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Much has been written and
discussed on the supposedly imminent death of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism
in India. Home Minister Amit Shah has emphatically declared 31st March
2026 as his deadline to end Maoism in India. Various sections of
journalists, intellectuals, lawyers and state forces have in one way or
another tailed the viewpoints of the state on the matter. Like Spurna,
the soothsayer who haunted Rome’s Julius Caesar with her prophecy about
his incoming death in the ides of March, whispers of 31st March 2026
have turned into pompous proclamations as just three months remain for
the deadline and the Indian state’s most brutal anti-communist
offensive, Operation Kagaar continues in Bastar. Under this offensive, 9
central committee members, including the General Secretary Basavaraju,
16 State Committee members and numerous lower committee members of the
proscribed Communist Party of India (Maoist) have been martyred either
in fake encounters or in direct confrontations with the forces of the
Indian state. News has now emerged that the youngest Central Committee
member, Comrade Madvi Hidma, a Bastar resident, was martyred in a fake
encounter along with 6 others. Apprehensions are also being raised by
family members and activists about the whereabouts of the Central
Committee’s Comrade Devuji, who is suspected to be in illegal police
custody. Numerous pro-state propagandists (such as the CPI revisionist
Manish Kunjam, who is still bitter that the PLGA annihilated his
landlord-state collaborator relatives this year) are now trying to sow
disunity within the ranks of the Maoists, trying to create a situation
similar to the party crisis of the 1970s after the martyrdom of Comrade
Charu Majumdar. Before these recent martyrdoms, much like his
ideological predecessor Satya Narayan Singh from the 70s, Sonu
(Mallojula Venugopal Rao) and his lackey Sathish tried their hardest to
liquidate the CPI (Maoist) and dismantle its entire political line into
the gutter of Parliamentarianism. Aided by the surrendered traitor Asin
(aka Narender/Anil) who left the plains of Haryana to now serve the
imperialist Lloyd Metals as part of their Public Relations office,
concerns aren’t misplaced that these men who have joined up to serve
Lloyd Metals and the mining companies after abandoning the Maoist
movement must surely have contributed to the fake encounters of Comrades
Raju, Kosa and Hidma (all of whom were captured by the Indian state
after receiving tips from informants and turncoats). Amidst this crisis,
a media storm is being whipped up about the imminent death of Maoism in
India. First, the Indian state mythologized Comrade Hidma as a deadly
“child soldier-turned-terrorist.” Now, they are parading his body as a
proclamation of the death of the mythical figure of Hidma, the
undefeatable commander of the PLGA’s Battalion 1. In Hidma, the state
and various sections of intelligentsia are presenting the idea of the
heralding of an end to the protracted people’s war in India. This guest
submission for Nazariya Magazine responds to this media blitzkrieg with a
Marxist-Leninist-Maoist response, particularly looking at an issue of
the Frontline magazine as well as discussions raised by the so-called
independent media outlet Newslaundry to cover the arguments among petite
bourgeois intelligentsia about the Maoist movement over the last few
months.
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The Frontline (part of The Hindu news group) has published its edition on Maoism and Operation Kagaar titled “State versus Citizen.”
Unlike most of the naysayers, the Frontline does not tow Amit Shah’s
line entirely, debunking it as a preposterous and unrealistic claim that
will inevitably fail, like all past deadlines to end the Communist
Party of India (Maoist) and People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA).
The Frontline correctly analyses the Indian state’s militarization of
India’s resource-rich regions in Central India as part of paving way for
mining projects and large-scale corporatization of Adivasi peasant
waters, forests and lands. The non-existence of democratic rights and
the Indian Constitution, the genocide of the Adivasi peasants and the
entrenchment of Maoists in the politics of liberation in Central India
are facts the Frontline expands upon. Yet, the entirety of the issue is
riddled with tacit support for the “sandwich theory” narrative which
treats the Adivasis as victims in the war between Maoists and the Indian
state. The Frontline treats Maoism as a sinking movement on its death
throes, its dying, spasming body causing anguish to the Adivasi
peasants. In a time when hardly any journalist has dared to write about
Maoism in India, an attempt to cover some aspects of Operation Kagaar is
an important venture but at the same time, it is crucial to expose the
various state-informed narratives that the Frontline and its journalists
have inadvertently fallen for. This review will address all key
contentions that we have with the issue and our positions on the same.
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“Violent Revolutions are a Dead End”
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Various authors in the
Frontline and Newslaundry have brought up this claim, including Meena
Kandasamy, the surrendered Naxalite Badranna as well as the likes of
Rahul Pandita. Meena Kandasamy, in her piece “Blood on Our Hands” writes, “the
most dangerous resistance to [resource] extraction is not the armed
insurgent but the peaceful protester armed with Constitutional
knowledge.” In her visit to Silger, Meena Kandasamy has most
definitely learned of the resolve of the Adivasi peasants engaged in
sit-ins against mining, road-building and other ‘developmental projects’
led by the now banned Moolwasi Bachao Manch. Yet, Kandasamy seems to
want to create this false distinction between the armed Adivasi peasant
and the peaceful Adivasi peasant. Are the two not united in cause?
Moreover, why do Maoists hold the view that boycotting elections is a
strategic call? Why do Maoists hold the view that only a party with
underground and illegal structures is capable of waging a revolution?
Why did Mao Tse-tung uphold the adage ‘power stems from the barrel of a gun’
? All these questions are answered by the Moolwasi Bachao Manch’s
recent ban and the arrests of their leaders. Kandasamy writes that the
state creates a false binary for all Adivasi peasants: stop resisting or
be criminalized as a Maoist. The reality is that the state gives only
one option to the people: armed revolution beyond the ambit of the law.
Claims of the Constitution have hardly touched the lives of most of the
people in India, the PESA Act, the 5th Schedule, the Forest Rights Act
have done nothing to prevent Operation Kagaar. They have done nothing to
stop the mining operations in the Sijimali, Kutrumali, Manjhingmali,
Mali Parbat area in Odisha. The Maoists have never told the people to
cease their struggles, they have only understood that in the end, the
only way for a revolutionary force to preserve itself is through arming
the people and defending itself and the people through war. The ban on
the Moolwasi Bachao Manch, the arrests of its leaders Sunita Pottam and
Raghu Midiyami, the arrest of Sarv Adivasi Samaj Vice President Surju
Tekam, the arrests of democratic rights activists like Rona Wilson, GN
Saibaba and Ajay Kumar are all clear indicators that a purely legal form
of resistance will never lead to liberation. Any force which poses a
militant and staunch resistance to feudalism, imperialism and comprador
bureaucratic capitalism in India has faced the full force of the state’s
paramilitary apparatus. Law, Constitution, judiciary are mere
extensions of the class rule of the comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie
and the landlords, appendages of their state. Under a fascist regime,
this becomes doubly true, as Kandasamy herself has expanded upon in her
piece.
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In fact, contrary to
these journalist-writer claims, it is because of the armed Maoist
movement that forces like Moolwasi Bachao Manch and other forms of
democratic dissent became possible in Bastar! It seems dust has
accumulated on the memories of the historic tendu patta movement in
Bastar which led to the change in rate of 1 rupee per 1000 leaves
collected to 50 paise per leaf along with the loosening grip of feudal
landlords in Bastar. It was due to the presence of Maoist movement in
Bastar that the Indian state was forced to acknowledge the democratic
rights of the peasants, culminating with its passing of the Forest
Rights Act in 2006, just two years after the merger of CPI (ML) People’s
War and Maoist Communist Centre of India to form the CPI (Maoist). It
was the Maoist movement in Telangana and Bihar which clamped down
against caste-based violence of the landlords and their militias,
redistributing land from the hands of the landlords to the landless and
poor peasants. The success of the Maoist movement led to the loosening
of the grip of feudalism in the areas where the movement existed,
forever changing the landscapes it touched. The intelligentsia seems to
have the memory of a goldfish, it has forgotten that Bihar and
Jharkhand, once dubbed the “wild west” for its various upper-caste
landlord militias like the Ranvir Sena, was tamed by the erstwhile
Maoist Communist Centre of India. The MCCI’s squads ended the feudal
practices of right of first night (the implied rule that a landlord gets
to sleep with a new bride), the terror of landlords harassing Dalit
landless peasant women when they would work on their fields, along with
all their impunity in using landless and poor peasants as bonded labour
through extra-economic coercion. Former Bihar I.A.S. officer Manoj
Srivastava publicly opined that the state machinery had entirely failed
the people of oppressed castes and the peasants of Bihar in this time
period. Instead, it was the path of Naxalbari which became the people’s
alternative. In places where the terror of landlords was such that Dalit
and other oppressed caste peasants could not dare to sit on a chair in
front of the landlords, the Maoists altered the social and economic
fabric to a point where the Dalit landless peasants could not only
demand wages for their labour but also combat the violence of the
landlords when the role of the state became clear to them as merely the
lawful guardians of the ruling class. Meena Kandasamy, who in the past
wrote heartfelt pieces on the Kilvenmani massacre, seems to forget that
in Bihar-Jharkhand, when the landlords carried numerous such massacres
of the Dalit landless peasants, it was the Maoists who led the peasants
to fight back, ensuring that further Kilvenmanis do not occur in parts
of the country where they were active. The Maoists organized both armed
actions as well as strikes, while running Revolutionary People’s
Committees in the Budha Pahar area and the Saranda Forest where people
actually experienced what a true democracy is. The founders of the
Ranvir Sena, in fact, went so far as to say that the armed actions of
the Maoists combined with their strikes forced the landlords into a
situation where they had to negotiate fair wages with the peasants for
the first time in their lives, some landlords being compelled to leave
the villages forever after they failed to reclaim their lands from the
peasants who seized their lands.
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In
areas where the Janathana Sarkars and the Revolutionary People’s
Committees have been formed, the Maoists achieved astonishingly rapid
results. In areas where the Janathana Sarkar exists, the Maoists managed
to carry out land redistribution, thus entirely eliminating the
presence of landless peasants. They carried out construction activities
like building check dams, setting up localized oil refineries in the
villages, building hostel schools for Adivasi children, introducing
medical care by training villagers in first aid, increasing productivity
by reviving extinct seed varieties and creating new seed varieties
indigenously in contrast to the state’s destructive HYV seeds and GMO
crops along with creating new means of storing potable water in areas
where freshwater rivulets are turning red with the toxic waste from
industrial plants. At the same time, Maoists carry out various forms of
social reform against patriarchal practices, metaphysical beliefs such
as seeking medical care from religious quacks, Brahmanism etc. In
Bengal’s Lalgarh, where the Maoists had only a few months to carry out
changes, while being encircled by the paramilitary forces, they still
managed to carry out large-scale reforms. They held camps against
cataract which was prevalent among the people. They managed to create
streams to irrigate the land in a region which had become arid due to
lack of a water source. They built tubewells, where once people had to
drink the same water in which their cattle would bathe in. They even set
up a health center as the nearest hospital in Midnapore was 40 km away,
training local volunteers to work and maintain the health center.
Sanhati’s Koustav De, who visited the area during this period and wrote
reports on it, noted “all these activities organized by the
villagers is what is perplexing the authorities and the ruling party.
Till date they have had to counter opposing parties or protests but have
never had to counter development. They are confused, scared and in
absence of answers are reacting in an erratic and violent manner. The
BDO has declared the health center illegal stating that it has been
forcefully occupied! But he had no answer to the question as to what
state was it in before occupation. According to him it is not when
authorities fail to appoint a single doctor to visit a health center in
two years and it remains locked, but it becomes illegal as soon as
people decide to turn it into a functional one.” Yet, in this very Frontline issue, the lawyer Bela Bhatia has had the audacity to make the claim that Maoists have “set Adivasi society backward!”
To Bhatia, we say that the only reason Maoists continue to exist in
Bastar is because unlike her, the people know who the real enemy is.
Maoists survive in Bastar because the people stand with the Maoists,
because the people continue to fill the ranks of the PLGA, the CPI
(Maoist) and the Janathana Sarkar. They do it because unlike her, they
are swayed not just by the changes Maoism has brought in their lives,
but because they understand what greater change Marxism-Leninism-Maoism
can bring to the rest of country if the CPI (Maoist) succeeds in its
goal of establishing a People’s Federal Democratic Republic of India.
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One need only look at the
civil society of India to note Maoism’s widespread impact. India’s
entire civil liberties movement was formed on the back of Maoism, with
the first ever civil liberties organizations such as the Andhra Pradesh
Civil Liberties Committee and the People’s Union for Civil Liberties
both forming in response to the anti-communist violence initiated after
the Naxalbari uprising. Whatever nominal democratic rights the oppressed
and exploited masses of India have achieved, it has been at the back of
militant and armed anti-feudal struggles, led by the Maoist party. Who
is the real threat for the Indian state? Is it the people who are “armed
with Constitutional knowledge” (as if the Adivasi peasants need to be
awakened by the shining light of the law to know that they are the title
holders to their lands!) or is it the armed Adivasi peasant who wages
war knowing full well that the only way out of the state of affairs
imposed upon them for the last 200 years is through protracted people’s
war and the establishment of a New Democratic India? Meena Kandasamy,
who writes in lengths about the harrowing days of the Salwa Judum
militia seems to forget that it was the Maoists, not the Indian Supreme
Court, not the Indian Constitution, which stopped the Salwa Judum. The
people, in unity with the Maoists exposed the Salwa Judum for what it
was, which compelled the state to literally create a legal variant of
the Salwa Judum in the form of first the Vikas Sangharsh Samiti (2016)
and now the District Reserve Guard! Yet, after all this militarization,
no mining operations have successfully started in Bastar. The Maoists
remain the only political opposition in the entire country which has
successfully been able to thwart corporate loot of natural resources and
provided people with a real alternative, that of the Revolutionary
People’s Committees and Janathana Sarkar in a time when the ruling class
opposition parties have withered to the sides.
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Meanwhile, many of these
journalists hailed the Lok Sabha results which saw the Congress-led
INDIA Alliance earn some higher votes than the previous elections,
thinking that the task of “preservation of democracy” lies with the
nepotistic scion of the Gandhi-Nehru family. What is this democracy,
where land redistribution never occurred? Has India ever truly been a
democracy, when it never formed a federation by justly upholding the
right of nations to self-determination? How can a democracy ever be
achieved without being birthed from the womb of an anti-feudal struggle?
The sanction of a book signed by members of the most of prominent
landlord and comprador bureaucratic bourgeois families, the Indian
Constitution, does not form a democracy. Even its purported author, Dr.
Ambedkar echoed this notion in his Rajya Sabha speech in 1953, going so
far as to proclaim that the “democracy” formed in India was a farce and
that communism may be the only correct path, in his interview with the
BBC. Many democratic-minded intellectuals like Meena Kandasamy and
Arundhati Roy have pinned all their hopes on the Rahul Gandhi project
thinking he will save a democracy that never was. Some have even gone so
far as to compare him to Karl Marx! And Modi has called him a Maoist.
To these misguided petite bourgeois intellectuals, we say, open your
eyes to the task at hand. Messiahs are not real, especially from among
the ruling class, but the politics of the masses is.
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For 58 years,
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism has been the only ideology which has
successfully managed to loosen the grip of feudalism in the country,
which has resisted imperialist-driven corporate loot of resources, which
has pushed back the comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie. The fight
against Brahmanism, caste-based feudalism, Brahmanical patriarchy,
against all forms of oppression and exploitation has actually been
fought successfully by the Maoists. In a country that never was a
democracy, claiming to be the “world’s largest democracy,” only the CPI
(Maoist), in its guerrilla zones and base areas, has managed to build
fragments of a true democracy. No other political force in the country
has been able to take the fight to the ruling class. When all political
opposition have wet their pants in front of Modi’s proclamations of a
“56-inch chest,” only the heroic members of the PLGA and the CPI
(Maoist) have dared to struggle against Brahmanical Hindutva fascism in a
combative manner.
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Democratic-minded
intellectuals have already recognized that Brahmanical Hindutva fascism
is a threat that will also target them and are correct to raise concerns
about it. But they must recognize that the recourse does not lie in the
likes of Rahul Gandhi or Akhilesh Yadav, who are merely representatives
of the other political factions within the Indian ruling classes. We
are sure that many of them internally know of this truth, but still
cling to vain hopes of a messiah. Maoists understand that metaphysics is
not a scientific outlook, instead we understand that dialectical
historical materialism is the only way to advance, and we remind all
such intellectuals of the same. In Nazi Germany, numerous members of the
intelligentsia who had once supported the communists slowly shifted
camps to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which was the
only opposition initially tolerated by the Nazi Party. Later, after the
Reichstag fire in 1933, even this opposition withered away and these
intellectuals either left the country or joined the Nazis to survive.
The few who stood by their ideals, formed underground groups to fight
back against the Nazi regime, learning from the methods of the Communist
Party of Germany (KPD) which went underground and continued to resist
by guerrilla methods. The famous White Rose group of students and
intellectuals was one such group, the members of which were all killed
by the Nazis for organizing meetings and distributing propaganda against
the fascist regime. Clinging to your petite bourgeois class positions,
or standing for the truly democratic ideals one represents, this is the
litmus test for all such democratic-minded intellectuals. So, we ask,
will you continue to knowingly shun Maoism and proclaim your allegiance
to the non-BJP camp of the ruling classes in the hopes that it will save
your skin? Or will you stand on the right side of history; stand your
ground and fight, just as the bold sections of petite bourgeois did in
Nazi Germany, even at the cost of their lives? We propose these
intellectuals to learn from the example of the former editor of Nazariya
Magazine, Vallika Varshri, as well as the people’s intellectual and
founding editor of the magazine Kalam, Comrade Yelavarthi Naveen Babu.
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Noor Sridhar to Venugopal Rao: “Evolved Naxalites” or Lapdogs of the State?
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Prominently featured in
this issue of the Frontline Magazine is an interview by the former CPI
(Maoist) Karnataka State Committee member Noor Sridhar, who is part of a
larger group of ex-Maoists and part of Karnataka Janashakti group. This
group is a unique group of cowards. While most cowards underscore their
cowardice by rejecting MLM and surrendering their arms to the state,
Sridhar Group is so delusional that they think they have not
surrendered! Let us recall, did Sridhar and his clique give up armed
struggle? Yes. Did Sridhar and his clique negotiate with the Indian
state to throw it crumbs from its vast finances (which it procures from
the loot of the people) at the cost of giving up their membership of the
CPI (Maoist)? Yes. Did Sridhar and his clique beg the Indian state to
not pursue legal cases against them in return for them not pursuing
revolutionary politics? Yes. Did the Indian state not give them
“rehabilitation packages” and did they, like all surrendered Naxalites,
proclaim their integration into the supposed “mainstream”? Yes, they
did. By all logic, they surrendered, but because the Karnataka Chief
Minister Siddaramaiah gave them minutes from his day, Sridhar and his
clique think they have some sway in the lives of the people! In the
interview, Sridhar proclaims with delight about how Siddaramaiah sat and
listened to the political grievances of the recently surrendered
Naxalites in Karnataka. For Sridhar and his clique, their biggest
victory is being able to get 10 minutes of the ruling class’ time.
Leaving aside his delusions regarding his surrender, let us first look
into the actual history of this clique which later became the cowardly
hub of Karnataka Janashakti.
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In 1991, in the erstwhile
CPI (ML) People’s War, there was an ideological crisis at the All-India
level. In this crisis, it was the Karnataka State Committee which wrote
a document exposing the wrong tendencies of the minority group within
the party. They called upon all the cadres to fight against the
opportunistic clique in ‘92. This call was given with the objective that
all the cadres in the Party must understand the disruptionist clique
and fight them ideologically. The Karnataka state committee was
organized by Comrade Azad of the CPI (Maoist) Central Committee who also
inducted Comrades Saketh Rajan and Kuppu Raj ‘Yogesh’ into the KNSC.
They quickly conducted a historical materialist study of the region,
under the charge of Comrade Saketh Rajan and Comrade Raji, which was
published in the form of the book Making History, taught as part of the
syllabus of Mysore University. The study elaborated the potentials of
protracted people’s war in the region and plans were laid down to
initiate armed struggle in Karnataka and the extended Western Ghats
region. As soon as work started in the Karnataka perspective area,
opportunists reared their head again and started contesting the proposal
to initiate armed struggle in Karnataka, saying that it would not work.
They were also against the merger of CPI (ML) People’s War and Maoist
Communist Centre of India and the formation of the unified CPI (Maoist).
In such a situation, Comrade Saketh Rajan was martyred fighting
heroically with the enemy. After his martyrdom, Comrade Kuppu Raj
continued the fight against the right opportunist clique, with the help
of the South West Regional Bureau. The conclusion of the ideological
struggle saw majority comrades standing with the party line. Finally,
the crisis was solved in the Karnataka State Conference in 2006. The
opportunistic clique left the party and a document was released to
counter the opportunists in the name of ‘Opportunists Never Understand
Revolutionary Dialectics’. Comrade Kuppu Raj was the main person behind
this document. He later became part of the Central Committee of the CPI
(Maoist) and was martyred along with Comrade Ajitha in 2016, facing the
bullets of the anti-Naxal force Thunderbolts and the STF. This right
opportunist clique, which opposed the possibility of people’s war in
Karnataka, in complete denial of all historical materialist analysis of
the region, was the one Noor Sridhar is a part of. This is the history
of the so-called “evolved Naxalites,” as Sridhar fashions himself to be.
When it came to the question of Maoist unity, they were sectarian. When
it came to the question of waging armed struggle and taking the class
struggle in the region to a higher level, they were right opportunists.
As the Karnataka State Committee correctly declared, they truly never
understood revolutionary dialectics.
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This is apparent in
Sridhar’s attempts to create a false dichotomy between what he calls
democratic struggles versus armed struggles. Sridhar’s understanding of
democratic struggles involves all forms of non-violent protests,
strikes, rallies etc. To be noted is that Sridhar’s democratic struggle
is virtually indistinguishable from the politics of ruling class
Congress party. Like the previously mentioned intellectuals, Sridhar’s
politics centres around tailing the Congress. He takes special
consideration in the interview to lick the boots of Siddaramaiah. Taking
the Indian communist movement 100 years back, to the dark days of the
PC Joshi-led undivided CPI, Sridhar’s “evolved Naxalism” is merely
servitude to the Congress party and a betrayal of
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. One would not be shocked if Sridhar thinks that
the Bharat Jodo Yatra led by Rahul Gandhi was a “democratic movement.”
In reality, as established above, no democracy in the world has ever
been achieved without waging anti-feudal struggle. In semi-colonial
semi-feudal India, where the rule of the landlords is preserved through
their alliance with comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie which serves the
interests of foreign finance capital, this is not possible without
waging armed agrarian revolution. One cannot wish away feudalism by
waving the Constitution in front of the landlords! The necessity of
arming the people is a matter of self-defense, who will have to face the
brunt of the police, the paramilitary and the private militias of the
landlords for raising their democratic demands. This is what happened in
Naxalbari, when the police open fired on protesting peasants. This is
what happened in Srikakulam. This is what happened in Kilvenmani. While
the ruling class is already heavily armed, organized, trained and
prepared to regularly mete out violence on the people, the people only
have the ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, their ingenuity and their
labour to fight back. Arming themselves is thus, the only way for a
people’s force to preserve itself. Armed struggle is an essential
historical necessity for any democratic struggle. But we are sure
Sridhar remembers all this, it is just that cowards need numerous
ideological walls to hide behind.
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The role Sridhar and his
group plays is not just that of ideological disruption, it plays the
role of traitorous snakes in the grass. Using their past connections
with comrades in the Western Ghats, they lured them, planting doubts
amidst adverse conditions of the movement and offering them a path to
surrender. Sridhar proudly proclaims Karnataka to be free of armed
Maoist activity, upholding his role in this process. During this part of
the interview, he seems no different than the Indian state’s Brigadier
K. Ponwar whose interview is also published in this Frontline issue.
Sridhar and his clique, after being kicked out of the movement and
ideologically cornered, now play the role of the running dogs of the
Indian state in weakening the movement. If Charu Majumdar and the first
martyrs of Naxalbari uprising would learn that in the future, people
like Noor Sridhar would fashion themselves as Naxalites, they would echo
Marx in saying that if he is a Naxalite, then they are not one.
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Frontline highlights the
notion of surrender policies and what it deems Karnataka’s advanced
surrender policy for Maoists. It seems to present this as a “solution”
to Naxalism. On ground, the Party is facing a temporary setback; this is
a fact. It is a fact that many comrades have surrendered. The
bourgeoise is quick to rejoice, saying that this state is an indication
of the ideological disunity of the Party and if not for the Indian state
finishing it, it would be defeated internally. The Party’s position on
surrender needs to be understood and the impression that all those who
surrender are treated equal (to traitors like Sonu and Rupesh for
example) countered. Surrendering is an act of class compromise and a
betrayal of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism that much is clear. In fact,
surrenderees, whether they be from the leadership or the rank and file,
all have been used by the state to counter the movement itself.
Thousands of surrendered Naxalites make up the ranks of the DRG and
Bastariya Battalion paramilitary forces, in contravention to the Supreme
Court judgement on the Salwa Judum. These same DRG men are the ones who
rape and loot their fellow villagers, even going so far as to shoot a 6
month old infant and her breastfeeding mother on 1st January 2024 (on
the very day Operation Kagaar began) in a drunken stupor. Others turn
into informants while those in leadership positions have been given
cushy jobs at mining companies and serve as the public faces of their
nefarious operations among the people. This is the case of Asin from
Haryana who surrendered in Gadchiroli and then became a part of Lloyd
Metal’s Public Relations office. The same Lloyd Metals which displaced
hundreds of Adivasi peasants from Gadchiroli’s Surjagarh Hills. Asin
(now going by the name of Anil) wrote letters appealing to the vanity
and ego of Venugopal, prior to his surrender, urging him to leave the
movement and join him at Lloyd. It is no surprise that discussions are
being held to make Venugopal a brand ambassador for Lloyd’s Corporate
Social Responsibility projects in Gadchiroli. Surrendered Maoists are to
become lapdogs for the imperialists and comprador bureaucratic
bourgeoisie. While the likes of Rahul Pandita, Sudipto Mandal and the
Newslaundry team hail “Comrade Sonu” as an enlightened intellectual,
even going so far as to compare him to Ashoka after the Kalinga war, the
reality is that he and others like him, as part of this surrender
policy, are to be the public faces of tyranny and the genocide of
Adivasi peasants.
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At the same time, in its
“Out of Steam” piece, the author proclaims that Maoists have hit a dead
end, a sentiment echoed by Noor Sridhar too. This is active ignorance on
part of the Frontline editorial team. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is not
some obscure manifesto, it is a comprehensive scientific
ideological-political-organizational framework. It is a guide to action,
yes, but it also has a philosophical component to it. Academics,
particularly from among the social sciences are quick to adopt elements
of the philosophical aspect of Marxism to explain socio-economic
phenomenon. The most cited academic works in the social sciences all
adopt some element of Marxism or another. What Marx achieved first with
Capital, transcending Adam Smith’s initial forays into theorizing
capitalism in the Wealth of Nations, and achieved again with his
development of historical and dialectical materialism, transcending
Hegelian dialectics, is undeniable even for the ruling class. 200 years
on and this fact remains true. The leap of Marxism towards
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism was once again undeniable for the ruling class,
as was evident with the worldwide impact of China’s Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution. Suddenly, every prominent academic adopting Marxist
framework was now a Maoist. Film, arts, theatre, identitarian struggles
be it against racism or homophobia, every field was rocking with the
wind from the East blowing from China. This was true for India too,
where Marxism-Leninism-Maoism was serving as a guide to action after the
Naxalbari uprising. Charu Majumdar’s call to the youth saw thousands
flock to the countryside to integrate with the masses. Prominent
intellectuals, academics, actors, doctors, politicians, singers,
artists, whether they agreed with it or not, acknowledged Maoism as a
political force of the people.
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While the Frontline has
chosen to refer to the Trotskyist academic Jairus Banaji’s ahistorical
piece to explain Maoist movement as a fragmented movement after Charu
Majumdar’s martyrdom (any serious journalist would take into account the
academically authoritative works of Prof. Manoranjan Mohanty, Amit
Bhattacharya, Suniti Kumar Ghosh, Sumanta Bannerjee and the CPI Maoist’s
own Brief History of MCCI and PW document if they wanted serious
academic engagement with the subject), the objective reality is that
Maoists actually united all the forces who upheld the Naxalbari path and
advanced correctly after CM’s martyrdom, with the numerous mergers
between CPI (ML) Second CC, CPI (ML) Naxalbari, CPI (ML) Party Unity,
Revolutionary Communist Centre of India, Revolutionary Communist Centre
(Maoist), Maoist Communist Centre of India and CPI (ML) People’s War to
form the CPI (Maoist). Nearly 60 years later, now when the Maoists are
much more organized, much more experienced ideologically, politically
and organizationally, leading one of the world’s largest remaining
communist movements, why does the Frontline editorial team think
surrenders will somehow spell the end of this vast movement?
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is not some obscure manifesto, we mentioned, it
is a guide to action. But a guide to action is needed when conditions
exist for a class to take action. The conditions that led to the storm
that is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism are largely the same, just as they were
back in the 60s. The contradiction between imperialism and the oppressed
nations and people has only sharpened, with various oppressed nations
like Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon etc. waging furious armed struggles
against imperialist and comprador bureaucratic states. The contradiction
between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in capitalist countries
continues to sharpen with imperialism’s crisis continuing to worsen the
lives of the proletariat and the people across the world. The
contradiction between the various imperialist powers is only sharpening,
with the recent tariff wars between the Donald Trump-led US imperialist
government, the French and Canadian bourgeoisie and the Chinese
social-imperialists as well as the US-NATO alliance’s proxy war in
Ukraine against Russian imperialism. Domestically, the contradiction
between imperialism and the Indian people is worsening, as the
Brahmanical Hindutva fascist BJP government has paved the way for
unprecedented penetration of foreign finance capital and loot of natural
resources. The contradiction between feudalism and the broad masses
remains firm, as land relations have hardly changed and landlords have
adopted new methods, in stronger alliance with finance capital to
maintain their class positions. The internal contradictions among the
ruling classes have also sharpened, with the fascist government clamping
down hard with UAPA-NIA-ED against Parliamentary opposition as well as
against petite bourgeois intellectuals. The conditions for Maoist
revolution, on a world-wide scale and on a domestic scale, have only
become more conducive. When one talks of stopping the flow of a river,
one does not talk of taking out buckets of water from the stream, one
talks of eliminating the source of the water. But unfortunately for
those waiting for the demise of the CPI (Maoist), the only way to do
this with the Maoists would be the success of the New Democratic
revolution in India and the success of the Maoists. As long as these
contradictions remain unresolved, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism will remain
the people’s guide to action. In the Newslaundry discussion panel, the
liberal journalist Rahul Pandita claims that we are witnessing the
downfall of CPI (Maoist). It is here that we must contest the idea that
CPI (Maoist) is finished, or that the state will be successful in
meeting its deadline of “ending Naxalism” by 31st March 2026. We have to
understand that Marxism is a living social science which emerges from
the contradictions of the society itself. Let us suppose the government
of India is successful in the annihilation of the party leadership, even
then the movement for New Democratic revolution cannot die. This is
because the contradictions in Bastar and in India in general will not
only continue to exist after the hypothetical annihilation of the party,
but will infact be even more intensified as the Indian state would
allow for unfettered penetration of foreign finance capital to worsen
the lives of the people more freely than ever, turning our ongoing
misery into the worst manifestations of Mussolini’s fascist dystopia.
This is why the current setback is a temporary one.
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What do the Post-Modernists have to say today?
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As Nazariya Magazine has
elucidated in its various pieces over the years, post-modern
identitarian thought is continuously being utilized as an ideological
apparatus to distance the petite bourgeoisie from seeking revolutionary
transformation. Sudipto Mandal serves as a great example to elucidate
what they have to say at this current juncture. He claims that CPI
(Maoist) is only asking for peace talks in Operation Kagaar as their
leadership is being killed off. Sudipto argues further that the ordinary
cadre (it is a known fact that these party members are often from
exploited classes and oppressed social groups, especially Dalits and
adivasis) have been constantly “mowed down” by the security forces but
the only thing different about Operation Kagaar is that the leadership
is being targeted in this operation, a leadership he claims is made up
of “upper caste outsiders”. He claims that the call for ceasefire is a
sign of the Party’s uncaring attitude- when the Party was strong, “you
didn’t want to surrender.” He even goes so far as to say that the Indian
state, the Maoists and the civil society are all the same, due to his
belief that they are all upper caste.
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Here it is important to
counter the subjective idealist philosophy on which these line of
arguments are based. First, he claims that the Party was strong…. But
why was it strong? It is solely because it has been able to represent
the interests of the people and build their mass base from amongst them.
This mass base is largely comprised of Dalit, Adivasi peasants and
women. As we elaborated above, most of the Maoist movements were rooted
in service of society’s most oppressed and exploited. In fact, the
political line of Protracted People’s War dictates that the communists
rely on the basic masses for building their People’s Army, which will
primarily consist of the proletariat and landless and poor peasantry in
semi colonial, semi feudal India; in other words, People’s War relies on
the participation of oppressed castes as they form the majority of the
most exploited classes in India. Therefore, if the masses, including
Dalits and Adivasis, did not partipicate in the Party, it would be
unable to exist. And if the Party did not represent the people’s
interest, it would have never been able to establish dual power.
Therefore the legitimacy of the Party doesn’t come from his subjective
claims that the Party is not representative or it doesn’t have
legitimacy, but from its very existence, built on the trust and
participation of the people in PPW. Therefore when he says that the
leadership of CPI (Maoist) is consistent of “outsiders”, it is nothing
but a blatant lie which serves the ruling class by splitting the people
into different castes (a false unity) instead of uniting people on the
basis of class, which leads to real solidarity and understanding due to
common shared class interests. We know that identity is not enough to
join a people with a solid basis, or that it is a not enough of
qualifier for “representation” by itself in isolation from class
relationships. It would not be remiss to remember that the erstwhile
MCCI was infamous among the landlords of Bihar as the “party of Chamars”
due to their strong foundation among the landless Dalit peasantry of
the region.
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Further, he has spit on
the memory of all martyrs whose blood stains the soil for the purpose of
revolution, claiming that CCMs like Hidma were only given leadership
within CPI (Maoist) “due to the process of elimination.” No CCM of the
Party will be given leadership simply due to their identity or their
class, responsibilities within any organization reliant on MLM are
determined by one’s potential and capability under organizational rules
based on democratic centralism. While Sudipto claims that the Central
Committee and Polit Bureau is not for Adivasis, a look at the basic
documents of the Party reveals the lie for the untruth that it is.
Scholarly work on this subject has already debunked this claim, with the
most recent study (2020s) on this subject concluding that atleast 65%
of the Central Committee is comprised of people from Dalit and Adivasi
backgrounds (Ravi Narla’s Caste and Revolution). Infact, going by the
documents of the Party publicly available, it recognizes that oppressed
castes (as well as Adivasis, women and LGBT and oppressed nationalities)
would have a harder time in building their capacity due to the
historical oppression and discrimination that they have faced, and
therefore in terms of promotions, its Cadre Policy has a positive
discriminate policy. This means that if two people are equally eligible
for promotion within the Party, the candidate from the oppressed special
group will be preferred over the other candidate in order to promote
their leadership within the Party. Any genuine student of B.R.
Ambedkar’s political thought would recognize that his vision of caste
annihilation, as he tried to argue in his work State and Minorities
(1937) is only recognized and advanced in the CPI (Maoist) text “Caste
Question in India-Our Perspective.” (Nazariya Magazine has already
elaborated this position in detail in a previous two-part article which
you can access at our website.) It is therefore unsurprising that
Sudipto Mandal, who seems to selectively cherry pick Ambedkar’s
political thought to suit his own compromising class politics, cannot
differentiate between the ruling class’ state and the people. He goes so
far as to blame the Bhima Koregaon-16 accused for raising slogans of
Lal Salaam at what he dubs a “Dalit pilgrimage” which led to the event
being attacked by the saffron terrorists of RSS. It seems the comforts
of his offices in Delhi and Kolkata has made him forget that the Bhima
Koregaon “pilgrimage” is to mark the site of a battle, that harassment
of Dalits going to that event was an yearly phenomenon prior to the 2018
incident and that all evidence has pointed to the fact that the RSS
planned to disrupt the event when they learned of the Elgaar Parishad’s
radical call to unite all oppressed and exploited people into a unified
force against brahmanical Hindutva fascism. The truth is that the
government too adopts the narrative that the Party is casteist since it
promotes postmodern identitarian trends which is suitable to serve the
ruling class interests. By creating friction amongst the revolutionary
ranks within the Party, the ruling classes are ensuring that the Party
is weakened. A communist party’s strength is based on ideological unity
and unity in action – if the state is able to create a split by
utilising a contradiction, it would weaken the fighting power of the
party and allow for the state to welcome the imperialists, big landlords
and comprador bureaucratic capitalists into Bastar with ease.
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The former Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht once wrote, “socialism is an easy thing that is very hard to do.”
In India today, Maoists face numerous hurdles in a period of acute
crisis. Ideologically, Maoists have to defeat post-modern
identitarianism, pacifism, modern revisionism and right opportunism. At
the same time, the Maoists have two historic responsibilities: defeating
Brahmanical Hindutva fascism like the Soviet Red Army once did and
establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat in a world where no such
state exists anymore, just as the Bolsheviks once did. But the Maoists
have continued to adapt to changing conditions, carrying out social
investigations and class analysis, as evident with their seminal
document “Changes in Relations of Production in India – Our Political
Program” (2021). While Operation Kagaar is the Indian state’s most
brutal encirclement campaign yet, the comprehensive anti-communist
Surajkund Strategic Offensive shows all indications that all experiments
carried out by the Indian state against the Maoists in Bastar will be
extended to the rest of the country as the Brahmanical Hindutva fascists
attempt to craft a militarized, fascist Hindu Rashtra. Maoists are the
apex of the resistance to the class rule of the comprador bureaucratic
bourgeoisie and the goal of “Naxal-mukt Bharat” is an essential part of
achieving Hindu Rashtra. This is clear to the state and the ruling
classes. This is the real meaning behind the purported “ides of March.”
But it should also be clear to these democratic-minded journalists,
lawyers, academics and members of the civil society who are still
deluding themselves about the political ramifications of the people’s
war in India. Pacifist strategies, surrenders, compromised peace,
incremental changes, are just pacifist illusions. There is no true peace
without liberation. Only revolution can permanently cut the knot of
social contradictions. “A Marxist bases himself on the class
struggle, and not social peace. In certain periods of acute economic and
political crises the class struggle ripens into a direct civil war,
i.e., into an armed struggle between two sections of the people,” said Lenin. Such conditions have existed in India since 1947. He further went on, “war
is no chance happening, no ‘sin’ as is thought by [religious’] priests
(who are no whit behind the opportunists in preaching patriotism,
humanity and peace), but an inevitable stage of capitalism, just as
legitimate a form of the capitalist way of life as peace is. Present-day
war is a people’s war. What follows from this truth is not that we must
swim with the ‘popular’ current of chauvinism, but that the class
contradictions dividing the nations continue to exist in wartime and
manifest themselves in conditions of war. Refusal to serve with the
forces, anti-war strikes, etc., are sheer nonsense, the miserable and
cowardly dream of an unarmed struggle against the armed bourgeoisie,
vain yearning for the destruction of capitalism without a desperate
civil war or a series of wars. It is the duty of every socialist to
conduct propaganda of the class struggle…. Work directed towards…. civil
war is the only socialist activity in the era of an imperialist armed
conflict of the bourgeoisie of all nations. Down with mawkishly
sanctimonious and fatuous appeals for ‘peace at any price’! Let us raise
high the banner of civil war!” As the contradictions between the
ruling classes of India and Pakistan seem to be sharpening and the era
of direct wars is escalating, Lenin’s call rings even truer. For all
seeking to turn the tide against the ruling class, raising high the
banner of civil war, defending the people’s war in India, is the only
way. Those who are panicking at the idea that the ship is sinking, and
already dreaming of jumping ship to save their lives, we remind them of
what became of the likes of Liberation’s Vinod Mishra, of Satya Narayan
Singh, of Red Star’s N. Ramachandran. The proletarian scientist does not
abandon her work simply because the waves of state repression struck
her shores, she already knew this to be a fundamental law of
revolutionary war; instead, she re-evaluates, self-criticizes and simply
goes back at it.
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