MCC IndiaThree Decades Leading Battalions of the Poor

One of the important Maoist forces in the world, a party that is little known outside of its own country, is the Maoist Communist Centre of India (MCCI), a participant in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement since 2001. This article attempts to introduce readers to the history, activities and political understanding of the MCCI. In addition to the MCCI's own documents and important contributions received from MCCI supporters, this article draws on the pamphlet entitled ---Inside MCC Country" by Aloke Banerjee, published in June 2003, excerpts of which are found later in this issue. 1 -- AWTW

When we talk about the International Communist Movement, we will certainly be talking about the Indian communist movement. This is true for different aspects and different reasons. A vast country with the second largest population of the world, India has a long history of communist movement, contemporary to that of China. Today there are a number of genuine communist forces in India, one of the most important of which is the Maoist Communist Centre of India (MCCI). The MCCI has had a decades-long glorious tradition of arousing the poor in armed revolutionary struggle against the exploiting classes. Since 2001, the MCCI has been a participating party in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM). The MCCI is particularly active in the Indian states of Jharkhand, West Bengal, Chattisgarh, Bihar and Orissa. The MCCI has developed guerrilla zones and an important degree of revolutionary political power in a vast section of Jharkhand and parts of adjoining states. These areas are populated by millions of desperately poor people, even by Indian standards, mainly from different groupings of adivasis or indigenous tribal peoples. Over the centuries these peoples have been pushed into the hilly region where land is less productive than in the fertile Ganges plain to the north in Bihar or to the west in Bengal. In these areas, schools are rare and doctors almost non-existent. A merger in the year 2003 with the former Revolutionary Communist Centre of India (Maoist) strengthened the presence of the MCCI in the north-western Indian state of the Punjab as well.2

The MCCI mobilises the masses not only to carry out the armed revolutionary struggle actions that often involve hundreds and sometimes thousands of fighters but also in the various mass mobilizations and bandhs (general strikes) that the MCCI has repeatedly called in Jharkhand. These bandhs can bring ---business as usual" to a grinding halt, even stopping the Indian state's strategic rail lines that pass through Jharkhand on the way between Delhi and Calcutta. On occasions, many thousands of peasants are mobilised to travel to Calcutta or other cities to demonstrate in favour of the revolutionary cause. While the government tries to stick the label ---terrorist" on the MCCI (as is the fashion among all reactionaries these days when it comes to slandering the revolutionary forces), in their large strategic area in which tens of millions of people live the depth of support for the MCCI is impossible to deny.

The MCCI today has a number of strong mass peasant organisations that it has mobilised broadly under the slogan of ---land to the tiller, political power to the peasant association". Organised in this way, the MCCI leads the peasants to fight back against their poverty and immiseration, which is rooted in their landless condition and in the way agriculture is organised more generally in the country, where a host of landlords, loan sharks, government bureaucrats and the like prey on the millions of peasants.

The MCCI in Action

In one case, for example, in August 2001, an armed squad under the leadership of the MCC led 1,200 people to march out at half past nine at night to the main Grand Trunk road near Kulgo village in the Hazarbagh district. There they stopped a truckload of grain and distributed half the large sacks of pulses to the masses before they were forced to retreat by the arrival of police reinforcements. Emboldened by their success, the next night an even larger group, 8,000 strong, halted five trucks on the Grand Trunk road near Titlamore village in nearby Giridih district. The slogans raised were ---confiscate the money lenders' goods to distribute amongst the poor", ---establish the authority of the revolutionary peasant committee" and ---protect the people from starvation". Banners and posters flew over the heads of the thousands of peasants. Before the goods were distributed, thirty jeep-loads of police arrived at the scene. Fierce fighting broke out, but the revolutionaries had prepared by laying mines. The police responded with grenades, followed by an intense exchange of gunfire. The police retreated, then returned in stronger numbers and attacked again. But the MCC guerrillas once again resisted their attack, boosting immensely their confidence and that of the peasants.

While the revolutionaries have sunk deep roots in broad sections of the countryside, the reactionaries have used their control of state power to sow terror and scare away support for their cause. Over two years ago when Babulal Marandi took over as Chief Minister in Jharkhand, he projected himself as a strong man, a Hitler-type figure who would ---destroy" all the revolutionary movements and struggles in the state. In one instance, a number of members of the Krantikari Kisan Committee (Revolutionary Peasants Committee), which had led an uprising earlier in the 1990s that had seen the militant involvement of hundreds of thousands of poor and middle peasants, were tracked down and caught. A special court in Gaya sentenced a number of them to life imprisonment and gave four the death penalty. The MCC called a 72-hour bandh in Bihar and Jharkhand in protest against this unjust verdict. There was massive support. A staff reporter of the revolutionary Indian quarterly Resistance Call in Ranchi reported that, ---Schools, colleges, courts, offices, shops and markets mostly remained closed. The movement of vehicles ceased in most places. All train services in the main, chord and branch railway lines came to a standstill. Thousands of people went for a sit-down on the railway track and gave vent to their voice of protest against the verdicts. The success of the bandh was total in 18 districts and 80 per cent in the other four. Business in Bihar came to a halt. The area all around seemed to have been placed under curfew&. During the three-day long bandh, the Maoists in their active protestations organized revolutionary raids with success against the police and administration at Lohardaga, Gumla and elsewhere."3

While India's press is full of lurid stories of international terrorist conspiracies, in fact the main armoury for the weapons of the revolutionaries is the Indian state itself, that is, guns seized from defeated troops and police. The revolutionaries have gone to great lengths to figure out how to deal with their situation of being greatly outgunned, but having superior morale and creativity. In one situation, General Reserve Police (GRP) forces had dispersed on a train on the Tata-Barkakhana line near Harubera station, with a pair of GRP personnel in each wagon on the train. MCC guerrillas captured the pair in the last wagon and took their weapons, then pretended to cry out for help from the pair in the adjoining wagon, as if they were in danger. When the next pair rushed into the wagon, the guerrillas captured them too, and so on, thus in the end overwhelming all the GRP personnel without firing a shot!

Much of the work of the MCCI has been among tribal peoples in north-eastern India. One focus of the struggle among these people is the use of the forest. The government has taken control of much of the forestry operation and uses this for its own coffers. In one incident, the police and forest department employees set fire to nearly 100 huts of poor tribals and Dalits (those held by Hinduism to belong in the lowest caste , sometimes referred to as ---untouchables") at Koradih village in Mirzapur, the home district of the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Rajnath Singh. The intention was to drive them out of the area. Nearby the Uttar Pradesh police shot down 16 revolutionary peasants in what they described as an ---encounter". Various human rights groups denounced the government for trying to disguise what was actually an outright execution.

The MCC and supporters from a tribal group countered and disarmed 66 jawans [soldiers]. The government was furious and offered a reward of 2.5 lakh rupees (100,000Rs = 1 lakh = $2000 US) for information leading to the capture of the Maoists -- a huge sum, more than a year's average wages in the Indian countryside. Despite this, the government learned nothing. At the same time, the government showed their contempt for the claims they had violated human rights of the tribals and Dalits by granting a cash award to the police officers responsible for the massacre.

At about 7pm on the night of 19 December 2002, while about 75 members of the Jharkhand armed police were returning with the body of a Maoist killed in the dense forest area of Sarenda, the biggest teakwood forest in Asia, they were attacked by an ambush of MCC guerrillas; 18 police were killed, 20-25 were wounded and most of the rest surrendered to the guerrillas. More than 50 weapons were captured. The police had been on a campaign of repression against the masses, particularly poor tribal people in the area, including the rape of women.

The Indian state has become increasingly alarmed at the growing strength of the MCCI along with other sections of the Indian communist movement, most notably the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (People's War), which has also made big advances in developing the armed revolutionary struggle of the peasantry in different sections of the country. The MCCI, like the CPIML(PW) and other communist forces, has come under fierce attack from the Indian state, as well as from local feudal forces and their armed goons, who together kill hundreds of communist revolutionaries and their supporters among the peasantry every year. Very often captured and unarmed revolutionaries or just peasant sympathisers are murdered in cold blood and later described as victims of ---armed encounters". New draconian laws, such as the ---Prevention of Terrorism Act" (POTA), are giving the government a free hand to repress the revolutionaries. The arch-reactionary Minister of the Interior Advani presides over regular meetings of the main government officials of the different Indian states in which armed struggle is being waged to co-ordinate the repression.

Despite the increased pressure from the reactionary state, the MCCI has been raising its ability, step by step, to defeat the reactionary attacks of the Indian Border Security Force (BSF), the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), as well as other militarised police forces. Now the MCCI says, ---We have reached a stage where it will be impossible for the government to curb our activities with the police. Sooner or later, they will have to deploy the army and we are preparing ourselves for that eventuality. To avoid a setback, the battle has to be developed to the next higher stage."4

Historical Background

In order to understand the work of the MCCI today and their perspectives, it is useful to review some of the outlines of the Indian communist movement.

The Communist Party of India was founded as part of the Third International or Comintern. But the Party, unlike the Communist Party of China under the leadership of Mao, was never able to chalk out a correct revolutionary strategy. It was only after the Second World War and the victory of the Chinese revolution that some elements of the Communist Party of India began to try to apply some of the lessons learned in China, in particular the importance of mobilising the armed revolutionary struggle of the peasantry.

The historic Telangana peasant revolutionary movement began in the late 1940s in one section of what is now the state of Andhra Pradesh in southern India. This armed movement of millions of peasants was growing like a storm before it was brutally suppressed by the Nehru government right after the formal declaration of ---independence". It was the leadership of the Communist Party of India (CPI) of that time that betrayed this revolutionary peasant movement from within. This was a historic betrayal of the revolutionary peasant movement by the mainstream CPI, which thus revealed itself, through its actions, as a revisionist party and an appendage of the Indian ruling class. Corresponding to its revisionist character, it was up to its neck in parliamentary cretinism. The degeneration was so appreciated by the reactionaries that they popularise the so-called ---first elected communist government" in the southern state of Kerala as their own victory, which in reality it was.

Internationally Mao Tsetung began a struggle against the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, led by Khrushchev, in 1963. A split with the revisionist leadership of the CPI became unavoidable. Since this meant a split from a revisionist organisation, it was necessary to raise revolutionary slogans and to gather support from the revolutionary communists and the masses. Thus at the beginning of the split the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) enjoyed the support of the revolutionaries. However, the CPI(M) took a centrist position in the international communist movement, pretending to stand equidistant between China and USSR, between Mao and Khrushchev, during the great debate, while never really accepting Mao's thorough revolutionary critique. In the course of time, the real face, the revisionist face, of the CPI(M) was further exposed, and it became indispensable to take new initiatives to form a new revolutionary party or a 'party of a new type'. Thus, the genuine communist revolutionaries in different corners of the country began new initiatives to form such a party.

It was a tough job for the Maoists to reorganise a real communist movement in India, which contained lots of rotten garbage inherited from four decades of revisionist domination. It is during this period that Comrade Charu Mazumdar hoisted the red flag against revisionism and drew a line of clear demarcation. The fruit of the revolutionary line he developed was the Naxalbari movement, named after the northern Bengal village where the armed struggle was sparked in 1967, and which quickly spread to many parts of the country. There were other comrades as well who had taken up the study of Mao's line and teachings, then known as Mao Tsetung Thought. Also inspired by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, they were calling on the genuine communists to thoroughly repudiate revisionism. Comrades Kanai Chatterjee and Amulya Sen are two outstanding leaders of the communist movement in India who dared to take up this task.

This period was marked by new and momentous developments in the Indian communist movement. Misguided and misled by various erroneous lines and different shades of right revisionism for more than four decades, the late 1960s and early 1970s were a turning point in the Indian communist movement, which gave rise to the Maoist movement in India. This important period of upheaval against revisionism and reaction gave birth to both the Communist Party of India (Marxist - Leninist) (CPI(ML)) and the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC), two major forces representing the two principal Maoist streams in the Indian communist movement. Apparently, there was broad unity among the leaders regarding the cardinal question of Indian revolution but differences remained, thus paving the way for the inception of two different Maoist organisations in India.

MCCI as a Distinct Maoist Stream

Why two different Maoist streams emerged right at the same period would be a valuable subject of investigation, but in any case it is a stark reality of the history of the Indian communist movement that everybody has to recognise.

It is very important to take note that the line of the MCCI is inherited basically right from the period of its foundation. The basic orientation was carved out during 1969 in Dakshin Desh, the Bangla language organ of the MCC during that period. Two consecutive articles, entitled ---The perspective of the Indian Revolution" and ---The tactical line of the Indian Revolution", were published on 1 May 1969 and 17 May 1969, respectively. They give a vivid picture of the perspective of the Indian revolution with the basic strategic and tactical line of new democratic revolution in India.

Comrades Kanai Chatterjee and Amulya Sen not only rebelled against the ideology and politics of revisionists but also abandoned the old tradition of ---coffee house revolutionaries". They left the city of Calcutta and chose to work in the remote backward forest area of Bihar (now most of which lies in the new state of Jharkhand). They organised class struggle based on the backward and poor peasantry and for the completion of the new-democratic revolution in India. The second generation of leadership, which is now leading the MCCI, is continuing this legacy. Facing all hardships, with a very simple life style and leadership in close relationship with the peasantry and oppressed classes, has been the MCC's style of work, which continues today. Based mainly on the principle of ---encircling the cities through the countryside" and taking the ---countryside as the main theatre of war", the MCCI has always given abundant emphasis to the work in the countryside and among the peasantry and to developing their armed struggle.

Both the MCC and CPI (ML) very correctly upheld the Chinese path as the basic path of the Indian revolution, and the leadership of the genuine communist organisations have tried to base themselves on Mao's teachings. Despite these basic similarities, it is equally true that they had separate origins, separate organisations and naturally a separate style of functioning right from the beginning.

Thus it is a fact of history that the MCC is a separate stream of the Indian communist movement, with a great wealth of experience, understanding and strength to contribute to the whole movement.

People's War as the Central Task

Right from the beginning, the MCC stood for taking up armed struggle as the main form of struggle and waging protracted people's war as the central task of the party. No party in the world can have a complete grasp and knowledge at the very beginning. As Mao has put it clearly, warfare can be learnt through warfare itself. Nevertheless, the level of clarity of the MCC during the 1960s about this vital question of revolution is important to note. This position of the MCC has been repeatedly expressed and emphasised:

---This armed revolutionary war is the war of the armed people themselves, it is 'Protracted People's War' as shown by Mao Tsetung. The concrete economic and political condition of India leads to the very conclusion that the path shown by the great leader and teacher, Mao Tsetung, the path of the Chinese Revolution, that is, &to establish a powerful people's army and people's militia and to establish dependable, strong and self-sufficient base areas in the countryside, to constantly consolidate and expand the people's army and the base areas, gradually to encircle the urban areas from the countryside by liberating the countryside, finally to capture the cities and to establish the state system and political authority of the people themselves by decisively destroying the state power of the reactionaries -- this very path of the protracted People's War is the only path of liberation of the people of India, the path of victory of the new democratic revolution."5

---The modern revisionists of the whole world without exception try to detract the people from the path of people's war, the only path of liberation of the people -- from the path of establishment of the armed state power of the revolutionary people and establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat by destroying the state machinery of the reactionary ruling classes."6

The leadership of the MCC not only accepted the theory of people's war in principle but also tried their best to apply it sincerely. They selected the remote rural backward areas of the backward state of Bihar and started to work among the poor and landless peasants, mainly from the indigenous and tribal people, and to develop the peasant movement and armed struggle in the same area. Later the Party developed guerrilla zones in those areas through a hard battle and intensive class struggle with the local zamindars (landlords), jotdars, bad gentry, their goons, their private armies, forest guards and the state police force. Steeled in harsh battle, the MCC developed guerrilla squads and militia.

The MCC also grew by analysing and deftly relating to the Jharkhand movement, a movement that began in the 1970s for the creation of a separate state for the tribal peoples occupying the hilly region of Bihar.7

In order to suppress the growing level of class struggle, the enemy has been deploying paramilitary forces in addition to the police force being used before. So, the Maoist guerrillas have to confront the paramilitary forces and special task forces trained mainly for fighting anti-guerrilla war. In accordance with this necessity, the MCCI has developed the quantity and also the quality of its armed forces, the formation has been developed from squads to platoon and company up till now and the force as a whole has been recently named the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army. It is well known that guerrilla war has to play a strategic role in the whole course of the people's war. But according to the level of development of the war, this develops from guerrilla war to mobile war and positional war. Now the struggle has developed to the point where mobile war, while still not the main form, is an increasing feature.

The founding documents of the MCC stressed the importance of base areas in the revolutionary process in India: ---If we are to build up agrarian revolution, a people's army and red base areas, we will always have to remain firm on some basic principles regarding their inter-relations. The building up and consolidation of the armed agrarian revolution, people's army and base areas -- these tasks are deeply inter-related to each other.

---Without armed agrarian revolution no people's army can be built up. Similarly, agrarian revolution cannot be advanced to its final end without a people's army.

---Again, without a people's army no base area can be built up. Similarly without base areas, the very existence of the people's army cannot be maintained.

---It is only through agrarian revolutionary guerrilla struggle and the establishment of the people's army that a red base area can be built up. Again, through this work alone the revolutionary high tide can be accelerated throughout the country, and depending on the base area and with the help of the people's army, the agrarian revolution also can be consolidated, deepened and expanded."8

Indeed, how to correctly understand these relationships and how to build red political power have been a subject of important discussion and debate in the Indian communist movement. Faced with the strength of the Indian reactionary state, establishing base areas is no easy matter, but the MCCI has made important progress in this regard in its central areas of work. The Revolutionary Peasants Committee, or KKC from its Hindi name, exercises power in the villages. This involves distributing land and crops seized from the class enemy, organising improvement works, such as digging ponds for fish production, resolving disputes and ensuring the security of the people. Cultural teams use song and dance as one means to carry the line of the revolution. In this part of India, which has long been neglected by the central authorities, formerly illiterate people are learning basic reading skills, as well as politics, in schools set up by the revolutionary authority.

New relations among the people and a new culture are emerging, step by step, in Jharkhand and elsewhere. This is particularly noticeable in the new role women are playing. In this backward area of India all sorts of superstitions and medieval customs added yet more oppressive weight on the women, in addition to the grinding poverty they shared with men. Now a large number of young women participate in all aspects of the revolutionary process - from cultural teams to the armed squads and platoons where they make up a good percentage of the troops. Child marriages, once a scourge, have been outlawed in areas under the people's control and major efforts take place to thoroughly wipe out the practice of ---witch-hunting", which leads to the deaths of hundreds of women per year in some areas. These reactionary customs are not only stopped by force, they are also the subject of intense criticism and education - indeed, this is one of the areas of focus for the MCCI's cultural teams, who produce songs and skits to ridicule and expose reactionary practices.

All-India Perspective

Although the MCCI has mainly carried out work in one section of vast India, it has a nation-wide political perspective. The earlier-mentioned merger with the RCCI(M) from Punjab gives it a stronger presence in the agricultural area north of Delhi. Even Jharkhand itself has very important industrial sections as well, especially the large steel production units run by Tata, the biggest private bureaucrat capitalist group in India. Nor are the masses of these areas cut off from the rest of India. Many desperate millions, especially men, must migrate to big cities, such as Calcutta, or to agricultural areas, such as Punjab, in search of work as day labourers. All this only underscores the importance of the developing red political power in Jharkhand and elsewhere in the perspective of the all-India revolution.

For the revolution to advance on the all-India level, the problem of a single vanguard party, based on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and united in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, is sharply posed. For a number of reasons, including history and the vast size of India, the communist movement there has developed in separate streams. The need for the unity of the genuine communists in order to withstand and eventually defeat the ferocious reactionary state is quite clear.

In the past, efforts to unite the communist forces failed. In fact, at one point in the late 1990s a very tragic situation emerged in which the forces of the CPIML(PW) and MCC were even involved in armed clashes with one another. It is important to note that the MCC responded quickly and energetically to the Appeal from the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (see AWTW 2000/26) to immediately cease such clashes and to eradicate the causes that gave rise to them. Since then, relations between the MCCI and CPIML(PW) have dramatically improved, and discussions have begun over the possibility of uniting.

Marxism-Leninism-Maoism the Guiding Ideology

A key to the MCCI's advance over the last several years has been the MCC's decision in 2000 to formulate the Party's guiding ideology as Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in place of Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Tsetung Thought, which the Party had been using since its formation. Opponents within the Party started factional and disruptive activities secretly, and later circulated a hand-written article entitled, ---Mao Thought vs Maoism", and published articles in open papers attacking Maoism. The opportunists developed a ridiculous slogan, ---Down With Maoism! Long Live Mao Thought!" The opposition was not strong organisationally, and it could have been simply ignored. But the MCCI chose a correct method of waging ideological struggle, which helped expose the wrong lines, thereby paving the way to establish Maoism further.

The MCCI Central Committee brought out a polemical document in June 2003 entitled ---Take a Correct Position in the Debate on Maoism, Hold High the Banner of Maoism". The opportunist opponents leapt out vigorously against the organisation after it took a position in favour of Maoism, which these opponents understood did not correspond to their opportunist positions on many matters, thus reaffirming that adopting Maoism is not only a change of terminology but something much more important. One of the main points of attack of the opportunists was to deny the significance of Mao's criticism of Stalin. They also strongly opposed RIM and MCCI's decision to participate in the Movement, arguing that RIM was a divisive factor.

If we judge this question through the concrete practice of the MCCI, we can clearly realise that, taking Maoism as the basis of unity, the Maoist forces are coming closer and the perspective of unity has been further enhanced. The MCCI has been able to unite with several Maoist forces already, and this process has been further advancing towards achieving the great goal of forging a single Maoist Party in India.9 Thus the importance of unity among the Maoist forces of India on the correct basis as envisioned by the South Asia Regional Conference of RIM Parties, i.e. ---based on a correct Marxist-Leninist-Maoist line and united in RIM",10 is self-evident. It is neither a matter of coincidence nor a matter of chance that all these developments towards unity among the Maoist forces in India have taken a concrete shape after MCC adopted Maoism and joined RIM and took the initiative on a correct basis.

Unity of Maoist Forces in India

After accumulating lots of experiences and passing through a long and hard course of class struggle and line struggles, and due to the changes taking place at the national and international level, the Maoist forces are now coming closer and heading towards the tremendous objective of forming a single Maoist party in India, and the question of the formation and line of such a party is coming onto the agenda of the whole movement. The MCCI, a participating party in RIM, has already united with three Maoist centres during 2003. Discussions are also going on with CPI (ML) Naxalbari, which is also a participating party of RIM. There have also been many press accounts about the possibility of unity between the MCCI and CPI(ML)(PW), the two Maoist forces with the greatest strength and experience in carrying out the armed revolutionary struggles, and this has generated widespread interest and enthusiasm among revolutionary-minded people.

The Indian communist movement thus stands at a very crucial juncture of history. The class contradictions in India, in the South Asia region and the world as a whole are sharpening. In India the class enemy is striking out more ferociously and systematically at the revolutionary forces but the perspectives for the advance of the revolution are bright indeed. A wind is blowing in favour of unity among the Maoist forces. This situation has emerged out of historical necessity, and it deserves to be given due importance. No doubt like any other breakthrough, this struggle too will be complex and will have twists and turns.

Vision of a ---New International"

Needless to say, the MCC joining RIM is a very significant event in the life of the Movement and also for the overall development of the contemporary international communist movement. RIM has set out to serve as the embryonic centre of the international communist movement and has set itself the task of working for the formation of a Communist International of a new type. In order to accomplish these tasks, it is necessary that the genuine Maoist forces in India play their full role. Already the participation of the MCCI in RIM helps makes this more of a reality. The necessary breakthrough in India in forging a unified vanguard and making a leap in the on-going people's war is closely linked to the advances, past, present and future, of forging RIM and advancing on the road toward a new International. There is no doubt that the great experience and understanding accumulated by the MCCI in its three decades of revolutionary struggle represents a vital factor not only for the further advance of the movement in India but also for the advance of the international communist movement as a whole.

Footnotes

1. The pamphlet can be ordered from New Horizon Book Trust, 57/1 Potuatola Lane, Kalkutta, 700 009 India. It includes colour illustrations of life in the guerrilla zones of the MCCI.

2. Until its merger in 2003 with the RCCI, the MCCI was known simply as the MCC; this change will be reflected in the abbreviations in this article.

3. Resistance Call, Jan-April 2002, p. 13.

4. Statement by Kamal of the Bihar-Jharkhand-Bengal special area committee of the MCCI, quoted by Bannerjee.

5. Red Star, Special Issue, p. 20. Red Star is the English language organ of the MCC.

6. Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, Vol. II, pp. 94-95.

7. How the MCC began its work and how it handled this movement are dealt with in the excerpts from Aloke Banerjee's "Inside MCC Country" to be found later in this issue.

8. Red Star, Special Issue - 1, p. 3. This article was first printed in Dakshin Desh, Bengali organ of the MCC, in June 1971, whose English version was later published in the journal Red Star on 1 May 1995.

9. In a short period of less than two years the MCC was able to unite with other Maoist forces, such as the Revolutionary Communist Centre of India (Maoist). After the unification of the MCC and RCCI(M), the name of the party was slightly changed from MCC to MCCI. Immediately after that, unity took place with the Revolutionary Communist Centre (Maoist), which was formed after a split had taken place in the MCC, some years before. There was then one more unity step with one group of the Second Central Committee of the CPI(ML), who previously were upholding the erroneous position that Lin Piao, a leader of the Chinese Communist Party who was exposed as a revisionist chieftain during the Cultural Revolution, actually was Mao's comrade-in-arms, a genuine follower of Mao and a champion of people's war. Now after a prolonged ideological struggle it dropped this position and has united with the MCCI.

10. The press communiqué of the Regional Conference of South Asian Parties and Organisations united in RIM, which was successfully held in July 2003, for the first time in the liberated area of Jharkhand under the protection of the MCCI-led People's Liberation Guerrilla Army. Red Star, Special Issue, pp. 42-43.