In 1969 one Trotskyist source noted, “The CPI(M) had described itself as Maoist when it broke from the pro-Moscow Communist Party of India (CPI) in 1964, but has since become critical of Peking.”[678]
The Naxalbari Insurrection
Although it had owed its establishment at least in part to its support of the Chinese in the Indo-Chinese border dispute, the new Communist Party (Marxist) was by no means Maoist. Indeed, in terms of strategy and tactics, it seemed to differ but little from the CPI, at least insofar as its national leadership was concerned. Within a year it had joined coalition governments in the states of Kerala and West Bengal. Nor did it side publicly with the CPML, which was Maoist, made up particularly of younger cadres, members, and sympathizers. By early 1965, some of these leftists began to plan for a rural insurrection along classical Maoist lines in the region of Naxalbari, in the northern part of the state of West Bengal, near the borders of Nepal, Sikkim, Baluchistan, and East Pakistan.
Justus van der Kroef wrote that the principal organizer of the movement in Naxalbari, Charu Mazumdar, “originally hailed from or had lived in this area (home-ground familiarity was an obvious asset in their struggle). … For the better part of two years, Maoist CPM dissidents… developed their Naxalbari organizational infrastructure, particularly Kisan Sabha, or peasant committees.”[679]
Finally, in May 1967, incidents occurred that enabled dissident CPMers to provoke the peasant revolt they had been planning for. Kathleen Gough has described what happened: “In May 1967, share-croppers and landless laborers revolted. … Landlords refused to give up lands as they were required to do under the land reform laws, and sent armed bands against cultivators who tried to occupy the lands. … The resistance was led by local Left Communists. One policeman and ten peasants died. The Left Communist Minister of Land and Land Revenue tried to effect a compromise but was foiled by continuing battles between police and peasants. The revolt affected 42,000 people in 70 villages, over an area of 20 square miles. The United Front government condemned it as adventurist and the Left Communist Party expelled the rebels.”[680]
Justus van der Kroef has noted that leftist CPM elements “provoked or unleashed a wave of terrorist violence, beginning in April 1967 in Calcutta and throughout West Bengal,” and that this “not only was supportive of the simultaneous rising of the Naxalbari peasantry, but also presaged a new and decisive split in the Indian Communist movement.”[681]
Naxalite Insurrections 1969—1972
From the scene of their first Maoist insurrection, Naxalbari, the left-wing CPM groups came to be known popularly as “Naxalites.” In the three years or more following the Naxalbari incident, they carried out a series of other uprisings. Justus van der Kroef noted, “Not only in scattered areas of West Bengal, but also in Bihar, Uttar and Andhra Pradesh states, the movement was gaining a hold during 1968; by the end of that year the Naxalites seemed to have established a new Yenan in the Strikakulam District of Andhra Pradesh.”[682]
However, the strategy and tactics of the Naxalites in this period were marked by differences from those prescribed by Mao and carried out in the Naxalbari uprising. There was little of the extensive propagandizing and political preparation on the ground for launching a prolonged rural guerrilla war that was advocated by Mao Tse-tung. Rather, the Naxalites, or at least those led by Charu Mazumdar, resorted to what they called “annihilation of class enemies,” first in the countryside, then in some urban areas as well.[683]
The “annihilation of class enemies” policy was carried out largely by young people from the cities—often students or recent university graduates—who were sent to neighboring rural areas. One of those who had been active in these forays explained them to a British journalist.
This young man said, “I’ve seen our activist comrades at work. They enter a village and pull out the landlord. They then convene a people’s court in the village. When the people vote to execute the oppressor, our comrades hand them over to them, with his entire family. The peasant comrades hack them all to pieces. Then, with the bleeding chunks of meat our comrades inscribe the thoughts of Chairman Mao on the village walls.”
This young man continued, “The first time I ever saw this, I felt a little queasy. It was due to my petty bourgeois upbringing. The activist comrades are workers and peasants themselves, and don’t have these sentimental scruples.”[684]
However, early in 1970, Charu Mazumdar and his followers shifted their attention to the cities, particularly Calcutta. Justus van der Kroef has written that “Raids were made on universities (where the staff was often frightfully man-handled in a continuing reign of terror) and on other schools, or hospitals, on public institutions and government offices, and even on railway stations. An orgy of destruction was visited upon such buildings. Not only were books and furnishings destroyed, but the raiders seemed especially intent on vandalizing portraits, photographs, and statues of Indian national and Bengali heroes and leaders… who were seen as exemplifying the old ‘feudal’ culture. … Mazumdar, in an address on August 15, 1970 specifically commended the Naxalite students’ attacks on the universities, declaring that no new revolutionary culture or education could prevail unless the colonial and imperialist culture and school system had been eliminated. … Between April and October 1970, according to official figures, Naxalites were reportedly responsible for 108 murders and 1373 acts of lawlessness.”[685]
Emergence of CPML and Other Naxalite Groups
While these events were transpiring, the Naxalite movement was taking on organizational forms. In November 1967, at a meeting in Calcutta, an All India Coordination Committee of Revolutionaries in the CPM was established. Its purpose, according to van der Kroef, was “to proceed with the formation of a new Communist Party to be avowedly Maoist in character. This development was undoubtedly spurred on by demands in China’s media in August 1967 that a ‘genuinely revolutionary party of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tse-tung thought’ be established in India in view of the allegedly ripening revolutionary conditions.” In May 1968, this group changed its name to All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR), which “called for a formal repudiation of all parliamentary participation in favor of an avowedly Mao-inspired, genuinely revolutionary struggle based on the Naxalbari experience.” At this time, there was circulating among the Naxalite groups a long document that “claimed that some fifty revolutionary ‘bases’ had already been established in eight Indian states for the purpose of training peasant guerrillas. It called for a popular rising and a strategy of encirclement of the ‘the enemy’ in standard terms.”[686]
Finally, on April 22, 1969, the hundredth anniversary of Lenin’s birth, the AICCCR was converted into the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). However, the CPML by no means completely unified the Naxalites. Justus van der Kroef noted that “the formation of the CPML was less the culmination of a spontaneous sense of unity among Indian Maoists than the consequence of a decision taken by the AICCCR in the face of opposition from other Maoist and CPM radical dissidents in Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and other states, most of whom had their own organizations or also constituted virtually autonomous branches within the CPM. Prominent Mao-oriented CPM splinter groups, like the one led by Nagi Reddy in Andhra Pradesh, declined to participate in the CPML’s founding, though they subsequently maintained an informal on-and-off liaison with the new party.”[687]
678
“Third Communist Party Fails to Unite India’s ‘Naxalites,’”
683
Mukund G. Untawale, in
684
Don Moraes, “Indian Revolutionaries with a Chinese Accent,”