Nepal: Maoist Leaders Demand India Return Occupied Land

This article was published on Telegraph Nepal on January 11, 2010.

Fight for National Independ-ence has begun: Nepal Maoists leaders

Our fight is not against India, we are fighting for our national independence.

• We will continue our struggle until India returns our occupied lands with dignity and honor
• We do not want an inch extra from India, however, we will not let India occupy even an inch of our land
• British Colonial mindset is still prevalent in Indian leadership
• We demand scrapping of all unequal treaties with India
• We have been cheated in Gandak, Koshi and we are going to be cheated again in Mahakali
• I would have been the prime minister until death if I had compromised
• After Sugauli Treaty, 1816, Nepal tuned into an semi-colonial state of India
• Nepal Integration by Prithivi Naryan Shah was necessary
• If Prithivi Narayan Shan would have been alive he would have whipped off the British to New Delhi but he would have never signed the anti-national treaty of Sugauli

These are some of the highlights of Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal’s speech made in Kanchanpur January 11, 2010. He addressed a protest rally as a part of the party’s fourth round of protest program after making on the spot visit of Tanakpur Barrage. Mr. Dahal in the course of his speech also mentioned that president Dr. Ram Baran Yadav had refused to participate in the Olympics-2008 held in China after he was told not to go there by his masters. “I however, refused to honor such directives coming from outside and headed to China”, he also said.

Bernard D’Mello: What is Maoism?

Mao with son Anying, 1949

This article was published in the November 2009 issue of Monthly Review.  It explores some of the key features of Maoism and their relation to classical Marxism as well as its subsequent permutations. The article then concludes by briefly examining the modern Maoist movements in India and Nepal and offering a suggestion of how Maoism can remain relevant and liberating today.

What is Maoism?

Bernard D’Mello

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Bernard D’Mello is deputy editor, Economic & Political Weekly, and is a member of the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Mumbai.

This essay is dedicated to the memory of my first editor, the late Samar Sen (Shômor babu, as we called him), founder-editor of the Kolkata-based weekly, Frontier. It is also in appreciation of Subhas Aikat whose Kharagpur-based, hand-to-mouth existing Cornerstone Publications brings out an Indian edition of the Monthly Review and books that pose the kind of questions generally shunned by academia. The essay is my small thanksgiving to all you MR people, past and present, on the occasion of your 60th anniversary. I thank Paresh Chattopadhyay, N Krishnaji, John Mage, C Rammanohar Reddy, and P A Sebastian for their critical but helpful comments on an earlier draft; the usual disclaimers apply.

… (A) Marxism stripped of its revolutionary essence is a contradiction in terms with no reason for being and no power to survive— Paul M Sweezy (1983: 7)

Anuradha Ghandy (Anu as we knew her) was a member of the central committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) [CPI (Maoist)]. Early on, she developed a sense of obligation to the poor; she joined them in their struggle for bread and roses, the fight for a richer and a fuller life for all. Tragically, cerebral malaria took her away in April last year. What is this spirit that made her selflessly adopt the cause of the damned of the Indian earth — the exploited, the oppressed, and the dominated — as her own? The risks of joining the Maoist long march seem far too dangerous to most people, but not for her — bold, courageous and decisive, yet kind, gentle and considerate. Perhaps her days were numbered, marked as she was on the dossiers of the Indian state’s repressive apparatus as one of the most wanted “left-wing extremists”.

Life in the Maoist PLGA: Men Cook, Women Patrol

This article appeared in Maoist Information Bulletin 13, available at Banned Thought.

Maoist country: Men cook, women patrol

DNA, November 1, 2009

The Laheri ambush on October 8, in which 17 policemen were killed, intelligence sources say, was led by Tarakka, alias Vimala Chandra Sidam, an educated rebel from Kistapur village in Jimalgatta area.

Tarakka’s photographs in the police records show a simple, good-looking woman, quite unlike the hardened image of a resolute guerrilla fighter that one would expect. Her husband, Bhupati, a central committee member, is a technology graduate. Police sources claim they had a love marriage.

A surrendered Maoist in Gadchiroli says that the couple is strongly committed to the Maoist cause and that the duo is idols among the youth in the territory they command. He adds, “In the dalams, there is no discrimination between women and men. Men can be asked to cook and women can be asked to do patrolling. So there’s nothing peculiar about women commanders or cadres.”

Interview with Azad on the CPI(Maoist)’s Preparations for Operation Green Hunt

This interview was published in Maoist Information Bulletin 12, October 31, 2009.

Interview by Comrade Azad, Spokesperson, Central Committee, CPI(Maoist), on the current unprecedented military offensive by the Central and various state governments on the CPI(Maoist) and the armed agrarian revolutionary movement

Q: There is lot of talk about an unprecedented massive military offensive due to begin anytime now. How will your Party confront it?

Azad: The fact is, the unprecedented massive offensive has already begun. In the Chintagufa area in Dantewada district almost 4000 police and central forces led by around 600 elite commandos of the anti-Naxal CoBRA force had carried out their biggest-ever counter-revolutionary operation called Operation Green Hunt in the third week of September. Some media reporters described it as Operation Red Hunt. Whatever is the name, it was the first major attempt by the central and state forces to wrest a part of the territory from the hands of the oppressed people led by the Maoists. This operation was a sort of a rehearsal for the forthcoming centrally-planned country-wide simultaneous offensive on all our guerrilla zones.

When the enemy attack took place near Singanamadugu village, our forces present there were hardly 50 or 60 in number. But they fought heroically, and successfully repulsed the attack by a superior force, by totally relying on the people. It was the people who gave us the information regarding each and every movement of the enemy force. Hence our guerrillas could deal the first biggest blow to these so-called CoBRAs who were specially trained in jungle warfare and sent to wage an unjust war against the Maoist revolutionaries. Six of their men including two assistant commandants—one from Manipur and another from UP—were wiped out in the real battle. These brave CoBRAs demonstrated their heroism and courage by murdering seven unarmed adivasi villagers, including two aged men and a woman, and burning four villages. Not a single Maoist was killed contrary to the false claims of the police that 22 Maoists were killed. Our forces chased them for about 10 kilometers. The people of the entire area stood with us in this counter-attack on the thugs sent by Manmohan-Chidambaram’s khadi gang at the Centre and Raman Singh’s saffron gang in Chhattisgarh.

This heroic resistance by a handful of Maoist guerrillas underscores the superiority of the tactics of guerrilla war and the massive mass support enjoyed by the Maoists. It demonstrates the ability of our Maoist guerrillas to confront and defeat a numerically far superior enemy force equipped with all the sophisticated weaponry, aerial support and what not, by relying on the sea of people in which we swim like fish.

CPI (Maoist) Leader Anand on Protracted War in India

This article was published in Maoist Information Bulletin 13, dated December 7, 2009, which is available on Banned Thought.

Interview with Comrade Katakam Sudarshan,  Secretary, Central Regional Bureau, CPI(Maoist)

We are publishing below parts of an interview by our MIB correspondent with comrade Katakam Sudarshan aka Anand, Polit Bureau member and the secretary of Central regional Bureau, CPI(Maoist). He is incharge of one of the two major regions under the CPI(Maoist) where people’s war is raging with great intensity. For almost three decades he has been in the field leading the struggle of the oppressed in the flaming fields of North Telangana to the adivasi-inhabited regions of Dandakaranya. A few years ago, he lost his life-partner, fiery, vocal and highly talented comrade Sadhana, when she was the secretary of Adilabad district in North Telangana.

Short and soft-spoken, comrade Anand answered all the questions very patiently in his native tongue of Telugu. The questions were mainly related to the stand of the CPI(Maoist) regarding the proposal of talks by Union Home Minister Chidambaram, on the question of violence, and the other issues related to the Centre’s war against the Maoists and adivasis.

MIB: You, as the Secretary of a very important zone of armed struggle in the country, must be studying the policies, plans and tactics of the enemy. How do you look at the Centre’s preparations for the final offensive or war on the Maoists?

Anand: To be frank enough, this is not something unexpected for our Party. In fact, we are in the midst of a cruel bitter war since several years. In fact, we had extended to Dandakaranya [DK] with a clear vision in the early 1980s as we were expecting a massive offensive in North Telangana in the course of the intensification of the class struggle in the region. Thus we made preparations to retreat to Dandakaranya when the need arose. And the course of development proved what precisely we had foreseen. Though we had put up a stiff fight and initiated a wave of armed mass resistance and mass struggles in North Telangana and throughout the state of Andhra Pradesh, at one point of time we had to retreat a large chunk of our forces to DK. In DK, the brutal state offensive had entered a new phase with the launching of the murderous terrorist armed campaign of salwa judum in June 2005 under the leadership of the Congress chieftain Mahendra Karma and the Hindu fascist Raman Singh government in Chhattisgarh.

Right from the time salwa judum received severe beating in our hands and was virtually on a backfoot after our heroic acts of resistance such as Ranibodili and Errabore, the reactionary rulers were preparing to intervene in a big way with their para-military and army if needed. Brigadier Ponwar, who is heading the Jungle Warfare School in Kanker, has been insisting ever since 2006 that salwa judum cannot deliver and that trained commando forces have to move in on a massive scale. This view is shared by several key figures in the political and police establishments.