Rahul Pandita has an article in Aeon titled 'dreams of a Maoist India'. This dream gained traction after the Chinese defeat of the Indian army in 1962. Stalin had said that a condition for success for a Communist uprising was support from a contiguous Communist country. If Mao helped Indian Maoists maybe they could defeat the Army and take power. In that case 'China's Chairman would also be India's Chairman' as the slogan of the Bengali leftists had it.
Why did this dream die? The answer is that China was weakened by famine and the Cultural Revolution. By 1967, the Indian army had the upper hand in the Chumbi valley. Also, the CPI-M (originally more inclined to Beijing than Moscow) feared that the more militant Maoists would take power from them. Thus Jyoti Basu was ready to unleash the police on them after Charu Majumdar formed his own Marxist-Leninist party. This was a fight the Naxals were bound to lose.
The Maoists had decided to enter Chhattisgarh and its adjoining areas (which comprised DK) in the early 1980s.
Militants from Andhra Pradesh had begun infiltrating in the late Seventies.
That was their second effort to bring about a revolution. An earlier attempt had been made in a village called Naxalbari in West Bengal, in the late 1960s. Peasants, who tilled the fields of landlords and received only a minuscule proportion of the harvest, rose against the iniquity of their small share.
Santhals- a tribal people- had been moving northwards as far as Nepal since the early Nineteenth century and gained employment as agricultural labourers or sharecroppers. The previous rulers of Naxalbari were Sikkimese Bhutias. They were the landlords and many of them held positions in the police and administration. Caste Bengali Hindus too had come in to the region. Jangal Santhal had begun his political career in Nepal organizing Santhals there, before returning to Darjeeling district. The mistake was to kill a Bhutia Police inspector. The indigenous people were bound to turn on the immigrants. Santhali is the mother tongue of only about 1 percent of the population. Nepali is spoken by about 15 percent and Rajbonshi (the autochthonous language) by about 12 percent. Tribal people from other parts of India were employed in the Tea plantations which, however, weren't affected by Naxal theatrics.
The two other ringleaders were Bengali Hindus who constitute about 30 percent of the population. Kanu Sanyal had been a Government clerk before devoting himself to the Communist party. His great claim to fame was that he had met Mao in 1967. Maybe the Chinese would give him weapons and money. Bengalis dearly love to fight for some foreign power- e.g. Imperial Japan or Communist China- in the hope that after India is conquered they will be as richly rewarded as the stooges of the East India Company. The third, and most important, Naxal leader was Charu Mazumdar who came from a wealthy 'zamindar' (landlord) family. He died, or was killed, in 1972. His son got about 3000 votes when he stood for an Assembly seat in 2009. Other Maoist splinter groups have been more successful.
The rebellion was inspired by members of the mainstream Communist Party of India,
No. There had been a split in the CPI between the Moscow loyalists and those who looked to Beijing. The Naxals were more pro-China than even the CPM. But Jyoti Basu didn't want Charu as his rival. Jangal Santhan and Kanu Sanyal, being lower class, did not trouble him.
who had begun to grow disillusioned with their organisation.
No. The dream was to become the new rulers of Bengal after Chairman Mao finished the job he had started in 1962. Sadly, China was too weak.
This questioning had also taken place in other parts of the world. In France, for example, during the May 1968 Leftist student protests, the postwar Left came to be seen as an obstacle to real social transformation.
The French Communist Party was as cautious and 'Trade Union minded' as the British Labour Party. Mao said examinations were a tool of bourgeois oppression. This appealed to students.
What do we win by replacing ‘the employers’ arbitrary will with a bureaucratic arbitrary will?’ asked the Marxist thinker André Gorz.
Who did advocate a universal basic income so nobody would have to worry about the authority of an employer. This is cool for rich countries but silly for very poor ones.
A similar sentiment had been expressed almost 40 years earlier by an Indian revolutionary, Bhagat Singh, whom the British then hanged in 1931 at the age of 23. In a letter to young political workers a month before his hanging, Singh warned that the mere transfer of power from the British to the Indians would not suffice, and that there was a need to transform the whole society:
His people- viz Sikhs- would soon have to run away from their ancestral village. Jinnah totally transformed it. Bhagat didn't transform anything. Come to think of it, Rahul's people too had to run away from the Vale of Kashmir.
'You can’t ‘use’ him [the worker and the peasant] for your purpose;
But you can get him to kill Sikhs and Hindus and chase them away.
you shall have to mean seriously and to make him understand that the revolution is going to be his and for his good.
If Sikhs and Hindus are chased away you can help yourself to any good things they might have had.
The revolution of the proletariat and for the proletariat.'
involved shooting policemen. That's what got him hanged.
Singh’s prescription proved to be right. Even as the prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, whose commitment to social justice could not be doubted, took over from the British in 1947,
he became head of the interim Government in September 1946. Like Rahul, he was a Kashmiri Pandit.
the poor and the marginalised communities like the Dalits and Adivasis continued to remain outside the welfare circle of his five-year plans.
like everybody else. On the other hand both got reserved seats and affirmative action. Muslims, when not forced to flee, lost any concession they had previously gained. The Muslim population of Delhi plummeted from 33 percent to 5 percent within a year of Nehru taking power.
Feudalism did not go away.
Yes it did. Landlords were not obliged to provide soldiers for the King. The problem was that the State lacked resources to replace whatever governance had been provided by local notables. There was a power vacuum in many of the less developed regions. Who would fill it? Eventually, it would be indigenous people. In the short term, however, ruthless ideologues or gangsters could move in.
Land reforms to break up the feudal concentrations of wealth and power were initiated, but the rich and the powerful also found means to circumvent the law.
So did the poor who owned a bit of land and who could join forces with those of their own community to kill any Commie troublemaker. The question was whether Kanu Sanyal could get his pal Mao to send guns and money. The answer was no. Sad.
The rich quickly joined politics,
as did poor people who wanted to get rich.
and the police acted as their private militia.
Nonsense! You had to pay the police to do your killing for you. It was cheaper to hire local goons. Indeed, 'Political Activists' or 'Social Workers' were experts not just in killing, but also extortion.
As recently as 2019, a survey by the Indian government revealed that 83.5 per cent of rural households owned less than one hectare of land.
Because the population is 1.4 billion. Per capita availability of arable land is 0.1 hectares.
The government’s Planning Commission figures (1997-2002) put the landless among Dalits at 77 per cent, while among the Adivasis it was 90 per cent.
In my community it is zero percent. Farming isn't profitable.
The government’s National Sample Survey in 2013 revealed that about 7 per cent of landowners owned almost half of the total land share.
No. The 2015 estimate is that 67 percent of India's farmland is held by the marginal farmers with holdings below one hectare, against less than 1 percent in large holdings of 10 hectares and above. It is a different matter that many small holdings are rented out to bigger operators. Further fragmentation is likely because of inheritance laws which now grant equal rights to daughters.
In the 1960s, these disillusioned communists
They were ambitious and believed that Mao might come to their aid. They would become wealthy and powerful as the Chinese enslaved India.
felt that the Communist Party of India had grown complacent and corrupt, and that its leaders were ‘conscious traitors to the revolutionary cause’.
Bernard Henri Levi spent some time in newly liberated Bangladesh. He was thrown out after publishing an interview with a Maoist nutter who was against the liberation of his own country. Why? Pakistani Generals were subservient to Mao. Sheikh Mujib, they said, had turned Bangladesh into a Soviet Colony. Bangladeshis should demand more rape and genocide from the Pakistani Army so as to show their love for Mao.
They made their case in long papers and articles full of communist jargon in publications like Deshabrati, People’s March and Liberation. The essence of their indictment was that the poor and the working class had been let down by the parliamentary Left.
They wanted to become the people letting down the poor and working class.
In 1969, these breakaway communists formed their own party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), which announced its aim to unite the working class with the peasantry and seize power through armed struggle.
Would the Chinese send them money and guns? No. Thus the thing collapsed.
They sought help from China, which was quick to offer it, calling the uprising ‘a peal of spring thunder’. Some of the men inspired by Mao travelled to China through Nepal and Tibet, receiving political training from Mao’s associates.
Kanu got to meet Mao in 1967. But the Indian Army gave the Chinese a bloody nose at Nathu La in that year. Mao grew tired even of the antics of the Burmese Communists who had killed H.N Ghoshal even though the man made his name as an anti-Browderist (Browder thought Communists could take power through the ballot box. This was a very evil doctrine. If you aren't killing and raping, you can't call yourself a true Marxist. Also, you need to be in the pay of an enemy country. Patriotism is totes bougie- right? )
The Maoist message spread from Naxalbari to other parts of India, like Bihar, Andhra Pradesh,
which had had a better indigenous 'Telengana' movement. Bengalis are useless.
Punjab and Kerala.
If you are good at raping and killing you can always find patrons in rural India.
Inspired by its main leader, Charu Majumdar, small guerrilla squads began to indulge in ‘class annihilation’, killing hundreds of landlords and their henchmen,
i.e. poor people who couldn't hit back.
policemen and other state representatives. ‘To allow the murderers to live on means death to us,’ Majumdar declared.
Killing him was easy. Why weren't Sanyal and Jangal killed? The answer is that they were lower class and thus not potential rivals. Anyway, they might come in handy to split a vote in some future election in the District.
Liberation, the party’s mouthpiece between the years 1967-72, is full of reports of killings of landlords, and how land and other property they owned had been ‘confiscated’ by peasant guerrillas.
In other words, you kill some weak people and the guy who takes over their land gives you a bit of money.
In practice, however, ‘class annihilation’ proved counterproductive.
Murder is a business like any other. Never kill for free. Charge the going rate.
On the streets of Calcutta (today’s Kolkata), for example, naive men from elite colleges
or shitty tutorial colleges.
would roam around with crude bombs and even razors with which they attacked lone policemen.
They killed Judges. After that, the Bench turned a blind eye to extrajudicial killing on an industrial scale.
Nonetheless, in the late 1960s, the Naxalbari movement inspired thousands of bright men and women from elite families studying at prestigious schools.
Just as Netaji Bose had inspired many when he joined hands with Hitler & Tojo. If the Japs colonized Bengal, their compradors would be relatively rich. Also they might be given the great honour of holding down their sisters while honourable Jap soldiers raped them. Hopefully, Mao would succeed where Tojo failed. It was clearly the duty of the Bengali 'buddhijivi' to assist any enemy of India with vim and vigour- or, more realistically, vacuous verbosity.
They said goodbye to lucrative careers
jobs. There were no lucrative careers in Socialistic India.
and made the feudal areas, where the poor faced the utmost oppression, their workplace.
The very poor were oppressed by the slightly less poor. Generally speaking, the name of the oppressor was 'Daddy' or 'Uncle'.
Beginning in July 1971, a brutal government response killed hundreds of Indian Maoists, probably including their leader Majumdar; he died in police custody in 1972.
Indira was willing to release funds so Ray, the new CM, could pay local hoodlums to do the dirty work. The police tended to be lazy though some squads and particular officers did distinguish themselves. My point is, killing costs money. Why bother spending it if poor people kill other poor people? There are plenty more where they came from. True, 'landlords' may run away from rural areas. But they didn't own much land and would have to learn a trade sooner or later.
Kondapalli Seetharamaiah,
who belonged to the Reddy aristocratic caste
popularly known as KS, was one of those dissatisfied with the shape that the parliamentary Left had taken in India.
Because he wasn't in parliament
He was a school teacher in Andhra Pradesh, which had a long history of feudalism and communist struggles.
It had been ruled by a Muslim Nizam.
In the state’s North Telangana area, bordering Chhattisgarh, for example, feudal customs of slavery like vetti were still being practised decades after India became free.
bonded labour of 'begar' (unpaid work) were common in poorer areas. So was killing your Uncle to inherit his land. 'Social Workers' could help you with this even if they weren't Maoist.
KS, a former member of the Communist Party of India, had not lost all hope, and decided to join hands with Majumdar’s line. But before he could restart, he decided the Maoists needed a rear base, just like Mao had urged, for the guerrillas to hide in the forest.
The ancestors of KS understood that entering 'tribal areas' and getting the tribals to kill each other was the way you could end up as the ruler of valuable territory.
The other amendment to Majumdar’s line was with regards to the formation of overground organisations to further the cause of revolution, something that Majumdar had strongly opposed.
Because this would create rivals of a similar class to himself.
In 1969, KS sent a young medical student to a forest area in North Telangana to explore the possibility of creating the rear base. But in the absence of any support, the lone man could not achieve anything and had to return. In the mid-1970s, KS sent yet another man, this time a little further inside, into Chhattisgarh. Spending a few months inside, the man, who had acquired basic medical training, started treating the poor tribals. But, again, how much could one man or two do? So, he returned as well.
The problem was that there was no reliable revenue source- e.g. sandalwood smuggling or gun running. If money can be made, the personnel will soon turn up by themselves.
So KS made another change in strategy – he took the Maoists out of the shadows and founded a few organisations that, on the surface, were civic associations, but were meant to further the Maoist ideology. Prominent among these was the Radical Students Union (RSU), launched in October 1974.
Did Jan Myrdal or some other such cretin get them some money from Swedish Socialists or other such shitheads?
Along with a cultural troupe, Jana Natya Mandali, young RSU members began a ‘Go to Village’ campaign on KS’s instructions. In this campaign, the young student radicals and ardent believers in the armed struggle would try to make villagers politically ‘conscious’. The ‘Go to Village’ campaign enjoyed some initial success, attracting students and other young people from working-class backgrounds.
Who, quite understandably, objected to working for a living.
Hundreds of young people in universities and other prestigious institutions in Andhra Pradesh left their studies
studying made their brains hurt
and vowed to fight for the poor.
Almost everybody in the country was as poor as shit.
Fourteen students from Osmania University in what was then Andhra’s capital, Hyderabad, joined; 40 from other parts of the state joined the Maoist RSU.
To be fair, Student politics was itself a great way to get into the Extortion or Contract Killing business. Look at Lawrence Bishnoi.
The Maoists’ ‘Go to Village’ campaign found fertile ground in the town of Jagtial, in the state’s Karimnagar district. There, as across Andhra, people celebrate the festival Bathukamma, which includes theatre performances in villages that were home to landlords from the dominant castes. The caste segregation of the villages was complete: the landlords lived in the village centre, while the Dalits lived on its periphery. But now in Jagtial, the Dalit labourer Lakshmi Rajam took the performance to the Dalit quarters. Another Dalit man, Poshetty, occupied a piece of government-owned wasteland, which would usually be in the landlords’ control. These acts enraged the landlords, who killed both these Dalit activists.
Dalits were about 16 percent of the population. Unlike the tribals- who were maybe 2 or 3 percent- there was no territory they could control. The Naxals repented their mistake of seeking to build upon them. It is the 'Other Backward Castes' who are decisive. Dalits understood this quickly enough. KS had recruited Sathyamurthy (Sujatha Gidla's uncle) whose talent should have assured his success. Like Sri Sri, he should have shifted allegiance to NTR. I believe his sons are now taxi drivers. They should be MLAs or wealthy contractors under Chandrababu. (Satyamurthy was Andhra. That's why the Telenganas didn't like him though his wife was from there).
On 7 September 1978, under the influence of the Maoists, tens of thousands of agricultural labourers from 150 villages marched through the centre of Jagtial. The march was led by two people, one of them Mupalla Laxmana Rao, alias Ganapathi. He came from Karimnagar itself and would become KS’s closest confidante, later taking over from him to become the Maoist chief.
Satyamurthy played a big role in recruiting him. Poets have a way with words. Rao was an upper class Velama. Got to say Telugu people are smart. But it was the 'Andhrapreneurs' who enabled the state to rise not just economically but culturally- e.g. in the film industry.
The other was Mallojula Venkateshwara Rao, alias Kishenji, a science graduate, who would prove to be an efficient leader and military commander.
Efficient compared to underpaid, cowardly, cops. It is easy to take control of territory which yields little and which it is costly to police. The big threat for the Naxal was malaria or snake-bite or other medical ailments.
The Jagtial march rattled some landlords so much that they fled to cities. The poor also decided to boycott the landlords who would not agree to any land reforms. Services that the poor provided – washer men, barbers, cattle feeding – were denied to the landlords. This strike led to further backlash from landlords, as reported by the respected Indian civil rights activist K Balagopal.
But the game was not worth the candle. Anyway, your nephew might kill you to inherit the property. Cities- even Indian ones- are less shitty than rural areas.
From these village campaigns, KS decided to move ahead and try to create a guerrilla zone where armed squads would mobilise peasants and contest state power.
What power? Why police a place which yields no revenue?
In June 1980, seven squads of five to seven members entered the hinterland – four of them in North Telangana, two in Bastar in Chhattisgarh, and one in Gadchiroli in Maharashtra, an area where the Adivasis lived. They were mostly food-gatherers, and their life had remained unchanged for hundreds of years.
That is why smart Telugus could exploit the fuck out of them. After all, that's what their ancestors had done. The thing was in their blood.
Abundant mineral wealth lay in the land under where the Adivasis lived, but they lacked even basic modern services like education and healthcare. Petty government representatives like forest guards would harass the Adivasis for using resources like wood, citing archaic forest laws. At first, the Adivasis did not welcome the presence of the Maoists. However, before long, a kind of alliance between them developed, where the common enemy now was the state.
No! It was International Finance Capital! Did you know Capitalism is brainwashing little girls into wearing ribbons in their hair? We must kill such reactionary forces though maybe raping them first is equally necessary. Otherwise, China will never invade and enslave the country. Ghost of Mao will cry and cry.
As the Maoists pushed on, the state retreated,
There hadn't been much of a State. What happened was that the previous Social Order collapsed. Why? It simply couldn't pay for itself. What would take its place? Gangsterism of one sort or another. It might call itself 'Maoist' but it could just as easily call itself 'ISIS'.
and the Adivasis began to exert their rights over the forest. In many areas, the feudal landlords were served ‘justice’ like Mao had dictated.
Normally, it would be their nephews who performed this service. Perhaps they paid the Naxals.
In 1980, the Swedish writer Jan Myrdal visited the Maoists, and one of the comrades told him of an incident from North Telangana, which Myrdal recounts in his book India Waits (1986). A notorious rowdy there had instilled fear among the people on behalf of his master, a landowner. He raped a washer-girl. In shame, she jumped into a well and drowned herself. When the Maoists came to know of it, four of them, till recently students, called him out in the bazaar. When he arrived, the rebels caught him with a lasso, cut off his hands and nailed them to a wall inside a shop.
Jan Myrdal jizzed copiously when he heard this. But all sorts of gangsters tell stories of this sort about themselves.
The rough vigilante justice inspired more young people to join the Maoists:
Unlike the Taliban, the Maoists were shit.
men like Nambala Keshava Rao, a graduate of the much-respected Warangal engineering college, and Patel Sudhakar Reddy, who held a master’s degree from Osmania.
i.e. both were unemployable
It also brought in young women like Maddela Swarnalata and Borlam Swarupa. Swarnalata came from a poor Dalit family and was recruited through the Radical Students Union. In the early 1980s, she’d taken part in clashes against Right-wing student groups, especially the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad.
If she had joined them she might have become an MLA or even a Minister.
The police would follow her and pressurise her into revealing details of her comrades who had already gone underground. Soon it became impossible to avoid arrest, so she too went underground, joining a Maoist squad, before dying in an encounter with the police in April 1987. Meanwhile, Swarupa had become active through campaigns with farmers’ groups for a better price for their crops. The Maoist leadership placed her as a labourer in a biscuit factory in Hyderabad, in order to recruit among workers there. Once she’d been exposed, Swarupa was asked to shift to the guerrilla zone, where she became the first woman commander, leading a squad in North Telangana, until she was killed in an encounter in February 1992. One of the prominent features of the Maoist movement is the way it attracted women to its fold. For women from the working class, who led difficult lives under a patriarchal mindset, joining the Maoists felt like a liberation.
So did getting shot.
Recruits to the Maoists often attracted their friends, siblings and other family members to join too.
and get shot.
Doug McAdam, professor of sociology at Stanford University in California, has written about this ‘strong-tie’ phenomenon, in which personal connections draw people into ‘high-risk activism’ of violence.
it also draws kids in London into gangs.
In Bastar and elsewhere, the Maoist guerrillas targeted people and agencies they considered exploiters. For example, they started to negotiate better rates for the collection of tendu leaves, used in the manufacture of local cigarettes, which was a lucrative business.
In other words, they wanted a cut. That's how gangsters operate.
But along with that, they also started to take cuts from businessmen for running their organisations. The Norwegian anthropologist Bert Suykens, who has studied the tendu leaf business, called it a joint extraction regime.
The Tendu leaf business called Bert a Norwegian anthropologist. It stung because it was true.
The Maoists also began to extort a levy from corporate houses involved in mining in these areas, as well as from government contractors.
Rahul finally gets to the point. The State only thought it worthwhile to wipe out the Naxals when it looked as though Corporations would prefer to pay them off rather than comply with environmental regulations and pay royalties to the government. What this meant was paying salaries and pensions to locals in return for their killing off the immigrant parasites.
In the process, they deviated from their promise – of returning the forest to the Adivasis, and of helping the poor. They spent most of their time running their organisation and launching attacks against government forces. In her research in central Bihar in 1995-96, the Indian sociologist Bela Bhatia concluded that the Maoist leaders ‘have taken little interest in enhancing the quality of life in the villages.’ In fact, these leaders regarded development ‘as antagonistic to revolutionary consciousness,’ she wrote in 2005.
Why would the new lords of tribal land want their subjects to get education or health care?
In the meantime, the Indian state was growing impatient with the Maoists.
The Maoists had a window of opportunity to displace the two mainstream Communist parties. Some Maoist splinter groups did succeed in specific areas. I suppose there was enough money coming in for the parliamentary game to appear not worth the candle.
In 2010, a London-based securities house report predicted that making the Maoists go away could unlock $80 billion of investment in eastern and central India.
Making Manmohan go away would achieve much more.
New Delhi began preparations for a large-scale operation to get rid of them. But, before that, the extraordinary arrest in 2009 of the Maoist ideologue Kobad Ghandy in Delhi heightened political interest in the insurgents.
At the time, yes. But Ghandy may never have been a true believer.
Special police agents from Andhra Pradesh had managed to locate Ghandy,
who was being treated for cancer in Delhi. He was being trailed by various agencies keen to identify his contacts.
who had been living in a slum using fake identification. He came from an elite Parsee family in Mumbai; his father was the finance director of Glaxo; he had studied with India’s political dynasts at the elite Doon School, and had then gone to London to pursue further education as an accountant. In the UK, he was introduced to radical politics,
He didn't like Enoch Powell & the National Front skinheads. It couldn't be that they just didn't like foreigners. They must be tools of International Finance Kapital- right?
and returned to Mumbai in the mid-1970s, where he met Anuradha Shanbag, a young woman from a family of notable Indian communists and a student of Elphinstone College in Mumbai. Shanbag and Ghandy were both drawn to Maoism, fell in love and married. Soon afterwards, in 1981, they met KS in Andhra Pradesh and shifted to a slum area in a city where Shanbag recruited my friend ‘A’ and others. In 2007, Shanbag was promoted to the Maoist Central Committee, a rare accomplishment for a woman. A year later, however, she died from complications due to malaria she had contracted in a guerilla zone.
It is equally possible that both were seen as useful idiots. The question is, did they bring money into the organization? I don't think so. That's why little was done to keep them operational.
After Ghandy’s arrest in 2009, rumours arose that he had been sent to work among the labourers as part of the Maoists’ urban agenda.
The State was making out that he was really smart and important. But he wasn't at all.
His arrest became a hot topic in Delhi circles: for the first time, it sparked interest in the Maoist movement among people who did not bother to read a newspaper beyond its Fashion section. Ghandy’s abandonment of his elite background to fight for the poor created a wave of empathy for the Maoist movement.
The thing was hilarious. Still, at least he had avoided becoming a Chartered Accountant.
Around the time of his arrest, I got a rare opportunity to meet the Maoist chief, Ganapathi.
now rumoured to be in the Philippines. He probably did make some money and cleared out while the going was good.
The meeting happened by chance. Through some overground sympathisers, he had learnt that I was in a city close to the guerrilla zone in which he was then hiding.
He also, quite correctly, believed Rahul was stupid.
By this time, state surveillance was at its peak, and the Maoist leadership was extremely cautious of any contact with outsiders. Ganapathi in particular barely met anyone except his commanders. After days of travel through the guerrilla zone, I was allowed to record our conversation on a digital device provided by his men. After Ganapathi left the area, I transcribed the interview, but even that I was not allowed to carry with me. A month later, I received the transcript through one of his overground workers in Delhi.
Journalists eat up that sort of cloak and dagger stuff.
A few months later, in 2010, while I spent time with the Maoist leaders Gajarla Ashok and Narmada Akka in their camp, I sent a questionnaire to Ganapathi. His reply came a few weeks later, in which he made mention of the importance of work in urban areas: ‘If Giridih [a small town in the east] is liberated first, then based on its strength and on the struggles of the working class in Gurgaon [now Gurugram, a satellite city close to Delhi where most multinational corporations have their offices], Gurgaon will be liberated later. This means one is first and the other is later.’
It means, 'Rahul, you are as stupid as shit.'
It was a tall order. There were innumerable problems in cities, including poverty. But with the liberalisation of the 1990s, middle-class insularity had made most people oblivious of the suffering of others.
i.e. once people became as well off as Kobad's daddy, they stopped caring about the poor.
The curiosity and empathy the Maoists generated among ordinary people in cities soon dissipated.
Why be a boring Maoist gangster when you could be a gangster who kills rap-artists? Also, why not run your extortion racket from Canada or Dubai? Being bitten by mosquitoes in some jungle is so not worth it.
The conservative BJP, which was rising to national power, relentlessly used Kashmir to rouse Hindu sentiment in mainland India.
Rahul doesn't get that the only people Hindus hate more than Muslims is Kashmiri Pandits.
In the first decade of 2000, Islamist radicals targeted
kaffirs wherever they might happen to live.
mainland India, creating friction with the Muslim minority. The Indian Parliament had come under attack in 2001; Mumbai city faced a terrorist attack in 2008. Between these, many Indian cities like Delhi, Hyderabad, Varanasi and Jaipur were targeted with bomb blasts, killing scores of people. At the same time, the overground sympathisers of the Maoist movement began hobnobbing with separatist elements from Kashmir and India’s Northeast, which had a long history of secessionism, and these potential alliances stirred controversy.
There was a backlash against brain dead Commies. Then the Left Front lost West Bengal to Mamta. There was no point keeping Naxals around to split the CPM vote.
This resulted in a backlash against Maoist sympathisers, and a new term was coined for them: ‘urban Naxal’.
i.e. nutters on campuses
Hindu nationalism was on the rise in India
It achieved apotheosis in 1947.
and, in the coming years, this term would become a ruse for the government to suppress all activism,
of the nuisance variety- sure. But you can't suppress genuine activism- e.g. farmers' protests.
resulting in the incarceration of civil rights activists like the human rights lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj.
She was born in the US but gave up American citizenship. That's just stupid. Also, don't get involved in a clash between two castes if all you are is an useful idiot. You will be framed and sent to jail because nobody gives a fuck about you.
What also did not help is the number of body bags – of forces killed in Maoist ambushes – going to different parts of the country.
Pay locals to do the killing for you. They are cheaper than soldiers.
As part of its anti-Maoist operation, the government began to push infrastructure – primarily roads and mobile/cellphone towers – in the Maoist-affected areas. It led to further entrenchment of state forces, which also weakened the Maoists. Their leaders who were in hiding in cities began to be hunted down.
If money is available for killing Maoists, Maoists get killed. This reduces their own ability to extort money. Sad.
The new roads and phone towers were welcomed by rural people. The Maoists began killing Adivasis on suspicion of being police informers. This violence alienated Adivasis, and others too. Earlier, the Maoists would visit a village in the night and slip away. Even if their presence was reported, it was of no use to security forces because the information would reach them quite late. But now, with cellphone networks, the people could call immediately, leading to encounters between the Maoists and state security forces.
There is always the suspicion that the tip-off came from some rival in the cadre.
Since about 2020, the decline of India’s Maoist movement has been rapid.
As rapid as the rise of the Lawrence Bishnoi gang. Rap-music and SUVs are cool. Dying of malaria in a jungle isn't.
The Maoist commander Ashok – whom I had met in the forest in 2010 – surrendered in 2015. One of his brothers had already died in an encounter. Meanwhile, Akka was arrested in 2019 in Hyderabad where she was seeking treatment for cancer; she died in a hospice three years later.
Cancer is a Capitalist tool which is being used to oppress the peasants and workers. So is death.
The government raised a special battalion of Adivasis, which included surrendered Maoists, to hunt down the Maoists. It started getting big results. In May this year, Nambala Keshava Rao, who had taken over as the Maoist chief from Ganapathi in 2018, was killed in a police encounter. A few weeks later, another of Ashok’s brothers, a senior commander, was also killed by police. The entire Maoist leadership, barring a few, has been wiped out.
But Lawrence Bishnoi- who is in jail- is safe and sound. Canada has named him as a terrorist- which is hilarious. They admitted Goldy Brar on a student visa. He is still at large.
Ashok has, of late, joined the Indian National Congress Party. ‘A’ has not been in touch in the last few years, ever since some of his friends were arrested as ‘urban Naxals’. A friend of his told me the other day that he has stopped interacting with people. A month ago, a friend in Gurugram told me of an incident where he lives. His local Resident Welfare Association had put a cage in their park, with a banana inside it to lure marauding monkeys in the vicinity. A few hours later, they found that the banana had been consumed by someone and the peel left outside the cage. It made me imagine how hungry that person would have been, most likely a poor worker.
It was a kid. Not a poor kid. An entitled brat who leaves the peel rather than disposing of it properly.
The friend sent me a screenshot of the residents association’s WhatsApp group. ‘Check the CCTV,’ someone had written.
A trapped monkey may have been sexually abused. I have a friend who lives in Gurugram. He is a partner with PwC. I bet he sexually abuses monkeys.
The Maoists have completely surrendered now, asking the government to accept a ceasefire. A statement released this September, purportedly by part of the Maoist leadership, apologises to people, saying that, in the process of revolution, the leadership made several tactical mistakes, and that the ceasefire was now important to stop the bloodshed.
Please don't kill me. Death is totes bougie. That is why I strongly object to dying.
What those mistakes are, the letter wouldn’t say.
It should have contested elections and gotten rich through corruption rather than crime. Look at the CPI (ML) Liberation party. It has two seats in the central parliament and 13 in the Bihar Assembly. It started off as an anti-Lin Biao splinter group. Giving up gangsterism for corrupt, caste-based, politics has kept its members safe and increasingly prosperous. Nobody gives a monkeys about Mao. What matters is getting your hands on lots and lots of bananas.
As anti-Maoist operations go on with even more rigour, a handful of those still inside the forest will ultimately surrender or be killed. How history remembers them is too early to say;
they were silly. China isn't going to invade India and appoint Maoist nutters as its compradors or Quislings. Also, as incomes rise, Hinduism gets stronger. Why? Religion is a service industry with high income elasticity of demand. Maoism is a Giffen good. You consume more of it as you run out of bananas.
but it is a fact that, had it not been for them, the much-needed focus on the hinterland of DK would not have been there.
The Namasudras who fled East Bengal were resettled there. It was a horrible place. They ran the fuck away. The Commies (CPM) massacred them in Marichjhapi in 1979. Then some evil Telugu bastards decided to go there and fuck up the locals. They are now being killed. Hopefully, the indigenous people will now be able to rise by their own efforts.
However, to the man in Gurugram who stole the banana, and to the man in Giridih, who doesn’t even have a banana in sight, it means nothing.
Giridih produces bananas. Gurugram doesn't. But it has higher wages. It really isn't true that its workers have to steal bananas because they aren't paid enough money to buy a banana. Rahul is as stupid as shit. That is why the Maoists targeted him as a useful idiot. Now Aeon magazine- in keeping with its mission to publish the stupidest shit being written anywhere- has plucked him from provincial obscurity. Could he become the next Pankaj Mishra? No. He can be the next Arundhati Roy. But first he must chop off his banana and feed it to some starving Chartered Accountant in Gurugram or Greater Kailash or wherever.
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