The word Naxal, Naxalite or Naksalvadi is a generic term used to refer to militant Communist groups operating in different parts of India under different organizational envelopes. In the eastern states of the mainland India (Bihar, West Bengal and Orissa), they are usually known as, or refer to themselves asMaoists while in southern states like Kerala they are known under other titles. They have been declared as a terrorist organization under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of India (1967).[1][2][3]
The term 'Naxal' derives from the name of the village Naxalbari in the state of West Bengal, India, where the movement had its origin. The Naxals are considered far-left radical communists, supportive of Maoist political sentiment and ideology. Their origin can be traced to the split in 1967 of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), leading to the formation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist). Initially the movement had its centre in West Bengal. In later years, it spread into less developed areas of rural central and eastern India, such as Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Andhra Pradesh through the activities of underground groups like the Communist Party of India (Maoist).[4]
As of 2009, Naxalites were active across approximately 180 districts in ten states of India[5] accounting for about 40 percent of India's geographical area,[6]They are especially concentrated in an area known as the "Red corridor", where they control 92,000 square kilometers.[6] According to India's intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, 20,000 armed cadre Naxalites were operating in addition to 50,000 regular cadres[7] and their growing influence prompted Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to declare them to be the most serious internal threat to India's national security.[8]
In February 2009, the Indian Central government announced its plans for broad, co-ordinated operations in all affected states (Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal), to plug all possible escape routes of Naxalites.[9]
History
The term Naxalites comes from Naxalbari, a small village in West Bengal, where a section of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) led by Charu Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhalinitiated a violent uprising in 1967. On May 18, 1967, the Siliguri Kishan Sabha, of which Jangal was the president, declared their readiness to adopt armed struggle to redistribute land to the landless.[10] The following week, a sharecropper near Naxalbari village was attacked by the landlord's men over a land dispute. On May 24, when a police team arrived to arrest the peasant leaders, they were ambushed by a group of tribals led by Jangal Santhal, and a police inspector was killed in a hail of arrows. This event encouraged many Santhal tribals and other poor people to join the movement and to start attacking local landlords.[11]
Charu Majumdar, inspired by the doctrines of Mao Zedong, provided ideological leadership for the Naxalbari movement, advocating that Indian peasants and lower class tribals overthrow the government and upper classes by force. A large number of urban elites were also attracted to the ideology, which spread through Majumdar's writings, particularly the 'Historic Eight Documents' which formed the basis of Naxalite ideology.[12] In 1967 Naxalites organized the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR), and later broke away from CPM. Violent uprisings were organized in several parts of the country. In 1969 the AICCCR gave birth to the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (CPI(ML)).
Practically all Naxalite groups trace their origin to the CPI(ML). A separate offshoot from the beginning was the Maoist Communist Centre, which evolved out of the Dakshin Desh-group. The MCC later fused with the People's War Group to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist). A third offshoot was that of the Andhra revolutionary communists, mainly represented by the UCCRI(ML), following the mass line legacy of T. Nagi Reddy, which broke with the AICCCR at an early stage.
During the 1970s the movement was fragmented into disputing factions. By 1980 it was estimated that around 30 Naxalite groups were active, with a combined membership of 30,000.[13] A 2004 Indian home ministry estimate puts numbers at that time as "9,300 hardcore underground cadre… [holding] around 6,500 regular weapons beside a large number of unlicensed country-made arms".[14]According to Judith Vidal-Hall (2006), "More recent figures put the strength of the movement at 15,000, and claim the guerrillas control an estimated one fifth of India's forests, as well as being active in 160 of the country's 604 administrative districts."[15] India's Research and Analysis Wing, believed in 2006 that 20,000 Naxals were involved in the growing insurgency.[7]
Today some Naxalite groups have become legal organisations participating in parliamentary elections, such as the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation. Others, such as theCommunist Party of India (Maoist) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Janashakti, are engaged in armed guerrilla struggles.
On 6 April, 2010 Naxalites launched the biggest assault in the history of the Naxalite movement by killing 76 security personnel. The attack was launched by up to 1000 Naxalites[16][17] in a well-planned attack, killing an estimated 76 CRPF policemen in two separate ambushes and wounding 50 others, in the jungles of Chattisgarh's Dantewada district. On 17th May naxals blew up a bus on Dantewda-sukhma road in Chhattisgarh, killing 15 policemen and 20 civilians. In third Major attack by Naxals on 29th June, at least 26 personnels of Indian Centre Reserve Forces (CRPF) were killed in Narayanpur district of Chhattisgarh.
[edit]Violence in Bengal
The Naxalites gained a strong presence amongst the radical sections of the student movement in Calcutta.[18] Students left school to join the Naxalites. Majumdar, to entice more students into his organisation, declared that revolutionary warfare was to take place not only in the rural areas as before, but everywhere and spontaneously. Thus Majumdar declared an "annihilation line", a dictum that Naxalites should assassinate individual "class enemies" such as landlords, businessmen, university teachers, police officers, politicians* of both Right and Left) and others.[citation needed]
Throughout Calcutta, schools were shut down. Naxalites took over Jadavpur University and used the machine shop facilities to make pipe guns to attack the police. Their headquarters becamePresidency College, Kolkata[citation needed]. The Naxalites found supporters among some of the educated elite, and Delhi's prestigious St. Stephen's College, alma mater of many contemporary Indian leaders and thinkers, became a hotbed of Naxalite activities.
The Chief Minister, Siddhartha Shankar Ray of the Congress Party, instituted strong counter-measures against the Naxalites. The West Bengal police fought back to stop the Naxalites. The house of Somen Mitra, the Congress MLA of Sealdah, was turned into a torture chamber where Naxal students from Presidency College and CU were incarcerated illegally by Police and the Congress cadres. CPI-M cadres were also involved in the "State terror". After suffering losses and facing the public rejection of Majumdar's "annihilation line", the Naxalites alleged human rights violations by the West Bengal police, who responded that the state was effectively fighting a civil war and that democratic pleasantries had no place in a war, especially when the opponent did not fight within the norms of democracy and civility.[11]
Large sections of the Naxal movement began to question Majumdar's leadership. In 1971 the CPI(ML) was split, as the Satyanarayan Singh revolted against Majumdar's leadership. In 1972 Majumdar was arrested by the police and died in Alipore Jail. His death accelerated the fragmentation of the movement.
[edit]Reasons for failure of naxalite movement, 1967-1975.
In a methodical study Dr. Sailen Debnath has surmised the consequences and reasons of failures of the Naxalite Movement organised by Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal. He writes "The Naxalite movement, though continued intensively from 1967 to the middle of 1970s and resurfaced after some years, could not go a long way achieving anything commendable because of the following reasons:-
- 1. The Naxalites wanted to surround the towns and cities by the villages, i.e. they wanted to encircle the urban centres with organized peasant forces of the villages. If the peasant militia could have occupied the cities, according to Majumdar, the so-called bourgeois government would fall making the passage to the coming of a socialist government; but the Naxalites could not and did not come up to a stage capable of organizing the peasants and thereby encircling the towns.
- 2. Majumdar gave sole importance to secret organization and armed training of its members for the purpose of eliminating the class enemies. As the Naxalites did not have mass level organization, they lacked mass support. Only with select few armed elements not properly educated in political line no big thing could be done.
- 3. "Khatam" or the action of eliminating the so-called class enemies in villages was a wrong principle of political mobilization by individual murder of select few people whose political class- character was never adjudged by their socio-economic conditions, and the properties they possessed, but very often only by their political affiliation or by the name and colour of the party or parties they directly or indirectly belonged to for a long or a short period of time. As for example in Jalpaiguri and Alipurduar they killed some petty jotdars who otherwise could have been comrades in action against the capitalists or could be friends in a revolution for radical change.
- 4. Recruitment in the Naxalite party was never done on proper judgment and scrutiny of the political characters and behaviours of the recruits. It so happened that many people only to feast on their animosities with their personal enemies got recruited in the Naxalite party only to utilize the help of the Naxalites to have their personal enemies in the neighbourhood killed on the basis of pseudo-identification of them as class enemies.
- 5. In many cases dreaded criminals too enrolled themselves in the Naxalite party with the objective of getting fire arms and to train themselves in the manufacture and use of fire arms. Thus very soon the party turned to be an organization of professional criminal outfits who soon deserted the party after their training period had been over or the cherished objective of owning armaments had been met or realized. Many of these criminals with fire arms soon turned to be dacoits and in many cases they informed the police all about the hidden training centres of the Naxalites and their main purpose in doing so was to have the original Naxalites arrested or else they themselves might fall victims of the Naxalites’ targets as approvers in favour of the government..
- 6. The ruling Congress party inserted their supporters inside the unguarded and porous Naxalite organization for the purpose of knowing and finishing its secret bases and arresting its supporters, and in the same way, the personnels of the government intelligence branch and police too in disguise of Naxalite sympathizers got into the party’s inner organization and rounded most of its leaders including Charu Majumdar into the jail. Thus police had information all about the movements of Majumdar after he had gone underground in 1970, and he was nabbed in Calcutta in July, 1972. The end of his life came in the jail in some days after his arrest; and how he had to pass through the gate of death, most probably in the night of 27th or 28th July, 1972, nobody except the police and the government could know properly, of course, it was told from the side of the government that he died of heart attack.
- 7. Ordinary people in villages were terrified at the brutal and gruesome ways they killed the fellow villagers vilifying them as class enemies. As for example, at Bholardabri in Alipurduar they killed Rajen Pandit who was a refugee from East Pakistan and arduously was running a family of 12 dependents. By any means he was no class enemy at all. In another case they killed a person, chopped his head off the torso and hanged the head and the torso down the branches of trees with ropes in two separate places, the horrible sights of which cast a gloom on the faces of bemoaning villagers. Certainly after that they could count no support from the villagers at all.
[edit]Lalgarh violence
In late May, 2009 in Lalgarh, West Bengal the Naxalites briefly threw out the local police and staged attacks against the ruling communist government. The region came under assault by Maoist guerrillas. The state government initiated a successful operation, with central paramilitary forces and state armed police, to retake Lalgarh in early June. Maoist leader Kishenji claimed in an interview that the mass Naxalite movement in Lalgarh in 2009 was aimed at creating a "liberated zone" against "oppression of the establishment Left and its police". He stated this had given the Naxalites a major base in West Bengal for the first time since the Naxalite uprising in the mid-1970s and that "We will have an armed movement going in Calcutta by 2011".[19]
Cultural references
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The British musical group Asian Dub Foundation have a song called "Naxalite", which is featured on the soundtrack to the 1999 film Brokedown Palace. A 2005 movie called Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, directed by Sudhir Mishra, was set against the backdrop of the Naxalite movement. In August 2008, Kabeer Kaushik'sChamku, starring Bobby Deol and Priyanka Chopra, explored the story of a boy who is brainwashed to take arms against the state.
In the novel English August by Upamanyu Chatterjee, there is reference to Naxal cadres whom the main protagonist, an IAS officer meets while visiting a tribal village in mid-1980's.
In the novel The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, there is a reference to a character joining the Naxalites.
In the novel The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, the Naxals (sic) are mentioned often by the poor and the rich alike.
The 1998 film Haazar chaurasi ki Maa (based on the novel, Hazar Churashir Maa[20] by Mahasweta Devi) starring Jaya Bachchan gives a very sympathetic portrayal of a Naxalbari militant killed by the state. The 2009 Malayalam movie Thalappavu portrays the story of Naxal Varghese, who was shot allegedly dead by the police during the 70s.
In the Kannada movie Veerappa Nayaka, Vishnuvardhan portrays a Gandhian whose son becomes a Naxalite. The 2007 Kannada movie Maathaad Maathaadu Mallige, again portrays Vishnuvardhan as a Gandhian, who confronts a Naxalite Sudeep and shows him that the ways adopted by Naxals will only lead to violence and will not achieve their objective.
Eka Nakshalwadya Cha Janma, (Marathi: The birth of a Naxal), a novel written by Vilas Balkrishna Manohar, a volunteer with the Lok Biradari Prakalp, is a fictional account of a Madia Gond Juru's unwilling journey of life his metamorphosis from an exploited nameless tribal to a Naxal.[21]
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