Saroj Giri

With Maoist leader Kishenji’s rather bold offer for ceasefire to the Union government, a new situation seems to be unfolding in the red corridor of heartland India. Seeking to place the ball in the Centre’s court, the 72-day offer clearly seems to trump Union Home Minister P Chidambaram’s 72-hour offer. Moreover, it’s the nature of the offer — unconditional, as opposed to earlier Maoist proposals stipulating the release of their key leaders, restoration of land and forests to the tribals, scrapping of Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) with big investors etc, all major irritants for the government — which begs a serious consideration. Practically the only condition set by the Maoists this time is that the State should reciprocate. This is at a time when reports of the CRPF in Lalgarh killing Lalmohan Tudu of the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities (PCAPA) in front of his family members on February 22 are filtering in, over and above the initial propaganda about him being killed during an attack on a CRPF camp.

Chidambaram, instead of welcoming the offer to start a process of negotiation and addressing the substantive issues at hand, responded with a presumptuous and hypocritical statement calling upon the Maoists to abjure violence first. The Planning Commission’s Expert Group on Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas has argued that the government is engaging in peace talks with other rebel groups like the Nagas even though they have not abjured violence and in fact ‘taken advantage of the peaceful conditions to consolidate their parallel government’. So, they ask, ‘why a different approach for the Maoists?’

Chidambaram is clearly trying to make violence the key issue — that the real problem facing the country is violence by illegitimate actors like the Maoists and not the inequalities and injustices that are spiralling in the country. On the other hand, basking in the cover of being constitutional and democratically elected, even as it spearheads a system of a million injustices and the repressive Operation Green Hunt, the charge of being ‘violent’ somehow does not stick against the government. Instead, with terror attacks in Mumbai and Pune, the non-State violence as the main problem gets reinforced by the discourse of the ‘war on terror’ — that our country is under attack and hence no dissensions. NATO troops at Marjah, Afghanistan, are currently supposed to be flushing out the Taliban and then installing a civilian government — not too different from Chidambaram’s policy of flushing out Maoists to make way for a civilian administration.

This approach frames the Maoists in terms of a conflict model — that this is primarily a problem of violence, of illegitimate actors challenging the State and rule of law, and indeed the understanding that the Maoists are ‘the biggest internal security threat’. There is an underside to this seemingly straightforward picture. By simply raking up the violent nature of the Maoists again and again, the substantive issues at hand — corporate plunder, land grab, vigilante groups like Salwa Judum — are easily set aside or regarded as secondary.

Hence Kishenji’s dropping of the other conditions for ceasefire might add to this perception that violence is the real issue. In fact, several civil society groups and independent intellectuals who have always insisted on addressing the core problems facing tribals might even feel that this is a new situation where only violence and hostilities become the real problem. However, through this offer, the Maoists may actually be trying to reach out to civil society. They are probably appealing to the wider civil society — maybe to gain some credibility as a political force; or be recognised as not only interested in violence and a military solution. This must be seen as a positive development. The ‘abjure violence first’ line, however, is bent upon undoing this.

So what about the ‘skeptics’ who argue that the Maoists have come with this offer only because they are feeling the heat of Operation Green Hunt, or they are being strategic and trying to regroup — biding time, trying to trap the government? What is significant is that even though they may be feeling the heat, given the repression unleashed by the State, the Maoists are seeking a political process, involving sections of civil society, unlike the belligerent attitude of the State.

Indeed the government has made it impossible for anyone from outside to visit these ‘affected areas’ — human rights activists and independent observers have been harassed and chased away repeatedly. A cessation of hostilities is therefore what the State fears the most — for that will mean the possibility of a free exchange between the Maoists in the hinterland and urban civil society. The State clearly does not want that to happen — for that will turn the heat on it. This is the real trap it fears — getting politically cornered for its misdeeds. Hence, the need for this hysteria surrounding Maoist violence and human rights activists of supporting it.

There is nothing retrograde for the Maoists in seeking a political way out when cornered militarily — if this is what the ceasefire means. But the ‘abjure violence’ approach of the government seems to be aimed at precluding precisely such a possibility. Even the language used in the media — regroup, bidding for time, walking into a trap — all assume a situation of continuing war. In a way, the demand to ‘abjure violence’ is nothing less than the guilt of the State slipping out. Foregrounding violence in the context of a ceasefire allows the State to skirt the key issues and keep portraying the Maoists as liable to be physically eliminated, catching them off-guard.

This is the experience of the talks between the State and the Peoples War Group in Andhra Pradesh, where the ceasefire was used by the State to finish off the Maoists. Making the ‘violent’ tag stick on the Maoists meant that they could be delegitimised and made easy targets even after formal talks had started in October 2004 between the Maoists and the government, while the undercover attacks and elimination of Maoist leaders and sympathisers continued unabated. Leading civil liberties activist KG Kannabiran, who was one of the eight mediators then, told BBC that, “It was agreed that the police would not undertake combing operations against the Maoists. Why was there a need for the police to become so active, launching combing operations and killing the extremists in encounters?”

PERHAPS THIS is where return to a focus on the core issue of tribal displacement and habitat, cannot in the circumstances, be delinked from the fate of the Maoist movement. After all the Maoist movement is not only a current problem or a temporary happenstance specific to the present conjuncture. Since 1967, the Naxal movement and its present avatar, the Maoists, have stared in the face of the ruling order of the country. Indeed the Naxal slogan — Yeh azaadi jhooti hai (this independence is false) is a comment on the state of our nation. To relegate the Maoist issue to only one of violence, or for that matter that of Adivasis or land reforms or livelihood — is to deny and suppress its wider political provenance — something which might have implications on the very ‘idea of India’. This is perhaps why the government is more comfortable engaging with the Naga or Kashmiri militants in talks, than with the Maoists.

Those on the left and progressive liberals, ruing the erosion of ‘the idea of India’ and the decline of our political ideals, are so status-quoist in their upholding of the constitutional values of democracy, that they have conceded any possibility of rewriting history, or revising the basic structure of the Constitution, to the Hindu right. This seems true of the post-ideological, neoliberal age where the right-wing free marketeers are the radicals, calling for change, whereas the left are the conservatives, holding on to the myth of the founding moment and a dream of the long-dead founding fathers of the republic. The Naxal who refuses to ‘abjure violence’, in precisely being unconstitutional and undemocratic, in moving out of the shadow of our founding fathers, has come to stand for a left-wing agenda of change, taking the wind out of the Hindu right’s sails and realigning the terrain of thinking for the left as a whole. Whether the Maoists are adequate to this fertile moment is however not a settled question yet.

Saroj Giri is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Delhi University

COURTESY: Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 09, Dated March 06, 2010

Nisha Mehta

Amidst the current gruesome war of the state power in India against a section of its own poorest people rebelling under the leadership of the Communist Party of India (CPI) (Maoist), the recent episodes of persecution of Himanshu Kumar (HK hereafter), the avowedly Gandhian activist running Vanvasi Chetna Ashram (VCA), by the Governments of Chhattisgarh and India are poignant as well as curious. The incidents of persecution are too well-known: how his ashram was shut down and bulldozed, how one of his main co-worker, Kopa Kunjam has been arrested, and finally how his attempts at a padayatra and jan-sunwai (people’s hearing) were blocked. (A summary of these can be found in the collection at Sanhati; there are videos too where we find HK himself summarizing these episodes (Video 1, Video 2).

One of the salutary features of these episodes is that HK himself seems to have been changing his political views gradually. So, below we summarize some lessons that appear to stand out from these episodes: especially regarding the understandings of revolutionary Marxism in India on the correct path of emancipating the poor in the country vis-a-vis the understandings of the specific issue-based “people’s movements”. This seems quite important as one perennial complaint against the CPI (Maoist), from Nandigram to Lalgarh, is that they have been regularly `hijacking’ spontaneous people’s movements geared toward some immediate goals to convert these into components of the broader struggle for seizure of political power by the working class and the poor. Below we try to understand whether these incidents with HK provide some justification for the perception and the corresponding revolutionary strategies of CPI (Maoist).

To put succinctly, these episodes seem to raise the questions whether any serious attempt to emancipate the deprived people in India has to, perforce, develop into an explicit class-war against the state and whether sufficient democratic space is currently present in our country for sustaining a serious movement in this regard while remaining within the existing structure of legal polity.

A. What is the nature of the state:

One of the very first lessons of Marxist understanding is that “the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order”, which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes” (Lenin: The State and Revolution). The further elaboration by Lenin is very well-known but still worth-remembering:

“In the opinion of the petty-bourgeois politicians, however, order means the reconciliation of classes, and not the oppression of one class by another; to alleviate the conflict means reconciling classes and not depriving the oppressed classes of definite means and methods of struggle to overthrow the oppressors. … the “Kautskyite” distortion of Marxism is far more subtle. “Theoretically”, it is not denied that the state is an organ of class rule, or that class antagonisms are irreconcilable. But what is overlooked or glossed over is this: if the state is the product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms, if it is a power standing above society and “alienating itself more and more from it”, it is clear that the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible not only without a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class and which is the embodiment of this “alienation”.”

Obviously, CPI (Maoist), following this understanding, specified the class character of the Indian state (rightly or wrongly) and the battle led by them in Chhattisgarh is directed against what they perceive to be the constituents of this state power.

HK avowedly perceived state in a different way. He seems to have understood the Indian government and its constitution to be quite sacrosanct. He repeatedly claimed that his aim was to assist government’s own work in perfectly legal ways (he has elaborated on this in his speech available as a four-part video in as well as in his interview). But it seems that when his apparently tame efforts at some seemingly harmless issue-based movements (like rehabilitating the villagers driven away by Salwa Judum) came into conflict with the class interests of what CPI (Maoist) would call the monopolistic capital and their ally of comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie, the Indian state did not hesitate to brush aside HK, his reconciliatory moralistic rhetorics notwithstanding. This raises the question once again: whether it is possible to continue a serious ‘people’s movement’ on any issue of fundamental importance without making it culminate into a war against the existing state.

B. To mobilize on the basis of what identities:

A person can, and often does, have several identities: nation, colour, class, religion, gender etc. From a Marxist standpoint, class is the most important identity among these. This perception is rooted in the Marxist conception of materialistic foundation of historical development. Thus, from Marxist point of view, one basic political task of the revolutionary left is to organize the oppressed people mainly along class lines.

Again, as a classic and unequivocal illustration of this point, Lenin’s writing in the context of Jewish workers in Russia can be put forward:

“The great slogan “Workers of all countries, unite!”, which was proclaimed for the first time more than half a century ago, has now become more than the slogan of just the Social-Democratic parties of the different countries. This slogan is being increasingly embodied both in the unification of the tactics of international Social-Democracy and in the building of organisational unity among the proletarians of the various nationalities…

The Bund’s mistake is a result of its basically untenable nationalist views; the result of its groundless claim to be the sole, monopolistic representative of the Jewish proletariat, from which the federalist principle of organisation necessarily derives; the result of its Long-standing policy of keeping aloof and separate from the Party. We are convinced that this mistake must be rectified and that it will be rectified as the movement continues togrow. We consider ourselves ideologically at one with the Jewish Social-Democratic proletariat. After the Second Congress our Central Committee pursued a non-nationalist policy; it took pains that such committees should be set up (Polesye, North-Western) as would unite all the local workers, Jewish as well as non-Jewish, into a single whole”. (To the Jewish Workers)

HK seems initially to have perceived the adivasis of Chhattisgarh having a pristine identity of their own. He still invokes this idea:

“There are three types of poor – (i) those who survive on your riches – the balloonseller, the domestic servant, construction workers; (ii) those who feel they are unworthy of being rich; they feel they are low caste, uneducated; they can never be rich; and (iii) those like the adivasis who were living happily in the forests till you invaded their land to make yourself richer.” (Economic and Political Weekly, Nov 21, 2009, p.12)

However, the CPI (Maoist) would characterize current phase of the struggle in backward Chhattisgarh in class terms. International monopolistic capital and their ally of comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie are grabbing the means of production and this specific method of accumulating capital is determined by the pre-capitalist production relations existing in Chhattisgarh: non-anonymous hegemony of a dominant class that imposes unfreedom on productive activities (including surplus appropriation) of the broad masses of people (see also, Tugge: “Two Paths of Development”, People’s March, December 2007).

The curious thing is that HK himself is coming round to a similar perception! (see his speech). He is explicitly going beyond any tribal identity: he is now talking about the 20% of people in India expropriating the remaining 80% and using the coercive state apparatus to hold the expropriated in check. So, from this, the question again arises whether any serious `people’s movement’ in India can do without a conscious scaffolding of class-based mobilization.

C. How meaningful are the existing Indian democratic institutions:

It is quite well-known that CPI (Maoist) considers the existing structure of democratic institutions in India as a sham which is quite in conformity with their goal of bringing about the New Democratic Revolution, ostensibly to usher in true `people’s democracy’. From such an understanding emerges their strategy of boycotting parliamentary elections, one component of the democratic institutions. This strategy has been disputed a lot and earned them a good deal of criticisms.

In contrast, HK tried to use these existing democratic institutions, MPs, ministers, judiciary… so far as possible for his efforts. His mode of movement was also entirely what is understood to be democratic mass movement. But he attained almost no palpable success. Finally he has had to leave Chhattisgarh convinced that the existing democratic institutions there are merely a sham.

Again, this makes us remember that Lenin is quoted famously by all the parliamentary left parties in India in justifying their primary attachment to electioneering:

“it has been proved that, far from causing harm to the revolutionary proletariat, participation in a bourgeois-democratic parliament, even a few weeks before – the victory of a Soviet republic and even after such a victory, actually helps that proletariat to prove to the backward masses why such parliaments deserve to be done away with; it facilitates their successful dissolution, and helps to make bourgeois parliamentarianism “politically obsolete”.” (Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder).

Perhaps the unsuccessful but sincere efforts of HK serve the same purpose–participating in these institutions to the fullest possible extent to expose their limitations. These experiences of HK, curiously, seem to prove the point claimed by CPI (Maoist)! I hope I am wrong. This should also make the `people’s movements’ in India trying to work within the present set-up to improve this set up from within think more about the fruitfulness of their efforts.