An Appeal
to Oppose State Repression Defend the Revolutionary Movement in
India!
From All-India Peoples Resistance Forum (AIPRF)
7 January 1999
Dear friends and Comrades,
This is an appeal before the country and the international community
to condemn the brutal repression unleashed by the Indian state against
the struggling masses of Indian people, particularly in Andhra Pradesh,
North Telangana, Bihar and the forest areas of central India popularly
known as Dandakaranya. …
The revolutionary, nationality, other democratic movements and even
all spontaneous people's struggles in India at present are facing
severe repression. The right to life and all other civil and democratic
rights are being violated with impunity. The intensification of
the imperialist onslaught with the initiation of Structural Adjustment
Policies (SAP) since 1991 and the increasing fascisisation of the
state and society have, correspondingly, added to the exploitation
and repression of the existing social order.
The revolutionary movement of Andhra Pradesh, North Telangana, Bihar
and Dandakaranya constitute the core of the revolutionary people's
movement in India today. More than a hundred million people are
part and parcel of this ongoing revolutionary movement in these
regions. Directly or indirectly all these people are subjected to
severe repression by the various state (provincial) Governments
and the Central Government. Today, the agrarian revolution in India
has sunk its roots with the masses and is gradually spreading to
other regions. The people in the revolutionary movement are waging
relentless struggle against the feudal and pro-imperialist ruling
classes.
The revolutionary movements in Bihar on the one hand, and Andhra
Pradesh, North Telangana and Dandakaranya on the other, fought fierce
battles in the last 20 years with the feudal landlords and compradors,
and have broken the feudal shackles, instilled a sense of confidence
among the rural masses and brought relief to the general masses.
Hundreds of thousands of acres of land were occupied in all these
regions and distributed among the landless (though, often, the government
does not allow the landless peasants who occupied the land to till
it). The land struggles are continuing. The Indian state reacts
by killing the revolutionary leaders and the people who are actively
participating in the struggles. The Indian state has been actively
supporting the landlord classes by using all its armed forces. It
is because the land reform laws of the government became a hoax
over the last fifty years that the rural masses have been fighting
to seize land from the feudal landlords. The feudal relations, bonded
labour and medieval practices of subjugation are continuing through
the caste system and the highly unequal land relations. It is against
these oppressive social relations that the rural people are fighting,
under the leadership of the revolutionary organisations. With people's
developmental projects and new visions and goals set with the formation
of embryonic forms of people's power in revolutionary struggle areas,
the revolutionary and democratic movements are growing from strength
to strength....
In the latest phase of repressive onslaught, a large number of people
are being killed in the name of encounters. Sometimes whole squads
have been wiped out. The police and the paramilitary forces in Andhra
Pradesh, North Telangana, Dandakaranya and Bihar have been given
unlimited powers. Every year in North Telangana and in the rest
of Andhra Pradesh, around 200 people are killed in the name of armed
encounters. In 1998, 290 people were killed in the supposed encounters,
while 159 people were killed in 1997, 161 in 1996 and 256 in 1992.
Generally, the leaders, activists and common people (supporters
or sympathisers) are picked up by the police from their houses or
shelters and shot dead after interrogation and torture. Normally
the dead bodies are not handed over to the kith and kin. In the
last few years, people have come out in thousands to claim the dead
bodies of the revolutionaries. The state is, once again, repressing
these movements as well.…
The state police are now using grenades, crude bombs, poisonous
gases, and even land mines to kill the revolutionary activists and
people. Chandrababu Naidu, the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh,
the blue-eyed boy of the World Bank and Bill Gates (of Microsoft
Corporation), now has navy helicopters to rush the killer "greyhounds"
(a sophisticated and deadly special task force) in the flash of
a second. By using greyhounds and helicopters, 13 members of the
People's War Party were hunted down and killed in the Orissa-A.P.
border area. …
As part of these operations, the police stormed into the houses
of mass organisation activists and destroyed their houses. The police
come on motor vehicles and also in convoys of 10-15 jeeps and beat
up the villagers, including children and women. The small shopkeepers,
employees, local political representatives and even the schoolteachers
are not spared. To carry on this kind of white terror and to root
out the revolutionary movement, each of the state governments has
been constructing roads into the interior places. When such attempts
are resisted by the people, even the army is brought in to construct
the roads.
Since the early 1980s, around 3000 revolutionary leaders and activists
were murdered and several thousands of revolutionary masses were
killed by the private armies of landlords and the government armed
forces in the struggle areas of CPI (ML) People's War, the Maoist
Communist Centre (MCC) and CPI (ML) Party Unity, i.e. in Andhra
Pradesh, North Telangana, Dandakaranya and Bihar. Special reference
needs to be made about the countless number of custodial deaths
which, more often than not, are passed off as missing cases, with
evidences destroyed. Further, mention needs to be made about the
hundreds of political prisoners languishing in Indian jails. In
many cases, they are kept in solitary confinement with neither chargesheets
filed nor trials taken. …
The rise, particularly since the mid 1980s, of Hindu communal fascist
forces represented by the political parties Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) and Shiv Sena and the numerous militant Hindu outfits supporting
them (VHP, Bajrang Dal, etc.), portends the prospects of even more
severe repression on the people's movements. The Hindu fascist forces,
today, are the meeting-ground of all reaction. They have been polarising
society on the basis of religion, thus pitting people against each
other, by engineering communal riots. They have grown up with the
massive support of the Indian state machinery and dominant class
forces who count on them as the ultimate guarantors of the status
quo, who could save them from the wrath of the people's movements.…
AIPRF earnestly appeals for the support of the toiling people of
the international community and all democratically minded people,
on behalf of the struggling peoples of India, who today are waging
a war against all odds of repression and exploitation. The prospects
of the liberation of the peoples of India, a most important country
in the imperialist world system, would definitely have a telling
impact upon the collective destinies of all the struggling peoples
of the world.
Contact:
G.N. Saibaba,
General Secretary, AIPRF
PD-50A,
Vishakha Enclave, Pitampura,
Delhi-110 034, India.
Phone: 91-11- 7466155
(also Fax).
E-mail: aiprf@hotmail.com
Fax: 91 - 11- 7458953.