Volume 5, No. 2-3, February-March 2004

As we had seen in the last issue of the magazine, the TDP led by Chandrababu Naidu in AP has begun a massive propaganda that Left-wing extremism, particularly the CPI(ML)[People’s War] has become an obstacle for achieving peace, progress and development in the state. Hence, he claims day in and day out, that Naxalism must be ruthlessly crushed in order to achieve development in the state. Citing this pretext, the state assembly was dissolved on 14th November 2003 and hundreds of crores of rupees are being spent on publicity coaxing people to assure the TDP a mandate to suppress the CPI(ML)[People’s War]. The state Cabinet’s resolution that was released on the day of the dissolution of the state Assembly, issued an open call for violence against Naxalites.

The resolution says, "We believe that the time has come to tackle extremism head on. If the State has to realise its true potential and achieve its true destiny of greatness it has to counter extremism with courage and fortitude… unless the issue of extremism is made the central issue of our time and countered effectively and decisively the State cannot move... towards development."

In fact, this stooge of the imperialists has been repeating ad nausea, ever since he assumed power with the help of the World Bank in August 1995, that the Naxalites are the obstacle for the development of the state thus justifying the ban on the CPI(ML)[People’s War] in July 1996 and the fascist repression thereafter.

We had seen how Chandrababu Naidu came to power as a stooge of the World Bank, the real essence of the development that his Party has been bragging about, the numerous scams of the TDP leaders and the top bureaucrats and police officials during the nine years of TDP’s misrule, the factional murders committed by the TDP leaders in Rayalaseema and coastal districts, and the scant respect that the TDP has for the fundamental rights and the constitutional provisions. We had also seen the crisis that AP had landed into due to the rapacious plunder and unbridled loot by the imperialists and the Comprador Big Bourgeoisie under the rule of their trusted manager and CEO, Naidu.

The TDP’s declaration that Naxalism is the principal agenda in the Assembly elections is not only a tacit admission of its utter failure to contain the revolutionary movement notwithstanding the brutal suppression campaigns undertaken in the past nine years of TDP rule, but is also a testimony for the growth and expansion of the movement and the party that is spearheading it. The specially-trained, much-pampered, elite, anti-Naxal force called the Grey Hounds on which a few hundred crores were spent, the Special Security Force (SSF), and the continuous deployment of hordes of the central para-military forces, had all failed to achieve the objective of putting out the fire of people’s war that had engulfed most areas of the state. Time and again, the TDP’s top functionaries as well as the police top brass claimed that the revolutionary movement had been almost extinguished, and that the People’s War party had been reduced to a skeletal structure and in no time it would become totally extinct. And every time when the revolutionaries scored a tactical success, these liars had to weave another lie to cover up their earlier lie.

However, Naidu’s projection of Naxalism as the real opposition in the state, and his request for massive assistance from the Centre to protect his own Party leaders, is the most humiliating instance for the police bosses in AP as they had to eat their own words repeated ad nauseum until now, that Naxalites were a spent force and posed no threat. The caretaker government had asked for at least 40 Battalions of Central Security forces to confront "Naxal threat" and to ensure smooth conduct of the elections. The fact is that the TDP’s functionaries had become virtually immobile and its electoral campaigning is yet to take off in the guerrilla zones and other areas of armed struggle led by the CPI(ML)[PW]. The leaders of the TDP have refused to undertake any campaign in the absence of a massive police force and the Chief Minister had assured them that the Centre would send the required number of forces soon. He has been desperately begging the Centre to dispatch at least 40 Battalions of the Central forces as the 8 or 9 battalions that had arrived were inadequate to ensure safety for the TDP-BJP leaders. The police officials have been expressing their helplessness in providing security to the VIPs in the Naxal hit-list as the number seeking police protection has been continuously growing. Most of the local functionaries of the TDP-BJP too had fled to the safety of the cities. The police had devised several novel methods of alerting those on the hit-list and even training them how to escape from attacks by the action teams of People’ War (see box). As the attacks by the special action teams of the PGA increase, the crisis within the TDP and BJP in AP is deepening with several leaders from these parties joining other parties like the TRS or Congress.

The present situation in AP where the TDP and BJP have become the principal targets of attack by the revolutionary forces during the elections, has been brought about by these parties themselves. In the eight years since Chandrababu came to power he had unleashed the most brutal violence ever witnessed in the state’s history ever since the days of the Great Telangana revolt of the late 1940s. 1500 revolutionaries belonging to CPI(ML)[People’s War], 350 belonging to Janashakthi, and another 150 belonging to other ML organisations were murdered, most of them in fake encounters. State repression had assumed varied brutal and inhuman forms. All this had alienated the broad masses from the ruling party despite its populist gimmicks and spending huge amounts of funds given by the World Bank. The revival of the slogan of ‘Separate Telangana’ is a manifestation of this growing alienation of the masses from the ruling party’s fascist rule and the daily violence perpetrated by the police forces. It is due to the deep-rooted mass base of the CPI(ML)[PW] and the extensive support it enjoys among the people that the TDP’s repressive campaigns failed to achieve the objective.

Let us see the methods used by the government and the police forces in AP to suppress the revolutionary movement and the party that leads it.

Encounter killings is the most commonly used method to suppress the revolutionaries and even those who oppose the police high-handedness in AP. The word has become so notorious that anyone expressing dissent is threatened by the police that he/she will face ‘encounter’. It simply means arresting a person in front of the people and shooting dead in cold blood. There have been very few real encounters where Naxals died in exchange of fire. Hence the word had acquired a peculiar connotation of killing the arrested persons.

The deaths in fake encounters which was 35 in 1985 was the highest figure until then. From then on, there has been a progressive increase in the killings under every successive regime. During the TDP rule between 1985-89 the total number killed was 196. The year 1990 was the only exception in being free from encounters for most part under Chenna Reddy who led the Congress government that succeeded the TDP. But this only lasted a few months. By the end of that year encounter killings began to mount with 20 persons being shot dead. Over a hundred were killed in 1991 and the highest figure was reached during Janardhan Reddy’s reign in 1992 when 256 people were killed in a single year. The Congress has the blood of 625 revolutionaries and their sympathisers on their hands during its five-year rule lasting until the end of 1994. The week preceding the ’94 Assembly elections was the bloodiest with 36 persons shot dead after being arrested from the villages. At least 4000 activists and sympathisers of the revolutionary movement were arrested during the election period and detained in police stations. They were used as human shields for the police and the polling staff to ward off attacks by the guerrillas.

The encounter deaths came down slightly in 1995 when the TDP under NTR came back to power and the government had to partially lift the ban on the Party under public pressure as that was one of the major promises made during the elections. But the state structure had become so much brutalised and fascised by that time that in spite of the partial lifting of the ban and the tall promises made during the elections, there were 67 killings in 1995. The figure climbed to 161 the next year with the graph of cold-blooded murders by the police showing a massive increase after Chandrababu Naidu took over the reins in early 1996. In just three years from 1998-2000, the blood-thirsty hounds of Naidu killed 746 people. In the period of almost eight years since the World Bank stooge took over, over 1450 people associated with CPI(ML)[PW], including several leading cadres, 350 belonging to CPI(ML)-Janashakthi, and 150 belonging to other ML organsiations were killed in these encounters, the overwhelming majority of which were fake.

Some of these so-called encounters are so openly enacted one wonders how the thugs who commit such murders are let off freely and even with rewards in a manner reminiscent of medieval ages. Chandrababu has thus proved himself to be a savage murderer in high-tech garb. For instance, when Karkagudem PS was attacked by the guerrillas in January 1997, it was Naidu who gave the call to the "people" to kill Naxalites and get rewards for the killings! This is the directive given to all the police officials and the lumpen rowdy elements organised into vigilante squads by the state.

Crores of rupees are spent for the perfection of the methods of suppression. The methods adopted by the police rival those in the Latin American countries under fascist juntas and military dictatorships. The first rule of the police is: Never arrest people when you can kill them. Thus it is a rare occasion to see revolutionaries being arrested and taken to court in AP. From the top leaders of the Central Committee to the ordinary squad members and even sympathisers, the method adopted is the same—arrest them, inflict the most brutal third degree methods on them, and shoot them within 24 hours lest the world wakes up to the reality of the arrest. Then float the story of encounter however weak-sounding and groundless it might seem to the outside world. In fact, the police and the TDP politicians have become so thick-skinned that no public outcry seems to affect them a bit. Hence they are not even bothered about the obvious self-contradictions in the story being put out.

Let us look into the various repressive tactics adopted by the AP police forces to suppress the revolutionary movement apart from cold-blooded killings in the name of encounters.

While underground cadre of the PW and the activists of the mass organisations and militia members are shot dead within hours after their arrest, those who are suspected to be sympathisers of the movement and those who openly protest against the state violence are arrested, tortured and harassed through various methods. Thousands of peasant youth were arrested in the rural areas in North and South Telangana, North Andhra, South coastal districts and Rayalaseema region. False cases are hoisted against them and they are forced to attend the local police station daily, or once in two/three days, thereby subjecting them to severe hardships. As most of them are poor and landless peasants or those who eke out their living as daily wage labourers, they find it extremely difficult to make both ends meet.

The arrested youth are subjected to the worst kinds of torture; limbs are mutilated, electric shocks and deadly drugs are administered; and many become disabled for the rest of their lives. No wonder, some find suicide preferable to a wretched and miserable life. At least ten cases of suicides are reported in the districts of North Telangana alone due to the arrests, torture and harassment by the police.

The police atrocities on members and leaders of APCLC, RWA, TJS, DTF, Ryotu Seva Samithi, Chaitanya Mahila Samakhya, Praja Kala Mandali, and other democratic people’s organisations have been increasing over the years. They are forced to tender their resignation to their organisations. Third degree methods and electric shocks are used even against the teachers, lawyers, government employees, non-Party peasant leaders, women and others. Hundreds of them are asked to report in the police station daily or weekly in several districts of the state, Warangal being the most notorious for such type of harassment. Over a hundred intellectuals were made to report at the Hanamkonda police station regularly for a long periods in the past three years where they were abused and threatened by the police goons led by the CI, Gulam Sandhani. The objective of the police is to break the will of the activists of these organisations and force them to resign and keep away from any type of political activity and people’s struggles. State terror and the terror unleashed by the state-sponsored lawless gangs have succeeded to some extent in creating a fear psychosis among the activists of these democratic organisations and in suppressing all forms of democratic dissent. Some of these organisations became defunct in some districts due to the unending harassment by the state.

The attacks on these organisations turned even more vicious after the Alipiri incident on October 1st. Several members of the above-mentioned orgnisations were arrested, tortured and implicated in false cases in Tirupati, Anantapur, Kurnool, Guntur, Hyderabad, Vishakhapatnam, and other towns.

The Grey Hounds forces harass and even fire at anyone they like in the forests and in the agricultural fields—adivasis collecting forest produce, shepherds, peasants guarding their crops, wage labourers and so on. What is worse, water points in the forests are poisoned by the police with the objective of killing the guerrillas. The peasants and other rural poor have become the sufferers. Three peasants died in Warangal as a result of consumption of the poisoned water.

Psychological warfare: Making phone calls to the homes of mass organisation leaders and legal activists in various mass fronts threatening them that they would face the same fate as that of Purushotham, if they went against the government. They abuse the family members and ask them to see that the activist tenders his/her resignation. Shrill cries of persons being tortured by the police in custody are played over the phones to terrify the family members. Activists of separate Telangana too are threatened. Kattula Sammayya had asked a person to kill a target and offered him 5 lakhs. After the death of Sammayya in Colombo airport the person revealed this plan.

The state in AP had given the utmost importance to the setting up of a closely-knit, efficient network of informers in the villages. One method of creating informers is by pouring in huge funds to purchase the lumpen elements, social degenerates, drunkards, and rowdy sheeters. Another method is to coerce the honest elements by threatening them with dire consequences if they do not supply specific information about the movement of the guerrilla squad. Incentives are also given by way of revoking the criminal cases filed against the youth, which are quite large in number throughout North and South Telangana. Those who do not agree have to visit the police station either daily or once in two or three days thereby making life miserable for the poor who survive on their daily labour. Thus the poorest too are recruited into the informer system of the police through such coercion. The ex-activists in the revolutionary movement who became inactive for various reasons are ready prey to the khaki vultures. They find it impossible to lead normal lives without cooperating in some way or the other with the police. When they are of no use to the police as informers they are used as human shield for the policemen who go to the villages and forest for combing operations or for accompanying polling officials during elections or accompanying government officials on other occasions like Janmabhoomi programmes. It has become the normal practice for the policemen in entire Telangana and districts of North Andhra to take some people from the tribals or other poorer sections with them whenever they move in vehicles in the interior areas.

Another source of informers is the petty shopkeepers and traders in the villages, teachers and the lower level government officials in some places. Though the number of actual informers might be small in a particular village, it becomes a large number when seen in the context of the region as a whole. Thus a large number of people are made into sacrificial goats by the police. When any informer is killed by the Naxalites a hue and cry is raised in the media and attempts are made to paint the Naxalites as blood-thirsty and anti-poor since most of these informers hail from the poorer sections and castes of society.

The Low Intensity War strategy as part of which a new attack had begun in 1997 comprises of various forms like establishing a well-knit informer’s network, creating covert agents, attacking, murdering and threatening the mass organisational leadership through renegades, etc.

As part of constant surveillance, the intelligence personnel are renting houses near the person’s house to constantly monitor all their movements. Building up informer network in the name of Maithri Sangams is another technique used. In a basti, a telephone booth owner who is a member of this sangam is asked to listen to all calls made from there.

The creation of covert agents is one of the cornerstones of the Naxal suppression policies pursued by the police state in AP. It is not difficult for a covert agent of the World Bank who has been ruling the state to think of such a heinous plan of creating a vast network of covert agents inside the revolutionary movement.

It was the Congress government under the stewardship of Janardhan Reddy in 1993 that had laid the foundation for the covert phenomenon. A deputy commander of the guerrilla squad of Husnabad in Karimnagar, Kattula Sammayya, was converted into a covert agent of the police and was deployed to eliminate the leadership from within. In November of the same year, the coward shot dead the commander of the squad, Bhupathi, and two other squad members when everyone was fast asleep and escaped with weapons and ten lakh rupees. He was received with open arms by the then SP of Karimnagar, Tripathi. The cases against him were revoked; huge reward and police protection were given. He soon became a mafia gang leader running a real estate empire in Hyderabad and elsewhere. That the top brass of the police benefited greatly in terms of monetary gains through the dubious business transactions of this gang led by Sammayya is another interesting story.

Ever since then, the conversion of some weak elements in the revolutionary camp into covert agents, training and funding them, employing them to eliminate the leadership from within, became a new tactic of the AP police and the ruling party.

The top leaders of TDP, including the Chief Minister and the Home Minister, were directly involved in this gruesome plan. Chandrababu himself advised his counterparts in other states to follow the tactic of eliminating the PW leadership through covert means as done so successfully in AP. This was in April 2000 after their spectacular success in apprehending and brutally killing three top leaders of the PW, Comrades Shyam, Mahesh and Murali, based on the information furnished by a covert agent Govinda Reddy, in whose house in Bangalore city they were captured.

The latest of these crimes by the police is the killing of a DCM of Nalgonda on the information provided by one Siraj who was acting as a covert agent for the police ever since his arrest and release in mid 2003. The plan that was sought to be carried out through this agent was ghastly—to poison the entire PGA members and the leadership at a guerrilla camp. When he was caught by the guerrillas prior to committing the crime, he revealed the entire police plan, the names of the police officials and the mafia gang of Nayeem that had a close nexus with the police, all of whom had met him and gave the terrifying plan.

The police had gone even a step further in their covert game. They had even created covert agents and shot them dead themselves while placing the blame on the Naxalites! Like Hitler setting fire to the Reichstag to unleash a blood-bath, the AP police in collusion with the fascist militia gangsters are capable of anything. They had even taken a video tape of the so-called covert agents, who were actually closely connected to the Party, without showing the real faces of the interrogators and sent the tapes to the media. The world came to know the truth only after the entire episode was exposed by the PW leadership of Nalgonda and held a martyrs memorial meeting in the village of one of the dead. The parents of the so-called covert agents squarely placed the blame on the police.

Presently the govt is spending crores on the covert agents and black hundred gangs. These are used for identifying the sympathisers and activists, and trailing and killing them. In Nalgonda, three relatives of Belli Lalitha were murdered by the Nayeem gang.

The AP police led by the autocrat Naidu have become adept in organising the people into so-called Maithri sangams, Gram Rakshak Committees, and various other organisations to counter the Naxalites. People are threatened with dire consequences if they entertained the Dalam. They have to not only inform the police when they chance upon the squad members but also should resist them. People of entire villages are forced to take pledge not to allow the guerrillas into their village. Any village resisting the Naxalites would be awarded ten lakhs of rupees. Under this pretext, lumpen elements, TDP cadres, landlords and their henchmen are given training and arms to counter the Naxalites. Village protection squads are formed and are entrusted with the duty of guarding the village during the nights in the name of defending the village from thieves. The actual purpose is to prevent the Naxalites from entering the villages. Karimnagar SP, Praveen Kumar, is in the forefront of this campaign.

In villages where the local bad gentry had organised some sections against the revolutionaries openly, the police are visiting the villages and organising ‘gram sabhas’ and are propagating that Naxalites do not have the support of the masses. People in the villages are being asked to keep vigil throughout the night to prevent the guerrilla squads from entering. People are forced to issue statements to the effect that they will not allow Naxalites into their villages. Those who refuse to follow the police dictum are warned of dire consequences; facilities to such villages are withdrawn, and cases are foisted on those who show defiance. In spite of such continuous pressure from the police, in some villages like Maddikunta in Nizamabad, people had refused to issue statement that they would not allow the dalam from entering their village.

The formation of vigilante squads reminds us of the Latin American military dictatorships like Chile under Pinochet, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador etc. The recruits to these vigilante fascist gangs are mostly from the renegade elements from the camp of revolution, the relatives of the victims of revolutionary violence such as the sons and daughters of landlords, police officials, police informants, and other lumpen elements of society.

These gangs are set up, trained, funded and regularly guided by the top police brass and political establishment under the direct supervision of the Home Minister and the Chief Minister. The need for the vigilante squads and covert agents was explicitly mentioned by the chief minister Chandrababu Naidu in the paper entitled ‘Left-wing Extremism in AP’ that was proposed at a meeting of the Chief Ministers in April 2000 presided over by the Union Home Minister, LK Advani.

The vigilante squads which began their terror campaign in the districts of North Telangana in the early 1990s, soon spread to the entire state, threatening, killing and harassing all those suspected to be associated directly or indirectly with the revolutionary camp. The family members of the underground cadre of CPI(ML)[People’s War], the activists and sympathisers of the various revolutionary mass organisations, as well as those working in civil liberties organisation, teachers’ federation and other democratic organisations are specially targeted.

Assuming various names such as Green Tigers, Red Tigers, Kranti Sena, Palnaadu Tigers, Tirumala Tigers (which is the latest addition that had come up after the PGA attack on Chandrababu Naidu), etc. these have become a law unto themselves. In the second half of the 1990s, the SP of Medak district in south Telangana, VK Singh, organised the gang in the name of CPI(ML)[Praja Rakshana]. They issue threats against those who question state terror, announce their hit-lists and issue press statements against the People’s War party whenever any ambush or attack on the police officials, political leaders by the PW takes place. Armed Shiva Sena gangs roam freely in the working class areas of Singareni threatening and murdering workers sympathetic to the PW and the family members of underground cadre.

These gangs are also used to terrorise all those who dare to speak against state terror. The activist of Telangana Kala Samithi, Belli Lalitha, was abducted, tortured and killed in a savage manner by cutting her body to several pieces. This was intended to terrorise all those who were actively campaigning for a separate Telangana state. Civil liberties state leader Purushotham was murdered in the state capital in broad daylight on 23rd November, 2000 and on 18th February, 2001, the civil liberties leader of Nalgonda district, Azam Ali, was killed by these state-hired murderous gangs. The latest murderous attack took place in December 2003 when the Mahboobnagar district president of the AP Civil Liberties Committee, Buccha Reddy, was hit by a car. Though he survived after suffering severe injuries, it is a clear warning to all the activists of the APCLC in the districts and to anyone who speaks against state terror or condemns the cold-blooded killings of Naxalites. A gang leader openly claimed responsibility for the attack.

Earlier, in November 2003, the president of the APCLC, Prof Lakshman, was abducted by the Hyderabad-based Nayeem gang. Using the name of Tirumala Tigers, the gang threatened to kill the civil liberties leader if the PW did not release the covert agent Siraj. He was tortured and finally left only after the direct intervention of the Chief Minister who feared that the murder of Prof. Lakshman could blow up into a big issue and affect his electoral fortunes. The nexus between these vigilante gangs, the police officials and the ruling party including the chief minister himself, thus came out quite nakedly in this episode.

Attacks on APCLC leaders and members of RWA have become a common feature throughout the state. The revolutionary balladeer, Gaddar, was shot at from point blank range in 1998. Luckily he survived after being hit by three bullets. The entire state observed total bandh spontaneously in protest against the attack.

The government spends huge amounts as prizes for nabbing the Naxalites. Perhaps nowhere else we find rewards on such a large scale. No underground member in the movement is left out. Names of over three thousand people have been announced in the press including those of the newly-recruited members. Photos of the cadre are displayed through papers, posters in public places, police stations, and the electronic media regularly. Even slides are shown in cinema halls in some places. Those who surrender are given the prize amount on his/her head along with other incentives.

Police officials who achieve success in capturing or killing any activist are given promotions and cash rewards. Besides, money and gold found in the dumps kept by the Naxalites or on the person of those killed/arrested are given off to the officials as additional incentive. Thus almost every police official posted in the districts of North Telangana received swift promotions after killing a Naxalite leader or inflicting serious losses to the guerrilla squads.

The police have been concentrating on mobilizing the people to meetings and rallies against the Naxalites, police memorial meetings, funeral processions of the dead policemen, peace ralies, and so on. Through this the police have been trying to create an atmosphere against the Naxalites and to isolate the PW and its leadership at various levels. For these mobilisations every sarpanch and MPTC, ZPTC member is asked to bring a fixed quota of people.

Thus desperate attempts are made to create media myth that public opinion is against the Naxalites. After the blasting of the train engine four trains between Nizamabad and Kamareddi were cancelled for two months so as to pit the people against the Naxalites.

Apart from the various methods of suppression as described above, the police have been using the carrot to wean away the masses in some villages from the influence of the Naxalites and the ongoing people’s war. These include: announcement of rehabilitation package for the surrendered Naxalites and to villagers who discourage the Naxalites from coming to their villages; setting up ‘family counselling centres’; supplying the daily needs and giving medical treatment in the name of ‘sanjeevini’ to the families of the underground Naxalites, helping in rebuilding their houses, sending even greeting cards to their family members—all with the aim of getting the underground cadre to surrender by winning over their family members and exerting pressure; even organising hunger strikes by the family members of the cadre to create psychological pressure; taking up petitions from the people concerning their issues and demands and even resolving some minor demands such as repair of bore wells and supply of drinking water, power supply, provision of bus service, roads, medical treatment and supply of medicines, (setting up medical camps and giving free treatment has become a regular practice of the police in the Naxalite stronghold villages in Telangana), setting up ration shops, setting up schools, providing relief to victims of fir accidents and natural calamities, punishing a corrupt official here and there, etc. thereby trying to create the impression that the police are close to the people (all these are done under the pompous banner of police mee kosam or ‘the Police is for You’); holding sports tournaments and supplying sports kits to the youth; free coaching centres to the youth for joining the police and the armed forces and conducting wide propaganda regarding recruitment into these forces; forming dalit Maithri Associations to wean away the dalits from the revolutionary movement; giving cultural performances in the villages on issues such as ‘left extremism’, poverty, illiteracy, corruption, etc (the villages of the Party leaders and PGA commanders and other strongholds of the CPI(ML)[PW] are given special attention for cultural performances where the most vicious lies and slander are propagated against the Party, movement and the leaders; conducting slanderous propaganda against the PW leadership and the movement by holding press conferences regularly that are often attended by the district SPs; asserting time and again that the Naxalite movement is finished, that only a handful are left in each district, that thousands of cadre had surrendered disillusioned by the ideology, line and methods of leadership, and so on; continuously focussing upon a few mistakes committed by the Naxalites; and desperately trying to paint the movement as anti-dalit, anti-adivasi, and anti-poor by citing statistics of the policemen, police informants, and covert agents who were eliminated by the Naxalites, and so on.

In several villages, the people are forced to take up a campaign of inviting the police to their villages in the name of maa ooriki randi (visit to our village) and to issue statements in the press to that effect. The three-tent-programme that combines medical camp, counselling and anti-Naxal cultural propaganda is organised by the police in the villages. Home guards are set up as a big force in several districts and are placed under DySPs and CIs. Instead of serving as a volunteer force, Home guards have become an arm of the police department and accompany the police to the villages.

Maithri Sanghams or ‘Friendship associations’ are formed at various levels by the police and are placed under the supervision of DIGs at the regional and state level. Though these are formed with the claim of playing the role of citizens’ committees, and the general public are also brought into these associations, the real intention of the police in setting up these is to counter the Naxalite movement. The leading elements in these associations are the counter-revolutionary elements, activists of fascist organisations like the RSS-BJP and of other bourgeois-feudal political parties, and such other elements. Overall, these associations are acting as an arm of the police in society and have a large number of police informers. Plans are afoot to supply arms to the members of these maithri sanghams.

As we had seen above, the state of Andhra Pradesh has been transformed into a police raj ever since 1985 first under NTR’s TDP, followed by the Congress and assuming even ugly dimensions under Chandrababu Naidu since 1995. Whoever was in power, the state violence against the revolutionary movement only continued to increase steadily. Several hundred peasants, workers, students, youth, women, adivasis and intellectuals lost their lives in attacks by the state and state-sponsored violence. The violence of the revolutionaries is only a legitimate response to this counter-revolutionary and institutional violence unleashed by the ruling classes to protect the status quo.

The fact is: it is the ruling classes and their political representatives such as the TDP, BJP and Congress that are the worst perpetrators of violence against the masses. They cannot stay in power for a single day without the support of the sanguinary state machinery that is strengthened and modernised on a continuous basis. Brutal killings and massacres, arrests and tortures, rapes and harassment, destruction of property of the fighting peasantry, adivasis, religious minorities, and other sections of the population has become the mainstay for the so-called stability and peace propagated by the ruling classes. And in the past decade, it has been the TDP that is in the forefront of this bloody campaign in AP. Moreover, Chandrababu Naidu has been desperately trying to export the brutal methods of suppression described above to all the nine states under the Joint Operational Command (JOC), where people’s war is raging.

It is the reactionary feudal-comprador ruling classes and the imperialist plunderers who are the real stumbling blocks for the development of our country. It is these blood-suckers who have pushed, and continue to push, the vast majority of the Indian people to the most wretched condition, bring misery and starvation for the actual toiling masses who create all the wealth of the society, suck the country of all its wealth while fattening themselves at the expense of the overwhelming majority of the poor, perpetrate the most brutal and inhuman violence against the dalits, adivasis, women, religious minorities and oppressed nationalities; against the peasantry fighting for their basic right to land and livelihood; against the workers who dare to resist their exploitation; and against all those democratic-minded sections who dare question their fascist rule. The planned ghastly massacre of the Muslims in Gujarat by the Hindu fascist gangs of the VHP-RSS-BJP-Shiv Sena-Bajrang Dal combine with the full assistance of the state machinery, the massacre of an entire generation of Kashmiri youth running to over 60,000, and the rape of thousands of women in Kashmir, North East, Gujarat, areas of armed agrarian struggle from Bihar to Andhra Pradesh —all these reveal the ugly fascist features of the deadly monster that has donned the garb of the biggest parliamentary democracy in the world.

These parliamentary parties have no qualms in resorting to any and every type of fraud and ploy if it helps them to secure, or cling on, to power. Chandrababu Naidu’s TDP, for instance, indulged in massive fraud by registering bogus voters to the tune of tens of lakhs taking the state’s electorate to an incredible figure of over 80 %! After much hue and cry by the Opposition parties, the Election Commission intervened to weed out over 50 lakh bogus voters thus bringing the figure down to the All India average of around 65 %. It is estimated that there are up to one crore bogus voters and even after the Election Commission’s exercise, several lakh names in the voters’ lists are still considered to be fake (see the box for a glimpse of this massive fraud called Parliamentary democracy).

The BJP and the sangh parivar proved no less adept in the art of gaining votes through crooked methods. They incited communal violence in Hyderabad in December last with an eye on the elections. The Civil Liberties Monitoring Committee (CLMC), a conglomeration of civil liberties and Muslim organizations, felt that the violence in the old city is the result of a conspiracy hatched by the BJP-RSS-VHP combine to terrorise Muslims and reap dividends during the forthcoming Assembly elections by polarization.

The current Assembly elections in AP promise to be the bloodiest and the most violent in the state’s history. The fraud indulged in by the various political parties, particularly the TDP, knows no parallel in the state’s electoral history. The funds spent on the elections too are mind-boggling. With the elections taking place almost five to six months from the time of the dissolution of the state assembly, the expenditure has continued to increase without any end in sight. Thus the entire electoral exercise is a useless extravaganza in a state rattled by recurrent famine and has a record number of suicide deaths.

These parties are traitors who sell the country’s interests to the imperialists, who have no other goal but abject self-interest. The hands of every Party and political leader are stained with the dirty commissions from innumerable scams such as Bofors, Securities scam, Tehelka, Telgi fake stamp scam, Coffins scam, liquor scam and so on involving thousands of crores of rupees of people’s money. But in the same breath they try to fool the people with the pseudo-rhetoric of development, peace and progress. They try to dupe the people with their concocted lies that Naxalites are the hurdle to development and peace.

This vicious propaganda is an integral part of the global conspiracy hatched by imperialism to drown the revolutionary movements, national liberation struggles and all the people’s movements against globalization and war in rivers of blood. But repression only breeds resistance. The bizarre plans of the Central and state governments to suppress the heroic revolutionary struggles of the peasant masses led by the CPI(ML)[People’s War] and the MCCI through their Joint Operational Command should be condemned by all the democratic forces in the country. The cold-blooded murders by the mercenary police forces; killings carried out through their covert agents and vigilante gangs; arrests, tortures, rapes and harassment of those who dare to resist and question their misdeeds; massive combings of the rural areas jointly carried out by the mercenary forces of the nine states under the Centre’s leadership to eliminate the fighting revolutionary forces and to create a reign of White terror; military and monetary aid and assistance from the US, Israel and other notorious regimes—all these are bound to be met with even greater resistance from the revolutionary masses and organizations.

It is to transform this unjust exploitative system that holds back development, to overthrow the feudal-comprador-imperialist combine who act as a deadweight on society, to put an end to the inhuman violence perpetrated by the reactionary ruling classes through the mercenary security forces, and to build a New Democratic, self-reliant India, that the revolutionaries, particularly CPI(ML)[PW] and the MCCI, have taken up arms. The revolutionary violence of the oppressed masses led by the Maoists is an inevitable response to the violence unleashed by the ruling classes to suppress the just and legitimate struggles against their exploitation and oppression.

Needless to say, it is the people who will ultimately triumph by consigning the blood-sucking, exploiting ruling classes and all their trusted representatives like the BJP and the TDP into the scrapheap of history.

<Top>