Background of Emergence of Indian Maoism
There was a long tradition in India—and particularly in Bengal-of peasant uprisings and of political terrorism. Soon after India obtained independence, the CPI launched a guerrilla war in a period when, apparently under Moscow’s inspiration, similar revolts were undertaken by Communist parties in several South Asian countries, including Burma, Malaysia, and Indonesia as well as India.
Kathleen Gough has described these Indian Communist guerrilla efforts. She wrote, “In Telangana in the princely state of Hyderabad… armed peasants seized 3,000 villages and administered them for six months. Communist-organized peasants similarly seized a block of villages in eastern Tanjore in early 1948. … Communists attacked black-market profiteering by seizing grain and distributing it to the landless. In Hyderabad the revolutionary institutions were crushed by the Indian army, which invaded the state and annexed it to the Union in late 1948. Police put down the Tanjore and Kerala revolts and several dozen peasants were shot.”
Ms. Gough said, “The South Indian Communists who guided the revolts of 1947—1948 were influenced by Chinese revolutionary theories, although their national leadership adhered to the Russian line of constitutional opposition. In 1948, the Communist Party’s main line changed again to revolutionary upsurge led by the urban proletariat.”[670]
Justus M. van der Kroef has stressed the importance of the Chinese experience in the CPI uprisings of 1946-1951. He wrote “the Andhra CPI leaders, who had had little actual support in their uprising from the CPI Politburo… formally called for the application of Mao On New Democracy to the Indian condition. Stressing that ‘our revolution’ was to a great extent similar to that of the Chinese Revolution, the so-called Andhra Letter proposed a Mao-style united front of four classes, including sections of the bourgeoisie and the wealthier peasantry, as well as workers and poor peasants, under proletarian leadership and utilizing guerrilla warfare against imperialism and feudalism, which were described as the principal targets of revolutionary action.”[671]
According to the Trotskyist periodical Intercontinental Press, the Telangana uprising was not completely ended until several years after Indian invasion of Hyderabad. “The peasant insurrection in the Telugu-speaking region of southeastern India lasted from 1946 to 1951 and was led by young members of the Communist party of India… the guerrilla actions in Telangana were called off in 1951 under pressure from Moscow.”[672]
During the 1950s and early 1960s, the strategy of the CPI concentrated on the “peaceful road to power.” The party regularly participated in elections, and sought to build up its mass support among urban workers and peasants, while doing as little as possible to incur the displeasure of the government of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
Emergence of Communist Party of India (Marxist)
By the early 1960s, the CPI was clearly divided into two hostile factions. This was obvious at the 6th Congress of the party in April 1961. Sharokh Sabavala described these two groupings: “The revisionists, led by Bombay trade union leader S. A. Dange and P. C. Joshi, the leading Communist in northern Uttar Pradesh state, are calling for the building of a ‘national democratic front’ through the continued wooing of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the isolation of ‘reactionary,’ right-wing elements within the National Congress Party and the continued support of the government on the India-China dispute. … The leader of the revolutionist faction is the old-guard Stalinist, B. T. Ranadive, who denies Chinese aggression against India and asserts that India’s northern borders, demarcated by the British, must be realigned. According to Ranadive, Nehru is the leader of a reactionary national bourgeoisie which is merely paying lip-service to the ideals of socialism.” In that meeting, a “centrist” group was headed by E. M. Nambooripad, ex-Chief Minister of a short-lived Communist government in the state of Kerala.[673]
Differences were papered over at this meeting, largely because the presence of Mikhail Suslov, “ideological expert” of the Soviet Politburo. Sharokh Sabavala noted, “Thanks to the presence of Suslov, the question of the China-Indian Himalayan border dispute, which had split the party into warring ideological factions and was the main reason for convening the congress, was hardly mentioned. Clearly, the congress had been ordered to avoid taking a stand on the border conflict, to tone down its attacks on Nehru and his National Congress party and to abandon any idea of launching a national insurrectionist movement—as advocated by the party’s leftist leader, B. T. Ranadive.”[674]
The Chinese invasion of Indian border territory claimed, and until then held by India, intensified the conflict in the CPI. It took ten days for the party to issue an official statement that said, “The behavior of socialist China toward peace-loving India… most grossly violated the common understanding in the communist world arrived at by the 81 Parties Conference in 1960 in relation to peaceful coexistence and attitude to newly liberated countries and the question of war and peace. Socialist China has fallen victim to narrow nationalistic considerations at the cost of the interests of world peace and anti-imperialism in its attitude towards India.” This statement provoked the resignation of three leftists from the Central Secretariat of the CPI.[675] A couple of months later, E. M. S. Nambooripad, who had by then aligned himself with the leftwing, was forced to resign as Secretary-General of the CPI.[676]
However, it was November 1964 before a formal split in the party took place, with formation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) by the left-wingers. At that time, each of the two factions held what it claimed to be a congress of the CPI. The rightwing met in Trivandrum in Kerala, and, as reported by a Pakistani newspaper at the time, “The left-wingers of the party, which included 32 members who were expelled from the National Council of the official Communist Party, met in Calcutta, West Bengal, regarded as the stronghold of the left-affiliated members.”
The same Pakistani newspaper commented, “The split in the CPI came more over their ideological differences between the right and the left than over the Sino-Indian border dispute. While the right-wingers, led by Mr. Dange, were termed as revisionists, collaborators, the left-wingers were abused as being guided by Peking line. No doubt, the split was hastened with growing bad relationship between the Soviet Union and China.”
The founding congress of what came to be the CPM passed several resolutions that presaged a new split within the ranks. The Dacca Times article noted that “the meeting in Calcutta declared a programme which said that the new party believed in constitutional movement and peaceful transition to power. The members described the talk of an armed struggle as ‘infantile nonsense.’… The conference also declared that they were neither Muscovites nor pro-Peking, and urged the Governments of India and China to try for a ‘mutually acceptable’ solution to the border dispute ‘in the interest of anti-imperialist movements in Asia.’”[677]
670
Kathleen Gough, “The Indian Revolutionary Potential,”
671
Justus van der Kroef, “Indian Maoism, Peking and Bangla Desh,” S
672
Sharad Jhaveri, “India’s Naxalite Movement Reviews Its Strategy,”
673
Sharokh Sabavala, “Meeting at Lunumbanagar,”
676
Sharok Sabavala, “Dispute Splits India’s Reds,”