In light of the recent May 21 massacre of Indian Maoists, readers of The Partisan may be wondering: what is the history and background of the revolutionary movement in India? Those more familiar with the International Communist Movement may know of the various Marxist parties and organizations of the 20th and 21st centuries in India. Obviously those have their importance, but the Indian people are not unfamiliar or new to revolution, and the modern New Democratic revolution in India is a direct product of a long history of Indian revolutionary violence against colonialism, imperialism, and feudal oppression, dating back centuries.
In British India (comprising the lands that would later become the modern countries of India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan), some of the earliest uprisings carried out against colonial rule by the masses came as a result of encroachment upon adivasi (tribal or indigenous) land. The Chuar uprisings of the Bhumij people between 1766–1834 in the Junglemahal, centered in the western part of what is now West Bengal and the eastern part of Jharkhand, were largely in response to the British imposition of taxation and land grabbing. The Santal Hul of 1855–1856 saw Santali people, under the leadership of brothers Sidhu and Kanhu Murmu, fight against the British imposition of taxation and feudal landlords on their traditional lands. The Indian masses were aware of the role of the British colonialists in their oppression, and despite the existence of pre-British oppressors it was always the British and their native allies who were singled out as the enemy of the era.
One of the most well-known agitations against the British rule in India was the First Indian War of Independence, also commonly known as the 1857 Indian Rebellion or the “Sepoy Mutiny.” While the inciting incident related to mistreatment of sepoys (a type of native Indian infantry) in the British East India Company’s private army, it quickly grew into a bloody war that lasted one and a half years. With participation of both the Indian feudal nobility or landlords, as well as the peasants, this war posed a major threat to British colonial rule. Thus, the British instituted a brutal campaign of mass murder of Indians, chiefly among the masses, while hypocritically decrying the relatively infrequent murders of “innocent” British by Indians. The War itself was morally just and represented the first major mass armed struggle against colonialism, and its aftermath would set the stage for future uprisings in India.
As the struggle for independence grew and developed over the latter half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, it took on a more revolutionary character. Frustrated with the more capitalist and reformist section of the nationalist movement, which advocated nonviolent means of transferring power from the British, a growing section of people took up more revolutionary nationalist and Communist politics. Organizations like the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HRSA) or the Communist Party of India (CPI) were founded at this time. Actions against British rule became more violent. For example, in 1928 HRSA member Bhagat Singh led an assassination of a British officer, avenging the murder of independence activist Lala Lajpat Rai by police at an independence protest in Lahore. In 1929, Singh also detonated a leaflet bomb at the Central Legislative Assembly, decrying British rule and stating: “It is easy to kill individuals but you cannot kill the ideas. Great empires crumbled, while the ideas survived.”
Bhagat Singh was imprisoned by the British and held a hunger strike while awaiting trial. He was sentenced to death for the murder of a British officer. After the hanging, his corpse was cut up by the British and covertly disposed of, to reduce any celebration by the masses of his martyrdom. Nonetheless, Singh highlighted the correctness of revolutionary violence against class enemies and is remembered to this day for bringing the struggle against colonialism and feudalism to a more militant level. Despite the leadership of the Indian independence movement ending up being mainly reformist, Singh stands as a shining example of the galvanizing importance of armed struggle that would continue even after the British rule ended. Before his death, Singh himself stated that:
Let us declare that the state of war does exist and shall exist so long as the Indian toiling masses and the natural resources are being exploited by a handful of parasites. They may be purely British Capitalist or mixed British and Indian or even purely Indian. They may be carrying on their insidious exploitation through mixed or even on purely Indian bureaucratic apparatus. All these things make no difference. […] The war neither began with us nor is it going to end with our lives.
The period after India’s independence from Britain immediately demonstrated the great truth of this statement. While formal independence occurred on August 15, 1947, Communists under the Communist Party of India had been organizing in the state of Hyderabad for many years. Hyderabad, a princely state (vassal kingdom of British India), had a brutal feudal system under which peasants suffered greatly. Inspired by the glorious Chinese Revolution lead by Chairman Mao and in response to this brutal exploitation and oppression, the peasants raised the slogan “China’s Path is Our Path,” and formed armed guerrilla units. From 1946, peasants rebelled against the feudal landlords, driving them out of the villages and seizing the lands they held. From these land seizures, land was redistributed to peasants. After the 1947 independence, Hyderabad was no longer a vassal but an independent country, and one with an active peasant revolution. To quell this, the Indian government invaded Hyderabad and by 1949, after extraordinary violence against peasants, managed to put down the rebellion, buy off the Nizam (i.e., king) to annex Hyderabad, reinstate the feudal landlords, and undo the land redistributions.
In the aftermath, the revisionist leadership of the CPI sided with the Indian government, and rejected the righteousness and correctness of the Telangana Rebellion in Hyderabad. The increasingly obvious revisionism of the leadership grew over the 1950s, and by the 1960s the CPI had split, with the more left faction forming the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI (M)]. And yet, despite their differences, the CPI (M) continued to pursue a path of tailing the State and ruling classes. Thus to rectify this, under the leadership of Charu Majumdar, in 1967 armed struggle along the path of New Democratic Revolution was re-initiated following a new spontaneous mass peasant uprising in the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal.
Who was Majumdar? Charu Majumdar was born in 1918 to a hereditary feudal landlord family in northern Bengal, although his family was progressive and supported the independence struggle. At age 20, in 1939, he joined the CPI and set about organizing in the region. He organized rail workers and peasants, eventually leading to his involvement in organizing against the Bengal famine. This famine, which was produced by the British colonialists and their allies, swept across Bengal and lead to mass starvation. Majumdar lead seizures of landlords’ crops to ensure the masses had access to food. Due to his support of the Chinese Revolution and criticism of the Khrushchev revisionists, he was pushed out of the CPI and joined the CPI (M) in 1964. It was during his time in the CPI (M) from 1965–1967 that he upheld Mao Zedong Thought and wrote the Historic Eight Documents.
Majumdar called for armed struggle, annihilation of class enemies, and for broad integration of revolutionary forces with the peasant masses. The 1967 Naxalbari struggle saw the formation of armed guerrilla units and the initiation of land seizure and redistribution in the area. In taking up the path of armed struggle, the Indian Communist movement was once again on the path to revolution after over a decade of revisionist leadership. With India at this point formally independent from Britain, the main struggle of the masses was against semi-feudalism and capitalism—the main enemies were (and still are) the feudal landlords and capitalists, and their imperialist allies in the US. The Naxalbari struggle shone like a beacon to revolutionaries in India, with the initiation of armed struggle spreading to other areas across the country too. Thus, to organize and centralize leadership of this powerful new Left line, by 1969 these revolutionary forces came together to take up the task of reconstitution and found the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) [CPI (ML)].
In response to these advancements, the Indian State cracked down harshly. From 1970 especially it jailed or killed a large number of comrades. This period was especially tumultuous, with leading comrades dying frequently, but nonetheless progress being made in the armed struggle with a push towards a full People’s Army. Yet in 1972 Charu Majumdar himself was imprisoned and killed while being held in police custody. This marked the end of the prior period and marked the beginning of what the Indian comrades have called the “Black Period,” noting its state repression and low national unity of revolutionaries. It did not help that the Indian State declared a state of emergency and instituted a relatively fascist rule from 1975–1977, under the leadership of Indira Gandhi. By this point the CPI (ML) Central Committee had become defunct, and despite some efforts to revive it, those efforts ultimately failed at reviving the now fragmented party. A variety of continuation projects proliferated, with the most notable of these being:
- The CPI (ML) Party Unity (PU), formed in 1978 from those who had left a pro-Lin-Biao split from the CPI (ML) upon rejecting their former Lin Biaoist line. They launched struggles in Bihar and Punjab.
- The Maoist Communist Centre (MCC), who were never part of the CPI (ML). Inspired by the Naxalbari struggle, they had actually formed the organization in 1969. They launched struggles mainly in West Bengal and Bihar (including Jharkhand).
- The CPI (ML) People’s War (PW) was formed in 1980 out of the attempts at reorganization pushed by the CPI (ML) Andhra Pradesh State Committee and Tamil Nadu State Committee. They launched struggles in Andhra Pradesh (including Telangana), Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh (including Chhattisgarh), and Odisha.
Thus with the death of Majumdar and disintegration of the CPI (ML), it was over the course of the 1980s that the stage would be set for both infighting and, eventually, unity. By 1982 the CPI (ML) PU and the MCC came into conflict in Bihar, and agreed to stay out of each other’s areas of work. On the other hand, the CPI (ML) PW and the MCC kept relatively cordial relations during this period. By 1990 the conflict between the CPI (ML) PU and MCC intensified with a series of actions that give the Black Period its dark and infamous character. The CPI (ML) PU killed an MCC activist, and the MCC retaliated by killing numerous CPI (ML) PU activists. This fighting continued and escalated until 1996, when the two groups self-criticized for the murders. Yet they still proposed a division of areas of work which was backwards and formalized disunity and division, still seeing each other as the enemy rather than seeing the capitalist, imperialist, and feudal landlord as class enemies, struggling for unity through principled two line-struggle, and working together in the same areas to wage revolution.
Throughout all of this, the CPI (ML) PW pushed for uniting revolutionary groups in the country. Over the course of the 1980s the CPI (ML) PU and CPI (ML) PW did not engage with each other much, both due to lack of overlapping areas of work but also due to differing ideological-political views. Eventually from 1989 onward, both parties engaged in bilateral discussions and even talked of mergers. This eventually led to the merger of the CPI (ML) PW and CPI (ML) PU into a single party in 1998, carrying the name of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) People’s War. In the same year, they wrote criticizing the MCC for their antagonistic approach to the CPI (ML) PW, which now included the former CPI (ML) PU comrades. The year of 1999 saw an improvement in relations, with leading comrades on both sides agreeing to take steps to stop the infighting and murders. Over the course of 2003 and leading into 2004, both parties held joint meetings to engage in criticism and self-criticism for the Black Period, and to push for unity. Through this struggle, unity was reached and by September 21, 2004, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) was formed and announced to the world.
Over the next several years the work to grow the Indian revolution continued, and expansions out of base areas brought the revolution to new heights. With revolutionary fervor growing in central and east India, the State launched a brutal campaign of repression. Termed “Operation Green Hunt,” this saw the use of brutal military tactics against the Indian masses. While police brutality was not uncommon, the new push oversaw an intense militarization of society. In areas with strong Communist presence, people were subject to restrictions on their freedoms and subject to the whims of soldiers and police. This was especially the case in the Junglemahal offensive. The masses in this region rose up and formed a liberated zone, cutting off the State from accessing villages. Comrade Kishenji, as an important leader of the Indian Revolution, led the Communist forces in the area. This was why the State extrajudicially killed him in 2011, while he was captured and in their custody. Subsequently, the State cracked down even more heavily on revolutionary actions around the country, perpetrating murder, assault, rape, and other crimes against the Indian people.
This repression forced the Indian Communists to largely retreat to their core base area in the Bastar area, which they have continued to hold in the decade since. Despite any quantitative “success” of Operation Green Hunt in repressing the CPI (Maoist) and the revolutionary actions of the Indian people, the State has not succeeded in wiping them out. In turn, the State has taken on a more overtly fascist character, with the BJP-RSS bureaucrat capitalists continuing to squeeze blood out of the Indian people, and as a result the people continue to rise up in struggle against their oppression. The State, wanting to eliminate the CPI (Maoist), has now implemented its new Operation Kagaar—meaning “precipice.” With the recent May 21 massacre of Indian Maoists the Indian State is cheering on their great “success” at eliminating Maoism and Communism in the country. Yet despite the murders of even leadership, such as the General Secretary Basavaraj, the revolution continues. We must remember the words of Bhagat Singh: “It is easy to kill individuals but you cannot kill the ideas. Great empires crumbled, while the ideas survived.” At every stage of the Indian revolution, from the Independence Movement until today, the best leaders are those who were rooted in the peasants and workers, and who rallied around Marxism-Leninism and later Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. No matter the brutal tactics and actions of the fascist Indian State, the Revolution in India will continue. It is our duty, in the spirit of Proletarian Internationalism, to support it.
For further reading on the Indian revolutionary movement, we recommend Amit Bhattacharyya and his book Storming the Gates of Heaven which provides an excellent history of the period between 1969–2004. We also recommend reading Charu Majumdar’s Historic Eight Documents and Karl Marx’s writings on the First Indian War of Independence.
