National Security
When Will the Peoples War on the Indian State End
Dt: 27/10/16
When Will the Peoples War on the Indian State End
Dr T.H.Chowdary*
The death of 28 Maoist guerrilla soldiers in the battle on 24 October on the A.P - Orissa border in Malkanagiri must raise the question as to the nature and purpose of the Maoists raising an army and whether and when and how their war would finally end? The armed actions of a section of communists in India known as Naxalites started in 1976 and in these four decades, it has taken the shape of a classical communist guerrilla army waging civil war to put an end to the bourgeois- capitalist state and substitute it by dictatorship of the proletariat under the hegemony of Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist Communist party .
2. These four -decades long armed actions of the Peoples War Group (PWG) guerrillas have a precedent. In September 1948, by the short four -day military action, the Nizam’s resistance to accede to India was finished by the 17 Sept 1948. The Communist Party of India, under instruction and direction of Stalin through the COMINFORM (Communist Information Bureau) took to armed actions to overthrow the Nehru government characterising it as a lackey and running dog of Anglo-American imperialism . The armed resistance of the communists to the Nizam’s police and Razakar goondas in Hyderabad state of the later 1940s was converted into the war against the Government of India itself. In Telangana, the communists fought the Indian Army from Sept 1948 until Sept 1951. The Indian military finally gained the upper hand ; the communist guerrillas were more are less eliminated; the few that remained and the leaders were confined to the forests. In this desperate situation, a delegation of communist leaders - Chandra Rajeswara Rao, Makineni Basavapunnaiah, S.A.Dange and Ajoy Ghosh, -secretly went to Moscow. After a long wait, they were received by J V Stalin. After thorough discussions of the situation, Stalin directed the Indian Communist Party to give up the armed actions not only in Telangana but everywhere else in India. He advised the communist party to forge popular Fronts and fight the elections that the government announced for 1952. The communist
delegation came back and wrote to the Government of India for discussion to end the peoples war. Govind Ballabh Pant was the Home Minister in Delhi. He summarily rejected the fantastic claim of the rump of the communist guerrillas for parleys. The Communist Party then publicly renounced the armed revolution and formed the Popular Democratic Front (PDF) in Telangana under the leadership of Dr N M Jaisurya and P D Deshpande.
3. Since then the Communist Party has taken to electoral politics and undergone several splits. In 1976 under inspiration from the Chinese Community party, the Naxalite faction of the communists have taken to arms . There are fractions among them and by now they seem to have all come under one leadership . They once said, “ China’s Chairman Mao is our Chairman”. In the last 40 years there have been several battles wrongly called encounters between these Maoist PWG guerrilla units and several police formations of the Andhra Pradesh , Odisha, Chattisgarh and Government of India .
4. The leadership of these factions had passed from Bengalis to Andhras. In Andhra Pradesh whenever a new government like that of NT Rama Rao and Y.S.Rajasekhara Reddy came, there used to be discussions between the leaders of Maoist armies and government. They were all futile. The guerrilla war was resumed after every failed discussion.
5. It is curious that, after every battle between the PWG and armed forces of the sates, revolutionary writers and leaders of communist front organisations for civil liberalities, democratic rights, human rights etc immediately give out, earlier than the police, names of people who died in the armed exchanges. They assert the dead Maoists were in fact captured by the police and killed in cold blood. These announcements including the names of the people are given to the press even before the police authorities come to know of them. This shows that these revolutionary writers and champions of human rights and civil rights are the above ground infrastructure of the PWG . They call the battles as fake encounters . But the battles in which many policemen are killed are celebrated at victory rallies in JNU Delhi and Jadhavpur University Kolkata etc. “Encounter” deaths i.e those battles lost by the PWG are characterised as state organised murders. High Courts are petitioned to order inquiries. These above-ground PWG organisations are civil and democratic rights warriors never open their mouths against the Maoist armies killing those whom they characterise as informers, coverts, defectors and “enemies of the people”
6. This 40- year long civil war has no parallel in the history of any country, at any time. This is raging in India because, unlike at the time of Sardar Patel and Govind Vallabh Pant, there is no clarity regarding the aim of the communists in this country. There are now eight above ground communist parties all of which are just statement parties of India. In elections they come together but never did they get more than 3% to 5% of the popular vote. There are various above -ground popular front organisations of different descriptions working for the PWG. The PWG cannot be defeated unless the above -ground infrastructures are identified and eliminated. (879 words)
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