This article provides the most detailed analysis of the People’s War in India I could find. The People’s War in India is the world’s largest revolution in the second most populous nation on Earth. The Communist Party of India (Maoist) and its military wing, the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army dominate the Eastern half of the country known as the Red Corridor. If they succeed the Maoist forces would shake the foundations of the global imperialist system whose impact would be similar to the Russian and Chinese Revolutions. Although not known for the most part outside of India. It arguably constitutes the largest guerrilla army in the world today, with 20,000 PLGA cadres and 50,000 Maoist militias fighting a protracted people’s war in the countryside and jungles of India. – Red Banner MLM

Does size matter?

The basic contradiction is this: in the very heartland of what is often referred to as the “world’s largest democracy” there is also occurring the “world’s largest revolution.” Revolutionary forces, led by the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and its military wing, the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army,1 have an active presence in at least a third of the country, and dominate major and shifting swaths of territory, with control over several key regions where they have established their main liberated areas. Their goal is to overthrow the entire Indian political, economic and social system, and to replace it with a radical transformation of the class structure and new forms of popular democratization and development. They are raising an alternative vision for society, one that challenges bourgeois political and economic norms that are dominant across the global capitalist system led by the United States. Within this imperialist structure, India is viewed as a rising star of international capitalism for its rapid economic growth, largely driven by foreign investment, and its adherence to Western style democratic practices. But it is these very aspects of its society that are leaving hundreds of millions of Indians in ever greater poverty and despair, fueling their revolutionary upsurge and demands for new forms of democracy and development. The success of the Maoist revolution would not only transform India itself, therefore, but deliver a critical blow to the entire structure of imperialist capitalism, and to the political methods now used to maintain its global hold.

The issue of scale is relevant here. The constant references, at home and abroad, to the democratic processes in India as “large” are part of the justification offered, even by some on the left, for maintaining its current system. The size and the viability of its political institutions are seen as being closely linked. As the vice-chancellor of Delhi University put it in a poster urging participation in the parliamentary elections of 2009, “The largest democracy of the world is going to the polls to choose its representatives. Wider voter participation will strengthen democracy in India and will make it more vibrant.” But why does size matter? Is the issue of democracy in India and elsewhere in the world today primarily one of quantity or quality? In the United States, the democratic ideal is often the Greek city state or the small New England town where every citizen could participate directly in choosing leaders and making the decisions that affect them. But in a country of over one billion people such as India, is it important that democracy is “large”? In one sense, yes. The system of democratic parliamentarism, inherited from British colonialism, was the primary instrument used after Independence in 1947 to stitch together a modern national state out of many disparate elements. The sprawling nation, covering an entire subcontinent, and deeply divided by class, caste, ethnicity, religion and language, still depends largely on this political structure to keep its centrifugal forces from flying apart. Democracy is the critical national “glue.” But by the same token, the breakdown of the current Indian parliamentary democratic process, the approach of its historical limits, and above all its growing inability to meet the needs of hundreds of millions, bursts the bonds of bourgeois political practices inherited from the colonial past, and threatens the fragile unity of the nation and the “ungluing” of its social order.

Under such critical circumstances, the demand arises all the more insistently for an alternative system of national organization, and for forms of democracy adequate to this new historic stage. It is this path of revolution, linked to the democratic upsurge of the oppressed, that the CPI (Maoist) is now taking. Led by these self-defined “Maoists,” significant areas of India are today in armed revolt against the state. Here again the question of scale is relevant. Though hardly unique—there are revolutionary forces guided largely by Maoist principles in Nepal, the Philippines, and other countries as well—the Indian struggle is the most widespread such movement in the world, both in the extent of its territorial reach and the size of the population where it is active. A so-called “Red Corridor” at least partly under control of Maoists, now stretches some 750 by 300 miles through much of eastern and central India, while regions under their influence extend even further south and into more isolated pockets elsewhere.2 Up to 20,000 fighters in the PLGA, plus Maoist militia “estimated by several intelligence analysts at over 50,000,” with supporting political and cultural cadre, are active in 20 of 28 states, and one-third of the administrative districts.3 With the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)—which is independent from its Indian counterpart—now struggling internally to define its direction and a new role in national political power, after a decade-long guerrilla war, the territory where the forces of revolution are actively engaged reaches virtually unbroken from the Chinese border in Tibet deep into the south of the subcontinent. Success by the Maoists in India would constitute the largest revolutionary victory since the 1949 triumph of the Communists in China. Like that revolution, it would “shake the world.”

Whether the Maoist leadership will be accepted by a large enough majority to succeed, is now the central issue of Indian society. So serious is the challenge, that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of the Congress Party-led coalition government has declared the Maoists “the greatest internal security threat to the country since Independence”—surpassing even longstanding regional insurgencies in Kashmir and the Northeast. The relation of the present Indian parliamentary system to the forces of revolution, and their alternative visions of democracy, reverberates at the core of the national dilemma today, and the consequences of how it is dealt with will largely determine the outcome of the current struggle. But the implications of this revolutionary expansion are much broader, extending far beyond the borders of India itself. The growth of the popular basis for revolution and the reaction to it under the specific Indian historical conditions pose a fundamental challenge to Western forms of democracy handed down from the earliest stages of bourgeois society, especially when these were adopted or imposed under the conditions of colonialism and neocolonialism. The upsurge of Maoist revolutionaries in India is testing the very limits of existing democratic practices to solve the contradictions of late imperialist capitalism, especially in the global South. The outcome could have profound ramifications not only across south Asia, but also for China itself—the original home of “Maoism”—and for the worldwide imperial structure under the domination of the United States. The rising up of millions of exploited and oppressed Indians under the leadership of Maoists would threaten the very foundations of the international capitalist system, and realign the working classes across the entire globe. As the recent profound economic crisis initiated by the United States, which spread worldwide, has demonstrated, the ability of the “great democracies” of capitalism to manage their global empire is now rapidly approaching its historic limits. The decisive historical break, the passing of the revolutionary torch, may come at any time and place. Is India at such a turning point?

Naxalbari and the rise of Maoist-led insurgency

The current upsurge in revolutionary activity under the leadership of Maoists is only the latest phase of a struggle that began more than 40 years ago in the district of Naxalbari, in northern West Bengal state. There, in 1967, led by Communist Party of India (Marxist)4 cadre, who hoped to follow the Chinese example of peasant revolution under Mao, the rural population rose up in arms against the landlords and money lenders, who mercilessly exploited them, and confronted the forces of the state which served as the protector of their oppressors. From these origins the Maoists in India have long been known as “Naxalites,” though both terms cover a broad range of revolutionary activism. Naxalbari fundamentally altered the political landscape of the Indian “Left” in ways that are still felt today. Coming just when the Sino-Soviet split was escalating, as the Cultural Revolution in China was reaching its early peak, and only a year before the worldwide revolutionary surge of 1968, the Naxalite explosion was a major dividing line in leftist politics in India, releasing new forces of bottom up activism and the resort to violence, and for the first time linking the demands of the peasantry to a struggle for state power. Though there had been many instances of armed insurrection before—from the 1855-56 uprising of Santal adivasis or indigenous people led by Siddhu and Kanhu, to the First War of Independence in 1857-58 by sepoy troops and popular forces revolting against the British East India Company, to the 1910 tribal rebellion in the Bastar area of present day Chhattisgarh, to attacks on the colonial establishment for which 23 year old Bhagat Singh and other young rebels were hanged for murder in 1931, to the peasant uprising led by the Communist Party of India in the Telengana region of what is now Andhra Pradesh in the 1940s, and a similar revolt in the same region under Maoist leadership in the early 1960s—it was Naxalbari “that put the Indian peasantry on the revolutionary map of the world.”6 Revolution, utilizing violence, was now an open goal, after the long dominance of nonviolence in the nationalist movement that led to Independence from Britain in 1947. The pattern of revolutionary Maoism and the state response to it were set there, and have continued in largely similar form until today.

The Naxalbari uprising created peasant guerrilla groups that overthrew the local landlords, and resisted the counterattacks of police sent to protect them. The goal was to start an agrarian revolution, one that would seize political as well as economic power.

Soon after the first incident in the last week of May 1967, the leaders of the Naxalbari unit of the CPI(M) declared the area a ‘liberated zone’ where police and government officials would not be allowed to enter, and armed squads were formed to defend the area. Village committees were established to take over the administration of schools and other public activities, and they performed the function of judicial bodies. Raids were organized on the houses of rich peasants, their stocks of hoarded rice were confiscated, and the mortgage and loan documents in their possession were destroyed.6

The rebellion in Naxalbari itself was brutally crushed within a few months, by a coalition government in which the parent CPI (M) was a leading partner—though it initially helped to restrain the police and later got those arrested released—and before the Maoists could consolidate their guerrilla operations into a secure base area. Yet in a pattern that was to be repeated over and over again down to the present time, the struggle that they had launched spread rapidly, largely because of the vicious response with which it met.

The 1967 movement grew beyond everyone’s expectations, mainly because of the reaction to the massive crackdown by the state … [which] resulted in the movement spreading to other areas of Bengal and Bihar, and into cities, primarily Calcutta [now Kolkata], where it became a straight ‘state versus the revolutionaries’ battle. Soon it crossed the class barrier and consumed intellectuals and students, even those with no background or interest in communist principles.7

Naxalism spread further northwest into Uttar Pradesh, and even as far as Punjab, and south into Andhra Pradesh, and to distant Kerala on the coast. By 1969, those Maoist revolutionaries favoring armed struggle split from the CPI (M) to form the CPI (Marxist-Leninist). For the first time in India, those advocating revolutionary class conflict had a national ideological and organizational center. Yet from the start, there were many opposing trends, factions, and divisions in the ranks of the Maoists, and they coexisted and competed with other political and social movements, such as Gandhianism and parliamentary Marxist groups, all of which tendencies have continued down to today.

Wherever possible, the Naxalites began to carve out base areas linked to popular struggles. Especially in Andhra Pradesh, in the old Telengana revolutionary center and in the coastal tribal area of Srikakulam, small liberated zones held out from the late 1960s to 1970s, before being overwhelmed by a massive police operation, with the arrest, torture or killing not only of Maoist leaders and cadre, but of thousands who had participated in the movement, as well as many who were only suspected of involvement or simply lived in the area. Adopting methods earlier used by the British in Malaysia, and the United States in Vietnam, state police and paramilitaries carried out mass displacement of the local population, creating “strategic hamlets” meant to isolate the Naxalites from their popular base, separating the “fish” from the “sea” in which they “swam.” Maoist forces in Andhra Pradesh and its capital Hyderabad were largely wiped out. In Kolkata as well, the Naxalite intellectuals and university students who had launched a campaign of urban violence, in part to draw the police and military away from the rebellious rural areas, lost their initial foothold as the first phase of uprising was met everywhere in the 1970s with massive state repression. Thousands of youth had “joined the Naxalbari and Srikakulam tribals and peasants. They were abducted, imprisoned, tortured, killed, and Indian English added a new meaning to the verb ‘encountered’ after the faked ‘encounter’ killings”8—the summary execution of those detained for “trying to escape” or on other trumped up excuses, such as “throw down” weapons planted on their dead bodies. Many thousand died, including hundreds in the cities, while across India, 30,000 Maoists and their supporters were jailed—under such harsh conditions and brutal treatment that it drew international protests—putting an end to the initial Naxalbari revolutionary upsurge.

But in the aftermath, as was to occur again and again in the coming decades, the Maoist cadre who survived went underground or dispersed into new areas. Especially those who had gained experience in Andhra Pradesh spread north and west into what are today Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra. Driven from the cities, and even from most of the agrarian countryside, they concentrated mainly in the vast belt of forest, much of it nearly inaccessible, that stretches through these states. There they based themselves even more than earlier among the adivasis or tribal peoples, dalits or“untouchables,” and other lower castes, the most oppressed segments of Indian society. Learning from the inability to protect their strongholds in the urban centers and main farming areas in the plains, the Maoist cadre adopted a strategy of guerrilla warfare deep inside the forests. There they showed that they were willing to live, struggle and die alongside the people, and to help them fight local tyrants, exploitative traders, abusive police, and oppressive government agencies, especially the forest administrators.

For the next quarter century, the Naxalite movement waxed and waned, suffering from external suppression, but also internal divisions—over the methods and targets of violence, participation in electoral bodies, the role of mass organization, and factionalism. Parties and groups, some based mainly in certain states or regions, formed and fractured, keeping the flame of Naxalbari alive, but without the guidance of a single central body. The response of the government also varied over both time and geography. While the basic instinct of the state was always to react with massive suppression, some efforts to ameliorate the conditions of the poorest and most oppressed were also sporadically tried. In West Bengal especially, after major labor unrest in the mid-1970s, and the 21-month long national state of emergency declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975, the CPI (M) held power from 1977 until May 2011 and in the earlier years instituted a quite substantial program of land reform, which gave some relief to millions of farmers, and strengthened bottom up democratic rights within village panchayat governments—though the new electoral processes also gave the party increased political domination over them. In Kerala too, Communist parties held office off and on over decades, introducing partial steps in redistribution, resulting not only in economic advances for the poor, but broader social gains such as a high literacy rate. Such reforms further undercut the Maoist appeal.

The ever renewing base for revolutionary struggle

The Naxalite movement, including its armed wing, never died out completely, however. From the late 1970s through the 1990s, it continued to reappear in various forms and different regions, most notably the Peoples War Group in Andhra Pradesh and the Maoist Communist Center in Bihar, which organized among the poor peasantry, the lowest or “scheduled” castes and the adivasis, and continued to carry out violent attacks. The very viciousness of the suppression campaigns, extending into post-Independence India the racist and caste-driven brutalities of the British colonial era, though constantly setting back the forces of revolution, at the same time renewed them with an ever longer list of heroes and martyrs, and an ever deeper well of popular grievances and resentments that the Maoists could draw on. Police, paramilitaries and state-sponsored vigilante groups employed murder, beatings, torture, looting, and the burning of houses and even entire villages, unleashing a veritable “reign of terror.” Sexual abuse, long a weapon of the upper castes against those under them—an “untouchable” woman becomes “touchable” when she is raped, as one dalit speaker put it—is so routine in these drives, that they are more redolent at times of the horrors of Sudan or the Congo than of a modern democracy. Many of the policing methods hark back to British colonial times, like lathi charges, the ubiquitous and brutal wielding of long cane batons to disperse and beat protestors. Other specialties, though hardly unique to India, are “mysterious” deaths in prison of uncounted numbers—Charu Mazumdar, the Communist leader at Naxalbari, died in 1972 after just 12 days in jail, under still disputed circumstances—and especially widespread use of the “fake encounter killings.” As early as the first anti-Naxalite campaign, such atrocities drew widespread condemnation not only from many Indians, but from international human rights groups and world renowned progressives, such as Noam Chomsky and Simone de Beauvoir.

While these suppression drives have the “unintended consequence” of constantly replenishing the subjective wellspring of the forces of revolution, raising popular anger at the state and the determination to fight on among Maoist cadre, and especially adivasi, dalit, peasant and worker activistswho suffer the heaviest blows, what renews their main objective foundation is the ever more dire conditions in which hundreds of millions live. The image of the new “Shining India,” with its high tech centers and young urban rich—living in gated housing and partying all night in five-star hotels, symbols of a booming economy competing with China for global superstar status—belies the immensity of the deep impoverishment of the majority of its population. This vast polarization is rapidly becoming more extreme. In 2009, India had 52 billionaires, up from “just” 27 the year before, and less than 10 at the start of the decade. The richest, Mukesh Ambani, has built a 27-story home, which by some press accounts cost a billion dollars, for his five-person family, in Mumbai, a city where most people live in slums. The combined net worth of the 100 wealthiest individuals has reached $276 billion, according to the Forbes’ India Rich List, equal to a quarter of GDP. The top decile owns 53%of wealth, the bottom one 0.2%. The number of poor has grown drastically.9 Though some 200 million or more—a number greater than the entire population of most nations—may share to some degree in the “shining” aspects of India, this still leaves what is not far short of a billion others excluded and now barely able to survive. More than 800 million, or some 77% of the population, live on just 20 rupees or less per day, equivalent to under $0.50, and almost 230 million receive less than half that.10 Released in 2010, “a United Nations report revealed that there are more poor people in just eight Indian states than in all the 26 countries of sub-Saharan Africa, with the large state of Madhya Pradesh comparable in intensity of deprivation to war-ravaged Congo.”11



This vast poverty is concentrated in the rural areas. Close to 75% of all Indians still live in the countryside, four-fifths of them engaged in agriculture. Based on 2002-03 government survey data, the average amount of land owned or operated per farm dropped continuously since the 1960s, losing over half of its size since the early 1970s, to 1 hectare—2.5 acres—or less.12 Despite sporadic efforts at reform, varying greatly over time and between states, lands remain highly and unequally concentrated. While the great zamindar estates of the colonial era, with their brutal and exploitative intermediary agents, were largely broken up, by the early 1970s, they were replaced in many areas by semi-feudal landlord-tenant relations, and in some cases, especially in Punjab and other states where the Green Revolution led to a high percentage of larger and more capitalistic modern farms, a small kulak class arose.13 Powerful landlords have for decades found ways to evade limits on their holdings, and to subvert the rights of sharecroppers and laborers, including by use of strong-arm tactics.14 By 2003, 80% of farmers, up from 66% forty years earlier, were marginal—landless, land poor or tenants—with an average of only 0.21 hectares or just over 0.5 acres, often little more than enough for their houses.15 Those “effectively” lacking land rose from 44% in 1960-61 to 60% in 2002-03, and thosewithout any lands are almost 300 million, outnumbering the entire middle class.These poorest farms have only 6% of all cultivable land, a proportion that is virtually unchanged or even a little less favorable than fifty years ago.16 Most of these are subsistence farmers, barely scratching out a meager survival, and selling only a minor part of their crops, if any, in the market. Above them the other marginal, small and semi-medium farms, some 36% of the total, have around 60% of all farmland, while medium and large farmers, or 4%, control around 34%.17 These larger farmsare the only ones fully engaged in capitalist marketing and labor relations, able to share in the wealth of the “new” India.

Grim as it is, this picture does not convey the extremes of impoverishment and exploitation that result from geographical variation and the discriminatory effects of caste. Those without any land or only enough for homesteads are close to 50% or more of rural households in Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar and several other states, and are concentrated in the dalit, adivasi and Muslim communities.18 Nationwide, 80% of dalits live in rural areas, and 86% are effectivelylandless. In Punjab, where they are 29% of the population—the highest proportion in any state—and are the main hired labor force, fully 95% have no land of their own to farm.19 These heavily discriminatory relations are being exacerbated by pressures on the entire farming sector. Nationwide, the economic role of farms is declining, with agriculture now accounting for a mere 17% of GDP, down from 39% in 1980. In the same period the share of national labor engaged in farming dropped from 68 to 60%, but it still grew in absolute numbers. An ever expanding rural population therefore shares in a decreasing portion of GDP, and especially on the marginal farms, income per person has also been falling. The average return for the vast majority of those farming is now only around 30 to 50 rupees per day, or from $0.66 to just over $1.20 But these averages include all types and sizes of farms, and for hundreds of millions, even this meager income is lacking. Their ability to survive is rapidly being lost as pressure mounts to compete in a global capitalist market for which they lack resources. Imports, such as fruits from the United States and elsewhere in Asia, and the mass output of large, mechanized and heavily subsidized farms in the rich countries, especially in cotton, have devastated many Indians struggling to survive on small plots, particularly as they have been pushed to alter their production from subsistence crops to those mainly for sale or export, making them ever more dependent on marketing.21 Rural processing and small industries are also failing due to import competition, especially from China, leaving farmers unable to supplement their household income.

Cultivation alone is therefore no longer enough to support the majority of farm families, leading to indebtedness, and the necessity to hire out as labor. Tens of millions have moved to the cities, where the vast majority find only insecure sources of income and irregular housing. Slum dwellers more than doubled from 1981 to 2001—a rate almost two and a half times faster than overall population growth in India—increasing from 28 to 62 million, and generating an impoverished urban underclass equal in number to all of Great Britain. A government commission estimated that the number will rise to over 93 million in 2011. Another study found that 62% of Mumbai residents now live in slum conditions.22 In recent years, drives to clear the slums have left growing numbers of poor urban dwellers homeless, and the sight of laborers and even whole families living on sidewalks or along railroad tracks, or on any open land where there is space to pitch a tent or build a shack, is common. Such governmental policies thereby exacerbate poverty, as the “development” model of the state compounds the failure to meet basic social needs like housing, education, health, sanitation and electrification.23 Not until 2010 was a law passed guaranteeing free schooling for all Indian children. Ratios of students to the often poorly trained teachers in public schools are high and growing, and in the villages, those who can afford it now commonly turn to private academies instead. Illiteracy remains almost 25%, concentrated in the rural areas, according to 2011 census data. For women, the national rate is still around 35%. Health care expenditures are only 1% of GDP, and 70 to 80% of that is private and largely unaffordable for the poor. The rural population especially suffers.24 In 2006, India ranked 138 in the world in medical expenses per capita, at $86, just below Afghanistan, Haiti and Rwanda. The young suffer most. Of newborns worldwide who die in the first four weeks of life, one-third are Indian.25 Some 40% of the population, or 480 million, mainly in the rural areas, are still unconnected to the electric grid.26 This too varies greatly by region. In Bihar, 80% of villages have no electricity.

Hunger and malnutrition are also rampant across most of the country. In 12 out of 14 states south of Punjab, 20 to 30% suffer from inadequate food, a rate considered to be “alarming,” while Madhya Pradesh falls into the “extremely alarming” category of over 30%.27 Even in cities, a third of the population is chronically hungry. The condition of young children is especially dire, with 42.5% of those below the age of five underweight—nearly half the world total—worse than the rate found in much of Sub-Saharan Africa. Adivasis and the lower castes have the highest hunger rates. Over 50% and 60%, respectively, of their young children are underweight.28 While India has not had a major famine since Independence, it suffers instead from a continuous “semi-famine,” that kills millions year in and year out.29 These already severe conditions have only become worse as India has turned sharply toward neoliberal “globalization” over the past two decades. A growing “scissors” between the rising costs of farm inputs and falling prices for their products have driven farmers ever deeper into debt. At the same time, rural health care and education suffer from growing neglect, as neoliberalism demands cutbacks in public funding, and its replacement—if at all—by high cost private services. This decline of the governmental sector has had a dire environmental impact as well, compounding the pollution and loss of natural resources resulting from detrimental practices and unregulated growth in the past. Such conditions have spread even to Punjab, where the “green revolution” had made it the “breadbasket” of India, but where indebtedness, falling water tables, and the poisoning of the land with herbicides, pesticides and artificial fertilizers have led to the ruin of many farms. One result has been over 200,000 suicides by Indian farmers, including many Punjabis, in the past two decades, the majority of them due to desperation over unrepayable debts.30



This widening crisis in much of rural India, and the never-ending exploitations of class, caste and ethnicity, have meant that revolutionary forces can always find new areas for bases, no matter how many times they may have been defeated or driven out of their earlier strongholds. This continual resurgence of the Naxalites is sometimes compared to an octopus or a hydra-like creature, or even to the demon king Ravana in the Ramayana, whose arms or heads can be cut off, only to grow out again. But it may be more useful to think of the Naxalite movement as a kind of sponge, which is constantly being squeezed and reshaped, parts of which may even at times dry up and harden completely, but which regains its shape and even expands again, especially when watered—all too often quite literally—with the blood of the poor and the oppressed. It is out of this constant renewal, and the deepening impact of neoliberalism and “globalization,” that pressure grew for the reunification of the revolutionary forces, as both subjective and objective conditions for unity ripened. In 2004, Peoples War and the Maoist Communist Center overcame their factional differences—which at their worst had even led to armed clashes between the contending groups—to form the CPI (Maoist). For the first time since the early 1970s, the Maoists had a national center, and on a larger scale than ever, equal to the task of confronting the all-India state on its own terms, and with its People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army, which far exceeds in effectiveness the scattered and poorly armed and trained forces that four decades ago grew out of the uprising at Naxalbari.

“The capitalists and the communists”

Nevertheless, the rise of the CPI (Maoist) to its leading revolutionary position today is the outcome of specific conditions over the past several years, and its ability to take advantage of the openings provided by these new developments. In part this is due to its flexibility. With well trained cadre, a battle-hardened guerrilla army, and a mobility that has, in large part, been forced upon it by constant suppression campaigns, the party has developed the kind of “have guns, will travel” capability that allows it to quickly seize opportunities that the system of oppression opens up before it. This was seen in 2005, when Maoists were once again largely driven from their bases in Andhra Pradesh, with heavy losses, yet not only quickly regrouped, but reached a new peak of national mobilization. This ability to convert setbacks into gains, to seize openings that constantly arise for expansion, is not simply the result of flexible and mobile organization, however. Over the last three decades, the Maoists have “seeded” the vast forest regions and other parts of the interior hinterland with dedicated cadre, who have helped to stimulate and lead resistance struggles by those who have suffered from centuries-long oppression and exploitation. These communities rise up over and over again when conditions become unbearable. This deep and dialectical tie between the Maoist revolutionaries and popular forces is the primary reason why the struggle continues to flare repeatedly, and to spread across the country, often at the very point when the movement has suffered setbacks.

Because it is deeply embedded in local communities and sensitive to the changing conditions there, the CPI (Maoist) is in a position to grasp new threats, and help to lead the opposition to them. Such is the case with Special Economic Zones. The Indian SEZs are different from those familiar from China—a few large areas in the coastal regions, with multiple export oriented factories. While some zones of this kind exist in India, its SEZs and similar projects under contractual Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) are generally smaller, more scattered, and set up for a specific enterprise or economic sector, most commonly auto, steel, mining, forest products, electronics, pharmaceutical or utility plants. Because only part of the land has to be used for production, many zones also engage in real estate development, such asshopping malls, luxury housing and golf courses.31 The first SEZ policy was drafted in 2000, but the major explosion of zones followed passage of a new law in 2005, with 462 being approved before the middle of 2008, a number now approaching 600—though only 100 plus are operational. Dubbed “Special Exploitation Zones” by activists, they are treated by the government as “public service utilities,” allowing them to offer exemptions from tax, tariff, environmental and labor regulations, including even the right to strike. States compete for the “privilege” of making such concessions and opening their territory for SEZs, turning them over to the largest multinational corporations, both Indian and foreign. Though claiming to bring jobs to poor areas, in practice most SEZ enterprises are capital intensive and hire few local workers.32 Driving thousands off the land and undermining local communities, they are generally devastating as well to the natural surroundings in the area, compounding economic ruin with environmental damage by polluting forests, fields and water systems.33 SEZs represent the latest peak of the Indian drive for a neoliberal globalized “development” form, with concessions to private capital, attraction of foreign corporate investors, casualization of labor, suppression of trade unions, and avoidance of ecological restraints. Many of these seizures are carried out under the Colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894, as amended in 1984 to allow the public takeover of land for privatized exploitation, once again demonstrating the roots of post-Independence India in its British past. One result is to radically undermine any earlier land reform campaigns or strengthening of democratic control by local panchayat governments.34

As is common elsewhere around the globe—the Amazon in Brazil and Ecuador, rainforests of Indonesia, or Native American reservations in the US West—many of the open lands and natural resources needed for capitalist “development” lie on the territories of indigenous peoples, which in India means primarily within the forestlands of adivasis. As a result, though limited by the opposition of the population and lack of infrastructure, it is in the tribal forest belt that the drive for SEZs and MOUs has been most devastating economically, environmentally, and socially, resting on the racist assumption that the people there are too backward and powerless to resist. But the current taking of their homelands is nothing new. Going back well before colonial times, adivasis have a long history of resistance and rebellion, and even the British were never able to conquer them. In recent decades, under the post-Independence government, thousands of mainly adivasi communities have been uprooted for construction of massive dams, such as those on the Narmada River in Gujarat and Rajasthan, leading to large anti-displacement struggles, many lasting decades and attracting support from progressives such as Arundhati Roy. This history should have served as a warning to those pushing for SEZ/MOU expansion.35 In addition, unlike construction of dams, which could at least claim to benefit the general public with power supplies or irrigation, SEZs and MOUs involve seizure of enormous tracts to be turned over to corporate enterprises, whose only aim is profits. Additional lands are taken by governments for publicly provided infrastructure such as roads, and water and electricity are provided by the state to aid these projects. The recipients of this governmental largesse read like the Fortune Global 500. Resistance to them means directly confronting neoliberal “globalization,” with the most marginalized and poorest sectors of Indian society at the forefront of the struggle.

In facilitating such investors, the ruling political parties of India have confirmed the charge by the Maoists that they have lost whatever claim they might have once had to being representatives of the nation or its states as a whole, much less the vast majority of the people, or even the domestic capitalist class. They have instead become “comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie”—what Latin Americans call vendepatria, those who sell their native land—acting in the interests of “imperial globalization.” Especially since the turn to neoliberal policies after 1991, this “is a commentary on the so-called ‘development’ model introduced by the Indian ruling classes and their political representatives who had sold out our country’s resources by hoodwinking people and also by drowning their resistance in pools of blood.”36 The last decade has seen an explosion of investment from abroad, subordinating India to outside forces.

Right now Indian economy is a foreign capital sponsored economy. Foreign Institutional Investment as well as Foreign Direct Investment together are rising rapidly from 5861 million US dollar to 51167 million US dollar between 2001-02 and 2009-10 fiscal. Between April-September, 2010, FII and FDI together increased by 29,137 million US dollar. Over this period of nine years and a half (9½), foreign investment grew ten fold. At present, more than a quarter of capital working in India is foreign capital. This ever growing basket of foreign capital acts as the catalyst spurring the Indian actors to dance to the tune set by the global players which is euphemistically called growth and development.37



Such an influx has been attracted, in turn, only by converting India into a new-style colony of capitalist imperialism. Today it is global capital to which a leading portion of the ruling classes has pledged their colonial-like servitude, in return for a large payoff.

‘Globalization’ is forcing middle India to colonize her own people. This is nothing new. It happened under British rule too. Since the days of Siraj-ud-daula [a Bengali ruler, defeated by the East India Company, and then murdered, in 1757], the various Nawabs and Rajas, a section of the Indian elite has steadfastly stood by the imperialists, helped them run Empires, and made a buck for themselves.38

As a result, multinational corporations today create their own restricted preserves, just as the British once did. These are extraterritorial zones from which both the people of India and the legal reach of the government are now largely excluded. “Enclave development, once a mainstay of the colonial state, has made a glorious come back in contemporary Indian economic policy.”39 Each SEZ, in particular, results in “the formation of a ‘foreign country within the country’, where no civil laws or industrial laws of the country will be applicable.”40 This “foreignness” is even given formal recognition under the law.41

By seizing the land of India and turning it over to the multinationals, the ruling parties serve as gendarmes for global capital, whether homegrown or brought in from abroad, and give a dominant role in setting Indian economic policies to imperial finance and trade bodies. “There is no longer an industrial, propertied, elite in India, therefore, that is interested in joining ranks with middle India to renegotiate power with imperialists. Instead all negotiations will happen henceforth in the UN, the WTO, the G8 summits, and the World Economic Forums.”42 This recolonization extends to the countryside as well, enforced by those imperialist institutions that facilitate penetration by multinationals.

The structural adjustment programme and WTO trade regime in the decade of the 90s, have brought about a new crisis of rural livelihoods. The new economic regime, in a way, has taken us back to the colonial era, where the process of surplus accumulation and utilisation is once again to be mediated by metropolitan capital.

The state withdrew from its earlier declared role of intervening in the market processes to protect economic space of domestic producers and among them that of small producers and weaker sections. The elaborate structure of controls on domestic and international trade and on investment has been dismantled rapidly…. The multinationals and big domestic units are now allowed to enter into these activities.43



Import controls were taken down and trade policies liberalized, with the result that “prices of all primary commodities (including wheat and rice) have fallen dramatically since mid 90s.” The resulting loss of the value of their crops has been devastating for small producers. But this penetration goes even further. “Agribusiness is fast acquiring control on the input and output flows of the farm sector with the acquiescence of Indian state,” and contract farming, in which corporations provide everything needed to grow a crop, and decide what is produced and the price paid for it, has spread into the rural areas, subordinating them to imperialist capital.44

As a result, with government backing, Indian farms and forests alike are falling victim to forces beyond national control, returning them to a kind of pre-Independence status. The willingness to use even those laws and repressive methods that have their origin under British rule, and to rely on a ponderous and corrupt bureaucracy inherited from that time—“an imperial edifice built on feudal foundations”45—only reinforces the sense of continuity between these “old” and “new” forms of colonialization, and the loss of sovereignty to outside powers, just as India proclaims its new “shining” image. The choice of adivasi forest lands, in particular, as easy targets for the contracting of SEZs and MOUs, builds on the historic suppression of tribal communities.46 It is a prime example of what the Maoists term the “semi-feudal, semi-colonial” character of Indian society, undermining the democratic exercise of governmental power.

India may be the world’s largest democracy, but it remains dogged by the twin legacies of feudalism and colonialism, which have meant that citizens are treated like subjects. Officials who are meant to serve them often act more like feudal lords than representatives of the people.47



Under this dual legacy, global capital is invited in to exploit the lands and labor of some of the most oppressed peoples to be found anywhere in the world, those who have for centuries suffered from both exclusion and abuse under its caste, class, ethnic and gender systems. In this way, many of the most powerful multinationals unite with feudalistic remnants in the expansion of the SEZs, which now stretch across India, promoted by virtually every political party that holds office, regardless of its ideological orientation.48

But it is in West Bengal that this has yielded its most ironic and dramatic results, for there seizure of lands and close collaboration with global capitalists has been carried out under the “Left Front” state government led by the CPI (M). Though ostensibly still “communist,” and holding the longstanding loyalty of many of its leftist members, including in its national trade union, this parliamentary party has long since degenerated after thirty years in office in a fashion similar to that of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional in Mexico, which held a virtual political monopoly for decades, enforced with strong-arm efficiency. As with the PRI, despite progressive aspects to its historic record, and social programs that are still more liberal at times than those of its more bourgeois rivals, whatever more radical tendencies the CPI (M) once had were long ago “institutionalized” into a complex mixture of compromised ideology, corrupted political power, and crony patronage—a pattern found not only in West Bengal, but in Kerala and other centers of its power. Especially on the local level, all of this is held in place by the often brutal repression of those who oppose its rule, using not only state police, but party cadre, and thugs and goons, known as harmads—a name that derives from the Portuguese pirates or armadas,dating back to Mughal times in the feudal era. Some CPI (M) leaders have even embraced neoliberal “globalization,” and become ardent admirers of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), with which they have held meetings. Just as the CCP has generated decades of explosive economic growth through introducing capitalist “reforms” and “opening to the world,” inviting in foreign investors and “globalizing” trade, so the CPI (M) has adopted a similar approach, becoming among the most aggressive of state leaderships in promoting SEZs, despite widespread criticism from its own ranks. Now it has plans to take tens of thousands of acres of land and lease them for manufacturing and mining operations and real estate projects, potentially forcing up to 2.5 million people from their homes to make way for multinational corporations, both homegrown and foreign.49 The result is a cynical political and economic alliance. As one leftist in China put it in condemning similar policies there, “the capitalists and the communists” have joined together to exploit the working classes and oppressed peoples.

Singur, Nandigram, Lalgarh

But resistance to these abuses is mounting. For hundreds of millions of farmers, and thousands of adivasi communities, land is the indispensable basis for the survival of their very lives and their cultural heritage. They are not just determined, but compelled, to fight, and even die for it. The more that the state and multinational corporations try to steal their lands, the greater their resistance, and the more ready their willingness to turn to revolutionaries to help protect them. In the past five years, three explosive conflicts have erupted in West Bengal over attempts to impose SEZs on areas populated primarily by the poorest and most marginalized sectors of society. These efforts ignited a firestorm of popular rebellion, fed by decades-long grievances over the brutality and corruption with which their communities have been treated, as well as the failure to provide their areas with even the most basic infrastructure, like roads and irrigation projects, locally controlled economic programs, and social services, such as health care and education. These widening revolts had as their goals not only to block the imposition of the SEZs, therefore, but to demand environmentally sound development and long denied societal supports. They also called for the new forms of popular democratic control needed to implement such changes. But they were instead met once again with massive state repression. This, in turn, only opened the door for the advancement of Maoist forces.

The first eruption came in Singur, 40 miles west of Kolkata, when CPI (M) Chief Minister of the state, Buddhadeb Bhattachary, announced in May, 2006, that some 1,000 acres of especially fertile farmland would be seized by the government and leased to Tata Motors—a branch of what was long the preeminent multinational corporation in India, owned by its leading capitalist family, which now gets 70% of its revenues from abroad. This SEZ would have destroyed 11 villages and robbed some 1,000 small farmers, and thousands more of their tenants and farm laborers, of the lands they worked, undermining the entire local economy. Overall, some 20,000 were affected—compared to an estimate of just 1,000 employees that the new auto plant would hire—losing not only their livelihoods, but traditional cultural and religious venues, and educational and social centers.50 The launching of this SEZ was nontransparent and undemocratic, with local communities not even consulted, and the state government later admitting that some land had been seized forcibly without legal consent. Those losing their farms were offered inadequate payments, while the landless were left with no compensation at all. Women, in most cases not holding title to family land, were especially hard hit. Villages closest to the proposed plant suffered the most, after Tata built a fence that cut off day laborers from nearby fields, with devastating economic and environmental effects. In reaction, a highly unusual class alliance of landowners and sharecroppers, supported even by their landless workers, refused to accept compensation. Led by a locally formed resistance committee, mass protests erupted, one having 15,000 participants, with women especially active in the leadership. Protesters blockaded roads, surrounded party offices, and militantly, at times violently, blocked those working for Tata. State police and paramilitaries guarded the SEZ property and brutally attacked demonstrators, resulting in dead and injured. CPI (M) cadre and harmads joined in, even raping and murdering one young woman leader.51



But the Singur villagers were not without allies. The opposition Trinamool, a split off from the national Congress party, used the opportunity to mount a local drive against the ruling CPI (M), while in Kolkata, there were large demonstrations, and a wide coalition of civic groups and intelligentsia joined in supporting the struggle. In the end, Tata could not withstand the public pressure, and abandoned the plant. But the land remained in state hands, still fenced off from local communities, many of them left permanently ruined. The Trinamool also reversed its position, after it joined the national ruling coalition, and agreed to new projects for “developing” the SEZ, thereby revealing the opportunism of its earlier opposition. The success at Singur in turning back the Tatas was therefore hollow and short lived, since it left only an unresolved land dispute and devastated adivasi region in its wake, and it is generally viewed as a defeat. It signaled, nevertheless, that a popular uprising backed by urban supporters could force a powerful alliance of the West Bengal state and a leading multinational to back down, even if only temporarily. It also raised the specter of a strengthening of the power of the CPI (Maoist), which helped to provide support for the struggle in Singur, as did other leftist parties.

This role was even more critical in the next clash, at Nandigram, a CPI (M) stronghold southwest of Kolkata, where in early 2007 the Left Front again tried to impose an SEZ, this time seizing over 10,000 acres for a chemical hub to be built by the Salim Group, the largest conglomerate in Indonesia—partly financed by Dow Chemical, owner of Union Carbide, which in 1984 caused thousands of deaths with the release of toxic gases at its Bhopal plant, an open sore that still haunts India. To clear the land for this project, some 100,000 villagers were to be displaced, wiping out entire communities, with scores of schools and religious centers demolished. But the people of Nandigram, mostly Muslims and lower-caste Hindus, drew on a long history of prior struggle. In the anti-colonial movement of the early 1940s, they freed the area of British control and set up their own regional government for almost two years. Later they again took part in at times violent Communist-led struggles, in which women played a leading role, for reduction in rents and to demand development projects and services. Now these small farmers, garment workers, laborers, fishers and shop owners rose up again. As at Singur, a Committee Against Eviction from the Land was formed, bringing together representatives from Muslim organizations, Naxalite factions, the Trinamool, and even defecting cadre from CPI (M), who put defense of their lands and communities ahead of party loyalty. When security forces, backed as usual by harmads, responded to protests with gunfire and the murder of three committee members, the entire region erupted. Several attackers and a CPI (M) informer were killed, police vans and party offices burned and roads blocked, and the Left Front administration driven out of the area for three months. The government retaliated by mobilizing thousands of heavily armed security personnel, and party cadre and goons, to reclaim the area. They were met by 10,000 protesters, with Hindu and Muslim women in the lead. Though unarmed, on the advice of political party leaders, they were attacked with live ammunition. In the massacre that ensued, at least 14 were killed and 70 wounded—later reports put the toll much higher—and the entire region was subjected to a reign of state and CPI (M) terror, brutality and rape.

The shock was felt not only in West Bengal, but nationally. Large protests were held in Kolkata and other cities, and the name of the CPI (M) was indelibly stained with blood. But the people of Nandigram, far from being intimidated, fought back with an even greater ferocity than before. Armed with whatever primitive weapons they had at hand, some 20,000 villagers drove the CPI (M) cadre and harmads from the area once again. Faced with a total boycott of the police, who were denied even food by the local community, the security forces fell back, restrained by widespread public revulsion at their murderous behavior. For nine months, until November 2007, Nandigram was again in the hands of the people, and the Left Front was forced to cancel its plans for the SEZ. In place of its authority, local communities set up an alternative administration, taking over governmental functions and putting them under popular control. Women organized their own movement, overcoming objections from their husbands to their activism, and extending the struggle to such issues as domestic violence and the closing of liquor stores. But attacks and a blockade of the area continued, and with elections looming, the Left Front was determined to bring the region back under its control. On November 5, CPI (M) cadre and harmads, backed by mercenaries from neighboring states and a range of security forces, launched a massive attack, killing dozens, burning and looting villages, taking hundreds prisoner, carrying out mass rapes and molestations, and driving 10,000-15,000 villagers into refugee camps, the forests or out of the area altogether.52

Once again, however, these actions were met with great public outrage, and by massive protests in Kolkata. Despite the deaths and pillage that they had suffered, those resisting in Nandigram inspired others. The movement spread, strengthening activists struggling against SEZs and forced displacement elsewhere, who began to link up across state lines and to organize nationally. But though tens of thousands had taken part in the Nandigram mobilization, their bottom up organizing under an ostensibly “nonpartisan” resistance committee had been partly undermined by power struggles and factional fights among the political parties involved.53 Just as at Singur, therefore, the normal workings of the parliamentary party system proved inadequate, and the greater the attack on the people—who learned a bitter lesson in trying to confront the state with little or no arms—the more they turned for help to revolutionary forces. The CPI (Maoist) sent its cadre to assist Nandigram, and many of those forced out of the region sought shelter 30 miles to the west, where its guerrilla army had a strong base. From this a key lesson was learned. Dependence on parliamentary processes and parties, even including leftist ones, had only led to losses and weakness, while the resistance of the people with traditional weapons, however brave, was inadequate to provide protection. The Maoists, in contrast, offered both an alliance not resting on legislative politics, and the armed forces to back it up.54

This new understanding carried over to the third mass uprising. At Salboni in the western part of the state, the Jindal Group, an Indian multinational with operations in Indonesia and Bolivia, was granted 4,500 acres of land for a massive steel plant, which threatened once again to displace adivasi forest communities. When Maoist guerrillas bombed the car caravan carrying Chief Minister Bhattachary as he returned from having inaugurated this SEZ in November 2008—he only narrowly escaped—the Left Front government once again retaliated with its usual massive indiscriminate violence against the neighboring region of Lalgarh, which it suspected of complicity in the attack. But after a long history of discrimination, corruption, brutality and lack of social services, this proved to be the last straw for the members of this tribal community. As in Singur and Nandigram before them, the villagers of Lalgarh rose up in rebellion. The name of the organization that they formed, People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities (PCAPA; sometimes PCPA), said it all. Yet learning from the negative lessons at Singur and Nandigram, and to avoid the internal divisions and factionalism that weakened those movements, the Lalgarh PCAPA was open to anyone, but only if they joined as individuals, not as members of political parties.

Instead, the CPI (Maoist), whose cadre had for decades organized in the region against the oppressive landlords and forest department officials, and whose guerrilla army was active there, moved to the forefront. One villager in the Lalgarh area explained to a group of visiting students the reasons for rejection of the parliamentary parties and their methods of control, and the turn to the Maoists as an alternative to support their struggle.

“Earlier, this area was a Jharkhand Party and Left-front dominated belt. They did not do anything for the betterment of this backward region. We talked to the Maoists and told them about our problems. They have mass support in the region as they are fighting with and for the poorest of the poor … Earlier the CPI (M) used to control everything through the weapon of fear. But our movement has made us free from fear. The Maoists actively support the movement that we are waging. The people here have come to realize very well by now that they cannot come out of their misery if they keep supporting the parliamentary parties. All these parties are of the same kind and they all bring only misery to us.”55

At first, the PCAPA only demanded an apology from the authorities for the brutality of their earlier attack. But a turning point came in June 2009, when after several days of protests, a rally against the arrest and reported rape of adivasi women was again attacked by harmads at Dharampur. “The rallyists couldn’t resist this attack and dispersed, but then a Maoist squad arrived and started a gun battle with the CPI (M) cadres, which continued till late in the night. With their superior firepower, the Maoists gunned down at least nine of the CPI (M) attackers.”56 The next day, 10,000-20,000 adivasis again protested at various locations, seized control of Dharampur and Lalgarh and, with a squad of CPI (Maoist) fighters offering protection, burnt down the CPI (M) offices, killed some of its members, and dismantled the palatial home of the most hated of its local party tyrants, Anuj Pandey. From then on, the uprising of the adivasis and the armed support of the Maoists reached a new and higher level of fusion.

A “Hunan” but not yet a “Yan’an”

The breadth and depth of the popular explosion at Lalgarh, nevertheless, caught even the most hardened revolutionary Maoists by surprise. “It has emerged as a new model of mass movement in the country,” as Ganapathi, General Secretary of the CPI (Maoist) put it. In this it closely parallels the experience of the Chinese Communists eighty years earlier. When in spring of 1927, Mao went high into the mountains of his native Hunan province, he was amazed to find that a revolutionary peasant struggle was already underway, assisted by Communists who had been working in the region. The uprising of the Hunanese peasantry provided the spark that led to the shift by the party later that year to rural bases, following the murderous purge of urban Communists by Chiang Kai-shek. The Red Army founded by Mao and Zhu De set up its first stronghold in the mountain fastnessof Jinggangshan in the Hunan-Jiangxi border region, a model for the peasant revolution and guerrilla warfare that, after more than two decades of struggle, would lead to nationwide victory in 1949. From the beginning, the Indian Maoists hoped to repeat this process. At the founding of the CPI (Marxist-Leninist) in 1969, they even declared “Naxalbari—the Chingkang mountain [Jinggangshan] of India.”57 There were many parallels between the early uprisings in Hunan and West Bengal. But from the start, there were also significant differences. Naxalbari never achieved even the limited security of Jinggangshan, and it did not lead to a permanent and relatively unified armed force like the Red Army in China. As a result, the Maoists in India have found themselves repeating the experience of a “Hunan” over and over, as the centers of the movement shifted from one area to another in response to popular struggles, and it is only recently that they formed a People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army like that of Mao and Zhu.

Lalgarh, some forty years after Naxalbari, is only the latest such linking up of Maoist armed forces and mass revolt. Its nature, however, carries greater significance than most uprisings over the past four decades. Lalgarh is sometimes referred to as the “second Naxalbari,” because of the way in which it combines popular uprising and the Maoist revolution. But there are critical differences. At Naxalbari, “Being uneducated and poor, the tribals depended on the Communists to lead their struggles against wealthy vested interests.”58 Well into the 1970s and beyond, the movement was led largely by middle class activists. But the West Bengal rebellions have altered this relationship, as popular forces themselves took the lead. At Lalgarh, this progression reached a new level. Just as Mao was astonished by the depth and breadth of the peasant rebellion that he “discovered” in 1927, from which he learned critical lessons, so Indian Maoists have drawn new insights from the unanticipated and explosive nature of the latest uprising. As Ganapathi puts it:

Yes, our party too has a lot to learn from the masses of Lalgarh. Their upsurge was beyond our expectations. In fact, it was the common people, with the assistance of advanced elements influenced by revolutionary politics, who played a crucial role in the formulation of tactics. They formed their own organisation, put forth their charter of demands, worked out various novel forms of struggle, and stood steadfast in the struggle despite the brutal attacks by the police and the social-fascist Harmad gangs.59



But is Lalgarh a new Indian “Hunan,” opening a further stage in the Maoist revolutionary struggle? How closely do the popular uprisings in West Bengal resemble the earlier ones of the peasants in China? Is the strategy of Chinese Communists in the 1920s still viable for Indian Maoists in the 2010s? To what extent has the CPI (Maoist) been able to lead the entire left, as the CCP was able to do? In what ways are the conditions faced by the revolutionary forces in India and China parallel or different? Since CPI (Maoist) still models itself on the Chinese revolution, and especially on the strategy of “surrounding the cities from the countryside,” it is necessary to analyze the degree to which it has done so successfully, the effectiveness of its current practices and its prospects for the future.

The peasant revolution that Mao found in Hunan and the Lalgarh uprising are surprisingly similar, even at times down to their smallest details. The Hunanese peasants organized their own associations, which seized power from landlords and moneylenders and their agents. Villagers “crowned” local tyrants with tall paper hats and paraded them publicly, and in the case of the worst abusers, confronted them with mass demonstrations, took over their homes, stripped them of their wealth, and imprisoned or even executed them. Peasants formed militias, armed mainly with traditional spears—soon to be backed by the Red Army—to replace private armies of the landlords. The peasant associations suppressed the political and judicial authorities of the landlord class. In its place, the local administration was taken over by a joint council of the county magistrate and the revolutionary mass organizations. Peasant associations assumed the handling of disputes, including even domestic ones. They also reduced rents and interest, formed buying and credit cooperatives, and forced wealthy landlords to repair roads and embankments. For the largely illiterate peasantry, education became a top priority, with new schools opened not only for children, but for adults. Villagers also took up social issues, challenging the old repressive clan and religious structures. Women formed their own associations, to combat the “masculine authority of husbands,” abuse by men, and denial of an equal right to participate in all areas of society, including peasant association meetings. “Bad habits” such as drugs, gambling and carousing were suppressed. As Mao concluded, “the forces of rural democracy have risen to overthrow the forces of rural feudalism.”60



In similar fashion, the PCAPA in Lalgarh organized mass protests, some in the tens of thousands, and took power from the CPI (M) cadre and harmads, who have assumed the powers and privileges of local rulers. As in Hunan, the most abusive tyrants are sometimes draped with shoes before parading them through the villages. Some had their houses burned, were driven from the area, or were even killed. The adivasis protect their communities with traditional weapons, such as bows and arrows, knives, and even red chili powder. As the PCAPA has put it, “To defend ourselves from the CPM backed terrorists and murderers, we had to form the militia. Without it, we would not have been able to protect the lives of our friends and supporters and we would not have been able to continue our resistance.”61 As in China, the Lalgarh militia was increasingly backed up by better armed Communist guerrilla forces, those of the CPI (Maoist). Though existing civil administration offices were left in place, demands were made that they submit to popular control, and give up their dependence on the state security forces, which were blockaded and boycotted. In place of notoriously corrupt and CPI (M) dominated courts, PCAPA committees directly resolved disputes and administered justice, with input from the entire community. They also began guaranteeing a minimal amount of land to poor farmers. The PCAPA largely bypassed the old conservative religious organizations, and combated superstitions like witch-hunting, in their place promoting indigenous pride in long suppressed tribal languages and culture. Women, who suffer most from humiliation and abuse, took the lead from the beginning, especially in mass protests and the parading of local tyrants. They formed their own wing of the PCAPA to combat official mistreatment, domestic violence, pornography, alcoholism and gambling. Village committees are required to be 50% female, and higher ones 30%, a similar proportion to that guaranteed women on local governing bodies in West Bengal.62



In Lalgarh, as in Hunan, therefore, “the forces of rural democracy have risen to overthrow the forces of rural feudalism.” It was the people themselves who opened this new era in their long struggle. Rejecting the “large” democracy of Indian parliamentary politics, the adivasi communities created a revolutionary “small” democratic process, one that rests directly on the village population, not on corrupt or opportunistic parties. Each PCAPA committee is democratically chosen by all the people, with similar bodies at the higher levels. Decisions are brought before a general assembly for ratification. This new form of democracy was critical for the success and spread of the movement. By June, 2009, the entire Jungalmahal region, of which Lalgarh is part, was inflamed with its bottom up spirit, and some 1,100 villages were involved in the struggle. As in China, they found their main support from revolutionaries under Maoist leadership, who offered them organizational assistance and the backing of a modern force of dedicated guerrilla fighters. Their popular opposition to parliamentary parties was also given impetus by the CPI (Maoist), which spurns the legislative process as an undemocratic betrayal of the oppressed. In the 2009 elections to the lower house of Parliament, it encouraged, at times forcefully, a boycott, and the PCAPA refused to allow the setting up of polling booths if accompanied by security forces. While others in the community took part in the voting, and state officials demanded a normal ballot that they were prepared to impose by force,

Eventually … only 12% polling took place in Lalgarh. The people clearly expressed their resentment against all parliamentary political parties to us. They said that they were completely disillusioned by electoral politics, where pre-poll promises melt into thin air as soon as the votes were over. “No elected representative ever visits our villages except during elections,” said the villagers of Sindurpur … “We are now making our own regime.”63



The boycott was largely effective, therefore, but further widened an already deep split within the left, between those still committed to a parliamentary approach and the forces of a revolutionary “new democracy.” While debate continues over the 2009 election and the Maoist role in it, there are now two competing models of an Indian democratic system.

Similarly, on the economic and social plane, a new program of “participatory development,” encouraged by the Maoists, took on projects long neglected by the Left Front, such as road repairs, “people’s health camps”—assisted by medical personnel from Kolkata—schools, tube wells, dams, irrigation and environmental improvements, using only local resources, collective efforts, and voluntary inputs of money and labor. In this way, parallel with newer democratic processes, the Lalgarh movement put into practice an alternative developmental policy, resting primarily on their own communities. It has also demanded waiver of rents, provision of cultivable land to all the poor, protection of the forests, and the planting of indigenous trees.64 With Maoist backing, villagers were able to force a doubling of wages paid for the collection of tendu leaves used in making tobacco filled bidi, a major source of local income, often controlled by abusive and corrupt traders. Such activities refute the charge that the CPI (Maoist) is limited to armed struggle—though its guerrilla army is the guarantor of its ability to carry out these other areas of its work. Instead, the upsurge in popular democratic participation has been extended beyond political power into the closely interrelated realms of economic, cultural and social matters. “With the setting up of the PCPA, the adivasis had been running their own affairs, and even taking up much-needed developmental work, a whiff of functioning democracy in the middle of the hoax that goes by the name of democratic governance in large parts of India.”65 This popular alternative system now poses the greatest threat to the ruling political parties and exploitative classes that they represent. As a local journalist, Amitava Rath, put it, “The rebels have started carrying out some development work as if they are already running a state within a state.”66



In Lalgarh, faced with this new alliance of popular power and the CPI (Maoist), the West Bengal authorities fell back, though only temporarily. Pressure not to commit another “Nandigram” restrained their initial response. But by June, 2009, in part to enforce the parliamentary elections, they launched a counterattack, this time using not only their own fully militarized police powers and CPI (M) party elements, but units of the national security forces as well. This battle still rages fiercely today. Yet despite massive repression, “the rebels are still present.”67 Having shown that the adivasis are willing to die rather than return to the old order, the PCAPA continues to exercise its newfound autonomy, and to pursue its own revolutionary program, backed up by CPI (Maoist) and its guerrilla army. Regardless of the outcome, a turning point has therefore been reached. In Lalgarh, the merging of popular rebellion and Maoist revolutionary forces has raised the struggle to new heights, moving it to center stage. In this sense it is a new Indian “Hunan,” that holds the prospect of repeating the Chinese “model.” Yet in one sense, the experience in India stands the one in China on its head. The revolutionary peasant uprising in Hunan came near the beginning of the Chinese Communist struggle. In India, by contrast, there have been several peasant rebellions in the years since Independence, and Lalgarh itself comes at the end of what is already 40 years of experience in making Maoist revolution.

There are further significant differences. The Indian Maoists have still not been able to secure a longterm liberation base area like the one the Communists in China managed to establish. Even the Chinese revolutionaries could only hold on to their initial southern soviets for a few years. But, after being driven out by the forces under Chiang Kai-shek, they undertook the Long March, finally finding a longlasting stronghold in Yan’an in Shaanxi province from 1935-47. The Indian Maoists have also held and lost many bases over the decades, always hoping that they too could achieve a similar relative security as the Chinese Communists. As early as 1969, Charu Mazumdar expressed the conviction that the struggle in the Srikakulam region of Andhra Pradesh showed “that India will create her own Yenan [Yan’an] in the near future.” Other Maoists even hoped that that revolutionary area itself could become such a stronghold.68 But it was not to be. The Maoists have been driven more than once from their bases in Andhra Pradesh, and the closest that they have come to gaining longterm security is in the deep forest region of Dandakaranya in Chhattisgarh, and in similar parts of Jarkhand and Orissa that they have held, in varying degrees, for decades. But the isolation of these forests, where even now the Maoist guerrillas must be frequently on the move, is a far cry from the small Chinese city of Yan’an, with its cave dwellings offering protection from bombing, and its ability to provide the Red Army with a relatively safe base area. The Indian Maoists have not been able to establish the same kind of center for their operations. In this sense, they have had their “Hunan,” but they have not yet found their “Yan’an.”

This has further consequences. Yan’an was not just a physical refuge that the Chinese Communists held for over a decade, which they were able to defend against both Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese, and from which they were able to launch their own offensive operations and expand the areas which were under their control. It was also a magnet for progressive and left forces from throughout China. Many intellectuals, artists and professionals, in particular, found their way to Yan’an, to join the revolution and provide it with much needed skills, such as medical care, as well as cultural resources. This allowed it to become a symbol and reality of the “other China” that the Communists were beginning to build, even in the midst of war, an alternate center of national authority. In contrast, though Indian Maoists have been able to set up some relatively secure forest “safe havens,” their inability to establish and hold a single longterm base like the Chinese, means that they have been on the strategic defensive up until now, and have no central alternative stronghold to which supporters can rally. Though some doctors, intellectuals, artists and others have joined the revolutionaries in the forests, their numbers are limited.

The Maoists may be able to hold their forest bases, therefore, and even expand out from them, but so far they have not been able to establish a semipermanent national pole of the ”other India.” Their ability to do so is further complicated by the divisive nature of Indian society, where many still identify more closely with their region, language, culture, ethnicity, caste or religion, than with the nation as a whole. This too is a legacy of the British, who forced together disparate areas, but never completed their integration—before splitting Pakistan off altogether. To mold a new revolutionary unity out of such a divided social order is a profound challenge to the Indian Maoists—a more difficult task than the Communists faced in the less splintered society of China, despite its regional differences and semi-colonial enclaves. They are also confronted—unlike the Chinese Communists—with a parliamentary democracy. This system, with its multiple parties and political centers, national and regional, reflects and reinforces the diversity of Indian society, but—partly for this very reason—holds the allegiance of many in the population, who still see it as the best route to express the goals of their communities, and share in the power needed to reach them. Such contradictions and divisions have impact within the Maoist revolutionary forces as well, limiting their efforts to reach national unity and demonstrate an alternative development model. This in turn has restricted their ability to expand their appeal beyond their forest bases, kept them largely isolated from many in the cities, and raised doubts about their capacity to overcome the Indian state.

Sandwiches and chapatis, vegetarian and non-vegetarian

The barriers to revolution, therefore, are both physical and social. The CPI (Maoist) has so far failed, with important exceptions, to win over to their side much of the rest of the Indian left and the mainly urban progressive intellectual and professional stratum. The effect of this holding back by leftists and progressives is stark, lending at least passive, and at times active, support to the status quo, in the name of “democracy.”

Perhaps we can put it this way: fortunately for the state today, the poorest of the poor who have been organised by the Maoists in the different parts of the country have not come up with a movement good enough for the middle classes or the urban democratic left to join, as in Bengal in the first half of the 1970s or during some phases of the struggle in Andhra Pradesh. This time around, one might say, the poorest of the poor have failed the urban middle class left, which is wedded to “democracy”; they have betrayed the cause of “democracy” by going ahead with the undemocratic Maoists! How else can we understand the fact that large sections of the non-Maoist radical left refuse to join the raging struggle, instead posing as “civil society”, trying to instill the due process of law and bring “peace”, that is, when they are not busy point out the faults of the “uncivil” Maoists.69



The CPI (Maoist) is of course anathema to most of the ruling parties and wealthy classes, but criticisms of its methods and doubts about its prospects are widely shared among the intelligentsia and in leftist circles. Even these critics commonly express admiration for the dedication and courage of its cadre and fighters, and it is not unusual to hear them say, “if I were younger, or more willing to take risks, or less tied down to family or career, I might join them.” Many of those who criticize the revolutionary Maoists are themselves also lifelong activists who courageously struggled for radical social change, often at great personal sacrifice, including long years of hardship and imprisonment. Not a few of them go back in their activism to Naxalbari itself. So attention must be paid to their critiques.

The list varies, but among the most common themes are that the CPI (Maoist) wants to put in place a one-party state, a classic “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and that in the areas under its control, it excludes and even suppresses all other parties. Many object to what they see as a violation of the multiparty system, and fear that a Maoist victory would mean the end to all forms of civil liberties and political freedom. Some also hold the view that India is not, as Maoists claim, a semi-feudal, semi-colonial nation, but rather a modern capitalist economy that, while highly exploitative, is that of a fully independent state, with a parliamentary democracy in which even most of the poor still believe. Others note that the Indian working class is undergoing rapid changes, in which casual and unorganized forms of labor are already dominant, undermining the basis for a “classical” proletarian-led revolution. A closely related critique is that the Maoist forces are isolated in the forests and unable to expand beyond their primarily tribal base. In this view, the main agricultural population in the plains, and especially urban workers, remain largely beyond their reach and ability to organize. Others hold that the CPI (Maoist) is not so much a national force, as a collection of semi-autonomous regional units, and that its liberated zones are relatively unstable, and unable to carry out development projects or provide civil services, while at the same time obstructing those of the state. That leads, from this viewpoint, to excessive reliance on military force and violence, and to overly adventuristic actions. Some even note that the Indian party lacks a single dominant and charismatic revolutionary leader, such as Mao Zedong, around whom to rally. Overall, for many such critics, the state and military in India are simply too powerful to confront, much less overcome, with the guerrilla strategy that the Maoists have been forced to adopt. For both substantive reasons, therefore, and the tendency to want “to go with the winner,” many progressives and leftists hold back from, or even oppose, the CPI (Maoist).

Of all the critiques leveled at the party and its actions, however, the most damning and ubiquitous is the “sandwich” theory. Over and over again, critics of the CPI (Maoist) claim that it lacks broad popular support, and instead, through its violent attacks, places the poor and oppressed in the “middle” between its revolutionary guerrillas and the state. This theory takes various forms. To some, adivasis are seen as a passive population, who are caught and crushed between two larger forces beyond their control. For others, tribal uprisings, such as in Lalgarh, are an expression of the “purity of the people,” a kind of “noble savage” role, while the “unprincipled and opportunistic” Maoists are viewed as having stripped them of the ability to serve as their own subjective political actors.70 Still others assert that the goals of the adivasis are limited to only practical demands for improvement of their situation, and that they are not interested in seizing state power. In the most extreme version, these critics assert that the mass demonstrations in the CPI (Maoist) areas are based on coercion by the party, that it indiscriminately kills any who oppose it, and that its attacks serve only to bring down repression by the state. In any case, the claim is made that the majority of the population are the main sufferers, while “It is the duty of middle India, according to the ‘sandwich theory’, to ‘rescue’ the hapless Adivasis and rural poor from the armed combatants.”71 Clinging to such “apparent neutrality” and similar reasoning, many of those who supported struggles in Singur and Nandigram are much more hesitant to rally for Lalgarh, with its closer ties to Maoists.72

But there is an alternative view of this relation. Until now, according to such a standpoint, the adivasis and other oppressed communities have for long been crushed under the heavy power of the state, and the brutal exploitation and abuse of upper castes and classes, as in a “sandwich” with only one piece of bread on the top. Viewed in this way, Maoists have finally provided the “bottom slice,” the ability to resist and fight back

In the yesteryears there were no Maoists. No political intervention from outside. And yet autonomous revolts got defeated in no time though all these movements created social mobility and consciousness for the next phase of rebellion. The violent past helped them raise their sights. This time tribals revolted against the attacks on their livelihoods, and objective condition was such that Maoist intervention was logical to sustain resistance against the mighty state and fill up the subjective vacuum. Had not the Maoists intervened, the struggle for survival could have been crushed much earlier. The Maoist presence is delaying the victory of armed forces over a community that has nothing to lose other than shame and drudgery. In many cases tribals themselves invited the naxalites….73



Earlier adivasi revolts were beaten down, in other words, regardless of any “sandwich.”

Now those who rebel against oppression at least have a base to rest on and to help defend them, an improvement even if they are in the “middle.” Calls on the Maoists to “leave the people alone,” in their “natural” condition, just serve to weaken them once again in the face of their oppressors, and to abandon them virtually disarmed against those in power. There is a special irony here. When Mazumdar called for the peasants to “annihilate” the landlords and moneylenders who oppressed them—a much disputed policy even within the Naxalite movement—he at first insisted that they use only their own conventional weapons, “choppers, spears, javelins and sickles,” not guns, which would lessen the self-initiation and immediacy of their revolt, and make them reliant on others for arms.74 Now, in a strange echo of the Naxalbari leader, some who oppose the CPI (Maoist) suggest that reliance on its guerrilla army for support ruins the “purity” of the adivasis, who should confront a powerful modern state alone with their bows, arrows and knives. Yet whether it is a Maoist policy in 1970 or an anti-Maoist one in 2010, this kind of “primitivist” approach is inadequate. The oppressed and impoverished of India, like those everywhere, have the right to fight “by any means necessary,” to arm themselves with the most effective weapons available, and to choose those allies who offer them the greatest support and the best ability to resist the enemy, as they and they alone determine.

But the issue runs deeper, raising fundamental questions about the very nature of revolution itself. In every revolutionary or liberation struggle, it is the oppressed who suffer the most. They are always, in varying degrees, caught between those who are actively leading the rebellion, and those who are suppressing it. Leaders of a revolution commonly seek to exclude those who do not follow their particular approach, of whom there are always a goodly number, due to class and other divisions, and try to monopolize the means of struggle, as the only “true path” to ultimate victory. There are inevitably, therefore, contradictions between organized liberation forces and “the people.” This is as true of nonviolent as of violent ones. The Gandhian movement for independence adhered strictly to his commitment to nonviolence, but many who were not directly active, as well as those who were, still ended up “caught in the middle,” with the massive repression that it brought down on nonparticipants and protestors alike, the suspending of civil liberties, the brutal suppression of labor, and so on. Early on, Gandhi halted his campaign to insist that those who advocated or took part in violent actions be excluded, demanding a total monopoly over the methods used, while the Congress Party too assumed dominance, a role that lasted long after 1947. Together, they worked to suppress all alternate strategies, especially any attempts at armed revolution. In so doing, they ensured that the struggle would be limited principally to national liberation, rather than social transformation—despite the efforts of the Mahatma on behalf of “untouchables,” who he called harijans or “children of god,” and the agitation in some areas, notably Bengal, on behalf of the poor and landless peasants—and that in place of working class internationalism, the communal rift between Hindus and Muslims was given the space and time to flourish, helped along by the intentional policies of the British to exacerbate and exploit such divisions.

When victory was finally achieved, over a million died and millions more were displaced—a much greater loss of life and dislocation than anything so far associated with Indian Maoists—during the Partition into India and Pakistan that Gandhi was unable to prevent. Were they too caught in a “sandwich,” between the Independence struggle and the dying gasp of the divide-and-conquer British colonial state? The nonviolence of the Gandhian movement did not prevent violence, therefore, but only postponed and redirected it. Violent conflict, both organized and spontaneous, continuously broke out. All along, many were ready to take up arms, and to carry on a revolutionary struggle against class and caste inequality, a pent up demand that is again resurfacing, in popular uprisings and the Maoist led guerrillas. Regardless of the character of the movement, therefore, the “sandwich” theory, the “suffering of the innocents,” and the “exclusionary” actions of leaders—who are invariably labeled as “bandits,” “fakirs,” or “terrorists,” as Chinese Communists, Gandhi, or Indian Maoists were in turn—are always used by those in power to argue against rebellion, and to confuse its supporters. The same attacks are heard over and over again in an attempt to delegitimize such movements—those who opposed South African Apartheid, for example, by organizing divestment and boycott campaigns, were constantly warned that it was Black people that they were hurting most.

The masses of the oppressed themselves, however, are not fooled. They know that they will suffer if they rebel, and they make a carefully weighed calculation, whether it is better to leave their oppression in place and refuse to rise up against it, or to pay the short-term price, always extremely high, that any revolution inevitably brings. When they finally “vote with their feet” and choose their revolutionary leadership, it is not from naiveté. It is rather out of the decision that they would rather take their losses now—which are in any case ongoing under those who rule, exploit and abuse them—than to hold off for another day and hope for a better future. So too at Lalgarh, where

All the villagers that we met were aware of the impending attack by the state. But they did not appear to us to be scared. “We have been scared for too long. We have seen the worst of atrocities. It was only after we started the fight that we finally got independence. We cannot go back on this now. We must fight on to defend our independence.”75



It is evident that increasing numbers of the poor and oppressed in India are now making that choice. They have decided to pay the revolutionary price, whatever the cost.

From this standpoint, it is not the majority of the people, but rather progressives and the left, including much of the stratum of the “articulate” and “influential” members of society, who are feeling caught in a “sandwich” today. “Thus, it is middle India that is ‘sandwiched’ and feels beleaguered by the combatants.”76 The uprising of the adivasi and other oppressed parts of the population, increasingly linked to the Maoist revolutionaries, presents them with the old challenge: Which side are you on?77 As Mao had made clear in Hunan, the choices are to try to block the way forward of the revolutionary movement, to stand on the side and criticize it, or to embrace and help to lead it. The question before progressives and the left, he noted, was whether to say “it is terrible” or “it is fine.” The same choice now lies before those in India committed to radical change. In this sense, the image of a “sandwich” may not be the most appropriate. After all, “sandwiches”—named for an English earl—are, like parliamentary democracy, a British colonial import. It may be more relevant, therefore, to think of the Indian left as a kind of chapati, the ubiquitous flatbread that seems to go with virtually any dish, mild or spicy, vegetarian or non-vegetarian. Leftists and progressives in India have similarly adopted an almost unlimited variety of positions and approaches: parliamentary and non-parliamentary, Marxist and Gandhian, violent and nonviolent. By some counts, there are over 30 Indian Communist parties alone—almost half of them Naxalite—big and small, national and regional.78 Many of them are even further divided into factions, and their differences and disputes often go back for decades. They are not so much caught in the middle, as spread all over the political map, each pursuing their own separate methods of struggle and ideal visions of an Indian future. But they are now being confronted with a fundamentally new era, in which the democratic system as inherited from the British, despite its “Indianization,” is increasingly unable to meet the needs of growing millions, who are rising in rebellion. This development is challenging all the old approaches, regardless of their character. For those on the left, the choice is to continue each on their own path, or grasp the opportunity for a new revolutionary unity.

A fourth stage?

There is nothing intrinsically unique in the challenges facing the CPI (Maoist), either in the history of revolutions or in the record of the liberation struggle in India. The contradictions that it faces—difficulty in uniting the disparate elements of Indian society, strong resistance to raising up the most oppressed castes and communities, entrenched regional power brokers and economic interests—closely resemble the ones confronting previous movements, both violent and nonviolent. Nevertheless, there are aspects to carrying out revolution under the specific conditions in India in the current era that must be addressed in order to be successful. The CPI (Maoist) and its supporters are the first to admit that they face a very difficult path and that they do not have all the answers. In part these difficulties derive from their historic allegiance to the Chinese revolutionary experience, which at most can provide only a partial guideline for the struggle in 21st– century India. But this dialectic—following in the footsteps of earlier revolutionaries, while having to find newer ways forward at the same time—generates its own creative tension. Though the CPI (Maoist) adheres to the “model” of the revolution led by Mao in China, it is also adopting, both by necessity and design, and even perhaps at times in spite of itself, its own new adaptive approaches. These have less to do, in the first instance, with Chinese “Maoism,” than with the social movements and participatory democratic practices that began in the 1960s-70s, but were not consolidated globally until later decades, well into the post-Mao era. Also shaping the Indian Maoists are the experiences, both positive and negative, of the “first wave” of socialist revolutions, as well as the most recent forms of “globalization,” which have altered the terrain on which attempts to build a new social order now take place. The CPI (Maoist) may adhere to its declared path of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, in other words, but may simultaneously be opening up a new “fourth stage” in that progression, one that is more closely geared to the 21st century.

In this process, the very weaknesses to which its critics point may, in dialectical fashion, prove to be strengths, better fitting the party and its guerrilla army for this era. Take, for example, their limited ability to set up semi-permanent liberated zones—despite the relative safe havens in Dandakaranya and elsewhere. This is a limitation to which the CPI (Maoist) itself points, and that it strives to overcome. But both the Indian setting and the current stage of revolution globally put this in new perspective. When Mao, in 1928, asked “Why Is It That Red Political Power Can Exist in China?,”76 he answered his own question by pointing to the weakness of the national government, the control of warlords over many areas, the interventions of competing imperialists, and the resulting lack of security for the state, especially in often mountainous provincial border regions. Though there were other factors, these weaknesses allowed the Communists to find space in the fractures between the central government and warlord forces—who often fought among themselves—and to set up a few tenuous early bases along the borders of provinces. In India, though there are also sometimes rivalries between states and tensions with New Delhi, overall the ruling class and its military are much more unified. While the Indian Maoists can take advantage of the interstate border regions, where coordination among security forces is at times weaker, it is more the deep forest cover than divisions in the political structure that has allowed them to establish their main bases there. But though it has thereby proven harder to set up liberated zones in India than was the case in China, the possibility of a general revolutionary uprising may be greater. Indian “Red Political Power” exists less at the physical boundaries of the states, than at the points of social fracture—of class, caste, ethnicity and reli