[Assam] An article on Maoism

[kamal deka]

The following article was written recently to the National Security
Advisary Board of which the writter is one of the members.


                                      Indian Maoists and their
‘Protracted People’s War’: A Challenge before India’s


Representative Democracy


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



        H.K.Deka


Variously described as Naxalites, Maoists or left extremists, the
Communist Party of India (Maoist) is avowedly a party theoretically
based on Marxist political doctrine that in praxis has consciously
adopted the political and military strategies of Mao. It envisages  a
‘new democracy’ for India to be achieved through an
agrarian-proletariat revolution and by means of  a ‘protracted
people’s war.’ Its root is traced to the sixties of the last century
to the launching of organized attacks in Naxalbari and some
surrounding villages in West Bengal on rich landlords by poor and
landless peasants under the guidance of some extremist CPM leaders.
Their ideologue was  Charu Mazumdar who interpreted Mao’s version of
Marxism in his own way and took up  the annihilation of class enemies
as the main agenda, in this case, killing of rich landlords and
looting of their agricultural produce that was the product of the
alienated labour of landless tenant peasants and poor agricultural
labourers, who were mostly tribals. Charu Mazumdar’s followers  had
split from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and had formed their
own party advocating an extremist line of armed agrarian revolution.
Thus Naxalism was born but the revolution was suppressed by means of a
purposive police action mounted by then Congress (I) government of
West Bengal. The CPM, which came to power thereafter, undertook
massive agricultural land reforms providing favourable tenancy rights
to the peasant tenants and redistributing surplus land to the landless
and marginal farmers.  According to many analysts this more than the
police action was responsible for defeating left-wing extremism in
rural Bengal.   But the movement was never fully annihilated and
various splinter groups spread throughout the central and eastern
states of the country working amongst the poorest peasant class and
garnering support. The People’s War Group (PWG)  and Maoist Communist
Centre (MCC) registered strong presence, the former particularly in
Andhra Pradesh (but it had to shift bases later to Chattisgarh and
Orissa border due to successful operations mounted by a specialist
police force called Grey Hound) and the latter in Bihar &  Jharkhand.
Though their ideological goal was similar, they were not only not
comfortable with each other, they even fought turf war. Between 1996
and 2002, more than 400 members were killed in their fratricidal
conflict. But in 2004, both the groups came together and merged
themselves into a single party named the Communist Party of India
(Maoist.)

Today, these Maoists have become a serious headache to the states
where they are operating as well as to the Centre. After 2004, the
Maoists have been spreading fast. In 2001, the PWG was spread out in
Andhra Pradesh, eastern Maharashtra, Southern Shhattisgarh, a small
part of Madhya Pradesh and remote border areas in the south of Orissa.
The MCC had its operational bases in northern Shhattisgarh, Jharkhand,
southern Bihar and parts of Orissa near West Bengal border. By 2005,
that is after the merger, while all the above areas became highly
affected, Maoist activities spread to newer areas affecting 130
districts (51 districts in highly affected category, 18  moderately
affected and 61 districts coming under marginally affected category.)
Besides the states already mentioned above, the Maoists further spread
to parts of  Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Kerala and
Tamilnadu. As of now, the Maoists are active in 195 districts in 16
states. Their presence is now being reported even from Rajasthan,
Haryana and Uttaranchal. Another potential area is Assam in the
North-east (the Maoist’s eastern regional bureau covers Assam, West
Bengal and Jharkhand.) Here ethnic insurgency is showing a declining
trend but a peasant movement is gaining ground.

The document called the “Strategy and Tactics of the Indian
Revolution’ central Committee (P)”  drafted by the CPI (Maoist) in
2004 is a revealing document. It is here that the party calls its
‘revolution’ a new democratic revolution and identifies four
“contradictions” in Indian Society 1) contradictions between
Imperialism and Indian people 2) between feudalism and broad masses 3)
between capital and labour 4) internal contradictions between the
ruling classes. In this context, the document makes a significant
observation, “The new democratic revolution in India has to pass
through more than one phase and in any of these phases, one of these
fundamental contradictions becomes the principal contradiction.” In
India, the fundamental contradictions, according to the above
document, at the moment are the first two and the principal
contradiction between these two is the no 2 contradiction i.e. between
feudalism and broad masses. If we remember this Maoist reading of
Indian social condition, it will be easier for us to understand why
Maoist activities are concentrated in the highly poverty-stricken
rural areas, particularly those areas where the socially deprived
sections of the tribal peoples live. Contradiction between ‘feudalism’
(represented by exploiter landlord class and now allegedly by big
industrial houses, part of the ‘comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie’)
and ‘broad masses’ (represented by landless & poor peasants who
constitute 60 to 70 p.c of the rural population together with rural
proletariat that is farm workers working in various plantations &
large farms) is stark in these areas. The Maoists identify two classes
of people of the Indian society to be the main enemies of the
revolution, they are being the landlords and the ‘comprador
bureaucratic bourgeoisie’, a Mao term here used for those who have
amassed enormous amount of wealth, whose capital monopolizes the
economic lifeline by using state power and who have emerged from the
comprador merchants, feudal lords, brokers and big users who have
always been ‘tied up with imperialism & feudalism.’ The motive forces
of their revolution in the Indian society are the industrial
proletariat, rural proletariat, landless & poor peasants,
semi-proletariat (skilled workers, either self-employed or working for
others, rural wage earners etc.), middle peasants, petty-bourgeois
(handicraftmen, even lower levels of intellectuals who include
students, school & college teachers, office clerks, non-gazetted
officers, engineers, lawyers, doctors and those employed in other
professions with middle class income mainly derived from manual and
mental labour), lumpen-proletariat, and even rich peasants (not
landlords), which is considered a vacillating class but a potential
ally when the revolution gains ground. It has identified the national
bourgeoisie, that is the middle & small bourgeois in the Indian
context, who though politically weak and possess a dual and
vacillating character can be a potential ally if the revolution
progresses. In the present phase, the Maoist’s primary tactics is to
‘spread agrarian revolutionary programme and area-wise seizure of
power.’

What is being witnessed today in the tribal heartland of India’s
several states, where tribal peasant alienation is very high, where
the incidence of poverty is the highest among all states according to
the Tendulkar committee report, is not just a problem of law and order
kind, but an early stage of tribal peasant agrarian revolution
spearheaded by the CPI (Maoist) according to an elaborate strategy to
be carried out in stages from rural to urban bases. It is designed to
be ‘protracted’ till the defeat of the class enemies and the
establishment of a ‘new democracy’ (to be run by the revolutionary
party and opposed to the parliamentary democracy) on way to a
‘socialist’ society. The areas of operations have been chosen
deliberately in the 5th schedule areas since these are the regions
where the state’s presence is all but nominal, the administrations of
successive governments have hardly set foot in those areas to make any
imprint, the areas are rich in minerals yet the masses are the poorest
of the poor, the incidence of land alienation is very high, land
acquisition is taking place for the benefit of the rich industrial
houses for their massive mining projects but without concomitant
benefit to the rural people who are displaced due to acquiring of
their land on unfavourable terms, where the principle of the eminent
domain has caused a sense of psychological deprivation of traditional
rights over land, a nature’s gift, amongst tribal communities.

 The Maoist call their military strategy ‘protracted people’s war’ as
per Mao’s revolutionary military doctrine and their aim is to
establish revolutionary base areas in the countryside where according
to the Maoists the ‘enemy’ is weak, meaning where governance is absent
or lacking, and then to gradually encircle and capture the cities,
which they call bastions of the enemy forces. It appears that they
have also an ‘urban perspective plan’ formulated in 2004, but their
activities there i.e. in towns and cities will remain confined to
clandestinely organizing the ‘basic masses’ for the time being (but
urban network is being used to source weapons, arrange medical care
for sick and wounded cadres, form sleeper cells amongst a section of
students and intellectuals). The Maoists have identified Dandakaranya,
Jharkhand, Andhra, Bihar, Orissa border, North Telengana, Koel-Kannaur
as of great strategic significance. In this phase, they are militarily
mounting guerilla war on ‘enemy forces’ and is mobilizing the rural
people politically, at present mainly adivasis, for an agrarian
revolution with the slogan ‘land to the tiller and power to the
revolutionary peoples committee.’ They are following a revolutionary
dictum of Mao, who said, “The seizure of power by armed forces, the
settlement of issue by war, is the central task and highest form of
revolution. But while the principle is the same (for all countries),
its application by the party of the proletariat finds expressions in
various ways according to varying conditions.”

Though the Maoists have inflicted heavy losses on the security forces
recently and the incidents of Dantewada (Chhattisgarh) and Silda (West
Bengal) have an unnerving effect on the forces as well as on the
Government at the centre and the states, and though they use military
terms to describe their mode of action, these offensives are not such
that the army or the air force is required to be deployed. This battle
is being fought amongst people whose alienation is being tactically
used by the Maoists to extend base areas.  Any large-scale bloodshed
in a militarily conducted operation by the armed forces will only
further alienate these people helping the Maoist revolution to spread.
Moreover, the security forces met setbacks because of their own grave
tactical mistakes as well as due to lack of accurate intelligence at
ground level. This is a guerilla phase of the Maoist’s people’s war
and by all accounts it has not reached its strategic offensive phase.
It is still confined to comparatively thinly populated tribal areas
and has not yet spread to non-tribal rural regions where the bulk of
the rural peasantry and rural proletariat live. Of course, the warning
bell is there, particularly in those areas where suicide rate of
indebted peasants is high. Though these operations have been
tactically well-conducted and though these demonstrative acts have
given them more following amongst the tribals, they do not appear at
the moment to be so strong as to mount a full-scale strategic people’s
war against the state.

In ideological terms, the liberal parliamentary democracy pursued by
India is under challenge of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist system of
proletarian dictatorship in the name of ‘new democracy.’  Victory one
way or the other will depend on which democracy earns the maximum
trust of the peoples concerned, in this case, the agrarian masses,
particularly the tribal peoples of various states who in independent
India are yet to see the impact of good governance. In an interview
datelined October 17, 2009, Ganapathy, the top Maoist leader, boasted,
”by building the broadest fighting front, and by adopting appropriate
tactics of combining the militant mass political movement with armed
resistance of the people and our PLGA (Peoples’ Liberation Guerilla
Army), we will defeat the massive offensive by the Central-State
forces.” Despite speaking of eventual victory, Ganapathy does not
speak about a revolutionary force superior in strength but only of
‘appropriate tactics’ and he speaks in the future tense. Their
document on strategy speaks of creating liberated zones by developing
guerilla bases. He has not claimed that any liberated zone has already
been created. The document also said that in ‘protracted peoples’ war
there are three stages, 1) the stage of strategic defense,  2) the
stage of strategic stalemate (or strategic equilibrium), 3) the stage
of strategic offence. Ganapathy speaks of resistance and not of
offence.  The present stage is, as Ganapathy himself has admitted in
the same interview, is the stage of strategic defense i.e. an early
stage of their ‘protracted peoples’ war.’ Against the Maoist guerilla
tactics and militant mass political movement, the state needs to
develop appropriate counter-guerilla tactics and use political
strategy to win away the heart and mind of the people. Causes behind
the tribal peoples’ alienation need to be examined and an
intelligence-driven counter-guerilla operational strategy has to be
adopted. The nation’s political economy has to bear fruit and reach
the alienated groups instead of wealth being concentrated starkly in
the hands of the urban affluent class and rural landlords.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh speaking on the occasion of the Civil
Service Day at New Delhi on April 21, 2010, reiterated what he had
said on a number of previous occasions, “Many areas in which such
extremism flourishes are underdeveloped and many people, who live in
these areas have not shared equitably the fruits of development.” The
Report of the Central Administrative Reforms Commission has pointed
out another cause—the disruption of the age old tribal-forest
relationship. It has rightly said that stringent forest laws and
Supreme Court orders have made the forests into prohibited areas for
the tribals ‘creating serious imbalances  in their lives and
livelihood.’ This along with land alienation of the tribal’s own land
to the non-tribals even where land transfer is prohibited by law has
caused serious discontent among the tribals and the Maoists have been
exploiting the situation. The Ministry of Rural Development of the
Government of India in its report 2007-2008 revealed that 5.06 lakh of
tribal land alienation cases were registered covering 9.02 lakh acres
of land out of which 2.25 lakh cases were disposed off in favour of
tribals covering a total area of 5.00 lakh acres. 1.99 lakh cases
covering an area of 4.11 lakh acres were rejected by courts under
various grounds. Cases rejected are a very big number. Legal rejection
should not be construed as that the tribals registered bogus
complaints or these were false cases. It does not mean that the
tribals were not the original title holders. In tribal areas
non-tribals in collusion with officials manipulate record so cleverly
that no legal remedy becomes available.  There are ‘benami’ transfers
of land in which land remains in the name of the original tribal
owners but they are reduced to the role of share croppers. The tribals
are compelled to lease or mortgage their land to local moneylenders or
to rich farmers due to acute poverty. Non-tribal entrants into the
area resort to systematic encroachment and in collusion with patowaris
show the same as transfer prior to a date from which law prohibits
transfer. Concubinage or marital alliance is another form to
circumvent the law prohibiting transfer. In the name of
industrialization, tribal lands have been acquired in favour of big
industrial houses (who in Maoist terms are comprador bureaucrat
bourgeoisie) against their willing consent and without any
ameliorative benefit. A recent investigative report in the Hindustan
Times under the caption “The biggest land grab after Columbus”
mentions a report of the Rural development Committee on Land Reforms
blaming the Government itself for corporate take-over of 5000 acres of
tribal land for a steel plant in the hinterland of Chhattisgarh and
calls it the biggest land grab after Columbus. India’s growth
requirement and the development trajectory are not in sync with social
justice. This mismatch has to be corrected to prove to the deprived
masses that the welfare motivation of the democratic government is
genuine and that its plans and projects are transparent, free of
corruption and equitable to all sections of the people.

 A Representative Democratic system needs to be implicitly trusted by
its peoples but in Indian scenario it has been questioned again and
again. The Maoists are now trying to use all the weaknesses of
governmental systems and the administrative machinery’s bureaucratic,
corruption-ridden approach to prove India’s representative democracy
to be a false democracy run by imperialism. Two examples are mentioned
here. Because the contractors and suppliers pay push money and hush
money to politicians and bureaucrats to get contracts, they are
compelled by the Maoist rebels to pay a part of it in the name of
levies and it adds to the poor quality of the works executed and the
government comes in poor light. Secondly, though unsubstantiated,
there are allegations that political parties have taken help of the
Maoists in some states in the latter’s areas of influence to win
elections. If such things have happened, then the political parties
need to wake up to the realization that this is only an indirect
recognition of the Maoists and it helps the latter to gain more
influence amongst the masses. Besides, the Government funded
programmes with huge investment to ‘fill critical gaps’ like Backward
District Initiative (BDI), Rastriya Sam Vikas Yojana, National Rural
Guarantee Progmme (NREGP), Backward Region Fund, Pradhan Mantri
Grameen Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) have not made the required impact because
of theirs insincere and tardy implementation. The Maoists also have
been extorting part of these funds systematically and ironically, they
are using a part of the extorted government fund to introduce their
own brand of social reforms like running school, health care centres,
providing rural credit and seed bank and even small irrigation
projects. They have been attacking economic targets like communicative
network, railway infrastructure, NDMC mines, solar plates in order to
frustrate infrastructural development. According to an estimate they
attacked about 350 such economic targets between 2006 and 2009.

Need for a Counter-guerilla Strategy:

Though the Maoist rebels are presently in the stage of strategic
defense and far from the mode of strategic offence, they have managed
to kill a large number of security personnel and arm themselves
heavily by looting arms from them by well-planned guerilla attacks.
Between 2005 and 2010, they mounted successful attacks on Jahanabad
district jail (13 november,05, 13 weapons looted), Rani Bodili police
post in Chhattisgarh (15 March, 07, 56 security personnel including 35
SPOs massacred), Nayagarh town in Orissa (15 February,08, policemen
killed, district armoury looted,1200 weapons along with a large
quantity of ammunition taken away), Orissa border (29 june,o8, 39
greyhound force personnel killed and weapons taken away. The
greyhounds had moved into the area from Andhra Pradesh without
coordinating with Orissa police), Malkangiri , Orissa (16 July, 08, 17
policemen killed in mine blast), Chhattisgarh, Rajnandgao police
district (12 July,09, 30 policemen including SP Rajnandgao killed),
Gadhricholi district, Maharashtra (October, 2009, 34 policemen
killed), Silda, West Bengal (14 February, 2, 2010, 24 policemen killed
and their camp burned down), Chintalnar-Tarmetla in Dantewada district
of Chhattishgarh (6 April, 2010, 74 CRPF personnel killed and their
arms looted.). The Maoists seem to have in place a human intelligence
system organized amongst the rural supporters to get accurate
information regarding the condition of security camps and movement of
security personnel. On the other hand, the security personnel’s
movements were mostly clumsy, their camp defenses poor and alertness
wanting. The security forces have to adopt counter-guerilla tactics
learning from the tactics of the Maoists. Ganapathy said, “By adopting
strictly secret methods of functioning and fool-proof underground
mechanisms, by enhancing our mass base, vigilance and local
intelligence, smashing enemy intelligence networks and studying their
plans and tactics, we hope to check further losses.” This is also a
lesson for security forces.

To halt the forward march of the Maoists, it is imperative that a well
Coordinated Counter-Guerilla Strategy is devised with unity of
approach by all the affected states under the Centre’s watchful
guidance instead of mounting piecemeal uncoordinated operations as is
being done at present by each affected state. For this purpose, the
states will have to raise special police forces but they should be
given the same standard of training and they should be trained
together in centrally funded counter-guerilla training academies.
There should be an Apex Coordinating Operational Mechanism amongst the
concerned states’ police administrations and a senior representative
from the Centre should be a part of it with the convergence of
communication network at all levels of operation and a Standing
Operational Procedure with a clearly defined command structure. The
operations should be conceived as borderless so that when need arises
the security force of one state can move within another state’s border
in pursuit of an objective without procedural wrangle but
communicatively in touch so that the task can be handed over to the
jurisdictional force as soon as possible (this may require some
amendment in the procedural law.)

On the whole, instead of piecemeal operations in different states,
there should be an integrated approach to the
counter-guerilla-strategy throughout the affected region. Most of
these operations will be in commando style and arms and equipments
should be befitting the task. Intelligence will be an important
component of this strategy. In this respect, a leaf can be taken from
the seminal work of Lt Colonel Sir Julian Paget’s ‘Counter-insurgency
Campaigning’ where he set six principles for effective intelligence.
The two vitally important for the present purpose are (a) the
intelligence organization should be fully integrated, under one chief
of intelligence (b) intelligence must be worked for and not waited
for. Another important suggestions made by him is that the cooperation
of the people is a tremendous asset and every effort should be made to
win this support. For this, the security forces need to be conscious
of human rights of common people and should avoid knee-jerk response
to provocations by the rebels.

Some media report has suggested that the Maoists rebels have now been
using Global Information System and Google maps, which needs
verification. It needs to be examined if a communication satellite can
be used for counter-guerilla operations to locate hideouts and
movements of the rebels in interior areas. Helicopter surveillance may
not be so effective, it is a give-away and can be targeted by the
rebels. On the other hand, satellite surveillance will be unobtrusive.
Mobile GPS with GIS can be a useful tool for the security forces
during their operational movements. These can be force multipliers.
Conventional operations engaging a large force is likely to be
disastrous. Small dedicated forces with swift commando style
operations backed by reliable intelligence will be more successful.

Development and Social Justice:

The report ‘Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas’
submitted by an Expert Group in 2008 to the Planning Commission
(constituted in 2006 under the chairmanship of D.Bandopadhyay,
Executive Chairman, Council for Social Development) has this important
observation to make regarding challenges in Naxalite affected areas,
“Poverty does create deprivation but other factors like denial of
justice, human dignity cause alienation resulting in the conviction
that relief can be had outside the system by breaking the current
order asunder.” Poverty in Adivasi land is acute, but more than that
they are alienated from their ancestral land under conditions created
by the country’s developmental paradigm. India’s voracious production
need encroaches into their world throwing them out of their land
without adequate economic compensation and with deep psychological
sense of loss. Once overtaken by fatalism, they are now being turned
into a component of an agrarian armed revolution The Maoists fully
exploit this sense of alienation. The Expert Committee report deals
with many kinds of social discrimination and large-scale human rights
violations against the scheduled castes and the scheduled tribes in
its report. It further observes, “The contradiction between the tribal
community and the state itself has become sharper, translating itself
into open conflict in many areas.” In the North-east, it has assumed
the form of ethnic insurgency and in the 5th schedule areas, the
Maoists are organizing the Adivasis for ‘people’s protracted war.’ The
Expert Committee refers to a study conducted by Dr Walter Fernandez
which shows that from 1947 to 2004, around 60 million persons have
been displaced due to various developmental projects  involving 25
million ha. of land , which includes 25 million ha. of forest land and
6 million ha. of other Common Property Resources (CPR). Whereas the
tribals constitute 8.08% of country’s population, they constitute 40%
of the total displaced/affected people. The Committee has made
specific recommendations in respect of developmental challenges in
these areas in the chapter 5 of their report. Without elaborating on
those recommendations, we will suggest that the Government prepare an
Action Plan most expeditiously on the basis of these recommendations.

No doubt, in the context of large-scale violence, a well-planned
counter-guerrilla strategy has to be adopted but it is not just a law
and order matter. The developmental need has to be visibly met and
social justice has to be assured. When some areas are cleared from
Maoist influence through security force’s operations, these areas must
not experience a vacuum on developmental and social justice fronts and
must witness prompt developmental results. Importantly, Good
governance needs to be established.