Recent developments in the Naxalite movement - communists in India

Monthly Review, Sept, 1993 by Tilak D. Gupta

For more than a decade, the Indian media have been printing sensational stories about armed members of the Naxalite movement who run "parallel" governments in the parts of the country in which they have effective control. Paradoxically, the media have at the same time sought to dismiss the Naxalite movement as "infantile terrorism" indulged in by a handful of extremists with no mass base.

Both of the above depictions distort the reality. Most Indian "Marxist-Leninists" (the term commonly used to differentiate them from the two older Communist Parties) would readily agree that the militant struggles of the rural poor which they lead have yet to reach the stage of guerrilla warfare and the establishment of guerrilla zones. The stories about parallel governments are often planted by opposition groups from the ruling classes to defame the governing party for its failures on the law and order front. This kind of news also partly reflects the growing "yellow" cast of a press that caters to a market in which suitably lurid stories of Naxalite violence sell well.

Though the Marxist-Leninist movement in India has without doubt a pronounced armed character, it would be silly to paint it as "terrorist." Massive people's rallies and the continual expansion of mass struggles organized by various Marxist-Leninist groups during the last fifteen years, particularly in the large states of Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, bear eloquent testimony to their increasing political support. In short, while the Indian revolution is not exactly around the corner, there is no denying that the struggles led by Marxist-Leninists of today are more sustained and widespread than ever before.

I

When Charu Majumdar, the chief ideologue of the Naxalbari armed peasant upsurge and later the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) died in police custody in July 1972, the initial attempts of the party to develop armed revolution had already been defeated. In his last writing shortly before his arrest Majumdar conceded that the "armed struggle in our country has, after reaching a stage, suffered a setback."(1) It was with that setback, that the first split in the CPI (M-L) had occurred by the end of 1970. After Majumdar's death the Party further broke into many factions, and sharp polemics among the factions continue to this day, as they seek to understand the reasons behind past failures and to plot out correct tactics and strategy for the Indian revolution.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is now of course easy to scorn many of the naive assumptions of the CPI (M-L) in its formative period. Resisting the temptation to try to sound wise after the event, one can briefly note in passing that all the major Marxist- Leninist groups now attribute the debacle, in varying degrees, to an adventurist tactical line adopted by the Party in its initial phase.

Before passing over to the contemporary happenings in the Naxalite movement, one important point deserves mention. Communists who supported the Naxalbari upsurge in 1967 were not members of the CPI (M-L), which was not formed until two years later. Notably, a large proportion of the Andhra Naxalites remained outside the new party because of serious political differences. These sections, later organized under the banner of the Andhra Pradesh Revolutionary Communist Committee (APRCC), while sharing in the main the programmatic concepts of the CPI (M-L) and its assessment of the national and international situation, put forth a less adventurist tactical line for building a revolutionary peasant struggle.

For instance, whereas the CPI (M-L) ignored the unevenness of Indian society, rejected mass organizations and mass movements as breeding grounds for economism and legalism, and sought to initiate guerilla war by attacks on notorious landlords carried out by secret armed squads, the APRCC argued for unleashing an armed popular struggle to defend the gains achieved by various mass movements. The APRCC also favored building mass organizations and stressed the need to combine illegal and secret forms of struggle with open and legal forms. This formation too, in time, got divided into a number of groups, and the strongest among them, led by Chandra Pulla Reddy, merged with one CPI (M-L) faction in 1975. Interestingly, as we shall see, the current tactics pursued by the major Marxist-Leninist organizations bear a closer resemblance to the line of the APRCC than to that of the CPI (M-L) of the first phase.

II

A story circulated on April 10, 1993, by India's biggest news agency reports that the Home Ministry of the central government has "asked the governments in the Naxalite-infested states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, and Maharashtra to follow an integrated regional strategy" to contain "the extremist violence and help address the economic and social problems being exploited by the Naxalites." (The Times of India, Patna Edition, April 11, 1993) The report goes on to add that "Ieft-wing extremism showed a distinct sign of revival since the mid-eighties" and "in the recent past the movement has become very violent and spread to wider areas through mass mobilization on a significant scale." The report, given prominent coverage by most national newspapers, pinpoints Bihar and Andhra Pradesh as the "center-stage of extremist activity" and names five of the Marxist-Leninist groups as being in the "forefront of violent activities." These organizations, according to the story, are CPI (M-L) (People's War), CPI (M-L) (Liberation), CPI (ML) (Party Unity), CPI (M-L) (led by Ramchandran), and the Maoist Communist Center (MCC).