This is a precis of the rise of the Naxal movement and its ideological evolution ever since. Should be an interesting read( if you are patient enough to read it all)
Origin and Rise
The earliest manifestations of the movement can be traced to the Telangana movement in Andhra Pradesh ,1948-1950 where deep rooted dissent against the government over inefficient land distribution rules had provided an apt laboratory for communist ideologues to put to test , the experiences and inspirations from the Chinese Peasant revolutions. During the 4 years, some 2,500 villages in the telangana region were ‘liberated’, sharecropper’s debt cancelled , rent payments suspended and land chunks redistributed making this movement one of the major chapters in the history of peasnt struggles. The rise of the CPI(M) and CPI as political entities received another shot in the arm when they formed a democratically elected government in Kerala in 1957 under E.M.S. Namboodaripad, the first such deposition in the world. The Indo-china war soon after in 1962 caused a split in the CPI with the newly formed CPI(M) entity now toeing a more radical centrist line.
The naxalite movement traces its physical origins to the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal where a farmer by the name of Bimal Kissan was beaten up by henchmen of local landlords when he attempted to plough his land in contravention of a judicial order that allowed him the freedom to do so. This small incident fired up the sensibilities of the Santhal tribals in the region who retaliated ,in the process recapturing land that had been illegally occupied. Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal broke away as a more extremist group from the Communist Party of India(Maoist) and spearheaded the spread of the then popular movement which they considered to be the progenitor of a new national revolution. Despite brutal suppression by the West Bengal government, the support of sympathetic revolutionaries from across the country led to the formation of the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries(AICCR) in 1968 and the Communist Party of India(Marxist-Leninist) in 1969. This fragment of the erstwhile CPI(M) deviated from its predecessors in their basic manifesto which aimed at usurping political power by taking recourse to an armed uprising. The adoption of philosophy of violence differentiated the Naxalite movement from other trans-national movements who, though reactionary and extremist, believed in achieving social justice through legal and peaceful means. Under the Naxalite Guru, Charu Majumdar aided by kanu Sanyal and Jagat Santhal , the CPI(ML) movement peaked in 1971 when over 3,650 violent outbursts were reported in Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and pockets of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Punjab , UP and Delhi. However, joint operations by the Police and Army leading to arrest and incarcerations of thousands of Naxal leaders, casualties and Majumdar’s death in 1972 led to a rapid decline of the movement’s intensity so much so that by the late seventies, the Naxal movement was given a final obituary in the pages of history. That the naxalites had had no formal training in Guerilla warfare and countered the Army’s .303 rifles and carbines with antique pipe guns, axes and sickles didn’t help their cause either.
K.P. Singh characterises this highly volatile and incendiary phase of movement in his article “The trajectory of the Movement1 ”. This period was fuelled by an ideologically sincere leadership and mid-level activists and thus appealed not only to the extreme left wing and deprived sections of the society but also a large chunk of sympathetic intellectuals and students in reputed colleges like Delhi University(remnants of which can be seen even now in the political commentaries of renowned individuals who were deeply influenced by the idea of a Robin-Hood like organisation giving the people back what was ‘rightfully’ theirs in the first place). China, locked in a bitter dispute over claims on Siachen and Ladhakh during that decade, saw the movement as its own extension and extolled its virtues at an international scale supporting it with financial aid and training.
The Revival
Post emergency, the now dormant movement got a fillip when it witnessed a revival primarily in Andhra Pradesh in form of the Anarchist People’s War Group(PWG) under Kondapalli Seetharamaiah , the Marxist Leninist CPI(ML) Liberation and in Bihar by the Maoist Communist Centre(MCC) along with a couple of other transient organisations like the Unity Organisation etc. The CPI(ML) Liberation functioned within the parliamentary democratic setup but did not rule out stepping in with an armed revolution in “a country where democratic institutions are essentially based on fragile and narrow foundations and where even small victories and partial reforms can only be achieved and maintained on the strength of mass militancy.” The PWG on the other hand initiated the line of thought that most naxals today relate to.At this point it would be enlightening to note an excerpt from the document Path of People’s War in India – Our Tasks!, a comprehensive PWG party document highlighting its aims, objectives and strategies and adopted in 1992.
“The programme of our Party has declared that India is a vast ‘semi-colonial and semi-feudal country’, with about 80 per cent of our population residing in our villages. It is ruled by the big-bourgeois big landlord classes, subservient to imperialism. The contradiction between the alliance of imperialism, feudalism and comprador-bureaucrat- capitalism on the one hand and the broad masses of the people on the other is the principal contradiction in our country. Only a successful People’s democratic Revolution i.e. New Democratic Revolution and the establishment of People’s Democratic Dictatorship of the workers, peasants, the middle classes and national bourgeoisie under the leadership of the working class can lead to the liberation of our people from all exploitation and the dictatorship of the reactionary ruling classes and pave the way for building Socialism and Communism in our country, the ultimate aim of our Party. People’s War based on Armed Agrarian Revolution is the only path for achieving people’s democracy i.e. new democracy, in our country.”
The People’s War Group emerged out of the disillusionment of cadres in the CPI(ML) Liberation when they took to participating in democratic elections. This was thought to be a far cry from Charu Majumdar’s vision of a protracted people’s war against feudal armies and the resistance against state attacks and these legalist reformist policies were portrayed as a transition into “stooges of the ruling classes.” For the first few years of its existence, PWG was mainly confined to Andhra Pradesh while the CPI(ML) dominated in its stronghold in Bihar. However the birth of CPI(ML) Party Unity in 1982 from the merger of the erstwhile Unity Organisation and the Central Organising Committee gave rise to a bloody territorial battle between CPI(ML) Liberation and PU, decimating cadres on both sides. In August 1998, the PU and the PWG came together to form the United Party, with a joint release heralding the coming of “The Age of Revolutions.” Coupled with the steady decline of the Liberation party because of the shrinking vote base and inefficacy of reforms , the PWG thus outgrew the confines of Andhra Pradesh and spread its network into Bihar, Orissa, MP, UP ,Jharkhand and Chhatisgarh.
The Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) was formed as Dakshin Desh in 1969 with a central agenda of an armed uprising against state actors. It later metamorphosed into MCC-India in 2003. The MCC swears by Mao Tse Tung and his ideas of a protracted People’s War and “to establish a powerful people's army and people's militia and to establish dependable, strong and self-sufficient base areas in the countryside, to constantly consolidate and expand the people's army and the base areas, gradually to encircle the urban areas from the countryside by liberating the countryside, finally to capture the cities and ... by decisively destroying the state power of the reactionaries.”
The important thing to note here in the decades of frequent splits and mergers and parting of ways, the naxalite movement was continuously spreading its areas of influence and expanding extensively through aggressive recruitments. For any division led to shrinking of numbers on both sides and in a zealous effort to swell them up to past figures and go one up on the adversarial fragment, the two sides often went on recruitment drives that basically increased the reach of the movement as a whole. At the same time, a merger caused large scale escalation of the scale of the struggle and any weakening of ideology that would have followed a split was reaffirmed and strengthened thus continuing the rise of naxalism.
In 2004, the naxal movement took a huge step forward in its quest for forming a nation-wide revolutionary organisation when the People’s War and MCCI under the general secretaryship of Ganapathy and Kishen respectively, declared their merger into a monolithic Communist Party of India(Maoist) or the CPI(M). This was but a culmination of the long standing process of organisational politics that resulted from organisational conflict. As discussed below, the broad aims of the different parties, so different from one another on crucial points, gradually moved towards the boldly expansive aims and manifesto of the CPI(M). The movement has only seen the rise of a hardening of stands, first against the unjustified agrarian policies and land redistribution by the state and later on, against what they call the semi-colonial semi-feudal and comprador bureaucratic capitalistic system. The reformist line taken by the CPI(ML) was rejected by the people whose grievances it was supposed to redress and progressively more violent methods advocated by the PWG and the MCC were adopted as part of the armed agrarian revolutionary war started in 1969. The new line that was taken up by the CPI(M) after the merger was the intention of forming a Compact Revolutionary Zone (CRZ) that stretched from Nepal to Bihar down through Chhatisgarh to Andhra Pradesh , the so called red corridor that would split India into two separate halves and controlling some of the most well endowed regions(from the perspective of natural resources). Dr. Rajat Kujur in his profiling of the naxalite movement, concludes that though the focus, methods of operation ,fighting capabilities and character of the groups have continuously evolved over time, the core ideology of the leadership is unshaken and has remained consistent over the years.
However, the CPI(M)’s aims of completing a New Democratic revolution through armed rebellion certainly raises eyebrows in the sense that the CPI(M) seems to be more interested and active in highlighting the violent nature of the revolution rather than its aims. Plans of what they reforms they will implement if placed in power is much less clear. Moreover, after the collapse of the Soviet Republic in the late nineties, collapse of socialism , India’s movement towards more globalised open markets have really had no impact in the shrill propaganda that the CPI(M) leadership advocates. Indeed, this can be considered as an indicator of ideological penury. Indeed, the motive factor of the large support base that the movement still enjoys cannot be said to be ideological. As we shall see later, the reasons for the same have changed drastically from the “high on Maoism” cadres that existed in the pre-independence era. As far as dealing with the naxal movement during these ‘unstable’ years is concerned, because of the multiply existing, sometimes incompatible, parallel organisations, successive state and national governments were unable to follow a uniform policy of tackling the menace before it grew unmanageable.
