Naxalite Ideology: Charu's Eight Documents

The Naxalite ideology is broadly based on Comrade Charu Majumdar's historic Eight Documents and creative application of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung thought in Indian conditions.

The documents are historic as they initiated a sharp departure from parliamentary cretinism and put forward revolutionary politics countering revisionism in Communist movement of India.

Naxalbari Uprising: The Naxalbari uprising of March 1967 saw the implementation of Charu Majumdar's vision of revolution. The armed peasants' struggle began in Naxalbadi in West Bengal on March 2, 1967 when a tribal youth named Wimal Kesan, who had a judicial order, went to plough his land. Local landlords attacked him through their goons. This sparked wide-scale violence by tribals who started capturing back their lands. In the 72 days of Charu Majumdar-backed tribal violence and retaliatory action by the state, a police Sub-inspector and nine tribals were killed. The incident echoed throughout the country and naxalism was born.

The ultra-leftist ideology took a concrete shape at May 1968 meeting of All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR) which represented revolutionaries from seven states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, UP, Bihar, Karnataka, Orissa and West Bengal.

The May 1968 declaration dubbed the Soviet Union "under the modern revisionists" as "a neocolonial power". "US imperialism, Soviet revisionism, the big landlords and the comprador-bureaucratic bourgeoisie are the main enemies of Indian people," the declaration said.
It said in present era bourgeois Parliamentary institutions "have become a positive impediment to revolutions in semi-feudal, semi-colonial countries like India" and gave a call to boycott elections.

In 1969, Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) was formed under the leadership of Charu Majumdar. It argued that democracy in India was a sham and decided to base Indian revolution on protracted guerrilla warfare on the lines of Chinese Model.

However, the famous 1970 programme of CPI (ML) projected an understanding that a strong worker-peasant alliance and effective implementation of Mao's theory can help revolutionaries to defeat powerful enemies like big landlords, bureaucrat capitalists and govt., which is a "lackey of US imperialism and Soviet Social imperialism".

A majority of revolutionary left stream formations of the day broadly accept this programme but their interpretation and understanding differ.

However, Kondapalli Seetharamaiah formed the Peoples War Group in Andhra Pradesh in 1980. He discarded total annihilation of "class enemies" as the only form of struggle and stressed on floating mass organisations too.

Today the ultra-leftists have got polarised between Marxist-Leninist line of CPI (ML) (Liberation) and the line of CPI (ML) (People's War). Now, the whole spectrum of the revolutionary left looks more akin to be working on tactical line of AP Revolutionary Communist Committee led by T Nagi Reddy and D V Rao, who deviating from CPML line, pressed for revolutionary mass movement.

First Published: May 09, 2003 17:18 IST