Uphold Charu Majumdar and the Indian People's War!

May 15 is Charu Majumdar’s 105th birthday, and May 18 is the 56th anniversary of the Indian people’s war. We will commemorate both in this post, for Majumdar initiated the people’s war in India.

Comrade Majumdar first worked with the Communist Party of India (CPI) against British imperialism. He organized peasants in India to resist landlords’ heavy rent policies and Britain’s exploitation of India, and in his mass work, he and other communists came to the correct conclusion that India faced colonialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat-comprador capitalism. After India’s legal “independence” in 1947, the former became semi-colonialism. Thus, Majumdar continued his work in educating, agitating, and organizing the workers and peasants of India, as did his party so long as it stayed truly communist.

The CPI did not remain communist for very long after India’s “independence”. The Sino-Soviet split occurred from 1956–64, and in that period, the CPI’s leadership exposed itself as a revisionist group. It agreed with Nikita Khrushchev’s “peaceful coexistence” nonsense, and it opposed China’s revolutionary and socialist line; in reality, it supported the Soviet capitalists’ attempt to take China as a semi-colony, just as they took most of Europe as semi-colonies. While it nominally remained “anti-imperialist” and against US imperialism, it was fine with Soviet imperialism’s “peace” with US imperialism; on top of that, it scaled back class struggle and, despite the government’s history of toppling communist leaders in states like Kerala, it encouraged electoralism and cooperation with the comprador-bourgeois state. This comprador state became a semi-colony of the USSR, which “generously” gave many loans of “assistance” to the regime. Because of the right-opportunism of the old party, the proletarian line within CPI left the party and formed CPI (Marxist) [CPI(M) or CPM)] in 1964. Majumdar supported this move and stood with the proletarian line, which was in CPM.

CPM itself had numerous issues, however. In the mid-1960s, Indian bureaucratic-comprador capitalism was failing; peasants, the growers of food, struggled to feed themselves and their families. The Indian state responded not with food aid, but with the suppression of protesting peasants. Workers resorted to gheraos to protest their exploitation, and peasants had organized their resistance to landlords’ exploitation and the state’s support of it. CPM not only did not lead them in these movements, but it discouraged them from taking part in class struggle! Comrade Majumdar saw right through the revisionist, capitulationist essence of this line, so he condemned it in his 1966 article, “Carry Forward the Peasant Struggle by Fighting Revisionism”

In the post-election period our apprehensions are being proved correct by the actions of the party (CPI-M) leadership itself. The Polit Bureau has directed us to “carry on the struggle to defend the non-Congress ministries against reaction.” This suggests that the main task of Marxists is not to intensify the class struggle, but to plead on behalf of the Cabinet. So a convention of party members was convened to firmly establish economism within the working class. Immediately thereafter, an agreement for a truce in industry was signed at the Cabinet’s initiative. Workers were asked not to resort to gheraos. What could be a more naked expression of class collaboration? After giving the employers full right to exploit, the workers are being asked not to wage any struggle. Immediately after the Communist Party joined the Government that was installed as a result of a mighty mass movement, the path of class collaboration was chosen. The Chinese leaders predicted long ago that those who had remained neutral in the international debate would very soon take to the path of opportunism. Now, the Chinese leaders are saying that these advocates of a neutral stand are in reality revisionists and they would soon cross over to the reactionary camp. In our country we are experiencing how true this prediction is. We have witnessed the betrayal of the working class.

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Majumdar and the left line of CPM organized a peasant uprising on May 18th, 1967 in the village of Naxalbari, in the state of West Bengal; the revisionist heads of the party opposed this armed struggle, but the masses supported the initiative to wage class war against the parasitic landlord class and their comprador-bourgeois allies. The counter-revolutionaries at the top of the organization supported the state’s brutal murders of the revolting peasants, further revealing to the masses that it was no longer a proletarian group, but a bourgeois one. Charu Majumdar and other revolutionary leaders led another uprising a week later, and this spread to members of oppressed tribes and other peasants attacking state forces and landlords. As expected, though totally unacceptable, the revisionist, social-imperialist USSR and its puppets armed India and supported the reactionaries and revisionists against the people’s war.

The All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR), founded in November 1967, was the organization that became the first to lead the Indian people’s war. Two years later, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (CPI(ML)) was founded as the vanguard party that would continue to lead it. . However, in 1971, Satyaran Singh, another revolutionary, led a faction of the CPI(ML) that combatted Majumdar for alleged “sectarianism” and “individual annihilations”. Majumdar’s party remained until Majumdar was captured, tortured, and killed in prison a year later, after which the event, combined with internal disunity and violent repression from the state, caused the party to fall apart into different, sometimes rivaling factions.

Even though the party fell, the revolutionaries formed their own organizations and parties, and since they had the support of the impoverished people, the people’s war was far from over. The parties differed in ideological stances, especially on the issues of Charu Majumdar and Lin Biao. While some parties became less forceful and more reformist (such as the “CPI(ML) Liberation”, CPI(ML)L), others continued the revolution. There was infighting among various parties, typically with more-radical parties attacking cadres from more-reformist groups; the nuances of all the splits, mergers, advances, and retreats of these organizations are far too complicated to get into, but after them all, two major revolutionary parties, the Maoist Communist Center of India (MCCI) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) People’s War [CPI(ML)PW], merged to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist) (CPI (Maoist)) in 2004. CPI (Maoist) has been the main party leading the people’s war, though there are other Maoist and Marxist-Leninist organizations in this battle for Indian liberation and New Democracy; many of these organizations merged with the party, while others remained independent.

There are national liberation struggles that also exist in India as the state suppresses many nations, and the Indian Maoists express their support for them. Various ethnic groups in the northeastern states in India are fighting for their right to self-determination. Oppressed castes and tribes are able to resist their oppression and exploitation with CPI (Maoist)’s fight against the feudal system of caste discrimination and chauvinism against certain ethnic groups. A lot of organizations are around the United National Liberation Front of Western South East Asia (UNLFW); these organizations are primarily not communist, but they have communist support. Another united front exists of communist organizations in Manipur (one of the northeastern states); their alliance is the Coordination Committee (CorCOM). The state of Manipur has the Maoist Communist Party of Manipur (MCPM), a party allied to CPI (Maoist). We hope for the liberation of these peoples, and we hope for the masses’ communist parties to rule there.

The CPI (Maoist) does not have an official united front organization, but it has numerous organizations that are connected with it, making a de facto united front. The most important organizations of the united front are the Revolutionary People’s Committees, the groups that help make up the New-Democratic state in India, and the Revolutionary Mass Organizations, the groups that take care of various tasks among the people, including economic organization, political agitation, and more; they even provide basic healthcare, education, and other services for the masses when the state abandons them and the ruling classes attempt to exploit them. With these organizations, the party uses the mass line method of leading the people; it supports democracy for the people, and centralism exists as the party tells the people what they must do.

CPI (Maoist) has an official people’s army, the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA), founded in 2000. The PLGA has “platoons, companies and battalions” [Source]. CPI (Maoist) also has a militia, namely the People’s Militia; this serves two functions: it is a support force for the PLGA, and it supervises the army, making sure it remains a genuine people’s army and not a revisionist, enemy’s army. These organizations are crucial for the people’s war, as the masses democratically control them while the army, in a centralist manner, gives direction to the masses in the war. Unlike the army of the enemy, the PLGA is made by, for, and of the people, so it makes sure to respect, protect, and truly serve the people. This is why the downtrodden people support this army and not the reactionary Indian army.

Something interesting to note about the three weapons of the Indian revolution—and this is also the case for the other people’s wars—is the large number of women involved in all of the organizations. CPI (Maoist), the PLGA, the militia, and the united front all fairly represent the women among the masses. Even bourgeois media admits that at least 60% of party cadres and soldiers are women, and this is because of the extreme oppression women face, especially women of poorer and tribal backgrounds. This empowerment of working-class and peasant women is admirable of the revolutionaries, and we ought to learn from their great example; we must not confuse this with identity opportunism, which focuses on identity politics at the expense of class struggle.

The reactionary Indian state launched Operation Green Hunt, its most recent attack, in 2009. This was done in an attempt to weaken the Indian people’s war. Though the CPI (Maoist) has lost numerous comrades, it still holds some territory from which it can continue the revolution. It is a force of the most oppressed of the Indian people, and consequently, it shall not die easily. If anything, with all of the problems that India has now, the Indian people have no real choice but to support revolutionary communism, support the building of New Democracy and socialism in India, and oppose all reactionary systems. India’s ruling party is Hindu nationalist; it is reactionary, and its supporters attack Christians, Muslims, and people of lower castes and indigenous tribes. CPI (Maoist) is tasked with combating this fascism, and so it allows people of all religions, castes, and tribes to join. It is absolutely the most revolutionary, democratic force in India, and that is why India wants to crush it.

The rulers’ thugs raid villages, often with poor people inhabiting them, and they destroy their property for allegedly aiding the revolutionaries. The book Operation “Green Hunt” in India by Adolfo Naya Fernandez explains how the fascist Indian state is committing genocide in its fight against the people’s war; it lists the characteristics of genocides committed in the past, and it clearly shows how “Green Hunt” fits these characteristics. In the Conclusion, it says:

Capitalism, in its highest stage, imperialism, shows that it moves “like a fish in water” in regards to the extermination of human beings, since that is its own predatory nature. As such, genocide is a “common” practice. …

It is clear that the events and practices narrated here, and what the Adivasis, Dalits and “Naxalites” are suffering constitute crimes against humanity…

The evidence provided in this investigation certifies that a genocidal practice is being carried out that complies with all the legal characteristics to be able to be brought to the International Criminal Court. …

That is why the only alternative for the survival of the Adivasis, Dalits and Naxalite militants who believe in another society, is a radical change in the semi-feudal and semi-colonial society of India, as well as the international support and solidarity to stop this massacre, so that they can advance in their objective of building a new society without classes, castes, racism and patriarchy.

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We must oppose the fascist suppression of the revolution. The masses support the communists, or at least they are sympathetic to their cause, and the state cannot win when the masses oppose it.

Down with the old Indian state! May the people be victorious in their struggle for New Democracy and socialism!