In spite of its expansion to new areas and a remarkable increase in its military capabilities and striking power, the Maoist movement led by the Communist Party of India (Maoist) faces a political-organisational crisis of sorts. The Maoists’ goals – the building of a “mighty mass movement against imperialism”, isolating and defeating the Hindutva-fascist forces, and building a “powerful urban movement, particularly of the working class” as complementary to armed agrarian struggle remain as elusive as ever. At a more theoretical level, the programme and strategic-tactical line of the CPI (Maoist) seem inadequate in coping with the complex Indian reality in a changed international situation, and in the context of the worldwide severe setback that socialism has suffered.

TILAK D GUPTA

 

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ddressing a meeting of the standing committee of the chief ministers of the six Naxalite affected states on April 13 this year, prime minister Manmohan Singh argued that factors such as exploitation, artificially depressed wages, iniquitous socio-political circumstances, inadequate employment opportunities, lack of access to resources, underdeveloped agriculture, geographical isolation and lack of land reforms contributed to the growth of Naxalite movement (The Hindu, New Delhi, April 14, 2006). Manmohan Singh was really not far-off the mark, given the agrarian programme of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), the strongest Naxalite formation in the country. That the Indian prime minister was in the same breath talking about setting up specialised forces on the lines of Andhra Pradesh’s ‘Greyhounds’, is, of course, a separate question that we shall come back to, later on.