According to Jhaveri, only one Naxalite group, led by Vinod Misra, was still trying to carry out guerrilla activity—in a “sixteen-square-mile stretch of forest” where they “receive shelter and sustenance from local villagers.”[705]
However, even the Vinod Misra group apparently abandoned guerrilla activity. Walter Andersen noted in 1980, “Two of the more prominent groups are the Santosh Rana group and the Virod Misra group. … The two disagree over participation in the parliamentary elections. The former will apparently run candidates, although with no greater enthusiasm. The more radical Misra is generally opposed. It is unlikely that any CPI-ML candidate will win, although CPI-ML support for other candidates in certain constituencies may have some marginal influence on the outcome.”[706]
During this period, at least some of the Naxalites abandoned their previous aversion to working in the organized labor movement. In July 1977 the Trotskyist periodical Intercontinental Press reported a strike of miners in Madhya Pradesh state led by “alleged members or sympathizers” with the CPML, who formed their own union in opposition to one affiliated with the All India Trade Union Congress, the trade union federation controlled by the pro-Moscow Communist Party.[707]
The Naxalites continued to be divided in numerous factions in the 1980s. Walter K. Andersen reported in 1982 that “The much splintered radicals (sometimes referred to as ‘Naxalites’) are more ideologically divided than before, in part because of policy shifts in post-MaoChina. Some of the groups now look to Albania as the center of communist orthodoxy (for example, the Communist Chadar Group), a few have taken an independent Maoist line (the pro-Lin Piao faction); but most are still pro-Chinese.”[708]
This situation had not changed half a dozen years later. In 1988, Walter K. Andersen wrote, “Some of these parties have retained their revolutionary orientation and others have begun to operate by the rules of India’s parliamentary system. Radical Naxalite activity is reported to be growing in West Bengal, Bihar, and Andhra Pradesh. Perhaps the most violent group is the People’s War Group operating in the Telangana region of Andhra Pradesh. It has reportedly been involved in a number of direct encounters with the state police and has built substantial support base by distributing land to the peasantry.”[709]
One Naxalite group, the Central Reorganization Committee, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), joined in the effort to establish an “international” of orthodox Maoist parties, loyal to the Gang of Four. It signed the communiquę issued in the autumn of 1980 calling for establishment of such a grouping.[710] Its periodical, Mass Line, after denouncing the “Teng Hsiaoping and Co.” regime in China, as well as “Albanian revisionism,” said that “the communiquę marks a historic victory for the revolutionary forces,” adding, “It would be possible only if a principled struggle on defending Mao Tse-tung Thought emerged victorious.”[711]
However, although in March 1992 the Central Reorganization Committee, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), was still listed as a member of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement by that group’s periodical, A World to Win, that same periodical carried a polemic over a decision of the Indian party “to dissolve its all India structure… transforming existing State units into national parties and forming a coordination committee.” That decision had been accompanied by an article by the leader of the Central Reorganizing Committee, K. Vanu, attacking “Marxist-Leninist fundamentalism.”[712]
Conclusion
The Sino-Soviet dispute was instrumental in bringing about a three-way split in Indian Communism. However, the first group to break away from the traditional Communist Party of India (which remained loyal to the Soviet party)—that is to say, the Communist Party of India (Marxist)—soon abandoned whatever sympathy it may have had for Maoism, and proclaimed itself neutral in the contest between the Chinese and Soviet parties. It also participated with some success in Indian parliamentary politics, particularly in the state of West Bengal, and in 1996 for the first time entered the Indian national government as a junior partner.
The evolution of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) gave rise to the breakaway of CPM groups in various states, some of which formed the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). However, the CPML never was a highly centralized organization, and did not have the support of all the adherents of Mao Tse-tung Thought.
The CPML and some of the other Maoist groups did attempt to launch guerrilla war in various parts of the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the main body of the CPML also launched a campaign of urban terrorism in 1970-1971. However, this was largely suppressed by the government of India and those of the various states, a process undoubtedly aided by the splintering of the Maoist movement itself.
Indian Maoism was abandoned by the Chinese much earlier than they abandoned such movements in most of the rest of the world. According to testimony of the Indian Maoists, that took place as early as 1971.
Although what had been Indian Maoism experienced a modest revival in the late 1970s and thereafter, it no longer was engaged primarily in either rural or urban guerrilla activity. At least some Indian Maoists went so far as to participate in elections, something they had strongly condemned a decade earlier.
Maoism in Indochina
Before World War II, the French colonial area of Indochina consisted of four parts. In the southwest was the Kingdom of Cambodia, spreading east from Thailand; north of that, bordering China and Thailand, was the Kingdom of Laos. Along the South China Sea were the Kingdom of Annam in the north, centering on Hanoi, and the colony of Cochin China, with its capital in Saigon, in the south.
After the war, the Kingdom of Annam and Cochin China were officially merged as Vietnam, although after the French were driven out in 1954, Vietnam was divided into two separate republics, until the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Thereafter, the Indochina region consisted of Vietnam, Cambodia (Kampuchea), and Laos.
Before the arrival of the French in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the whole Indochina area had owed a titular allegiance to China. With the emergence of Communism in the area after World War II, the historic relationships of each of the three countries of the region with China, and with one another, had more to do than did ideology with the positions the respective Communist parties took with regard to the Sino-Soviet quarrel.
Put all too succinctly, the Vietnamese and Laotians, as China’s immediate neighbors, nursed traditional fears of Chinese efforts to dominate them. The Cambodians had similar apprehensions about the supposed Vietnamese desire to control them and their land.
The Communist movement in Indochina made its appearance in 1930 with the establishment, under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, of the Communist Party of Indochina (CPI). Yuri Antoshin, writing in the New Times of Moscow, sketched the evolution of that party: “Its Second Congress, held in February 1951, decided that a separate party should be formed in each state of those three countries. In Vietnam, the CPI’s cause was continued by the Working People’s Party, renamed the Communist Party of Vietnam in 1976. Some 300 former CPI members, meeting in Laos in March 1955, founded the Marxist-Leninist People’s Party, renamed the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party in February 1972. The First Congress of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, attended by 21 delegates, took place secretly in Phnom Penh at the end of September 1960.”[713]
706
Walter K. Andersen, in
708
Walter K. Andersen, in
709
Walter K. Andersen, in
710