CPI (MAOIST) VIOLENCE

Revolutionary Or Anarchist

Sitaram Yechury

THE audacious assault conducted by the CPI (Maoist) at the Jehanabad jail raises serious questions of security and intelligence lapses. In its pre-occupation to conduct free and fair elections, the diversion of security forces under the Election Commission directive has also reportedly contributed to this “operation jail break” succeeding. The whole incident also raises serious questions on how sophisticated arms are acquired by this organisation, their professional training and linkages with other extremist outfits. While these must engage the attention of the government and its agencies, there are other issues that need to be discussed.

Such violence is often described as Left extremism. In the process, there is a concerted attempt to denounce communism as fostering a “cult of violence” and equating anarchism with revolutionary activities. The RSS, in fact, continues to systematically spread disinformation by equating  such anarchic violence with the revolutionary work that the CPI(M) is engaged in.  The RSS, in fact, goes to the extent, in pursuit of its political objective, to deliberately equate anarchic violence with Islamic fundamentalists. While the RSS has not and, in fact, shall never succeed in confusing the people to such fabricated maligning, it needs to be underlined that anarchism is the very anti-thesis of Marxism and mindless militancy negates – and often regresses – the  fundamental tenets of revolutionary activity.

It is necessary to recapitulate briefly the historical roots of the emergence of such Left extremism.  After a prolonged ideological debate against revisionism within the Indian communist movement, the CPI(M) was formed in 1964. Immediately, the mass anger against the policies of the then ruling governments saw the establishment of a united front government in West Bengal in 1967. This further unleashed mighty popular struggles on the question of land reforms. The peasants movement organised in the village of naxalbari was elevated as a struggle aimed at capturing State power in India by certain sections within the Party. Thus, confirming the fact that while combating the revisionist deviation within the communist movement, there is always a real danger of sliding into the Left adventurist deviation.  These sections, who fell with him to such a deviation, went on to form the CPI(ML) in May 1969.

IDEOLOGICAL DEVIATION

Before we proceed to discuss some of the ideological issues underlying this deviation, it is necessary to recollect what Lenin had once said about Marxism: “The irresistible  attraction of this theory, which draws to itself the socialists of all countries lies precisely in the fact that it combines the quality of being strictly and supremely scientific with that of being revolutionary.  It does not combine them accidentally and not only because the founder of the doctrine combined in his own person the qualities of a scientist and a revolutionary, but does so intrinsically and inseparably”. 

Clearly, the ability to combine the scientific and the revolutionary aspects  constitutes the essence of the creative science of Marxism-Leninism.  Emphasising only its scientific content and ignoring the revolutionary aspects leads the movement towards right revisionism or class collaboration. Conversely, highlighting the revolutionary aspect, mainly at the level of emotional passions, has a danger of leading the communist movement astray into Left adventurism.  In either case, the communist movement runs the risk of being derailed. 

Based on an erroneous understanding that the Indian ruling classes were a “comprador bourgeoisie”, i.e., that they were merely agents of imperialism and, hence, did not possess a social force or a mass following domestically, therefore, according to the Naxalites, it was only a matter of time to overthrow the ruling classes. There was, hence, no necessity to mobilise the people and organise a mass revolutionary party.  The  people, it is presumed, are ready for a revolution by overthrowing the ruling classes.  All that was needed was to arm the people and, hence, emerged the slogan “People’s War”. This slogan was accompanied by its twin of “annihilation”  of class enemies.  The following years saw widespread violence and anarchy. The CPI(M) was the main target as it was seen as ‘obstructing’ this process. 

INTERNECINE STRUGGLE

Within a period of five years, however, the naxalite movement splintered into innumerable small groups.  This process of disintegration went on for a few decades.   While one group – the CPI(ML) – chose to abandon this understanding to return to mainstream democratic politics by contesting elections, two others – the People’s War Group (PWG)  in Andhra Pradesh and the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) in the areas of Jharkhand and Bihar – continued with their anarchic violent activity. These two who were at ideological loggerheads once, came together on September 21, 2004 to form the new party – the CPI (Maoist). It was this party that conducted the raid at Jehanabad jail.

The CPI(M) continues to  remain the main target of these groups all along and innumerable number of its cadre were targeted and murdered. Apart from this, their anarchic violence has claimed many innocent lives. 

Between 1991 and 2001, 2,077 people, mostly ordinary citizens, were killed in Naxalite-related violence. The method of killing is gruesome.

In 2002, the Maoists killed 90 people, in 2003 the figure reads 136, in 2004 it was 70, and in 2005 (till before the Jehanabad incident), 122. Despite the Maoists’ penchant for identifying persons as ‘police informers’ before killing them, 80 per cent of those killed by them represented ordinary people who are not class enemies, even by Maoist criteria. Some of those killed were in fact members or supporters of rival Naxalite groups; this was internecine struggle, pure and simple.

Apart from such reprehensible violent activity, there is a serious ideological problem as well. While expressly appropriating “Maoism”, they seek to replicate the pre-revolutionary Chinese experience in modern India. So colossal is their deliberate neglect of the domestic conditions in India that they advance the slogan, “China’s Chairman is our Chairman”.  They, hence, refused to engage in any Marxist analysis of India’s socio-economic realities.  By doing so, they negate Mao himself who, once, said a party which was not able to analyse the situation evolving in its own country and would rather emulate experiences of another country without analysis was a “hotchpotch”.  In fact, the Chinese Communist Party never uses the word Maoism.  They consistently use the term `Mao Zedong Thought’ which, they define, as “the integration of the universal principles of Marxism-Leninism with the concrete practice of the Chinese Revolution”.  Clearly, therefore, this relates to, and, is confined to, the specific Chinese situation and Chinese experience. It is a serious ideological flaw to universalise this experience and to seek to impose it under modern Indian conditions.

CPI(M) POSITION

The CPI(M), while rejecting both the ideological positions and the practice of the various naxalite groups, stated in its Programme:

“The struggle to realise the aims of the people’s democratic revolution through the revolutionary unity of all patriotic and democratic forces with the workers-peasants alliance at its core, is a complicated and a protracted one. It is to be waged in varying conditions in varying phases. Different classes, different strata within the same class, are bound to take different positions in these distinct phases of the development of the revolutionary movement. Only a strong Communist Party, which develops the mass movements and utilises appropriate united front tactics to achieve the strategic objective, can make use of these shifts and draw into its ranks these sections. Only such a party bringing within its fold the most sincere and sacrificing revolutionaries would be able to lead the mass of the people through the various twists and turns that are bound to take place in the course of the revolutionary movement. (Article  7.16)

“The Communist Party of India (Marxist) strives to achieve the establishment of people’s democracy and socialist transformation through peaceful means. By developing a powerful mass revolutionary movement, by combining parliamentary and extra-parliamentary struggle, the working class and its allies will try their utmost to overcome the resistance of the forces of reaction and to bring about these transformations through peaceful means. However, it needs always to be borne in mind that the ruling classes never relinquish their power voluntarily. They seek to defy the will of the people and seek to reverse it by lawlessness and violence. It is, therefore, necessary for the revolutionary forces to be vigilant and so orient their work that they can face up to all contingencies, to any twist and turn in the political life of the country. (Article 7.18)

Social transformation in India, thus, can only be on the basis of the concrete analysis of the concrete conditions that exists in India.  It can neither replicate the Russian or the Chinese or that matter of any other experience in the world. 

Let me conclude by quoting Lenin: “A petty bourgeois driven to frenzy by the horrors of capitalism is a social phenomenon which, like anarchism, is characteristic of all capitalist countries. The instability of such revolutionism, its barrenness, and its tendency to turn rapidly into submission, apathy, phantasms, and even a frenzied infatuation with one bourgeois fad or another — all this is common knowledge.”

Such is the experience of Maoist anarchism and practice of many erstwhile `comrades’.