In previous articles, we talked about the armed struggle waged by separatist groups in various states of India. However, it is not only religious and national minorities who are taking arms against the central government. For a long time, the ideological heirs of Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong - the Indian Maoists - have also been waging a civil war in India. The impressive part of Hindustan, from the extreme south and northeast, up to the border with Bangladesh, even received the name "Red Corridor" in world political literature. After all, it is here, in the states of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, West Bengal, that the so-called "Naxalites" have been fighting for many years.
Revolutionary fire of Naxalbari village
The Naxalites of the Maoist guerrillas were nicknamed by the name of the village of Naxalbari, where in 1967 an armed uprising of communists from the radical wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) against the central government broke out. The village of Naxalbari is located in West Bengal, near the Indian-Nepalese border. Ironically, across the border, in Nepal, where the Maoists were largely unknown in 1967, the Maoist Communist Party ultimately succeeded in overthrowing the royal regime. In India itself, the Maoists are still waging a civil war. At the same time, the village of Naxalbari is considered a place of pilgrimage for radicals from all over Hindustan. After all, it was with Naxalbari that the history of the Indian "Red Corridor" and the hostilities, nicknamed the "People's War" by the Maoists, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), which was the "alma mater" of the entire Indian Maoist movement, began.
Although the leader of the Naxalite uprising, the legendary communist Charu Mazumdar (1918-1972), died under mysterious circumstances in a police station shortly after being detained 42 years ago, in 1972, the Indian government has not been able to defeat his followers today. The woodlands of the Indian states that are part of the Red Corridor play a role, but we must not forget about the massive support of the guerrillas from the peasant population.
The hotbed of the Naxalite uprising in the late 1960s. became West Bengal. This Indian state is densely populated - according to official figures alone, more than 91 million people live on its territory. Secondly, in West Bengal there are very strong social problems associated not only with the dense population, but also with the consequences of the Bangladesh War of Independence, which led to the resettlement of millions of refugees to India. Finally, the land problem is very acute in West Bengal. The radical communist insurgents attracted the sympathy of the peasant masses precisely by promising the latter a solution to the land question, i.e. forcible redistribution of land by large landowners in favor of landless and land-poor peasants.
1977 to 2011 in West Bengal, the communists were in power. Although they represented the more politically moderate Communist Party of India (Marxist), the very fact of the left forces in power in such an important Indian state could not but give hope to their more radical like-minded people for the speedy construction of socialism. Moreover, the Maoist rebels of India all this time were supported by China, which hopes, with the help of the followers of Mao Zedong on the Indian subcontinent, to significantly weaken its southern rival and gain leverage in South Asia. For the same purpose, China supported the Maoist parties in Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
West Bengal has become the epicenter of the "people's war", which over the last three decades of the twentieth century has spread to the territory of the "Red Corridor". When moderate communists from the CPI (Marxist) came to power in West Bengal, the Maoists were actually able to conduct legal campaigning and even establish their bases and camps in the rural areas of the state. In exchange, they promised not to make armed sorties in territory controlled by their more moderate associates.
Adivasi - the social base of the "people's war"
Gradually, the role of a hotbed of armed resistance passed to the neighboring states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. The specificity of these states is that, in addition to the Hindus proper - Bengalis, Biharians, Marathas, Telugu - there are also numerous aboriginal tribes. In racial terms, they represent an intermediate type between Indians and Australoids, approaching the Dravids of South India, and ethnolinguistically they belong to the Austro-Asian branch and are included in the so-called. “The family of the Munda peoples”.
This family includes both the Munda and Santalas proper, as well as smaller ethnic groups - Korku, Kharia, Birkhor, Savari, etc. The total number of the Munda peoples exceeds nine million. At the same time, throughout their history, they were outside the traditional Indian caste system. In fact, in caste society, non-membership in the caste system provided them with a place for the "untouchables," that is, at the very bottom of the social hierarchy of Indian society.
In India, the forest peoples of the central and eastern states are usually summarized under the name "adivasi". Initially, adivasis were forest dwellers, and it was the forest that was their natural habitat and, accordingly, the sphere of economic interests. As a rule, the economic life of an adivasi was confined to a village located in the forest. The Adivasi tribes were engaged in subsistence farming and contacted neighboring communities only as needed, including for the exchange of medicinal plants, fruits, etc. collected in the forest.
Considering that most of the adivasis were engaged in primitive agriculture, or even fishing and gathering, their standard of living was far below the poverty line. Economically, adivasis are markedly backward. Until now, in the territory of the central and eastern states of India, there are tribes that are not familiar with arable farming, or even completely focused solely on the collection of medicinal plants. The low level of economic development is also due to the total poverty of the adivasi, which is especially clearly manifested in modern conditions.
In addition, adivasis are exploited by more developed neighbors - both Indo-Aryans and Dravids. Using their financial and power resources, landowners from among the representatives of the higher castes drove adivasis from their lands, forcing them to engage in farm laborers or turn into urban pariahs. Like many other peoples, cut off from their usual conditions of existence, adivasis outside the forest environment instantly turn into outcasts of society, often degrading both morally and socially and, ultimately, dying.
At the end of the twentieth century, the situation was aggravated by the increased attention to the lands inhabited by adivasis on the part of large timber and mining companies. The fact is that East India is rich in both forest and mineral resources. However, in order to gain access to them, it is necessary to free the territory from the indigenous population living on it - the same adivasis. Although the adivasis are the indigenous peoples of India and lived on the peninsula long before the emergence of the Indo-Aryan ethnic groups, their legal right to live on their land and possession of its resources does not bother either the Indian authorities or foreign industrialists who have laid eyes on the forests of Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal and other East Indian states. Meanwhile, the deployment of mining in the area of direct residence and management of adivasis inevitably entails their eviction outside the villages, the cessation of traditional industries and, as we noted above, complete marginalization and slow extinction.
When the Maoists expanded their activities outside West Bengal, they looked to adivasis as a potential social base. At the same time, the sympathy of the Maoists was caused not only by the extremely low position of the adivasis in the social hierarchy of modern Indian society and their almost universal poverty, but also by the preservation of significant components of the communal system, which could be considered as a favorable basis for the approval of communist ideas. Let us recall that in the neighboring states of Indochina, in particular in Burma, the Maoists relied primarily on the support of the socio-economic backward and oppressed mountain peoples.
Salva Judum in the service of the Indian government
On the other hand, the Indian authorities, and above all the landowners and industrialists, realizing perfectly well that it is easy to turn the disadvantaged adivasis into their puppets, even if they are interested in even a little money, they are recruiting thousands of representatives of the forest peoples into the ranks of paramilitaries serving the local rich and timber companies. As a result, adivasis become involved in the process of mutual annihilation. Private military units are destroying the villages of their own tribes, killing fellow tribesmen. In turn, peasants en masse join the ranks of the Maoist insurgents and attack police stations, landowners' estates, and the headquarters of pro-government political organizations.
The Indian government is actually replicating the colonial policies of its British predecessors. Only if the British colonized India, exploiting its wealth, then the modern Indian authorities colonize their own territory, turning it into an "inner colony." Even the adivasi policy is very similar to the colonial one. In particular, villages and tribal communities are divided into “friendly” and “hostile”. The former are loyal to the authorities, the latter, as it should be, are in opposition and participate in the armed struggle of the Maoists. In its quest to suppress the Maoist "people's war", the Indian government, like the colonialists in their time, seeks to act on the principle of "divide and conquer", relying on the support of "friendly" adivasis.
Using the experience of colonial predecessors, the Indian authorities are actively using units of security forces against the Naxalites, recruited in completely different regions of the country, from representatives of ethnoculturally alien peoples. So, police regiments are actively used, staffed by representatives of the Naga and Mizo ethnic groups - people from the states of Nagaland and Mizoram, which are widely known for their military traditions and skills. Since 2001, the Naga battalion has been in the state of Chhattisgarh. On the other hand, the state authorities, with the support of the police leadership, are promoting the formation of private squads of landowners and paramilitary pro-government organizations, recruiting their fighters from among the adivasis themselves. The Maoists themselves accuse the Indian authorities of using American counterinsurgency instructors to train police personnel.
Since 2005, the Salva Judum movement has been operating in the "tribal zone", inspired by the Indian government under the direct organizational and financial leadership of the local feudal elite. The task of this movement is an anti-insurrectionary struggle, relying on the forces of the adivasi peasantry itself. Thanks to government propaganda, financial injections and the activities of traditional tribal authorities, many adivasis side with the government forces in the fight against the Maoists. They form their own patrols to search for and destroy the rebels. Adivasi youth auxiliary police officers are recruited to participate in these patrols.
Auxiliary police officers are not only paid a good salary by the standards of an adivasi, but also are given weapons, food, and most importantly, many of the young adivasis, joining Salva Judum, get the opportunity to subsequently enter the personnel police service, that is, to arrange their future fate in a way that it would never have been set up in a village or rebel camp. Of course, a significant part of the auxiliary policemen are the first to die in clashes with the Maoist rebels, especially considering that their weapons and uniforms are much worse than that of the regular security forces, and the training also leaves much to be desired (many auxiliary police officers are generally minor teenagers who enroll into these detachments, guided rather by romantic motives).
The brutality of "Salva Judum" towards not only the rebels - the Maoists, but also towards the ordinary peasants of the Adivasi is impressive. Like the police officers who were in the service of the Nazis during the war years, auxiliary police officers in India hope, with their cruelty, to bargain from the owners for a more significant salary or to be enrolled in the police cadre. Therefore, tracking down the rebels, they deal with the peasants who sympathize with them. Thus, villages where the Maoists enjoy the influence and support of the local population are burned to the ground. At the same time, residents are forcibly resettled in government camps. Cases of mass murder of civilians by auxiliary units, sexual crimes have repeatedly become known.
International organizations draw attention to the inadmissibility of violence by police forces against the civilian population. However, the Indian government prefers not to disseminate information about the actual situation in the "tribal zone" and, above all, in the so-called. "Government camps" where adivasis are forcibly resettled from villages formerly under the control of Maoist rebel groups. Although in 2008 the Chhattisgarh state government suspended the activities of the Salva Judum units, in fact they continued to exist under other guise, without changing their essence and tactics with respect to the Maoists and the peasant population that supported them.
It should be noted that the adivasis, despite the plight of their overwhelming majority, also have their own elite, relatively prosperous even by the standards of the more advanced Indo-Aryans. First of all, these are tribal feudal lords and landowners, traditional clergy, who are in close cooperation with government officials of state administrations, police command, large timber and mining corporations. It is they who directly lead the part of the adivasi formations that oppose the Maoist rebels.
On May 25, 2013, a motorcade of the Indian National Congress Party was attacked by Maoist rebels. The attack killed 24 people, including sixty-two-year-old Mahendra Karma. This richest man in the state of Chhattisgarh was himself an adivasi by origin, but due to his social position in society he never associated his own interests with the needs of his oppressed peasant tribesmen. It was Karma who stood at the origins of Salva Judum and, according to the Maoists, directly responsible for placing over 50 thousand adivasis of the Dantewada district in government concentration camps.
"People's War": Does the Revolution Have an End?
Despite the efforts of the central government and state administrations to suppress the hotbed of guerrilla in East and Central India, until recently, neither the security and police forces, nor the paramilitaries of private companies and Salva Judum have been unable to overcome the armed resistance of the Red guerrillas. This is largely due to the support of the Maoists in various strata of the population, due to the very specifics of the socio-economic and political situation in modern India and, especially, in its central and eastern states.
It is noteworthy that the Maoists also find supporters among the upper strata of the population. As in Nepal, a significant part of the Indian Maoist leadership is made up of people from the highest caste of Brahmins. In particular, Kishendzhi was also a Brahman by birth, aka Koteswar Rao (1956-2011) - the legendary leader of the Maoist guerrillas in Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal, who was killed in a clash with government forces on November 25, 2011. Having received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in his youth, Kishendzhi rejected a scientific career and, from the age of 18, devoted himself to the revolutionary struggle in the ranks of the Maoist Communist Party. However, the vast majority of modern Maoists in the states of East and Central India are still adivasis. According to media reports, among the Indian political prisoners - Maoists, who number up to 10 thousand people, adivasis make up no less than 80-90%.
The Communist Party of India (Maoist), which in 2004 united the most active armed organizations - the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) "People's War" and the Maoist Communist Coordination Center, managed to rally up to 5,000 armed militants in its ranks. The total number of supporters and sympathizers, on whose help the Maoists can rely in their daily activities, totals no less than 40-50 thousand people. The armed wing of the party is the Rebel Army for the Liberation of the People. The organization is divided into detachments - "dalams", in each of which there are approximately 9 to 12 fighters (that is, it is a kind of analogue of a reconnaissance and sabotage group). In the states of East India, there are dozens of "dalams", as a rule, staffed by young representatives of the Adivasi peoples and "revolutionary romantics" from among the urban intelligentsia.
In India, the Maoists are actively using the concept of "liberated areas", which provides for the creation of separate territories not controlled by the government and fully controlled by rebel groups. In the "liberated territory" the people's power is proclaimed and, in parallel with the implementation of armed operations against government forces, the Maoist rebels are working to form parallel structures of command and public organization.
In a wooded mountainous area at the junction of the borders of the states of Anjhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Maharashtra, Maoist armed groups managed to create the so-called Dan Dakaranya Special Zone. In fact, these are areas where the authority of the central Indian government and the state government does not operate. The adivasi villages here are under the complete control of the Maoists, who not only organize their military bases, training centers and hospitals here, but also carry out all the fullness of day-to-day management.
First of all, the Maoists carried out a number of economic reforms in the territory they controlled - land was redistributed in favor of ordinary communes, usury was prohibited, and the system of crop distribution was modernized. Own governing bodies have been created - People's Revolutionary Committees (Janatana Sarkar), which include the Peasant Workers' Union and the Revolutionary Women's Union. Branches of unions - sangams - perform the basic functions of rural self-government. That is, they are responsible for agricultural work, social protection of villagers, their medical care and education.
The Maoists are organizing schools where adivasi children, formerly illiterate, are taught, medical services are provided to the population, and rural libraries are being opened (nonsense for remote regions of Central India!). Likewise, prohibitive measures of a progressive nature are being carried out. Thus, child marriages, debt slavery and other remnants of an archaic society are prohibited. Significant efforts are being made to increase the productivity of peasant farms, in particular, peasants are being trained in more effective farming methods. That is, from the point of view of respecting the interests of the indigenous population, the communist rebels do not look like extremists. Rather, they represent the interests of the indigenous tribes, helping to raise their standard of living and discouraging aggressive actions by timber merchants and landowners.
At the same time, the Maoist rebels, operating in the "liberated territories", carried out compulsory measures, in particular, they conscripted young people, both male and female, into partisan units. Naturally, repressive measures are also carried out against the peasant elders, former elders and clergymen who disagree with the policy of the Maoist party in the villages. There are also death sentences by Maoists against local residents protesting against their activities in the "liberated territories".
In many ways, the current situation is determined by the conservation of social foundations in modern Indian society. The preservation of the caste system makes it impossible for a genuine equality of the population of the country, which in turn pushes the representatives of the lower castes into the ranks of the revolutionary organizations. Despite the fact that a movement for the rights of untouchables and indigenous peoples has been growing in India over the past several decades, the practical policy of the Indian government, especially at the regional level, sharply differs from the declared humanistic goals. Local oligarchs are also making their contribution to the escalation of violence, who are only interested in financial gain, and specifically in making a profit as a result of the sale of timber and mineral raw materials to foreign companies.
Of course, the guerrilla war carried out by the Maoists in the states of the "red corridor" does not contribute to the improvement of the socio-economic situation in India. Often, the actions of the Maoists turn into an escalation of violence, entailing the death of hundreds of civilians. It is also difficult to deny a certain cruelty shown by the rebels even to the civilian population of the "liberated territories" in the event that the latter violates ideological dogmas and decisions of the "people's power". But, one cannot but give credit to the rebels in that they are, albeit mistaken in something, but still fighters for the real interests of adivasis. In contrast to the government, which, following the traditions of the still old colonial British India, seeks only to squeeze out the largest possible profit from the subject territories, completely not interested in the future of the people living there.
Reconciliation of the parties in the "people's war" that has not ceased for more than forty years in East and Central India can hardly be achieved without fundamental transformations in the social and economic spheres of the country's life. Naturally, the Indian government and, moreover, the financial oligarchy and feudal landowners, will never go to the real improvement of living conditions for adivasis. The profit received from the sale of natural resources and forests, the exploitation of forest territories that once belonged to the adivasis will outweigh, especially since we can talk about the presence of a foreign factor - interested foreign companies, whose owners are certainly not interested in the fate of unknown "tribal people" in hard-to-reach corners distant India.
