The Maoist movement peaked around 2010 but entered a steady decline due to military losses and shrinking mass support.
Internal debates on violence, ideology and conduct exposed fractures within the CPI (Maoist) leadership.
Arrests of senior leaders and weakening grassroots presence deepened the movement’s crisis after 2014.
Central committee spokesperson Abhay’s May 2014 interview also contained a statement that marked the party’s revised stand, from the one taken by Azad and Kishanji, on another issue.
In his interview with The Hindu in April 2010, Azad had defended the act of planting mines inside the bodies of slain security personnel by guerrillas in his famous declaration that stated there were ‘no rules in a war’. Kishanji, despite championing the rules of the Geneva Convention in the early phases of the Lalgarh movement, had made similar remarks as the war progressed.
Reacting to an incident that took place in Latehar, Bihar in January 2013, where the body of a CRPF jawan was booby trapped with a mine, Abhay said that the trend was ‘worrying’ and ‘should be avoided’.
‘Due to the lack of knowledge about the norms of war prevalent in the world, our fighters are taking actions, although rarely, that are not acceptable even to our supporters…such instances were paining the “well-wishers of the revolution and pro-people forces,” Abhay said. ‘They are asking that such incidents be avoided … Any method that has the possibility of causing damage to the people and the non-combatant employees in civil administration, medical personnel and civilians should be avoided,’ he said.
By the time Abhay had had this interview, the Maoists had slowly started to recover from their heavy losses. The Odisha state committee was reconstituted a year after state secretary Sabyasachi Panda quit. Coordination with the Bihar unit was re-established. Maoists carried out a series of attacks on the security forces in the run-up to and during the general elections that elected Narendra Modi as the prime minister. According to the central committee, within the first five months of 2014, including the election period, sixty-three security personnel were killed in Maoist attacks, and 122 personnel were injured in thirty-one encounters. They claimed to have seized thirty-six weapons and 3,366 rounds of ammunition. The casualties were, however, half the losses the security forces had suffered in the 2009 general elections, when 112 security personnel died.
Statistics for the period between 2010 and 2015 from the Ministry of Home Affairs show that the Maoists managed to check the steep losses they had been suffering since 2010–11. The number of Maoist arrests and casualties decreased, as did the number of deaths of security personnel.
In 2010, when the war was at its peak, as many as 720 civilians died, including 323 ‘police informers’, and 285 security personnel lost their lives. Among the Maoists, there were 172 deaths that year, while 2,916 were arrested.
The Maoists continued to suffer losses and went into a defensive mode by 2012. There was an overall reduction in the number of Maoistrelated violence. Until that time it had been the norm that the security forces suffered more casualties than the Maoists every year.
But the number was nearly equal in 2015. Ninety-two security personnel died while the Maoists lost eighty-nine of its members and supporters. Both sides were evidently trying to conserve their energy.
But statistics also show that the state forces had gained an upper hand over the Maoists. In 2010, Maoists looted 256 weapons from the security forces, while the forces had seized 642 weapons from them. In 2015, the forces recovered 723 weapons from the Maoists–the highest number ever–while the Maoists had only looted eighteen weapons from them, the lowest ever.
In a circular issued on 15 August 2015, Ganapathy said the party managed to kill nearly eighty security personnel, ‘seize’ twentyfour guns and 4,500 rounds of cartridges. He called it a ‘major achievement’ since 2010.
The Maoists’ desperate bid to expand to other areas started paying off in 2014, when they managed to increase their influence in Kerala (Wayanad area) and adjoining areas of Tamil Nadu (Saryamangalam forest and Madurai) and Karnataka (Malnad) largely due to the merger of CPI (ML) (Naxalbari) and CPI (Maoist).
By the end of 2014, the Maoists were optimistic about their progress in south-west India. But they suffered a rude shock within a year, when three of their top operatives in this region were arrested within a week.
The first arrests were in early May 2015, when Kerala’s top Maoist leaders, Roopesh and his wife Shyna, were captured in Tamil Nadu. Roopesh, a law graduate who went underground in 2002, was seen in a video clip in 2014 in Maoist military uniform, carrying a gun and talking about an armed rebellion.
Shyna, who was an upper division clerk in Kerala High Court, went underground in 2008 after she was accused of sheltering Maoist politburo member Malla Raji Reddy. With the arrest of the couple along with three others, the police claimed that the Maoists’ South-west Regional Bureau was nearly destroyed.
The second blow came within a week. Ajith, previously the general secretary of CPI (ML) Naxalbari, was arrested from a hospital in Pune, Maharashtra. A Naxalite since the 1970s, Ajith was a top theoretician known in Maoist circles worldwide, especially for his role in countering the ‘new revisionist theory of Avakinism’– a theory propagated by an American, Bob Avakin, and presenting ‘a proper synthesization of the teachings of Marx, Lenin and Mao’ with regard to the present time.
Son of a former diplomat and an engineering graduate, the Keralite leader, who was in his sixties, was absorbed into the CPI (Maoist) central committee and given charge of publication of magazines and propaganda material, as well as that of the Western Ghat Special Zonal Committee.
Ajith’s arrest was a loss that could not be understated as it came at a time the Maoist top leadership was desperately seeking ‘advances in the ideological sphere’. This was after they realized that the loss of their support base in the core areas of the movement – where they run the outlawed Janatana Sarkars – was largely due to the ‘ideological weaknesses’ prevailing in different levels of the party.
In one published article, Ajith had tried to explain what goes wrong when the opposition becomes the ruler. He said that the opposition has to depend more on the people because of the pressure they face from the rulers. After becoming rulers, their dependency on people decreases and a disconnect grows. Only ideological conviction can keep them on track.
Faced with the nationwide setback, changes in the Maoist approach towards increasing influence among the masses became apparent. The central committee widely publicized self-criticism by another top leader, Sushil Roy.
Before his death in June 2014, Roy had completed the final task that his party had entrusted him with: a detailed record of his experiences during his many decades with the party. In his autobiography, published in 2015, his concerns about ‘non-proletarian trends in the party’ were a reminder of the similar worries plaguing Ghandy.
Roy’s message to his party was published on the occasion of its tenth anniversary, in the September 2014 issue of its Bengali mouthpiece, Biplabi Yug.
Roy stated that no one enters a communist party as a communist and it is only when one is in the party that, through an uncompromising inner struggle against petit bourgeoisie and feudal trends that one has grown up with, that he or she learns to develop the qualities of a true communist.
To him, building a communist party actually means building the party ‘ideologically and politically–a task that never ends’. While discussing their failure in doing so, Roy pointed out thirteen non-proletarian trends that he had witnessed among the leadership, especially in the middle and lower rungs.
‘Generally, the problem is not deep in the higher committees where ideological standards and political consciousness are at a higher level. But the real place to watch is the lower level committees – the people who are working with the people on a daily basis … whether their lifestyles, habits, behaviour and attitudes are gaining the people’s trust. Otherwise, they will get disconnected from the masses, and so will be the party.’
People may not be aware of what characteristics a Marxist revolutionary should possess, but they definitely know that any revolutionary should be honest, selfless, hardworking, humble and disciplined. It is the members of the lower level committees whose examples draw people towards the party,’ Roy wrote.
Excerpted from Lalgarh and the Legend of Kishanji: Tales from India’s Maoist Movement (HarperCollins Publishers India, 2016)
