[Reader-list] "Naxalbari--Will Never Die":The Power of Memory and Dreams:Bernard D'Mello in Sanhati

[asit das]

 ‘Naxalbari … Will Never Die’: The Power of Memory and
Dreams<http://sanhati.com/articles/5875/>

*December 2, 2012*

by Bernard D’Mello

*[Here is the full-text of what I said – as also, what I wanted to say but
restrained myself because of the time constraint or because of my
diffidence – at the book release of Gautam Navlakha’s Days and Nights in
the Heartland of Rebellion (Penguin Books, 2012), organised by Sanhati
<http://sanhati.com/event/5797/>at the Gandhi Peace Foundation, New Delhi,
on 27 November 2012.*]

There’s this aphorism from Clausewitz about “war as a continuation of
politics by other means”. The question however is: What politics is this
People’s War in India a continuation of? In other words, what are the
Maoists and their People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) fighting for?
My friend Gautam’s Days and Nights in the Heartland of Rebellion answers
this question in the true spirit of the public intellectual, with unusual
clarity and honesty, free of jargon, dogma and pedantry, and importantly,
free of the political line of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). In his
view, the People’s War has to be subordinated to the politics.

*In the Maoist Heartland*

The book is based on a two-weeklong visit Gautam made to a guerrilla zone,
and within it, a guerrilla base of the Maoists in southern Chhattisgarh.
The Maoists have been offering the most formidable resistance, in parts of
eastern and central India, to the implementation of the various Memoranda
of Understanding that the central and state governments have put their
signatures to with Indian big business houses and transnational
corporations on the latter’s plans to profit from industrial, including
mining, projects and various infrastructural installations. The two,
capital and the Indian state, care a damn about the Gonds (indigenous
people) who have been and are being deprived of the land under their feet,
their ancestral land. The minerals in the ground below are being and are in
the process of being taken away. The forests with which these indigenous
people enjoy a symbiotic relation are being and will be cut down. In such
circumstances, “to rebel is justified”, and the Maoists, many of them
Gondi, are here the leading force, with the Gonds, the main force of the
resistance. The state forces, together with a state-backed private
vigilante force, has been trying to cut off the Maoists (the leading force)
from the Gondi people (the main force), even launching Operation Green Hunt
to hasten the process.

Simultaneously, a psychological war against the Maoists is on, unleashed by
the commercial media. Righteous indignation against “left-wing extremism”,
with images and profiles meant to depict the Maoists as “cold-blooded
criminals” is all that the public gets to read, hear and see. In sharp
contrast, besides answering questions about their politics, their
justification of violence, their treatment of the “enemies of the people”,
their perceptions of their People’s War, what they are fighting for, how
they managed to win over the Gondi and other indigenous peoples in
Dandakaranya (the forest area situated in the border and adjoining tribal
districts of the states of Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and
Orissa), Gautam also tells us how they live in their “guerrilla base” and
how their “Jantanam Sarkar” (People’s Government) functions there. There is
an interesting section on the reforms forced by the Maoists, for instance,
the Forests Rights Act, 2006 that aims to provide secure land tenure to
“Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers”, which is even
officially conceded as coming about due to the state’s dire need to
undercut the support that the Maoists enjoy among the Adivasis. And,
towards the end of the book, Gautam also singles out “two major failings”
of the Maoists, which he insists, must be seen against the backdrop of what
the Maoists have achieved.

This is a book that I would have no hesitation in recommending to all those
who would like to see workers, poor peasants and landless labourers, dalits
and “Other Backward Classes”, and Adivasis stand up, have a genuine voice
of their own, with the courage to speak out, speak out against their
oppression and exploitation, fight against their domination. It will also
be of interest for those of us who are interested in the Adivasi Question,
conceptualized in relation to winning land to the tiller and full forest
rights, realizing that the mere passing of laws and decrees is wholly
inadequate, and rejecting the one-dimensional identity politics of
‘indigenism’.

*On the Radical Side*

With this, let me now go over to the topic of today’s panel discussion,
“Beyond the Accounts of Repression and Armed Struggle: The Question of
Revolutionary Generalisation”. I am going to speak about revolution and the
power of the public memory and the dreams it unleashes. Lest I be
misunderstood by liberal-reformist intellectuals and even by those who call
themselves Marxists, let me state my position. The present is the outcome
of more than four centuries of the history of capitalism, right since its
beginnings in the process of primitive accumulation. Capitalism, based as
it is on the exploitation of the labour of human beings, and of nature,
generates inequality, and when it works with “the gloves off”, as it does
today, this is greatly exacerbated, so much so that the system is now
heading towards catastrophe as a result of the cumulative ecological
degradation it has caused. War, including People’s Wars, and revolutions,
are not a matter of choice or preference; they spring from the very
internal contradictions of the capitalist-imperialist system. Tragically,
so far, they have not succeeded in doing away with the very system
(capitalism-imperialism) that breeds them. The classes that hold wealth,
privilege and power have, managed, by doing all they could (including armed
counter-revolution), to preserve their monopoly over them. That, in a
nutshell, is how we radicals view history and the present. In sharp
contrast, liberal-reformist intellectuals hold that nothing had to happen
the way it did, and what will likely happen depends on the choices “we”
ultimately make from among those in “our” liberal “cookbook”. People’s War
and revolution are very costly in terms of human lives and suffering, and
so “we” are shocked that the Maoists even consider them as options, and
have to express “our” rejection and condemnation. It’s best to reform the
system, the liberal-reformists say, to rid it of its imperfections, this by
choosing ways that interfere the least with the market mechanism.

Most liberal-reformists, like my friend Ramachandra (Ram) Guha of India
after Gandhi fame, have a superficial understanding of Marxism, and so
their critiques of Marxism and of our view of history and the present are
largely irrelevant. In the first half of the 1980s, Ram and I were doctoral
students at IIM Calcutta, when he flirted with Marxism and then rejected
it. He has written about those times in “An Anthropologist among Marxists”,
published first, if I remember correctly, in Civil Lines, Issue 1, sometime
in the early 1990s. More recently, he penned “The Past and Future of the
Indian Left”, which is now chapter 4 of his latest book, Patriots and
Partisans (Allen Lane, Penguin Books India, 2012). Ram is singularly ill
equipped to discussing Marxism, for he never had any empathy for it; he
only trifled with it, at times, caricatured it and its practitioners, and
I’m afraid, I find him irrelevant on such subjects.

But there are those who call themselves Marxists, and even
Marxist-Leninists, and now when hundreds of thousands of tribal peasants
are being led by the Maoists in India in the revolutionary movement, such
“Marxists” have stood in their way and opposed them (in Jangalmahal, the
“Marxists” were even collaborators of the occupying forces, the Joint
Forces of the central and the state government). The “Marxist-Leninists”,
on their part, have trailed behind the Maoist movement, gesticulating and
criticising, and now that the movement’s faced a severe setback in
Jangalmahal, they are being wise after the event.

*The Potency of Echoes*

Mao famously said that a revolution “cannot be so refined, so leisurely and
gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A
revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class
overthrows another.” Like Mao, the CPI (Maoist) poses the revolutionary
question in terms of “armed revolution against armed counter-revolution”.
Presumably, certain internal contradictions of the system have developed to
a stage where war is seen as the principal means of resolving them. The
dominated classes are being organised to overthrow the oppressive Indian
state and the unjust social order that it preserves. Such ideas about
revolution – derived from Mao – in their more generalised form, come from
the collective memory of the French Revolution. Indeed, I think Mao was
also drawing upon the collective memory of the French Revolution when he
expressed himself in the words that we just quoted. And, if we know
anything about revolutions, the French, the Russian and the Chinese,
revolution is merely the beginning of a process. Mao, of course, spoke of
uninterrupted revolution. The outburst unleashes dreams, and of course,
radical social demands; the future is thus, as yet, unachieved.[1]

My thoughts about the revolution-in-process in India go back to the
martyrs. Those of you from my generation and my elders will remember
Krishna Singh. It was in Palamu in June 1984 that the CPI (ML) (Party
Unity) lost one of its most able leaders. Krishna Singh came from a poor
peasant family, made his livelihood as a transport worker. The Maoist
movement was where his talents blossomed – he went on to become the General
Secretary of the Mazdoor Kisan Sangram Samiti, the mass organisation of the
CPI (ML) (Party Unity). But tragically, he was killed by an armed gang that
was organised by Rajput landlords, this when the movement was at its
initial stage in Palamu.

The beginning of the recent repression and the consequent severe setback to
the movement in Andhra Pradesh dates from 8 January 2005, when Lakshmi, an
executive committee member of the Andhra Pradesh Chaitanya Mahila Samakhya,
the women’s mass-front, was picked up, brutally tortured and killed. In a
couple of months, the police then let loose organised private gangs –
called Narsa Cobras, Kakatiya Cobras, Nallamala Cobras, more venomous that
the real reptile – to decimate the mass organisations in Andhra Pradesh and
deprive the Party of its mass base over there.

Women have always been in the forefront of radical left movements, right
from the time of Telengana in the 1940s. Gautam too, in his book, speaks of
the role of women in the movement: “…it is remarkable that one sees young
women as commanders of platoons and leading cadres of the JS” [Jantanam
Sarkar]. But I would suggest that you read Gautam’s chapter on “Women:
Against Superstition, Patriarchy and the State” alongside Arundhati Roy’s
forging of a close bond with Narmada, Maase, Roopi and other comrades of
the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sanghatan, expressed so movingly in her
celebrated essay, “Walking with the Comrades”.

I can’t resist just one more recount of this fighting spirit that I am
alluding to, here of a remarkable couple, Vadkapur Chandramouli (comrade
BK), a Central Committee member of the CPI (Maoist) and a member of its
Central Military Commission, and his comrade-in-arms and partner Karuna, a
barefoot doctor and guerrilla fighter. Comrades BK and Karuna were on their
way to the Party’s Unity Congress when they were arrested in the Eastern
Ghats on the Andhra Pradesh (AP)-Orissa border, brutally tortured and
assassinated on 29 December 2006. The Andhra Pradesh Special Intelligence
Bureau which allegedly apprehended BK and Karuna was however not able to
extract even a clue from them as to the venue of the Party Congress,
information that would have caused grave harm to the Party and the
revolutionary movement.

The vital spark of these revolutionaries whom we remember, Krishna Singh,
Lakshmi, comrades BK and Karuna, and many others like them, is still
glowing, and it seems to instil a self-confidence and determination to
carry on to the very end. That’s the power of memory that state repression
cannot erase, and so the movement goes on, recovering time and again from
the many serious setbacks it has suffered.

*Spring Thunder’s Yearnings*

Let’s then come to the dreams that revolutionary upheavals unleash. Here, I
will break with tradition and talk of my dreams. It was in the early 1980s
that I came to the conclusion that the debility of Marxism in India really
stemmed from the fact that since 1951 – more so since 1957 – the CPI toed
the line of a peaceful transition to socialism by winning a majority in
Parliament. A series of self-defeating compromises with capitalist
institutions then became the order of the day in establishment left
practice. The first split in 1964, and the formation of the CPI (Marxist)
didn’t alter the situation, for the historic compromise that the Party made
in 1951/57 was the result of weak and ineffective middle-class leadership
that, to a lesser or a greater extent, was the victim of the cultural,
moral, and political values of the dominant classes. Ultimately, this
culminated in the marginalisation of the CPI and the public disgrace of the
CPI (M) as a result of the repression the party and the Left Front
government it headed in West Bengal let loose on the poor and landless
peasantry in Singur, Nandigram and Lalgarh. From being hailed as the
harbinger of the rights of the sharecropping bargadars, and of the
redistribution of surplus land to those who tilled the soil, to the
humiliating epithet of the forerunner of the dispossession of reluctant
peasants of their land was, indeed, a public disgrace. The dreams of many a
comrade of that party now lie shattered.

The Naxalbari armed struggle began in March 1967, but by mid-July of that
year, it was crushed. Soon thereafter, in the autumn Charu Mazumdar, who
subsequently became the new party, the CPI (Marxist-Leninist)’s General
Secretary, said: “…hundreds of Naxalbaris are smouldering in
India…Naxalbari has not died and will never die.”[2] But he was not
daydreaming, for the power of memory and the dreams unleashed gave the
movement a fresh dynamic.

*Imagining Red Bases in Urban Areas*

Gautam has given us an account of life in a guerrilla base in southern
Chhattisgarh and the takeover of governance and some of the productive
functions by the people, under Maoist guidance, over there. But can we
imagine parallels of the Maoist guerrilla base in the urban areas, say
right here in the National Capital Region? The Party’s urban structure is
presently very weak. The mass organisations, even in the urban areas,
merely seem to serve the People’s War and the agrarian revolution, and
struggles led by them are shaped in accordance with the advance or retreat
of that struggle. Frankly, if the Party continues to view the role of mass
organisations and mass struggles within such circumscribed limits, it will
continue to trail in its endeavour to gain the support of the 90% that
Maoism claims as its constituency. To win over the 90%, the Maoists need to
work within the intermediate sphere (between the economic base and the
repressive apparatus of the state), namely, the educational system,
cultural institutions, the media, trade unions, etc – the institutions of
civil society (the complex of the ideological structure) in Antonio
Gramsci’s sense.

It is these institutions that socialise youth, shape public opinion,
indeed, structure the very thought processes of the exploited and oppressed
to build consent for the authority of the prevailing social order. The
ruling classes not only use the repressive apparatus of the Indian state to
suppress dissent, but manage to do this, most of the time, by establishing
their ideological hegemony (maintaining one’s authority not through
coercive force alone) over the exploited, the oppressed and the dominated.
The CPI (Maoist) needs to counter the political, cultural and moral
leadership of the organic intellectuals of the ruling classes over the
masses by the ascendency of radical working class, peasant (rural school
teachers, for instance), and middle-class (academics, doctors, lawyers,
journalists, etc) intellectuals in all the institutions of the civil
society. Otherwise, we see no hope of successful growth and spread of the
United Front (UF) under the leadership of the Party.

*Path of Creative ‘Illegality’*

In Gramscian terms, the UF has to be seen as the new emerging ‘historic
bloc’ that is to take the place of the present one led by the big
bourgeoisie and the big landlords. This can only come about if and when the
Maoists capture the hearts and minds of the people in a protracted ‘war of
position’––the long struggle for hegemony. How may one begin to do this in
urban settings, where there are definite limits to the use of violence? How
about turning workplaces into “Red Bases”? The path of what has been termed
creative ‘illegality’ might show the way. Here, I think, we can learn
something from French Maoist practice of the ’68 generation. French Maoists
of that generation were inspired by Mao, and they applied his 1943 theory
of the “mass line” and his ideas of radical-democracy during the Cultural
Revolution in the national context of France in the late 1960s and early
1970s.[3] If they learned from Mao like we do, surely we and they can also
learn from each other.

The path of creative ‘illegality’ clearly implies “not working by the
bourgeois rules of the game” and “constantly transcending the limits of
legality”. Here the Maoists will have to adopt a combination of “mass line”
and radical-democratic principles of leadership to win cultural hegemony in
workplaces, whether the university or the factory. But what do we mean by
the “mass line” and by radical democracy? The mass line is a principle of
leadership whereby the vanguard, the leading force of the revolution,
democratically wins over the people, the main force of the revolution, to
its side, and thereby gains legitimacy as the leading force. It does this
by involving the people in the very formulation of its programme and
remains flexible as far as the methods of fulfilment of concrete tasks are
concerned, allowing the people to take the initiative and play a major role
in implementation, and thereby even learns from them. Radical democratic
functioning is predicated upon a realization that “rich individuality” and
liberty for all requires a commitment to equality, and in turn, that the
latter cannot be attained without a commitment to rich individuality and
liberty for all.

Adopting the “mass line” with a commitment to radical-democracy would call
for the least hierarchical forms of organisation. The goal is to win
cultural hegemony, wherein even non-Marxists have at least a grudging
admiration for the revolutionary banner. The parallel of the guerrilla base
in the urban areas, call it the Red Base, is set up upon gaining the upper
hand in the ‘war of position’, and the revolutionary act that cements this
entails the takeover of the governance and productive functions of
colleges, universities, and factories – “occupying” them and instituting
democracy there, popular student or worker power as the case may be, with
students and young lecturers conducting free evening classes for the
workers, either at the university or at the “occupied” factory. The
workers, in turn, challenge the hierarchical division of labour, their
division by management into “permanent”, casual and contract workers, and
the corresponding pay differentials. This is done by each worker teaching
every other worker how to perform his or her task.

Of course, sooner or later, the repressive apparatus of the state is bound
to crack down on such a politics of liberation and repress its
practitioners. But by this time a semblance of libertarian, democratic
consciousness would have spread and the state would be condemned and
indicted, for such repressive action would be seen as being totally
undemocratic.

*A Libertarian, Democratic Consciousness*

What do we mean by a libertarian, democratic consciousness? Actually, a
communist should, by definition, in Marx’s sense, be democratic and
libertarian, but sadly, with the deep inroads that Stalinism made, these
adjectives now have to be prefixed with the word communist. A libertarian,
democratic consciousness requires a deep commitment to beauty, artistic
freedom, and democratic rights, more generally speaking, and further, to
craftsmanship, to un-alienated and creative work, to love, “to sexual
fulfilment as a positive value”, to the unity of all working people, to
their mutual and shared interests, all of this to be achieved by working
people though their struggles.

Both work and sex need to be liberated from their capitalist, caste and
patriarchal confines. We are here reminded of the character Velutha in
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997). Velutha came from a dalit,
attached-labour household. But despite his origins, he became an
accomplished carpenter and mechanic, indispensible to semi-feudal capital’s
profit register in the small town of Ayemenem. Rahel and Estha, Ammu’s
children, established a close bond of friendship with him. Ammu was
attracted to him, fell in love with him – he was a passionate lover, he
loved her like no one else could ever have loved her. Velutha is my hero –
he did what he did with devotion; he kept the creativity and imagination in
him alive. But he was hunted down by the police and beaten so badly that he
died of the injuries inflicted, all this, because he crossed the barriers
of caste & class and violated the “Love Laws” that lay down “who should be
loved, and how. And how much”.

Just like proletarians like Velutha make and remake themselves in the
process of struggle as part of life’s experiences, Marxism and its Maoist
version have to be made and remade in the light of experience, and one of
those improvements now has to be “a vocabulary in which moral choice and
agency can be adequately discussed”.[4] It is high time Maoists come to
terms with the Stalin phenomenon, the truth as corresponding to what is the
case as regards Stalin and Stalinism. I am very hopeful in this regard. The
CPI (Maoist) leader, Kobad Ghandy, from within the high-risk ward in Tihar
jail, what he calls “a jail within jail”, seems to be overcoming the
repression of moral discourse among Marxists.[5] And, Edward Thompson, who
completed his magnum opus The Making of the English Working Class when he
was only 38 years of age, later on, raised fundamental ethical questions
from within the Marxist paradigm. But now, with the failure of the
revolutions of the 20th century, isn’t Marxism in desperate need of a
developed ethics as much as it is in need of an advanced ecological
perspective and rejuvenated political economy?

*Notes *

1 Michael Lowy, The Poetry of the Past’: Marx and the French
Revolution<http://newleftreview.org/I/177/michael-lowy-the-poetry-of-the-past-marx-and-the-french-revolution>,
New Left Review, I/177, September-October, 1989

2 Sumanta Banerjee, In the Wake of Naxalbari (Kolkata: Sahitya Samsad),
2008, chapter 4, p. 112. This remarkable book 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.
The present edition (2008) has an interesting “Post-script”.

3 Belden Fields, French Maoism <http://www.jstor.org/stable/466540>, Social
Text, No. 9/10, The 60’s without Apology (Spring-Summer, 1984), pp. 148-177.

4 Henry Abelove, Review of the The Poverty of Theory by E. P.
Thompson<http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2505154.pdf>,
History and Society, Vol. 21, No. 1 (February, 1982), pp. 132-142.

5 Kobad Ghandy, Questions of Freedom and People’s Emancipation – IV: No
Freedom without Values <http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article3811.html>,
Mainstream, Vol. 50, No. 47, November 10, 2012.