Across most of the globe there has been a decline of left forces of all kinds over the past two decades. But there have been three or four countries in which political parties that trace their roots to the traditions of the Third International or to Maoism have remained stable or even grown: South Africa, Nepal, India and, arguably, the Philippines. South Africa has the sacp, while a Maoist party is the single largest political force in Nepal, and Maoism retains a national presence in the Philippines. The case of India is very interesting in that here there are representatives of both formations, which have—to an uneven extent—maintained or actually strengthened their reach over the past twenty years. Both the Stalinized Communist Party of India–Marxist (cpm) and the once larger, but now smaller and shrinking, Communist Party of India (cpi) have remained forces of some political significance. The cpm, unseated in West Bengal after a record 34 continuous years in office, even in defeat obtained around 30 per cent of the vote, at the head of the Left Front which won 41 per cent.footnote1 Formations owing allegiance to the Maoist tradition, meanwhile, have actually increased their membership and extended their influence in recent years. Why has this been the case?
If only three or four countries have been bucking what is otherwise a global trend, the reasons must lie in the specificities of their respective socio-political formations. In India, the explanation for the persistence of Maoist and Communist forces is best sought in the country’s peculiar dualism, in which stable macro-structures of bourgeois liberal democracy co-exist with extremely undemocratic, violent socio-political realities at the meso- and micro-levels, especially, but not only, in the countryside. Secondly, steady capitalist development has brought dramatic polarizations between prosperity and extreme deprivation, overlaid onto the enduring pre-capitalist structure of the caste system, with great social deference at one end of the hierarchy and contemptuous exclusion at the other. In this context, traditional Stalinized and Maoist notions of developmentalism in the name of socialism continue to exert a powerful appeal for large masses of people.
The combination of sustained macro-level democracy and capitalist advance with persistent underdevelopment and socio-economic exploitation has pushed the Indian left in two different directions. The legatees of the Communist tradition have essentially been co-opted into the liberal-democratic system of electoral and parliamentary politics. Even their stalwart defenders recognize that their many years in power in West Bengal as part of the Left Front—dominated by the cpm and its junior partner, the cpi—and their alternating terms of office in Kerala have corrupted them programmatically, bureaucratically, socially and morally. The effects of their long involvement in ‘managing capitalist development’, even as this process has taken an increasingly neoliberal turn, were evident in the West Bengal Left Front’s behaviour over land acquisition in Singur and Nandigram, though this did at least cause rumblings internally. However, political differences between the cpm and the cpi are not of serious consequence. In the wake of the recent state-assembly reverses in West Bengal and Kerala, talk of a possible near-term merger of the two parties has resurfaced. Were it to go ahead, which is by no means certain, it would be of much less moment than if it had taken place 15 to 20 years ago.
Even if the cpm and cpi were willing—which they are not—they are increasingly incapable of carrying out mass mobilizations among the poorest and most deprived, either to defend them or to help fulfil their basic needs and aspirations. Perhaps the most dramatic indication of this came in 1992, when the Hindu right organized the destruction of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya—the greatest mass mobilization in India since independence. But at this decisive moment in modern Indian history, the parliamentary left could not even carry out a counter-mobilization against the onslaught of communalism. Bringing out their captive trade-union wings in the standard form of one-day bandhs (strikes) and mass processions with economic demands is no substitute for a sustained practice of extra-parliamentary mass mobilizations that address a whole range of issues. The only relatively bright spot is the growth of the cpm’s and cpi’s women’s wings; but this too is taking place within a broader women’s movement in India that, compared to its past, is more sectoral in character, more fragmented, in which socialist- or Marxist-feminists exercise less influence than before.
Indian Maoism, by contrast, has moved in the opposite direction. With the exception of one strand—the cpi-ml (Liberation) group, which is itself stagnating—it has remained essentially immune to the lures of parliamentary and electoral politics, at least concerning its own direct involvement. It has rooted itself among the poorest and most deprived sections of the population: Dalits and especially tribals in Central India. Its base area of Dandakaranya is a hilly, thickly forested region covering an area of 92,000 square kilometres, over twice the size of Kerala, cutting across the states of Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Maharashtra and most of Chhattisgarh.footnote2 Naxalites also have a presence in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Gujarat and Uttarakhand. In July 2011, the government declared that 103 out of the country’s 602 administrative districts were affected by ‘left-wing extremism’.footnote3
Maoism has survived and grown in India for one obvious reason which neither the state nor the mainstream parliamentary left are prepared fully to acknowledge: it has been the principal defender of the poorest and most deprived against their class oppressors and the politicians, bureaucrats, police and paramilitaries backing them at various levels. Like Marxist revolutionaries everywhere, India’s Maoists face the persistent riddle of how to bring about enduring radical transformation in a capitalist society with stable and entrenched structures of bourgeois democracy; as well as strong military and police apparatuses as a back-up for sustaining class rule. Yet Indian Maoists have simply failed to register the existence of this strategic dilemma, since their theoretical understanding of the Indian social formation as semi-feudal and semi-colonial effectively denies the existence of the country’s complex reality. Their strategy has essentially been one of armed overthrow of the state through a struggle in which the ‘countryside will surround the city’. They now give greater emphasis to lower- and working-class urban mobilization, and also speak of building ‘mobile liberated zones’—from which revolutionaries move out when under pressure, to return later. But in the longer term, their strategy is simply a recipe for comprehensive failure, and in the short and medium term paves the way for many damaging and unacceptable practices.
This is so for a number of reasons. Firstly, a military strategy cannot in the long run succeed against the Indian state. Provincial governments and some opposition parties have sometimes found it useful to harp on the ‘Maoist threat’ and exaggerate its impact, as a way of obtaining more Central funds, which are then used for various other purposes; at other times, it has suited them to make a rapprochement with the Maoists. But much weaker national governments than that of India have been able to defeat very significant insurgencies which had mass support. The principal lesson the authorities have learned is that the more prolonged the stand-off between themselves and even popularly rooted armed insurgencies, the more wearied becomes the latter’s mass base, the more likely internal divisions are to emerge, and therefore the weaker the insurgency will become. The lessons of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (ltte) defeat in Sri Lanka are clear. Here was a non-state insurgency with unusually strong military capacities—it had its own air force and navy—confronting a state far weaker than India’s, with a mass base that was not just looking for life improvement but was even committed to the strategic goal of Tamil independence. Yet it still lost militarily to its opponent, which was of course helped out by the Indian state. It is not a coincidence that India, precisely after the Rajapaksa government’s victory over the ltte, escalated its coercive actions against ‘Naxalites’.