Abstract
The chapter examines the world’s longest ongoing Maoist-led peasant insurgency and the state’s counterinsurgency in India from an anti-anti-Communist—with a capital C—frame of reference and with a historical approach. It begins with analyses of the would-have-been Ghadr uprising of 1915 and the persecution that followed; the politics of Bhagat Singh and his close comrades and its suppression in the period 1924–1931; and early communist activism (and the crackdown on it) around the formation of the Communist Party of India in India in December 1925. This is followed by an examination of the state repression of the Telangana peasant insurgency (1946–1951) and of the ongoing Naxalite/Maoist-led peasant insurgency, beginning in 1967. These inquiries suggest interplay of continuity with significant change in the character of anti-communist persecution in independent India. Grave social injustice at different points in time has been at the root of the communist resistance.
Bernard D’Mello, a member of the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Mumbai, is the author of India after Naxalbari: Unfinished History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018); Gautam Nalvakha, a member of the People’s Union for Democratic Rights, Delhi, is the author of Days and Nights in the Heartland of Rebellion (New Delhi: Penguin, 2010). As the authors of this chapter, we think it might be pertinent to emphasise that besides being social-science writers, we are also human rights activists. We thank Christian Gerlach and Clemens Six for their thoughtful comments and suggestions that have led to improvements in both the form and the content of this chapter. The usual disclaimers apply.
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Notes
- 1.
In Maoist theory, “New Democracy” is the democratic system that is supposed to come into being after the victory of the “New Democratic Revolution”, which does away with semi-feudalism, frees the country from imperialist domination, and expropriates big business to render it politically impotent, thereby making capitalism much more compatible with democracy, and thus aiding the transition to socialism.
- 2.
Base areas are self-administered, liberated areas, miniature “New Democratic” self-governments of the revolutionary forces, albeit under siege, but serving as places of refuge and remobilization for the people’s army.
- 3.
The United Front is a political bloc based on a four-class alliance of the working class, the peasantry, the middle class, and the national bourgeoisie (a section of the capitalist class that suffers from imperialist domination) in the New Democratic Revolution.
- 4.
Hamza Alavi, “State and Class Under Peripheral Capitalism”, in Hamza Alavi and Teodor Shanin (eds.), Introduction to the Sociology of ‘Developing Societies’ (London: Macmillan, 1982): 302. According to Hamza Alavi, the colonial state was overdeveloped in relation to the economic base in terms of its powers of control and regulation, including repression, and the bureaucracy, the military and the polity in independent India had a vested interest in continuity rather than change on this score. Harbours, ports, railways, roads, canals and the telegraph were public-sector infrastructure that was essential not merely for the smooth functioning of the export- and import-oriented businesses, but such public infrastructure was also indispensable for the British Indian Army, police, and paramilitary, and for the public administration of the subcontinent. Moreover, the British Indian Army was organised, not merely to maintain the “peace” within the country, but also for overseas colonial military expeditions financed from government revenue. Not for nothing did Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister from 1874 to 1881, refer to India as “the brightest jewel in the crown”, for colonial policy, over a long period, was focussed upon the expansion of the British Empire, and the British Indian Army was a key tool in the modus operandi of that enlargement. The eminent Indian historian Ranajit Guha too emphasises the growth and consolidation of the “colonial empire with its centralised bureaucracy, army, legal system, institutions to purvey a western-style education, its railways, roads and postal communication, and above all, the emergence of an all-India market economy” in the nineteenth century itself. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983): 297.
- 5.
The “strategic hamlets” tactic involves forcibly taking the peasants away from their villages and relocating them elsewhere in order to isolate them from contact with and influence by the communist guerrillas.
- 6.
The “mass line” is a Maoist leadership principle of learning from the masses, developing and enriching their ideas, and then propagating and explaining these enriched ideas in a way that the masses accept them as their own, implement them, and test their validity in action.
- 7.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 159. By “accumulation by dispossession” David Harvey implies a “continuation and proliferation of accumulation practices which Marx had treated as ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ during the rise of capitalism. These include the commodification and privatisation of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations …; conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights …; suppression of rights to the commons; commodification of labour power and suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; colonial, neo-colonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); …”.
- 8.
The “financial aristocracy” is a section of Indian big business that accumulates private wealth not by production alone, but by pocketing the already available wealth of others, especially public/state wealth, as also agricultural and other lands, and the appropriation of common property resources.
- 9.
An exemplification of the liberal line of reasoning can be found in Ramachandra Guha, “Adivasis, Naxalites and Indian Democracy”, Economic & Political Weekly 42, no. 32 (August 11, 2007): 3305–12.
- 10.
Again, as representative of this line of thinking, Ramachandra Guha, “Adivasis, Naxalites and …”.
- 11.
In the present-day, terror and terrorists refer to the deliberate killing of civilians by state and non-state combatants, whereas with reference to the “revolutionary terror” and “revolutionary terrorists” of those times, for instance, in the case of the Narodnaya Volya in Russia in the late nineteenth century, although the group was responsible for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, it had, nevertheless, stated explicitly that “‘individuals and groups standing outside its fight against the government would be treated as neutrals, their person and property were to be inviolate.’” See Eric Hobsbawm, “Barbarism: A User’s Guide”, New Left Review I, no. 206 (July–August 1994), accessed December 21, 2010, http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=1768. However, this limiting condition notwithstanding, such anarchist acts of “revolutionary terror” in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century led to an unjustifiably large loss of lives, which cannot be overlooked.
- 12.
Our account of the Ghadrs mainly draws on (but not uncritically) Harjot Oberoi, “Ghadar Movement and Its Anarchist Genealogy”, Economic & Political Weekly 44, no. 50 (December 12, 2009): 42–46.
- 13.
What distinguishes a “morally justifiable target” in the practice of “revolutionary terror” from its opposite? An episode in a 1949 play written by Albert Camus, entitled Les Justes (translated as The Just Ones), illustrates the moral question well. It is based on an incident in Russia in 1905 in which a group of “Socialist Revolutionaries” decided to assassinate the Czarist Grand Duke Sergei Alexanderovich who was directly involved in brutally suppressing revolutionary activity. The man who was deputed to do the job was carrying a bomb which he hid under his coat, but as he approached the carriage carrying the Grand Duke, he noticed that the man had two children on his lap, and this led him to abandon the attempt. In this he had the support of some of his comrades, one of whom puts it well: “Even in destruction, there’s a right way and a wrong way –– and there are limits”. The quote is from Albert Camus, “The Just Assassins”, in Caligula and Three Other Plays, translated by Stuart Gilbert (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958): 258. However, morally justifiable or not, such acts of “revolutionary terror”, divorced from the masses, can, on the historical record, be presumed to have been inefficacious and inappropriate as revolutionary means, especially when one keeps in mind the revolutionary objectives—a point which applies to the anarchist tactics of the Ghadr movement too.
- 14.
Radha D’Souza, “Revolt and Reform in South Asia: Ghadar Movement to 9/11 and After”, Economic & Political Weekly 49, no. 8 (February 22, 2014): 59–73.
- 15.
In Chauri Chaura, peasants, when at least two of their comrades were killed in police firing, set a police station on fire, which caused the death of twenty-two (some reports say twenty-three) policemen. This led Gandhi to withdraw the whole civil disobedience struggle, with the peasants condemned as “murderers” and traitors because they had broken their vow of non-violence, which was Gandhi’s precondition for their participation. As many as nineteen persons were hanged in July 1923, including some of the leaders—Nazar Ali, Lal Mohammad, and Bhagwan Ahir—and there were many life sentences.
- 16.
Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (Delhi: Macmillan, 1983): 268.
- 17.
Sarkar, Modern India, 268.
- 18.
The Simon Commission, chaired by Sir John Simon, had been constituted in November 1927 to review the 1919 Reforms (that had allowed provincial legislative assemblies) two years prior to their date of lapsing.
- 19.
Sarkar, Modern India, 268–69.
- 20.
A. G. Noorani, The Trial of Bhagat Singh: Politics of Justice (New Delhi: Konark Publishers, 1996).
- 21.
Ghosh went on to become, much later, in 1951, general secretary of the CPI, paradoxically, when the party embarked on the parliamentary road as a social-democratic agency.
- 22.
Sarkar, Modern India, 247.
- 23.
Irfan Habib, “The Left and the National Movement”, in The National Movement: Studies in Ideology and History (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2011): 88.
- 24.
Habib, “The Left and the National Movement”, 92.
- 25.
Sarkar, Modern India, 272; Habib, “The Left and the National Movement”, 93.
- 26.
K. G. Kannabiran, The Wages of Impunity: Power, Justice and Human Rights (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2004): 27.
- 27.
The Maintenance of Internal Security Act, 1971 included provisions for indefinite preventive detention, search and seizure without warrants, and other repressive powers. It was based on the Preventive Detention Act, 1950, passed a month after the Constitution of India came into force, which lasted till the end of 1969.
- 28.
K. G. Kannabiran “Creeping Decay in Institutions of Democracy”, Economic & Political Weekly 27, no. 33 (August 15, 1992): 1718; Kannabiran, The Wages of Impunity, 71–72, 65 and 69.
- 29.
P. Sundarayya, Telengana People’s Struggle and Its Lessons (Calcutta: Communist Party of India (Marxist), 1972); P. Sundarayya, “Telangana People’s Armed Struggle, 1946–1951—‘Part One: Historical Setting’”, Social Scientist 1, no. 7 (1973): 3–19; “Part Two: Phase One and Its Lessons”, Social Scientist 1, no. 8 (1973): 8–42; “Part Three: Pitted Against the Indian Army”, Social Scientist 1, no. 9 (1973): 23–46; and “Part 4: Background to a Momentous Decision”, Social Scientist 1, no. 10 (1973): 22–52. The author, P. Sundarayya, was one of the leaders of the Telangana People’s armed struggle.
- 30.
K. Balagopal, “Telangana Movement Revisited”, Economic & Political Weekly 18, no. 18 (April 30, 1983): 709–12; Barry Pavier, The Telengana Movement: 1944–51 (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1981).
- 31.
Ranajit Guha, “Indian Democracy: Long Dead, Now Buried”, Journal of Contemporary Asia 6, no. 1 (1976): 41.
- 32.
The former Asaf Jah VII was made the Rajpramukh (Governor) of Hyderabad State when the Constitution of India came into force on January 26, 1950, and until Hyderabad State was merged with Andhra State to form Andhra Pradesh on October 31, 1956.
- 33.
Adivasis are tribal people who, it is claimed, were the “original inhabitants” of the Indian subcontinent. The official bureaucratic label is Scheduled Tribe. Throughout this chapter, we view the various Adivasis—distinct tribes, for instance, Gonds in Bastar in the province of Chhattisgarh, or Koyas of parts of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh—as distinct communities of people, with their own dialects, customs, culture and rules which structure how they act towards and in regard to each other. What distinguishes them from mainstream society, whether Bengali, Oriya or Telugu, is internal social relations based much more on kinship bonds, frequent cooperation to achieve common goals, and maintenance of a certain distance from the state and mainstream society because there is an historical memory of such contact—with state officials, traders, usurers and contractors—as having brought oppression, exploitation and degradation. Adivasis have not only been subjugated and exploited by the dominant caste-elite but have also suffered discrimination at the hands of this elite, which imputes physical, cognitive, and cultural superiority to itself vis-à-vis Adivasis. Hence, it would not be an exaggeration to characterize the oppression the Adivasis have been subjected to by the dominant caste-elite in India as also being racist in nature. Moreover, there has also been an underlying prejudicial ideology of dominant caste-elite superiority and Adivasi inferiority. Bernard D’Mello, “India’s Rotten Democracy and the Maoist Movement”, Economic & Political Weekly 52, no. 3 (January 21, 2017): 70–75.
- 34.
Sundarayya, Telengana People’s Struggle and Its Lessons, 138–46, 178–79, and 138–89. Of course, the counterinsurgency also tried to co-opt the insurgent peasantry with a Jagir Abolition Regulation (in August 1949) and even set up an agrarian enquiry committee to recommend land reform.
- 35.
Ranajit Guha, “Indian Democracy: Long Dead, Now Buried”, 41–42.
- 36.
Mohan Ram, “The Telangana Peasant Struggle, 1946–51”, Economic & Political Weekly 8, no. 23 (June 9, 1973): 1025–32.
- 37.
Sarkar, Modern India, 444–45.
- 38.
The 1964 split in the CPI led to the formation of the CPM.
- 39.
Sumanta Banerjee, In the Wake of Naxalbari (Kolkata: Sahitya Samsad, 2008): 93–112. This classic account was first published by the Calcutta publisher Subarnarekha in 1980, and then by Zed Press, London in 1984 under the title India’s Simmering Revolution: The Naxalite Uprising.
- 40.
Suniti Kumar Ghosh, Naxalbari Before and After: Reminiscences and Appraisal (Kolkata: New Age Publishers, 2009): 132.
- 41.
Ghosh, Naxalbari Before and After, 132–33.
- 42.
D’Mello, “India’s Rotten Democracy and the Maoist Movement”, 72 and 75.
- 43.
Ghosh, Naxalbari Before and After, 204–5.
- 44.
Banerjee, In the Wake of Naxalbari, 129–30; Ghosh, Naxalbari Before and After, 205–6.
- 45.
Banerjee, In the Wake of Naxalbari, 162–63, 176–78; Ghosh, Naxalbari Before and After, 206–7.
- 46.
Frontier, September 18, 1971, quoted in Ghosh, Naxalbari Before and After, 230.
- 47.
Lawrence Lifschultz, “The Problem of India”, Monthly Review 32, no. 9 (February 1981): 19.
- 48.
Dalit is a self-description of the outcasts/ati-shudras (those who have been relegated below the lowest varna in the caste hierarchy) as “the crushed” or “the oppressed”. The official description is Scheduled Caste.
- 49.
Banerjee, In the Wake of Naxalbari, 343.
- 50.
Banerjee, In the Wake of Naxalbari, 344–45. The Naxalite insurgency in its first phase had almost been defeated by the state’s counterinsurgency before the declaration of the State of Emergency in June 1975.
- 51.
Bernard D’Mello, India After Naxalbari: Unfinished History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018): 41.
- 52.
APDR, “About APDR”, Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights, September 9, 1972. This was APDR’s first declaration, two and a half months after its formation.
- 53.
Mohan Ram, “Parvathipuram Conspiracy Case”, Economic & Political Weekly 14, no. 19 (May 12, 1979): 827–28. There was also the Nagi Reddy Conspiracy Case involving Tarimela Nagi Reddy and the other membrs of the Andhra Pradesh Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries.
- 54.
M. R., “New Uses of a Colonial Law”, Economic & Political Weekly 9, no. 24 (June 15, 1974): 940–41; Manoranjan Mohanty, “Lessons of the Secunderabad Conspiracy Case”, Economic & Political Weekly 14, no 10 (March 11, 1989): 482.
- 55.
P. A. Sebastian, “Law: Suppression of Disturbances Act”, Economic & Political Weekly 15, no. 33 (August 16, 1980): 1389–90.
- 56.
Guerrilla zones are tracts where the agrarian revolutionary movement is strong, but where the Party and its mass organisations are in power only if the guerrillas have the upper hand over the state’s forces. Power reverts to the Indian state when the guerrillas are forced to retreat.
- 57.
Besides the CPI(ML)(PW), there have been other factions of the movement in Andhra Pradesh (AP), stemming from the Andhra Pradesh Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries, originally led by Tarimela Nagi Reddy (“TN” as he was called, 1917–1976) and Chandra Pulla Reddy (CP, 1917–1984), but we will focus on CPI(ML)(PW), whose successor, the CPI (Maoist) has been at the helm of the Maoist insurgency since 2004 up to the present.
- 58.
For a brief account of the Naxalite movement in the Gadchiroli and Bastar regions of Dandakaranya in its initial foray, in the 1980s, and in the 1990s, see Gautam Navlakha, Days and Nights in the Heartland of Rebellion (New Delhi: Penguin, 2012): 99–108, 114–16.
- 59.
K. Srinivasulu “CPI(ML) and the Question of Caste: Dynamics of Social Mobilisation in Anti-Feudal Struggles in Telangana”, in Discourses on Naxalite Movement, 1967–2009: Insights into Radical Left Politics, ed. Pradip Basu (Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2010): 228–29. Later, in the 1990s, they even gained political legitimacy through the Panchayati Raj institutions.
- 60.
K. Balagopal, “Physiognomy of Some Proscribed Poems”, Economic & Political Weekly 22, no. 13 (March 28, 1987): 537–38.
- 61.
K. Balagopal, “A Tale of Arson”, Economic & Political Weekly 22, no. 29 (July 18, 1987): 1169–71.
- 62.
K. Balagopal, “Chintapalli Again: One Eventful Day in a Lawless Life”, Economic & Political Weekly 23, no. 5 (January 30, 1988): 180–83.
- 63.
Bela Bhatia, “The Naxalite Movement in Bihar”, Economic & Political Weekly 40, no. 15 (April 9, 2005): 1536–49.
- 64.
Bernard D’Mello, “Arwal Massacre: Report of People’s Tribunal”, Economic & Political Weekly 22, no. 35 (August 29, 1987): 1486–87. The double quotes indicate quotations from the report of the Indian People’s Human Rights Tribunal that investigated, conducted open hearings, and gave its ruling on the Arwal Massacre.
- 65.
D’Mello, India After Naxalbari, 158–59.
- 66.
The CPI(ML)(Party Unity) and the CPI(ML)(PW) maintained close relations.
- 67.
A little more than a decade later, Cherukuri Rajkumar (alias Azad), now CPI (Maoist) politburo member and party spokesperson, and journalist Hemchandra Pandey were allegedly shot dead in Adilabad district on the night of July 1–2, 2010 by the Andhra Pradesh police after being picked up at or near Nagpur. Another “police encounter” killing.
- 68.
K. Balagopal, “Naxalite Terrorists and Benign Policemen”, Economic & Political Weekly 32, no. 36 (September 6, 1997): 2253, 2257, and 2259.
- 69.
K. Balagopal, “People’s War and the Government: Did the Police Have the Last Laugh?” Economic & Political Weekly 38, no. 6 (February 8, 2003): 514.
- 70.
D’Mello, India After Naxalbari, 167.
- 71.
D’Mello, India After Naxalbari, 173–73.
- 72.
D’Mello, India After Naxalbari, 231.
- 73.
D’Mello, India After Naxalbari, 231.
- 74.
Sudha Bharadwaj, “Gravest Displacement, Bravest Resistance: The Struggle of the Adivasis of Bastar, Chhattisgarh against Imperialist Corporate Land-Grab”, June 1, 2009, accessed June 30, 2019, http://sanhati.com/excerpted/1545/; Navlakha, Days and Nights in the Heartland of Rebellion, 26–39.
- 75.
The BJP, a Hindu-nationalist, semi-fascist party, has been the main rival of the Congress Party since the 1990s.
- 76.
Union Ministry of Home Affairs, Annual Report, 2003–04 (New Delhi: Government of India, 2004): 44. See the section “Involvement of Local Groups against the Naxalites” in this report.
- 77.
Union Ministry of Home Affairs, Annual Report, 2004–05 (New Delhi: Government of India, 2005): 47–48.
- 78.
Jason Miklian, “The Purification Hunt: The Salwa Judum Counterinsurgency in Chhattisgarh, India”, Dialectical Anthropology 33 (2009): 442, 456; Navlakha, Days and Nights in the Heartland of Rebellion, 116–20. The reader wanting to get a feel for the mindsets of the police officers manning the law and order apparatus at the district and state levels may see Sudeep Chakravarti, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (New Delhi: Penguin, 2008): 27–94; and Nandini Sundar, The Burning Forest: India’s War in Bastar (New Delhi: Juggernaut Books, 2016): chapter 10. Sundar describes most of the regular police officers as “indifferent and careerist”, who “try to convince themselves that the villagers support the Naxalites out of fear, and they need ‘rescuing’ by the police, though in their hearts they know otherwise. They find comfort in claiming that there is a vast conspiracy afoot by human rights activists to defame the nation, without caring that it is they who have destroyed the Constitution from within” (p. 187). Some at the top of the police hierarchy, S R P Kalluri, for instance, “like to see themselves as messiahs, saving the nation from the Naxalites, even if it means breaking several laws and every norm of the Constitution in the process” (p. 207).
- 79.
D’Mello, India After Naxalbari, 191–92.
- 80.
D’Mello, India After Naxalbari, 200.
- 81.
The extent of brutalization of the Salwa Judum, the Special Police Officers, and the central and state security forces in Chhattisgarh is evident from Human Rights Watch, Being Neutral Is Our Biggest Crime: Government, Vigilante, and Naxalite Abuses in India’s Chhattisgarh State (New York: Human Rights Watch, July 2008). The Maoists and the victims responded with counter-violence, and this is also narrated and condemned. Of course, Human Rights Watch cannot be expected to look at the class war from the perspective of the oppressed and the Maoists who have organised the resistance. For this, see PUCL–PUDR, When the State Makes War on Its Own People: A Report on the Violation of People’s Rights During the Salwa Judum Campaign in Dantewada (Delhi: People’s Union for Democratic Rights and People’s Union for Civil Liberties, 2006). Among other things, this report tells the reader about the sections of the society in Dantewada that supported the Salwa Judum, the process of militarization that was tearing apart the whole social fabric, and the security forces acting like an occupation army. For a liberal-political democratic account, see Independent Citizens’ Initiative, War in the Heart of India: An Enquiry into the Ground Situation in Dantewara District, Chhattisgarh (No Place: Independent Citizen’s Initiative, July 20, 2006), accessed June 30, 2019, https://cpjc.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/ici-warintheheartofindia.pdf.
- 82.
D’Mello, India After Naxalbari, 235–36; Azad, Spokesperson, Central Committee, CPI(Maoist), “PLGA’s Heroic Tactical Counteroffensive in Chhattisgarh is a Fitting Answer to the Brutal State-sponsored Terrorist Salwa-Judum Campaign”, Press Statement, March 16, 2007. The website bannedthought.net is a rich source of information about the Maoist movement in India from a Maoist point of view, but the Indian government has banned and blocked this website, and so, we have not been able to refer to it.
- 83.
D’Mello, India After Naxalbari, 236.
- 84.
D’Mello, India After Naxalbari, 236.
- 85.
D’Mello, India After Naxalbari, 236.
- 86.
D’Mello, India After Naxalbari, 236–37.
- 87.
D’Mello, India After Naxalbari, 237; Also see Azad, Spokesperson, Central Committee, CPI(Maoist), “On the Dantewada Guerrilla Attack”, Press Statement, reprinted in Maoists in India: Writings and Interviews by Azad (Hyderabad: Friends of Azad, 2010): 87–90.
- 88.
D’Mello, India After Naxalbari, 237.
- 89.
Indeed, on July 5, 2011, the Supreme Court had declared the practice of the state of arming local Adivasi youth as Special Police Officers and of funding the recruitment of vigilante groups like Salwa Judum to fight the Maoists unconstitutional. “Nandini Sundar & Others vs. State of Chhattisgarh on July 5, 2011”. Supreme Court of India, Bench: B. Sudershan Reddy, Surinder Singh Nijjar. New Delhi, July 5, 2011, accessed June 30, 2019, https://indiankanoon.org/doc/920448/.
- 90.
Gautam Navlakha and Bernard D’Mello, “In a Guerrilla Zone: Two Reigns of Political Violence in Bastar”, MR Online, June 8, 2013, accessed June 30, 2019, https://mronline.org/2013/06/08/dn080613-html/.
- 91.
Navlakha and D’Mello, “In a Guerrilla Zone”.
- 92.
At a general level, the Maoist peasant insurgency bears some of the hallmarks of peasant insurgency in colonial India in the nineteenth century, and one must thus acknowledge the influence of the latter on the former. For a conceptualisation of peasant insurgency in colonial India (up to the end of the nineteenth century), see Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects …, 109–66.
- 93.
South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), “Fatalities in Left-wing Extremism, 2005–2019”, accessed July 2, 2019, https://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/maoist/data_sheets/fatalitiesnaxal05-11.htm. Launched by the “non-profit, non-governmental”, New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management (ICM) in March 2000, SATP is a website with a data base on “terrorism and low intensity warfare in South Asia”. ICM was the brainchild of K.P.S. Gill (1934–2017), its founder and president, who had earlier, as Director General of Police in the State of Punjab, led a particularly ruthless, lawless counterinsurgency, backed by the executive of the Indian state, to end the Sikh ethno-nationalist, “Khalistani” insurgency. Basant Rath, “The Indian Police Does Not Need Role Models Like K.P.S. Gill”, The Wire (May 30, 2017), accessed December 21, 2019, https://thewire.in/government/k-p-s-gill-role-model. Directed by Gill, this counterinsurgency also ruthlessly and lawlessly attempted to suppress independent human-rights investigation bringing to light the atrocities it was committing. Indeed, it has been confirmed that “the [Punjab] police had hatched a conspiracy and abducted [the prominent human-rights activist Jaswant Singh] Khalra on September 6, 1995 from his residence, kept him in illegal detention, killed him and disposed his body in a canal”. Express News Service, “Activist Khalra Custodial Death: SC Upholds Life in Jail for Punjab Cops”, Indian Express (November 5, 2011), accessed December 21, 2019, http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/activist-khalra-custodial-death--sc-upholds-life-in-jail-for-punjab-cops/871023/. Gill also served as “security advisor” in 2006–2007 to the State of Chhattisgarh on the “Naxalite problem”. The SATP’s data must therefore not be taken at face value. As per that data on the “Fatalities in Left-wing Extremism” over the period 2005–2018 (over the last 14 years), out of a total of 8063 deaths, 3166 (39.3%) were of “civilians”, 1999 (24.8%) of “security force personnel”, and 2898 (35.9%) of “left-wing extremists/CPI-Maoists”. We think that the figure of “left-wing extremist/CPI-Maoist” fatalities is exaggerated by the inclusion of killings of civilian supporters of the Maoists by the security forces who classify the dead civilians as “left-wing extremists”. Moreover, it is not clear whether the killings of “irregulars” (e.g. SPOs, Koya Commandos, etc.) by Maoist guerrillas have been included as security force personnel or civilian deaths. Most likely, Maoist killings of “informers”, “irregulars” and private vigilante force personnel have been taken as civilian deaths, whereas they are “combatants” on behalf of the state forces. And, the many of the killings classified as civilian deaths may likely have been committed by security force personnel, “irregulars” or private vigilantes but these have implicitly been attributed to the Maoist guerrillas. Of course, the Maoist guerrillas’ major asset is the sympathy and support, active and passive, of the local populations of the oppressed in the countryside. So, drawing on the old-fashioned Nazi approach, the counterinsurgency has been treating many of these civilians as potential guerrillas. Frankly, in the absence of a truth commission, it is almost impossible to get to the veracity of the number of killings of combatants and non-combatants by each side, insurgents and counterinsurgents. But, from the investigations of the civil liberties and democratic rights’ organisations over the years, and as democratic rights’ activists, we think that our proposition that killing has not been the principal modality of the Maoist insurgency is fair-minded and open to reason.
- 94.
There are similarities in the characterisations of peasant insurgency by the counterinsurgencies directed by the respective states in colonial and independent India. For the colonial state’s depiction of peasant insurgency, see Guha, Elementary Aspects …, 16–17.
- 95.
The executive of the Indian state has not given up on colonial-style conspiracy cases, as is evident in the latest (2018) of this mode of legal persecution in what may be called the Pune Conspiracy Case (referred to in the media as the Bhima Koregaon Case) that has so far led to the under-trial imprisonment of eleven prominent democratic-rights’ activists, including Gautam Navlakha, one of the two authors of this essay, under Conspiracy, Sedition and UAPA laws. Manu Sebastian, “What Happened a Year After the Bhima Koregaon Arrests”, June 6, 2019, https://www.livelaw.in/columns/what-has-happened-a-year-after-bhima-koregaon-arrests-145484; Sukanya Shantha, “A Year later, Rights Activists Accused in Bhima Koregaon Case Struggle for Bail”, June 6, 2019, https://thewire.in/rights/bhima-koregaon-activsts-arrests-bail; Malini Subramaniam, “European Parliament Sub-committee Urges India to Release Navlakha and Teltumbde Immediately”, May 30, 2010, https://scroll.in/latest/963309/european-parliament-sub-committee-urges-india-to-release-navlakha-and-teltumbde-immediately.
- 96.
D’Mello, India After Naxalbari, 215; Navlakha, Days and Nights in the Heartland of Rebellion, 204–8.
- 97.
D’Mello, India After Naxalbari, 249–50.
- 98.
An abominable deed—a war crime committed—by soldiers of the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army, of planting a bomb in a dead security-force combatant’s body in order to cause further loss of life and limb to the state’s armed police force personnel, occurred in a forest in Latehar district in Jharkhand in January 2013. This was after the former had inflicted heavy casualties on a battalion of the latter. The Bihar–Jharkhand-North Chhattisgarh Special Area Military Commission of the Maoist party sought to justify such action by arguing that the Indian state does not abide by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and Protocol II of 1977 related to non-international armed conflict, so the Maoists are under no obligation to abide by these norms. Navlakha, War and Politics, 124–26. For an account of how the Maoist cadres view the killings for which they have been held responsible, and a discussion of ethical questions that have come up in the course of the civil war, see Navlakha, Days and Nights in the Heartland of Rebellion, 70–79 and 209–14.
- 99.
Navlakha, Days and Nights in the Heartland of Rebellion, 62. However, the jan militias (people’s militias), organised at the village level by the Maoists, non-mobile as they are, and therefore more vulnerable than PLGA personnel, do not wear uniforms, although these local-level activists are intermittent combatants.
- 100.
Integrated Headquarters of the Ministry of Defence (Army), Doctrine for Sub Conventional Operations (Shimla: Headquarters Army Training Command, December 2006). “Perception management”, manufacturing a good image of the counterinsurgency in the eyes of the civilian population, is an integral part of counterinsurgency doctrine, and so it is not unexpected that the Doctrine is written in a manner that also contributes to that end. Advocacy of “a humane approach towards the populace … winning their hearts and minds … scrupulous respect for human rights …” find pride of place in the Doctrine: i–ii.
- 101.
Doctrine on Sub Conventional Operations, 9 and 21; Navlakha, War and Politics, chapter 6, “Counterinsurgency Doctrine”, 79–80.
- 102.
Doctrine on Sub Conventional Operations, 21–22.
- 103.
Navlakha, War and Politics, 81–82.
- 104.
Doctrine on Sub Conventional Operations, 1 and 6.
- 105.
Doctrine on Sub Conventional Operations, “Appendix B: COAS [Chief of Army Staff] Ten Commandments”, 66.
- 106.
Navlakha, War and Politics, 83–84. One of the “irregulars”, Kartam Surya, an SPO and a Koya commando, was considered a “Chhattisgarh hero” by the counterinsurgency for his ability to “‘instil fear in the ultras for his ruthlessness’.” Surya commanded his own “Surya gang” and amassed considerable wealth through extortion and other illegal means. Wanted by the law as an alleged rapist and killer, he lived under police protection in a police camp until his death in a Maoist ambush in 2012. Navlakha, War and Politics, 84 and endnote 67 on 163–64; Sundar, The Burning Forest, 200.
- 107.
Rediff, “Naxalism Single Biggest Internal Security Challenge: PM”, April 13, 2006, accessed July 2, 2019, https://www.rediff.com/news/2006/apr/13naxal.htm; Press Trust of India, “Naxalism Biggest Threat to Internal Security: Manmohan”, The Hindu, May 24, 2010.
- 108.
Prime Minister’s Office, “PM’s Meeting with Editors, 06.09.2010”, Press Release, New Delhi, September 6, 2010, accessed July 2, 2019, https://archivepmo.nic.in/drmanmohansingh/press-details.php?nodeid=1143; Press Information Bureau, “PM Addresses IPS Probationers”, Prime Minister’s Office, Government of India, December 24, 2010, accessed July 2, 2019, http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=68695.
Moreover, the Indian Army’s twenty-seventh Chief of Army Staff, General Bipin Rawat, who assumed office at the end of December 2016, has declared that the “Indian Army is fully ready for a two and a half front war [our emphasis]”, i.e., that it is capable of simultaneously taking on China, Pakistan, and the insurgencies in Jammu & Kashmir, the North-East, and in the “Red Corridor” (the areas of Maoist insurgency). Associated News International, “Indian Army Prepared for a Two and a Half front war: Army Chief General Bipin Rawat”, Indian Express, June 8, 2017.
- 109.
D’Mello, India After Naxalbari, chapter 6, “‘The Near and the Far’—India’s Rotten Liberal-Political Democracy,” 203–24, and chapter 9, “‘Little Man, What Now?’—In the Wake of Semi-Fascist and Sub-Imperialist Tendencies,” 277–98.
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D’Mello, B., Navlakha, G. (2020). Maoist Insurgency and the State’s Counterinsurgency in India: An Anti-Anti-Communist Historical Perspective. In: Gerlach, C., Six, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Anti-Communist Persecutions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54963-3_6
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