Release activists arrested for protesting Nonadanga evictions in Kolkata
Friends :
We are deeply concerned by your government’s arrest of seven democratic rights activists and its earlier detention of residents of the Nonadanga slum on April 8, 2012 at Ruby junction. These activists were engaged in a peaceful sit-in demonstration attended by a broad spectrum of left organisations and individuals of good conscience, demanding rehabilitation of hundreds of residents evicted from the Nonadanga slum of Kolkata on March 30, 2012. The peaceful character of their protest is a matter of public record, documented by various media reports. Accordingly, we are shocked and dismayed at the response of your police forces to these democratic protests..
Kindly read and sign the enclosed petition on the Nonadanga situation.
This is meant to be a simple and brief exposition of the goals and strategies of the Maoist movement in India for people who may not have much awareness about it and are confused by the propaganda in the mainstream media. This does not go into the arcane debates about mode of production in India, the debates among communist revolutionaries over strategy and tactics etc. This aims at people who, for example, are perplexed why the Maoists, instead of trying to ensure safe drinking water like an NGO, rather, often resort to violent activities against the Government.
The Indian government is launching a full-scale war against the Maoist rebels and the people led by them in different parts of the country. The initial battles, without any formal announcement, have already started. For this purpose, they intend to deploy about 75,000 security personnel in parts of Central and Eastern India, including Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Jharkhand. The government will organize its regular air-force in addition to paramilitary and specially trained COBRA forces. The air-force has begun to extend its logistic support.
A great many of us attracted to revolutionary politics in the U.S. (and similar “developed” countries) often see radical change through the prism of our surrounding society — where feudalism has been largely absorbed into capitalist agriculture, and where only a small-and-declining proportion of the working classes are on the land.
So when revolutionaries in the third world (for example: India, Nepal, Peru, Turkey) talk of the political tasks facing both communists and the people because of major feudal elements — the discussion often seems a bit strange. Their discussion involves problems of genuine national independence, village-level land reform, basic industrial development, basic infrastructure (roads, sewage, electrification…), ending the patriarchy of peasant life… burning questions that aren’t concerns of any revolutionary movement in the U.S.
And meanwhile the face of the Third World is changing — rapidly — with profound implications for the politics, economics and revolutions of today’s world. Islands of imperialist-style production (and even social structures with broad bourgeoisified strata etc.) are emerging in former colonial areas and anchoring regional markets — within South Africa, Bangalore in India, Singapore in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Shanghai in China, even in their own way, Israel and Dubai within the still impoverished Middle East. And tremendous transformations are happening in third world agriculture — including capitalist development (dams, factories) and capitalist farming that are changing the face of village life and provoking powerful resistance.
S0, for many reasons, revolutionaries in the U.S. need to understand the conditions, theories and history of Third World revolution. I want to open the discussion here by simply sketching some ongoing controversies and peeling back to show some ways they affect our global political unities and theoretical challenges.
Capitalism or socialism: Two roads in the poorer countries
Jan Makandal gave us one place to start when he wrote in a nearby discussion:
“A theoretical error made by the proponents of the bourgeois revolution stage, they identify two antagonistic modes of productions capitalism, however deformed and dominated it is, and feudalism as two modes of productions existing equally thus the concept of semi. This identification is a mechanical approach of contradictions. In the reality contradictory phenomenon always exist in struggle, even on their relative correspondence, and the objective of these struggle are for dominance and annihilation of the opposite and as materialist we do need to understand all the prevailing tendencies to understand the direction and the path this annihilation is going and mostly qualitatively. For example, most of those feudal landlords are heavily indebted to capitalist. For me even in most of those social formation feudalism is strong but it is stagnant as well and capitalism is deformed, dominated but emerging.
“So inside these social formation I would not deduct that they are semi feudal and semi capitalism but recognize the existence of these two modes of productions and as well recognize capitalism as dominant and making it the dominant elements to deal with into those social formations. Concluding no to bourgeois revolutions, an opportunist and revisionist political line but yes to a revolution under the leaderships of the proletariat.”
Jan is (i believe) critiquing a concept Mao developed– “semifeudal semicolonial” — which Mao used to describe conditions in China in the 1920s and 1930s, and which have since been applied(by Maoists) to other countries in the Third World. Mao’s initial analysis was an important breakthrough — in ways that will become clear. And it is still a controversial one today — for reasons that Jan makes clear.
I welcome that Jan is broaching these questions… and i want to address some points he raises.
So lets start here: So what does this mean, “semifeudal, semicolonial,” and what kind of a strategic revolutionary road has that been connected with over the last century? And how does it relate to the changing forms of global oppression today?
Panda’s laptop helped securitymen lay trap for Kishenji
Nov 25, 2011
A laptop confiscated recently from a top Maoist leader Sabyasachi Panda’s hideout in Odisha is believed to have helped the security forces carry anti-Maoist operation against Mallojula Koteshwar Rao alias Kishenji.
According to sources, the laptop was analysed by top analysts in Delhi to locate the whereabouts of the no 3 leader in the Maoist hierarchy.
According to sources, security forces including the CRPF had surrounded Kishenji and a few other top leaders in the forests of West Bengal on Wednesday itself. However, Kishenji managed to give police the slip only to land in the middle of yet another ambush. An encounter for half an hour resulted in his killing.
Panda’s laptop is believed to have provided several important clues about the whereabouts of other leaders including another politburo member Akkiraju Ramakrishna alias RK. According to soruces, RK was earlier spotted in the Andhra-Orissa border. However, a miscommunication among the security forces in cornering him allowed him to escape the police net recently. Though unconfirmed, sources said the next target would be RK since his location has almost been confirmed.
We received the terrible news that the leading Indian Maoist Kishenji (AKA Mallojula Koteswara Rao) was murdered in by government forces in a “fake encounter.” Kishenji was a leading figure and spokesman for India’s Maoist (Naxalite) movement — and reportedly the military leader of their embryonic popular armed forces.
The following is one of the more recent accounts of outrage and exposure.
Our hearts are with the brave communist fighters of India and the hundreds of millions of oppressed people who dream of liberation.
Varvara Rao:
Maoist leader Kishenji was tortured before being killed
Telugu poet and Maoist sympathiser Varvara Rao Friday alleged that top Maoist leader Kishenji was tortured before being killed in a fake encounter and demanded a white paper from the West Bengal government.
“Kishenji was subjected to inhuman torture as his body bore marks of several injuries and he was killed in a fake encounter 24 hours after being nabbed. I demand a white paper on the killing,” Rao told reporters at the state secretariat.
Nepal is a classic border region – to the south lie the humid, densly populated plains of India. To the North, over the ice-peaks of the Himalayan ridge, is the Tibetan plateau, today dominated harshly and uneasily by the expansive new Chinese powerhouse.
So bookstores here in Katmandu, the main city of Nepal, are entwined with geo-politics, and are often consciously implanted to influence the direction of events.
For example, Tibetan bookstores are everywhere in Kathmandu. They have many purposes. First, they are there to promote the claims that the Dalai Lama (and the apparatus of Buddhists monks) have on the political future of Tibet. They are there to connect with Kathmandu’s tourist trade, and keep the issues of pre-communist Tibet before them. And they are also there as a kind of projection of power: Because the base area of the Dalai Lama’s forces is to the South, across the Nepal-India border, in India. And Tibet itself lies to the north, across the Nepal-China border. And for over fifty years now, the Lamaists have used Nepal as a forward base area – from the CIA-backed guerrilla attacks into China during the 1960s, to the monk demonstrations against the Chinese control in the 1990s.
When I walked in, the bookstore was full of Buddhist works and new-age white people. Of course, most prominently featured are the works of the Dalai Lama. Two entire walls in the store are dedicated the writings of the Dalai Lama. One book is entirely dedicated to photographs of the Dalai Lama.
I thought to myself that “the Dalai Lama’s cult of personality is large enough to make Stalin blush.”
Charu Mazumdar, leader of the armed Naxalbari uprising of peasants and founder of the modern Maoist movement
Charu Mazumdar was the communist leader of India’s 1967 uprising in the village of Naxalbari — an opening shot of a fierce revolutionary wave that raged for years. This daring act of revolt created the Naxalite movement — the heart of India’s modern revolutionary effort.
Charu Mazumdar became one of the most wanted men in India, and was captured by police in 1971. He died ten days later at 4 am on July 28, 1972 — in Lal Bazar lock-up – a prison notorious for torture. Today, July 28, we remember him and the many martyrs in India’s great historic struggle for liberation and communism.
In 2007, several of us were looking for a form to write our first Kasama manifesto. We wanted to use a style sharply different from Bob Avakian (whose rambling, self-indulgent style reflects key weaknesses of his method). We chose to study closely the “Eight Documents” of Charu Mazumdar (plus early pieces by Turkey’s Maoist Ibrahim Kaypakkaya). The result was the format we adopted — “9 Letters to Our Comrades.”
Indian army sets up anti-guerrilla warfare training camp in central India
13 June 2011. A World to Win News Service. During the first week of June, the Indian army began moving into the Bastar region in the southern part of the state of Chhattisgarh, in central India, to set up what officials describe as an installation to train soldiers in jungle warfare. This area is a centre of the revolutionary movement of Adivasi (tribal) people led by the Communist Party of India (Maoist), and it is adjacent to the vast region of eastern and central India that the “Naxals”, as the Indian Maoists are known, have made their stronghold.
Indian media have reported that several columns totalling 500 “jawans” (soldiers) and officers have reached Abujhmad in Narayanpur District, where 750 square kilometres of land has been allotted for the camp. A statement from the CPI(M) refers to a thousand central government troops. The 4 June statement says that while details remain secret, there has been talk that the central authorities plan to set up two more jungle warfare schools in the area. It warns that as these troops are trained, they are likely to be sent elsewhere in Chhattisgarh and also to Maharashtra, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Western Ghats, West Bengal, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, all areas where the Maoists have been leading struggles by Adivasis and other rural people. This is an escalation of “Operation Green Hunt”, a military campaign against the people in the Maoist-led Adivasi areas. (For CPI[M] documents, see www.bannedthought.net)
Following is another press release, put out by the CPI(M) Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee 3 June, explaining and opposing this army deployment. The vast forests of Dandakaranya extend through the states of Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Maharastra and Orissa.
Short Report on Arundhati Roy Meeting on 12th June
My Impressions
by Nickglais
Arundhati Roy spoke to an audience of about 500 people at Friends Meeting House in Euston about the War on the People of India by the Indian State on 12th June 2011.
My impressions of the meeting are very positive as Arundhati’s resistance to the murderous activities of the Indian State is an inspiration and listening to her energises you for further struggle.
She told the audience about her recent speech at School of Oriental and African Studies when she was confronted by a hostile questioner who said she should be thankful she was born in India the world’s largest democracy has if she had been born in China she would be in prison.
Here is a second document connected to the new 5th Conference of CCOMPOSA. Last week we published the press statement that announced the event.
We would like to remind our readers, however, that we still do not have a number of crucial details — including which parties attended. This means that it is still unclear who these documents are speaking for. We will post more details as they become available.
Political resolution adopted by the 5th Conference of CCOMPOSA, March 2011
On the Current Situation and Tasks
Since the 4th Conference of the Co-ordination Committee of Maoist Parties and Organisations of South Asia (CCOMPOSA) held in 2006, there have been significant developments in the world and in South Asia. These changes have given rise to both challenges and opportunities. Guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the unity among the constituents of CCOMPOSA and their joint activities will surely strengthen the revolutionary struggles and initiatives going on in the different countries of South Asia and be a catalyst in facing up to these challenges and seizing the opportunities. This has a significance going far beyond the boundaries of South Asia.
Many of our readers will recognize that this might be an important development — if the revolutionary groups who have previously been united within CCOMPOSA have met in their fifth conference.
We do not yet have significant details — including who attended. This means that it is still unclear who this press release is speaking for.
We will post more details as they become available.
The following is their public statement (brought to our attention by banned thought).
Press Release of CCOMPOSA
The 5th Conference of the Co-ordination Committee of Maoist Parties and Organisations of South Asia (CCOMPOSA) was successfully completed in early March.
The delegates took up analysis of the current political situation in order to identify its main features. They noted the fall out of the global crisis, the devastations it has caused among the masses, the wave of struggles in imperialist citadels triggered of by the crisis and the recent series of popular upsurges in Arab countries, apart from developments in South Asia such as the successful withstanding of Maoists in India of the state’s counter-revolutionary offensive.
The Hindu published the following cable. Alastair Reith wrote an analysis of what it means and reveals.
The Hindu’s introduction:
“On June 15, Indian Ambassador Shiv Shankar Mukherjee confirmed to the Ambassador that the Government of India had taken a tougher line on Maoist abuses. Mukherjee’s recent visit to New Delhi had coincided with the visit of Communist Party of Nepal – United Marxist Leninist General Secretary Madhav Kumar Nepal.”
* * * * * * *
112456 6/18/2007 13:21 07KATHMANDU1197 Embassy Kathmandu SECRET//NOFORN 07KATHMANDU1112|07KATHMANDU1197 “VZCZCXRO8272OO RUEHCIDE RUEHKT #1197/01 1691321ZNY SSSSS ZZHO 181321Z JUN 07FM AMEMBASSY KATHMANDUTO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC IMMEDIATE 6311INFO RUEHBJ/AMEMBASSY BEIJING PRIORITY 5863RUEHLM/AMEMBASSY COLOMBO PRIORITY 6169RUEHKA/AMEMBASSY DHAKA PRIORITY 1399RUEHIL/AMEMBASSY ISLAMABAD PRIORITY 4194RUEHLO/AMEMBASSY LONDON PRIORITY 5468RUEHNE/AMEMBASSY NEW DELHI PRIORITY 1610RUEHCI/AMCONSUL KOLKATA PRIORITY 3602RUEKJCS/SECDEF WASHDC PRIORITYRUCNDT/USMISSION USUN NEW YORK PRIORITY 2784RHEFDIA/DIA WASHDC PRIORITYRHMFISS/CDR USPACOM HONOLULU HI PRIORITYRUEAIIA/CIA WASHDC PRIORITYRHEHNSC/NSC WASHDC PRIORITY” “S E C R E T SECTION 01 OF 02 KATHMANDU 001197
SIPDIS
NOFORN SIPDIS
E.O. 12958: DECL: 06/18/2017 TAGS: PREL, PGOV, PTER, KDEM, MARR, IN, NP SUBJECT: NEPAL: INDIAN OFFICIALS TAKE TOUGHER STAND ON MAOISTS
REF: KATHMANDU 1112
Classified By: Ambassador James F. Moriarty. Reasons 1.4 (b/d).
Summary
1. (C) On June 15, Indian Ambassador Shiv Shankar Mukherjee confirmed to the Ambassador that the Government of India had taken a tougher line on Maoist abuses. Mukherjee’s recent visit to New Delhi had coincided with the visit of Communist Party of Nepal – United Marxist Leninist General Secretary Madhav Kumar Nepal. According to Mukherjee, who sat in on a June 6 meeting between Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee and MK Nepal, the Foreign Minister had expressed concern that the law and order situation in Nepal continued to deteriorate and Maoist abuses had gone unpunished. Moreover, Foreign Minister Mukherjee had been categorical in his discussion with MK Nepal that the Maoists should not be integrated into the Nepal Army. Ambassador Mukherjee asserted that the GOI would not tolerate continued attempts by the Maoist splinter Janatantrik Terai Mukti Morcha (“”People’s Terai Liberation Front”") (JTMM) to derail the Constituent Assembly election. He agreed that the Maoists had not showed a true commitment to joining the political mainstream.
Indian Foreign Minister Concerned About Maoist Intentions
“The Indian Ambassador continues privately to express much more pessimism about Maoist actions and intentions than in the past. Mukherjee shared our analysis that the Maoists continue to seek total state power — even if he is not prepared to say so publicly.”
The following was written for our Revolution in South Asia Info Project. Alastair’s previous analysis of Wikileaks and Nepal is here.
by Alastair Reith
Thanks to Wikileaks, another classified diplomatic cable from the U.S. Ambassador to Nepal was yesterday made public. Sent on the 18th of June 2007 under the title “INDIAN OFFICIALS TAKE TOUGHER STAND ON MAOISTS”, it details US and Indian interference in Nepal’s peace process and attempts to push for a brutal security force crackdown on the Maoist movement.
Perhaps most significantly, it confirms that from the very beginning of Nepal’s five year peace process India has categorically opposed the integration of Nepal’s two armies — the People’s Liberation Army and the National Army — into a single, new, unified military force restructured to serve a democratic Nepal (and not the previous feudal, monarchical order).
Thanks to the Revolution in South Asia team which is posted a series of such pieces for International Women’s Day on March 8th, 2011. This article originally appeared at eKantipur.com.
Women rally against “Eve teasing” in S. Asia
NEW DELHI, MAR 01 -
It sounds almost playful, but “Eve teasing” is a daily torment for many women in South Asia, who are now trying to call time on what they see as a bland euphemism for sustained sexual harassment. Read the rest of this entry »
This is a map of the "Red Corridor" where the Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-M) has predominant influence
This conference is being hosted by the South Asia Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The text below comes from their Facebook page. The event listing can be found here.
Maoism and the State of the Indian Left
Issues surrounding the CPI (Maoist) have acquired an important place in the political debates on contemporary India. By estimates of the Government of India, the Maoists have their presence in about 220 of 626 districts of the country. While the ruling dispensation, including most mainstream political parties, paint the Maoists, to use the famous expression of the current Prime Minister, as “the gravest threat to internal security”, the Maoists claim that they are fighting for the marginalized, poor and tribal populations.
Maoist presence is mainly concentrated in the forested regions of central-east India. The militarized Maoist movement – which does not contest elections unlike the mainstream Communist parties in India – and its predecessor, the Naxalite movement of the 1970s, claim to have given voice to the social, economic and political aspirations of the rural poor through their revolutionary opposition to the Indian state. Those sympathetic to the Maoists claim that Maoists have been successful in developing their movement in India in the era of economic liberalization, in contrast to the fate of the parliamentary Left in India, most notably the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which are increasingly faced with electoral decline in areas where they were once dominant. The parliamentary Left on the other hand, is critical of the Maoists. They consider them to be dogmatic and term their militarized strategy and tactics to be erroneous in the Indian context, which has high human costs and has no chance of success.
Vijay Prashad is George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College, Connecticut and the author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. As explained in reference to an earlier article by him republished on our sister site, Revolution in South Asia, he is also “an unwavering supporter of the ruling party in West Bengal, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM), which has lorded over the tribals and other oppressed in that state for nearly 30 years. He helped to organize a letter from US intellectuals (some of whom later withdrew their signatures when Arundhati Roy and other intellectuals and activists in India made a prompt response) defending the role of the CPM in repressing the struggle of tens of thousands of peasants in Nandigram against a huge petrochemical plant that was being forced on them by the CPM, which touts imperialist “globalization” as a panacea for the people of West Bengal.” The following interview with Prashad has received considerable praise from revolutionary-minded people on the internet. We are republishing it for two reasons. First, it is genuinely informative and reflects a sophisticated analysis of events in Egypt. Second, to provoke a discussion of the connections between that analysis and Prashad’s support for the CPM and its political program.
If power is not seized, counter-revolution will rise’: Vijay Prashad on the Arab revolt
Pothik Ghosh (PG): In what sense can the recent events in the Arab World be called revolutions? How are they different from the colour revolutions of the past two decades?
Vijay Prashad (VP): All revolutions are not identical. The colour revolutions in Eastern Europe had a different tempo. They were also of a different class character. They were also along the grain of US imperialism, even though the people were acting not for US but for their own specific class and national interests. I have in mind the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. Otpor in the Ukraine, among others, was well lubricated by George Soros’s Open Society and the US government’s National Democratic Institute. Russian money also swept in on both sides of the ledger. These Eastern European revolutions were mainly political battles in regions of the world still unsettled by the traumatic transition from state socialism to predatory capitalism. Read the rest of this entry »
Our sister site, Revolution in South Asia, has now passed over half a million page views. Together our two sites have now attracted 3.5 million page views.
We salute our readers and supporters. We should all together salute the site’s hardworking new moderating team.
But above all we salute the revolutionary fighters of Nepal and India — who through complex conditions, through the twists and turns of real life, are pressing forward to liberation and socialism.
We urge you to think about creative ways to promote this site — to help these powerful revolutionary Maoist movements become part of the political landscape of global society.
AlJazeera English broadcast “Faultlines” interviews Indian author Arundhati Roy.
This is a very thoughtful and interesting discussion of the big picture (in india and the region) and the sources of Indian state aggression (in both hindu fundamentalism and corporate occupation).
““The Gandhian ethos is a very frightening ethos in the forest; because the Gandhian ethos requires… performance that requires an audience, you know. And in the forest, there’s no audience… in a society that doesn’t belong to the rest of society. How do hungry people go on a hunger strike? How do people who don’t have any money not pay their taxes or do civil disobedience?”
We received this from Sanhati.
The following article appeared on the 
