The Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) has attracted a lot of publicity by attacking the Gandhi centre at Jadavpur University and by burning a tram and two buses in Calcutta on the eve of its first anniversary on April 22. Its activists, popularly known as Naxalites, have shown a striking capacity for secrecy and surprise on these occasions. But if the Government spreads the net wide enough as it proposes to do, they may soon discover that acts of terrorism and adventurism do not pay.
The CP(M-L) does not tire of proclaiming “Chairman Mao Is Our Chairman” and “The Chinese Path Is Our Path”. Perhaps its leaders have convinced themselves that they are unleashing in India the kind of “people’s war” which led to the success of the Communist revolution in China. The enthusiastic endorsement of their actions by Peking encourages them in the belief that they are following the Maoist path.
Sole Aim
But India is a very different kind of country from China in the ‘twenties and the ‘thirties, so different in fact that no genuine Maoist can possibly think of organising a successful guerilla war here. Only romanticists, adventurists and frustrated intellectuals can convince themselves that this country is ripe for a revolution of the Chinese variety. That is what the Naxalites are in spite of their protestations. They are neither Maoists nor Cheists*. They are the descendants of the terrorists of the pre-Gandhian era without the nationalism of the latter and indulge in the kind of “guerillaism” which Chairman Mao has condemned in the strongest possible terms.
“The political idea of the roving insurgents arises in the Red Army because the vagabond elements form a very large proportion of it and because there are enormous numbers of vagabonds in the country,” Chairman Mao has written. “This idea manifests itself as follows: (1) To be unwilling to expand our political influence by strenuous work in founding base areas … (3) To be impatient in carrying on hard struggle with the masses and to hope only to go to big cities and indulge in eating and drinking. .. ”
Since the beginning of their dispute with the Soviet Union in 1956, the Chinese have spared no effort to spread the myth that guerilla warfare can succeed in all developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, irrespective of local conditions. This proposition is wholly contradictory to what Chairman Mao and his leading Chinese colleagues wrote during more than two decades of their own armed struggle for power.
There can be little doubt that in preaching guerilla warfare indiscriminately, China is guided solely by considerations of its national interests. It does not care if hundreds, thousands, and even hundreds of thousands (as in Indonesia) of idealistic young men perish in reckless adventures so long as there is the smallest chance of its foreign policy objectives being advanced.
In the case of India, China is out to disprove Moscow’s theory that there is a parliamentary and peaceful road to socialism and to embarrass the CPI and CPI (M) which are willing, the latter with some reservations, to function within the constitutional framework. It is also deeply interested in undermining India’s defences in the north and north-east, keeping alive the insurrectionary movements among the Nagas and the Mizos, fanning discontent among other tribes, specially in the north-east, and stirring as much trouble as possible so that the Government is forced to divert an increasing proportion of its revenues from constructive economic tasks to national security. The programme of the CP(M-L) has been designed to serve all these foreign policy objectives of China.
The Chinese cannot be so naive as not to know that tribal people cannot be the architects of a communist revolution in India and yet they exhort the CP(M-L) to concentrate its efforts among them precisely because their real objective is not a successful revolution in India but disruption of this country. They are concerned first and last with the great power interest of China.
Realities
In their natural desire to reduce social and economic inequalities public men in India naturally emphasise the need for speedy reforms and the dangers of the status quo. But this does not mean that the situation in this country is in any way comparable to that of China in the ‘twenties when Chairman Mao advocated the launching of a peasant-based people’s war. A perusal of his report on the peasant movement in Hunan (1927) should open the eyes of Naxalites to the harsh realities.
A massive peasant revolt in Chairman Mao’s home province of Hunan was already on when he was sent there again by the Chinese Communist Party in 1925. It was a spontaneous affair and not the handiwork of communist agitators. It was deeply rooted in the Chinese tradition of peasant revolts which go as far back as the founding of the Han dynasty and in the conditions that had prevailed in the country since the fall of the Manchu dynasty in 1911.
These conditions are best described in the words of two well- known historians, Mr. Harold R Isaacs (The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution) and Mr. CP Fitzgerald (The Birth of Communist Revolutions in China), Mr. Isaacs has written:
“The civil wars and the reign of the generals deepened the misery in the countryside. Exactions increased. Land was laid waste. Agricultural production declined. Famines and unchecked floods took heavy tolls in human life. Millions of peasants, driven off the land, swelled the hordes of militarist armies or took to banditry, often much the same thing…”
Mr. Fitzgerald adds: “The flight of the rich from the countryside, the prevalence of banditry hardly differing from the exactions of the military destroyed the balanced economy of the countryside, drove the peasantry down further into misery, drained money away to the coast, and left the great irrigation and drainage works uncared for and in decay… All contributed to the ruin of the older order of society.”
It was this kind of situation which led Chairman Mao to conclude in 1926-27 that “in a very short time, in China’s central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm… so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back.”
Contradictions
He formulated his strategy and tactics strictly on the basis of the conditions that were then prevailing in China. The growing misery and the revolt of the peasantry were only a facet of the total picture. From Chairman Mao’s point of view it was equally important that the central authority was still too weak to make its writ run in large parts of the country, that warlords fought against each other, that transport and communications systems were still highly inadequate and that the old order with its Confucian ethics was rapidly disintegrating.
Chairman Mao attached a great deal of importance to what he called internal contradictions among the ruling classes. He argued in 1930:
“In the wake of the contradictions among the reactionary ruling cliques – the tangled warfare among the warlords – come heavier taxation … in the wake of … heavier Government taxation, etc., comes the deepening of the contradiction between the landlord class and the peasantry, that is, exploitation through rent and usury is aggravated …
“Because the reactionary Government, though short of provisions and funds, endlessly expands its armies and thus constantly extends the warfare … because of the … rise in rent and interests demanded by the landlords and the daily spread of the disasters of war, there are famine and banditry everywhere…
“Once we understand all these contradictions, we shall see in what a desperate situation, in what a chaotic state, China finds herself …”
No CP(M-L) leader can seriously maintain that similar contradictions exist in India. Instead the Union Government has the necessary power and means to put down rebellion in any part of the country; even the lowest sections of the community are beginning to make use of the vote to acquire a share in power; agricultural production is steadily rising; even if the landless do not benefit from it as much as others, they are not starving and their condition is slowly improving; and the ruling elite is responsive to the needs of the peasantry because it derives its power and legitimacy from the latter.
(To be concluded…)
The Times of India, 22 April 1970
*Cheists – followers of Che Guevara