"Naxalbari
Zindabad!" means "It's Right to Rebel!"
Thirty years ago, the armed rebellion of the peasants of Naxalbari,
a village in the State of West Bengal, sparked off a revolutionary
conflagration in India. Centuries-old shackles of oppression and exploitation
were attacked. Revisionist appeals to continue living as obedient
slaves were scornfully ignored. The poor and downtrodden peasants
dared to seize political power and expropriate the fruits of their
toil from the hated feudal landlords.
Naxalbari literally shook up the whole country. The pent-up
fury of the lowest of the low in Indian society, of Adivasis
and Dalits (tribals and “untouchables” of caste
society) besides other poor and landless peasants, burst out as
raging storms of revolution in numerous places all over the country.
The gusty winds of Naxalbari blew away a decades-old revisionist
stench and stirred up hundreds of cadres trapped in parties like
the CPI and CPM 1 into rebellion. In Calcutta and a number
of smaller industrial centres whole sections of workers and the
urban poor broke away from trade unionist hacks. A large number
threw themselves into battle, fighting in the van of armed agrarian
revolution as class-conscious proletarians. People from all walks
of life, professionals, academics and others, joined the revolutionary
festival of the masses. Naxalbari swept across a whole generation
of youth and students and channelled the revolutionary vigour of
thousands of youth fired by communist ideals of serving the people
and self-sacrifice for the cause of revolution.
Despite long spells of revisionist domination before Naxalbari,
the communist movement in India also had an inspiring history of
revolutionary struggle. Notable was the five-year-long Telengana
armed struggle of the late ̓40s which succeeded in establishing
red power in hundreds of villages during its high tide but was later
betrayed by the CPI leadership. Groups of revolutionaries had sided
with Mao Tsetung in the struggle against Soviet revisionism. But
Naxalbari marked a leap. It was the product of a conscious grasp
of Mao Tsetung Thought as a qualitatively new stage of Marxism-Leninism
and its application to Indian conditions in initiating the revolutionary
armed struggle of the masses. This is the distinct and key element
which catapulted Naxalbari into centre stage. Led by Charu Mazumdar,
a group of revolutionary cadre within the CPM organization in Darjeeling
district had consciously fought to deepen te struggle against revisionism
and centrism. Drawing valuable lessons from the ideological struggle
led by Mao Tsetung against Khrushchevite revisionism and further
from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, Charu Mazumdar
succeeded in making a thorough rupture with revisionism (including
recognizing the then-existing Soviet Union under revisionist leadership
as an enemy) and launching the armed agrarian revolution aimed at
the seizure of political power bit by bit through the path of protracted
People̓s War. Naxalbari was seen as part of the world proletarian
revolution. It fuelled revolutionary struggle in other countries
in the region and received enthusiastic support from the Communist
Party of China and other proletarian revolutionaries the world over.
Naxalbari raised the process of rupturing from the revisionists
and forging a genuine communist vanguard to a new and higher level.
In 1969 the bold step was taken of forming the Communist Party of
India (Marxist-Leninist) under the leadership of Charu Mazumdar.
The founding congress of the CPI (ML), held in 1970 amidst the advance
of the armed struggle, adopted a program which characterized Indian
society as semi-feudal, semi-colonial and identified the targets
of revolution as feudalism, comprador-bureaucrat capitalism, imperialism
and social-imperialism (as represented by the then-existent Soviet
bloc). It laid down the tasks in the stage of New Democratic revolution
and the path of protracted People̓s War.
Revolution is not a dinner party but, as Mao put it, an
act of violence by which one class overthrows another. The new vanguard
had to be forged in and through the intense revolutionary upheaval
unfolding in large parts of India. Deeply entrenched revisionist
thinking and styles of work had to be continuously fought out, thousands
of youth had to be remoulded and trained as proletarian fighters
and leaders, the wealth of experience gained at the cost of blood
had to be synthesized to develop the line and raise the level of
the party̓s work — and all of this had to be done while
making bold advances in the armed struggle and fighting off the
murderous suppression of the enemy. The loss of a number of experienced
cadres in the early days of the new party evidently put a big strain
on its capacity to tackle these tasks. Serious difficulties caused
by setbacks were further compounded by a rightist wind which tried
to reverse the correct orientation of the party, seizing on some
real weaknesses in its line and practice.
Much has been said about the so-called “sectarianism”
and “adventurism” of Charu Mazumdar which supposedly
“isolated” the party from the masses and caused setbacks.
Yes, elements of one-sidedness, spontaneity and subjectivism which
run counter to Charu Mazumdar̓s overall Marxist-Leninist-Maoist
stand, viewpoint and method are evident in his works. But what strikes
one most forcefully while reading them now is the resolute clarity
in his criticism of revisionism, a keen grasp of the key question
of seizing power, deep faith in the masses and robust revolutionary
optimism. Far from isolation, his leadership deeply entrenched the
party among the masses and created a vast reservoir of support which
is still being tapped by genuine revolutionaries. His name continues
to haunt the ruling classes and inspires revolutionaries.
Following the dastardly murder of Charu Mazumdar in 1972
by the Indian rulers abetted by the CPI-CPM revisionists, the CPI(ML)
failed to continue as a single, united party. Since then there has
been a lot of struggle over the summation of experiences and attempts
to unite. The 1976 capitalist roaders̓ coup in China caused
new divisions, greatly strengthened the rightist tendencies in the
CPI(ML) and added complexities. But it also created important and
new obligations and opportunities to deepen the grasp of ideology
which in turn could give a new thrust to the struggle for a correct
summation and unity. Unfortunately these opportunities were either
missed, or ended up misused in cases where they were initially begun.
Over the past years the genuine revolutionary forces have developed
a better understanding of the significance of the internationalist
struggle to defed Mao Tsetung̓s qualitative development of
Marxism-Leninism to a whole new stage and to fight the capitalist
usurpers in China initially led by Hua Kuo-feng and Deng Xiao-ping
as well as Hoxhaite revisionist attacks on it. Yet this issue, which
has direct implications for successfully completing the task of
uniting Maoist revolutionary forces into a single centre, still
remains to be fully resolved.
During this whole period, revolutionary forces who were
part of the united CPI(ML) as well as others have heroically continued
to hold high the red banner of Naxalbari. In Andhra, Bihar and Dandakaranya
2 armed revolutionary struggle has made significant advances,
won wide-spread support from the masses of people and accumulated
important experience.
Over the past 30 years the conditions which made the armed
agrarian rebellion of Naxalbari possible and necessary have ripened
even more. Aggressive imperialist penetration in all sectors of
the economy coupled with the exploitation and oppression of the
Indian ruling classes is causing an all-round intensification of
the misery of the masses. Most importantly, it is calling forth
resistance and struggle, including armed struggle, in diverse regions
and sectors of society. Divisions among the ruling classes are increasing.
Moreover, the initiation of People̓s War in neighbouring Nepal
by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) gives a direct and intensifying
impetus to revolutionary ferment within India.
This situation clearly demands a daring and mighty push
to unite the communist revolutionaries into a single centre based
on a correct Marxist-Leninist-Maoist line capable of uniting and
leading all the streams of revolt and struggle into a mighty People̓s
War. In the struggle to achieve this goal, which necessarily implies
a synthesis of the rich experiences of the past 30 years, the revolutionary
communist forces in India can and must draw strength from the experience
of the whole class internationally, especially the higher understanding
concentrated in Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Concretely this means fighting
to forge a single vanguard party united in the Revolutionary Internationalist
Movement.
Proletarian revolutionaries throughout the world cannot
afford the slightest indifference to the advances and difficulties
of our comrades in India. In the first issue of this journal we
pointed out that: “If you are talking about world revolution,
you are talking about India.” In the diverse languages
of India, “Naxalbari Zindabad!” means “Long Live
Naxalbari!”. But, for the oppressed in India and beyond, it
also means “It̓s Right to Rebel!”
1 Communist Party of India, CPI, the pro-Soviet revisionist
party in India. Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) is a centrist
split-off from the CPI in 1963 which criticized the CPI and Khrushchev
as revisionist but which never adopted a genuine revolutionary program.
2 A vast forest region comprised of parts of
four states in central India.
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