Photo: People’s Liberation Guerilla Army in India



By Mike Talavera

Over the past month, the old Indian state has escalated its Hindu nationalist program by intensifying its crackdown of Kashmir and launching an anti-immigrant campaign in the northeast state of Assam. Meanwhile, successful actions by the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) under the leadership of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) have advanced the People’s War in defiance of the belligerent old state.

Over the weekend, the Indian military stepped up its enforcement of a month-long curfew of occupied Kashmir after thousands demonstrated again on Saturday in protest of the fascist Modi administration’s revocation of the state’s special governance status. The move was done in part to fulfill a campaign promise of Modi’s reactionary Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to allow Hindu nationals to settle in the predominantly Muslim Jammu and Kashmir.

The previous weekend, the state published a National Register of Citizens to be used to persecute undocumented immigrants (many from Bangladesh) residing in Assam. More recently the first detention center is being built in the area for those not found on the list, the camp itself being built in part by the Bangladeshis it seeks to detain and deport.

As the state ramps up this reactionary nationalism, the PLGA has persisted in its campaign against it. On August 25, combatants ambushed over a hundred Indian soldiers who were looking for a PLGA camp in the Narayanpur district, killing one and injuring two. Another ambush a few days later in Malkankagiri shot one soldier dead and injured another.

In line with its active boycott of the elections that put the BJP in power, the PLGA killed a BJP Mayor last weekend as he campaigned in Dantewada for the upcoming September 23 election. Also that weekend, propaganda appeared in the district of Bhadradi Kothaguden denouncing state repression, including the murder of comrade Jady Veeraswami, and promised punishment for the BJP and another reactionary party, Telangana Rashtra Samiti, for their crimes against the people. That same day, PLGA forces ignited several construction machines at a site for a new railway bridge in the Bokaro District of Jharkhand in order to sabotage mining companies’ encroachment on peasant and tribal lands.

On September 3, PLGA forces annihilated a leader of the BJP’s military arm (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) in Chhattisgarh.

This series of attacks and propaganda actions, carried out under the leadership of the Communist Party, continue to demonstrate to the Indian people as well as the people of Kashmir and Assam that New Democratic revolution towards socialism is the only way to take on the Hindu nationalism and fascism imposed by the old Indian state.