Comments

Dear Readers/Followers,

We have been able to fix the problem with commenting on the blog posts. The inconvenience caused by the malfunctioning of this section is regretted. Do comment on the posts and let us know what you think about the issues being highlighted here.

Thanks,
Moderator.

Tigers and Terrorism

http://www.sanctuaryasia.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=Tigers-and-Terrorism.html&Itemid=52

by Bittu Sahgal

I have been making calls across the country to establish whether or not the forest authorities are aware of the way in which insurgents, separatists and insurrectionists of all descriptions are using unprotected forest wealth to finance their anti-national activities. I was alarmed to discover that forest officers in most states, including Assam, Manipur, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and parts of Maharashtra ARE aware of this truth, but believe that other departments should be handling this issue as their jurisdiction does not extend beyond the areas in their charge.

There is a lot of truth in what they say, but in light of the kind of mayhem that was unleashed upon us in Mumbai recently at the hands of just ten terrorists, surely this systemic flaw in our country's administration should be plugged? By some accounts the revolving door between the illegal trades in narcotics, arms and wildlife could be offering anything in excess of Rs. 500 crores per annum to the purveyors of violence. If this terror supply-tap is not switched off, no amount of hand wringing, or television advice from experts is going to help India.

The root cause of the problem is the low priority extended to wildlife and forest protection by economists whose advice is gospel for both politicians and bureaucrats. We therefore end up with a situation where thousands of crores of rupees worth of standing timber, and all the mineral and wildlife wealth contained therein, is left in the charge of a miserably funded, poorly equipped and apathetic field force. When I wrote of these connections in 1999 in Sanctuary, I was invited to speak at the National Defence College and other official fora for a period of a few months. Then all was forgotten. I hope this is not going to be the fate of the recent impetus to shore our defence against terrorism this time too.

Open Letter to Noam Chomsky: Nirmalangshu Mukherjee

http://kafila.org/2009/10/21/open-letter-to-noam-chomsky-nirmalangshu-mukherjee/

Posted by Aditya Nigam

[We publish below an open letter to Noam Chomsky, written in the wake of his endorsement of a statement against 'Operation Green Hunt', issued recently by a large number of intellectuals in India and in the US. Nirmalangshu's letter is important because it raises some very serious questions that are being brushed under the carpet by sections of the radical intelligentsia. Unlike Nirmalangshu, I would not put 'radical' within scare quotes, since it is precisely this that highlights the immense tragedy of our times. Radical intellectuals - truly radical intellectuals - once again find themselves caught in this situation where in order to oppose state violence, they will wilfully turn a blind eye to the violence of armed nihilist gangs, simply because these claim to speak on behalf of the oppressed - a claim that Nirmalangshu's letter exposes in all its falsity. He lays bare how the politics that goes by the name of 'Maoism' (i.e. CPI-Maoist) believes in violently erasing all other voices of opposition to and criticism of the state, but that of itself. This brand of politics in fact lives in symbiosis with the state - delegitimizing all forms of mass democratic politics. At this moment one deeply misses the courageous voice of the late Balagopal - recently slightingly dubbed a 'liberal humanist' by a spokesperson of the Maoists, at a meeting meant to salute his memory. I cannot help recalling here the feeling of immense sadness many of us were overcome by, watching and hearing speakers at this meeting (in Delhi) for Balagopal - speakers who were ungenerous, if not carping and outright dismissive of the courage of conviction that was Balagopal. AN]

Dear Prof. Chomsky,

I saw your support to the statement issued by Sanhati in the form of a letter to the prime minister— endorsed by some intellectuals from India and abroad. Three points are transparent: (a) the Indian government is planning a massive armed operation in the tribal-hilly areas in the eastern part of the country, (b) the poorest of the poor and the historically marginalised will suffer the most in terms of loss of lives, livelihood and habitat, and (c) for whatever it’s worth, an all-out campaign by democratic forces is needed to resist the armed invasion of people’s habitat by any party. To that extent, the statement does bring out the urgency of the matter.

What is not so transparent from the statement is the condition that has brought about this state of affairs. It is said that large-scale neo-liberal policies—including formation of SEZs and encroachment of tribal habitats for mining and other forms of exploitation—has led to mass impoverishment. So, in desperation, the poor have allegedly taken up arms to defend themselves.

This picture is wrong in (i) ascribing the so-called armed struggle to the people, and (ii) being silent about the ’specific’ source of the current aggression by the state, namely, the armed operations of CPI (Maoist). The statement is otherwise right about the ‘general’ situation: sinister neo-liberal policies, growing impoverishment and marginalisation of the poor, and the resulting anger thereof.

Hundreds of organisations working at the grass roots level across the country are engaged in a variety of struggles against state repression and the insidious economic policies of the government. This includes many Gandhian, liberal and leftist organisations and individuals. Importantly, some of these—such as the organisations led by veteran activists Kanu Sanyal and Asim Chatterjee, among many others in Bengal, Andhra, Bihar, Orissa and elsewhere—also subscribe to maoism and are known initiators of the original naxalbari movement. Thus, the labels ‘maoist’ and ‘naxalite’ apply to a much wider category of organisations and individuals than the CPI (Maoist). Needless to say, even the wider category of maoists, not to mention just the CPI (Maoist), forms a tiny fraction of the broad democratic resistance to the policies of the state. The current armed operations of the state are directed ostensibly against the CPI (Maoist) in the areas under its control.

The state of course makes no such distinction in public; by identifying the wider category with the narrower one, it is constructing the opportunity to target the entire left-democratic fraternity in due course. To put the point differently, although the undeclared target of the state covers the entirety of left-democratic forces—as evidenced, for example, in the growing attacks on industrial workers especially in the private sector—the declared target currently consists of CPI (Maoist) and its area of control. The significance of this specificity is wholly missing from the statement you endorsed.

The identification of CPI (Maoist) with the entire resistance movement suits CPI (Maoist) as well. Its Supreme Commander recently declared from his hideout from a guerrilla-controlled area: ‘People, who are the makers of history, will rise up like a tornado under “our party’s leadership” to wipe out the reactionary blood-sucking vampires ruling our country … our party’s influence has grown stronger and “it” has now come to be recognised as the only genuine alternative before the people.’ (Open magazine). We will evaluate the factual content of this declaration below.

For now, it is interesting to note the character of the propaganda: somehow the propagandist interests of CPI (Maoist), the state, and the corporate media suitably converge. The Supreme Commander’s claim is grimly endorsed by the prime and the home ministers of India; according to them, the ‘naxalite menace’ is the greatest threat to internal security. It is also endorsed by the corporate media: the ‘menace’ is said to have spread in 15 of about 25 states, and in 180 of about 500 districts of the country—the numbers accelerating each month to encourage the prospect of a ‘civil war’ soon across the country. The Central government frequently convenes high-profile meetings of chief ministers, secretaries, and police chiefs of the country to meet the challenges posed by the menace. Cutting-edge special forces, carved out of the paramilitary forces, are being constructed and deployed in ‘naxal-infested’ areas. In recent months, even the army and the air force are beginning to enter into the picture. Naxalite actions—widespread arson, mass killings, and the ability to take on the security forces—are prominently reported in the corporate media with ill-concealed awe. This strand of the naxalite movement never had it so big in its close to 40 years of existence in hideouts in remote jungles.

As for the factual content of this dramatic story, I will briefly record some facts that do not find a place in the three-pronged propaganda.

- CPI (Maoist) is a comparatively new organisation formed in 2004 when two naxalite factions Maoist Coordination Committee (MCC) and People’s War Group (PWG)—located primarily in some tribal-inhabited jungle areas in Bihar and Andhra Pradesh respectively—decided to join hands after fighting a bloody war for area-control among themselves for close to two decades. By 2006, CPI (Maoist) was almost completely wiped out from Andhra after their presence there for close to forty years. They also lost major areas in Bihar. The organisation has basically shifted to two of the most backward, tiny, and newly-formed states of Jharkhand and Chatthisgarh. As noted, even there, their presence is basically centered in the areas of dense forest and adjacent tribal-dominated villages, especially in the Bastar district. Ostensibly, as the jungles extend from their headquarters, they have also developed some hideouts and some armed squads to create enough violence to mark their ‘presence’ in West Bengal, Orissa, and elsewhere. To sum, they have essentially failed to emerge out of portions of jungles of eastern India after over four decades of campaign for this particular strand of ‘Marxism-Leninism-Maoism’.

- The organisation has no presence whatsoever in the vast agrarian and industrial terrains of the rest of the country. It has no trade union, no peasant organisation worth its name, no penetration in the dalit, youth, and women’s movements. But it seems to have captured the imagination of sections of elite, urban, and ‘radical’ intelligentsia in Calcutta and Delhi who have impressive connections with some Indian intellectuals settled in universities abroad, as the statement you endorsed highlights (earlier, this intellectual support used to come from Bombay and Hyderabad). The phenomenon is historically familiar.

- ‘The only genuine alternative before the people’ is viewed as a terrorist organisation by none other than Kanu Sanyal and many other active maoists, not to speak of broad spectrums of left parties and organisations most of whom do not find a representation in the statement. The basic reason why Sanyal calls CPI (Maoist) ‘terrorists’ is as follows.

Ever since its inception in 1969, this brand of maoism rejected all classical forms of mass struggle and adopted the sinister doctrine of individual annihilation of ‘class enemies’. ‘Class enemies’ typically consisted of hapless, poorly armed police constables, petty landlords and traders, and an assorted category of ‘informers and traitors’. Most notably, the category of ‘class enemies’ also included grass-root cadres—not their leaders—of the parliamentary left. In the states of West Bengal and Andhra, where this campaign originated, the parliamentary left was typically the only organisation present at the grass root. The annihilation of these ‘class enemies’—typically, middle peasants, school teachers, party wholetimers, etc—effectively meant capturing of areas, by means of guns and knives, already under the left. To that end, the squads first targetted their own maoist fraternity who refused to subscribe to their murderous politics. After the ‘renegades’ were silenced, the next target was cadres of CPI(M), CPI, etc.

This ‘red terror’ basically led to the dismantling of democratic movements in the erstwhile red bastions. In West Bengal, a neo-fascist regime of the Congress Party won the elections handsomely and watched the mutual killings of the left with glee. Once the task was accomplished, the government turned on the maoists and the remaining left and white terror ruled West Bengal for five years. During the nightmare, all forms of democratic movements virtually disappeared from the state as lumpen youth accompanied by paramilitary forces roamed the streets.

In time, almost all of the initiators of this campaign realised their grave mistakes and those who survived encounters, long imprisonment, and psychological collapse, returned to classical mass lines in a variety of forms, including participation in the elections. However, a fragment continued the murderous politics in the jungles of Andhra and Bihar in the form of two organisations MCC and PWG, later unifying into CPI (Maoist), as noted.

Two recent—and contrasting—events in the neighbourhood throw significant light on the consequences of this brand of politics. In Sri Lanka, a vast freedom movement of Tamil nationalism arose about three decades ago. As the movement became progressively militant, it gave rise to a formidable militarist organisation: Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE). LTTE declared armed struggle, systematically eliminated all other groups advocating Tamil liberation, took to the jungles, and launched a civil war.

There were several rounds of ‘negotiations’ between the government and the LTTE, often with international effort. LTTE refused to give up arms and join the democratic process; thus, it used each pause in the hostilities to consolidate its forces. After over twenty years of bloody war with Sri Lankan security forces, resulting in incalculable suffering of Tamil people, the LTTE was recently wiped out from Sri Lanka. The calamity facilitated the emergence of a neo-fascist regime in Colombo; it also left behind nearly a million hapless Tamil refugees at the mercy of this government. With all moderate forces from both the sides eliminated from the scene, the Tamil freedom movement is now faced with a historical setback after over hundred thousand deaths.

The Supreme Commander (cited above), whose organisation was trained in guerrilla warfare by former commandos of LTTE, agrees with the consequences: ‘There is no doubt that the movement for a separate sovereign Tamil Eelam has suffered a severe setback with the defeat and considerable decimation of the LTTE. The Tamil people and the national liberation forces are now leaderless.’ But he puts the blame elsewhere: ‘The jingoistic rallies and celebrations organised by the government and Sinhala chauvinist parties all over Sri Lanka in the wake of Prabhakaran’s death and the defeat of the LTTE show the national hatred for Tamils nurtured by Sinhala organisations and the extent to which the minds of ordinary Sinhalese are poisoned with such chauvinist frenzy.’ Nonetheless, he hopes that ‘the ground remains fertile for the resurgence of the Tamil liberation struggle. Even if it takes time, the war for a separate Tamil Eelam is certain to revive, taking lessons from the defeat of the LTTE.’ Although he is prepared to learn—perhaps, tactical—‘lessons’, he does not seem to have any problems with the militarist, sectarian, and exclusivist politics of the LTTE.

In sharp contrast, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) (CPN(M)) also launched a civil war against a ruthless feudal monarchy protected by the Royal Nepalese Army after all democratic methods failed. The war lasted nearly a decade with the CPN(M)-directed People’s Liberation Army dominating vast terrains of the country with massive popular support. The basic point to note is that what CPN(M) strove for during the armed struggle—republic, constituent assembly, supremacy of the parliament created by universal franchise, etc.—India already has. Once that was achieved in Nepal, a genuine armed struggle—far far superior than anything Indian ‘maoists’ have ever envisaged—was immediately brought to a halt. CPN (M) proved its point by winning over 40% of the seats in the interim parliament after the republic was established. With this mandate in hand, innovative, peaceful but militant processes were then adopted to broaden the democratic base even in a context in which the possibility of a counter-revolution orchestrated by the ousted monarch, the army and the ruling elites of India loomed large.

The current impasse in Nepal is about the supremacy of the parliament over the army. As the leader of CPN(M) Prachanda points out, the democratic movement is at a crossroads due to this seminal conflict. Indian republicanism addressed and solved that problem 60 years ago.

During the war, PWG—followed by CPI (Maoist)—maintained close contact with CPN(M). But after the CPN(M) joined—in fact, established—the democratic process in Nepal, the CPI (Maoist) does not find any lessons to be learned. This time the blame is on CPN(M). As the Supreme Commander puts it: ‘It is indeed a great tragedy that the CPN(M) has chosen to abandon the path of protracted people’s war and pursue a parliamentary path in spite of having de facto power in most of the countryside.’ In a letter to CPN(M), CPI (Maoist) ‘advised’ the former not to give up armed struggle until the ‘old order’ is smashed and the CPN (M) is able to seize power all by itself to usher in ‘new democratic revolution’. However, the Supreme Commander remains optimistic since ‘given the great revolutionary traditions of the CPN(M), we hope that the inner-party struggle will repudiate the right opportunist line pursued by its leadership, give up revisionist stands and practices, and apply minds creatively to the concrete conditions of Nepal.’ So, the statesman-like leadership of Prachanda is ‘revisionist’.

Beyond the bluster, it is not difficult to discern that, no matter what, the CPI (Maoist) is not prepared to give up its fatal policies. They are not open to any debates, no one can enter their ‘liberated zones’ without unconditional support to their line. Like Prabhakaran and his LTTE, having meticulously secured hideouts for themselves in ‘impregnable’ dense forests protected by squads armed with sophisticated weapons, they are prepared to carry on ‘protracted war’ for many years before their inevitable decimation. In the process, not only will the tribals under their control suffer immensely, it will give the growingly authoritarian state a golden opportunity to smash whatever avenues of hard-won democratic resistance still remain in place.

As noted, the CPI (Maoist) has exactly two channels of ‘popular’ support: the tribals they control and a section of ‘radical’, urban intelligentsia. It is the support of the latter that gives the CPI (Maoist) significant propaganda mileage and a false impression of invincibility and popular support. By posing the current military preparations of the state only as a state vs. people conflict, the statement you endorsed effectively exonerates the CPI (Maoist) and plays into their hands.

Sincerely

Nirmalangshu Mukherji
Department of Philosopy
University of Delhi

See Also:

http://development-dialogues.blogspot.com/2009/11/operation-green-hunt-who-is-state.html

The Pleasures of Release

http://www.hindustantimes.com/editorial-views-on/opeds/The-pleasures-of-release/Article1-470640.aspx

By Aman Sethi

While there is always the thrill of holding people hostage against their desire, the Maoists, of late, seem to have discovered the pleasure of release.

Having spanked the State into submission by beheading Francis Induwar; by freeing policeman Atindranath Datta and ‘peacefully’ vandalising the Bhubaneswar-New Delhi Rajdhani Express, the Maoists appear to be signaling a new phase in their troubled relationship with the State.

Now that the State and the media know that the Maoists are capable of taking the pleasure equals pain principle to its logical climax, freeing hostages and good-naturedly scribbling slogans on trains appears like a far more civilised way of fomenting revolution.

Just recently, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi expressed their willingness to break free from the handcuffs of current discourse and engage with those who abstain (from violence).

Maoist leader Kishenji has insisted that while the rebels shall not lay down their arms, talks with the West Bengal and central governments must be preceded by the unconditional release of all prisoners taken captive since military operations began in Lalgarh in June, a withdrawal central forces from the area and a declaration of ceasefire by both sides.

In the meantime, Home Minister P Chidambaram has warned that he can keep his velvet gloves on for only so long; thereafter it’s steel fisting all the way. The victims of military operation shall inevitably be the poor tribals who have love for neither State nor rebel. Now if only the Maoists would take themselves in hand.

Maoism’s other side

http://www.hindustantimes.com/editorial-views-on/editorials/Maoism-s-other-side/Article1-474600.aspx

Dilip Simeon

There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic – Albert Camus

Spokesmen of Maoist extremism have recently expressed regret for beheading a police officer and explained their actions as a defence of the oppressed. Their comrades’ brutality they say, is an aberration. They cite instances of state violence to justify actions they claim are undertaken in self-defence. There is more to this than meets the eye. Maoist theory holds that India is a semi-colonial polity with a bogus constitution that must be overthrown by armed force. The comrades view all their actions as part of a revolutionary war. Their foundational documents declare armed struggle to be “the highest and main form of struggle” and the “people’s army” its main organisation. In war, morality is suspended and limits cast aside. War also results in something the Pentagon calls “collateral damage.” Is it true that Naxalite brutality is only an aberration?

On August 15, 2004, the Maoists killed nine persons in Andhra Pradesh, including a legislator, a driver and a municipal worker. On August 14, 2005, Saleema 52, a cook in a mid-day kitchen in Karimnagar was beaten to death by Maoists for being a “police informer.” This was the second woman killed by them in a fortnight. A former Naxalite, Bhukya Padma 18, was hacked to death in Marimadla village on July 30. On September 12, 2005 it slit the throats of 17 villagers in Belwadari village in Giridih. Landmine blasts in February 2006 killed 26 tribals and injured 50 in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh. The victims were returning from religious festivals, and some from anti-Naxalite rallys. Another blast on March 25 killed 13 persons.

Some of these killings may be incorrectly reported, some carried out by local cadre on their own. But the comrades clearly believe in political assassination. Moreover, the decisions to kill are taken in a shadowy realm wherein the fault of the victim is decided by whim. Truth and falsehood are dispensed with because the Party is Always Right. Their targets have no chance of appealing for mercy, and no one will be punished for collateral damage. And all this is justified because the Maoists are at war - a circular argument, because whether or not we are at war is another whim.

But there is an elephant in India’s drawing room. Maoists openly defy the Constitution, which they say is a mask for a brutal order. Are not our mainstream parties equally contemptuous of the law? Why did the NDA regime try and do away with Schedule 5 of the Constitution, that protects tribal lands from encroachment? Why is it still being violated? Is there not prima-facie evidence of politicians’ involvement in massacres in Delhi and Gujarat in 1984 and 2002? Why haven’t they been brought to justice? In 1987, 40 Muslims of Meerut were killed in custody. Why did the case take eighteen years to come to court? The BJP and the Congress both supported the private army named Salwa Judum with disastrous consequences for Chhatisgarh’s population. Even the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court criticised the States’ recklessness. In 2007 the West Bengal government despatched an illegal armed force to crush its opponents in Nandigram. India’s rulers regularly protect criminals, and part of the public is complicit in this. Policemen in dereliction of duty get promoted. Mass murderers are hailed as heroes. Why are we addicted to the double-standard?

Those who believe in virtuous murder are today calling upon the democratic conscience. Does democracy include the right to kill? Our left-extremists have changed the world for the worse. Along with right-wing radicals, they ground their arguments on passionate rhetoric and a claim to superior knowledge. Fighters for justice have become judge and executioner rolled into one – in a word, pure tyrants. Every killing launches yet another cycle of trauma and revenge. Will Francis Induvar’s son ever dream of becoming a socialist? Should not socialists hold themselves to a higher standard than the system they oppose?

Symbolism counts for a lot in Indian politics. If the Maoist party is interested in negotiations, I suggest a demand that will expose the hypocritical nature of our polity: ask the government to remove the portrait of V.D. Savarkar from the Central Hall of Parliament, placed there in 2003. If it cannot do that, ask it to place Charu Mazumdar’s portrait alongside. Why not? Both were extreme patriots. Both believed in political assassination, both hated Gandhi and both insisted that the end justifies the means.

My suggestion will meet with indignation. But the deep link between these two currents of extremism is the unutterable truth of Indian history. Hindutva is the Maoism of the elite. In 1969, an ultra-leftist Hindi writer penned a diatribe titled Gandhi Benakaab that praised Godse as a true son of India. In 42 years of activity, Naxalites hardly ever confronted the communalists; although to be fair, one ultra-left group in Punjab did combat the Khalistanis. The assassination of a VHP Swami in Kandhamal in August 2008 is the only example. The Maoists owned the crime, but the Sangh Parivar vented its wrath upon Christian villagers. Thousands were displaced and over 30 were killed. The comrades were unwilling or unable to prevent the carnage.

Savarkar’s acolyte Nathuram Godse murdered Mahatma Gandhi. In 1969, the Justice Kapur Commission concluded that the conspiracy was hatched by Savarkar and his group. Sardar Patel said as much to Nehru in February 1948. If Savarkar deserves to be honoured by the Nation, so does Charu. Since the government is unlikely to accept either option, we may finally come to a debate about why one kind of political murder is anti-national, while the other is patriotic virtue.

Operation Green Hunt: Who is the state hunting?

Press Release

30^th October 2009

Findings of fact-finding team into 17^th September and 1^st October murders by security forces in Dantewada

The government claims that Operation Green Hunt is a necessary measure to bring ‘civilian administration to 2.5 million people’ in areas which the Maoists control The Home Ministry has admitted that it will take at least 18 months to show the results. Begun in September, Operation Green Hunt has been accompanied with a huge publicity campaign against the Maoists and news ranging from beheading of a police officer to the most recent ‘train jacking’. What have been suppressed in this vehement campaign are violent actions carried out by the security forces in the name of ‘flushing out Maoists’. For instance, no substantive information has been given in the media regarding the Gachanpalli killings of 17^th September 2009 and 1^st October killings at Gompad and Chintagufa villages in Chhattisgarh by security forces. Nor have any reports appeared regarding detentions and arrests of several young men on 1^st October. Information regarding looting, burning and torture which accompanied these operations have remained unknown. Also, that people have fled their villages and are living in make shift sheds in the forest, has gone unnoticed. The fact that on both these days, security forces (Cobra, local police and SPOs and Salwa Judum leaders such as Boddu Raja) went on a rampage—stabbing and killing people, looting, burning houses and forcibly picking up young men—is the other side of Operation Green Hunt which has been carefully kept away from public scrutiny.

In order to ascertain these facts, a 15 member fact-finding team visited Dantewada area between 10^th and 12^th October 2009. The team comprised members from PUCL (Chhattisgarh), PUDR (Delhi) Vanvasi Chetna Ashram (Dantewada), Human Rights Law Network (Chhattisgarh), ActionAid (Orissa), Manna Adhikar (Malkangiri) and Zilla Adivasi Ekta Sangh (Malkangiri). The team was initially denied permission and was repeatedly questioned and interrogated at Dornapal and Errabore police camps on the way. The team stayed at Nendra village and met witnesses and victims from several villages and gathered testimonies from them. Subsequently, the team spoke to District Collector and Superintendent of Police, Dantewada. Given below are some of the observations made by the team.

17^th September 2009: 7 villagers brutally killed by security forces.

1. Gachanpalli murders: In the early hours of 17^th September, 6 villagers were murdered by security forces in this village. Dudhi Muye (70 yrs) who could hardly walk was murdered after her breasts were cut off. Family members who had fled the scene on seeing the security forces, found her lying dead in a pool of blood. Similarly, Kawasi Ganga (70 yrs) who could barely see was stabbed and murdered in his bed. He too was found by his family members who had fled from the house and had taken shelter in the forest. Madvi Deva (25 yrs) was tied to a tree and shot at three times and then beheaded. His grandfather who was accompanying him back to the village was a witness to this. The family hasn’t found his body. Three other villagers, Madvi Joga (60 yrs), Madvi Hadma (35 yrs) and Madkam Sulla were stabbed and murdered. The last two were killed in front of one witness, the wife of Madkam Sulla. Madvi Joga was killed after being stripped naked while ploughing his little plot of land. All the houses were ransacked, broken and burnt down. Family members are either living in sheds in the forests or have taken shelter with relatives. Many others have also taken similar shelter as their houses were burnt down by the security forces.

The case of Madvi Deva: This young man was a resident of Singanpalli village and had gone out in the morning of 17^th for some family work. When he did not return his family searched for him. Two days later, a Patel from another village informed the family that he had been shot and killed by the security forces and his body was buried in the compound of Chintagufa PS. The Patel was asked to supervise the burial in the PS.

2. Torture: Burnt in hot oil: Muchaki Deva (60 yrs) of Onderpara was grazing cattle on the morning of 17^th September. He was caught, beaten and dragged into the village by security forces. He was hung on a branch of a tree and pushed into a pot of hot oil which was kept ready under the tree. He was then pulled out and poured over with water. As a result, the upper part of his body is severely burnt and he has developed maggots in his wounds. He gravely ill and although he has no access to medical aid he has been taken to Bhadrachalam by members of the fact-finding team.

Tied and paraded: 6 villagers, including 3 women were tied and paraded through Gachanpalli and other villages where the security forces went. Fortunately, they escaped as timely rains made it possible for them to flee.

3. Forced displacement and terror: families of those who were murdered by security forces and those whose houses have been burnt down vengefully, have fled the village and are living in make shift sheds in the forest. The condition of the others is no better as the entire village has been terrorized by security forces.

1^st October 2009: 10 villagers brutally killed by security forces

1. Gompad ‘encounter’: SP Dantewada described the operations in Gompad village on 1^st October as an ‘encounter’. An encounter with a difference: while 9 villagers were killed by security forces in the village and their bodies were left there, no casualties were inflicted on security forces. This too the SP confirmed. 4 members of one family, Madvi Bajar, his wife, Madvi Subbi, their married daughter, Kartam Kanni and their young daughter, Madvi Mutti were stabbed and killed inside house. So too were two other villagers from Bhandarpadar, Muchaki Handa and Madkam Deva, who were staying the night over at Madvi Bajar’s house on their way home from Andhra Pradesh where they had been working. Another couple, Soyam Subba and Soyam Jogi were stabbed and killed inside their house. Yet another villager, Madvi Enka was stabbed inside the house and then dragged all over the village. Before leaving the village, the security forces shot him and left his body. All 9 deaths, like the ones on 17^th September, were preceded by stabbing and the bodies were left in the village. When the team asked the SP about recovery of bodies from the encounter site, the SP stated that Naxalites had ‘taken them away’.

More killings: In Chintagufa, a 45yr old man, Tomra Mutta was stabbed and shot inside his house. On seeing the sudden arrival of the security forces, Tomra Mutta ran to protect his family. He was shot in the process. The team confirmed 10 murders that had taken place that day but there is apprehension that the total number of killings may be much higher as many villages could not be contacted or accessed. The SP confirmed that two sets of raid parties set off that day comprising of Cobras and local police. Hence, the details with the team do not give the entire and exact picture of how many villages were attacked and targeted.

2. Torture: Travails of a 2yr old: Madvi Bajar’s grandson was not spared. He is all of two and yet the security forces beat him, cut four of his fingers, broke his teeth and cut off part of his tongue. He has been taken to Bhadrachalam by members of the fact-finding team.

Witnesses reported several instances of harassment at the hands of the security forces. In Gompad, one villager was caught and interrogated and then shot at in his leg. He managed to run away but still has the bullet injury and has had no medical treatment. In Chintagufa, security forces tied another man and made him walk to Injaram PS. They severely beat him and also attacked him on his toe with a knife. He was finally let off in the evening. In Gompad, one young mother was shot at under her knee by security forces inside her house. Her four children fell on her and she was thus, saved. Without any medical treatment for over two weeks, she was first brought to Dantewada, and now to Delhi where she has been operated upon and is undergoing treatment.

3. Arrests: 8 arrested and 2 missing: Ten young men between 18-32 years were beaten and picked up by security forces from Mukudtong and Jinitong villages on 1^st October. Eight have been shown as arrested in a case that was registered on 3/10 at Konta PS under various sections of IPC, Arms Act and Explosives Act. They are currently lodged in Dantewada jail. However, two still remain missing. Female relatives who went in search of those missing at the Konta PS were harassed, made to affix their thumb impression on blank documents and driven away. When they returned two days later, they were abused, told not to return and informed that the men had been taken to an unknown place.
4. Looting and Burning of property and houses: As many as 9 instances of looting and burning by security forces were reported to the team. Unlike the 17^th September killings which were followed by arson and burning of the houses of those murdered, security forces on 1^st October looted homes. They took away paddy, pusles, brass pots and poultry from many homes. Money, ranging from 300/- to 10,000/- was stolen from these houses. Destruction of property, particularly burning down of houses was carried out in as many as seven instances.
5. Presence of SPOs and Salwa Judum leader with security forces: Residents of Mukudtong village confirmed that the ‘raid’ party was accompanied by known Salwa Judum leader, Boddu Raja of Injaram camp and they recognised SPOs Pande Soma of Phandeguda village and Ganga of Asarguda village. Residents of Gompad village were able to recognize SPO Madvi Buchcha who belongs to their own village.
6. Forced displacement and terror: Several families are living in makeshift sheds in the forest area as their houses have been burnt down. Those who are unable to run and flee are living in terror in the villages and residents and relatives have helped them to repair their houses and have given them other support.

Conclusion:

While the team could only meet residents of some of the villages, there is apprehension that a much larger number of people were killed on both days in other villages. The same is true for instances of torture, loot and detentions. The clamp down on information makes it impossible to know what exactly is happening in distant and far flung villages. However, what is clear is that the operations conducted by security forces have compelled villagers to leave their villages, flee into the forests and/or take shelter with relatives in other villages.

The condition of those who are residing in their villages is precarious and vulnerable. Given that the government has not complied with the Supreme Court order on rehabilitation of displaced families (families which were displaced in the earlier phase of Salwa Judum violence), the new and current phase of violence by security forces has added to the crisis in these remote and inaccessible villages. Instead of rehabilitating people, the government, in the name of combating Maoism, is bent upon unleashing its lethal paramilitary forces and evicting people from their villages. It is imperative to immediately end to this policy of eviction and terror and enable people to settle in their villages.

Unanswered Questions:

1. If each of the deceased were ‘maoists’, then why did the security forces leave the bodies in the villages? What was the point of the brutality that preceded killing?
2. Equally, if those injured were also Maoists, then why didn’t the police arrest them? Why were they not given medial aid?
3. Why was an old man tortured brutally in hot oil? Why was a two year old subjected to such torture?
4. Why were houses looted and burnt?
5. Why is justice denied in these cases? Why haven’t the families of the deceased, those injured and tortured and those whose houses were looted given compensation?

Demands

1. That the government must accept responsibility for murders committed on 17^th September and 1^st October by security forces and file FIRs against those responsible. Further, the government must acknowledge all instances of torture, illegal detention and destruction of property. FIRs must be lodged in each case and compensation given in each instance.
2. That an impartial inquiry (comprising civil society representatives and representatives of organizations working in the area) be conducted into the incidents of murder and acts of arson, loot and torture on 17^th September and 1^st October by security forces. The focus should be to bring out the truth behind these killings an also investigate the extent of the operations carried out on both days.
3. That the government must immediately take steps and show its conviction in the Supreme Court order on rehabilitation of villages and implement it immediately. The above described incidents of 17^th September and 1^st October have created fear and panic and compelled villagers to flee. Unless the government implements the SC order, villagers will not be able to live in their villages.
4. That along with the implementation of the above mentioned order, there be an immediate end to cordon and search operation carried out by security forces in these areas. Lack of rehabilitation coupled with an ever increasing size of the paramilitary forces in such backward areas with low population density raises fears of repeated incidents, such as the ones described above.

Signed by

Sharmila Purkayastha, PUDR

Asish Gupta, PUDR

Himanshu Kumar, VCA

On behalf of fact-finding team

[received via an email]

See also:

http://development-dialogues.blogspot.com/2009/11/open-letter-to-noam-chomsky.html

Maoist Martyrdom Vs State Barbarism

http://www.countercurrents.org/sagar051109.htm

By Satya Sagar

Is Maoism in India really the only response to poverty and lack of development? Is an armed rebellion the only way to change the way the Indian State operates? Will such a movement lead to a better future for underprivileged people in this country? Are other forms of mass democratic struggles an alternative option at all?

These are the questions that haunted me as I sat through a public hearing on drought at Daltonganj in Jharkhand’s Palamu district late October this year. Questions that are not new and have been debated repeatedly within the various strands of the Indian left movement for several decades now, with no clear answers as yet.

While I mused, there was this young woman standing on the stage, slowly edging towards the mike, patiently waiting for her turn to speak. She need not have said anything at all. Her emaciated, frail frame, the harassed look on her face and the tears silently welling up in her sunken eyes had already conveyed to us this was another tale of unmitigated tragedy.

Barely in her early twenties, she had been diagnosed with tuberculosis a few months ago. Her husband was already on his deathbed due to the same affliction as there was no public health center near her village. Treatment in town was obviously unaffordable. The drought raging in the district, reported to be the worst in over half a century, would end up wiping out her entire family she explained in a quiet, matter of fact tone.

As we sat there, the small ‘jury’ of three or four of us who had come from Delhi and Ranchi to listen to the woes of Palamu’s villagers felt much, much smaller. For her horror story was only one out of some 3000 similar ones of neglect, deprivation and outright desperation that tensely waited to be recalled that early winter afternoon.

The old man who never got his old age pension, the abandoned widow on the verge of starvation, the landless worker who slogged for wages that never arrived, the child born with a deformed hip a decade ago and still hobbling his way through childhood. This contrasted with the fact that thousands of crores of rupees had been allocated for employment guarantee schemes, subsidised rations, public health and infrastructure schemes – all siphoned off somewhere between the Indian capital New Delhi and the state capital Ranchi. Stolen by a kleptocracy that dares to call itself the ‘elected’ representatives of the Indian people.

And yet, poverty and lack of development are not the only reasons why the Naxals or Maoists, the MCC or whatever you want to call them thrive in Palamu. It is also the lack of respect and dignity that the dalits and adivasis of these parts have suffered for centuries, their abject humiliation by the ‘upper castes’ continuing without redress in Independent India.

Many, many moons ago when the first movements for justice started in this district they were led by the Communist Party of India, the Socialists, the Gandhians. Struggles against feudal practices like the ‘right to the first night’, which forced the brides of Dalit men to spend the first fortnight after marriage as concubines of upper-caste landlords- a ‘custom’ enforced at gun-point. Or against the practice of bonded labour whereby generations of families slaved for their ‘creditors’, the interest on their loans accumulating faster than the rivers of sweat they were able to shed.

In the seventies, when these popular struggles died down due to changing priorities or exhaustion or corruption or whatever of these organisations the Naxals had moved into this vaccum- with their guns. So somehow it is not just the failure of the Indian state to deliver the basic needs of the people we are talking about here but the inability of our mass, democratic movements to maintain a consistent long-term presence too.

Do the Maoists have popular support? Among the landless, the poor, the ‘lower castes’, the adivasis the answer obviously would be yes as in the initial years their interventions did help wipe out the worst of feudal excesses. Most of their cadres come from these oppressed sections of society though the occasional ‘upper caste’ youth too have joined.

Have their actions led to an overall improvement in the lives of the people? Well, yes and no. Yes, because as mentioned their activities have boosted the morale of the poor and the oppressed. No, because a high morale is all very well but a highly nutritious meal or a functioning high school would be still better and these are still elusive.

The Maoists with simple Newtonian logic had achieved the first step of doing away with the fear of feudal oppression. Greater the inertia of an object, greater the force required to move it. Shoot a few really bad, ‘upper-caste’ warlords in the area and this has the force-multiplier effect of, at least for a short while, moving mountains of unaccounted power.

The next several steps of organising people, winning all the basic things they crave for- food, water, healthcare, escape from poverty and so on has proved far more difficult for the Maoists. In other words, the details of day-to-day life are missing from their strategy. There is only so much martyrdom and bloodshed any population can take.

It is also true though, once the gun has been taken up by the oppressed, the State weighs in heavily on the side of the local oppressors. The latter themselves escalate the levels of violence and it becomes impossible to do anything in the open. No more public meetings, no rallies, no discussions and debates among the people, no mass organisations. In other words none of those basic ingredients required to build a future, participative people’s democracy.

At the same time, the underground- that dark and dangerous space so tantalising from a safe distance to angst-ridden, urban radicals- is fraught with enough problems of its own. The constant hiding, the secrecy and suspicion bordering on paranoia, the inability to communicate with comrades or carry out political education of cadre, the costly lapses and subsequent losses- all leading to the near negation of the movement’s original objectives.

Every now and then a creative Maoist cadre somewhere will try to do something different at the local level like run schools, crackdown on social evils, mobilise people for militant struggles that don’t involve the use of arms These struggles, wherever they have occurred, have always been hugely popular with the people. Those in power, who had complained about the violence of the Maoists, would now worry about their non-violent methods and at some point of time step in with their jackboots to crush the experiment.

Unfortunately, I suspect, the Maoist leadership too sees these experiments as ideologically soft, reformist or even worse as too ‘Gandhian’ and doesn’t really believe in them in any way. It occasionally allows them to happen with the idea that ‘deviants’ within their fold can always be brought back to the ‘correct path’ one way or the other. The lives of the people, after all, can really change for the better only when the ‘New Democratic Revolution’ happens.

In the worldview of the Maoist ideologues the physics of the armed struggle will some day square the grand mathematical equation of social injustice on one side with the predations of capitalism and imperialism on the other. Their solutions are alarmingly final ones, all derived from the dead abstractions of physics and mathematics, whether they correspond with the living biological needs of the faceless ‘people’ and ‘masses’ or not.

Nobody knows what this ‘New Democratic Revolution’ really means, how many hands and feet it has or whether it prefers sugar and milk with its coffee or not. Or for that matter, why the Dalits and Adivasis of India should fight for this particular model of the future and not something else. The indigenous people of the Indian subcontinent for example may be better off fighting for complete autonomy from the rest of India instead of taking on the burden of carrying out the entire ‘Indian revolution’. And if the Dalits and Adivasis should take up the gun why not poor Muslims, many of whose social and economic indicators are even worse? Also if this Revolution does happen some day, why should it be confined to the borders of India – why not South Asia as a whole or even beyond?

Again, nobody even knows when this Revolution is supposed to happen or be finally declared ‘successful’ but it is believed passionately that nothing but the gun can lead the people of India to this utopia. As one of the Maoist ideologues caught by the police recently in Jharkhand reportedly told the media with frightening clarity, ‘the bloodshed will stop only when the Revolution is over”. He did not bother to set a timeframe- they could be fighting for the next 200 years for all we know- all their martyrs looking nice on wall posters in the meanwhile. Will there be anyone out there left to recognise the ‘victory’ when it finally comes?

I personally do believe in the right of the masses to wield the gun if need be. When faced with a violent ruling class, it is an ugly but understandable premise. Mao was right when he said ‘power flows from the barrel of a gun’. The problem is about all the things he did not mention and that do not flow from guns – like water, food, medicines, peace or ultimately for that matter, even guarantees of justice and democracy. Making a fetish of armed struggle to the neglect of every other way of operating is not serious politics at all and rather indicative of the nihilist mindset behind such strategies- ‘jalaa do, mitaa do, yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaaye tho kya hei’.

The Indian State too on its part is appropriately barbaric in everything it does, making each wild accusation and conspiracy theory of the Maoists seem like a profound, well-studied thesis. Rs. 470 crores is the sum given by the Central Government for Jharkhand’s anti-Naxalite operations- to be spent on more arms for the police and more uniforms for the unemployed youth who go on to become the Indian police. If that sum were spent sincerely on the kind of people queuing up to complain at the Daltonganj public hearing there may have been no need for either the Naxal or the noxious cop.

Instead the State builds schools in the Naxal dominated areas and fills them with policemen- there are 3000 schools right now in Jharkhand full of Cobras and Scorpions or similar species lower down the evolutionary order. It is clueless about who is really a Maoist and who is not so it ends up blindly lashing out at some innocent folk within the reach of its very short and clumsy arms.

Again, the State, for all its prattle about ‘rule of law’, also does nothing to encourage any form of peaceful resistance either. Mahendra Singh of the CPI(ML) Liberation, the brave and only MLA in the Jharkhand Assembly exposing corruption in high places, was gunned down in broad daylight in early 2005. An investigation by an official committee has implicated a senior police officer, who continues to rise up the hierarchy instead of being booked for murder!

Just a year and half ago Lalit Mehta, a bright young engineer and certainly no Maoist, was shot dead in Palamu district as he exposed corruption and organised social audits of the NREGA or employment guarantee scheme. His killers, local politically connected mafia, have not yet been apprehended and may never be. All this obviously sends out a chilling message to anyone who wants to follow Lalit’s path of ‘unarmed’ activism.

The truth is that those who run the Indian State and sections of the Indian population who benefit from its policies really don’t give a damn for the people the Naxals or other left forces are trying to mobilise. The Dalits, Adivasis and the poor in general can all shrivel up and die for all they care. Whether these folks want it or not they will be subjected to a perverse development process that involves driving nails through their flesh and laying rail lines across their bones so that a small minority of Indians can have their ‘infrastructure’ and feel like a ‘superpower’. If they choose to fight back they will be crushed like flies- the endless legions of unemployed Indian youth from around the country marshalled in uniforms for this genocide.

That is precisely why when the masked Maoist leader Kishenji openly mocks the Indian State on prime time television and invites it to battle he should be careful, for he may get exactly what he wishes. The State would like nothing better than a war against its own citizens, as it becomes another opportunity to make lots of money, replenish its arsenal, demolish whatever little democratic space is left in the country and rollback all resistance to its skewed policies for decades to come. A war, for which the Maoists too, despite all their bravado, are simply not prepared well enough.

Both the Maoist leadership and the Indian State it seems are keen on playing with each other only one game called ’revolution and counter-revolution’, which ends only when either of the two players ceases to exist forever.

One thing is very clear though. If a new game is to emerge forcefully on the Indian stage soon, far greater number of Indian citizens need to get down to the task of solving the problems of poverty, oppression and injustice than involved currently. The situation today, more than ever before, calls for the building of many, many more creative mass movements to establish the rights of the people than out there right now.

As the late K.Balagopal pointed out so insightfully in a piece on violence versus non-violence in the Economic and Political Weekly a few years ago, neither method has really made much difference to the course of Indian state policies since Independence. In other words, there is simply not enough happening to bring about change given the scale of the country’s various problems.

There is no point though in blaming either the Indian State or the Maoists, both of whom will continue to do only what they know best. While Indian democracy is too important to be left to ‘elected’ politicians Maoist martyrdom by itself will also never be enough to change the Indian State.

It is for the rest of India to decide whether they are going to be mere spectators, pliant players or makers of a different destiny for themselves and their society.

Satya Sagar is a writer, journalist and videomaker based in New Delhi. He can be contacted at sagarnama@gmail.com

Will the mindset from the past change?

http://www.hindu.com/2009/11/09/stories/2009110955350800.htm

Amit Bhaduri & Romila Thapar

Those that have governed in tribal areas must share the responsibility for the negligence of the adivasis. The proposals for a multi-lateral dialogue should be set in that context.

There has been a flurry of concern as also vituperation over the activities of the Maoists in the forests that are mostly home to tribal society. There is a confrontation between the state and this society through the intervention of the Maoists. One pauses while reading the speeches of those in authority and thinks back to the past. The texts of the past represent the people of the forest, the forest-dwellers, largely as “the Other” – the rakshasas, and those who moved like an ink-black cloud through the forest with their bloodshot eyes, who ate and drank all the wrong things, had the wrong rules of sexuality and, as strange creatures, were far removed from ‘us.’

Kautilya in the Arthashastra condemns them as troublemakers and Ashoka threatens the atavikas, the forest-dwellers, without telling us why. The interest of various kingdoms in extending control over forests has an obvious explanation. The forests supplied elephants for the army, mineral wealth including iron, timber for building, and by clearing forests the acreage of cultivable land increased and the consequent agriculture brought in revenue. In later times, even when there were situations of dependence on forest people, the conventional attitude towards them was that they were outside the social pale and had to be kept at a distance.

So is this pattern essentially different from the present?

Naxal activity started in the 1960s and gained some support in the rural and later urban areas of West Bengal and subsequently Bihar and Andhra. It raised the ire of the state but did it make the state more sensitive to problems of the adivasis? It was treated as a law and order problem and put down although sporadic incidents kept occurring to remind ‘us’ that ‘their’ problems have remained. So this activity is not new but there is an increase in anger and with attacks from both sides. This makes it far more palpable even in our big cities, as yet far away from the ‘jungle areas.’

The government’s anxiety over Maoist activity has at this point increased and needs explanation. Violence on both sides has been stepped up. The Communist Party of India (Maoist) was banned. Now the Maoists are being threatened with Operation Green Hunt but at the same time are also being invited to cease their violence and negotiate. The Maoists have slowly cut a swathe through the sub-continent and the fear is that this may expand. Would this be sufficient reason for a “hunt” or could there be other factors changing the equations from 40 years ago?

The current violence on both sides is fierce enough but what happens if the state launches a semi-military offensive trying to snuff out the Maoists and the Maoists retaliate, as they are likely to? It would displace and kill many hundreds of our people, villagers and tribals living in areas of Maoist activity, including those who are not sympathetic to the Maoist ideology or objective. Any “hunt” would have to be on an enormous scale since groups claiming to be Maoists are now widespread in over 200 districts in the country in contiguous areas. Has this kind of hunt helped solve our problems elsewhere? Manipur, Assam, and Kashmir continue to remain areas of on-going civil strife.

Perhaps we should look at it less as an ‘us’ and ‘them’ situation and more as an ‘us’ and ‘us’ situation. At the end of the day, we are all involved as people who live in this country and what is more, as people who have to go on living in this country. Even those whose lives have not been remotely touched by what goes on in ‘tribal societies’ will find themselves ill at ease with expanding civil strife.

If we see it as an ‘us’ and ‘us’ situation, then the need for a dialogue with all the groups involved becomes the most immediate concern. The question is who should be talking to whom and about what. If the state has to start the dialogue — as the strongest party in the conversation — it should be conversing with several groups:

1. Those living in the rural areas and the forested areas affected by the current civil strife, frequently referred to as ‘the people.’ This should be the primary and most important dialogue. It is not about who is right and who is wrong but about what is it that is leading to people becoming embroiled in revolts. People do not support insurgent groups or get imposed upon by such groups unless there is a reason. The adivasis live in areas where the benefits of development hardly ever reach them. Education, health care, communication, access to justice are mentioned sotto voce, since in most places they don’t exist. Our Prime Minister and Home Minister have had long tenures in earlier governments as finance ministers and have been well aware of patterns of development. Did they and their colleagues not recognise the injustice of unequal “development” and the anger it could produce? The same applies to the State governments of these areas who have not exactly distinguished themselves in addressing the problems of the adivasis. The situation now demands attention because it has turned violent.

2. Then there is the state. What has the state done in these areas to annul the terror of poverty over the last 60 years? Perhaps terrorism and its victims should be redefined to include many more varieties of terror than the ones we constantly speak of. The spectacular increase of wealth despite the recession has still done little to make poverty less immanent in much of the country. As the arbiter of Indian citizens, it might explain what it would propose to change in order to remove the injustices that encourage poverty. For example, what should be the terms and conditions that should prevail in a transfer of land between adivasis and others?

3. Many areas under Maoist control are those that the corporate world would like to “develop.” These have rich mineral resources — once again, almost as in earlier times, the attraction is timber, and water, and also mineral wealth such as coal, iron, bauxite. There is of course a history to such “development” since colonial times: except that it has now been intensified given the increase in the number of corporates and more importantly, their hold on the state. Are the corporates the new factor, as some would argue? The state acquiring land to hand over to private corporations is not identical with the appropriating of the land and resources of the forest-dwellers in earlier times, but there are some echoes. Both the appropriators and the appropriated have to have their say in any dialogue with due respect to PESA (Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas Act, 1996), which recognises the right of the adivasis to decide on the use of their land. For any successful dialogue, the state has to be neutral without biases in favour of corporations in its notion of “development” in these areas.

4. The Naxals/Maoists. Are they a unified party with a common programme? And is their programme tied to development for the people only through a revolution accompanied by bloodied violence? Do they reflect immediate demands related to the daily life of the people that sustains them or an ambiguous promised utopia that may never come? Discussions between the state, the Maoists, and the people on the implementation of development are far too compelling to be ignored.

If there is such a dialogue, what should the corporates be concerned with? Clearly land is the key issue and most of it is in forested areas. Is all and any land up for grabs? Surely there should be some categories of land that should be left alone if we are to survive on this planet. Is the demand for large tracts of land in these areas not a subversion of the much-vaunted Forest and Tribal Act of 2006, which promised 2.5 hectares to every tribal family that had rights to the land? And what does the forest dweller get in return for selling his land? He cannot use the money to secure his future income since there are no such facilities available to him. He is left with money with which to buy hooch — the pattern that was followed all over the colonial world in North America, Australia, and Africa. Are we now internalising a colonial history to repeat it on our own citizens?

And where lands have already been sold to corporations, one does not hear of the corporate organisations first setting in motion the essentials of development in education, health care, communication, and access to justice among the displaced or resettled communities, before they actually start working for profit on the land they acquire. Should this not be considered as part of the sale deeds, particularly as the state is the broker? Corporates are good at drawing up contracts so there should be contracts with the people, vetted by lawyers representing the people where agreements can be examined and negotiated, and those that have been pushed around can still make demands with the possibility that they might be heard.

Such actions may be more effective, certainly in the long run but even in the short run, than an Operation Green Hunt. Violence is a dead end even for the Maoists. When practised by the state on its own citizens, its collateral damage is unacceptable in a democracy; lasting civil strife escalating into a civil war in these areas will create its own demons of the arbitrary repression of ordinary citizens. An alternative form of intervention ushered in through a multi-lateral dialogue involving all the concerned parties is not merely an option, it is imperative.

(Amit Bhaduri is an economist and Professor Emeritus at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Romila Thapar is a historian and Professor Emeritus at JNU.)

Kerala firms reject GM seeds, urges prime minister not go ahead

http://www.southasiapost.org/2009/20091031/features.htm#4

IN a clear and cogent manner the CPM led government in Kerala has rejected GM seeds. In a letter to the prime minister, the chief minister has argued in derail about the dangers of these GM seeds and the threat from the multinationals to Indian bio diversity.

Here is the Text of the letter.

Shri. Manmohan Singh,
Honourable Prime Minister of India,
South Block, New Delhi.
Greetings from the ‘God’s own country’.

I am addressing an important issue here - the introduction of GM crops and food in the State as well as in the country. I understand our stand on the GM crops and foods was already made very clear to the Union Agriculture Minister, Shri. Sarat Pawar, and to your kind self, by our Agriculture Minister, Shri . Mullakara Ratnakaran and the Chairman of the Kerala State Biodiversity Board, Dr. V. S. Vijayan respectively.

We are concerned about the introduction of the GM crops into the State. We had conducted a national workshop on the desirability of the GM crops sometime in April 2008 and, at the end of the two day workshop, it had come out with a unanimous resolution that the GM crops and foods should not be allowed in the State and, the resolution further says that we should also try to impress upon the Union Government in banning the GM in the country. A copy of the resolution is enclosed herewith for your ready reference.

May I reiterate that the Kerala State has already taken a policy decision not to allow GM crops, even for trials, until the debate on the issue of GM that is going on the world over is settled for ever. We are convinced with the available information that:


(a) GM crops are not economically viable for the farmers,
(b) GM crops and foods lead to unimaginable health hazards,
(c) GM crops contaminate the local and wild varieties, the damages of which are irrevocable and, such contamination of our traditional varieties cause irreparable damage to food security of the country
(d) GM denies the farmers right to choose what he wants to sow in his own farm, and ultimately,
(e) The country’s sovereignty over food and agriculture will be endangered.

Moreover, we are convinced that the Genetic Modification of crops is not a solution for hunger as has been wrongly advocated by the proponents of the GM, because the genetic modification is done not to increase the productivity, but to control the insect pests or the weeds. I am sure, you would agree with me that there are several cheaper and environment-friendly options to control the pests and weeds.
It may also be noted the Task Force on Application of Biotechnology on Agriculture headed by Prof. M. S. Swaminathan is unambiguous that the mega-diversity centres and biodiversity hotspots like Western Ghats shall be kept free of any GM experiments/ crops.

The Task Force report further recommends that even the transgenic research should not be undertaken in crops/commodities where our international trade will be affected.

In this context, you may please note that Kerala is a State heavily depended on international market for its agricultural commodities. Any contamination from genetic modification can cause further damage in the trade prospects of the State.

Kerala is also an important centre of diversity of medicinal plants and heritage of traditional medicines like ayurveda. Serious concern has already been expressed by the Ayurveda practitioners on GM research being undertaken on various crops.

You would be delighted to note that the State has already declared an Organic Farming Policy, Strategy and Action Plan in 2008. Accordingly, the entire food crops would be converted to organic within five years and the cash crops within another five years. This will, apart from helping to feed the people with non-poisoned food, enhance our export possibilities with a high premium. However, introduction of GM crops will certainly defeat the very purpose of organic farming, because GM crops/foods are more disastrous than those from crops raised using chemical pesticides and fertilisers. It would also kill the State’s trade prospects.

Considering all these, the Government of Kerala has taken a decision to prohibit all environmental release of GMOs and keep the State totally GM free. We would also request the Honourable Prime Minister to reconsider the policy on GM in the national scale and declare a moratorium at least for the next 50 years, so that we could learn the desirability of GM from other countries where it is being practised in large scale.

We would urge the Central Government to respect the well informed decision of the State Government and issue necessary orders to all concerned Ministries not to permit any GM research or release of GMOs within the boundaries of the State. Such an order from the Union Government will further strengthen the federal fabric of our nation as enshrined in the constitution.

With kind regards
Yours sincerely,
V. S. Achuthanandhan
Copy to: Ministry of: Environment and Forests; Agriculture and Cooperation; Science and Technology; Health and Family Welfare; and Department of Biotechnology

Valuing Folk Crop Varieties for Agroecology and Food Security

http://www.bioscienceresource.org/news/article.php?id=42

by Dr Debal Deb

On May 25, 2009, Hurricane Aila hit the deltaic islands of the Sunderban of West Bengal. The estuarine water surged and destroyed the villages. Farmer’s homes were engulfed by the swollen rivers, their properties vanished with the waves, and their means of livelihood disappeared, as illustrated by the empty farm fields, suddenly turned salty. In addition, most of the ponds and bore wells became salinized.

Since Aila’s devastation, there has been a frantic search for the salt-tolerant rice seeds created by the ancestors of the current Sunderban farmers. With agricultural modernization, these heirloom crop varieties had slipped through the farmers’ hands. But now, after decades of complacency, farmers and agriculture experts alike have been jolted into realizing that on the saline Sunderban soil, modern high-yield varieties are no match for the “primitive,” traditional rice varieties. But the seeds of those diverse salt-tolerant varieties are unavailable now; just one or two varieties are still surviving on the marginal farms of a few poor farmers, who now feel the luckiest. The government rice gene banks have documents to show that they have all these varieties preserved, but they cannot dole out any viable seeds to farmers in need. That is the tragedy of the centralized ex situ gene banks, which eventually serve as morgues for seeds, killed by decades of disuse. The only rice seed bank in eastern India that conserves salt-tolerant rice varieties in situ is Vrihi, which has distributed four varieties of salt-tolerant rice in small quantities to a dozen farmers in Sunderban. The success of these folk rice varieties on salinized farms demonstrates how folk crop genetic diversity can ensure local food security. These folk rice varieties also promote sustainable agriculture by obviating the need for all external inputs of agrochemicals.

Folk rice varieties, the best bet

Not only the salinization of soil in coastal farmlands but also the too-late arrival of the monsoon this year has caused seedlings of modern rice varieties’ to wither on all unirrigated farms and spelled doom for marginal farmers’ food security throughout the subcontinent. Despite all the brouhaha about the much-hyped Green Revolution, South Asia’s crop production still depends heavily on the monsoon rains and too much, too late, too early, or too scanty rain causes widespread failure of modern crop varieties. Around 60 per cent of India’s agriculture is unirrigated and totally dependent on rain. In 2002, the monsoon failure in July resulted in a seasonal rainfall deficit of 19 percent and caused a profound loss of agricultural production with a drop of over 3 percent in India’s GDP (Challinor et al. 2006). This year’s shortfall of the monsoon rain is likely to cause production to fall 10 to 15 million tons short of the 100 million tons of total production forecast for India at the beginning of the season (Chameides 2009). This projected shortfall also represents about 3 percent of the expected global rice harvest of 430 million tons.

In the face of such climatic vagaries, modern agricultural science strives to incorporate genes for adaptation -- genes that were carefully selected by many generations of indigenous farmer-breeders centuries ago. Thousands of locally-adapted rice varieties (also called “landraces”) were created by farmer selection to withstand fluctuations in rainfall and temperature and to resist various pests and pathogens. Most of these varieties, however, have been replaced by a few modern varieties, to the detriment of food security.

Until the advent of the Green Revolution in the 1960s, India was believed to have been home to about 110,000 rice varieties (Richharia and Govindasamy 1990), most of which have gone extinct from farm fields. Perhaps a few thousand varieties are still surviving on marginal farms, where no modern cultivar can grow. In the eastern state of West Bengal, about 5600 rice varieties were cultivated, of which 3500 varieties of rice were shipped to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) of the Philippines during the period from 1975 to 1983 (Deb 2005). After an extensive search over the past fourteen years for extant rice varieties in West Bengal and a few neighboring states, I was able to rescue only 610 rice landraces from marginal farms. All others--about 5000--have disappeared from farm fields. The 610 extant rice varieties are grown every year on my conservation farm, Basudha. Every year, these seeds are distributed to willing farmers from the Vrihi seed bank free of charge.

Vrihi (meaning “rice seed” in Sanskrit) is the largest non-governmental seed repository of traditional rice varieties in eastern India. These varieties can withstand a much wider range of fluctuations in temperature and soil nutrient levels as well as water stress than any of the modern rice varieties. This year’s monsoon delay has not seriously affected the survivorship and performance of the 610 rice varieties on the experimental farm, nor did the overabundant rainfall a few years earlier.

Circumstances of loss

If traditional landraces are so useful, how could the farmers afford to lose them? The dynamics are complex but understandable. When government agencies and seed companies began promoting “miracle seeds,” many farmers were lured and abandoned their heirloom varieties. Farmers saw the initial superior yields of the high input–responsive varieties under optimal conditions and copied their “successful” neighbors. Soon, an increasing number of farmers adopted the modern, “Green Revolution” (GR) seeds, and farmers not participating in the GR were dubbed backward, anti-modern, and imprudent. Seed companies, state agriculture departments, the World Bank, universities, and national and international development NGOs (non-governmental organizations) urged farmers to abandon their traditional seeds and farming practices--both the hardware and software of agriculture. After a few years of disuse, traditional seed stocks became unviable and were thereby lost. Thus, when farmers began to experience failure of the modern varieties in marginal environmental conditions, they had no other seeds to fall back on. Their only option was, and still is, to progressively increase water and agrochemical inputs to the land. In the process, the escalating cost of modern agriculture eventually bound the farmers in an ever-tightening snare of debt. After about a century of agronomists’ faith in technology to ensure food security, farming has become a risky enterprise, with ever greater debt for farmers. Over 150,000 farmers are reported to have committed suicide between 1995 and 2004 in India (Government of India 2007), and the number grew by an annual average of 10,000 until 2007 (Posani 2009).

The government gave ample subsidies for irrigation and fertilizers to convert marginal farms into more productive farms and boosted rice production in the first decade that GR seeds were used. Soon after, however, yield curves began to decline. After 40 years of GR, the productivity of rice is declining at an alarming rate (Pingali 1994). IRRI’s own study revealed yield decreases after cultivation of the “miracle rice variety” IR8 over a 10-year period (Flinn et al 1982). Today, just to keep the land productive, rice farmers in South Asia apply over 11 times more synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and 12.8 times more phosphate fertilizers per hectare than they did in the late 1960s (FAI 2008). Cereal yield has plummeted back to the pre-GR levels, yet many farmers cannot recall that they had previously obtained more rice per unit of input than what they are currently getting. Most farmers have forgotten the average yields of the traditional varieties and tend to believe that all traditional varieties were low-yielding. They think that the modern “high-yielding” varieties must yield more because they are so named.

In contrast, demonstration of the agronomic performance of the 610 traditional rice varieties on Basudha farm over the past 14 years has convinced farmers that many traditional varieties can out-yield any modern cultivar. Moreover, the savings in terms of water and agrochemical inputs and the records of yield stability against the vagaries of the monsoon have convinced them of the economic advantages of ecological agriculture over chemical agriculture. Gradually, an increasing number of farmers have been receiving traditional seeds from the Vrihi seed bank and exchanging them with other farmers. As of this year, more than 680 farmers have received seeds from Vrihi and are cultivating them on their farms. None of them have reverted to chemical farming or to GR varieties.

Extraordinary heirlooms

Every year, farmer-researchers meticulously document the morphological and agronomic characteristics of each of the rice varieties being conserved on our research farm, Basudha. With the help of simple equipment--graph paper, rulers, measuring tape, and a bamboo microscope (Basu 2007)--the researchers document 30 descriptors of rice, including leaf length and width; plant height at maturity; leaf and internode color; flag leaf angle; color and size of awns; color, shape and size of rice seeds and decorticated grains; panicle density; seed weight; dates of flowering and maturity; presence or absence of aroma; and diverse cultural uses.

Vrihi’s seed bank collection includes numerous unique landraces, such as those with novel pigmentation patterns and wing-like appendages on the rice hull. Perhaps the most remarkable are Jugal, the double-grain rice, and Sateen, the triple-grain rice. These characteristics have been published and copyrighted (Deb 2005) under Vrihi’s name to protect the intellectual property rights of indigenous farmers.

A few rice varieties have unique therapeutic properties. Kabiraj-sal is believed to provide sufficient nutrition to people who cannot digest a typical protein diet. Our studies suggest that this rice contains a high amount of labile starch, a fraction of which yields important amino acids (the building blocks of proteins). The pink starch of Kelas and Bhut moori is an essential nutrient for tribal women during and after pregnancy, because the tribal people believe it heals their anemia. Preliminary studies indicate a high content of iron and folic acid in the grains of these rice varieties. Local food cultures hold Dudh-sar and Parmai-sal in high esteem because they are “good for children’s brains.” While rigorous experimental studies are required to verify such folk beliefs, the prevalent institutional mindset is to discard folk knowledge as superstitious, even before testing it-- until, that is, the same properties are patented by a multinational corporation.

Traditional farmers grow some rice varieties for their specific adaptations to the local environmental and soil conditions. Thus, Rangi, Kaya, Kelas, and Noichi are grown on rainfed dryland farms, where no irrigation facility exists. Late or scanty rainfall does not affect the yield stability of these varieties. In flood-prone districts, remarkable culm elongation is seen in Sada Jabra, Lakshmi-dighal, Banya-sal, Jal kamini, and Kumrogorh varieties, which tend to grow taller with the level of water inundating the field. The deepest water that Lakshmi-dighal can tolerate was recorded to be six meters. Getu, Matla, and Talmugur can withstand up to 30 ppt (parts per thousand) of salinity, while Harma nona is moderately saline tolerant. No modern rice variety can survive in these marginal environmental conditions. Traditional crop varieties are often recorded to have out-yielded modern varieties in marginal environmental conditions (Cleveland et al. 2000).

Farmer-selected crop varieties are not only adapted to local soil and climatic conditions but are also fine-tuned to diverse local ecological conditions and cultural preferences. Numerous local rice landraces show marked resistance to insect pests and pathogens. Kalo nunia, Kartik-sal, and Tulsi manjari are blast-resistant. Bishnubhog and Rani kajal are known to be resistant to bacterial blight (Singh 1989). Gour-Nitai, Jashua, and Shatia seem to resist caseworm (Nymphula depunctalis) attack; stem borer (Tryporyza spp.) attack on Khudi khasa, Loha gorah, Malabati, Sada Dhepa, and Sindur mukhi varieties is seldom observed.

Farmers’ agronomic practices, adapting to the complexity of the farm food web interactions, have also resulted in selection of certain rice varieties with distinctive characteristics, such as long awn and erect flag leaf. Peasant farmers in dry lateritic areas of West Bengal and Jharkhand show a preference for long and strong awns, which deter grazing from cattle and goats (Deb 2005). Landraces with long and erect flag leaves are preferred in many areas, because they ensure protection of grains from birds.

Different rice varieties are grown for their distinctive aroma, color, and tastes. Some of these varieties are preferred for making crisped rice, some for puffed rice, and others for fragrant rice sweets to be prepared for special ceremonies. Blind to this diversity of local food cultures and farm ecological complexity, the agronomic modernization agenda has entailed drastic truncation of crop genetic diversity as well as homogenization of food cultures on all continents.

Sustainable agriculture and crop genetic diversity

Crop genetic diversity, which our ancestors enormously expanded over millennia (Doebley 2006), is our best bet for sustainable food production against stochastic changes in local climate, soil chemistry, and biotic influences. Reintroducing the traditional varietal mixtures in rice farms is a key to sustainable agriculture. A wide genetic base provides “built-in insurance” (Harlan 1992) against crop pests, pathogens, and climatic vagaries.

Traditional crop landraces are an important component of sustainable agriculture because their long-term yield stability is superior to most modern varieties. An ample body of evidence exists to indicate that whenever there is a shortage of irrigation water or of fertilizers--due to drought, social problems, or a disruption of the supply network-- “modern crops typically show a reduction in yield that is greater and covers wider areas, compared with folk varieties” (Cleveland et al. 1994). Under optimal farming conditions, some folk varieties may have lower mean yields than high-yield varieties but exhibit considerably higher mean yields in the marginal environments to which they are specifically adapted.

All these differences are amply demonstrated on Basudha farm in a remote corner of West Bengal, India. This farm is the only farm in South Asia where over 600 rice landraces are grown every year for producing seeds. These rice varieties are grown with no agrochemicals and scant irrigation. On the same farm, over 20 other crops, including oil seeds, vegetables, and pulses, are also grown each year. To a modern, “scientifically trained” farmer as well as a professional agronomist, it’s unbelievable that over the past eight years, none of the 610 varieties at Basudha needed any pesticides--including bio-pesticides--to control rice pests and pathogens. The benefit of using varietal mixtures to control diseases and pests has been amply documented in the scientific literature (Winterer et al. 1994; Wolfe 2000; Leung et al. 2003). The secret lies in folk ecological wisdom: biological diversity enhances ecosystem persistence and resilience. Modern ecological research (Folke et al. 2004; Tilman et al. 2006; Allesina and Pascual 2008) supports this wisdom.

If the hardware of sustainable agriculture is crop diversity, the software consists of biodiversity-enhancing farming techniques. The farming technique is the “program” of cultivation and can successfully “run” on appropriate hardware of crop genetic and species diversity. In the absence of the appropriate hardware however, the software of ecological agriculture cannot give good results, simply because the techniques evolved in an empirical base of on-farm biodiversity. Multiple cropping, the use of varietal mixtures, the creation of diverse habitat patches, and the fostering of populations of natural enemies of pests are the most certain means of enhancing agroecosystem complexity. More species and genetic diversity mean greater complexity, which in turn creates greater resilience--that is, the system’s ability to return to its original species composition and structure following environmental perturbations such as pest and disease outbreaks or drought, etc.

Ecological functions of on-farm biodiversity

Food security and sustainability at the production level are a consequence of the agroecosystem’s resilience, which can only be maintained by using diversity on both species and crop genetic levels. Varietal mixtures are a proven method of reducing diseases and pests. Growing companion crops like pigeonpea, chickpea, rozelle, yams, Ipomea fistulosa, and hedge bushes provide alternative hosts for many herbivore insects, thereby reducing pest pressure on rice. They also provide important nutrients for the soil, while the leaves of associate crops like pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan) can suppress growth of certain grasses like Cyperus rotundus.

Pest insects and mollusks can be effectively controlled, even eliminated, by inviting carnivorous birds and reptiles (unless they have been eliminated from the area by pesticides and industrial toxins). Erecting bamboo “T’s” or placing dead tree branches on the farm encourages a range of carnivorous birds, including the drongo, bee eaters, owls, and nightjars, to perch on them. Leaving small empty patches or puddles of water on the land creates diverse ecosystems and thus enhances biodiversity. The hoopoe, the cattle egret, the myna, and the crow pheasant love to browse for insects in these open spaces.

Measures to retain soil moisture to prevent nutrients from leaching out are also of crucial importance. The moisturizing effect of mulching triggers certain key genes that synergistically operate to delay crop senescence and reduce disease susceptibility (Kumar et al. 2004). The combined use of green mulch and cover crops nurtures key soil ecosystem components--microbes, earthworms, ants, ground beetles, millipedes, centipedes, pseudoscorpions, glow worms, and thrips -- which all contribute to soil nutrient cycling.

Agricultural sustainability consists of long-term productivity, not short-term increase of yield. Ecological agriculture, which seeks to understand and apply ecological principles to farm ecosystems, is the future of modern agriculture. To correct the mistakes committed in the course of industrial agriculture over the past 50 years, it is imperative that the empirical agricultural knowledge of past centuries and the gigantic achievements of ancient farmer-scientists are examined and employed to reestablish connections to the components of the agroecosystem. The problems of agricultural production that arise from the disintegration of agroecosystem complexity can only be solved by restoring this complexity, not by simplifying it with technological fixes.

References

Allesina S and Pascual M (2008). Network structure, predator-prey modules, and stability in large food webs. Theoretical Ecology 1(1):55-64.

Basu, P (2007). Microscopes made from bamboo bring biology into focus. Nature Medicine 13(10): 1128. http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v13/n10/pdf/nm1007-1128a.pdf.

Challinor A, Slingo J, Turner A and Wheeler T (2006). Indian Monsoon: Contribution to the Stern Review. University of Reading. www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/Challinor_et_al.pdf.

Chameides B (2009). Monsoon fails, India suffers. The Green Grok. Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. www.nicholas.duke.edu/thegreengrok/monsoon_india.

Cleveland DA, Soleri D and Smith SE (1994). Do folk crop varieties have a role in sustainable agriculture? BioScience 44(11): 740–751.

Cleveland DA, Soleri D and Smith SE (2000). A biological framework for understanding farmers’ plant breeding. Economic Botany 54(3): 377–394.

Deb D (2005). Seeds of Tradition, Seeds of Future: Folk Rice Varieties from east India. Research Foundation for Science Technology & Ecology. New Delhi.

Doebley J (2006). Unfallen grains: how ancient farmers turned weeds into crops. Science 312 (5778): 1318–1319.

FAI (2008). Fertiliser Statistics, Year 2007-2008. Fertilizer Association of India. New Delhi. http://www.faidelhi.org/

Flinn JC, De Dutta SK and Labadan E (1982). An analysis of long term rice yields in a wetland soil. Field Crops Research 7(3): 201–216.

Folke C, Carpenter S, Walker B, Scheffer M, Elmqvist T, Gunderson L and Holling CS (2004). Regime shifts, resilience and biodiversity in ecosystem management. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics 35: 557–581.

Government of India (2007). Report of the Expert Group on Agricultural Indebtedness. Ministry of Agriculture. New Delhi. http://www.igidr.ac.in/pdf/publication/PP-059.pdf

Harlan JR (1992) Crops and Man (2nd edition). , p. 148. American Society of Agronomy, Inc and Crop Science Society of America, Inc., Madison, WI.

Kumar V, Mills DJ, Anderson JD and Mattoo AK (2004). An alternative agriculture system is defined by a distinct expression profile of select gene transcripts and proteins. PNAS 101(29): 10535–10540

Leung H, Zhu Y, Revilla-Molina I, Fan JX, Chen H, Pangga I, Vera Cruz C and Mew TW (2003). Using genetic diversity to achieve sustainable rice disease management. Plant Disease 87(10): 1156–1169.

Pingali PI (1994). Technological prospects for reversing the declining trend in Asia’s rice productivity. In: Agricultural Technology: Policy Issues for the International Community (Anderson JR, ed), pp. 384–401. CAB International.

Posani B (2009). Crisis in the Countryside: Farmer suicides and the political economy of agrarian distress in India. DSI Working Paper No. 09-95. Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science. London. http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/DESTIN/pdf/WP95.pdf

Richharia RH and Govindasamy S (1990). Rices of India. Academy of Development Science. Karjat.
Note: The only reliable data are given in Richharia and Govindasamy (1990), who estimated that about 200,000 varieties existed in India until the advent of the Green Revolution. Assuming many of these folk varieties were synonymous, an estimated 110,000 varieties were in cultivation. Such astounding figures win credibility from the fact that Dr. Richharia collected 22,000 folk varieties (currently in custody of Raipur University) from Chhattisgarh alone - one of the 28 States of India. The IRRI gene bank preserves 86,330 accessions from India [FAO (2003) Genetic diversity in rice. In: Sustainable rice production for food security. International Rice Commission/ FAO. Rome. (web publication) URL: http://www.fao.org/docrep/006/y4751e/y4751e0b.htm#TopOfPage ]
Singh RN (1989). Reaction of indigenous rice germplasm to bacterial blight. National Academy of Science Letters 12: 231-232. http://nasi.iiita.ac.in/library/National%20Academy%20Science%20Letters/Vol%2012/1989_PART07_VOLXII_SCIENCELETTER.pdf

Tilman D, Reich PB and Knops JMH (2006). Biodiversity and ecosystem stability in a decade-long grassland experiment. Nature 441: 629-632.

Winterer J, Klepetka B, Banks J and Kareiva P (1994). Strategies for minimizing the vulnerability of rice to pest epidemics. In: Rice Pest Science and Management. (Teng PS, Heong KL and Moody K, eds.), pp. 53–70. International Rice Research Institute, Manila.

Wolfe MS (2000). Crop strength through diversity. Nature 406: 681–682.

The author is the Founder-Chair, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, India

What Is Maoism?

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/dmello021109.html

by Bernard D'Mello

The Maoist movement in India is a direct consequence of the tragedy of India ruled by her big bourgeoisie and governed by parties co-opted by that class-fraction. The movement now threatens the accumulation of capital in its areas of influence, prompting the Indian state to intensify its barbaric counter-insurgency strategy to throttle it. In trying to understand what is going on, and, in turn, to re-imagine what the practice of radical democratic politics could be, it might help if, for a moment, we step aside and reflect over the questions: What is Maoism? What of its origins and development? What went before its advent? What are its flaws? Where is it going? Where should it be going, given its legacy? As I write at this lovely time of the festival of lights -- Diwali -- in India, I hope to bring back into the glow this body of thought and practice that the stenographers of power have consciously, deliberately distorted. I am fully aware that those whose job it is to transcribe the opinion of the dominant classes will -- having already presupposed what Maoism is all about -- accuse me of pushing an ideological agenda, and will dismiss what I have to say as illegitimate. Nevertheless, let me persist.

. . . (A) Marxism stripped of its revolutionary essence is a contradiction in terms with no reason for being and no power to survive. -- Paul M Sweezy (1983: 7)

Anuradha Ghandy (Anu as we knew her) was a member of the central committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) [CPI (Maoist)]. Early on, she developed a sense of obligation to the poor; she joined them in their struggle for bread and roses, the fight for a richer and a fuller life for all. Tragically, cerebral malaria took her away in April last year. What is this spirit that made her selflessly adopt the cause of the damned of the Indian earth -- the exploited, the oppressed, and the dominated -- as her own? The risks of joining the Maoist long march seem far too dangerous to most people, but not for her -- bold, courageous and decisive, yet kind, gentle and considerate. Perhaps her days were numbered, marked as she was on the dossiers of the Indian state's repressive apparatus as one of the most wanted "left-wing extremists". That oppressive, brutal structure has been executing a barbaric counter-insurgency strategy -- designed to maintain the status quo -- against the Maoist movement in India. What is it that is driving the Indian state, hell-bent as it is to cripple and maim the spirit that inspires persons like Anu? Practically the whole Indian polity -- from the semi-fascist Bharatiya Janata Party to the main affiliate of the parliamentary left, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) -- have pitched in against the Maoists, backing a massive planned escalation of the deployment of paramilitary-cum-armed-police, this time with logistical support from the military, to crush the rebels. It seems that sections of monopoly capital -- including ArcelorMittal, the Essar Group, Vedanta Resources, Tata Steel, POSCO, and the Sajjan Jindal Group -- have given an ultimatum to the state governments concerned and the union government that they will dump their proposed mining/industrial/SEZ projects if the local resistance to their business plans are not crippled once and for all.

Righteous indignation against "left-wing extremism" has reached a crescendo, buttressed as it is by sections of the commercial media, with images and profiles (dished out to the fourth estate by anti-terrorist squad officers) of apprehended revolutionists a source of excitement for TV audiences. A year and a half ago, my son -- lanky, unkempt, his hair dishevelled -- came home from school one day to tell us that his teacher called him a Naxalite (what the Maoists are popularly called). I asked him, "How did you react?" He queried, "Daddy, who are these guys, these Naxalites?" I answered, "Well, they are rebels who resent the deep injustice meted out to the poor." He responded, "Well then, I feel proud to be called a Naxalite". The boy is still very young, but he will soon approach that wonderful time of his life when his urge to understand what is going on in the country and the world will be unquenchable. More recently, a malicious and vengeful advertisement by the home ministry in the newspapers painted the Maoists as "cold-blooded criminals". Maybe it is time for me to consider how I will answer his question: What is Maoism?

An answer to such a query requires a stepwise approach to finding first answers to questions such as: What is Marxism? What is Leninism? What is Stalinism? Only then, can one get to understand what Maoism is all about. For, after all, Mao's Marxism undoubtedly stemmed from the Leninist school; he applied Marxism, Leninism (the latter, a school of Marxism in the age of imperialism) and Stalinism (a decomposed form of Leninism which he also struggled to overcome and go beyond), as a method of analysis of the social reality of China. But more, he intervened in that reality through conscious social political action guided by Marxist theory and from the late 1920s to the end of the 1960s continuously learnt from events, thus making possible an enrichment of the original.

What has come to be known as Maoism had its material roots in China's underdevelopment, the failed practice of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the urban areas in the 1920s, and its subsequent peasant-cum-guerrilla-based movement in the countryside. Theoretically, and in practice, Mao's Marxism was enriched by overcoming and going beyond Stalin's mechanical interpretation of Marx's theory of history. And, Mao constantly applied Marx's "materialist dialectics" in helping to understand and resolve multiple "contradictions" -- internal conflicts tending to split what is functionally united -- with the likely outcome following from the reciprocal actions of the opposing tendencies. It is the fusion of all of this with the original Marxism and Leninism that constitutes Maoism. Like Marxism, at its best, it is a comprehensive world view, a method of analysis and a guide to practice, not a set of dogmas. What then is meant by the Maoist dictum "learn truth from practice"?

With this preview, we are now in a position to move on. At the outset itself, let me say that while I speak solely for myself, I make no claim whatsoever to originality. I wrote this piece as a self-clarifying exercise and submitted it for publication in the hope that it might help others like me, striving to be educated about matters that are not academic.

What Is Marxism?

In searching for an answer to this question, I can do no better than what the Monthly Review has taught me. In one of the founder-editor's words (Sweezy 1985: 2):

Marxism is above all, a comprehensive world view, what Germans call a Weltanschauung -- a body of philosophical, economic, political, sociological, scientific . . . principles, all interrelated and together forming an independent and largely self-sufficient intellectual structure. . . . It is a guide to life and social practice, and in the long run its validity can only be judged by its fruits.

In its view, prior to the development of capitalism, civilization had been impossible without exploitation; the social surplus appropriated was (1985: 3-4)

concentrated in the hands of a few, so that luxury, wealth, civilization at one pole was necessarily matched by poverty, misery, and degradation at the other.

It was into such a world that capitalism was born . . . incomparably the most productive and in that sense progressive society the world had ever seen. . . . [I]ndeed, for the first time ever it made possible a society in which exploitation and the concentration of the surplus in the hands of a few was no longer the necessary condition for civilization.

Now humanity faced . . . a prospect without precedent. Would it go forward to a new and higher, non-exploitative form of civilization . . . or would the exploitation of the many by the few continue to be the way of human life?

Marx believed that . . . capitalism . . . would never be able to make use of . . . [society's productive forces] for the benefit of the workers who he thought were on their way to becoming the majority of the population. . . . Sooner or later . . . the workers would become conscious of their real class interests, organize themselves into a powerful revolutionary force, seize power from the capitalists, and begin the transition to a communist society from which exploitation and classes would finally be abolished.

It hasn't worked out that way. Workers in the more developed capitalist countries were able to make enough gains by struggle within the system to forestall the emergence of a revolutionary consciousness. A significant part of these gains came at the expense of dependent and exploited countries of the third world, which were thereby prevented from using their resources for their own independent development. As a result, the centre of revolutionary struggle shifted from the advanced to the retarded parts of the capitalist world.

At this point, it must be said that while Marxists share a conception of reality, they differ in many respects in explaining the world and in assessing it. Also, the intellectual structure created by the founders of Marxism -- Marx and Engels -- has been significantly modified and adapted, as it no doubt should, with advances in human knowledge and understanding, and with the development of capitalism into a global system. But, and of course, its scientific validity should be judged in the first instance by its contributions to the ability to explain reality.

However, there's something even more exacting -- in the very long run, Marxism has to be judged by the fruits of its project of taking humanity along the road towards equality, cooperation, community, and solidarity. We should have done this earlier, but it is now apt to bring into focus the most crucial character of Marxism, something, following Sweezy, we alluded to in the beginning of this article. The whole purpose of constructing and re-constructing its distinctive intellectual structure to understand the world was and is so that this exercise may lay the basis of changing society for the better. This is stated most succinctly in Marx's 1845 Theses on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point however is to change it." But integrating theory and practice (developing a strategy and a set of tactics for changing the world for the better and implementing them) is far more difficult and messy a project.

Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in December 1847 and January 1848, but they never even attempted to define, let alone provide, any blueprint of the transitional society (their followers called it socialism) which would in time -- that was the expectation -- evolve asymptotically towards communism, never really reaching it. As Sweezy has it, in Marx and Engels' conception, the transitional society ("socialism")¹ would begin its existence as "primarily a negation of capitalism which would develop its own positive identity (communism) through a revolutionary struggle in which the proletariat would remake society and in the process remake itself" (1983: 2-3).

But, frankly, the proletariat in the developed capitalist countries, for reasons already mentioned, was increasingly losing its quality as the source and carrier of revolutionary practice. The development of the working class, the advance of human capability -- always at the very centre of the forces of production -- was not perceived by the workers as being hindered by the relations of production; the latter was not discerned as intolerable by the workers as long as they were able to extract better terms from capital through their struggles (strikes, etc) within the confines of the system. Why should they then bear the risk of losing what they were gaining in the present when what they could gain by revolting against the system was highly uncertain and far away in the future? In other words, Marx and Engels didn't blame the workers for the lack of a revolutionary consciousness; the objective conditions weren't there for its germination.

What then of early Marxism (it was not called Marxism is Marx's time, but for convenience we are designating even that period within its scope) in its mistaken expectation, drawn mainly from its analysis of the living and working conditions of the working class (in Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England, written in late 1844, early 1845 when he was 24) and the logic of Marx's the famous 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that that class in the advanced capitalist countries would eventually, sooner or later, revolt and emancipate itself? The at first spontaneous, and later on organised, struggles of the workers, led by the parties of the left, were eventually able to force the ruling class and its political representatives to bring in the factory laws and various social legislations, and implement them, which convinced the workers that things could get better even within the confines of capitalism. In this, no doubt the surplus from the toilers in the colonies/neo-colonies/semi-colonies/dependent countries (the "periphery"), shared not only between the local elites and the ruling classes in the "centre", but also to an extent, by the working classes there, helped provide part of the cushion. As a result capital at the "centre" got richer and stronger too.

Marx and Engels didn't take all of these developments into account and so proved wrong in their expectations of a socialist Europe. But, to his great credit, Marx did brilliantly take account of -- besides the massive expropriation in Britain through the enclosures -- capitalism's pillage, in its mercantilist phase, of what later came to be called the "periphery" or the third world, in Part VIII of Capital, Volume 1, entitled "The So-Called Primitive Accumulation". He also did not ignore "unequal exchange" -- through siphoning a part of the surplus created in production via funds used by a distinct class for trade in commodities (merchant capital) -- with the periphery, in the competitive phase of capitalism. Basically, merchant capital played a crucial role in the periphery, albeit as an appendage of industrial capital at the centre (Kay 1975). Marx had not the opportunity to re-orient his theory of accumulation to take account of what had begun to happen at the end of his life, the emergence of capitalism as a global system with the ushering in of monopoly capitalism. But, we have it from Sweezy (1967: 16) that he was fully aware of the causal relationship between the development of capitalism at the "centre", in his day, in Europe and the development of underdevelopment in the "periphery". Early Marxism however proved inadequate in elaborating a theory of accumulation on a world scale that would explain the functioning of capitalism as a global system. All the same, Marx suggested a way of analysing capitalism -- how capital got its wealth from the pillage of the "periphery", from expropriation through the enclosures, from the surplus labour of workers in the past, and from the acquisition of smaller and weaker units of capital; how the superstructure (the state, the legal system, the dominant ideology and culture) was adapted and modified to facilitate all of this; and with what potentialities. That method was "materialist dialectics", which was applied by the best of his followers -- two of whom were Lenin and Mao -- to understand the ever-changing world and to intervene to change it for the better.

Meanwhile, the parties leading the various working class movements in Europe, members of the Second International, continued to pay lip service to the cause of proletarian revolution. But, soon they were exposed for what they really had become when in 1914 they supported their respective governments in the war, an act demonstrating nothing less than the self-destruction of internationalism, and the quashing of many a hope of proletarian revolution. With the possibility of the workers making significant economic, social and political gains within the confines of capitalism at the "centre", Marxism was "revised", re-fashioned by Eduard Bernstein and others to empty it of its revolutionary content. Of course, this was not Marxism anymore, but given the objective conditions in Europe, the "revisionist" doctrine took the place of the revolutionary one there.

What Is Leninism? What Is Stalinism?

It was in these the worst of times that Lenin, a thoroughly orthodox Marxist, struck a momentous chord on the political stage with his pamphlet, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), explaining the war then raging in terms of a division of the world into separate spheres of influence and the inter-capitalist struggles for its re-division. Lenin's purpose was limited mainly to explain the nature of the war then underway and what should be done by socialists leading the working class. Lenin urged that rather than fighting and killing each other in this imperialist war, the workers must be convinced to convert the imperialist war into a civil war to overthrow their respective bourgeoisies. The impact of accumulation on a world scale in shaping the nature of "underdevelopment" of the "periphery" and, in turn, the accumulation of capital at the "centre" -- and the consciousness of the working class there -- were not the focus.

Instead, in Lenin's view, the super-profits of monopoly capital were, among other things, used to bribe an upper stratum of the working class -- thereby creating an "aristocracy" of labour -- and some leaders of the working class movements. Lenin thus blamed the political leaderships of the social-democratic parties leading the movements of their respective working classes and their betrayal of the majority of their respective proletariats. The fact that the objective conditions in Europe had changed, which thwarted the permeation of a revolutionary consciousness in the workers on the continent, eluded him. But it may be said -- on the whole -- of Lenin and the Bolsheviks that in the course of their practice they rescued Marxism from those of its adherents who mistakenly and mechanically interpreted Marx as a "historical determinist".

But let me explain the Marxist position. A "determinist" way of thinking argues that history and the given conditions existing on the ground uniquely determine what is likely to happen next. In pure contrast, a "voluntarist" point of view holds that almost anything can happen subject to the will and positive resolve of effective leaders and the resolute support they get from their followers. In my view, Marxism is neither "determinist" nor "voluntarist" -- in its conception, at any given moment there are a range of possible outcomes, determined both by history and the existing conditions and context. The actual outcome from among this set will depend on social action. That is, which particular intermediate goal the leaders choose from the range of possibilities ("strategy"), and whether they and their supporters go about trying to achieve that result with appropriate tactics and respond "correctly" to the course of events that unfold. Clearly, Lenin -- and Stalin, and Trotsky, we might add -- put great weight on patterns of leadership -- centralized direction by a revolutionary elite. Mao did not disagree with this, but from experience emphasized the necessity of honest and correct feedback from the party rank and file and the masses.

Stalin has called Leninism the Marxism of the era of "imperialism" and "proletarian dictatorship". But he is one who evokes deep anguish among many socialists. On the one hand, he was the only top leader among the Bolsheviks who came from the wretched of the earth (his father was a poor cobbler and his mother was of poor peasant-serf stock), fortunate to have been educated at a religious seminary; it was under his leadership that the Soviet Union and its Red Army vanquished the might of the German armed forces in the Second World War to safeguard humanity from fascism. And as long as he lived it was possible to believe (mistakenly, in the view of some) in the existence of a global co-ordinated movement in active revolutionary conflict with capitalism and imperialism. But, on the other hand, he consigned Leninism and socialism to the grave -- that which is not democratic can never be socialist. Indeed, as Harry Braverman (1969: 54) put it:

The destruction of the old Bolshevik Party closed innumerable possibilities to the Soviet Union, and it is hard to envision them all. [And, in a footnote, he adds] Stalin did not stop with the annihilation of the left and the right oppositions, led respectively by Trotsky and Bukharin. He turned on his own faction, and, as Khrushchev told the Twentieth Congress, executed 98 of 139 (70 percent) of the Central Committee selected at the Seventeenth Congress in 1934.

Paresh Chattopadhyay (2005) argues that the very notion of socialism in Lenin and the other early Bolsheviks' (before Stalin's consolidation of power) was completely at odds with that of Marx. The suggestion seems to be that, given this original flaw, and economic and social backwardness, it was only a matter of time before the ruling elite in the Soviet Union metamorphosed into a ruling class, legitimizing its authoritarian (and, in this view, exploitative) rule in the name of Marxism. Certainly, as a result, Marxism and Leninism have been discredited in the eyes of many. After all, following the seizure of power in October 1917, didn't the means begin to shape the very ends to eventually overwhelm the socialist aspiration? However, I think one should take account of what has come to be called "Lenin's last struggle" -- warning of serious danger from the growth of a ruling bureaucracy and from the "crudity" of Stalin. Beyond this, it seems to me, and I have come to believe this, that given the existence of class, patriarchy, racism (and caste, one might add) over millennia, power and compulsion are deeply rooted in social reality; indeed, they have almost become part of the basic inherited (but not unchangeable) human condition, which leads one to make a very strong case for civil and democratic rights and liberties (these have been gained through historic struggles waged by the underdogs) that should not be allowed to be abrogated come what may.

For our purpose over here, however, it would be pertinent to briefly mention the way Lenin conceived of the revolution in "backward" capitalist Russia where, in his analysis, the bourgeoisie and its political representatives were incapable of bringing about the "bourgeois-democratic revolution" -- overthrowing czarism and seizing and dismantling the feudal estates -- making it imperative that the working class in alliance with the peasants take over that task, only to quickly move on to the next stage, that of socialist revolution. In all of this, the worker-peasant alliance was to be led by the vanguard party. Lenin's conception of such a party then becomes germane -- its purpose was to politically organise and bring revolutionary ideas to the working class, more generally, the masses, and lead the revolution to establish a "dictatorship of the proletariat". Marx had conceptualized the latter as a system in which, following the seizure of power, this would be the regime in which the proletariat would "not only exercise the sort of hegemony hitherto exercised by the bourgeoisie", but a "form of government, with the working class actually governing, and fulfilling many of the tasks hitherto performed by the state", and Lenin fully endorsed this view (Miliband 2000: 151). Of course, in Lenin's way of thinking, the dictatorship of the proletariat was to be exercised by the workers under the guidance of the vanguard party.

The latter evolved over time -- in the conditions imposed by illegality, inner-party organisation was different in 1902 from that following 1905, and then February 1917, when a mass-based party adhering to "democratic centralism" was seen to fit the bill. Democratic centralism was conceived as an inner-party organisational principle and practice where the various factions within the party strictly adhere to the guideline "freedom of discussion, unity of action" (Johnstone 2000: 135). Of course, what happened in practice was the stamping out of the democratic component; in 1921, factions were virtually outlawed, something Stalin is said to have taken advantage of to ultimately secure his domination of the party (Johnstone 2000a: 408-409). In parallel, the dictatorship of the proletariat -- conceived as a dictatorship over the former ruling classes, but a democratic role model as far as the masses were concerned -- came to be "widely associated with the dictatorship of the party and the state over the whole of society, including the proletariat" (Miliband 2000: 152), which came to be associated with Stalinism.

Stalinism -- a decomposed version of Leninism closely associated with the regime in the Soviet Union from the late 1920s to the time of Stalin's death in 1953 -- has to be seen, as Ralph Miliband rightly emphasised, in the context of Russian history (2000a: 517). However, given the constraint of brevity, we can, at most, only list its principal characteristics, drawing largely -- but not uncritically -- from Miliband (Ibid: 517-19):

• the outlook that it is possible to build "socialism in one country";
• the opinion that under socialism there must be a very strong state;
• the view that class struggle intensifies with the advance of socialism;
• the cult of personality, with an obsessive focus on the supreme leader's will;
• forced collectivisation and rapid industrialisation;
• crude suppression of dissent, and of critical intelligence and free discussion within the party;
• the "political" trials and the purges, and elimination of most of the major figures of the Bolshevik Revolution;
• the forced-labour camps where thousands of ordinary people suffered complete ruin (recalling this makes me cry);
• opposition to fascism and a decisive contribution to the Allied victory over it; and,
• the discrediting of Marxism-Leninism because of a mechanical interpretation of it, and its stamping as official state ideology to legitimise elite/ruling-class power.

All the same, it seems that Lenin's aspiration and vision of the socialist state -- as expressed in State and Revolution, written in the summer of 1917 -- after the seizure of power was inspired by Marx's lauding of the 1871 Paris Commune and drawing lessons from it about the future socialist "state". Marx was emphatic that the working class, after taking power, should not simply take control of the existing structure, institutions and machinery of the old state, all of which had to be "smashed" and replaced by a state of a radically new type. As Ralph Miliband (2000b: 524) sets forth Marx's depiction of the credo of the Commune, which Lenin seems to have accepted, and the role of the party envisaged by the latter in his tract, State and Revolution:

[All state officials] would be elected, be subject to recall at any time and their salary would be fixed at the level of workers' wages. Representative institutions would be retained, but the representatives would be closely and constantly controlled by their electors, and also subject to recall. In effect, the proletarian majority was intended not only to rule but actually to govern in a regime which amounted to the exercise of semi-direct popular power.

A very remarkable feature of State and Revolution, given the importance Lenin always attributed to the role of the party, is the quite subsidiary role it is allotted in this instance.

But Lenin's vision of the socialist state "did not survive the Bolshevik seizure of power". Yet, he "never formally renounced the perspectives which had inspired State and Revolution". Can we thus conclude that Lenin wanted "the creation of a society in which the state would be strictly subordinated to the rule and self-government of the people" (Miliband 2000b: 525)? The contrast between theory and practice, in this respect, couldn't have been starker. Frankly, one has to clearly distinguish between what one says and what one does. After all, what happened to the Congress of Soviets -- soviets which had the potential to be self-governing organs of the workers and the peasants -- that had arisen almost spontaneously from the movement of February 1917? By the summer of 1918 the soviets had no more than a mere formal existence. The main institution of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies (independent of any one party), took the back seat, with the party leadership at the steering (Miliband 1970). Indeed, the dictatorship of the proletariat was deemed impossible except through the leadership of the single party; socialist pluralism too got precluded (Ibid). But, to be fair, it is important though to note that Lenin, in his last writings, expressed the need to create the basis for popular self-governance, for which, he felt, there must be a genuine revolution, where culture flowers among the people. Was he then calling for a "cultural revolution", something that Mao launched in China in 1966 with the aim of "preventing capitalist restoration" (Thomson 1970: 125)?

Maoism: Evolution and Development²

Millennia are too long: Let us dispute over mornings and evenings. -- Mao Zedong (1963)

The conventional wisdom of the day presents Mao as some kind of a "monster", for instance, in Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's 2005 book, Mao: The Unknown Story, which, in its obsessive intent to denigrate Mao, is least concerned with the known facts about the man (Gao 2008: chapters 4 and 5). Indeed, in Li Zhisui's The Private Life of Chairman Mao, he is made out to be a "monstrous lecher" by a doctor, bent on disparaging Mao, shabbily doctoring the facts (Gao 2008: chapter 6). It is evident that a "battle for China's past" is underway, with the elite intelligentsia leading the attack. The latter are Chinese, who were the victims, real or imagined, direct or indirect, of the Cultural Revolution, and some leading lights in the "China Studies" field the world over, who have always been prone to somersaults depending on the direction of the political wind in Washington. For instance, their positions have shifted from "disparaging" during the period of Cold War hostility to "grudgingly complementary" following Sino-US détente in the early 1970s, and then to "Mao-was-all-wrong; Mao-is-to-blame" with the great reversal in China in the post-Mao period when the official view turned anti-Maoist, and the ideology of neo-liberalism took hold.³

The credo of objectivity that is repeatedly claimed is a myth. It is not surprising that in a world where "the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas", the views of the beneficiaries of the cultural revolution, the peasants and the workers, who gained in terms of education, healthcare and other aspects of social welfare, as well as the "voice" they got in the fields and the factories and in the political arena, are not being heard (Gao 2008).

With this necessary communication of the side I lean on, let me then get to the origins of Maoism, which got its lease on life in the immediate aftermath of the eventual rejection of the disastrous line of "united front from within" (leading to restraints on organisational independence), which was virtually forced on the CCP by the Third International (the Comintern) in 1923. It was claimed by the latter that the Kuomintang (KMT), led by Chang Kai-shek (after Sun Yat-sen died in March 1925), represented the "revolutionary national bourgeoisie" of China. This alliance was supposed to produce national liberation and the bourgeois-democratic revolution (revolution led by the bourgeoisie in alliance with the workers and peasants) but led only to the disastrous defeat of the communists at the hands of Chang's counterrevolution in 1927, leading to the civil war (1928-35).

But even in defeat there was a silver lining: no doubt the Chang-led KMT controlled the bulk of the armed forces; but the Fourth Army deserted in August 1927 to join the communists, which led to the founding of the Red Army. A new leadership of the CCP gradually began to coalesce around Mao; however, it was only by around 1932 that this budding "Maoist" authority gained legitimacy and the CCP could forge, and refine over time, its own strategy and path to achieve the goals of the "new democratic revolution" (NDR).

For our purpose over here, it must be mentioned that the Comintern had mechanically extended Marx's historical analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe to the colonies/semi-colonies/neo-colonies, merely adding that imperialism had allied there with the feudalists to maintain and consolidate its power. It was then assumed that the national bourgeoisie would take the lead in the struggle against imperialism and feudalism/semi-feudalism, and therefore it was the duty of the communists there to rally the masses in support of such a project, for it would lead to national independence and bourgeois democracy, without which the struggle for socialism would have had to be indefinitely postponed. But, as we have seen, such a policy led to the disastrous defeat of the communists in China in 1927. The so-called national bourgeoisie proved to be nothing but the ally of imperialism against the communists.

It was the CCP under Mao that most effectively challenged the Comintern line by refusing to surrender control and leadership to those who could not be relied upon to carry through to the very end the struggle for genuine national independence or the fight against feudalism/semi-feudalism. The quality of the leadership was crucially important (Sweezy 1976: 10). It adopted the strategy of protracted people's war (PPW), which relied on the peasants, built rural base areas, carried out "land to the tiller" and other social policies (for instance, dealing with the gender question through the mobilization of women in the countryside) in these areas (run democratically as miniature, self-reliant states), thereby building up a political mass base in the countryside to finally encircle and "capture" the cities.

Here it needs to be emphasised that it was only during the anti-Japanese resistance (1937-45), when the contradiction between Japanese imperialism and national independence became the principal one (playing the leading role), relegating the fight between feudalism and the masses to a secondary and subordinate position, that the CCP managed to shift nationalist opinion progressively in its favour. It was in this period that it overcame its confinement in the rural areas to move on to the national stage, extend the PPW and capture the popular imagination. The CCP could not have successfully "captured" the cities, but for the massive nationalist upsurge in the course of the anti-Japanese resistance turning decisively in its favour due to its correct handling of the unity and struggle between nationalism and anti-imperialism, leading on to the successful completion of the NDR.⁴

At the core of the NDR was opposition to the transformation of the society under the leadership of the bourgeoisie and its political representatives. The NDR -- unambiguously led by the communist party -- suppressed the big bourgeoisie because, even as it retained private capitalist enterprise, it was primarily meant to create the prerequisites for socialism.

At the heart of the course of the NDR, from 1927 to 1949, was the building of base areas, involving the following (Gurley1976: 70-71):

• achieving victory in the political struggle, thereby establishing the basis for running a miniature state in the base area;
• winning the economic struggle -- land to the tiller, land investigation, promotion of mutual aid and cooperation, and achieving the development of the productive forces (the material means of production and human capabilities) in agriculture and small industry; and
• carrying out the cultural and ideological struggle, with a great deal of overlapping among the three.

All of this -- whether political, economic, or cultural and ideological -- entailed following the "mass line", which is a distinctive feature of Maoism. This is a method of involving the masses in how, for instance, each of the above is to be done and then implementing what had been decided upon with their participation. The party leaders thereby correctly understand the opinions of the people and so fashion the required policies in a manner the masses will support and actively implement. Mao summed this up pithily as: "from the masses, to the masses". Indeed, in the process of participating in the "land to the tiller", land investigation, and in the ideological struggles, the people understood the local class structure and the ideas and institutions bolstering the status quo (Gurley 1976: 71-72).

This brings us to three crucial dimensions of Maoist theory and practice in trying to enrich the democratic process in the Leninist vanguard party, the mass organizations, and the society. In the Maoist conception of the vanguard party, just like in Lenin's, centralised guidance by a revolutionary elite is at the core, and this elite leadership is drawn from intellectuals, workers and peasants, with the difference that workers and peasants are sought to be represented, over time, in greater proportion. What is however distinctive in Mao is the conscious effort to fuse the inner-party organisational principle of democratic centralism ("freedom of discussion, unity of action") with the mass line ("from the masses, to the masses"), the mass organisations under party leadership providing the crucial link between the two. However, a word over here about the claim of the vanguard party being led by the proletariat might be in order. Here, as Benjamin Schwartz (1977: 26) explains, in Maoism, the term "proletarian" refers to a set of moral qualities -- "self-abnegation, limitless sacrifice to the needs of the collectivity, guerrilla-like self-reliance, unflagging energy . . . iron discipline, etc" -- as the norm of true collectivist behaviour. Proletarian leadership then comes to be constituted by a set of intellectuals, workers and peasants who excel in these moral requirements.

We are thus beginning to grasp some distinctive features of Maoism -- the conception of NDR as opposed to that of bourgeois-democratic revolution; PPW; "base areas" and the way they are established; the principal contradiction (which may change over time) steering the course of the PPW; and, democratic centralism plus the mass line. It is then time to introduce what may indeed be the differentia specifica of Maoism, best done by illustration from Maoist practice in China. We have already alluded to the idea that the road to socialism was already entered upon and struggles to persist on that road were undertaken early on in the new democratic stage of the revolution itself. We said that the big bourgeoisie is suppressed during the NDR itself in order to lay the ground -- create the pre-conditions -- for socialism. Why?

Socialists, more than others, are well aware that there are definite limits to the compatibility of capitalism and democracy, that is, if the latter is understood as government in accordance with the will of the people (Sweezy 1980). But from a capitalist point of view, such democracy is acceptable and considered viable only if the majority continues to believe that the capitalist system is the best for them, or that there is no alternative but to live with it. The moment this belief erodes, democracy becomes a potential danger to capitalism, best illustrated by the case of Chile, where, following the coming into office in 1970 of a party pledged to begin the transition to socialism, the big bourgeoisie collaborated with Washington and the military took over to save capitalism there (Sweezy 1980). To circumvent such a reaction, a new type of democracy ("new democracy") -- a type of democracy that doesn't preclude the transition to socialism if the majority want it -- has to be created, for which, the big bourgeoisie has to be suppressed. In effect, the NDR doesn't do away with capitalism, but it confiscates the property of the imperialists and the big bourgeoisie -- those at the apex of wealth, power and privilege -- and hence stymies the anti-democratic opposition to socialism from their representatives and backers.

But let us elaborate upon the Maoist idea of steps within the new democratic stage, steps in the transition to socialism, and steps within the socialist stage itself, and the thought that the pre-conditions of a subsequent step/stage in the process of progressive change must be created within the step/stage that has to be transited from. The land reform program leading in steps to communes can be used as an apt illustration. It may be best to take William Hinton's books, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (1966) and Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village (1983), which together provide a rich documentary account of the land reform in Long Bow village of Shanxi province during 1946-48, onward to the formation of mutual aid teams, and from 1953, the merging of those teams into "elementary cooperatives", and from there to advanced cooperatives and further on into communes, and tracing developments up to 1971. They tell a whole lot of facts, even those that contradict what the author is trying to argue; it is difficult to even propose a framework to look at this whole social canvas. However, fortunately, subsequently Hinton has helped provide such an enabling structure (1994; 2002; 2004), though he also revised his assessment of the Cultural Revolution following the publication of Shenfan (Pugh 2005).

Perhaps it would be best to begin where Fanshen concludes (Hinton 1966: 603):

Land reform, by creating basic equality among rural producers, only presented the producers with a choice of roads: private enterprise on the land leading to capitalism, or collective enterprise on the land leading to socialism.

The book, however, does bring some thoughts to mind and I cannot resist expressing one or two. As is well known, Hinton's first story of Long Bow offers a "microcosm" of the upheavals in China that overthrew semi-feudalism in the countryside. On the one hand, it throws light on what a poor peasant has to go through in a bad year and how he/she feels when there is no surplus to pay the rent, interest and amortization, and yet he/she then has to part with the grain that would have kept his/her family from hunger and starvation, and to know that that very landlord and/or moneylender-trader had collaborated with the Japanese during 1937-45. On the other, one can understand why a close bond may develop between the poor peasant and the village-level party person when the former knows that latter considers himself/herself accountable to the poor peasants' league and the village congress.

There is one more important insight that comes from Fanshen -- that when one extracts rent and interest, and what is lost in "unequal exchange" from the net output of the poor peasant household, especially in a bad year, what remains is not even what wage labour would have got, that is, if one were to impute the respective wage rates for family labour. This suggests exploitation of a greater order under semi-feudalism than under backward capitalism, if both are at the same technological level. Marx had also referred to this, albeit, in a different context, when he discussed the plight of the Irish tenant farmer. This leads one to a dispute with those scholars, including Benjamin Schwartz (1951: 4) who hold that the CCP, though successfully having come to power essentially on the strength of its organisation of the peasantry, and not that of the urban proletariat, had inaugurated in China the "decomposition" of Marxism that Lenin began in Russia, and thus, the opposite of the significant innovation that some have attributed to it. Given Marx's remarks on the Irish tenant farmer, I would doubt that he would have agreed with this view.

Let us then get to Shenfan. In 1948 itself, the peasants had begun to form mutual aid teams where a small number of households pooled resources other than land (tools, implements, draft power, occasional labour) but still cultivated the land on an individual basis. Then in 1953 the formation of elementary cooperatives got underway, in which land as well as other resources were pooled, but individual ownership rights were maintained. Incomes were based partly on property ownership and partly on labour time committed to cooperative production in ratios set to garner majority local support. Here dividends had to be paid on the assets, including land, made available, but the complaint of the middle and rich peasants was that this was not as much as they would otherwise have got, that is, if they had cultivated individually by hiring in labour. But when crop yields began to increase because of more intensive use of labour in the cooperative mode, the conflict regarding how to divide the income as between the labour contributed and the assets pooled became sharper (Hinton 1983:142-43). The resolution usually took the form of moving from something like a labour to capital share of 40:60 to 60:40, for, over time, it was living labour that had created the addition to assets. A time would then come when the new assets created by labour overwhelm the original assets pooled at the time of the formation of the cooperative, when it then became appropriate to abolish the capital share of the net output, that is, move to "advanced cooperatives".

The latter entailed a definite socialist advance, involving all peasant households being incorporated in such producer cooperatives, with common ownership of all productive resources. As Hinton (1994: 6-7) puts it:

When the new capital created by living labour surpasses and finally overwhelms the old capital with which the group started out, then rewarding old shareholders with disproportionate payments amounts to exploitation, a transfer of wealth from those who create it by hard labour to those who own the original shares and may, currently, not labour at all.

Of course, with one more step on the collective ladder, the advanced cooperatives were turned into larger units of collective economy and government -- the communes. The point however is that in each step of the ladder leading up to collectivization, the preconditions of the next step were introduced, which helped resolve the old contradictions and smoothed the transition to the next step/stage.

But, it is alleged that the strategy of the Great Leap Forward (GLF) (1958-61), the organisation of the people's communes, and the left deviations of that period led to a massive famine in which up to 30 million people are said to have died.⁵ Then, there have been the excessive violence and the personal tragedies of the Cultural Revolution (CR). For both, the excesses of the GLF and the CR, Mao and Maoism have been held entirely responsible. Hinton however disagrees. To get to the truth, he explains the context -- that of "protracted political warfare" (Hinton 2004: 51). The NDR was a revolution of a new type, new in that it was meant to create the preconditions for the socialist road, unlike bourgeois-democratic revolutions that open the road to capitalism. Following 1949, however, the resolution of the contradictions with semi-feudalism and imperialism brought the contradiction between capitalism and the Chinese working people to the fore -- the latter became the principal contradiction.

Right from the time of the launch of the NDR, the CCP had been divided into two major factions -- a "proletarian" one, headed by Mao, and a "bourgeois" one, headed by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping; pre-liberation, the former was based in the liberated areas, while the latter was in the KMT-dominated cities. After liberation in 1949, the two factions "merged as one organisationally, but they never did merge ideologically" (Hinton 2004: 54). This led to a fundamental split over development strategy and policy ever since Mao took China decisively on to the socialist road. It was on the eve of the GLF that Mao declared on 27 February 1957 ("On the Correction Handling of Contradictions among the People"): ". . .the question of which will win out, socialism or capitalism, is still not settled". As Hinton put it: "No policy, from either side, could be applied without contest", which meant extreme friction between the two factions (Ibid: 55). He goes on (Ibid: 56-59):

To blame Mao, then, for the struggle that ensued and for its outcome is unwarranted, unrealistic, and unhistorical. Mao did what needed to be done given his social base [the rural poor and the workers in the alliance he cultivated], while Liu did what he had to given his social base. After a decade of conflict things came to a head in the Cultural Revolution. . . . Mao had the upper hand politically. He was able to speak directly and mobilise hundreds of millions of peasants and workers. But Liu had the upper hand organisationally. . . .

. . . in 1958, . . . severe disruption . . . coupled with very bad weather in 1959, '60, and '61 . . . produce(d) a shortage of crops, hunger, and even starvation. Mao's initiatives failed temporarily but were well conceived. . . .

. . . During the Cultural Revolution similar extremes arose. . . . However, the movement as a whole was a great creative departure in history. It was not a plot, not a purge, but a mass mobilisation whereby people were inspired to intervene, to screen and supervise their cadres and form new popular committees to exercise control at the grassroots and higher.

. . . The principal contradiction of the times was the class struggle between the working class and the capitalist class expressed in the party centre . . . [U]nless it was resolved in the interest of the working class the socialist revolution would founder. . . . [T]he method must be to mobilize the common people to seize power from below in order to establish leading bodies, democratically elected⁶ organs of power was . . . summed up by the phrase "bombard the headquarters" . . . [T]he target of the Cultural Revolution [was] "party people in authority taking the capitalist road".

Basically, in order to resolve the contradiction between the "proletarian line" and the "bourgeois line" within the party in favour of the former, the Maoists, in the CR, tried to plant the seeds of a later stage of socialism in the earlier stage itself, thus doing away with a mechanical separation of the two stages and concentrating instead on their interrelations (Magdoff 1975: 53). The two stages of socialism, supposed to follow chronologically, are the phase where distribution of the social product is according to the principle "from each according to her/his abilities, to each according to her/his work" followed by the phase where distribution is according to the norm "from each according to her/his abilities, to each according to her/his needs". Magdoff (1975: 53-54) explains that Maoists focus on the interrelations between the two and therefore emphasise the need to create the preconditions for the transition within the earlier phase itself, the main prerequisites being the way the social product is distributed and a change in human relations. If one doesn't do this, the inequalities produced and reproduced by the current stage will lead to the emergence and consolidation of a new privileged elite that will gradually transform itself into a new ruling class. And, they derive their justification of this with reference to Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme, with its forceful description of the necessary persistence of inequality in a socialist (but not communist) society. One can thus understand why the major concerns during the CR were "measures that tend[ed] to reduce differences arising from the division of labour between city and country, manual and mental labour, and management and employees", knowing very well that their attainment was "in the far distant future and will involve many political struggles in the years ahead" (Ibid: 54).

It is then clear that Maoists reject Stalin's mechanical interpretation of Marx's 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy as a deterministic theory of history. Mao accused Stalin of emphasising only the forces of production (the means of production and human capability) to the neglect of the relations of production (relations at work, and ownership relations that bestow control over the forces of production and the product), and the superstructure (institutions such as the state, the family, religion, education, and the law, and culture and ideology). Even among the productive forces, Stalin -- Mao alleges -- in a relative sense neglected the growth of human capability, which should have constituted the core of the forces of production. Again, Stalin essentially viewed the direction of causation as a one-way route from change in the forces of production to alteration in the relations of production, and thereon to revamp of the superstructure (Mao 1977).

Mao instead argued that elements of the superstructure are transformed only with a considerable lag; the old culture hangs on long after the material base of the economy is radically altered. But, if a conscious effort is made to change the elements of the superstructure, this, in turn, affects the economic base (the productive forces and the relations of production). Hence, Mao was bent on ushering in the people's communes even before the modernisation of agriculture, for, in his view, changing the relations of production and elements of the superstructure would, in turn, spur the productive forces. Hence, also the stress upon the stifling economic effects of the prevailing class structure of the factories during the CR, or of the domination of landlords and "comprador-bureaucrat" capitalists in the pre-liberation period, or on the liberating effects of smashing the superstructure (for example, Confucian culture) (Howe and Walker 1977: pp 176-77; Gurley 1976: chapter 2). How apparently open-ended the interrelations among and between the forces of production, the relations of production, and the superstructure are in Mao's conception of Marx's theory of history!

Marrying the Various Strands

We have seen in this essay that, at its best, Marxism leads one to expect a close interrelationship between theory and practice; where either is scarce the other will be acutely disadvantaged. Maoism, by and large, has privileged practice over theory -- it views practice as the foundation of theory. But what does the Maoist dictum "seek truth from practice mean"? At its best, and if one reads Mao's July 1937 definitive On Practice: On the Relation between Knowledge and Practice, Between Knowing and Doing, he takes on both, the dogmatists and the empiricists, the "right opportunists" and the "leftists". As he puts it: "Practice ['class struggle, political life, scientific and artistic pursuits'], knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge. This form repeats itself in endless cycles, and with each cycle the content of practice and knowledge rises to a higher level". And, in his outstanding August 1937 essay On Contradiction he holds that contradictions -- the struggle between functionally united opposites -- cause continual change. Development stems from the resolution of contradictions and strategy involves choice of the form of struggle most suited to resolve a contradiction. But the desired qualitative alteration can be brought only through a series of stages, where the existing stage is impregnated with the hybrid seeds of the subsequent one, thereby dissolving the salient contradictions of the former and ushering in the latter. Mao's Marxism was of the Leninist school, albeit tending closer to its Stalinist version (which, as we have seen, is a decomposed version of Leninism), but struggling to overcome and go beyond Stalinism.

We have traversed a wide canvas with some wild strokes, covering the ground from Marxism to Leninism, and from there to its Stalinist revision, and then to Maoism in terms of its evolution and development in China from the late 1920s to the late 1960s, focussing on its differentiae specifica. The latter, we have found, are:

• the poor peasantry of the interior of a backward capitalist/semi-feudal society rather than the urban proletariat constitute the mass support base of the movement;
• theory of revolution by stages as well as uninterrupted revolution, implying a close link between successive stages;
• the stage of NDR, which makes capitalism much more compatible with democracy, thereby aiding the transition to socialism;
• the path and strategy of PPW, which relies on the peasants, builds rural base areas, carries out "land to the tiller" and other social policies in these areas (run democratically as miniature, self-reliant states) thereby building up a political mass base in the countryside to finally encircle and capture the cities;
• the conception of "base areas" and the way to establishing them;
• "capturing" (winning mass support in) the cities by demonstrating a brand of nationalism that is genuinely anti-imperialist, thereby re-orienting an existing mass nationalist upsurge (as during the anti-Japanese resistance, 1937-45 in China) in favour of the completion of the NDR;
• democratic centralism plus the "mass line", ensuring that "democracy" doesn't take a backseat to "centralism" and making sure the people are involved in policy making and its implementation;
• the central idea that contradictions -- the struggle between functionally united opposites -- at each stage drive the process of development on the way to socialism, which is sought to be brought about in a series of stages, where the existing stage, at the right time, is impregnated with the hybrid seeds of the subsequent one, thereby dissolving the salient contradictions of the former and ushering in the latter;
• open-ended interrelations among and between the forces of production, the relations of production, and the superstructure; and
• the idea that political, managerial, and bureaucratic power-holders entrench themselves as a ruling elite and, over a period of time, assume the position of a new exploiting class, and that the people have to be constantly mobilised to struggle against this tendency.

"Materialist dialectics" as a way of thinking and a guide to doing was a powerful tool in Mao's hands, but its weaknesses were perhaps inherent in its very strengths; in the end, the very method led him to hugely overestimate the pace of change and vastly underestimate the obstacles to change. Marx too fell into the same trap when his very method of analysis led him to believe that revolution was around the corner, immensely underrating the huge barriers to progressive change. Does the very application of the method of materialist dialectics lead its practitioners to err on the side of "voluntarism" in their practice?

If one looks forward from the vantage point of 1969 -- the year marks the beginning of the end of the Maoist era -- the great reversal from "socialism" to capitalism (Sharma, ed. 2007) lay ahead. But 1969 also affords a good look back in time. It might help to begin from an incident from Mao's childhood when he was in school, which he related to the American journalist Edgar Snow (1972). One day he and his fellow students were witness to the decapitated heads of rebels strung to the city's gates as a warning. The insurrectionists had led starving peasants in an uprising to find food. The savage repression of the rebellion was obvious, and the incident left a profound impression on the boy and he never forgot it, deeply resenting the treatment meted out to the rebels. Clearly, from a very young age Mao came to view the prevailing social order as quite simply intolerable and to expect a revolutionary high tide sooner or later. "A single spark can start a prairie fire", he told his close comrades in January 1930; twenty years later, he is said to have declared: "The Chinese people have stood up!" There is a touching story of Mao's triumphant entry into Beijing which is worth recounting:⁷

There were a million Chinese present to welcome him. A large platform, fifteen feet high, had been built at the end of a vast square, and as he mounted the steps from the back, the top of his head appeared and a roar of welcome surged up from a million throats, increasing and increasing as the lone figure came fully into view. And when Mao . . . saw the vast multitude, he stood for a moment, then suddenly covered his face with both hands and wept.

But in the years after 1949, even in the mid-1960s, as we have seen, the question of whether it will be capitalism or socialism in China was still unsettled. At the age of 72, the guerrilla in Mao stirred again -- better to burn out than to hit the skids. As Jerome Ch'en (1968: 5), quoting Mao the poet put it:

The Chinese revolution was at a cross-road. It could "look down the precipices" and beat a retreat or "reach the ninth heaven high. . ." and then "return to merriment and triumphant songs." The choice, according to the poet, depended entirely upon one's "will to ascend."

Four years later, all that remained were the embers -- the time had come to just fade away. Not much later, his closest comrades, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De passed away. The Bard of Avon's idea that "all the world's a stage" has acquired the status of a cliché, but it must surely have been one of the great pleasures of Mao's life to have been on the same stage with the two of them. The time was now up for one of the greatest Marxist revolutionaries of all time to ascend to the stars to join them: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, the 20 million soldiers of the Red Army who had died in the war against fascism, the many ordinary peasant-guerrillas of the PLA who sacrificed their lives in the long march to a better world.

Maoism, however, needs to be taken to task; one cannot but ask: Why the peasants and workers didn't resist the great reversals to capitalism in China and the Soviet Union -- the counter-revolutions? Were these regimes, as long as Mao and Stalin were around, really socialist, as has constantly been the claim of latter-day Maoists? The truth could only be highly disappointing, that is, if one were to judge Maoism, as is only fair, by the fruits of its project of taking humanity along the road towards equality, cooperation, community, and solidarity. In China itself, Maoism didn't succeed on this score -- all the united actions of the workers and the poor peasants, all the mass education of the Maoist period, didn't seem to have brought about their intellectual development to a point where they could take on the "capitalist roaders" after 1978 to uphold the ideas of equality and cooperation as against hierarchy and competition. Maoism failed to provide a successful working model of socialism in the 20th century. What's worse, even as Mao was in his last years, People's China entered into an accommodation with US imperialism against the Soviet Union -- Mao's On Contradiction was misapplied to justify the arrangement. In a blatant violation of an important Maoist tenet, nationalism got the better of anti-imperialism when in 1974 Deng Xiaoping used so-called "three worlds' theory" to rationalise the "right-wing" turn in China's foreign policy.

But despite all these shortcomings, there can be little doubt that over the longer period, from the late 1920s to the late 1960s, Maoism did something unprecedented in human history -- it brought about a drastic redistribution of income and wealth in China; it radically reordered the way Chinese society's economic surplus was generated and utilised, all for the better.

Mao's Legacy and the Future of Maoism

It's time then to talk of Mao's legacy. As we have seen, Maoism has a definite view about how to get to socialism, and about what needs to be done to meet the basic needs of everyone in a poor country. Development is to be on an egalitarian basis -- we are all in it together and everyone rises together. What then of Mao's legacy, Maoism? Surely, this is open to all who share his Weltanschauung, his method of analysis -- materialist dialectics -- his values, his vision, and choose to embark together on the long march to socialism, knowing beforehand that the journey is fraught with considerable peril. What then of Maoism in India (Ram 1971; Banerjee 1980; Mohanty 1977; Gupta 1993; 2006; Azad 2006), one might ask? Maoist China did its best to feed, clothe and house everyone, keep them healthy, educate most of them. Contrast this with the deplorable conditions in India at the end of the 1960s and even today -- the tragedy of India ruled by her own big bourgeoisie -- and one gets wind as to why there are some in India who look to the Maoist model of development as the way to a richer and fuller life for all. Anu -- whom we started this article with -- was one of them.

However, while one may have deep respect for such people, one needs to ask the question: Are the basic path and strategy of revolution that were necessary in China in the 1930s and 1940s right for India in the 21st century? Well, India differs very significantly from the China of those times, more so in its history, geography, class and social structure, traditions, and in the nature of its "semi-feudalism"/backward capitalism, the accommodation of the big bourgeoisie with imperialism,⁸ the strength of the repressive apparatus of the state, the nationalities question, and so on. And, importantly, while Chinese history is replete with periodic widespread peasant uprisings, Indian history, in a comparative sense, is scarce of such rebellions, which perhaps can be explained in terms of caste (Moore 1966: chapters 4, 6, and 9) -- it is fundamentally antithetical to any meaningful unity of the exploited and the oppressed.⁹ Recall that Mao adapted his Marxism-Leninism to the realities of China's history, China's potentialities; "learn truth from practice" was his message. Surely a party like the CPI (Maoist) that stems from a political tendency that, over the last 40 years, has done its best to take the Indian revolution forward might like to take a hard re-look into the abyss that is India -- its history, its potentialities.

The Maoists must keep in mind that the scientific validity of the Maoism they uphold will be judged in the first instance in India by its contributions to correctly explaining Indian social reality. There is a lot they have had a hand in this respect, for instance, in emphasising the parasitical reliance of Indian capital on the state for its self-expansion, expressed in the notion of bureaucrat capital. Or, in stressing the powerful role of the state in the very making of the Indian big bourgeoisie (of course, the "state's" fostering of the ruling classes more than the other way round, going back to ancient times, is an insight from the eminent historian D D Kosambi). The Maoists have also helped us to see the post-1956 official "land reforms" as having led to the partial amalgamation of the old rural landowning classes into a new, broader stratum of rich landowners, those not setting their hands to the plough, including an upper section of the former tenants, all of whom, despite the various markets, have yet to rid themselves of various "semi-feudal" practices and pre-capitalist elements of culture. Also, it is the Maoists who, in their practice, correctly do not even try to differentiate the rural poor into "agrarian proletariat" or "landless peasantry", knowing very well that the same very poor household can be categorized in one or the other at various points in time. And, in organising the "agrarian proletariat"/"landless peasantry" along with the poor and middle peasants, and a section of the rich peasants, they insist on factoring in the caste question, despite their knowing how highly problematic and painfully difficult such a getting together can be. Also, it is the Maoists more than others who first grasped the brutal character of the dominant classes and the leaders of the political parties they have co-opted, the very same categories whose forebears had taken power in the name of Gandhian non-violence. All this is knowledge essentially derived from their practice.

The CPI (Maoist) has come in for a lot of condemnation for its violent activities, including killings. The violence however has to be viewed in the context of the undeclared civil war that is underway in the areas of its influence, for instance, in Dantewada in the state of Chhattisgarh (PUDR 2006). The government is implementing a barbaric counter-insurgency policy, which includes the fostering of a network of informers and combatants among the civilian population, right from the village level upwards: a state-supported, state-sponsored, and even state-organised so-called people's resistance -- called Salwa Judum (SJ) -- against the Maoists. Entire villages have been evacuated and the villagers forcibly dumped into relief camps, and this, in the circumstances of large-scale acquisition of land by private corporations in what is a mineral-rich region. The last four years have witnessed violent attacks, loot, destruction, intimidation, rape and killing on an unprecedented scale principally by the SJ; indeed, the latter has even forcibly mobilised the displaced into its ranks. Undoubtedly, the killing is by both sides, but the big difference is that the Maoists, generally when they target specific state representatives, or even informers, they first warn them to desist from the anti-people activity they are undertaking. Those guilty of rape, torture, deaths in custody, or responsible for "encounter" killings are singled out so that others may, out of fear of such reprisals, desist from acting thus. As far as the SJ representatives are concerned, any person who joins them is targeted, not because of any personal enmity, but because of the role that the SJ has been playing in the undeclared civil war.

More generally, the violence also has to be seen in the context of the close de facto nexus between economic and political power at the local and regional levels; the dominant classes, through various means, exercise a degree of control over the police and the judiciary, which increases the chances of violent confrontation between the contending classes.¹⁰

Those who deliberately, falsely depict the Maoists as "devotees of violence" choose to suppress the fact that the violence of the oppressed (and the Maoists who now lead them) has been always preceded and provoked by the violence of the oppressors (and the state and private forces that back them). To claim, as some liberals do, that the violence of the oppressed is "morally equivalent" to that of the oppressors is to endorse the reactionary state, which backs the oppressors. And, in this age of the management of public opinion, the "programming" of what the public thinks, sees and reads, the "facts" that are disseminated are artificially separated from a whole host of other relevant facts, never allowing the public to discern the "real" present.

But, while acknowledging that antagonistic contradictions between hostile class-based organisations will lead to violence, it is a Maoist tenet that guerrilla actions ought to be subordinated to "mass-line" politics -- the Maoist guerrillas should give precedence to winning over the mass of the people in their base areas and, in consequence, in the surrounding areas -- and work towards a better balance ("proportionality") than ever before between means and ends. Regarding the resort to violence in the revolution, to the extent that I have absorbed their writings, it would be fair to say that Marx and Engels might not have disagreed with the use of violent methods by the revolutionary forces in India today. The dominant classes could never be expected to give up their control without employing all the repressive power at their command. It is useful perhaps to recall that Marx's response to the "crimes and cruelties alleged" against the "insurgent Hindus" of 1857 was to set out an account of the daily violence "in cold blood" of British rule in India (Marx 1857).

As to the false claim that the Maoists have no mass support in their areas of influence, one has only to listen to perceptive yet sensitive, independent observers who know the situation on the ground. The state forces are much stronger (as far as armaments and numbers go) than the Maoist guerrillas, and yet the tribal peasants support the latter. Why do these peasants take the risk of supporting the underdogs, even when they know that, when the guerrillas are vanquished, they, as their supporters, will be at the mercy of the state forces, and will most probably perish? If, at the risk of death itself, the peasants choose the guerrillas, surely there must be something more significant going on over here.

Besides India, Maoism is a political force to reckon with in Nepal (Bhattarai 2005; 2009; Mage 2005 and 2007; Parvati 2005; Mage and D'Mello 2007; AMR 2008), the Philippines (Sison 1989; 2003), and Peru (Spalding 1992, 1993; Leupp 1993). The Nepali Maoist leaders have been imaginative -- their ideas of some combination of the "Chinese" (triumph in the countryside and spread to the cities) and the "Russian" (victory in the cities and spread to the countryside) models of revolution, and of "21st century democracy" (multi-party competition as long as all agree on the goals of "new democracy") are appealing. The Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), given its relative strength vis-a-vis "the enemies" of democracy and their friends and masters outside the borders of that small country (above all in India), seeks to utilize the bourgeois republic as a stage in mustering the force of the impoverished masses and nationalist intermediate strata to proceed towards NDR (Bhattarai and WPRM-Britain 2009). But these theories are being put to a severe test in practice.

What then of the future of Maoism and the renewal of socialism that it promises? Frankly, "whatever chance there may have been that the revolutions of the 20th century could or would provide successful working models of socialism" has long since been extinguished; "socialism, we are told, has been tried and failed" (Sweezy 1993: 5). But, as Marx was the first to show, the obstacles to a better future cannot be meaningfully addressed within the framework of capitalism. The challenge then is to revive and renew the legacy of socialism. In this, can Maoism illuminate the way?

Maoism has its roots in Marx who was, above all, a radical democrat -- he demanded the reincarnation of community and mass solidarity; he dreamed of the communion of human beings with nature; he stressed the dialectic of liberation; he looked forward to a just society alongside "rich individuality"; and, as Paresh Chattopadhyay (2005) reminds us, he insisted on the removal of commodity exchange, the division of labour, the state. . . . But, then, Lenin too, in his State and Revolution appeared as a thoroughgoing democrat, though he introduced into his conception of socialism elements that are antithetical to the "association of free individuals" -- wage labour and state (Ibid).

Mao and the Chinese Maoists too gave the impression of being revolutionary democrats, that is, if one were to go by the 20 million people marching through the streets of various Chinese cities in the last week of May 1968, the demonstrators mainly chanting the slogan: "long live the revolutionary heritage of the great Paris Commune". Indeed, Marx's interpretation of the Commune was then deemed relevant to the revival of the revolution in China, something that found a place in the famous "Sixteen Points" of 8 August 1966 (Meisner 1971; Robinson 1969: 84-96). "Let a hundred flowers blossom, let a hundred schools of thought contend" was not merely intended policy for the promotion of progress in the arts and sciences, but one of ushering in a flourishing socialist culture -- at least that was the claim.

Thus, given the radical democratic streak running from Marx to Mao, the best thing that Maoism could do is to commit to the promise of radical democracy: just as there cannot be liberty in any meaningful sense without equality, for the rich will certainly be more "free" (have more options) than the poor, so there cannot be equality without liberty, for then some may have more political power than others.

So far, all revolutions inspired by Marx have only enjoyed the support or participation of a significant minority. Can the commitment to radical democracy up the tide to get the help of the majority? Will the means then be carefully chosen so that they never come to overwhelm the socialist aspiration?

Notes

1 Paresh Chattopadhyay, in personal correspondence, draws my attention to the view that Marx spoke of a "political transition period" (not of constituting a distinct "society") from capitalism to communism under the rule of the proletariat; socialism and communism, for him, were simply the alternative names for the same classless society he looked forward to, after capitalism.

2 We think it necessary to be more comprehensive on Maoism because even one of the best dictionaries of Marxist thought (Bottomore 2000), even in its second edition, didn't have an entry on Maoism, although it, rightly and deservedly, had one on Trotskyism.

3 But even as I make such general remarks, I need to qualify them by stating that within the "China studies" field there have been and are a set of first-rate scholars, some of whom we have learnt a great deal from -- Benjamin Schwartz, Stuart Schram, Maurice Meisner, Mark Selden, Carl Riskin, Manoranjan Mohanty, G P Deshpande, Chris Bramall come to mind. However, as will soon be evident, herein I mainly rely on writers of the Monthly Review School -- John Gurley, William Hinton, Harry Magdoff, and others.

4 To his credit, it was Benjamin Schwartz (1951) who first highlighted the shift in the CCP's strategy (in response to what the party saw as a change in the "principal contradiction") during the course of the anti-Japanese resistance.

5 The figures have been disputed though, among others, by Utsa Patnaik (2004: 10-12) and Joseph Ball (2006).

6 I may be naïve, but given that Mao is said to have had overwhelmingly the people's and the PLA's support but the Liu-Deng faction had the upper hand organizationally within the party, Mao could have split the party and gone for a referendum to decide China's future course -- capitalism or socialism -- and there would have been little doubt what the result of the plebiscite would have been, the outcome of which would have totally legitimized the socialist road. Why didn't he do this?

7 This episode was related by Chou En-lai [Zhou Enlai] to Charlie Chaplin in Geneva during the Korean crisis when the former had come to negotiate an end to the Korean War and the latter had made possible a showing of City Lights to the visiting dignitary (Chaplin 1966: 526, 530).

8 The country has recently witnessed the largest ever Indo-US military exercise on Indian soil.

9 Also, religion, ethnicity and nationality have been divisive cards played by the main political parties and their forebears to divide the toiling masses at the local level in the Indian sub-continent. The utter criminality of communalist-religious mobilizations and the pogroms unleashed against the main religious minority in India have been the most tragic outcomes of this brand of semi-fascist politics in the recent past.

10 In 1994, I happened to go to the courts in Midnapore town (in Paschim Midnapore district of the Indian state of West Bengal) for some legal matter. During the long lunch break I was resting in an empty courtroom when two desperately poor tribal men, who seemed to be in a bad condition as a result of torture, were brought by the police into this "court" -- as I pretended to sleep, the court clerk, masquerading as the judicial authority (the real guy was probably enjoying his extended siesta at home) passed a summary order in a minute, remanding the accused to further police custody. I mention this because Lalgarh, in the Jhargram sub-division of the district, and the contiguous Jangalmahal area, is presently one of the epicenters of Maoist revolt, and, if one wants to get to the roots of this local eruption since November last year, the criminal justice system's deliberate, callous, and continuing discrimination against the poor, the tribal poor in particular, is not unimportant. It is interesting that at the time of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 Marx, referring to "some of the antecedents which prepared the way for the violent outbreak", quoting from the report of the "Torture Commission at Madras" highlights "the difficulty of obtaining redress which confronts the injured parties". Marx concludes (1857):

In view of such facts, dispassionate and thoughtful men may perhaps be led to ask whether a people are not justified in attempting to expel the foreign conquerors who have so abused their subjects. And if the English could do these things in cold blood, is it surprising that the insurgent Hindoos should be guilty, in the fury of revolt and conflict, of crimes and cruelties alleged against them?

What is tragic is that, in a province of independent India governed by the "social-democratic" Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front government without a break since 1978, there are elements of an essential continuity (with respect to British India in 1857) in the manner in which the criminal justice system functions.

References

AMR (2008): "Nepal's Revolution: Armed Struggle Made Free and Fair Elections Possible", Editorial, Analytical Monthly Review, April.

Azad (2006): "Maoists in India: A Rejoinder", Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 41, No 41, October 14, pp 4379-83.

Ball, Joseph (2006): "Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward?" Monthly Review, September.

Banerjee, Sumanta (1980): In the Wake of Naxalbari: A History of the Naxalite Movement in India (Calcutta: Subarnarekha).

Bhattarai, Baburam (2005): "The Royal Regression and the Question of the Democratic Republic", Monthly Review, March.

Bhattarai, Baburam and WPRM-Britain (2009): "Nepal: Interview with Baburam Bhattarai", 26 October, World People's Resistance Movement (Britain).

Bottomore, Tom (ed) (2000): A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (New Delhi: Maya Blackwell).

Braverman, Harry (1969): "Lenin and Stalin", Monthly Review, June, pp 45-55.

Chaplin, Charles (1966): My Autobiography (New York: Pocket Books).

Chattopadhyay, Paresh (2005): "Worlds Apart: Socialism in Marx and in Early Bolshevism", Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 20, No 53, December 31, pp 5629-34.

Ch'en, Jerome and Mao Tse-tung (1968): "An Unpublished Poem by Mao Tse-tung", The China Quarterly, No. 34, April-June, pp 2-5.

Gao, Mobo (2008): The Battle for China's Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (London: Pluto Press).

Gupta, Tilak D (1993): "Recent Developments in the Naxalite Movement", Monthly Review, Vol 45, No 4, September, pp 8-24.

Gupta, Tilak D (2006): "Maoism in India: Ideology, Programme and Armed Struggle", Economic & Political Weekly, Special Issue on the "Maoist Movement in India", Vol 41, No 29, July 22, pp 3172-76.

Gurley, John G (1976): China's Economy and the Maoist Strategy (New York: Monthly Review Press).

Hinton, William (1966): Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York: Monthly Review Press).

Hinton, William (1983): Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York: Vintage Books).

Hinton, William (1994): "Mao, Rural Development, and Two-Line Struggle", Monthly Review, Vol 45, No 9, February, pp 1-15.

Hinton, William (2002): China: An Unfinished Battle – Essays on Cultural Revolution and Further Developments in China (Kharagpur: Cornerstone Publications).

Hinton, William (2004): "On the Role of Mao Zedong", Monthly Review, Vol 56, No 4, September, 51-59.

Howe, Christopher and Kenneth R Walker (1977): "The Economist", in Dick Wilson (ed): Mao Tse-tung in the Scales of History: A Preliminary Assessment Organized by the China Quarterly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp 174-222.

Johnstone, Monty (2000): "Democratic Centralism", in Tom Bottomore (ed), pp 134-37.

Johnstone, Monty (2000a): "Party", in Tom Bottomore (ed), pp 408-11.

Kay, Geoffrey (1975): Development and Underdevelopment: A Marxist Analysis, (London: Macmillan).

Leupp, Gary P (1993): "Peru on the Threshold: A Reply to Hobart A Spalding", Monthly Review, Vol 44, No 10, pp 25-30.

Magdoff, Harry (1975): "China: Contrasts with the USSR", Monthly Review, Special Issue on "China's Economic Strategy: Its Development and Some Resulting Contrasts with Capitalism and the USSR", Vol 27, No 3, July-August, pp 12-57.

Mage, John (2005): "Nepal – An Overview: Introduction to Parvati", Monthly Review, Vol 57, No 6, November, pp 13-18.

Mage, John (2007): "The Nepali Revolution and International Relations", Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 42, No 20, May 19, pp 1834-39.

Mage, John and Bernard D'Mello (2007): "The Beginnings of a New Democratic Nepal?" MRZine, 16 March.

Mao, Tse-tung (1977): A Critique of Soviet Economics (New York: Monthly Review Press).

Marx, Karl (1857): "Investigation of Tortures in India", New York Daily Tribune, 17 September.

Meisner, Maurice (1971): "Images of the Paris Commune in Contemporary Marxist Thought", The Massachusetts Review, Vol 12, No 3, Summer, pp 479-97.

Miliband, Ralph (1970): "The State and Revolution", in Paul M Sweezy and Harry Magdoff (ed): Lenin Today: Eight Essays on the Hundredth Anniversary of Lenin's Birth (New York: Monthly Review Press), pp 77-90.

Miliband, Ralph (2000): "Dictatorship of the Proletariat", in Tom Bottomore (ed), pp 151-52.

Miliband, Ralph (2000a): "Stalinism", in Tom Bottomore (ed), pp 517-520.

Miliband, Ralph (2000b): "State and Revolution", in Tom Bottomore (ed), pp 524-25.

Mohanty, Manoranjan (1977): Revolutionary Violence: A Study of the Maoist Movement in India (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers).

Moore, Jr, Barrington (1967): Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (London: Penguin).

Parvati [Hisila Yami] (2005): "People's Power in Nepal", Monthly Review, Vol 57, No 6, November, pp 19-33.

Patnaik, Utsa (2004): "The Republic of Hunger", Social Scientist, Vol 32, No 9/10, September-October, pp 9-35.

PUDR (2006): When the State Makes War On Its Own People: A Report on Violation of People's Rights During the Salva Judum Campaign in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh" (Delhi: People's Union for Democratic Rights), April.

Pugh, Dave (2005): "William Hinton on the Cultural Revolution", Monthly Review, Vol 56, No 10, March, 33-42.

Ram, Mohan (1971): Maoism in India (Delhi: Vikas Publications).

Robinson, Joan (1970): The Cultural Revolution in China (Harmondsworth: Penguin).

Schwartz, Benjamin (1951): Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press).

Schwartz, Benjamin (1977): "The Philosopher", in Dick Wilson (ed): Mao Tse-tung in the Scales of History: A Preliminary Assessment Organized by the China Quarterly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp 9-34.

Sharma, Hari P (intro) (2007): Critical Perspectives on China's Economic Transformation: A "Critical Asian Studies" Roundtable on the book China and Socialism by Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett (Delhi: Critical Asian Studies and Daanish Books).

Sison, Jose Maria (1989): The Philippine Revolution: Leader's View (New York: Crane Russak, Taylor & Francis Group).

Sison, Jose Maria (2003): "'The Guerrilla is Like a Poet. . . ' -- Professor Jose Maria Sison in Conversation with Bernard D'Mello", Frontier, March 30-April5, pp 3-5.

Snow, Edgar (1972) Red Star over China (Harmondsworth: Penguin).

Spalding, Hobart A (1992): "Peru on the Brink", Monthly Review, Vol 43, No 8, January 1992, pp 29-43.

Spalding, Hobart A (1993): "Peru Today: Still on the Brink", Monthly Review, Vol 44, No 10, pp 31-39.

Sweezy, Paul M (1967): "Notes on the Centennial of Das Kapital", Monthly Review, Vol 19, No 7, December, pp 1-16.

Sweezy, Paul M (1976): "Socialism in Poor Countries", Monthly Review, Vol 28, No 5, October, pp 1-13.

Sweezy, Paul M (1980): "Capitalism and Democracy", Monthly Review, Vol 32, No 2, June, pp 27-32.

Sweezy, Paul M (1983): "Marxism and Revolution 100 Years after Marx", Monthly Review, Vol 34, No 10, March, pp 1-11.

Sweezy, Paul M (1985): "What Is Marxism?" Monthly Review, Vol 36, No 10, March, pp 1-6.

Sweezy, Paul M (1993): "Socialism: Legacy and Renewal" Monthly Review, Vol 44, No 8, January, pp 1-9.

Thomson, George (1970): "From Lenin to Mao Tse-tung", in Paul M Sweezy and Harry Magdoff (ed): Lenin Today: Eight Essays on the Hundredth Anniversary of Lenin's Birth (New York: Monthly Review Press), pp 115-25.

---

Bernard D'Mello is deputy editor, Economic & Political Weekly, and is a member of the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Mumbai. This essay is dedicated to the memory of my first editor, the late Samar Sen (Shômor babu, as we called him), founder-editor of the Kolkata-based weekly, Frontier. It is also in appreciation of Subhas Aikat whose Kharagpur-based, hand-to-mouth existing Cornerstone Publications brings out an Indian edition of the Monthly Review and books that pose the kind of questions generally shunned by academia. The essay is my small thanksgiving to all you MR people, past and present, on the occasion of your 60th anniversary. I thank Paresh Chattopadhyay, N Krishnaji, John Mage, C Rammanohar Reddy, and P A Sebastian for their critical but helpful comments on an earlier draft; the usual disclaimers apply.

Debate concerning the Lalgarh movement

http://radicalnotes.com/journal/2009/10/24/debate-concerning-the-lalgarh-movement/

The ongoing Lalgarh movement in West Bengal has accomplished many things. It has taken people’s movement on to a higher stage where resistance against state repression in various forms is tied up with the struggle for the development of the adivasi languages and script, a new pro-people model of development and a determined fight not to hand over the natural resources of the region to foreign and domestic big capital for plunder and loot in the name of ‘industrialization’. This historic movement has also led to controversy as to its nature, the nature of the involvement of the Maoists in it, the relation between the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities and the Maoists and the problems faced by the civil rights bodies and various sections of the people in responding to the movement in the different stages of its development. Many articles have been published in the dailies from Kolkata, most of which are not available to people in other states. Since the debate is rich in content, we felt that the arguments and counter-arguments should be circulated among as many people as possible. This debate is good for the functioning of democracy, for dispelling wrong notions and helpful in forming/changing/modifying/strengthening one’s opinion. We have picked up three articles—all written in the form of open letters and responses. The first article is captioned ‘An Open Letter to the Maoists’ written by Sujato Bhadra, a well-known civil rights activist from West Bengal. The second and third articles are responses to that. One (the second) is captioned ‘Response from Jangal Mahal’ and written by Kishenji, the well-known and much talked-about Maoist leader now in Jangal Mahal; the other is captioned ‘Violence and Non-violence’ and written by Amit Bhattacharyya, Professor of History, Jadavpur University, Kolkata and human rights activist. These were published in the Bengali daily Dainik Statesman. The first came out on 26 September 2009, and the second and third came out in a single issue, that of 10 October 2009. The following is a free translation from the Bengali originals.

An Open Letter to the Maoists

Sujato Bhadra

The present writer is an Indian citizen, associated with the civil rights/human rights movement in West Bengal for some decades. You are probably aware of the fact that recently in this state your armed activities and the more violent and more cruel repression subsequently adopted by the state by making your activities as a pretext has given rise to a debate.

As you know, the civil society became vocal in its criticism of police repression and terror in the Jangal Mahal area including Lalgarh in last November (2008). The charter of demands placed by the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities got the wholehearted support from the civil society and many organizations. The civil society was conscious about the happenings that took place since 18 June; it raised its voice time and again against repression perpetrated by the joint forces, stuck to the demand for the withdrawal of joint forces and placed demand to the government for sitting in a dialogue with all the parties. We have strongly opposed the ‘terrorist’ tag being affixed to your organization (by the state). The dissident part of the civil society was also much vocal demanding the repeal of the UAPA. In a nutshell, the position of the civil society against state repression and terror is zero tolerance. Many of us are in no way subscribers to the ‘Ticking bomb situation’ model.

The basis of our protest is our adherence to democratic values, consciousness emanating from humanitarianism and morality. Such elements, we feel, should also become part and parcel of politics guided by class outlook. It is these thoughts that have made me feel that some of your activities suffer from lack of logical thinking. Some events even severely hurt out consciousness and gave us pain.

Your party was confronted with such questions earlier also. You have replied to the open letter from the ‘Concerned citizens’ of Andhra Pradesh, I have also gone through your reply to the questions raised (centring round Chhattisgarh) by some eminent persons (Ramchandra Guha and others). At that time you worked as an underground party. Recently, after the promulgation of the ban on you and the draconian black law, the situation, no doubt, has become more difficult for you. Now there is no legal avenue for us to know your views and to respond to them from our side. We appreciate the fact that you have to carry on in the face of such a suffocating atmosphere and state terror. While sharing your anguish, I bear doubts about some of your activities. I am placing those things, keeping in mind the difficult situation you are in. My request to you is to give these (critical observations) some consideration.

In one of your leaflets on ‘Maoist violence’, the following is stated: “…violence has a class-orientation, it is never neutral…only armed struggle and people’s war would develop and spread people’s democratic struggles…our work in not violent, it is people’s violence to get rid of violence, which is part of people’s war” (dt.18-07-09).

I do not subscribe to this political view. I am not even opposing this standpoint from an alternative political outlook. I, on the contrary, would raise questions by keeping myself within your logical structure: one can talk about notion of violence and deal with it at the theoretical plane; problems crop up at the time implementation and the social impact that necessarily follows from it. It is related to the intense reaction that has been generated within the supporters of Lalgarh and other democratic movements.

Why only you, many philosophers throughout ages had clearly maintained that justice could be established through violence only(?). For example, Sartre has written: “Violence is acceptable because all great changes are based on violence” (The Aftermath of War p.35). He forgot to add that history itself had shown that a society created through violent means could not live for long. Whether anything good can be achieved through violence is also very much doubtful. The concept “End justifying the means” rejects the notion of justice and morality; and the result is that “the means outweigh the end”.

You have declared in quite unequivocal terms that the heroic people of the area (Jangal Mahal) under the leadership of the CPI(Maoist) conducted trial in people’s courts and meted out to those lumpens (hermads of the CPM) the punishment they deserved for being police informers (Press Release dt.16-08-09).

Our opposition is over the question of this capital punishment. Many people and civil rights bodies throughout the world including India mustered public opinion for the final abolition of capital punishment (legalized murder). As a result, the majority of the countries in the world (224 countries) have abolished death sentence. The reason is that as a form of punishment, this practice is barbarous and cruel. Over and above, it also does not act as a deterrent. Beheading does not allow the victim any chance to rectify oneself. Not only that, there could also be possibility of error in judgement. If it is found after carrying out the punishment that the condemned person was innocent, nobody can return his life. On the contrary, such violent punishment makes the society more inhuman and more violent. Long time back, Tom Paine remarked: “The people by nature are not violent, they only reproduce the cruel methods used by the state”. We strongly oppose this cruel method/means adopted by the state. Side by side, we also hold that if notions such as ‘eye for an eye’ or ‘life for a life’ take root in the minds of the oppressed people in this unequal and deprived society, then there is the outburst of violent mentality from the side of the people; this is happening now. You represent the advanced elements striving for social transformation. What should be your role as the vanguard? Will you submit to that violent emotion, or will you uphold advanced democratic values and guide the people under your influence along that path?

What is the organizational structure of the ‘people’s courts’? Is it that the accusers themselves are judges and they themselves are the butchers? It is important to remember that in the judicial system set up by the state, there are certain recognized stages, judicial procedure, regular and separate judicial structure, a higher court of appeal and the right to clemency in the hands of the president. Despite all these, we demand abolition of the system of legalized killing. How can we thus and from what democratic, human rights or the values of just trial accept such trials in ‘people’s courts’ and the meting out of punishment?

The armed forces in Jammu and Kashmir and the north-east think that all the people living there are ‘suspect’; they raise big hoardings to declare ‘Suspect all’. Are you not acting in the same way? In your judgement, each and every CPM supporter or individual is part of the hermad gang and engaged in spying for the police forces. Unless they surrender to the people, they would be given death sentence. Such a method could be the manifestation of your power; but it is devoid of sense of values. You have already meted out death sentence to many ‘informers’; nobody knows how many more will have to meet the same fate before the rest of the lumpens would surrender to the people. This is because everything depends on what you think about it. You have stated: “To set those lumpens free would mean handing over the struggling and revolutionary masses to the joint forces’ (Press Release dt.16-08-09). Let us state in the light of what the psychologist Christopher Bolas has said: “Every time the killer strikes, it is his own death that he avoids”. It means that such attacks come from a sense of fear and apprehension. The question is: if you have a social base in the area, then it is possible to socially isolate the informers. On the other hand, if your political opponents carry on ideological struggle, and they are physically liquidated by branding them as such, then it will appear that some type of acute ‘irrationality’ pervades throughout your activities. In reality, Lalgarh has become a valley of death, and from there the message of death is travelling round. Is there no way to combat espionage other than liquidating them? Could not the people adopt the method of exposing those informers under your leadership? Marx had to close down his Das Kapital write a whole book named Herr Vogt in order to expose espionage. And Mao was in favour of beheading only a few.

In that case, propaganda and exposure will, on the one hand, not exert any negative social reaction, and, on the other, the state will also not able to get any illegal but apparently social sanction to ‘liquidate’ you. If that is not done, then we will be faced with a terrible situation: unmoved, indifferent human mass. In a situation attended with violence, counter-violence, repression and counter-attack, it will not be possible to mobilize democratic people and raise the voice of protest. We belonging to the third force (those who are neither with the state nor with you ideologically) would find ourselves in a helpless situation. Had we been able, as an alternative, to unite and create a tide of democratic movement against the ruthless state repression in Lalgarh, then we would have found in our ranks that civil society which was imbued with democratic values and inspired by the teachings of Singur and Nandigram, and thus would have ensured the victory of the weak over the strong. In the initial period (November ’08 to June ’09), it was in fact achieved.

You have passed your judgement on some eminent persons and decided to mete out death sentence to them. As you stated, it was the demand of the people. There was an attempt on the life of the chief minister through the Salboni blast. It is true that the chief minister is accused of committing genocide. It is also true that after 14 March massacre in Nandigram, posters and placards were raised demanding ‘Hang the chief minister”. But all of us realized that such outbursts were the manifestation of immediate intense emotion. But if that is interpreted as the serious, logical demand of the people to kill him, then, I am forced to state, this is totally childish. To brand someone as ‘authoritarian’ and then to attempt to kill him, is equally ludicrous and manifestation of anarchist philosophy. Let us remember that Marxist philosophy was established in the world by negating anarchist philosophy. Whether there is any philosophical or theoretical recognition of such individual-centric attack from Marxism to Maoism is not known to me.

Mao Tse-tung’s favourite military strategist Karl von Clausewitz wrote that like politics, war also has a specific aim; but that war at the same time negates that politics; the contending parties get busy parading their forces. War and annihilation bring destruction, but that not only to the enemy, but also inflict severe damage to your own side. And there is also no end to this war.

Friends and foes act always by treating each as a ‘unholy force’. The question is; while getting rid of the unholy, we ourselves are getting influenced by that force. We should not forget that great note of caution: ‘Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you” (Beyond Good and Evil). Counter-violence, counter-attack—these are the natural reactions of human beings. That does not require any special kind of philosophy. Philosophy, on the other hand, can control that reaction with logical thinking, can make human values and notions about morality indispensable elements in formulating policies. I feel that you suffer from serious limitations on this issue.

In the recent period, the police arrested two of your important members, but did not produce them in the court in time. Through your press release, you had quite rightly claimed that the police had violated law by not producing them in court within 24 hours and appealed to civil rights bodies for intervention. You have rightly thought about fake encounters. In the face of a public outcry, the police were forced to produce them in court. Before that, you have also made appeals to the intellectuals to come to Lalgarh to see with their own eyes the barbarity perpetrated by the joint forces in Lalgarh.

By doing so, you have admitted that if, even within this structure, the process of ‘rule of law’ is kept operative in the proper manner and if democratic voice is raised in its support, then it is possible to resist in some cases the illegal, anti-human rights activities and bad intentions of the state. Should it not be our task to strengthen all democratic forums of this type, so that it is possible to ensure the implementation of state-declared commitments to safeguard civil rights of the people? The more such space widens, the more will it be possible to prevent fake encounters, the killing of struggling people and to isolate and defeat the ‘Culture of impunity’.

If instead of doing so, we kidnap someone, oppress him and after that kill him and throw his body in the streets, then we ourselves become oppressors like the state. You will have to accept responsibility for the trauma that the children undergo when murders take place before their very eyes. Such a brutal method of murder can never be accepted by the sensitive people. How can thus we be able to enable people to dream of a society based on human values in place of the ugly face of the state? How can that dream be fulfilled by following the same condemnable, mean method?

You have claimed that Jangal Mahal has posed the questions to the whole people: “Would you support the repression by the joint forces in Lalgarh, or would you support the resistance and protest movement of the heroic people under the leadership of the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities against the joint armed forces and the resistance forces including the hermads?’ (Statement dt.16-08-09). You have made appeals to all to stand by the side of the Lalgarh movement.

Many of us have consistently been supporting the movement against police atrocities and the demands of the Lalgarh people unconditionally. That is not the question. Many of us also do not consider your extension of support to that movement to be unjust.

The problem has started with the transformation in the character of the movement. It relates to your practice of violence. Needless to say, you have been using the typical Marxist ‘binary’ model of seeing it as a contradiction between the two—either one is on this side or on that side or on the side of the enemy; none among you is prepared to accept the fact that there could also be third, fourth or fifth position and stand by the movement. Scholars have written so many things on this ‘history of seeing’!

We are condemning the continuous state violence and the repression perpetrated by the main ruling party in this state. Along with it, we have also felt that that your declared presence has pushed into the background the focus of the direction of people’s upsurge and movement under the leadership of the People’s Committee. On the other hand, there are some negative elements inherent in the armed resistance under your leadership that stand in the way of getting mass support against state violence. Whether you realize it or not, we do not know. While standing in the 21st century—an era of human rights consciousness, in any resistance movement, particularly those with arms, certain universal unchallengeable notions, which we may call ‘minimal absolutist view’, should have to be recognized. Discarding those notions as ‘bourgeois’ at the time of formulation principles would only be suicidal.

Response from Jangal Mahal

Kishenji

The human rights movement in Bengal started in the early 1970s after the setback of the Naxalbari movement. The next few decades were one of vacuum in the revolutionary movement; it was in that context that human rights movement developed.

The human rights movement played a glorious role for four decades, standing by the side of oppressed masses. In those days, Sujatobabu stood in the forefront of that struggle. Civil rights movement in those decades took some shape. That model was the model of standing by the side of the oppressed masses.

However, as there was a resurgence of revolutionary movements in Andhra Pradesh and erstwhile Bihar in the 1980s, civil rights movement, by degrees, was beset with a crisis. That was the time when the masses rose to shake off the image of ‘oppressed masses’ and asserted their identity as the ‘resisting warrior masses’. Thus old model of civil rights movement could not fit in the new situation. The state started clamping down on human rights activists to keep the movement within specified limits. That gave rise to debate and contradiction within human rights movement. The glorious representative of human rights movement at that stage in Andhra Pradesh was Ramanathan R. Purushottam.

Human rights movement in Bengal still remained untouched by that crisis. This is because revolutionary movement in Bengal, as yet, had not regained its relevance in the political scenario.

Today the movement in Lalgarh-Jangal Mahal has raised a question before the human rights movement. Will the civil rights activists, who are accustomed to stand by the side of the ‘oppressed masses’, equally not be successful in standing by the side of the ‘resisting warrior masses’? The movement in Lalgarh-Jangal Mahal has brought to the fore two main questions:
1) Should the people’s movement, in the last analysis, be allowed to be exploited to make room for mainstream leaders/lady leaders? Or will the people be able to channelize it in a way that helps in the resurgence of the people themselves?
2) Should the people fighting against fascist rule be satisfied with saving their skin by holding the hands of leaders/lady leaders along the constitutional path? Or will the people protect themselves by destroying the fascist fortresses like that of Bastille?

Violence or non-violence? This had never been an ‘issue’ in Indian politics. What is called ‘democratic politics’—the practice of violence in that mainstream constitutional politics far surpasses the practice of violence in revolutionary politics. Thus in the language of law, this is a ‘non-issue’. It is to bury the two main issues raised by the Lalgarh movement that the state policy-makers’ circle has put forward this ‘non-issue’.

The right to self-defence is recognized even in bourgeois law. The right to kill the attacker for self-defence is recognized, though that right is used as pretexts to kill revolutionary masses and revolutionaries in the hands of the state. But when the oppressed masses turn into resisting warrior masses and come forward to exercise that right, the whole context changes.

What is meant by fascist rule? It is rule by a coterie of a handful of political leaders and bureaucrats. At the grassroots level, it takes the form of combined terror perpetrated by state forces and Gestapo forces of the party.

Let us keep in mind that fascism is a well-organized centralized system. Even if there is any loophole, then fascist system would penetrate through that loophole into the village and bring with it murder, rape and destruction of houses by fire. The right of self-defence of the masses demands that no shadow of the hermads exists in the villages, no loophole is allowed to be created through which they could penetrate any time. Today we are witness to the hair-raising serials associated with genocide, terror, rape and house-burning like Hitler’s Gestapo forces in the wake of the emergence of ‘salwa judum’ in Chhattisgarh, ‘Nagarik Suraksha Samiti’ in Jharkhand and ‘hermad forces’, ‘ghoskar bahini’, ‘Santras Protirodh Committee’ in the Jangal Mahal area of Bengal. These are part of everyday life–the operation by the joint forces, the setting up 80 to 90 bunkers, big hermad camps, with modern weapons like LMGs under police protection around Keshpur and Gorbeta to recapture Jangal Mahal. All these are known thanks to the media. On the other hand, the state is moving with moneybags from one village to another to create an informer and covert network, the police forces are creating a terror by beating up people indiscriminately, all the schools have been converted into police camps and thereby a war situation is being created. In such a war situation, can the yardsticks of just principles remain the same? Can the yardstick be the same for a normal situation and a situation when fascism rules? Civil war and fascism bring changes in human lives. The notions and yardsticks about just principles also undergo changes temporarily.

In order to tire out informers, the people are adopting a number of methods. On the other side, the state is also trying everything in its power to whet their greed. Thus the number of informers being killed is also mounting. Had there been some proper system in Jangal Mahal today, the number of informers getting killed would have been far less. In different parts of Dandakaranya, informers are being detained in people’s prisons.

As long as the joint forces did not enter the area, no need was felt to liquidate the spies in such a large number. After the intrusion of the joint forces, the situation has changed. Likewise, the notion of self-defence has also changed.

We are also opposed to death sentence. However, the notion of just principle in a normal situation is different from that in a war situation. In the war situation, freedom of thought, consciousness, initiative and innovation is much limited in scope.

Sujatobabu has observed: “Your pronounced and armed presence has pushed the focus of the speed and movement of people’s upsurge led by the People’s Committee to the background”.

Sujatobabu! The state has snatched away your right to openly enter Jangal Mahal area with only one objective. That is to indulge in disinformation campaign. Had it been otherwise, you would have been able to see that everyday thousands of people have been taking part in processions, mass gatherings, gheraos and demonstrations in every nook and corner of Jangal Mahal. Despite repression by joint forces, the system initiated by the People’s Committee is giving inspiration to the people. The creativity of the masses has increased even after the arrest of Chhatradhar Mahato. You would have seen how irresistible people’s movement has become. The inherent strength of the people’s movement, people’s initiative, their intense consciousness have truly been instrumental in writing the epic of struggle. If you are willing, we are ready to arrange everything for your visit to Jangal Mahal and provide security. Come, see with your own eyes, put them in writing, change your outlook. And turn upside down the frontier of human rights movement.

When the decision to form central coordination to take steps for curbing the Maoist movement and to silence 100 top leaders is taken and when the retired DG of the BSF, Prakash Singh openly expresses his displeasure with such a move, it shows that the state has been waging war, and war has to be fought in some particular way. In order to counter the decision of the state to silence top 100 revolutionary leaders (Prakash Singh himself has explained what it means in police parlance to make one ‘silent’), the need to take military action against top leaders of the state arises.

Sujatobabu, has stated that no change achieved through violent means has ever been long-lasting. We are not giving his remark much importance. We do not feel that he himself seriously believes in it. Most of the epochal changes in history could not be accomplished without violence. It was through violence that the ruling dynasties of the medieval age came to an end. Let me conclude by citing one example—that of slave Dred Scott against American slavery, the defeat in which made the civil war inevitable. It is the lust for power and property that made violence inevitable in all ages.

Violence and Non-violence

Amit Bhattacharyya

In the letter of 26 September (2009), captioned “An Open Letter to the Maoists” written by Sujato Bhadra, human rights activist, the author has completely messed up the cause and effect of the Lalgarh movement. In Lalgarh or Jangal Mahal, state repression was not the outcome of the ‘armed activities’ of the Maoists; rather, it was state repression, deprivation and sense of humiliation and years of pain and exploitation that has forced the people to support the ‘jungle party’, to become Maoists and to adopt ‘armed activities’ as the means of resistance and the realization of demands. What is actually implied in the author’s statement is that since armed resistance or counter attack would invite more severe state repression, it is better not to get armed at all.

The author then referred to the application of violence and the meting out of death penalty through trial in people’s courts. Here he has harped on several issues.

What transpires from his statement—and that I also the view of many others—is that ‘democratic’ struggle should be peaceful, and, if takes a ‘violent’ turn or gets ‘armed’, then it would lose its ‘democratic’ character and become an undemocratic one. The question is: is it a fact that only peaceful movements are ‘democratic’? And if it is ‘armed’ and ‘violent’, then it becomes ‘undemocratic’? What do History and practical experience tell us? Generally every person (barring the ruling clique and their faithful servants) wants peace, wants to have food and clothing and live in dignity; nobody wants violence or bloodshed. It is the repressive state that forces them to take up arms.

One of the main features of the Lalgarh movement is armed resistance (with firearms and traditional weapons) in the face of violent attacks launched by the state. There the state is waging a war against the people and the people in their turn are keeping up resistance to the best of their ability. Some CPM cadres and hermads have been killed. The Maoists declared that all of them were police ‘informers’; that they were warned before, but did not listen, so they were given death sentence in people’s courts. Whether they were police ‘informers’ is not known to the present writer. However, what is quite clear is that during the last 32 years, the gap between the ruling CPM and the police administration has vanished into thin air. Two years back, when female members of the Nari Mukti Sangha had been sticking posters in the Bagha Jatin railway station, they were encircled by CITU/CPM cadres, taken to the party office and then handed over to the police. During the same period, the members of the women’s wing of the CPM and some cadres tried to hand over five members of the Matangini Mahila Samiti residing in Jadavpur, Kolkata to the police. These mean attempts prove that the CPM cadres were playing the role of police informers.

The author is against death sentence. I believe, why only he, many people are generally against death sentence. His question is: as 224 countries have abolished death sentence, why should the Maoists still keep it as a form punishment? Here the author has committed a major error. This question is reasonable to countries and established governments; but how can it be applicable to those who do neither have any country nor an established government? The present writer is in total agreement with Sujato on one point: there should be thorough investigation before making any move; the loss of lives on the part of and damage to innocent people is totally undesirable.

In the opinion of the author, ‘a society formed through violent means is short-lasting’. My question to him is: Where at all has fundamental social transformation taken place and that too became long-lasting? Granted that in countries like Russia and China, where society was changed through violent means, there was change in colour. However, was the application of violent means responsible for those societies being short-lasting? Or was it due to the inherent contradictions in the new societies? History teaches us that fundamental social transformation did never take place without war and armed uprisings.

The author has raised the question of the social impact of violence. Why should he speak here only of some urban intellectuals who are detached from the struggle? What about the impact on the people of Jangal Mahal, those adivasi students who have been daily subjected to state violence? Would he not also talk about the resistance struggle by the people, of those people of the area who, like the people of Nandigram, have been spending sleepless nights and standing up to the challenge of the hermads and the joint forces?

The problem with the human rights activists is that they never challenge the existence of the state; on the contrary, they accept its legitimacy and demand that it should ‘put into practice its declared commitment’. Influenced by post-modernist thinking, they see only the tree, but fail to see the forest; to them, the Lalgarh movement is just a conflict between state repression and counter-violence perpetrated by the ‘armed opposition group’. But the lalgarh movement is at the same time a struggle against the plunder of the country’s natural resources by foreign capital and domestic comprador capital, a struggle for attaining pro-people development (setting up of health centres, construction of roads, dams and water reservoirs, implementation of land-to-the-tiller programme etc through people’s initiative and voluntary labour).

On 16 September last (2009), the English daily from Kolkata The Statesman organized a discussion on a theme captioned ‘Surely the Maoist is not one of us’. There in his speech, Prof. G.Hargopal said: “When a landlord takes away a villager’s wife, keeps her in his house to sexually abuse her and orders the husband to go away when he pleads with him for returning his wife to him and his two children, what is he supposed to do? Mouth platitudes about non-violence and peace? Or take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them? In one such case, a youth in Andhra Pradesh went straight into the jungle, organized a group of about 25,000 people, killed the landlord and ended up being Maoists”(The Statesman 17-09-09).

History teaches us that violence, murder—all these existed in the past and will continue to exist at present. All of us individually want peace; nobody wants violence or murder. Despite this, these will continue to stay irrespective of our wishes, and would influence the direction of History and leave behind their negative or positive imprint on the way.

Your Mama! Or The Blitzerization Of Indian TV

http://www.countercurrents.org/selvam291009.htm

By Trevor Selvam

In the past two weeks, I have viewed three shows on NDTV 24/7 and one on CNN-IBN live. On one NDTV show, the moderator was Mr. Vikram Chandra and the other one had the ubiquitous Ms. Barkha Dutt. The CNN-IBN show was moderated by Ms Sagarika Ghose. All three of the shows had to do with Naxalites or Maoists. The NDTV shows had the emblematic war-drum like sound effects and graphic interplay that aped the “War on Terror” style of the Fox/CNN networks. The lead caption of the “Maoist Muddle”, the talk show hosted by Ms. Dutt, had an old Western badlands style letter font in use, which would swish back and forth, when Ms. Dutt took a break. (No! they did not play the theme tune from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly or Appaloosa).

Ms. Ghosh’s moderation was subdued in comparison and I would say, more interested in extracting a minimum possible new thought process in this discussion. However, the two guests on this show, Mr. Gautam Navlakha of the EPW and Mr. Swapan Dasgupta of trash-the-left-any-which-way-you-can fame, took off their gloves in no time and while Mr. Navlakha could have restrained himself a wee bit, I could understand the anger he felt with the asinine, Rush Limbaugh-esque harangue of Mr. Dasgupta. A third guest, Mr. Sudipta Chackravarti, writer of the book Red Sun, attempted to steer a safer line between the absurdly nonsensical right wing cant of Dasgupta and the enraged decency of Navlakha and got nowhere in terms of contributing to the discussion. While this particular show did make an attempt at clean lines and decency in terms of format, the NDTV show, as usual, was like a Vegas-style slot machine/ video game box circus with Ms. Dutt rushing around town-hall style, impatient as hell, and making shallow summaries from time to time. Mr Vikram Chandra used his stationary command centre approach to parse everyone’s unfinished thoughts, by interrupting them and making sweeping summaries and essentially telling off those who wanted to raise larger issues. Barkha Dutt’s pancake makeup and potty-designer clothes added further vacuous glitter and frenzy to the otherwise polyvinyl theatre that she now stages frequently. I think Ms. Dutt has run out of the chutzpah that characterized her initial foray into cable news and live reporting. She has bought into the ethos that employs her i.e be true to the status quo definition of the nation, no matter what, uphold some sanctimonious interpretations of “terror, violence and democracy” and mendaciously ignore the institutionalized violence that characterizes the Indian state and all its institutions, especially the police. I am sure the fact that there are at least one hundred criminals sitting in the Indian Parliament, does not seem to have any impact whatsoever on all these apologists in her show, regarding the greatness of “the world’s largest democracy.” One of the goofy guests in the show, named Tavleen Singh, gave an “Arey Baba!” style shpeel on how great it is to be part of Indian democracy and not be part of Pakistan or China. No jingoism there! And these are experts on “the greatest threat to Indian democracy”?

What is wrong with these shows?

They all pander to a sensationalist, alarmist and finally a fabricated version of the facts on the ground to start with. In their rush to compete with each other they also use melodramatic terminology to describe events. During a Chukka Bundh or a Rail Roko (stopping trains during a general strike in an area, for example West Mednipur) , some channels in no time started referring to it as a “Train Hijack”. Chukka Bandh has been going on for ages. In fact in India it happens almost every day. People vent their anger by stopping trains. A hijack is something else and as a result in no time people are talking about the Taleban and prisoner swaps etc. Arnab Goswami’s Foxy network (Times Now) goes over the deep edge with Goswami almost leaking sputum from the sides of his mouth, calling the Lalgarh PCPA, a “ terrorist” outfit repeatedly during his so-called moderation of events. He invites people to speak and then trashes them continuously, hogging the limelight himself and repeatedly changing his “one basic question” several times. Santhals and tribals with traditional weaponry are called “armed Maoists and terrorists.” Even the CNN and BBC prefer to use words like militants, referring to these same incidents. Goswami, of course, is universally recognized in India as the yellowest of all TV moderators.

The primary problem, as I had stated elsewhere in a previous essay, is that these Indian TV channels have not gone through the stage of development that American radio and TV shows had gone through—of nuanced, thoughtful interdictions---that preceded the Wolf-Blitzerization of Cable news. The Bill Moyers and the Amy Goodmans of PBS, NPR and Democracy Now! have for a long period of time upheld decent, selfless, incisive, conclusive interviews and glamour, glitz and circus acts have not been their bag. A tradition exists in American radio and to a certain extent in Public TV that preceded Time-Warner’s onslaught on the mind waves. India’s Doordarshan, staid and unexciting as it often may seem, does not follow this bombastic TV style that Barkha Dutt and Vikram Chandra espouse. But, Indian TV has missed out on the tradition of the thoughtful radio show. It has taken a leap into the nightmare Vegas style, as far as intellectual cadence goes. Pretty much like the fact that India also skipped over (for the most part) the laying down of optical fibre-glass high speed lines and jumped into the wi-fi data card and satellite disc technology, at least in some regions. Convenient, but unnatural, in some respects. There is thus a missing link in India’s media development. It is not a matter of quickly leap-frogging into the newest technology; it is very simply a question of missing out on a stage of incipient intellectual development. And that stage requires some genuflection on what it is to be a real democracy. Having elections every five years or having law courts and elected officials (even without criminal records) amounts to drawing lane markers on Indian city roads. Nobody takes it seriously or avails of it with pride. It is like an attempt at showcasing the trappings of democracy. As simple as that. When Mr. Chidambaran cajoles the country’s intellectuals and so does the West Bengal government officials, suggesting that any sympathy for the Naxalites amounts to seditious behaviour, it is the beginning of a McCarthyite era of “Un-Indian” activities. In that sense the Americanization of the Indian polity has been seamless since the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is no wonder that the Indian state, once a champion of non-alignment and independent post-colonial political direction, has done a fantastic somersault into the lap of the United States. It is unthinkable that the same forces that have just decided to “phase out ”of Iraq, have now arrived in India and are engaging in what a US commander described, only a few hours ago on NDTV, “the most advanced counter-insurgency operations” with Stryker tanks and various elements of the US Army, Airborne and Cavalry divisions and paratrooper wings, right next to New Delhi! Does Barkha Dutt care? Does Vikram Chandra give two hoots that American boots that were kicked out of Vietnam and are being kicked out elsewhere and especially out of Latin America, are now stomping around in this country? When Barkha Dutt and Vikram Chandra and others invite Indian intellectuals, historians, economists and political scientists who wish to raise some fundamental issues about Indian democracy, they are swept away by the undignified hollerings of the loafers they also invite. So first rule: Do not invite more than three people, at a time. Let them speak to a very specific and elevated concept about the actual workings of Indian democracy. Let them conclude and do not bust them up, half way, with your own impatient and argumentative vox populi style journalism. If you need to invite other people, arrange for a Part 2 of the same debate, with others.

What are some other reasons?

Aside from the two or three people at a time that PBS and National Public Radio invite, the calibre of the people invited also happen to be those with extraordinary historical acumen and analytical skills.

Mr. Chandra, amongst the hordes he invites, brings in loafer-type MPs from the BJP and CPM to trot out their standard rhetoric on behalf of “Indian parliamentary democracy, law and order, national security and non-violence”. The BJP fellow keeps ranting hysterically about how “criminal” the Maoists are with their barrel of the gun power politics and the wily CPI(M) fellow (typical of the Bengal CPIM) snidely jibes away, with a crooked smile on his lips, at the Maoists for not “following the example of the Nepali Maoists.” Also invited are a Maoist sympathizing poet, a Gandhian activist, another EPW editor, a retired police officer (who turns out to be quite sane, decent and at least logical, despite his law and order leanings). Surprisingly, there is also a young Congress MP from Andhra, who is quite lucid that the Naxalite problem cannot be a resolved by guns and choppers, when for sixty two years the State has been absent in the lives of the Adivasis. Anyone who is decent (and the Congress MP who seems very much like one) and waits his turn, does not get the chance to lay down the facts. He or she is either shouted down or stopped short by Chandra or Dutt. Such a procession of flag bearers and party hacks and straight laced law and order folks can never provide education to the masses, who expect to imbibe something from these shows. It ends up being a five-a-side indoor football mêlée and opinions, ideas are never developed. People go home, convinced that India is a flourishing but troubled democracy, Naxalites are violent idealists backed by foreigners and terrorists, that wealth will trickle down someday to the poor if law and order is maintained and the ultimate profanity ---that if Maoists participated in the democratic process (as some other Naxalites seem to be) then they could also have their day under the sun! All these sacred Indian cows are then chewed vociferously and then spat out like pan-masala on the walls of Indian media, for the next half hour in rapid-fire mode. By the time we are two minutes into these so-called forums, not a single assertion is made about the actual facts. There is no discussion on what constitutes “development”, no discussion on institutionalized violence, no discussion the existing statutes of the Indian constitution and how they remain unfulfilled after 60 years, no discussion on the role of the Indian Police force, dubbed as the world’s worst law-breaking and human rights violating outfit, no discussion on the charter rights of the aboriginal people of India, no discussion on the megalomaniac plans of P. Chidambaran to relocate 85% of India’s population into urban centres, no discussion on the devastating and stultifying environmental impact of damming India’s rivers and attempting to join them up (another Chidambaran hair-brained plan) and no discussion on the twenty five years of systematic development work in the Dandakaranya, which the Naxalites have engaged in from using shifting crop agriculture, innovative irrigation, land distribution, mobile educational projects, health clinics, where for 62 years the GOI has done zip. Mr. Chandra demonstrates clearly that he is not a moderator, not a listener, that he has come made up his mind and injects silly conclusions each time the bell rings for an ad and Barkha Dutt does the same with a proto yank mannerism-- “Don’t go away.” In reality, it is time to switch off. But I keep my patience till the end and until the swishing militarist/western sound effects that keep happening every few seconds, come to a final end.

When I sat down to write this essay, I was reminded of a time, in the early seventies when I was in the US and the Watergate scandal had broken out and Nixon was about to be indicted. I was sitting in a room with African American friends, when one of the TV commentators, mostly white at that time, declared that American Democracy would weather this storm and the rebels in US campuses were nothing but agents of foreign left-wing governments. My buddy, who sat next to me, spat out two words-- “Your mama”!

What happened with the Bhubaneshwar Rajdhani? Reflections on Dissent and Violence

http://kafila.org/2009/10/30/what-happened-with-the-bhubaneswar-rajdhani-reflections-on-dissent-and-violence

By Nibedita Menon

From passengers’ eyewitness accounts, and those of the driver and assistant driver of the train (congratulations, for once, to Times of India and to Indian Express reporter Debabrata Mohanty for going beyond statements from police and other officials of the Indian state), this is what happened:

The train was running on schedule when the driver noticed logs on the tracks and a large mob of about 300 waving red flags, rushing towards the train. As the train screeched to a halt, stones were pelted (some passengers reported minor injuries from shattered window glass) and some men climbed into the driver’s cabin. Said the driver, K Ananth Rao and his assistant K G Rao to the ToI reporter, Sukumar Mahato, “They said they were holding up the train because the state had waged a war on tribals. We followed them and sat by the tracks.”

[The Indian Express story by Ravik Bhattacharjee and Kanchan Chakrabarty, unattributed to any source, claims "The Rajdhani Express was intercepted by a 1500 strong mob and its driver and his assistant were taken hostage."]

The PCAPA (People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities) claimed

a) it was not hostage-taking, but a rail abarodha (a blockade) of the train for flouting the rail roko call, when an indefinite bandh against atrocities by the joint security forces in the district had begun since morning.

b) it was meant to draw attention to the arrest of Chhatradhar Mahato, the PCPA leader. One of the slogans sprawling in red letters across the side of the train says, in English, Chhatradhar Mahato is a good man.

The passengers generally conveyed that they never felt a threat to their lives from the men, saying things like: “After about an hour they took pity on us since there were so many children with us, and they let us get back on the train” (Himanshu Patra, in Indian Express); “the commander said that we should report any attempt to harm us or loot us directly to him” (Harish Verma in ToI); “They asked us to come down with our luggage one by one” (Hamid Khan, to ToI); “We thought they would loot us. But they did not harm anybody after we followed their orders” (Susanta Das, DNA)

What did they loot? Samosas, sandwiches, water cartons, blankets. State property in this case, it being the Rajdhani Express. Food, water and warmth – basic necessitites of life that most “citizens” of India cannot expect as a matter of course. The mobiles and walkie-talkies they took from the drivers were returned to them.

Most of the men were armed with tribal weapons (axes, swords, bows and arrows); some were carrying fire-arms. When security forces arrived, there was some firing from the forests, and then the crowd melted away.

The general sense among those who speak in the public domain (including fellow-kafialite Aman Sethi, with whom many an argument has been had in the past!) is that the Maoists have “learnt a lesson”.

But perhaps we need to be alert to something else altogether?

The PCAPA is not the CPI (Maoist), it seems worth stating. (Nor are all Maoists with the party that calls itself CPI-Maoist. One of the most pernicious conflations carried out by the mass media and the government – as well as unknowingly by intellectuals of integrity - which suits the CPI-Maoist very well, is the complete non-differentiation of of tribals taking up arms, Maoists in general, “Naxalites”, and the CPI-Maoist). This operation was not a Maoist one, it has all the hallmarks of a tribal action. No blowing up rail tracks, no hostages, no demands to blackmail the state with the lives of innocents – these are not the signs of a Maoist operation. There were Maoists among them, the PCAPA is now “backed” by CPI (Maoist), and why did it need this backing? Because a legitimate mass movement in Lalgarh against police atrocities in the wake of the bomb blast on Buddhadeb’s route, has been consistently demonized, dubbed Maoist, its members arrested without cause, and thus, step-by-step, driven by the state into the hands of the CPI (Maoist) – exactly what the bomb-blast was intended to accomplish. It was not meant to kill anybody, but to provoke the state to do what it does best - launch its war on terror so effectively as to make the most violent alternatives to democratic mass movements look like the only effective politics possible.

The arrest of Chhatradhar Mahato has been widely condemned, even by Left Front partner Forward Bloc. State general secretary Ashok Ghosh told PTI that Mahato, who has been in open contact with political leaders for some time and was issuing statements regularly, could have been arrested three months ago through the same process as today. So why now? Whom does it help?

The arrest was illegal (of course, most arrests in India are) – he was arrested by policemen posing as journalists, flouting a judgement of the Supreme Court that says that during arrest, arresting police must be in uniform and bear the official badge.

Mahato is no criminal, there are no criminal cases against him, he is the leader of a democratic mass movement against indiscriminate state action. The arrest is unacceptable by any standard or argument, whether strategic (‘why now’) or democratic.

What we now see emerging in the Rajdhani incident is a legitimate people’s mass movement protesting state atrocities, that had contained the CPI (Maoist) within its formation for months, now being driven into the control of that party.

Can this be the beginning of the democratization of CPI (Maoist) under the pressure of being part of a mass movement?

I doubt it. What many of us fear is really the case, is that the mass movement is going to come under the control of the inherently anti-democratic thrust of armed revolution as strategy to overthrow state power.

Let me be very clear, I’m not arguing that violence as such is “inherently anti-democratic”. I am not a pacifist. Spontaneous violence against the structural violence of the state and structure of private property, violence in self-defence, even pre-planned violent action designed to redress a specific situation – all of these possibilities always simmer just below the skin of normal society, and must be understood within the context of hideous, unrelenting, never-addressed injustice. As Eduardo Galeano puts it in The Upside-Down World:

“The killer instinct is an essential ingredient for getting ahead, a human virtue when it helps large companies digest small and strong countries devour weak, but proof of bestiality when some jobless guy goes around with a knife in his fist.”

Such acts of violence I will insist are justifiable political violence – from the long and glorious history of adivasi uprisings against repressive power, to the battered wife with an endlessly abusive husband, waiting for him to fall into a drunken sleep before stabbing him to death.

But make no mistake – this is not the violence enshrined in parties like the CPI-Maoist. Armed revolution as a strategy to overthrow state power involves two things – working towards becoming the state, and in the process, intense, paranoid secrecy. Both of these are what are inherently anti-democratic.

And to be fair, the CPI-Maoist is very up-front about its plans. Here are excerpts from its document, Urban Perspective, available freely on the web:

“In order to mobilize the broadest possible sections in struggle it is absolutely essential that we should utilize all possible open and legal opportunities for work (and not reject the use of legality). Broad mass organizations help the Party to have wide contact with masses, so that it can work under cover for a long time and accumulate strength…Broad, open and legal forms of organizing the masses have, however, to be combined with the strictest methods of secrecy, especially with regard to the link between the open and underground organization….

Thus we must be clear that the open revolutionary mass organization cannot be a permanent form of mass organization in the urban areas. It can and must be utilized in the periods and situations of legal opportunities, and we must be ever alert to make use of such opportunities whenever they arise…

Fractional Work – Here the Party works through the numerous traditional mass organizations that operate in the urban areas. These traditional mass organizations are the organizations normally set up by the masses to fight for their sectional interests or otherwise fulfill their needs. The Party, through its members or other activists, penetrates such organizations without exposing any links with the Party. Through the activities of the organization, the masses, while being mobilized for their sectional interests, are attempted to be drawn towards the revolution. This method of organizing, if properly conducted, offers the best opportunity for cover work for a long period of time… Once we have decided to do fractional work within an organization we should strive to achieve a leading position in it. This means we should be in a position to influence and guide the decisions of the organization. If it is necessary to takeover office bearers’ posts in order to achieve this influence, then we should make attempts to do so. Whether we take up office bearers’ posts or not, the important point in fractional work is the skillful exposure of the reactionaries and reformists leading or participating within these organizations. This exposure is essential to draw the masses away from their influence. This must however be done without exposing ourselves to the enemy. The forms of exposure will thus differ depending upon the concrete situation. In vast areas where risk of direct exposure of our fractional work activists is low, we can use propaganda by the secret revolutionary mass organization or even direct calls by the Party. In smaller areas like a single factory or slum we may have to mainly or only use word-of-mouth propaganda. Sometimes we can create artificial banners like ‘angry workers’, ‘concerned slum dwellers’, etc. for doing our propaganda. Very often we may have to use a combination of various methods. Whatever is the method it should be applied carefully, skillfully, and consistently… It should ensure that the masses are drawn away from the influence of reactionaries and reformists…

Party-formed Cover Mass Organizations – It sometimes becomes necessary for us to directly form mass organizations under cover without disclosing their link with the Party. Mostly, such a need arises due to the absence of any other suitable mass organization within which we can do fractional work…The methods of mass work too are not very different from the areas of fractional work. The main difference is of course that we do not have the task of exposure, as when working within the reactionary and reformist organizations…

Legal Democratic Organizations – These are the organizations formed on an explicit political basis with some or all aspects of an anti-imperialist, anti-feudal programme, and with a programme of action and forms of struggle that broadly fall within a legal framework. …The scope of the legal democratic organization is very wide, extending to the broad coalitions and alliances formed against repression, globalization, Hindutva, and right up to the all-encompassing bodies formed with the banners of anti-capitalism or people’s struggles. ..The legal democratic movement itself too can grow from strength to strength and remain on the correct political course only if we concentrate sufficiently and simultaneously on developing the secret Party core within it.”

In short, take over existing mass organizations when you cannot set them up, work towards subverting their exisiting processes by producing secret propaganda about those who are influential in it, and so on and on – always, always, utilize people towards a secret end that you know if you reveal out in the open, very few will be with you.

Having participated over the 1990s in many broad non-party, non-funded formations in Delhi against the state in general and against Hindutva politics, the inexplicable and bitter break-up of some of them is now tragically crystal clear to me.

And yet, my democratic instincts insist, even the CPI-Maoist must be given its place within the spectrum of political dissent. As one element of the spectrum.

The problem is, the party in its turn has no notion of legitimate dissent to its politics. If you’re not with it, you’re with the state. If it declares war on the state, it commits everyone within range – willing or unwilling, knowing and unknowing – to that war. And this war is no metaphor. The entire document quoted above is a document of war strategy – there is the party, and there is the “enemy”. The rest are to be utilized.

Another voice must emerge. Based on a critique of the state – of any state, of this state, of corporate greed in partnership with institutions masquerading under cover of democracy. But insisting also, always, on the legitimacy of dissenting voices within the dissent to the state.