by Annavajhula J.C. Bose*

Since times immemorial efforts to gain liberation from physical and mental exploitation in the workplace and society, and thereby achieve a dignified life, has been an unfulfilled quest for humanity. During the 1960s and 1970s, for example, this was seen in the anti-establishment and counterculture movements in Western countries as well as Mao Tse Tung’s blood-stained cultural revolution in China. A modified version of the latter was adopted by intellectual believers of Marxism and Leninism in Third World countries, known as Maoists, as a solution for tackling the problems of rural poverty.    

Maoists argued that the best strategy to win political power was to first conquer the rural areas by mobilizing poor peasants and landless laborers. Then surround and conquer the major cities by building an alliance with industrial workers. Maoists also viewed violent actions as the only way to achieve revolutionary humanism: a new conception of humanity based on “radical democracy,” also termed “peoples’ democracy” or “new democracy.” Here they adopted Mao’s slogan: “Power flows from the barrel of a gun.”

Naxalbari Uprising of 1967

In 1967, urban Maoist intellectuals led a violent uprising, including by mobilizing some rural residents, in Naxalbari, a region in West Bengal at the base of the Himalayas. The bloody insurgency was crushed by the police and troops sent in by the state and central governments. The revolting group, known as Naxalites, also splintered into various factions who started killing each other and also members of other left parties.

In later decades, the Naxalite uprising inspired the rise of Maoist-led violent actions in about ten other states, covering almost half the land mass of India. This region, known as the “red corridor,” is a lush region with large forests, populated by poor tribal folk. The tribals face a genocidal situation at the bottom of India’s economic and social ladder. The red corridor had “liberated zones” where the Maoists ran local governments and where the official state and central governments had little or no power. The area is India’s natural resources’ corridor, being the source of much of the country’s deposits of coal, iron ore and other raw materials.

In this context, I bring to your notice Bernard D’Mello’s writings on Maoism in India. With working class origins and an engineering degree from the world renowned Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, he is a civil rights activist, journalist and socio-economic researcher. D’Mello is an Indian intellectual apparently beholden to Marxist ideologues outside India. He was self-educated in Marxism from the writings in Monthly Review, a monthly journal published by radicals in New York, His sympathy for Maoism has led to him being criticized by other intellectuals, especially those who support the Indian establishment.

Bernard D’Mello’s books on Maoism

D’Mello’s 2010 work - What is Maoism and Other Essays – reflects his desire to “rekindle an imagination of socialism that brings to the fore the emancipation and fulfillment of the basic human needs of the most exploited, the most oppressed and the most dominated on this earth,” and to “light a fresh candle in young minds eager to understand Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism, and work towards socialist renewal.”

In this small book, D’Mello reviews a mountain of leftist literature trying to prove that Maoism, also known as Naxalism in India, is a “superior Marxist practice taking humanity along the road towards equality, cooperation, community and solidarity.” But he overlooks the horrors of Mao’s cultural revolution which saw sociopathic mass murder, rape, cannibalism and torture. Mao himself was a monster on a par with Hitler and Stalin. He was also a pedophile, a sexual abuser of young women.

D’Mello brushes aside these issues as not worth serious consideration when compared to the way the economy and society were transformed in China “in favor of the underdogs.” He also does not probe why China today, while still controlled by the Communist party founded by Mao, is the second largest capitalist economy in the world, after the United States, and shows very wide disparity in wealth and power, contrary to the ideals of Maoists.

D’Mello’s 2018 work - India after Naxalbari: Unfinished History - is an extension of his 2010 book. Intensively researched, the book has received accolades from Maoist luminaries both inside and outside India. But it adds to an overcrowded field of studies on Maoist thought and practice in India; similar to “Kafka’s theoretical and empirical investigations of a dog.”  

He wrote the book, D’Mello states, because: “Hundreds of millions of people have been the victims of Indian capitalism’s irrationality, brutality, and inhumanity, and it is the actions of those who could not remain unmoved and were compelled to revolt that have motivated me to write this book…India remains among the most poverty-stricken countries of the world, with most of its population still inadequately fed, miserably clothed, wretchedly housed, poorly educated, and without access to decent medical care. Its deeply oppressive and exploitative social order is crying out for revolutionary change.”

Also, he adds, Maoism is the way of emancipating the masses from oppressors through “correct leadership” that springs “from the masses, to the masses”. The main achievement of Maoism in India, D’Mello claims, is the transformation of class-power relations by making poor peasants, landless laborers, dalits (the scheduled castes) and tribals (adivasis) stand up against their oppressors.

The two books reflect his deep romantic love for what Charu Mazumdar, the leader of Maoist insurgency in India in 1967, said: “Naxalbari…will never die.” Indeed, there is poetry in the books. For example, here is a Naxalite guerilla getting poetical:

“Though battered and broken, like a wave of the sea, I will be born, again and again.”

Violent Fanatics and Dostoevsky’s Demons

Let me now assume that you are an avid reader of the complicated issues facing the Indian economy, politics and society. Then one day, trying to make sense of the copious and confusing literature on radical leftwing politics, you feel paralyzed and disoriented. However fortuitously you had heard about the keen insights on radical fanatics offered in The Demons, a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. You walk into a library, find the book and finish the masterpiece in one sitting. The demons include a self-centered intellectual who views himself as a revolutionary leader. He blackmails his small group of followers to kill an innocent and good man to try to cement the loyalty of the group to him and his radical cause.

Dostoevsky’s Demons helps understand revolutionary fanaticism, and its degeneration into violence and murder. D’Mello though believes that the depiction of Maoists as ‘devotees of violence’ is false. He justifies that the violence of the oppressed, and the Maoists who lead them to such violence, has always been preceded and provoked by the violence of the oppressors and the state and private forces that back them.

Walking out of the library, you are wondering who are the demons and who are the good folk in India? According to D’Mello, the Maoists are the good folk in India, while all those in establishment are the devils. This argument is also conveyed by other writers with Maoist sympathies. To them, the real devil is the deep-rooted socio-economic problems which drive radical movements in India. As Sudeep Chakravarti puts it in his book Red Sun, “Maoism is not our greatest internal security threat. Poverty, non-governance, bad justice and corruption are. Maoist presence in a third of India merely mirrors our failings as a nation. The Maoist movement comprises people treated poorly, denied livelihood, justice and all the other ideals enshrined in India’s constitution. Their leaders see in the country’s present realities a certain futility of purpose, and this fuels their belief in violent change.” 

The ten long chapters of the 2018 book covers a wide range of issues: the origins of Naxalism; the 1968 decade of revolutionary humanism; principal characteristics of India’s underdeveloped  capitalism and the process of dependent and unequal development steered along the last six to seven decades by an Indian big business-state-multinational corporation ruling bloc; Naxalite attempts at mobilizing the tribal and dalit masses during 1978-2003; the 1989 period of monstrous inequality and rise of financial aristocrats; the incompatibility between capitalism and political democracy; Maoist guerilla army tactics in the period 2004-2013; the rise of semi-fascism and sub-imperialism of the Hindutva nationalism fueled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party; and reimagining a “new democracy and anti-semifeudal revolution in India on the long road to a communitarian basis for socialism.”

In going through this long tour, you will find the reading difficult and heavy because of D’Mello’s leftist lingo and loaded analytical frames, adopted from Marxist intellectuals in India and abroad. By contrast, Chakravarti gives you a racy style of writing and a spirited and exhilarating read.

A Marginal Force

D’Mello’s books also offer insights into some critical questions: How does one become a Maoist? What drives middle class intellectuals in India and abroad to accept Maoism as do-good humanism? What drives one to pick up a shovel, axe, spear, bow and arrow, or a gun and be willing to sacrifice one’s life to fight India’s state apparatus? Why are young Indians not attracted to Maoism?

The Maoist insurgency is now practically reduced, as D’Mello himself acknowledges, to small-scale guerilla actions on the fringes of Indian society. Overall D’Mello’s romantic eulogy and critical analysis of Indian Maoism does not instill any confidence in a reader like me, who seeks solutions to the widespread poverty and exploitation of the poor in India. Expecting a non-exploitative future social order from power-hungry, violent and fear inducing Maoists is a cruel joke. We are back to Dostoyevsky’s “Demons,” a revealing account of revolutionary fanaticism - which is no different from the Hindu religious extremism that is plaguing India now or similar fanaticism elsewhere. 

The solution for the poor in India is not intellectual left-wing militancy, based on copying ideologies that arose in China. There is hope for tribals only in the democratic political tradition such as that of Shankar Guha Neogi, who was murdered in 1991, and A K Roy of the Marxist Coordination Committee. D’Mello should have strongly latched on to such exemplary leadership from below that respects people and includes them while trying to solve their problems.

Cry, my beloved country, India!

*Annavajhula J.C. Bose teaches economics at the Shri Ram College of Commerce, in Delhi, India.

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