Maoism in India and Nepal

Ranjit Bhushan

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138639898
• eBook ISBN: 9781317412328
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Comunismo, post-comunismo e socialismo

Why are Maoist, Naxalite and Left extremist movements taking root in the most backward and underdeveloped regions of South Asia? This book examines this multi-layered question in democracies such as India and Nepal through an analysis of these movements as well as their leaderships and ideologies. Through a series of detailed interviews and dialogues, it sheds fresh light into the minds and actions of people who have critically defined the nature of Maoism and related movements in the region. Weaving together diverse narratives, voices, and streams of dissent, this first-of-its-kind volume brings cohesion to the seemingly fragmented but formidable Maoist politics in South Asia. It also highlights how such 'civil wars' are embedded into the larger politics of the region.

Perceptive and lucid, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, sociology, peace and conflict studies, and security studies, especially those concerned with Maoism and social movements. It will also be useful to government institutions and policy-makers.

Part I Ideologues' Take

1 Dipankar Bhattacharya

DOI: 10.4324/9781315685496-1

‘Vinod Mishra was both a great theoretician and an outstanding practical organizer'

Dipankar Bhattacharya is general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, the most original of all Marxist-Leninist groups active in the country. Of them, it can claim to be the true inheritor of the Charu Mazumdar legacy. In 1998, Bhattacharya succeeded Vinod Mishra, founder of the Indian People’s Front and general secretary of the party and the man responsible for spearheading the radical Left line in Bihar between 1975 and 1998. After topping the Higher Secondary Examination in 1979 in Bengal, Bhattacharya joined the B.Stat. programme at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, and became active in CPI (ML) politics. Despite turning into a professional politician, he completed his M.Stat. degree in due course. He later worked as the general secretary of the Indian People’s Front and then as the general secretary of the party’s trade union wing, the All India Central Council of Trade Unions (AICCTU). He was elected member of the Central Committee and Political Bureau of CPI (ML) in December 1987. After the sudden demise of Vinod Mishra, Dipankar was unanimously elected to succeed him. In this interview, Dipankar reflects on some far-reaching tactical changes that the party adopted in the aftermath of Charu Mazumdar’s death. From being an underground entity, it decided to opt in for a more over-ground role and focused deeply on Bihar, where socio-economic conditions remained among the most backward in the country. Bhattacharya talks about the important theoretical debates that surrounded CPI (ML) in the 1970s and early 1980s. In a deep evaluation of his former comrade Vinod Mishra, Bhattacharya explains how the Left radical tradition gathered momentum in Bihar and became the catalyst for social and economic change in a way that has not been seen anywhere else in the Hindi belt.

Q.Of the main lines that emerged post-Charu Mazumdar and the splintering of CPI (ML) factions, yours, that is the Vinod Mishra-led ML, proclaimed a different line that was away from annihilation theories to over-ground parliamentary politics. The move proved important in terms of CPI (ML)’s long-term goals.

A. If you look at the Eight Documents authored by Comrade Charu Mazumdar between 1965 and 1967 preceding the Naxalbari uprising, the documents that laid the ideological and political basis for the polarization between the revolutionary and reformist streams within the CPI (M); or most of his post-Naxalbari writings, you will never find him talking about any generalized annihilation campaign. Annihilation of reactionary landlords was envisaged as an integral part of mass assertion of the oppressed rural poor and rise of red power in certain rural pockets. Annihilation, armed struggle, boycott of elections – all these were features or forms of a revolutionary mass upsurge, characterizing revolutionary response to a specific situation and not measures intended for all times to come. With the situation turning adverse and the movement suffering a setback, in his last writings, Charu Mazumdar himself had hinted at a shift away from these forms, stressing instead on the need for a broad anti-Congress front of the labouring people based on united struggles. The reorganized CPI (ML) fought against both sweeping generalization/vulgarization of the forms of struggle that had come to be known as Naxalism and pedantic and opportunist denunciation of the basic revolutionary content of Naxalism in the name of rectification of past mistakes. Overcoming the dogmatism or one-sidedness that had crept into our thinking or practice, the CPI (ML) went on to revive and expand itself by unleashing the full initiative of the rural poor masses and raising their struggles to new political heights.

Q.What prompted this change? Can you now visualize Vinod Mishra picking up the pieces from a truncated CPI (ML) movement to arrive at the conclusion that armed struggle was not the way to revolution? His RectificationCampaign in 1978–79 altered the course of radical left politics, in that the CPI (ML) for the first time opted for mass politics. It was a paradigm shift. It lifted the CPI (ML) movement from a spiral of violence to legitimate politics. You are, in a sense, carrying his mantle.

A. Vinod Mishra never rejected armed struggle. As a revolutionary Marxist, he neither ruled out nor advocated any specific form of struggle for all times to come, rather he believed that the question of form of struggle depended on the concrete conditions at hand. He always drew a strict line of demarcation between parliamentary struggle and the so-called parliamentary path. Inasmuch as the existing Parliament is subservient to the existing state based on the domination of the propertied classes, no revolution could be accomplished within the confines of the existing parliamentary system. The whole question of revolution revolves around not just a change of government but effecting a change of the system or the state, replacing the existing state by one that draws its power from the working people and enforces the will of the working people through a qualitatively different constitutional and electoral framework.

There have been other CPI (ML) leaders and organizations who too stressed the importance of mass work or utilization of parliamentary struggles. If under Vinod Mishra’s leadership the reorganized CPI (ML) succeeded in effecting a paradigm shift, it consisted not so much in the so-called transition in forms of struggle but in infusing a new revolutionary content in the familiar forms of mass work or parliamentary struggle. Inability of the communist movement to emerge as a strong force in the Hindi belt is considered a historical handicap for the movement. Many Marxist theoreticians have blamed the lack of a bourgeois renaissance or social reform or awakening movement for this paradoxical situation. It is paradoxical because it is in the Hindi belt that the presence of feudal survivals is still most pronounced and stubborn, and communists with their agenda of anti-feudal democratic revolution should have found the Hindi belt soil particularly challenging and promising. But somewhere along the line the Indian Communist movement began to wait for a bourgeois social initiative, resigning itself to a side role in the Hindi belt. The rather economistic understanding of class and class struggle by the dominant communist school left the ground open for the socialist stream to retain and occasionally expand its base by highlighting and often counter-posing the aspect of social oppression and backwardness to the basic reality of bourgeois-landlord rule and structural domination and exploitation of the working people.

Comrade VM never tried to remedy this situation with any eclectic combination of caste and class; he led the party in attaining a dialectical understanding of India’s complex social reality. In place of the popular liberal discourse which treats castes as basic social units, classes as economic units and power groups as political units, a discourse which has also been considerably assimilated by vulgar Marxists; he fought for a comprehensive and revolutionary Marxist social analysis. Under his leadership our party has attained considerable success in exposing the organic interconnections between social oppression, economic exploitation and political marginalization or denial of political rights. The questions of dignity and power for the oppressed and the exploited have thus figured high on the agenda of our movement and this explains to a great extent the relative success of our party in the Hindi belt and especially in Bihar.

Q.How was that transition? From a rural guerrilla movement to sedate parliamentary politics − open party organs, open rallies with party banners, activated party units, seminars and the works?

A. If boycott of elections had been the revolutionary answer to the widespread mass disillusionment and rural discontent in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the assertion of the oppressed rural poor as an independent political force in the electoral arena, the very attempt by the effectively disenfranchised Dalit and landless electorate of feudal Bihar to exercise their franchise, had a profound political and social impact in the 1980s and 1990s. Much of the feudal-kulak violence, state repression and terrorist attacks that the CPI (ML) has had to endure in Bihar, Jharkhand and Assam in recent years (massacres of hundreds of members and supporters; killings of popular revolutionary leaders like Chandrashekhar in Bihar, Anil Barua and Langtuk Phangcho in Assam and Mahendra Singh in Jharkhand), and incarceration and conviction of hundreds of activists including elected people’s representatives on fabricated charges under a host of criminal laws including draconian ones like TADA [Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act], can only be understood as a desperate reactionary attempt to halt the CPI (ML)’s assertion and advance in the arena of mass struggles and electoral battles.

Q.How do you visualize Vinod Mishra? A theoretician, a practitioner? What is his role in the history of Maoist politics and folklore? He certainly believed that a correct and unified Centre was a sin-qua-non for reinvigorating the party. Your views? In more real terms, how did he impact radical left politics in Bihar, to which he was very close and which in the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s was very feudal (it still is) and strongly anti-Dalit. I would like you to react to his role in guiding the party work on the peasant front in Bihar. As a newspaper reporter in Patna in the mid-1980s, I could see that Vinod Mishra certainly fired the imagination of a lot of young people?

A. Comrade Vinod Mishra was both a great theoretician and an outstanding practical organizer who paid keen attention to every aspect of building a mighty movement and developing a consolidated and comprehensive communist party structure in the midst of the movement. Even in the 1970s and early 1980s, when our party organization was very small, we had a vibrant democratic life inside the party with proper committees functioning, regular holding of conferences and party congresses and publication of regular party periodicals. Since the very beginning, our party promoted the culture of comprehensive study of Marxist-Leninist classics and insisted on a Marxist understanding of India’s social and historical reality. Committees at all levels were encouraged to conduct thoroughgoing investigation into grass-root level social conditions and regular campaigns of party education became an essential component of inner-Party life.

Comrade Vinod Mishra was the moving spirit behind all these multifarious activities. He was the main architect of the Indian People’s Front (IPF) experiment. The IPF played a crucial role in the 1980s in expanding the frontiers of the revolutionary democratic movement in the country, especially in the Hindi heartland where the old Communist parties had either failed to make much headway or had started losing ground. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the intensification of the global hegemonic offensive of US imperialism and the rise of Hindutva forces within India, it became necessary for the CPI (ML) to enhance its direct ideological-political role and the party’s Fifth Congress held in Kolkata in December 1992 resolved in favor of the party coming over-ground.

This was the backdrop in which the IPF dissolved itself, but this in no way marked an end to the party’s united front efforts or its interaction with other progressive and democratic forces. In the post-IPF years, the CPI (ML) has undertaken issue-based joint campaigns both nationally as well as in different states. The party’s efforts for forging a broad-based unity of Left and democratic forces on the basis of a common programme continue unabated.

Q.Politically, the coming together of the PWG and MCC resulted in formation of the CPI (Maoist). What is the significance of this merger? What is your reading of the CPI (Maoist) and does it represent an important link in this protracted agitation?

A. The Left camp in the country is undergoing constant differentiation and polarization. The merger of the People’s War Group (PWG) and the erstwhile Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) [the latter actually predated the formation of the CPI (ML) but it never joined the CPI (ML) stream and always operated as a militarist organization arguing that conditions had not matured for the formation of a revolutionary communist party] signifies the consolidation of a full-scale anarchomilitaristic trend, which is not compatible with the CPI (ML), and this departure from the CPI (ML) trajectory is also reflected in the name of the new organization, i.e. CPI (Maoist). In contrast to this anarchomilitaristic trend which abjures politics and any kind of mass activity, the reorganized CPI (ML) has emerged increasingly as the rallying centre for not only Marxist-Leninists in different parts of the country but also for many sincere comrades from within the CPI and CPI (M).

Q.With this break from tradition by coming over-ground, Vinod Mishra took the CPI (ML) away from the classical Maoist mould. Did he see any future in an armed struggle, or in violence as a means to justify a political end, the classic Chinese Maoist situation? There were a number of occasions when he himself escaped death.

A. In January 1979, Comrade Vinod Mishra was encircled and injured by the CRPF at Barpathujot village under Phansidewa police station of Darjeeling district. Later in the same year, he led a delegation to China. In the aftermath of the controversial ‘Cultural Revolution’, China was then taking its first transitional steps towards what Deng called ‘Socialist Modernization’, but deep inside the Chinese society, especially among the peasantry, Vinod Mishra could easily discern great respect and admiration for Mao. While acknowledging the validity of the perspective in which the CPC under Mao had launched the ‘Cultural Revolution’, he did not dismiss Deng’s policies as a counter-revolution. He believed in studying and judging the entire zigzag course of socialist construction in terms of China’s own conditions and not on the basis of any rigid or abstract ‘socialist model’. But he never shied away from expressing his critical opinion on many aspects of China, the economic and social problems spawned by the so-called socialist market economy, the way the CPC handled the Tiananmen protests or China’s passive and at times, ambiguous role in the international arena vis-à-vis the US imperialist offensive in the post-Soviet era.

Q.After the Emergency in 1977, when Vinod Mishra called for fighting ‘against the metaphysical viewpoint of perfectionism’, what did he have in mind? Was there a roadmap for change? Was it a war cry to bring as many groups of the CPI (ML) under one banner?

A. Communist parties employ united front tactics with a view to winning over the working people from the influence of the parties of the ruling classes and tilting the class balance of society in favour of revolution. The kind of coalition politics that we are witnessing in present-day India reflects a reverse process of the big ruling parties like the Congress and the BJP cobbling political coalitions and co-opting smaller parties into a policy consensus around the settled agenda of the ruling classes. The immediate success that smaller parties have seemingly gained in terms of power-sharing has actually pushed polity towards a two-coalition pattern where even the Left parties have been reduced to an extension of the UPA in national politics. But parties like the CPI and CPI (M) have not succeeded in gaining any bigger base among the working people by collaborating with the Congress or with regional parties like the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, RJD [Rashtriya Janata Dal] in Bihar, TDP [Telugu Desam Party] in Andhra or DMK/ADMK [Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam/Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam] in Tamil Nadu. Their parliamentary strength is basically a reflection of their old organizational strength reinforced by the unity of the ‘Left Front’ in West Bengal and Tripura and the LDF in Kerala. The CPI (ML) obviously cannot join any coalition led by the parties of the ruling classes. Instead of collaborating with the UPA against the NDA or vice versa, we prefer to strive for an alternative left/democratic bloc.

Q.What about violence or the theory of annihilation? There is a view that the Maoist discourse in India seldom refers to the ethical aspects of the use of violence. The killing of suspected police informers, petty government officials, heads of panchayats − mostly poor people and innocents − have not been answered adequately in any quarters.

A. The question that has raised the fiercest of debates is the question of ‘annihilation’ as formulated by Comrade Charu Mazumdar. It is argued that there is no Marxism in this, and that it is simply vulgar individual terrorism, which has only brought about losses. It is also said that armed struggle and mass struggle must be combined and therefore, the ‘annihilation line’ must be condemned.

Let us first deal with the question of combining armed struggle and mass struggle. The general repetition of this phrase as a panacea has no relevance for Marxists engaged in practical work. It remains a historical fact that all mass movements acquire newer forms in the course of their advance – constantly discarding the old and creating the new – and transformations as well as new alignments of new and old forms are thus observed. Our duty as communists is to take an active part in this process so as to develop suitable forms of struggle. As Lenin says, while not denying even a bit the necessity of force and terror on principle, we shall have to develop such forms of struggle in which direct participation of the masses has been assumed and this participation has been ensured. Coming out of the bounds of neo-revisionism after the heroic Naxalbari struggle, and after engaging in some two years of revolutionary practice to build mass movements, communist revolutionaries of India faced such a situation and longed for a new form of struggle.

It was in this context that, in the heat of the Srikakulam struggle, ‘annihilation’ based on mass support was formulated. This sought to combine the beginnings of armed struggle with the step-by-step mobilization of the masses in struggles. And it was this basic orientation in Comrade Charu Mazumdar’s line, that of combining armed actions with mass struggles – with one aspect predominating at one time – which runs through his entire political line from the pre-Naxalbari days to the end of his life. Evaluating the successes and failures of his efforts is one thing, and very important too, for any real advance. But calling him a ‘terrorist’ is the height of absurdity and nonsense and betrays a servile attitude.

In the overall perspective of mass support, this particular form of struggle, which was to be combined with mass movements, actually aimed at an area-wise seizure of power. This struggle led to the formation of many peasant squads in different parts of India and also to a mass upsurge. This upsurge was sought to be organized through revolutionary committees by taking up certain programmes of agrarian reform while these squads were to be organized as units of the People’s Liberation Army by conducting guerrilla actions against police and paramilitary as well as military forces, thus heading towards red power. This, in brief, was the entire process and outcome of the ‘annihilation line’. Its achievements were many, and the existence of Bhojpur till this day bears testimony to this aspect.

H...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I Ideologues' Take
• PART II Activism on Ground in India
• PART III Maoism in the Himalayas
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Index