By Sumanta Banerjee
The 'spectre of Communism' maybe no longer haunts Europe from the pages of The
Communist Manifesto. But it continues to haunt the ruling powers of India from
its vast and volatile rural hinterland - in the shape of Naxalism. The armed
movement carrying that name which was born in the turbulent 1960s, still
survives in India. It has an abiding appeal among the dispossessed and
underprivileged rural poor in several parts of India, who see in it a hope to
free themselves from their present miserable conditions. The police and
bureaucrats of at least eight Indian states (Bihar, West Bengal, Maharashtra,
Madhya Pradesh, Chhatisgarh, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa, which
comprise a large chunk of the Indian land mass, and accounts for more than half
of the Indian population), meet at regular intervals to devise ways and means
to check the armed guerillas who operate in a narrow belt of Naxalite pockets
that stretches across these states.
The Naxalite movement takes its name from a peasant uprising which took place
in May 1967 at Naxalbari – a place on the north-eastern tip of India situated
in the state of West Bengal. It was led by armed Communist revolutionaries, who
two years later were to form a party – the CPI (M-L), or the Communist Party of
India (Marxist-Leninist). Under the leadership of their ideologue, a 49-year
old Communist, Charu Mazumdar, they defined the objective of the new movement
as 'seizure of power through an agrarian revolution'. The strategy was the
elimination of the feudal order in the Indian countryside to free the poor from
the clutches of the oppressive landlords and replace the old order with an
alternative one that would implement land reforms. The tactics to achieve it
was through guerilla warfare by the peasants to eliminate the landlords and
build up resistance against the state's police force which came to help the
landlords, and thus gradually set
up 'liberated zones' in different parts of the country that would eventually
coalesce into a territorial unit under Naxalite hegemony – a la Yenan of China!
The uprising at Naxalbari was crushed by the police within a few months. But
although defeated, it unleashed a flow of events which escalated over the years
into a political movement that brought about far-reaching changes in India's
socio-cultural scene. The fact is that despite the continuing use of the most
repressive methods by the police to crush its cadres - and in spite of a series
of splits that had fissured the movement – during the last three or four
decades, Naxalism as an ideology has become a force to reckon with in India.
Its continuity can be explained by the persistence and exacerbation of the
basic causes that gave it birth – feudal exploitation and oppression over the
rural poor (who constitute the majority of the Indian people), and the Indian
state's repressive policies to silence them whenever they protest.
The Historical Background
The birth and development of the Naxalite movement under the leadership of the
CPI(M-L) should also be located in the contemporary global context of the 1960s.
This was the period in Europe, Asia and America, when new radical struggles
were breaking out, marked by the rereading of Marx, the rediscovery of the
sources of revolutionary humanism and the revival of the ideals that inspired
individual courage and the readiness to sacrifice for a cause. These trends
were reflected in the national liberation struggle of the Vietnamese people; in
the civil rights and anti-war movements in the USA; in the students' agitations
in Western Europe; in Che Guevara's self-sacrifice in the jungles of Bolivia in
pursuit of the old dream of international solidarity of all revolutionaries;
and in China's Cultural
Revolution which, in spite of being derailed by excesses, errors and crimes
committed in the name of `class-struggle', initially began as a campaign for
putting an end to bureaucratic authoritarianism and transforming the
individual. The Naxalite movement was a part of this contemporary, worldwide
impulse among radicals to return to the roots of revolutionary idealism. In the
Indian context, it took the form of going back to the source of all revolutions
in the Third World – the peasantry, which had a long tradition of fighting
against imperialism and feudalism. The Naxalite leaders drew inspiration from
the Indian peasant jacqueries of the18th and 19th centuries (which were
directed against the British colonialists and their Indian landed agents), and
the more modern organized armed peasants' struggles led by Communists in
Telengana in south India in the late 1940s, as well as the contemporary
Vietnamese war of liberation and other global
demonstrations of protest.
Ironically enough, although the uprising in Naxalbari in May 1967 was crushed
by the police within two months, the Naxalite ideology gained rapid currency in
other parts of West Bengal and India within a few years. By the early 1970s,
the Naxalite movement had spread from far-flung areas like Andhra Pradesh and
Kerala in the south, to Bihar in the east, and Uttar Pradesh and Punjab in the
north. Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh in particular became a mini-`liberated
zone' for a brief spell, when Naxalite guerillas drove out the landlords, and
set up alternative institutions of administration in several hundreds of
villages. In parts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the Naxalites succeeded in
mobilizing the peasantry to recover lands that they had lost to the
moneylender-cum-landlord class (to whom they had mortgaged their properties in
lieu of money) and carry their harvested crops to their homes.. In Punjab rich
landlords and policemen were targeted by bands of
Naxalites. In West Bengal itself - the birthplace of the Naxalite movement –
armed peasants' struggles broke out in Midnapur and Birbhum, where some
villages passed over to total Naxalite control during the 1969-70 period.
Incidentally, in Andhra Pradesh and in West Bengal, the Naxalites found their
main support among the aboriginal tribal communities, who had been the most
oppressed and marginalized in Indian society – the Girijans in Andhra Pradesh
and the Santhals in West Bengal.
The situation was alarming enough for the Indian government to investigate into
its causes. It set up a committee to compile a report. Prepared in 1969, and
entitled The Causes and Nature of Current Agrarian Tensions, the report
acknowledged: "The basic cause of unrest, namely, the defective implementation
of laws enacted to protect the interests of the tribals, remains..." It then
added: "unless this is attended to, it would not be possible to win the
confidence of the tribals whose leadership has been taken over by the
extremists." (Emphasis added). The term extremist is still being used by the
Indian officials to describe the Naxalites, or any one resorting to armed
resistance against the Indian government.
While the Indian countryside saw extensive guerilla actions, Calcutta (now
known as Kolkata) in West Bengal, became the center of Naxalite urban violence
from the beginning of the 1970s. Young cadres of the CPI (M-L) targeted police
personnel and political rivals. They planned to build up an arsenal by mass
scale snatching of arms and ammunition from police stations. These youth were
mainly middle class Bengali students who had been inspired by the Naxalite
ideology of agrarian revolution. Some went to the villages, lived and worked
with the rural poor among whom they propagated the Naxalite ideology, fought
shoulder to shoulder with them against the police, and laid down their lives.
Those who remained in Calcutta hoped to supplement the rural movement with such
violent urban actions that would keep the police and para-military forces fully
bogged down in Calcutta, and thus cripple their capacity to intervene in the
rural areas. But they underestimated
the military strength of the Indian state.
Instead of fully implementing land reforms to alleviate their grievances - as
suggested by many impartial observers as well as its own previously mentioned
committee of 1969 - the Indian government chose the simplistic path of military
suppression of peasant grievances. It unleashed a reign of terror on the
Naxalite bases and the villagers who supported them. In Srikakulam,
para-military forces swooped down upon Girijan villages, arrested thousands of
young tribals, captured and killed their Naxalite leaders, and resorted to the
policy of setting up `strategic hamlets' (as the US did in Vietnam) where
entire tribal villages were removed, so that the mass base of the CPI(M-L)
could be dispersed. In Birbhum in West Bengal, the Indian army was deployed to
encircle the Naxalite-controlled villages, close in and kill the leaders.
Thousands of their Santhal tribal followers were thrown behind bars.
Apart from the state repression, several splits within the Naxalite movement in
the 1970s weakened its capacity to resist the police and army offensive. Many
among Charu Mazumdar's comrades and followers became critical of his tactics of
assassination of individual `class enemies', his indifference to mass fronts
like trade unions (that led to the isolation of the Naxalites from the
industrial workers), and the growing bureaucratization of the party
organization. As a result, the CPI(M-L) split into several factions – often
fighting among themselves. This fragmentation in the Naxalite ranks helped the
Indian state to suppress them – for the time being..
By 1972, the Indian state had succeeded in defeating the Naxalite rebellion to
some extent – its main trophy being the capture of the ideologue Charu Mazumdar
from a Calcutta hideout on July 16, 1972. Mazumdar died in police custody 12
days after his arrest – raising suspicions about the treatment meted out to him
by the police. The movement continued even after his death – with sporadic
battles between the police and the Naxalites in far-flung villages in Andhra
Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and other states. But it faced increasing
repression from the state. By 1973, the number of Naxalite activists and
supporters held in different jails all over India had swelled to 32,000. News
of their ill-treatment compelled more than 300 academics from all over the
world including Noam Chomsky and Simone de Beauvoir to sign a note protesting
against the Indian government's violation of prison rules, and send it to New
Delhi on August 15, 1974 – the 27th
anniversary of India's Independence day. A month later, Amnesty International
released a damning report, listing cases of illegal detention and torture of
Naxalite prisoners in Indian jails. Such attempts by academics and human rights
organizations – whether in India and abroad – to highlight the plight of these
prisoners, were soon snuffed out by the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi,
when she declared Emergency on June 26, 1975, which imposed censorship on
publication of news, apart from clamping down upon public demonstrations of
protest. With military suppression of their bases in the villages,
dissemination of their leaders by the police, dissensions within their ranks,
and choked out from any democratic avenue of expressing their grievances, the
Naxalites reached the end of a phase of their movement in the late 1970s.
The new phase and situation
It was only after the lifting of the Emergency and the coming to power of the
Janata Party (an alliance of non-Congress and anti-Indira Gandhi parties) at
the Centre in New Delhi after the 1977 elections, and following a wide scale
movement organized by various human rights groups in India and abroad, that the
Naxalites were released from jails. The different Naxalite factions and their
leaders found an opportunity to meet and chart out their new path of action in
the light of their past experiences. Although committed to the original
strategy of eliminating the feudal order in rural India, they parted ways on
the question of tactics - one group of followers deciding to lay stress on the
parliamentary path of elections (e.g. the Liberation group of the CPI - M-L,
concentrated in Bihar), and the others preferring to go back to the path of
guerilla warfare, like the PWG - People's War Group - in Andhra Pradesh, and
MCC - Maoist Communist Centre - in Bihar.
During the last two decades since the 1980s, these two different streams of
the Naxalite movement drifted along with their respective tactics – often
fighting among themselves.
But during this period, it is these armed groups which have emerged as the main
challenge to the Indian state. They have also expanded their area of operations
(from their old pockets in West Bengal, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh in the 1970s)
to new guerilla zones in other states like Orissa, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh,
Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh in the new millennium. Their main
support base in these states are the poorest and the most deprived classes –
the landless and tribal people who are ousted from their homes by up-coming
industrial projects, are being denied access to their traditional forest
resources, regularly exploited by landowners and money lenders and persecuted
by the police, and who continue to suffer from non-availability of education
and health facilities in their far-flung and inaccessible villages.
Apart from expanding their guerilla zones within India, the PWG, MCC and other
smaller armed Communist groups have been able to build a network with similar
Communist revolutionary organizations in the neighbouring states of Bangladesh,
Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Nepal under the banner of the Coordination Committee of
Maoist Parties and Organizations of South Asia. Their representatives met in a
guerilla zone in eastern India in July 2003, to chalk out future strategy of
coordination of their activities. All these South Asian Maoist parties are also
members of a larger international organization called the Revolutionary
Internationalist Movement.
It should be pointed out however that despite their survival for almost four
decades, the Naxalites do not yet control any large area comparable to the
`liberated zone' that the Chinese Communists could establish in Yenan within a
decade or so in the 1930-40 period, or the sizable tract that the Maoists
occupy in neighbouring Nepal today. They have not been able to reach out to the
masses of the peasantry in the vast countryside of other parts of India, and
have expanded only to a few isolated pockets and stretches of areas inhabited
mainly by tribal and landless poor. Closeted in their rural underground
shelters, the Naxalite leaders have ignored the task of setting up bases among
the large number of workers both in the organized industrial and the
unorganized sectors. They have also failed to build up a regular army like the
Chinese People's Liberation Army, or the Vietnamese military organization –
that helped both the Chinese and the Vietnamese to
effectively fight their enemies.
These shortcomings have both crippled and distorted the character of the
Naxalite movement. The failure to establish a `liberated zone' has frustrated
their original strategy of setting up an alternative order to bring about
agrarian and social reforms. Instead, all their energies are now devoted to
defensive actions to preserve their pockets of influence, and offensive
assaults which are degenerating into acts of terrorism against soft targets
like village headmen or junior government employees.
The main villains always escape, as evident from their abortive attempt on the
life of the Andhra Pradesh chief minister in October last. Moreover, the
Naxalites in spite of their belief in armed resistance, have shied away from
the task of squarely facing the violence of the Hindu communal forces – the new
fascist face of the Indian ruling powers – who are increasingly occupying the
political space in the country, and are also burrowing holes into the Naxalite
support base.
If the Naxalites, along with other democratic and secular forces fail to resist
this advance of Hindu fascism, their movement may soon be reduced to an
insignificant factor in the current Indian political scenario, lacking any
decisive power to change the balance of forces in favour of a revolutionary
transformation of Indian society.
Lasting impact of Naxalism
But even if the movement declines and is suppressed, its ideology will continue
to threaten the Indian ruling powers as long as they fail to put an end to the
grinding poverty and social oppression that crush the Indian poor. Their
pitiable living conditions nourish the soil for the rejuvenation of Naxalism.
What is peculiar to Naxalism is not the physical occupation of and
administrative control over land by its leaders and followers, but its lasting
popularity among the economically impoverished and socially oppressed rural
people.
We cannot but acknowledge that Naxalbari was a water-shed in the recent history
of India – in more than one sense. It sensitized Indian society to the
desperate efforts made by the rural poor to escape the intolerable conditions
of economic oppression and social humiliation. It served as a catalyst in West
Bengal (the birthplace of the movement) for the introduction of some limited
land reforms by the Left Front state government there. Most of the progressive
trends in Indian social activism today (like the growth of voluntary
organizations working among the underprivileged and powerless, or the role of
the media in exposing atrocities on the depressed castes and the landless, or
the affirmative actions by human rights activists as agents of entitlement,
acting on behalf of the dispersed social groups) can be traced indirectly to
the issues raised by, or associated with, the Naxalite movement. Hand in hand
with these political and social developments,
Naxalism has left an indelible imprint on modern Indian culture. Apart from a
rich crop of poems and songs composed by the participants and sympathizers
(both urban and rural), major works of fiction, theatre and films have been
produced in different Indian languages, dealing directly with the movement, or
keeping it as the background. To understand today's India, it is essential to
listen to these voices that describe the tortuous odyssey of a political
movement that had been born from the womb of the bleeding Indian countryside.
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