An era is coming to an end. The killing of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), Basavaraju and his security guard of 26 commandos of the People's Liberation Guerilla Army (PLGA) by the security forces on May 21st deep inside the jungles of Abujhmarh in Chhattisgarh was a decisive blow against Naxalism which will almost certainly bring this six decade long armed struggle to overthrow the state through a people's war to an end soon.
Naxalism emerged in 1967 initially as a movement of Adivasi peasants in West Bengal's Naxalbari village, from where it got its name, to sieze the land of landlords but soon morphed into a revolutionary movement to overthrow the Indian State altogether to establish a revolutionary peasants and workers state on the lines followed by the Communist Party of China (CPC).
However, unlike the CPC, the Naxals neither had a broad mass base nor a guerilla army of any strength and so were crushed very soon and within four years the movement had abated in West Bengal and a little later in Andhra Pradesh and Bihar where too it took off about the same time.
Nevertheless, it did leave a huge impression on some people who were troubled by the unjust development being pursued in India which had left the majority of its citizens in severe economic distress without proper education and health. The idea of a people's state still enthused people and especially the youth in the nineteen seventies and I was one of them. Like others so enthused I read up on Marxism-Leninism and Maoism and was in the student's wing of one of the many splinter Naxal organisations that were floating around then, still mouthing revolutionary rhetoric even if not engaging in armed struggle to actualise it!!
Even though by the early 1980s it became clear to me that Marxism-Leninism and Maoism, while providing a fairly incisive critique of the functioning of capitalism and feudalism, were by then a bit off the mark as far as conducting armed struggle to overthrow the modern capitalist Indian State was concerned, some others in Andhra Pradesh and Bihar continued to believe in this ideology and its programme of armed struggle and launched a fairly strong one. Eventually though the considerable power of the modern Indian state forced these armed groups into the dense jungles of Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Garhchiroli in Central India and in Jharkhand.
They held their own for four decades in these jungles till drone warfare aided by satellite surveillance and the induction of former Maoist surrendered guerillas into the security forces and betrayal by some Maoists from withing have finally taken their toll. Given the fact that there was just one fatal casualty on the side of the security forces while the ferocious and well armed elite commandos of the PLGA and the General Secretary were all killed, it seems that the latter were surprised in their sleep and surrounded by the former from all sides.
Moreover, Mao's famous adage - "The guerilla must move among the people as a fish swims in the sea" was also rendered ineffective as the PLGA was increasingly isolated from the mass base that it had among the villagers as the security forces set up camps in the villages. The urban intelligentsia which provided silent support, sometimes of a crucial nature, too has been decimated through better surveillance technology available to the security establishment.
On many occasions from within their ranks and outside and by the state, the Maoists have been asked to give up armed struggle and pursue justice within the rights framework of the constitution but their top leadership has always refused, saying that there is no alternative to overthrowing the capitalist state. Now with their ranks severely depleted it is unlikely that they will be able to continue with the armed struggle.
Contemporaneously to the Maoists, there have been many mass movements for justice within the constitutional framework in these five decades from the mid nineteen seventies. They too have been unable to bring about a people centric state. Primarily because the state is inimical to any mass mobilisation whether armed or unarmed that tries to foreground the fundamental rights of its citizens in the development policies of the state. In fact, the state has had no hesitation in labelling even mass organisations engaged in unarmed protests as naxals and incarcerating their members under the draconian laws enacted to curb the Maoists and other armed organisations.
It will be interesting to see how the struggle for justice evolves in future in Central India in the absence of the armed Maoists.
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