Not as uniform as it looks

Not as uniform as it looks

India is one of the rare nations to have a tradition of democratically-elected regional Communist governments.  The state of West Bengal has been ruled by the Marxists and their allies for over 30 years (BBC, 2009), the longest period that a Communist party has held power via democratic means.  Communism is peacefully manifested in both West Bengal and the southern state of Kerala, the most literate and least corrupt state in India.  Indeed, it seems that the Indian school of Marxism fits rather well in the democratic machine that makes up the nation, a far cry from the stereotypical revolutionaries made famous by Lenin, Castro, and Mao.  However, there is another element in India’s mosaic of political affilations that adheres to the Communist stereotype in a rather more linear fashion – the Naxalites.

Naxalism is a broad term referring to the various left-wing revolutionary ideologies that have spread through the rural northeast of India.  Named after Naxalbari, the site of a famous peasant uprising in West Bengal, the movement is spearheaded by the Communist Party of India (Maoist).  Not to be confused with the parliamentarian, democratically-elected Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Maoist faction functions as the ideological heir to the anti-democratic tradition of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist).  The Maoists, like their Marxist-Leninist predecessors, have been fighting a bloody guerilla war across the northeast of the nation.  With a semi-professional force known as the ‘People’s Liberation Guerilla Army’, the Maoists form the backbone and the political face of the Naxalite movement.  The Naxalites have long been the cause of class-based violence in the eastern Indian states of West Bengal, Orissa, and Bihar, alongside the plethora of small northeastern states affected by the movement.  Recent anti-Christian sectarian violence in Orissa was traced to Naxalite involvement, as a senior Hindu leader was assassinated by suspected Naxalites, causing the murder, rape, and assault of Christians and destruction of Christian properties by gangs of Hindus.  Similar periodic incidents of communal violence across Orissa have been blamed on the Naxalites, along with a host of bombings, raids, and attacks.

In early June, the Naxalites orchestrated a coordinated attack on the Lalgarh region, capturing it from government forces (BBC 2009), sending shockwaves through West Bengal’s administration and putting pressure on the recently re-elected Congress leadership, now shorn of their leftist allies.  The Maoists claimed Lalgarh as the first ‘liberated’ area of West Bengal, and proceeded with the ransacking of the village of Dharampur (a stronghold in Lalgarh) and the murder of officials associated with the state’s Marxist leadership.  The state and national administrations were shocked into action, and as of today, the Indian army has confirmed that it has successfully driven the Maoists out of Lalgarh, and is attempting to push the Naxalites out of the region entirely (BBC 2009).  Although Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has long acknowledged the pressing importance of battling the Maoists, it seems that the army has only been pressed into full action against the Naxalites after this recent series of episodes confirming the power that the rebellious factions still wield in the region.  While many areas of West Bengal can be seen as proof of the “Indianisation” and moderation of extreme-leftist ideologies, it is clear that there are still parts of India where the principles of violent revolution, anti-parliamentarianism and the proletarian dictatorship have yet lingered on in their distilled, Maoist form.  Now it’s time to find out how Mr Singh and the West Bengali administration will combat this threat and dilute this poisonous ideology.