The charge that the Maoists are irrelevant to urban working-class movements, to the Dalit movement, to the plight of farmers and agricultural workers outside the forests is true. There is no doubt that the Maoists’ militarized politics makes it almost impossible for it to function in places where there is no forest cover. However, it could equally be argued that the major Communist parties have managed to survive in the mainstream only by compromising their ideologies so drastically that it is impossible to tell the difference between them and other bourgeois political parties any more. It could be argued that the smaller factions that have remained relatively uncompromised have managed to do so because they do not pose a threat to anybody.
Whatever their faults or achievements as bourgeois parties, few would associate the word “revolutionary” with the CPI or CPI(M) any more. (The CPI does play a role in some of the struggles against mining companies in Orissa.) But even in their chosen sphere of influence, they cannot claim to have done a great service to the proletariat they say they represent. Apart from their traditional bastions in Kerala and West Bengal, both of which they are losing their grip over, they have very little presence in any other part of the country, urban or rural, forest or plains. They have run their trade unions into the ground. They have not been able to stanch the massive job losses and the virtual disbanding of the formal workforce that mechanization and the new economic policies have caused. They have not been able to prevent the systematic dismantling of workers’ rights. They have managed to alienate themselves almost completely from Adivasi and Dalit communities. In Kerala, many would say they have done a better job than other political parties, but their thirty-year “rule” in West Bengal has left that state in ruins. The repression they unleashed in Nandigram and Singur, and now against the Adivasis of Jangalmahal, will probably drive them out of power for a few years. (Only for as long as it takes Mamata Banerjee to prove that she is not the vessel into which people should pour their hopes.)
Still, while listing a litany of their sins, it must be said that the demise of the mainstream Communist parties is not something to be celebrated. At least not unless it makes way for a new, more vital and genuinely left movement in India.
The Maoists (in their current as well as earlier avatars) have had a different political trajectory. The redistribution of land, by violent means if necessary, was always the centerpiece of their political activity. They have been completely unsuccessful in that endeavor. But their militant interventions, in which thousands of their cadre—as well as ordinary people—paid with their lives, shone a light on the deeply embedded structural injustice of Indian society. If nothing else, from the time of the Telangana movement, which in some ways was a precursor to the uprising in Naxalbari, the Naxalite movement, for all its faults, sparked an anger about being exploited and a desire for self-respect in some of the most oppressed communities.
In West Bengal, it led to Operation Barga (a bargadar is a sharecropper), and to a far lesser extent in Andhra Pradesh, it shamed governments into carrying out some land reform. Even today, all the talk about “uneven development” and “exploitation” of tribal areas by the prime minister, the government’s plans to transfer Joint Forest Management funds from the Forest Department directly to the gram panchayats, the Planning Commission’s announcement that it will allocate Rs 14,000 crore ($3 billion) for tribal development, has come as a strategy to defuse the Maoist “menace.” If those funds do end up benefiting the Adivasi community, instead of being siphoned away by middlemen, then the “menace” surely ought to be given some credit. Though the Maoists have virtually no political presence outside forested areas, they do have a presence, an increasingly sympathetic one, in the popular imagination as a party that stands up for the poor against the intimidation and bullying of the state. If Operation Green Hunt eventually becomes an outright war instead of a “subconventional” one, if ordinary Adivasis start dying in huge numbers, that sympathy could ignite in unexpected ways.
Among the most serious charges leveled against the Maoists is that its leaders have a vested interest in keeping people poor and illiterate in order to retain their hold on them. Critics ask why, after working in areas like Dandakaranya for thirty years, they still do not run schools and clinics, why they don’t have check-dams and advanced agriculture, and why people were still dying of malaria and malnutrition. Good question. But it ignores the reality of what it means to be a banned organization whose members—even if they are doctors or teachers—are liable to be shot on sight. It would be more useful to direct the same question to the government of India that has none of these constraints. Why is it that in tribal areas that are not overrun by Maoists, there are no schools, no hospitals, no check-dams? Why do people in Chhattisgarh suffer from such acute malnutrition that doctors have begun to call it “nutritional AIDS” because of the effect it has on the human immune system?
In their censored chapter in the Ministry of Panchayati Raj report, Ajay Dandekar and Chitrangada Choudhury (no fans of the Maoists—they call the party ideology “brutal and cynical”) write:
So the Maoists today have a dual effect on the ground in PESA areas. By virtue of the gun they wield, they are able to evoke some fear in the administration at the village/block/district level. They consequently prevent the common villager’s powerlessness over the neglect or violation of protective laws like PESA, for example, warning a talati, who might be demanding bribes in return for fulfilling the duty mandated to him under the Forest Rights Act, a trader who might be paying an exploitative rate for forest produce, or a contractor who is violating the minimum wage. The party has also done an immense amount of rural development work, such as mobilizing community labour for farm ponds, rainwater harvesting and land conservation works in the Dandakaranya region, which villagers testified had improved their crops and improved their food security situation.5
In their recently published empirical analysis of the working of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGA) in two hundred Maoist-affected districts in Orissa, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand, which appeared in the Economic and Political Weekly, authors Kaustav Banerjee and Partha Saha say:
The field survey revealed that the charge that the Maoists have been blocking developmental schemes does not seem to hold much ground. In fact, Bastar seems to be doing much better in terms of NREGA than some other areas … on top of that, the wage struggles, the enforcement of minimum wages can be traced back to the wage struggles led by the Maoists in that area. A clear result that we came across is the doubling of the wage rates for tendu leaf collection in most Maoist areas…. Also, the Maoists have been encouraging the conduct [sic]of social audits since this helps in the creation of a new kind of democratic practice hitherto unseen in India.6
Implicit in much of the debate around Maoists is the old, patronizing tendency to cast “the masses,” the Adivasi people in this case, in the role of the dim-witted horde, completely controlled by a handful of wicked “outsiders.” One university professor, a well-known Maoist-baiter, accused the leaders of the party of being parasites preying on poor Adivasis. To bolster his case, he compared the lack of development in Dandakaranya to the prosperity in Kerala. After suggesting that the non-Adivasi leaders were all cowards “hiding safely in the forest,” he appealed to all Adivasi Maoist guerrillas and village militia to surrender before a panel of middle-class Gandhian activists (handpicked by him). He called for the non-Adivasi leadership to be tried for war crimes. Why non-Adivasi Gandhians are acceptable, but not non-Adivasi Maoists, he did not say. There is something very disturbing about this inability to credit ordinary people with being capable of weighing the odds and making their own decisions.
In Orissa, for instance, there are a number of diverse struggles being waged by unarmed resistance movements which often have sharp differences with each other. And yet between them all, they have managed to temporarily stop some major corporations from being able to proceed with their projects—the Tatas in Kalinganagar, Posco in J
agatsinghpur, Vedanta in Niyamgiri. Unlike in Bastar, where they control territory and are well entrenched, the Maoists tend to use Orissa only as a corridor for their squads to pass through. As the security forces are closing in on people and ratcheting up the repression, they have to think very seriously about the pros and cons of involving the Maoists into their struggles. Will its armed squads stay and fight the state repression that will inevitably follow a Maoist “action”? Or will they retreat and leave unarmed people to deal with police terror? Activists and ordinary people, falsely accused of being Maoists, are already being jailed. Many have been killed in cold blood. But a tense uneasy dance continues between the unarmed resistance movements and the CPI (Maoist).
On occasion, the party has done irresponsible things, which have led to horrible consequences for ordinary people. In 2006, at the height of the tension between the Dalit and Adivasi communities in Kandhamal district, the Maoists shot dead Laxmanananda Saraswati, leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a fascist outfit of proselytizers, working among Adivasis to bring them “back into the Hindu fold.” After the murder, enraged Kandha tribals who had been recently converted to Hinduism were encouraged to go on a rampage. Almost four hundred villages were convulsed with anti-Christian violence. Fifty-four Panna Dalit Christians were killed, more than two hundred churches burnt, tens of thousands had to flee their homes. Many still live in camps, unable to return. A somewhat different, but equally dangerous situation is brewing in Narayanpatna and Koraput, districts where the Chasi Mulya Adivasi Sangh (which the police say is a Maoist “front”) is fighting to restore land to Adivasis that was illegally appropriated by local moneylenders and liquor dealers (many of them Dalit). These areas are reeling under police terror, with hundreds of Adivasis thrown in Koraput jail and thousands living in the forests, afraid to go home.
People who live in situations like this do not simply take instructions from a handful of ideologues who appear out of nowhere waving guns. Their decisions of what strategies to employ take into account a whole host of considerations: the history of the struggle, the nature of the repression, the urgency of the situation, and the landscape in which their struggle is taking place. The decision of whether to be a Gandhian or a Maoist, militant or peaceful, or a bit of both (like in Nandigram) is not always a moral or ideological one. Quite often, it’s a tactical one. Gandhian satyagraha, for example, is a kind of political theater. In order for it to be effective, it needs a sympathetic audience, which villagers deep in the forest do not have. When a posse of eight hundred policemen lay a cordon around a forest village at night and begin to burn houses and shoot people, will a hunger strike help? (Can starving people go on a hunger strike? And do hunger strikes work when they are not on TV?)
Equally, guerrilla warfare is a strategy that villages in the plains, with no cover for tactical retreat, cannot afford. Fortunately, people are capable of breaking through ideological categories, and of being Gandhian in Jantar Mantar, militant in the plains and guerrilla fighters in the forest without necessarily suffering from a crisis of identity. The strength of the insurrection in India is its diversity, not uniformity.
Since the government has expanded its definition of “Maoist” to include anybody who opposes it, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Maoists have moved to center stage. However, their doctrinal inflexibility, their reputed inability to countenance dissent, to work with other political formations and, most of all, their single-minded, grim, military imagination makes them too small to fill the giant pair of boots that is currently on offer.
When I met Comrade Roopi in the forest, the first thing the techie-whiz did after greeting me was to ask about an interview with me published soon after the Maoists had attacked Rani Bodili, a girls’ school in Dantewada that had been turned into a police camp. More than fifty policemen and special police officers were killed. “We were glad,” she said, “that you refused to condemn our Rani Bodili attack, but then in the same interview you said that if the Maoists ever come to power, the first person we would hang would probably be you. Why did you say that? Why do you think we’re like that?” I was settling into my long answer but we were distracted. I would probably have started with Stalin’s purges—in which millions of ordinary people and almost half of the seventy-five thousand Red Army officers were either jailed or shot and 98 out of 139 Central Committee members were arrested, and gone on to the huge price people paid for China’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and might have ended with the Pedamallapuram incident in Andhra Pradesh, when the Maoists, in its previous avatar as People’s War, killed the village sarpanch and assaulted women activists for refusing to obey their call to boycott elections.)
Coming back to the question: Who can fill that giant pair of boots? Perhaps it cannot, and should not be, a single pair of feet. Sometimes it seems very much as though those who have a radical vision for a newer, better world do not have the steel it takes to resist the military onslaught, and those who have the steel do not have the vision.
Right now, the Maoists are the most militant end of a bandwidth of resistance movements fighting an assault on Adivasi homelands by a cartel of mining and infrastructure companies. To deduce from this that the CPI (Maoist) is in principle a party with a new way of thinking about “development” or the environment might be a little far-fetched. (The one reassuring sign is that it has cautiously said that it is against Big Dams. If it means what it says, that alone would automatically lead to a radically different development model.)
For a political party that is widely seen as opposing the onslaught of corporate mining, the Maoists’ policy (and practice) on mining remains pretty woolly. In several places where people are fighting mining companies, there is a persistent view that the Maoists are not averse to allowing mining and mining-related infrastructure projects to go ahead as long as they are given protection money. From interviews and statements made by their senior leaders on the subject of mining, what emerges is just a sort of “We’ll do a better job” approach. They vaguely promise “environmentally sustainable” mining, higher royalties, better resettlement for the displaced, and higher stakes for the “stakeholders.” (The present minister for mining and mineral resources, too, thinking along the same lines, stood up in Parliament and promised that 26 percent of the “profits” from mining would go into “tribal development.” What a feast that will be for the pigs at the trough!)
But let’s take a brief look at the star attraction in the mining belt—the several trillion dollars’ worth of bauxite. There is no environmentally sustainable way of mining bauxite and processing it into aluminum. It’s a highly toxic process that has been exported out of their own environments by most Western countries. To produce 1 ton of aluminum, you need about 6 tons of bauxite, more than 1,000 tons of water, and a massive amount of electricity. For that amount of captive water and electricity, you need Big Dams, which, as we know, come with their own cycle of cataclysmic destruction.
Last of all—the big question—what is the aluminum for? Where is it going? Aluminum is the principal ingredient in the weapons industry—for other countries’ weapons industries. Given this, what would a sane, “sustainable” mining policy be? Suppose, for the sake of argument, the CPI (Maoist) was given control of the so-called Red Corridor, the tribal homeland—with its riches of uranium, bauxite, limestone, dolomite, coal, tin, granite, marble—how would it go about the business of policy-making and governance? Would it mine minerals to put on the market in order to create revenue, build infrastructure, and expand its operations? Or would it mine only enough to meet people’s basic needs? How would it define “basic needs”? For instance, would nuclear weapons be “a basic need” in a Maoist nation-state?
Judging from what is happening in Russia and China and even Vietnam, eventually communist and capitalist societies have one thing in common—the DNA of their dreams. After their revolutions, after building socialist societies that millions of workers and peasants paid for with their lives, bo
th countries now have unbridled capitalist economies. For them, too, the ability to consume has become the yardstick by which progress is measured. For this kind of “progress” you need industry. To feed the industry you need a steady supply of raw material. For that you need mines, dams, domination, colonies, war. Old powers are waning, new ones rising. Same story, different characters—rich countries plundering poor ones. Yesterday, it was Europe and America, today it’s India and China. Maybe tomorrow it’ll be Africa. Will there be a tomorrow? Perhaps it’s too late to ask, but hope has little to do with reason.
Can we expect that an alternative to what looks like certain death for the planet will come from the imagination that has brought about this crisis in the first place? It seems unlikely. The alternative, if there is one, will emerge from the places and the people who have resisted the hegemonic impulse of capitalism and imperialism instead of being co-opted by it.
Here in India, even in the midst of all the violence and greed, there is still immense hope. If anyone can do it, we can do it. We still have a population that has not yet been completely colonized by that consumerist dream. We have a living tradition of those who have struggled for Gandhi’s vision of sustainability and self-reliance, for socialist ideas of egalitarianism and social justice. We have Ambedkar’s vision, which challenges the Gandhians as well as the socialists in serious ways. We have the most spectacular coalition of resistance movements with experience, understanding, and vision.
My Seditious Heart Page 63