat different manner in the very different conditions obtaining there. They have had clandestine local level deals with both the CPI(M) and the Trinamool Congress (mostly with the latter) in different areas at different times to suit their own convenience. But the Maoists have also gone beyond such ‘local deals’ to express their open preference for Mamata Banerjee in no uncertain terms. In September 2009 Kolkata’s Ananda Bazaar Patrika and some other dailies published Politburo member Kishenjee’s detailed views on why he thought Mamata Banerjee was the fittest person to replace Budhhadev Bhattacharya as the Chief Minister. In recent months Ms Banerjee, now that her purpose has been served and she finds herself within striking distance from the coveted seat of power in West Bengal, has started distancing herself from Maoists; but that only proves her cunning – not any principled position on the part of CPI(Maoist).

Even if we set aside the aspect of secretive, indirect participation, abstention from politics – particularly from participation in elections – always boils down to subordination of the working people to bourgeois politics and constitutes a basic feature of anarchism. This is so because you just cannot cut yourself off from crosscurrents of dominant politics of the day, which can only be bourgeois politics in present conditions. And this subordination can happen in either of two ways: when the masses are left to the mercy of bourgeois electoral propaganda alone (since the ‘revolutionary party’ is absent from the scene) or when the latter, rather than fielding its own candidates and contesting independently, supports parties like RJD or Congress with an eye to some temporary gains for itself. The Maoists are masters of both methods.

The utter Maoist indifference to the task of combating bourgeois politics with revolutionary politics, especially in the arena of elections, can also be seen in the emerging phenomenon of ‘ex-Maoists’ joining the electoral fray in Jharkhand. It started initially as Maoists contesting the polls as independent candidates before Kameshwar Baitha, an erstwhile commander contested on BSP ticket from Palamau LS (SC) seat in a by-poll in 2006. Baitha finished second in that election and in 2009 he contested as a Congress-backed JMM nominee and won the polls. The Assembly polls in November-December 2009 saw a whole contingent of Maoist leaders contesting the polls in the state, most notably in the Palamau region, and almost all of them are JMM nominees. In the 2009 LS election we had put up a former Maoist leader from the Chatra LS constituency, but by the time of Assembly election we found him migrating to the RJD!

The CPI(M) too caters to the same subordination of the working class to bourgeois politics by means of all sorts of pacts with the latter, but they do so often with a different set of logic, like defeating the ‘main enemy’ and securing a few seats in the process, whereas Maoists want quid-pro-quo with dominant local leaders/major state parties/state governments. Subordination to bourgeois politics thus expresses itself both as social democratic parliamentary cretinism and anarchist “boycottism” (to borrow once again from Lenin, who said ‘left’ phrase mongers reduced the politics of Bolshevism to this narrow concept),with the CPI(M) taking pride in having the longest-running state government or the biggest contingent of left MPs (never mind the recent reversals) and the CPI(Maoist) complimenting itself for upholding what is commonly perceived as one of the most distinct hallmarks of pure, unadulterated Naxalism.

But this is a patently superficial and one-sided perception. Depending on assessment of situation, Charu Mazumdar advocated utilization of elections for the sake of revolutionary advance and he called for a boycott when that assessment changed radically. In the penultimate article of his celebrated Eight Documents written less than six months before the Naxalbari uprising he asked revolutionary communists “to take advantage of these elections to propagate our politics ... the politics of New Democratic Revolution... of worker-peasant unity under working class leadership, of armed struggle ...”This theoretical direction corresponds to what he did in practice when he contested the 1963 by- election from Siliguri constituency as a CPI candidate, he used the occasion to forcefully propagate the politics of armed struggle and to condemn the Indian government as aggressor against China, thus going directly against the party line. He was defeated, scoring only some 3000 and odd votes. Let us have a victory procession, he said, for it is a big achievement that so many people have voted for armed struggle and against the frenzy of chauvinism. The procession was duly organised.

After the first UF government was formed, he wrote: "communists may join an alternative government with only one purpose – to create conditions for launching movements, and not to protect or uphold constitutional obligations. But if, instead of advancing along this path, calls for struggle are given on one hand and on the other the owning classes are assured that they have nothing to fear, the whole perspective of the struggle gets lost. The target of struggle itself gets blurred. This line inevitably leads to the path of class collaboration.”'Lessons of the Elections and the Responsibility of the True Marxist Leninists', dated 3rd April' 67 Clearly, he was not against participation in an alternative government on principle; his debate was on how to utilise such government for the advancement of class struggle.

It was only before the mid-term elections that was held after the implosion of the first UF government, that CM advanced the slogan of boycott. In late 1968, with the CPI(M) spreading constitutional illusions under the slogan of another UF government and communist revolutionaries longing for a direct assault on the state in a context of rapid upswing of revolutionary peasant movement, the question of choice of the path of struggle assumed decisive importance. The latter, much like Russian Bolsheviks in 1905, felt it necessary to fight constitutional illusions “with the utmost demonstrativeness. And that meant refusing to take part, abstaining oneself and holding the people back, issuing a call for an assault on the old regime instead of working within the framework of an institution set up by that regime.”'Against Boycott', Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 13 On behalf of AICCCR, CM wrote:

“In the present era when imperialism is heading towards total collapse, revolutionary struggle in every country has taken the form of armed struggle; Soviet revisionism, unable to retain its mask of socialism, has been forced to adopt imperialist tactics; world revolution has entered a new higher phase; and socialism is marching irrepressibly forward to victory ... the slogans ‘boycott elections’ and ‘establish rural bases and create areas of armed struggle’ ... remain valid for the entire era.”'“Boycott Elections!” International Significance of the Slogan' (Liberation, December 1968)

Boycott elections and build base areas/areas of arms struggle – this integrated call was clearly premised on the assumed existence of a whole era of worldwide revolutionary upswing and rapid advance of socialism. This arguably proved to be a case of overestimation, but the lesson that must be learnt here is that the tactic of boycott is premised on the assessment of situation and employed not negatively but as a positive weapon so as to lead the people along a more direct course of action towards seizure of power. But to delink the boycott tactic from these basic conditions or to imagine that such conditions obtain permanently in a country like India is a clear travesty of Marxism-Leninism. Ostrich like, our Maoist friends bury their heads in the sands of the past because they lack the political courage to wield the difficult weapon of parliamentary struggle and continue to play with the great Leninist tactic of boycott.

This does not mean that communists should opt for the polar opposite – the parliamentary path. It is entirely possible and absolutely imperative to keep up the revolutionary spirit and uphold the revolutionary perspective even while participating in elections and waging parliamentary battles, as Lenin observed after the failure of the first Russian Revolution of 1905: “since the accursed counter-revolution has driven us into this accursed pigsty [the Duma – AS], we shall work there too for the benefit of the revolution, without whining, but also without boasting.”'Against Boycott', Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 13

It is in this spirit that true heirs to the legacy of undivided CPI(ML) has been developing a principled policy framework for parliamentary struggle: (a) take parliamentary forms of struggle as supplementary and subservient to extra-parliamentary forms, (b) participate in elections for the basic purpose of organizing powerful political campaigns with a view to projecting alternative policies in different spheres and heightening the political assertion of the working people as an independent force, (c) measure success mainly by our ability to integrate our election campaign with the basic movement of the people and raise the level of popular mobilization (d) where elected, raise the voice of popular movements within these bodies (from panchayats up to the parliament) and play the role of revolutionary democratic opposition vis-a-vis higher authorities, (e) reserve the boycott tactics for exceptional circumstances marked by, inter alia, an unmistakable upswing in revolutionary struggle.

Left Sectarian Concept of Mass Organisations and Mass Movements

Right from comrade Kanai Chatterjee in late 1960s through comrade Seetaramaiya in early 1980s to the present leadership of CPI(Maoist), this stream has repeatedly stressed the importance of mass organizations and criticized the undivided CPI(ML) for neglecting these. The MCC for example, organized the Nari Mukti Sangh, the Revolutionary Peasants Committee etc in late 1970s; but these never developed beyond being rather decorative appendages to the parent body, observing a few commemorative days like the International Women’s Day, Workers’ Day or November Revolution Day etc. The CPI(ML) PW made a more promising start by developing powerful mass movements under banners like the Rayathu Kuli Sangham (an organization of the rural poor), the Radical Students Union and so on. Through these it developed a broad mass base and a strong cadre force, but the good practice was aborted before long. As K Balagopal later pointed out, in the face of repression they underwent a political shift that would prove fatal. They made armed squads “the focal point of the activity” instead of “exposing the anti-poor bias of the government and extend[ing] their mass activity to a point that would have given their aspiration for state power a solid mass base”. One consequence of this was “The people for their part have come to look up to the squads as a substitute for their own struggle for justice. This has, on the one hand, created more enemies – victims of revolutionary arbitrariness – than they need have made, and, on the other, corrupted the masses into receivers of justice rather than fighters for it.”'Maoist Movement in Andhra Pradesh', EPW, July 22, 2006, emphasis added

The theoretical foundation of such lapse into anarchism is to be found in the Maoist document Strategy and Tactics. It talks of a wide array of mass organizations from “strictly underground revolutionary mass organizations” to “legal democratic organizations” to “cover organizations”, but only from a narrow militarist standpoint:

“While recognising the importance of mass organisations and mass struggles, we have to also keep in mind that in the revolution as a whole, it is war or armed struggle against state, that will be the main form of struggle and the army the main form of organisation. ... from the very beginning, our orientation, perspective and the method of building mass organisations and mass struggles should be to serve the war directly or indirectly.”

Well, perhaps such perception would be valid in pre-revolutionary China, but superimposing it on present Indian conditions betrays an obsession with war, i.e., partisan armed action against the state and/or the ruling party isolated from the natural objective course of peasant struggle and other popular movements. This has been most glaringly borne out in Lalgarh.

The CPI(Maoist) admits that the people’s movement in Lalgarh was a spontaneous one and the party “played the role of a catalyst.” [Ganapathy’s interview in Open magazine, October 2009.] Ganapathy also said “The people of Lalgarh had even boycotted the recent Lok Sabha polls, thereby unequivocally demonstrating their anger and frustration with all the reactionary ruling class parties.”

This second claim is totally unfounded. The adivasis, like people in Nandigram, were eager to vote, but without allowing the hated police in their villages. So, on their behalf the People’s Committee proposed that booths must be set up outside the villages where police boycott was still on. The government had to concede this demand and the people voted en masse, with the authorities providing free transport.

And what was this “role of catalyst”?

Like peasants in Singur and Nandigram who rose in arms against state-sponsored corporate land grab, adivasis in Lalgarh revolted against police atrocities demanding apology from and punishment for guilty officials. As in Nandigram, tens of thousands of women and men with their traditional weapons actively created their own liberated zone of sorts, very different from Maoist guerrilla zones that exist on the strength of firearms of guerrilla squads. It is this mass dimension that placed Lalgarh in the proud category of Singur and Nandigram and earned for it great support from all corners of India and abroad. What Maoists managed to do was to take over the reins of the movement from the People’s Committee against Police Atrocities (PCPA) and mark it with typical Maoist features like serial killings, often with barbaric features such as murdering a teacher in front of schoolchildren, leaving the body of a slain CPI(M) cadre to rot under the sun for days together; and so on. In the process, much of the movement’s broad democratic appeal was lost and its distinct political voice muted, while the state government found what it was looking for: a pretext for launching the crackdown. The valiant adivasi masses are still carrying on their struggle against the state-centre joint para-military campaign, but unless the movement can free itself from the Maoist stereotype and find its independent political voice, we are afraid it stands the risk of being eventually subsumed by the ruling class agenda, whether in the name of “restoration of law and order” or “delivering development and good governance”.

Destroying the spontaneous dynamism of the masses in the name of armed struggle goes against Mao’s revolutionary mass line and constitutes the root cause why Maoists can never build real broad mass organizations; Lalgarh proves this once again.

Modus Operandi: Politics Commanded By the Gun

Of late, we are hearing a lot about Maoist development work. For example, in Dandakaranya region of Chhattisgarh they have helped the poor build irrigation tanks and wells. Such work has been compared to Gandhian constructive work/work of “good NGOs” and bestowed with generous praise from well-meaning reformist quarters and official circles (see "Report of an Expert Group to the Planning Commission", April 2008). However, this particular strand cannot be judged separately from Maoist praxis as a whole, and surely the main thrust or USP (unique selling point) of Maoist politics is not grassroots development work but sensational actions -- the kidnappings, political killings, raids on police stations, destruction of soft targets like unguarded railway stations and tracks and so on. This brand of politics runs, and can only run, on a vast network of extortion economics. Huge levy or tax is regularly collected from all kinds of sources in their areas of operation: from contractors and brick kiln owners to tendu leaves merchants and other industrialists and businessmen, from illegal forest product dealers and coal and iron ore miners to corporate houses and bureaucrats. With manifold increase in flow of funds into rural areas for various development schemes, Maoists now find it convenient to share a slice of this development cake too. The dependence on big amounts of money runs contrary to the cardinal revolutionary principle of reliance on the people, a key tenet in the example set by the CPC under Mao’s leadership in the course of the victorious Chinese revolution.

Even if the big amounts gathered through extortion is sought to be legitimized as ‘tax’, the problem is, by paying ‘tax’ the vested interests earn a license to loot and exploit, and a patron-client relation often develops between them and the ‘tax’ collector, and the masses are inevitably discouraged, even restricted, from launching movements against the exploiters.In Lalgarh for example, Maoists never bothered to use their political authority for taking up a programme of land redistribution. In an interview to the Times of India Kishenji in fact said that In West Bengal there is no feudal exploitation any more, rather the CPI (M) members have emerged as new feudal lords. During prolonged bandhs called by them, small shops and minor business establishments have had to down shutters and public transport have been off the road, but the bigger concerns in Jhargram block (West Medinipur district) – such as the MPS Group (Dahijuri) and Ashok Patwari’s sponge iron factory --remained open. This was to be observed again and again and then in the face of criticism the Maoists set fire to a semi-deserted sponge iron factory. Maoist sensationalism thus flourishes at the cost of class struggle and adds to their coercive power and ‘authority’. In the past, clashes between MCC, PWG and PU were a routine affair; even now internecine clashes among squads belonging to the unified party are occasionally reported, especially from Jharkhand and Bihar. It is such pecuniary interests again which prompts them to try and obstruct the entry of other Left parties in what they consider their fiefdoms. Our party has had a bitter experience of this sectarian exclusiveness – of direct engagement with Maoists, which we would like to share with our readers in the last chapter.

Theory: Caricature of Mao Zedong Thought

The Communist Party of China (CPC) started its journey with the Russian Revolution as a model to be followed and constructed the Chinese path of revolution through trials and tribulations over a long period of time. Mao Zedong led and epitomized this collective endeavour in theory and practice, which he described as integration of the universal or general truth of Marxism Leninism with the concrete (historically evolved) conditions of China. Later the CPC coined the word Mao Zedong Thought to describe this process of integration and incorporated it as part of its guiding ideology along with Marxism-Leninism (not as a replacement, as the ‘Maoists’ have done). So did communist revolutionaries the world over, who seized upon this as the most advanced weapon for fighting modern revisionism during the international great debate of early and mid-1960s. Never – not even during the heyday of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution – did the CPC found it necessary to ‘elevate’ it to the level of an “ism” at par with Marxism-Leninism. The same was true for comrade CM, recognised by friends and foes alike as the most ardent protagonist of Mao Zedong Thought in India and his cofounders of CPI(ML), who did not opt for the “Maoist” tag.

Not content with this whole tradition, the CPI(‘M’) has adopted “Maoism” as “the Marxism-Leninism of today”. However, it is not so much the use of the term per se, as its actual implications – as manifested in their theoretical deliberations and practical activities – that compel us to see the ideology and politics of this group as a poor parody of Mao Zedong Thought.

But are they not, with their effective stress on armed struggle, upholding what is most distinct, most fundamental in the teachings of Mao Zedong? Did not Mao famously said, "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun"? And was not the first phase of the CPI(ML) movement built on this very foundation?

The quotation mentioned above, like Marx's famous comment about religion being the opium of the people, is almost always used out of context to convey an absolutely distorted meaning. Those words find place in the article Problems of War and Strategy. After discussing the fundamental differences between bourgeois democracies and China, which “has no democracy” (being ruled by feudal warlords) and “no national independence” (being directly oppressed by different imperialist powers Mao elaborates on a “peculiarity of China’s” – literally every party or grouping, from Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang and the Progressive Party to extremely reactionary parties, have to have their own armies. In this backdrop and particularly in the context of national war of resistance to Japan, he wrote:

“.... Every Communist must grasp the truth, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party.”

Our ‘Maoists’ forget these peculiar contexts of time and place, gloss over the huge differences between Indian and Chinese conditions and generalise the particular. By upholding and absolutising one part of Mao's teachings (political power growing out of a gun) in isolation from the other part (party, that is ideology and politics, commanding the gun), they in effect turn the whole thing upside down. Similarly, from the rich experience of the application of Mao Zedong Thought in Telangana and Naxalbari-Srikakulam, they have isolated the armed dimension (the element of squad activities) from the mass dimension (the element of broad peasant movement). Whereas CM was no advocate of isolated and exclusive armed actions – for him the two key phrases were “integration with the landless rural poor” and “politics in command” – our Maoist friends have delinked the whole question of arms from this essential context and have thus moved beyond the purview of the CPI(ML). Perhaps this was why they found it necessary to choose new names to describe their ideology and organization.

With their dogmatic adherence to the Chinese path, the CPI(Maoist) actually negates the very essence of Mao’s method. Mao had to conduct a firm struggle against Chinese dogmatists, who despite severe losses were bent upon blindly copying the Russian model in Chinese conditions. The famous formulation of Mao on the integration of the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism with the concrete conditions of China arose only in the course of this struggle. In our country a similar struggle has to be waged, and is being waged, against the self-proclaimed Maoists by those who sincerely try to integrate Mao Zedong Thought with the concrete conditions of India.

Anarcho-Militarism Masquerading as Maoism

The outline sketch of India’s Maoism attempted above leads us to characterize it as a negation of Marxism-Leninism, a caricature of Mao Zedong Thought, and a deviation from the revolutionary legacy of CPI(ML) – as anarcho-militarism. We believe this characterisation traces so-called “Maoism” back to its basic ideological roots (anarchism) and at the same time brings out its most important specific feature or manifestation (militarism). Here anarchism is understood in the sense or senses in which founders of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought encountered it in their practical work, that is in course of organising the working people for revolution, and hence also in theory, as outlined earlier.

Anarchism, broadly defined as a political philosophy encompassing theories and attitudes which consider the state or compulsory government to be unnecessary and/or undesirable, has been in existence within and without the arena of working class movement for a very long time. The most influential proponent of anarchism within the International Working Men's Association (First International) was Russia's Bakunin. He held that abolition of the bourgeois state was the immediate task, which the workers were to carry out not by forming a workers’ party, not by political struggle, but by ‘direct action’. In the words of Engels, “... since for Bakunin the state is the main evil, nothing must be done which can keep the state... alive. Hence complete abstention from all politics. To commit a political act, especially to take part in an election, would be a betrayal of principle....” (Engels to Theodor Cuno, 24 January 1872)

After the historic defeat it suffered at the hands of Marx and Engels in the First International, it was no longer possible for anarchism to reappear as a wing of the working-class movement in its pristine countenance. But in newer forms it continued to resurface again and again as a disruptive trend that negates or neglects the role of protracted mass political work as a condition for the attainment of a revolutionary goal.

In Russia for example, anarcho-syndicalists rejected “petty work”, especially the utilisation of the parliamentary platform, and held that workers could capture factories and seize power through trade unions without a disciplined proletarian party. Other ultra-left trends also got mixed up with anarchism to produce various shades of “petty bourgeois semi-anarchist (or dilettante-anarchist) revolutionism” and Lenin summed up the experience of his lifelong struggle against such trends in Left-Wing' Communism -- An Infantile Disorder. One of the most concise descriptions of anarchism is to be found in his theses contrasting anarchism against Marxism (see box).

In China as in Russia, the Communist Party found itself engaged in a continuous “struggle on two fronts” -- against both right and ‘left’ opportunism or in other words against “rightist pessimism” and “left impetuosity”. In the article On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party Mao writes about “various non-proletarian ideas”, the first and fore-most being “the purely militarist viewpoint”. This viewpoint, says he, “regard[s] military affairs and politics as opposed to each other and refuse to recognize that military affairs are only one means of accomplishing political tasks. Some even say, ‘if you are good militarily, you are good politically; if you are not good militarily, you cannot be any good politically’ -- this is to go a step further and give military affairs a leading position over politics....

“The sources of the purely military viewpoint are... a low political level... the mentality of mercenaries... overconfidence in military strength and absence of confidence in the strength of the masses of the people...” (emphases added; notice the similarity with our ‘Maoists’)

Mao also takes note of alien ideas like “subjectivism”, “disregard of organisational discipline”, “the ideology of roving rebel bands” and “remnants of putschism”. The most important manifestation of putschism, he says, is “blind action regardless of subjective and objective conditions”, adding that “in its social origins, putschism is a combination of lumpen-proletarian and petty bourgeois ideology.”

This is how, in different ways in different climes and times, “petty bourgeois revolutionism, which smacks of anarchism, or borrows something from the latter” (Lenin in Left-Wing Communism) tends to get mixed up with other alien tendencies and crop up “in somewhat new forms, in a hitherto unfamiliar garb or surroundings” (ibid), posing ever newer challenges to revolutionary Marxism. In the peculiar historical and social setting of our country, anarchism has evolved with a pronounced militarist overtone, compelling us to call them anarcho-militarists.

This characterization does not in the least deny that the CPI(Maoist) strikes a chord of sympathy and support among a section of students and intellectuals with revolutionary leanings. As Engels pointed out, anarchist propaganda “sounds extremely radical and is so simple that it can be learnt by heart in five minutes; that is why the Bakuninist theory has speedily found favour in Italy and Spain among young lawyers, doctors, and other doctrinaires. But the mass of workers will never allow itself to be persuaded...”Letter to Theodor Cuno (24 January 1872) This is true for the Indian working class also. However, Maoism has a wide support base among some most marginalized sections, especially adivasis, among whom they have been working with great persistence over a long time. In their main areas of work they sometimes mobilize hundreds or a few thousands of people in their militant programs. For all this, they remain anarchists -- in their abstention from mainstream politics, i.e. capitulation to bourgeois politics, especially during election times; aloofness from the available democratic space and fetishization of the underground; refusal to form/work in democratically functioning mass organisations; terrorist actions, including attempts on the lives of Chief Ministers, which take us back to the early phase of revolutionary terrorism in India’s freedom movement.

This is about the general political content of anarchism. As for the concrete manifestation in the form of militarism, it appears and reappears, in the full glare of media publicity, as a series of sensational military actions and, in theory, as feudal-bourgeois warmongering in reverse, as an exclusively militarist understanding and articulation of the whole gamut of strategy and tactics, as a doctrine of subordination of everything to a war in permanence.

Overall, the most crucial characteristics noted by Lenin in the boxed quotation should be easily discernible to anyone familiar with Indian Maoists: individualistic work style of dalams and federative nature of the organization (much like anarcho-syndicalism, where sections of workers and their trade unions worked under separate controls) with state and regional units operating autonomously in matters of extortions, executions etc, leading to frequent cases of “mistakes” admitted later by top leaders (as in the case of Francis Induvar murder in Jharkhand and attacks on polling officials in Chhattisgarh); reckless actions causing unnecessary inconvenience, even death, to common peopleThe lack of concern for people’s lives stood out in an interview of Politburo Member Bimal with Mint (22 June, 2009): / Mint: A lot of civilians might die in the crossfire. Wouldn’t you be morally responsible for those killed? / Bimal: In a war, there are no civilians – there are people either on your side or against you.; acts of heroism frequently interspersed with cases of surrender and betrayals leading to arrests of senior leaders and major losses caused by adventurism; the exclusive panacea of squad actions -- which they use not only to settle scores with class enemies and the state but also to settle political debates with communist revolutionaries (recall numerous cases of murderous attacks on our comrades, including one on the house of comrade Nagbhushan Patnaik) and so on. These features unmistakably bring out the class character of anarchism: despair and desperation of “a petty bourgeois driven to frenzy by the horrors of capitalism” (Lenin in Left-Wing Communism).

But did not the CPI(Maoist) evolve from within the revolutionary communist movement? Yes it did, and only through a process crystallized into the present shape of fully fledged anarcho-militarism trend. We shall now take a look at the course of this evolution.

CHAPTER - III

While this original ‘Maoist’ body remained the main vehicle of ultra left/anarchist activities, similar trends emerged within and around the CPI(ML) also. This occurred in three distinct phases: in the wake of Naxalbari; following the setback of early 1970s; and since the 1980s.

Upsurge and ‘Left-Wing’ Communism

In one of his most celebrated classics, Lenin showed how left adventurist trends emerged in course of struggle against right opportunism during the formative period of communist parties in different countries (Left-wing’ Communism – An Infantile Disorder) at the end of the second decade of the 20th century. He saw this as a normal teething trouble (“infantile disorder”) that could lead to catastrophic consequences unless cured in time. A similar phenomenon was to be observed in our country too during the formative years of the CPI(ML).

Charu Mazumdar (CM), the founder of CPI(ML), developed a clearly cut-out proletarian connotation or framework of agrarian revolution: build concentrated areas of anti-feudal peasant movement and extensively propagate the total politics of seizure of power; establish the leadership of landless and poor peasants as the vehicle of proletarian leadership on peasant struggle and rely on them, rather than on party organisers from petty bourgeois background, for unleashing militant peasant movement; encourage peasants to arm themselves with locally available weapons rather than sophisticated fire arms; combine different forms of struggle – mass seizure of crops, for instance – with armed attacks on class enemies and the state; and so on. In 'Fight against the Concrete Manifestations of Revisionism' he wrote: “Chairman Mao has pointed out: ‘Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor; it is people, not things, that are decisive.’ The oppressed and persecuted peasants launch their struggle against the ruling classes with bare hands or with whatever they have, but as needs arise with the development of the struggle and dictated by the compulsions of advancing the revolution, they begin snatching and seizing arms from the ruling classes. This is how people’s armed forces develop. It is impossible to wage a revolutionary war by bringing arms from the outside. This is so because, as Chairman Mao has taught us ...‘The revolutionary war is a war of the masses; it can be waged only by mobilizing the masses and relying on them.’”

CM cautioned comrades against the dangers of isolation from broad masses and the national mainstream if base areas were to be built in mountainous or forest regions and drove home the need and feasibility of developing bases in the plains. On this question, as on many others, he was keen on developing the distinct features of an Indian path of revolution. With a rapid surge in the revolutionary movement, he came to place more and more emphasis on the fight against anarchist ideas and practices such as militarism and infatuation with "actions". When students and the youth in Calcutta were celebrating the festival of revolution in their own – often adventurist – ways, CM personally met and placed before them "only one task: go among workers and landless and poor peasants – integrate, integrate and integrate with them".'Notes Taken in a Meeting with Student Comrades', Collected Works of Charu Mazumdar published in Bengali by CPI(ML)(Liberation)

“Annihilation of Class Enemies”

However, the volcanic eruption of the pent-up revolutionary energies of the toiling millions led by revolutionary communists was naturally not free from 'left' excesses (it is these – not the whole upsurge – that we have called “left-wing communism”). This found concentrated expression in what was called the line of “annihilation of class enemies”. Emerging as a new form of struggle in the heat of Srikakulam peasant movement, it sought to combine, with some success, the beginnings of armed struggle with broad mass mobilisation. In certain pockets this led to the formation of peasant squads, mass upsurges and some agrarian reform measures. The valuable experience thus gained would subsequently help build sustained armed peasant struggle in Bhojpur and neighbouring regions in central Bihar. But in many areas annihilation was wrongly conducted as a “campaign”, with a lot of indiscriminate and unnecessary killings, in the process getting isolated from peasants’ class struggle. These were serious left deviations that did tremendous harm to the people and revolution. However, factors like overestimation of the revolutionary situation, generalising the form of struggle suitable for some areas for every corner of the country out of subjective wishes, infancy of the party and impetuosity on the part of the leadership as a reaction to revisionist betrayal, prevented us from taking corrective measures and the infantile disorder grew into a fatal disease with the first CPI(ML) Congress (May 1970) declaration that "Class struggle, i.e., annihilation will solve all our problems". CM later realised that annihilation had been taken too far and tried to formulate a policy of organised retreat in the shape of a militant united front of labouring people, particularly people under the influence of Left parties, against the Congress regime [see his last article “People’s Interests Are the Only Interests of the Party” – AS]. But a planned and orderly retreat could not be organized because, first, the retreat was still supposed to be a very temporary phenomenon and secondly, because the policy and methods of retreat were not clearly formulated in terms of various forms of struggle and organisation. These tasks remained on the unfinished agenda of revolution when with the martyrdom of CM curtains finally came down on the first phase of the CPI(ML) movement.

Setback and Semi-Anarchism

Among the many splinter groups into which the CPI(ML) was split after the total setback of 1971-72, there emerged three distinct trends or approaches on the question of evaluating the past and charting a course for the future. The first to emerge from the underground and carve out a niche for itself in the post-emergency democratic space was the Provisional Central Committee (PCC) led by Satyanarayan Singh – an erstwhile PB member who in the name of fighting left deviation advocated unity with rich peasants in 1970 and in 1977 worked out a deal with Charan Singh, the then Union Home Minister, asking Naxalite prisoners to come out of jails by signing bonds abjuring violence. The organization built up largely on the basis of this ‘tactical’ surrender soon surrendered the banner of revolutionary Marxism. As this group happily abandoned all efforts of building revolutionary peasant struggle, Kanu Sanyal, who had the honour of announcing the foundation of CPI(ML) on 1 May 1970, now declared that the party foundation itself was a mistake and to make amends, now founded the Communist Organization of India(ML). The first batch of “rectifiers” thus went down the liquidationist path.

At the opposite end of the Naxalite spectrum there were groups which stuck to the letter and forgot the spirit of the revolutionary line represented by Charu Mazumdar, refusing to recognize the change in balance of class forces or take any serious lessons from the setback. They fell back on the ‘left’ deviations, as it were, to bring back the revolutionary days simply by mimicking the past. Thus it was that petty bourgeois anarchist trends, which remained submerged in and indistinguishable from the overall upsurge, now crystallised into distinct formations like Mahadev Mukherjee’s group, the Second CC, COC (PU) (subsequently CPI(ML) Party Unity) etc. We called these groups semi-anarchist in the sense that they still had one foot back in the CPI(ML) tradition of anti-feudal struggle even as they were moving in the direction of progressively abandoning class struggle for sensational squad actions. The same was more or less true for the semi-anarchist group outside the CPI(ML) stream – the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC).

Reorganisation of CPI (ML) and the “Rectification Campaign”

Diametrically opposed to both these extremes, there was the party centre reorganized on the second anniversary of CM’s martyrdom (28 July, 1974), comprising comrades Jauhar (Subrata Dutta), Vinod Mishra and Swadesh Bhattacharya. The reorganization provided a new fillip to the armed peasant struggle, but persistence of old meta-physical ideas prevented us from formulating a comprehensive policy for developing mass movements. We suffered serious losses in different areas. In November 1975 Comrade Jahar died fighting the enemy’s encirclement and suppression campaign in Bhojpur. Comrade Vinod Mishra then took over as the General Secretary. The Second Party Congress (February 1976) played an important role in uniting the revolutionary forces and in keeping alive the flame of revolutionary peasant struggle in the plains of Bihar in the face of enemy offensive during the emergency. But, as the Political-Organisational Report of our Third Party Congress pointed out,

“Over this entire period of 1974-76, our main drawbacks consisted, firstly, in our failure to link up with the anti-Congress upsurge of students, youth, and all sections of people of Bihar (the leadership of this upsurge was later captured by JP and it degenerated into impotency) and secondly, in our failure, when the movement collapsed with the arrest of leaders and repression on the masses, to provide a new guideline to organise the remnant forces. Although we maintained the political line of building an anti-Congress united front and upheld our areas as models of the same, we could not link this with the actual anti-Congress mass upsurge. This so happened because we had a mechanical conception of the development of united front on the basis of what Comrade Charu Mazumdar had said and we refused to analyse the concrete way in which things were actually developing beyond that mechanical framework.” During the 1974-76 period, “heroic actions and great sacrifices notwithstanding, the line was clearly left-adventurist in character”, as comrade VM later noted.CPI(ML) – The Firm Defender of the Revolutionary Legacy of Indian Communists

However, things did not stand still either in the party or in the society at large. “By 1976, the dialectics of practice had clashed violently with the metaphysics in theory and, given the required conditions, the Party was poised for a major change.”Political-Organisational Report of the Third Party Congress of CPI(ML), which serves as the basis of the evaluation of the past in this booklet. The post-emergency water-shed in national life saw an explosion of democratic and opposition impulses in various forms and class dimensions. If the Janata Party became its big bourgeois tribune, the CPI(ML)(Liberation) emerged as the proletarian platform while the CPI(M) came up with its new project of formation of stable governments in states and “conclaves” with parties of bourgeois opposition at the centre. The inner-party campaign that enabled us to make this historic transition has been known as the rectification movement.

This movement or campaign started with the limited purpose of correcting wrong ideas and practices concerning armed units, but quickly developed into a full-fledged onslaught on the metaphysical viewpoint of dogmatism and perfectionism. This led to great changes in the party’s political and organisational lines. Mass organisations were built up on students’, workers’, peasants’ and other fronts, later brought together under the umbrella of Indian People’s Front (launched in April 1982).

Semi-Anarchism Crystallises into Anarcho-Militarism

Meanwhile, the semi-anarchist groups were going through a long and complex process of coming together and falling apart to give rise to several short-lived and few relatively stable combinations. The CPI(ML) People’s War (PWG for short) was founded in 1980. There was a long and tortuous course of three-way unity talks among MCCI, PWG and PU, frequently interrupted by internecine clashes including a "black chapter" (as the concerned organizations called it after the merger). In 1998 the PU merged with the PWG. Then in September 2004, the two "Maoist" formations merged to form the CPI(Maoist). The long process of centralization of semi-anarchist groups around two centres – the MCCI and PWG – was thus brought to culmination. The quantitative growth and enhanced strength led to a qualitative leap too: the unified body started its solitary journey tangentially away from the CPI(ML) trajectory as an anarcho-militarist current.

In an unprincipled attempt to satisfy the cadre of the two organisations, both Charu Majumdar and Kanai Chatterjee were projected as co-founders of the new party! The two leaders who in their lifetimes consciously and resolutely avoided uniting in a single party were now posthumously compelled to do so by their followers! The post of general secretary went to PWG's comrade Ganapathy while the group agreed to drop the ML tag and with it the residual commitment to the CPI(ML) tradition.

The primary immediate task announced by the new organisation in its first press communique was to transform the existing armed squads into a full-fledged People's Liberation Army (PLA) and the existing guerrilla zones into base areas. But the first task that the world actually saw it taking up was a truce with the Congress government in Andhra Pradesh, a 'tactic' that backfired before long. After losing much of their old bases in AP at the hands of the YSR government, which ironically they had helped to come to power, they concentrated their activities in relatively newer areas like Dantewada in Chhattisgarh, Koraput-Rayagada region in Orissa and the Bankura-Purulia-Medinipur belt in West Bengal.

‘Maoist’ Sect vis-à-vis Revolutionary Communist Party

The most conspicuous common feature of these Maoist strong-holds is that both in terms of terrain (mountainous and forest areas) and socio-economic conditions (the historic alienation of tribal communities from the economic, political and socio-cultural lifelines of India) these regions are very suitable for armed skirmishes with the state. This advantage has always prompted the MCC, PWG and later the CPI (Maoist) to flock into such areas, leaving behind the peasantry and other toilers in the vast plains. Moreover, in recent years these regions have witnessed increased intrusion and oppression by the corporate-state nexus in search of minerals and other resources. The age-old tribal alienation is thus developing into an explosive situation pregnant with prospects of an adivasi rebellion of 21st-century (taking “a dangerous turn” in the words of the Prime Minister of India). The Maoists have successfully built on these objective factors, but in the process they have turned their backs entirely on their communist past and ended up as a rebellious sect based in just one section of the Indian people and working on a single-point agenda of armed struggle. This one-dimensional endeavour, however intense, has nothing in common with the broad vision and wide range of activities of the communist party and has no chance of success in a country like ours.

In clear contrast to the anarcho-militarist trajectory of the Indian Maoists, our Party has boldly re-emerged as a frontline organisation of revolutionary communists, reclaiming and upholding the revolutionary legacy of now nearly nine decades of communist practice in India. Drawing on an expanding mass base and armed with a rich variety of struggles and organisations, we have effectively combated the sectarian conceptualization of “Naxalites” as a special kind of New Left current or a product of the cultural Revolution in China and repositioned the CPI(ML) in the mainstream of the Left movement in opposition to opportunists of all hues.

The development of our Party has been based primarily on two things. First, our success in critically assimilating the lessons of the past – separating elements of petty bourgeois anarchism from proletarian revolutionary steadfastness, discarding the former and developing the latter. Second, taking open, honest, serious ideological struggle rather than factional manoeuvres as the key link in party building and gradually perfecting the system of democratic centralism. Over the last few decades this party culture has enabled us to protect the party from the intrusion of both rightist/liquidationist and ‘left’/anarchist ideas and move forward through a series of readjustments in political line and policies with a united and consolidated party organisation.

CHAPTER - IV

Isolation and Decline of Semi-Anarchism in Bihar

In the course of the rise and spread of our movement and organization in Bihar, we have historically had to face hostilities from different quarters – the feudal forces, the state as well as the ‘Maoists’. In the Magadh region of central Bihar (especially in the districts of Patna, Jahanabad-Arwal, Gaya and Aurangabad), where the predecessors of today’s Maoists too had pockets of operation and influence, we had to withstand a spate of attacks and killings unleashed by both the MCC and the Party Unity group.

Till date we have lost no less than 224 comrades including our supporters, activists and leaders in these attacks. In Jahanabad-Arwal alone, 127 comrades have lost their lives, at least 70 in Patna, 17 in Gaya, and 7 in Aurangabad. The attacks and killings did stop for a while after 2005, but of late we have again lost 3 comrades in East Champaran and most recently a long-standing comrade and member of Party’s Barachatti block committee, Comrade Arjun Patel Yadav was gunned down by Maoists in Gaya district. In Jahanabad-Arwal, COC (Party Unity) killed 66, MCC 21 and PWG 40 of our comrades. Anarchists have perpetrated as many as 16 massacres claiming the lives of 85 people: 48 people in 7 massacres in Jahanabad-Arwal, 31 people in 7 massacres in Patna, 3 people in one massacre in Gaya and 3 in one massacre in East Champaran.

The list of comrades killed includes popular cultural activists like people’s poet Virendra Vidrohi (Kurtha, Jahanabad, killed on 30 January 1993) who had ignited the imagination of the people of Bihar by blackening the face of Congress CM Bhagwat Jha Azad in the late 1980s and Rameswar Muni of Aurangabad; popular elected representatives like Comrades Rajeswar Mochi (block pramukh, Dulhinbazar, Patna), Vijendra Prasad (mukhia, Berhama panchayat, Punpun block, Patna), Raju Singh (mukhia, Charma panchayat, Masaurhi, Patna), Yogendra Bind (mukhia, Issebigha panchayat, Jahanabad) and district/local Party organizers like Comrdaes Rajeswar Prasad (DCM, Patna) and Jaipal Singh Yadav (Member, Paliganj Area Committee, Patna).

Collusion with Feudal Forces

While the MCC had been following a militarist line from the very beginning, the COC (Party Unity) had initially waged some mass struggles under the banner of Mazdoor Kisan Sangram Samiti (MKSS) against feudal hegemony especially on the issue of land. This is the reason why we were involved in joint actions with the COC (Party Unity) in the eighties, but it was not possible to do so with the MCC.

In the 1980s, the Party Unity too fought against the Bhoomi Sena [BS] in Jahanabad district and managed to erode the power of the feudal forces to an extent. In this phase our two organizations even waged some successful joint resistance against the BS. Under the banner of Daman Virodhi Sanyukt Morcha (United Front against Repression), a massive historic gathering was organized in Jahanabad against state repression unleashed in the name of Operation Task Force in the mid-1980s. The call for the historic gherao of the Bihar Assembly in August 1986 (in protest against Arwal massacre, April 1986) was also given jointly.

But this joint action could not be sustained for long. Gradually, criminal and lumpen elements and feudal forces began to join the PU organization. Things reached a critical point when the PU’s involvement was exposed in Nonhi Nagma (16 June 1988) and Damuha Khagri (18 August 1988) massacres in Jehanabad district in which 31 poor people were killed. As a result, our party had to end all relations with the PU. At Kumhawa, Sikaria, Bistol (Jehanabad), feudal forces became their main support base and at their instance, assault upon assault was perpetrated on the poor masses to uproot the CPI(ML). Following their merger with the PWG, such attacks became more frequent. Former BS elements joined them and many of our leaders and activists lost their lives in these attacks. PWG swiftly spread to new areas. At Kosiyama (Kako, Jehanabad), they fired on us in league with feudal forces to wrest 62.5 acres of Mutt land on which peasants led by our Kisan Sabha had staked their claim.

MCC had substantial influence in Gaya district. When land struggles erupted under our leadership and our organization began to expand in Gaya, the MCC in collusion with feudal forces sought to block us by unleashing violence. In order to wrest control over 400 acres of ceiling surplus and government land of Pipra Estate in Dumariya from people under our influence, they killed our activist Chandra Deo Prasad. To stop our struggle over 1300 acres of bechiragi [without chirag or lamp, i.e., deserted village land] and forest land grabbed by coal mafia and feudal lord Awadh Behari Singh, and 100 acres of ceiling surplus land of the Bodh Gaya Mutt, they brutally killed our activists Ram Narayan Yadav and Shibbali Mistri as well as the septuagenarian parents of comrade R N Yadav.

Collusion with Bourgeois-Landlord Parties

Collusion with feudal forces below is incompatible with opposition to bourgeois parties above. Their camaraderie with bourgeois parties is by now common knowledge [we have discussed this in Chapter II – AS]. Thus when comrade Kunti Devi won the Zila Parishad seat (2003 by-election) from the so-called “base area” of PWG in Jehanabad, the latter indulged in several attacks on us at the instance of RJD leader Munilal Yadav. In a similar incident, a Maoist squad gunned down five of our comrades including the Block Pramukh of Dulhinbazar comrade Rajeswar Ravidas right inside our Paliganj office on 18 August 2004 – at the instance of the local RJD MLA Dinanath Yadav. Following the near-total collapse of the Bhoomi Sena, some aggressive kulaks of Kurmi caste too joined the PWG to terrorise the struggling rural poor even as they enjoyed the political patronage of the JD(U)-BJP combine.

How We Dealt with Semi-Anarchists

First, the entire party rank and file was mobilized ideologically and politically through an intense education campaign about anarchism.

Secondly, we would politically expose many of their actions. Major political initiatives would be taken against such incidents: for instance, a large mass meeting was held at Paliganj after the attack on our Party office.

Third, as opposed to their anarchist activities, we concentrated on struggles on the issues of the poor and would involve their mass base too in such struggles.

Fourth, we never discriminated between the mass base of the anarchists and ours, and always worked as a party of the entire rural poor. Especially when feudal forces, criminals or the police attacked their mass base, we always came forward to resist.

The Assembly gherao against the Arwal massacre was a shining example – the victims of the infamous Arwal massacre were MKSS supporters, but the CPI(ML) and Indian People’s Front spearheaded the massive protests that rocked the then Congress government in Patna. Some fifteen years later, it was once again our Party which organized a militant gherao of the Bihar Assembly and challenged the discredited Lalu-Rabri regime following the massacre of MCC/RJD supporters by the Ranvir Sena in Miyanpur of Aurangabad district. During the struggle against Ranvir Sena (RS) the mass base of PWG was killed on a large scale in massacres at Lakshmanpur Bathe, Shankar Bigha, Narayanpur and Sendani. We took the lead in offering multi-pronged resistance to the RS and pushing back the feudal forces. This resulted in improving our relations with their mass base and eventually played an important role in drawing them into our fold, thereby isolating the anarchists.

Fifth, whenever their squad members were killed in fake encounters, we came out on the streets in protests.

Sixth, in spite of their attacks on our mass base, we never retaliated against their mass base. Instead, we responded with a policy of political exposure, mass resistance and selective military actions. In fact, on some occasions, their squads were spared in spite of their having attacked us. At Dariyapur (Masaurhi), a PWG squad tried to capture a fish pond which was under the control of our supporters; the masses resisted and encircled that squad. Had the people wished, they could have killed the entire squad, but when the latter surrendered, they were allowed to return with a warning. Generally our policy has been one of selective retaliation and encouraging the people to mete out punishment only to notorious criminals and killers involved in heinous incidents like, for example, the murderous attack at Paliganj office or the killing of comrade Virendra Vidrohi.

The limitations and ineffectualness of the anarchists were exposed even more in the course of the struggle against Ranvir Sena, which enjoyed broader and more vocal political patronage compared to all other private armies. It was not possible to deal with them merely through military actions but the anarchists, especially MCC, had excessive confidence in their own military prowess. Previously they had demoralized the feudal forces by organising massacres at Dalelchak-Baghora and Bara. Drawing on this experience, they indiscriminately killed many peasants belonging to the Bhumihar caste at Senari. But the RS immediately retaliated by killing many supporters of the MCC at Miyanpur and they could do nothing. In the same region, we successfully fought against the RS at Lodipur (Tekari, Gaya) and this prompted many MCC villages to join us.

As a result of our painstaking and consistent efforts of the last 20 to 25 years, the anarchists/semi-anarchists have eventually suffered disintegration in their own former fortresses. At present nowhere in Bihar can one see the Maoists take up any activities on the issues of the people or wage any struggle against feudal forces. They say this would cause tension in rural areas and curb their armed activities. Under this pretext they have come to an undeclared compromise with dominant feudal and kulak forces and in the name of “struggle against state power”, they now only attack the police and the railways.

Our Contention with the ‘Maoists’ in Jharkhand

In its early days, the PWG (then operating under the banner of its predecessor, COC(PU) established roots through struggles against feudal forces and had a significant mass presence in Garhwa district in particular and the entire Palamu region in general. Gradually, armed struggle became their exclusive concern and in this phase clashes with us increased. The feudal forces and middlemen against whom we were building mass struggles would use the anarchists against us very often. In recent years more than 30 comrades have been killed by the MCC and the PWG and the CPI(Maoist). Most shocking is the reported involvement of a Maoist squad (as mentioned in the CBI chargesheet) in the dastardly assassination of Comrade Mahendra Singh during the January 2005 Assembly elections.

The Maoists have always been notorious for attacking mass movements and colluding with sections of the ruling parties. On 17 September 1996, an armed MCC squad surrounded Gondlitand village at night and killed 7 leading comrades. In 1998, they surrounded and attacked a mass meeting at Amkudur and killed 9 comrades. In early 2003, while we were fighting against Inder Singh Namdhari (then Speaker in Jharkhand Assembly) on issues of corruption and loot in Chainpur block of Palamu district, a PWG squad attacked a mass meeting being conducted as part of this campaign on 23 February at Karso village. Comrades bravely resisted this attack but comrade Jubrail was martyred. This attack was protested all over the district; questions were raised in the Assembly about this incident; and comrade Mahendra Singh even resigned from the Assembly in protest. The leader of this squad Naresh Yadav was reported to have close links with both Namdhari and prominent RJD leader Girinath Singh. Maoists have always allowed themselves to be used by such forces, especially during elections, when much money would change hands.

Gradually, masses were won over from the anarchist fold through regular initiatives on people’s issues. Lacking popular support and faced with growing resistance against their anarchist activities, the PWG/MCC/Maoists increasingly shifted to the jungles and interior areas. In many areas previously or partly under their influence, people would invite us to come and build up organisation in their villages.

By 2003, in most places we managed to halt the advance of anarchist forces. Since the formation of CPI(Maoist), they have experienced several splits, many of their leaders have left their party while many others fell prey to state repression. Today, they do indulge in sporadic actions and attacks on police, but their areas of operation have shrunk quite a bit. Many anarchist groups have developed from within their own organisation – such as Tritiya Prastuti Committee (Third Preparatory Committee or TPC), Jharkhand Prastuti Committee (Jharkhand Preparatory Committee or JPC), Jharkhand Liberation Tigers (JLT) and Jharkhand Liberation Force (JLF). They all talk of revolution but their main preoccupations are extorting levy, and attacks on opponents. As part of its counter-insurgency strategy, the state is cleverly using these groups – giving them protection and pitting them against one another.

Anarcho-Militarism versus Revolutionary Communism: Orissa Experience

From their base in AP, the PWG spread to districts like Raygada, Gajapati, Koraput, Malkangiri in mid-80s. Initially they conducted a few annihilations (relatively soft targets) for tilting the balance of terror in their favour and organised selective military action against police or para-military forces. For rapid expansion they would stand by one side of a contradiction among the people or one group of villagers, without caring for class line. As in other places, they collected huge amounts of money from forest contractors, businessmen, and landlords.

CPI(ML) Liberation also started its journey from scratch in mid-80s under the leadership of Comrade Nagbhusan Patnaik in districts like Gajapati and Rayagada. A few specific cases of ceiling-surplus or government land illegally occupied by landlords or other vested interests were identified through investigation and some 100 acres of ceiling- surplus government land was captured and distributed among tribal and other landless people.

The party emerged as a powerful trend since the mid-1990s. The following factors contributed to this particular development: first, nearly 1000 acres of ceiling-surplus, temple, government or forest land were captured from illegal occupants and distributed among the landless; second, conducting regular political campaigns; third, winning over the support base of anarchists through militant mass movements combined with effective political campaign including participation in elections (in the last two Lok Sabha elections, our candidate polled more than 50,000 votes from Koraput (ST) LS seat.

After failing to develop a consolidated area in Rayagada-Gajapati belt, Maoists tried to build a corridor in Orissa to link Dandyakaranya and Jharkhand-West Bengal-Orissa border region. This was taken care of mainly by the armed squads of Jharkhand.

Over the last 5-6 years Maoists organised two major military actions in Orissa to seize large amounts of arms and ammunition – one in Koraput police HQs and the other in Nayagarh state armed police training centre. In both cases they mobilised their best possible armed forces from several states. They also killed a VHP functionary in Kandhamal region which was then used by the Sangh brigade to unleash massive communal violence on the Christian population in the region. The Maoists could play little role in resisting this fascist communal offensive.

The Rise and Fall of ‘Maoism’ in Eastern UP

The activities of Maoists came into notice in the latter half of the 1990s in the Naugarh block of District Chandauli and Nagwa block of District Sonebhadra, which are predominantly inhabited by tribals and are adjacent to Bihar and Jharkhand. The tribals eke out their living by collecting Tendu leaves, Mahua and firewood from the forests. The forest department along with mafia elements has been trying to seize the traditional forest rights of the tribals. Sexual exploitation of women has been rampant. Maoists promised to fight against these and killed or beat up a number of junior forest officials. Impressed by the instant justice delivered and the aura of the gun, many local youths joined the Maoist squads. They also developed links with some feudal forces and criminals in the name of extracting levy.

After a few encounters with the police in 1998-99, there was a major encounter with the police in Karki Minor of Sonebhadra in 2000 in which two policemen were killed. The police retaliated by unleashing a reign of terror. Fake encounter killings and arrest of innocents became common. In a fake encounter in 2001 at village Bhawanipur (District Mirzapur), 16 unarmed youth were killed in cold blood. Although there were no party contacts in this region, a weeklong strike of landless labourers was organised in Mirzapur-Sonebhadra-Chandauli belt against this, culminating in a Bandh on 14 March 2001. The bold initiative of the Party at the opportune moment was widely appreciated by democratic circles and dalit-tribal communities at large.

The CPI(M) had led powerful land struggles in some pockets of Mirzapur district, in course of which Comrade Ramadhar Singh (who was earlier active in ML movement) was killed by feudal forces in August 1998. While the CPI(M) leadership failed to respond, Maoists used this situation to spread their influence in that region, especially among tribals. Almost the entire district committee of CPI(M) became Maoist sympathizers. Many of their party members joined the squads, but after the Bhawanipur massacre most of them returned to the parent party. The Maoists looted a PAC (Provincial Armed Constabulary) camp in Khoradih village in November 2001 and escaped with a few rifles. This attack was a manifestation of their ‘Hit and Run’ tactics. They were hoping that this military action would break the reign of state terror and more cadres will join them. This was not to happen. On the contrary, the state retaliated with more repression. The Maoists were nowhere to be seen during those terrible times. Gradually, people were beginning to lose the faith they once had in the Maoists. The CPI(ML) intervened by organizing the rural poor against state terror. People could appreciate the difference between the ‘Hit and Run’ tactics of the Maoists which left them defenceless in the face of state terror and the mass mobilization carried out by CPI(ML) to repulse the state terror. Side-by-side, the basic issues of land, wages and dignity were also addressed while championing the cause of democracy. Our Party thus launched a two-pronged struggle against the Maoists.

The Maoists failed to rectify themselves and resorted to another major adventurism. In 2004, they mine-blasted a PAC truck in Hinaut Ghat area of Naugarh block. About 18 jawans were killed in the attack. The police picked up Maoist cadres and sympathizers and killed them in cold blood. Many, who had already parted ways with the Maoists and were leading a normal life, were arrested from their homes and jailed. Once again, the Maoists leadership was nowhere to be seen. This was perhaps the last major action that the Maoists could carry out in this region. Their mass base is inclined towards us while some of their erstwhile leaders are working for BSP and SP.

In Lieu of Conclusion

Today Left politics in India is poised for a new turn. The CPI(M)-led politics of ‘Marxist’ elitism and bourgeois respectability which revolves around compromise and capitulation vis-à-vis the ruling classes has all but collapsed on the soil of Bengal. Naturally, its projection on the all-India plane is also in for a serious crisis.

The Left ground today can only be reclaimed through powerful struggles and initiatives in the democratic political arena. For a resurgence of the Left we need a new realignment, a new model of fighting unity based on mass struggles.

It remains to be seen how and to what extent this new situation is grasped, in theory and practice, by different Left trends in the country. And the future alone will tell us whether the Maoists too will come out of their orbit of one-dimensional theory and practice to reposition themselves as a constituent or participant in this new realignment of the Left.

Comrade Vinod Mishra wrote this for a Hindi edition of the Communist Manifesto  published by Samkaleen Prakashan, Patna, in November 1998.

In view of the massive growth of modern industry and the concomitant expansion and development of working class party organisations, and especially in the light of the experience of the 1871 Paris Commune, a quarter century after the publication of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels felt that the programme had become dated in some of its details. They said the programme outlined at the end of the second chapter would have been written quite differently. The critique of socialist literature was also incomplete in the sense that it did not cover the period beyond 1847. Most of the parties described in the Manifesto had also become extinct by then. And the sea change in political situation had also rendered much of the comments about the relations of communists with other opposition parties considerably outdated.

The Communist Manifesto has now completed 150 years. These 150 years witnessed major periods of crisis in global capitalism, the quest for control over the world market led to two world wars among bourgeois states, socialist revolutions became victorious leading to the rise of socialist states, yet in the last decade of the twentieth century it was capitalism which prevailed over socialism in the global contention between the two (socialism and capitalism).

A unipolar world, a new world economic order, the breakneck speed of globalisation, the all-out domination of multinational corporations, the scientific and technological revolution and the more recent information revolution reducing the whole world to a single village – such are the principal features of the present age. Rifts in the international solidarity of the working class, the rise of ethnic, feminist and environmentalist movements, the philosophy of post-modernism – all these are questioning the very relevance of Marxism and the communist movement.

When the communist movement across the world finds itself at the crossroads, Marxist intellectuals are once again returning to a renewed study of Marxist classics to find directions for an answer to today’s questions. Indeed, it has become imperative for every progressive individual to revisit the Communist Manifesto and study it afresh.

According to the Communist Manifesto, “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Further on, we find, “In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production.”

And then “The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. ... In one word, it creates a world after its own image. ... Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.”

The informed reader can see in these lines a living picture of today’s globalisation.

The picture of internationalism of the working people drawn by Marx and Engels in contrast to this globalisation of capital clearly underlines the complex interrelationship between national and international circumstances as between classes and nations: “The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must the rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word. …

“In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.”

The Manifesto had clearly stated that “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Even in its most liberal and broadest form of parliamentary democracy, the modern state can essentially be nothing else. The socialist state, in contrast, champions real democracy for the common people. In spite of this if the bourgeoisie has succeeded in projecting the defeat of socialism as the victory of democracy, we will surely have to deeply investigate the reason.

In the wake of the experience of the Paris Commune (1871) in which the proletariat had controlled political power for full two months, Marx had drawn the important conclusion that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” (The Civil War in France).

Lenin, in his debate with Kautsky in his all-important work “The State and Revolution”, raises the crucial question as to whether the old state machinery will continue after revolution or be smashed. Citing the aforementioned inference drawn by Marx, Lenin answers this question categorically: the old state machinery will have to be smashed because the bourgeois state rests on the very basis of alienation of the people from state power.

According to Lenin, democracy in a capitalist society is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation, the majority of the population is denied participation in public and political life.

In clear contrast to Kautsky who limits the political struggles of the proletariat to the goal of securing parliamentary majority and establishing parliamentary control over the state machinery, Lenin advocates a representative assembly of the proletariat which will be a working body, executive and legislative at the same time, where the electorate will enjoy the right to recall and representatives will have to work and take responsibility for implementing the laws they have legislated, will have to test their impact in real life and will have to be accountable mass directly to the electorate.

“[T]he mass of the population”, emphasised Lenin, “will rise to taking an independent part, not only the in voting and elections, but also in the everyday an administration part of the state. Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing.” (The State and Revolution)

According to Lenin the Paris Commune was one such organisation and after the Russian revolution, the Soviets had also emerged as similar organisations. Regarding the state Lenin goes so far as to say that in the first phase of the communist society, the socialist state itself is a remnant of the bourgeois state: “The state withers away insofar as there are no longer any capitalists, any classes, and consequently, no class can be suppressed. But the state has not yet completely withered away, since there still remains the safeguarding of “bourgeois law”, which sanctifies actual inequality. For the state to wither away completely, complete communism is necessary.”

This is why be “In fully its mature first phase, economically or first and entirely stage, free communism cannot as yet from traditions or vestiges of capitalism. Hence the interesting phenomenon that communism in its first phase retains “the narrow horizon of bourgeois law”. Of course, bourgeois law in regard to the distribution of consumer goods inevitably presupposes the existence of the bourgeois state, for law is nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the rules of law.

“It follows that under even communism the bourgeois there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but state, without the bourgeoisie!” (The State and Revolution)

Since the days of the Paris Commune to the Soviet and Chinese Revolutions, we have seen several experiments with proletarian state power. The Cultural Revolution in China witnessed vibrant debates on the nature and form of proletarian state power. The setbacks suffered by socialism in recent years have further intensified these debates.

While Social Democracy accepts parliamentary democracy as the ultimate limit of democracy, anarchism ends up negating democracy itself by its primitive negation of parliamentary democracy. The basic challenge facing Marxists today is to explore the broadest form of proletarian democracy beyond the limits of parliamentary democracy so that the defeat of world capitalism in the coming century is seen as the victory of not just socialism but also democracy.

Many changes could possibly be made in the Communist Manifesto in the light of the questions arising from the experiences of the last 150 years of the international communist movement, but as Marx and Engels wrote in the preface to the 1872 German edition, “the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have no longer any right to alter”. Indeed, nobody has this right today, especially because the general principles delineated in this document, remain by and large as true as they were 150 years ago. The practical implementation of these principles will however depend on the historical circumstances of a given country and time.