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

The Maoist call their military strategy a ‘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, these setbacks of the security forces are owing to grave tactical mistakes by them 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 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 been created. The document also said that in ‘protracted peoples’ war there are three stages, 1) the stage of strategic defence, 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 classes 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.*(1)

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.

Harekrishna Deka, (b. 1943) Eminent Assamese poet, fiction writer, critic, editor, and the recipient of Sahitya Akademi Award (1987), Katha Award (1996), Assam Valley Literary Award (2010) and Padmanath Bidyabinod Award (2015); has nine collections of poems, six volumes of short stories, five books of literary criticism, two novels, two edited books, two books of social criticism and one collection of translated poems to his credit; has served as the editor of the English daily ‘The Sentinel’ and the Assamese literary magazine ‘Goriyoshi’. Starting his professional career as a college teacher, he has served as the Director General of Police and a member of the National Security Advisory Board.