Terms of Trade: How “spring thunder” became a doomed revolution in India

The military defeat of the Maoists was only a matter of time. What is more damning is there was very little ideology left in the Indian Maoists by the end

On 21 May, news broke that security forces had killed 26 members of the outlawed Communist Party of India (Maoist) in an operation in the forests of Abhujhmad, Chhattisgarh. Among those killed was Nambala Keshava Rao, alias Basavaraju, the general secretary and topmost leader of the CPI (Maoist).

The Communist Party of India (CPI) had already split in 1964, leading to the creation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M) (PTI)

Basavaraju’s killing in an encounter came just four days short of marking 58 years since another police action that led to what is now known as the Naxalbari uprising in India. On 25 May 1967, the police opened fire on a group of villagers who had killed a police inspector after looting arms and grains from local landlords in the Naxalbari block of West Bengal. Naxalbari and Naxalites would later become the Indian moniker for Maoist guerrillas, which at one point could be found in many countries.

The events in Naxalbari were not just about the actions of a group of villagers. They were an important flashpoint in what was then a militant Indian communist movement, set against a world that was not only marked by the conflict between capitalism and socialism but also by a discord between Soviet and Chinese lines of communism. The Communist Party of India (CPI) had already split in 1964, leading to the creation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M). The latter was critical of the undivided party leadership’s pro-Congress stance, which was also advocated by the Soviet Union.

The radicals who led the creation of the CPI(M) were far from a homogeneous group, and some believed that revolution was synonymous with what was described as the “annihilation of the class enemy.” When the peasants in Naxalbari did precisely that—by killing landlords and local police personnel—the CPI(M) refused to endorse their actions, leading to yet another split in the party. This process eventually resulted in the formation of the Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist (CPI-ML).

It was against this backdrop that the celebration of the Naxalbari uprising by the Chinese Communist Party became an important event in the Indian communist movement. An editorial published on 5 July 1967 in People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China, described the Naxalbari uprising as “spring thunder over India.” “The spark in Darjeeling will start a prairie fire and will certainly set the vast expanses of India ablaze. That a great storm of revolutionary armed struggle will eventually sweep across the length and breadth of India is certain,” it read.

In hindsight, the irony is difficult to miss. The month of May, when the Naxalbari uprising happened, is spring in China but summer in India. If one were to make a cheeky joke in the communist lexicon, the comrades in China were analysing the Indian situation through a Chinese lens—mistaking a revolutionary summer for spring.

Indian communists initially held the view that independence in 1947 meant little and that armed revolution was the way forward (like in China). However, they later changed their line for good reason, beginning to blend class struggle with parliamentary democracy to make incremental gains for the poor and for themselves. Communist governments in Kerala and West Bengal, and the land reforms they pursued, were among the most prominent examples of this early success.

To be sure, the parliamentary footprint of communists today is a pale shadow of what it was even a couple of decades ago—but that is a topic best left for another discussion.

What became of the Maoists though? Basavaraju is only the third general secretary of a major faction of what started as the CPI-ML — the present CPI (Maoist) was formed after a merger of the People’s War Group and the Maoist Communist Centre in 2004 — to have been killed in police custody or action. Charu Majumdar, the first general secretary of the CPI-ML died in police custody of a heart attack (which his supporters claim was a result of him being denied medicines) in July 1972. Subrata Dutt alias Jouhar, who took over the party after Majumdar’s death was killed in police action in November 1975 in a village in Bhojpur, Bihar, once an epicentre of violent land struggles between landlords and Naxalites. In the 50 years between the killing of Subrata Dutt and Basavaraju – both topmost leaders of the Maoist movement in India – by the police, the Naxalite movement has seen a lot of ups and downs and churns.

Its highest point, at least in this author’s view, came in the 1980s when the CPI-ML group under Vinod Mishra decided to transform the underground party into an overground outfit called the Indian People’s Front (IPF) and chose to participate in elections. This move generated significant (although nowhere near capturing power) traction in the state of Bihar, based on the mobilisation of some of the poorest and most exploited sections of the peasantry.

The CPI-ML Liberation, which succeeded the IPF, continues to be a political group to reckon with in the state and has managed to retain its popularity among the rural poor, despite not having broken its ideological links with Majumdar’s armed revolution line—even as it has now entered into electoral alliances with what the old-school communists would call “bourgeois parties.” With land struggles mostly a thing of the past in Bihar and other states, the Liberation has been trying to keep itself relevant by taking up other issues concerning the poor. For example, during an election reporting trip in the 2019 Jharkhand assembly elections, workers of the Liberation told this author that they take up the cause of migrant workers who get hurt or die while installing power transmission lines outside the state. To be sure, the Liberation is still a long way from eradicating class exploitation, even in the areas where it operates.

The ideological degeneration of the Maoists came in the form of some of their factions straying into mindless violence, including acts such as derailing trains or carrying out assassinations—not just of security personnel, but of anyone who opposed their activities. Those killed included politicians as well as poor villagers, who were often executed on the accusation of being police informers.

This orgy of violence, in many ways, accelerated their transformation from a revolutionary to a mercenary force in large parts of their operational areas. The trigger happiness of the Maoists only gave more legitimacy to the state offensive against them, which, by most accounts, has often deployed tactics and methods beyond the realm of not just ethical but also legal.

Such policies have turned the poor tribal population in these regions into cannon fodder. Some of these methods—such as Salwa Judum—were so obnoxious that even the Supreme Court declared them illegal.

Is the so-called triumph of the security forces over the Maoists – which is how the Indian state would like to describe the ongoing developments – something to be unambiguously celebrated or condemned; the former from a security point of view and the latter from a civil society perspective?

It is useful to end by borrowing from the book Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas by Alpa Shah, an anthropologist at Oxford University, who is among the foremost scholars on Maoists in India and often questions the simplistic binaries used to understand their existence or functioning. Shah lists several contradictions that the Maoist movement in India has faced, even if one were to take their revolutionary objectives at face value. One of them is worth reproducing in detail.

“Mobilising people to fight against inequality and injustice may require the use of arms, but violent resistance will attract the violence of state repression. The danger is that mastering the art and discipline of guns becomes the focus of the (Maoist) struggle, overriding and thus destroying the move to mobilise people towards new ideals and new communities. This problem became acute for the Naxalites when one of the world’s most powerful states began to send its military apparatus to destroy them and the communities they lived amidst. When the Naxalites retreated into the Adivasi heartlands of India and started to wage their protracted people’s war from there, they became trapped – in the face of the Indian security force battalions – focusing only on their military strategy at the expense of working with the people for a new imagined future,” she writes.

While the state’s military triumph over the Maoists was only a matter of time, one should be careful to note that the exploitation which generated support for the Maoists in these regions is still worth fighting against—but with a more pragmatic and democratic approach than the Maoists adopted. Of course, this is easier said than done, but the difficulty of the task does not justify succumbing to either of the echo chambers in the Maoist-versus-state debate in India.

Roshan Kishore, HT’s Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political fallout, and vice-versa