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Aditya
Nigam |
After the first
burst of utopian energy in the late 1960s, Naxalism underwent a long
period of silent transformation. The second phase, in the post-Emergency
period, was one of intense churning and regrouping, a period of reflection
on, and redefinition of, the various Naxalite groups’ relationship
with democracy and democratic institutions. Most groups actually started
limited participation in electoral processes and moved away from what
had come to be known as ‘annihilation of the class enemy’
— that is, the killing of individual oppressive landlords. They
started building organisations of democratic mass struggles like trade
unions, peasant organisations and student organisations.
The current phase,
in the form of ‘Maoism’, has been marked by the reassertion
of the path of armed struggle and complete rejection of parliamentary
participation. This is not an entirely new development. Rather, it represents
the culmination of a long period of guerilla operations that have been
carried out separately by three important groups in different parts
of the country. The most important of these was the ‘CPI(ML) People’s
War’ led by Kondapalli Sitaramaiah in Andhra Pradesh, popularly
known as the People’s War Group (PWG).
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Martyrs,
victims: bodies of men killed in a Naxalite strike on
the Rani Bodli police camp in Chhattisgarh on March 15
Anil Mishra |
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While the mainstream
Left was preoccupied with largely abstract macro issues, the real
problem was the accelerated dispossession in the countryside |
Through the 1980s,
the PWG built legal mass organisations of students, writers, peasants
and other sections but soon moved into almost exclusively underground
military operations and built up what turned out to be the most feared
and awesome machinery of a guerrilla army. It was in the 1990s that
the PWG moved away from mass struggles and became exclusively preoccupied
with armed struggle.
It is in this period,
especially in the 1990s, that the PWG expanded its guerilla operations
in a whole belt extending from Andhra Pradesh to northern Karnataka
and eastern Maharashtra as well as neighbouring parts of Chhattisgarh
and Orissa. It also established relations with some important non-party
organisations and movements such as Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha, and the
Bharat Jan Andolan that was set up by BD Sharma, a former civil servant
who began working with the tribals of that region after he gave up his
job.
The PWG managed
to draw these movements into its close circle of allies and expanded
its influence quite rapidly, despite the fact that it gradually became
reduced to a terror machine, often indulging in wanton killings and
extortion to finance its activities. It would be wrong, however, to
conclude that all these movements shared the PWG’s politics, its
philosophy of violence or its methods.
It seems that this
expansion of its influence became possible largely because it was precisely
in the 1990s that the democratic space for raising questions of poverty
and exploitation virtually disappeared. This is one of the relatively
understudied ironies of the 1990s that have otherwise been described,
correctly, as a period of democratic upsurge. In this period the virtual
erasure of issues of the working class or peasantry from the media and
public discourse went hand-in-hand with a massive neo-liberal ideological
attack on trade unions and organisations of the peasantry. The cynicism
and ruthlessness with which the non-violent struggles of the displaced
people of the Narmada valley — to take only the most well known
example — were treated by the power bloc (including the media
and the judiciary, who are deeply implicated in the new nexus of power),
produced the general scenario where the PWG began to seem to many of
the poorest an attractive option.
Adopting the nomenclature
of ‘Maoist’ helped in laying claim to a shared project with the
Nepali insurgency |
Added to this was
the complete abdication of the space of mass struggles by the entire
mainstream Left and its confinement to the parliamentary arena. While
the preoccupations of the mainstream Left in this period were with largely
abstract macro issues like defence of the public sector and opposition
to foreign investment, the real issues that were beginning to emerge
on the ground related to accelerated dispossession in the countryside.
In northern Karnataka for example, what gave the PWG popular support
was its defence of tribals who were being uprooted from their habitat
in the forests, to make way for the Kudremukh National Park. This dispossession
also meant denying the tribals their traditional access to minor forest
produce and eliminating a whole way of life that lives in symbiosis
with the forest. Elsewhere, in parts of Andhra Pradesh, the PWG confronted
the issue of imminent displacement of peasants from their land that
the government had acquired for private corporations.
As the violent displacement
of common people from their habitat assumes unprecedented proportions,
and with no recourse to justice — the judiciary being complicit
in this game of dispossession — Maoism seems to offer an increasingly
attractive option to many.
In the second half
of the 1990s, the PWG and two other groups that relied exclusively on
armed struggle, namely the CPI(ML) Party Unity and the Maoist Coordination
Centre (MCC), both of which functioned in central and south Bihar, came
together to form a legal front called the All India People’s Resistance
Forum (AIPRF). The AIPRF functioned as a legal coordination centre as
well as a forum for joint activity in the middle class constituency
and effectively laid the ground for the eventual merger of the three
groups. The Party Unity and PWG merged in 1998 and functioned with the
latter name till 2004, when it merged with the mcc and adopted the name
CPI (Maoist).
Adopting the nomenclature
of ‘Maoist’ helped in laying claim to a shared project with
the powerful Maoist insurgency in Nepal which had by then made Maoism
a household name in the region. Further, the merger of three groups
that functioned in different parts of the country under the banner of
Maoism, conjured up for the Indian power bloc a fearsome vision of the
‘Red Corridor’ — a corridor that, it believes, extends
from Andhra Pradesh via Chhattisgarh and Orissa through the contiguous
regions of Jharkhand and Bihar right up to Nepal. The success of this
merger and of the semiotics of its naming is apparent from the fact
that Maoism is once again seen as a power to reckon with by its enemies,
including the government and the media.
Nigam
is a Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
