Introduction

Starting in November 2008, the tribal people (or adivasis) of the Lalgarh village area of the West Midnapore district of West Bengal, India, rose up against decades of oppression and abuse by the police and armed thugs of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). This party is usually known by its initials as the “CPM”. Despite its name, this is by no means a revolutionary Marxist party; it is instead a revisionist or phony “communist” party, which represents not the workers, peasants and the poor, but actually the ruling alliance of exploiting classes (capitalists and landlords). The CPM has been in power in West Bengal for decades, and has come to demonstrate that old revolutionary Marxist addage that revisionism in power is nothing other than outright fascism as far as the masses of people are concerned.

Naturally the people of West Bengal are more and more resisting this state oppression, but when a revolt like that in Lalgarh occurs, the CPM police and armed goons become all the more ferocious in their attempts to suppress the people’s upsurge and drive them back into submission. There are now huge numbers of state police and paramilitary forces in the Lalgarh area attempting to put down the people’s revolt. But the mass struggle is continuing!

In recent years hundreds of adivasis in the Lalgarh area have been imprisoned on charges of having ties with the Maoist insurgency which is ongoing in large parts of India, and many of them have been murdered. This was the immediate spark for the uprising in late 2008. While the resistance of adivasis to their oppressive conditions has taken many forms over the years, the organized strength of this advanced political revolt grew from over a decade of work by the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in the area. It has proven to be the only significant party which actually sides with the people in their fight against the oppressive CPM state machine. It has helped the adivasis set up People’s Committees, and start to take control over their own lives. Activists of the CPI(Maoist) have played a leading role in promoting these People’s Committees and in expanding the struggle to new areas. Among these people’s organizations, which have a broad range of support and participation, is the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities (PCAPA) [also known as the Police Santrash Birodhi Janasadharaner Committee (PSBJC)], which is playing a very positive role in defense of the masses. This is the overall situation at present in the Lalgarh area and beyond.

The reports and documents below, available either on this site or else via links to other sites, provide extensive information about this great Lalgarh struggle of the Indian masses. While many of the news reports from the establishment press which are included below are of course not themselves banned in India, they are listed here in order to present a fuller and more complete picture of all the many events in this prolonged struggle. Sometimes the ruling class suppresses views and information outright and directly, but more often it suppresses it through simply making sure it has very limited circulation and does not actually reach most of the masses. This is just as much true in the United States as it is in India, and maybe even more so, due to the tyranny of capitalist media market forces. Withholding news coverage to the people, or only very spotty news coverage, is really almost as bad as the outright banning of publications which try to break the news embargo. It is the goal of BANNEDTHOUGHT.NET to help break down both of these forms of suppression of news and ideas, and to combat the ignorance and “dumbing down” of the population which the rulers seek to impose on us.

Much background information on sources below has been provided by researchers from the MLM Revolutionary Study Group in the US; their web site is www.mlmrsg.com, and they can be contacted at: mlm.rsg@gmail.com

[Note added on April 20, 2010:] The new International Campaign Against War on the People in India website (at http://icawpi.org) has a large number of articles and commentaries about the struggle in Lalgarh and also Operation Green Hunt and related topics. This is now the best site for keeping up to date on news and developments relating to such events and resistance struggles. From now on we will only be posting a relatively small number of the more important articles relating to Lalgarh or OGH here on BannedThought.net.

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