Three Waves of Indian Terrorism: A First-Hand Report on the Naxalite Movement

...the structure is too large and well-integrated for that...

...Toward the end of 1948, barely a year after India won independence, they rejected parliamentary politics and chose insurrection instead...

...Not only are they out of the mainstream of Indian politics...

...Gherao is India's most spectacular political invention and export since nonalignment...

...But like the student rebels of Paris two summers ago, they have decided to wreck the present system in the hope that something more spontaneous will take its place...

...But there is a significant difference at present between their tactics and those of the CPI 20 years ago...

...The first time this happened was just over 40 years ago, when some scattered but daring young men decided they could win freedom for India with gun and dagger...

...But it can be hollowed out by termite action...

...Pictures of Mao are left by them, rather as the burning cross used to be left by the KuKlux Klan, at the scenes of their raids— university offices, students' examination centers, Gandhi peace exhibitions, family planning clinics, printing presses...

...For some years thereafter, the Communists got lost in an inner debate between rival strategies for power...

...There was romance in their deeds, which was lacking in the struggle Mahatma Gandhi waged with less dramatic weapons...

...The Naxalites are creating the same gulf today, and perhaps a wider one, by their unashamed espousal of China and its leaders...

...The most formal among these is The Communist Party of India (Marxists-Leninist...

...Up to a hundred of them may visit a selected village at night, march to the house of a selected landlord, beating drums and firing pistols to scare others away, and loot or kill according to plan after warning the villagers not to inform the police...

...Only a few years earlier they had been expelled from India's main political party, the Congress...

...It opted PRAN CHOPRA for pitched confrontations with the enemy —mainly the police, but occasionally also military and paramilitary forces—to create a "liberated zone" which could be used as a base for expanding Communist power...

...Where this is done to make the threat more vivid, the head is sometimes left hanging by a bam 436 boo tree outside the village—an example to all...

...But they have become a cause of unprecedented concern, and since the beginning of this year they have been the subject of the most agitated debate at all levels of our politics...

...This certainly suggests that their numbers are growing, and there is a possibility that once their numbers in a given region grow sufficiently large, they will try to raise a Telengana type of rebellion...

...but I do not think it is clever in the long run as well...

...A First-Hand Report on the Naxalite Movement FOR THE THIRD TIME in recent Indian history the cult of terror has burst into politics...

...In some parts of the country, as in Srikakulam, this has begun to happen...

...The ambush is usually carried out by a small and swift-moving band...

...When Mahatma Gandhi decided to call student power to his aid, as he did on occasions during the struggle for India's freedom, his weapon was that of widespread strikes in which several thousand students took part at any given time or place...

...The Sino-Soviet split had not yet occurred...

...But usually their tactics are to hit swiftly and run fast, which also makes it necessary that the raiding party be small...

...In 1948, the Communist party of India had only the Soviet model to look to...

...For every Englishman they killed, several of their own men were shot or hung...

...In this way they have pushed the whole examination system over the brink in West Bengal and in several other places as well, and one university after another has had to shut down, From their unwillingness or inability to mobilize large numbers of people, and the resulting dependence upon small but tightly knit bands, it inevitably follows that they have no use for elections, in which, in any case, they have no faith...

...They proclaim themselves devotees of Mao...

...This, probably, is how it happened that, going only by the model then available, the CPI reached for a strategy that exceeded its grasp...

...Their tactics may change as opportunities develop...

...They may not need the help of more than 1500 or 2000 dedicated young persons to tie up the whole of an enormous city like Calcutta...

...To talk of an Indian path different from the Chinese path is to tread the road of class collaboration...

...At the moment the opprobrium is passive...

...Now there are Communists to the left of CPI(ML) who denounce it for accepting a party label and hierarchy, which they are convinced is the starting point of the downward path to revisionism...

...it is reasonable to assume that they will change as the present tactics yield their present objectives...

...In being comprehensively ideological, the third wave of terror resembles the second more than the first...

...For while the system is hospitable to free dissent and sometimes even responsive to it, it is not ready to be wrecked through termite action...

...At a few places they have been able to snatch sophisticated small arms from the police...

...The third time for a politics of terror has come 20 years later, Extreme Left splinters of the Communist movement are fighting their way to the surface in large parts of eastern India and at a few places in north, south, and central India...

...This is a barren, rocky, and poverty-ridden region, once part of the princely state of Hyderabad and now part of Andhra Pradesh, one of the larger states of southern India...

...They had incan descence and dedication on their side, while Gandhi's nonviolent struggle was a hotchpotch of people, some of whom had very mixed motives...

...They were impatient with the nonviolent struggle of Mahatma Gandhi...

...Yet they, too, became a tiny sidestream because the mainstream came under the control of Mahatma Gandhi...

...India has grown used to political violence...

...When the police sent in a punitive team, there was a counterattack by the tribals and a senior officer was killed with a poison-tipped arrow...

...In 1969 the CPI(ML) broke off from the CPI(M), denouncing it as revisionist, aged, anti-revolutionary, and wage-oriented, almost exactly as the CPI(M) had denounced the old CPI only four years earlier...

...For every conspiracy that succeeded, several were ruthlessly crushed...

...Second, the Naxalites make themselves extremely vulnerable when they lose touch with the mainstream of Indian life...

...The Naxalites' tactics are those of a small party aware that for the time being it is small...

...Next, and more important, Nehru succeeded in isolating the Communists from the main stream of national sentiment...

...They rely mainly on home-made bombs, grenades, pipe guns, and acid bulbs...

...Therefore, whatever their position in Telengana, in the country as a whole the Communists were like fish out of water, not at all what Mao Tse-tung wanted his guerrillas to be— fish floating in an ocean of popular sympathy...

...But Gandhi commanded the loyalty of the great bulk of the people, and not of only a few dedicated bands...

...Clearly, it overestimated its numerical strength...

...No power, however great, can stop us, as China's Chairman is our Chairman, China's path is our path...

...The Naxalites rely on numbers, to some extent, in only one area: to set up a repeat pattern of their activities in as many centers as possible...

...Their aim is rather to demoralize the enemy and thus cause him to collapse than to defeat him in battle...

...And they thought that their own method of conspicuous assassination would strike such terror in the heart of British rulers that they would quit and India would win freedom...

...Similarly, by more economical but con THREE WAVES OF INDIAN TERRORISM centrated effort, the Naxalites have succeeded in disrupting the educational system...

...For some years now, the Communist THREE WAVES OF INDIAN TERRORISM party of India has been steadily multiplying by fission...

...In this respect the Naxalites are doing very well...

...The second explosion of terrorism in Indian politics came 20 years later, when the Communists chose terror as a political weapon...

...Later, Telengana was to become famous for other reasons: as the starting point of Bhoodan, a countrywide movement for the voluntary donation of land to the landless, and as the scene of a violent upheaval in 1969 over the separation of the area from Andhra Pradesh...

...More popular is the insurrectionists' other name: The Naxalite movement—because they first were active, about three years ago, in Naxalbari, a small village in the remote hills of northern Bengali...

...The latter was much closer to Peking but, no less than the CPI, it worked within the parliamentary system, whether by conviction or convenience...

...Encouraged, if not even financed by Moscow, and inspired by the recent example of China, they decided to set up a "liberated area," their very own Yenan, in Telangana...

...By contrast, the first generation of Indian terrorists did not make that kind of an error...

...Suddenly, 30 or 40 persons will surround their victim, perhaps a professor, or a floor superintendent, or a works manager, or the editor of a paper...

...Historically, this marks the beginning of the Naxalite movement...

...The task is to establish peasants' revolutionary power through the process of armed guerrilla actions in isolated pockets in rural areas and to create liberated zones...

...They do not aim, or at least not yet, at capturing a territory, much less at holding it...

...In the short run, the Naxalite diagnosis is clever...

...it was unable to sustain the tactics of concentration...

...Skillful Communist cadres took over the leadership of the unrest organized assaults upon a few scattered landowners and distributed their rice hoardings...

...T IS DIFFICULT TO SAY whether the Naxal-I ites today have hopes of any serious external assistance...

...But hardly anyone remembers it now as a former Communist base...

...Sooner or later the Naxalites will find themselves so isolated that organized authority will be able to eliminate them with public approval...

...The government of India is heckled almost every day for its failure to curb them, and, recently, had to promise it would take drastic action...

...Where a party with a larger peasant base, for example, will try to intimidate the landlord by occupying his lands or by forcibly seizing and selling his crops, the Naxalites try to terrorize him with the specter of ambushing him and chopping off his head...

...In this their position is somewhere between Cohn-Bendit and the Red Guards of China's Cultural Revolution...

...In the first place, it underestimates the capacity of the system to rectify itself...

...But another reason for their success is the sharp burst of intimidating violence that they suddenly let loose, with grenades, knives, and acid bulbs...

...The partition of the country into India and Pakistan was accompanied by the worst rioting recorded anywhere in its history—only the rioting during the reorganization of India's states in the mid-fifties can approach it...

...First, the Telengana insurrection caused a split between those who believed in adventurist methods and those who did not...

...The Naxalites are ignoring all this because theirs is, I suspect, a belated reaction to what the system had become in the closing and tired years of the Nehru era —not a timely reaction to the new stirrings it is experiencing today...

...But while it lasted, this terrorist movement fired the imagination of the young...

...Therefore, they avoid pitched confrontations and concentrate on well-timed harassment that causes confusion by being unpredictable, sudden, efficient, and drastic...

...They proclaimed in their May Day statements that "The Red terror activities in cities and towns have come to stay...

...Few commercial and industrial executives in Calcutta have been the same after being subjected to such treatment...

...whereas the CPI threw all its resources into the single operation in Telengana, the Naxalites are keeping theirs wellscattered...

...Usually, they are able to do so because others are apathetic and do not defend their right to study though they outnumber the Naxalites a hundred to one...

...In 1948 the CPI took the view that India had yet to establish a new structure after the dismantling of British administration and the shock of the separation of Pakistan...

...But none of the violence since the Telangana insurrection was intended or seen as a revolt against the legal and parliamentary system...

...But the violence in which they believe is of the cool kind, a carefully workedout tactic, not the disorderly frenzy of a mob...

...They will keep him surrounded until his morale breaks under the combined effect of personal insecurity, insulting words and gestures, and the acute sense of discomfort...

...Nor can it claim any conspicuous "kills," as the terrorists of 40 years ago could do almost as soon as they got going...

...But anything substantial would be contrary to their professions...

...as for themselves, they insist that they only believe in perpetual revolution by spontaneous groups...

...But they get only opprobrium when they raise their hand against institutions that are largely beneficial even if not all that they should be...

...PRAN CHOPRA But all this lasted less than two years...

...they are also putting themselves out of touch with the mainstream of sympathy...

...The former was Moscow-oriented...

...This they do in two ways: first by the adoration of China, which the rest of the country still regards as an enemy power, and next by making an assault upon institutions that do not deserve it...

...Ultimately, they collapsed while the nonviolent movement carried India to freedom, mobilizing the support of vast numbers of people through peaceful mass agitation...

...At the time of Telengana, the Communists made the irreversible blunder of offending nationalist sentiment by their willingness to more than merely go along with the abuse heaped upon Nehru by Moscow...

...These early Indian terrorists paid a fearful toll...

...informants" were shot in public squares...

...Instead, the Naxalites operate through the guerrilla tactics of gherao—a loosely constructed Hindi word, both a noun and a verb, meaning encirclement or the act of encircling a place or a person...

...And winning in numbers means making compromises, which in turn means loss of the elan, the single-minded zeal of an uncompromising spirit, which are an essential part of revolutionary armor...

...They send a handful of their commandos into a campus and disrupt classes and examinations...

...it reflects a difference of interpretation about the state of India...

...They are mobilizing every local grievance they can find, and are training the discontented and farming bands of commandos...

...they thought it slow, humiliating, and unlikely to succeed...

...Because of the critical push gheraos have given to labor agitation, workers' wage demands have been met that would not even have been considered by employers faced by the legitimate and peaceful methods of collective bargaining...

...The Naxalites would, if they could, bring the immense weight of India and China together, and thus swing world Communism away from the Soviet orbit and into that of China...

...Then, in the mid-sixties, the main CPI split into two almost equal halves: the CPI and the CPI(Marxist...

...Under its impact the Congress party, which has ruled India ever since the dawn of independence, broke into two—and after doing so it not only survived, showing the durability of the parliamentary party system, it also imparted a new dynamism to India's politics...

...in others it is bound to happen too...

...But in their immediate tactics the Naxalites are more like the terrorists of the independence movement than like the insurrectionists of Telengana...

...For this reason they are able to fire the imagination, almost equally, of two very different types of the discontented young...

...even then they exhort the cadres to rely, and they do, on daggers and knives, bows and arrows...

...But they need several such detachments to set up centers of discontent in other parts of the country, and they are setting them up wherever they find that discontents, especially those arising from social and economic causes, have created a favorable climate...

...Similarly, wherever they are active in labor agitation they do not organize strikes —which, to be effective, require cessation of work by large numbers of workers and, therefore, can be pulled off only by major trade unions and organized parties...

...They are convinced that their best weapon is terror...

...they simply came out of their classes at the call of the Mahatma...

...From 1967 to 1969, the only two governments in India led by the Communists, in West Bengal and Kerala, were dominated by the CPI(Marxist), which began to resemble more and more the relative constitutionalism of the former, undivided CPI...

...Therefore, it reasoned, a large piece of territory could be detached immediately and made the springboard of a Communist conquest of India...

...The "base" was wellchosen...

...They do not profit from the mistakes of the second as well as the first generation of Indian terrorists...

...T T HE INSURRECTIONISTS go by many names...

...For their methods they chose peasant rebellion and forcible seizure of land and, for their weapon, individual terror...

...Perhaps no one will unleash physical violence against him, but the danger is everpresent and makes all other provocations doubly demoralizing...

...What disturbs most people is not the violence that accompanies this terrorism...

...Therefore, the Naxalites may be overestimating the actual disillusionment prevailing today...

...One more epidemic of violence would not startle anyone...

...Nehru, however, was successful in denouncing the Telengana rebellion as an assault on India's freedom, which the people had only just won after almost two decades of struggle...

...The bulk of the Congress party, though not Nehru, opposed it as a war of British imperialism...

...As yet, their movement has not assumed the intensity of the Telengana rebellion...

...Nothing harmed them more than the gulf this created between them and the mainstream of Indian politics...

...Declaring "a revolt against the present bourgeoisie-oriented educational system and also against petty nationalism, an enemy of socialist unity," the Naxalites said the ruling class had no means of coping with the tremendous upsurge brought about in rural and urban areas by the CPI(ML)-led guerrillas who have waged a war against parliamentarianism...

...This brand-new party celebrated its first anniversary together with that of Lenin's hundredth birthday on April 22 this year...

...That is why he succeeded and the terrorists failed...

...It ignores the fact that only a year ago the Indian government went through a sharp upheaval, which has created PRAN CHOPRA the circumstances for a sharp readjustment...

...Where the Naxalites feel strong enough to do so, as in the Girijan tribal area of Srikakulam, they carry out their strikes in much larger numbers...

...But whether spontaneous or hierarchical, the Naxalites and other ultra groups again have brought the gun into Indian politics...

...The latest Communist insurrection, however, is precisely such an assault...

...there are enough soft spots in it for that, spots made soft by discontent with the established order, The Naxalites may not yet have a clear vision of the future...

...Their aim, for the time being, is to intensify the confusion in the present structure of society, and to make the enemy feel acutely insecure by subjecting him to conspicuous, selective, and unpredictable violence...

...Fanning the subnationalism of linguistic regions, which was just becoming a serious threat to India's survival as a nation, the Communists tried to build up a zone of independence...

...Whatever else grows here, resentment does, whether, as then, against the splendor of a princely court that mocked the poverty of the people, or, as now, against exploitation of the area by enterprising immigrants from the Andhra coast...

...the Communist world was still unicentric...

...This is a sparsely populated, somewhat inaccessible area of small tea plantations—a narrow neck of Indian territory wedged-in by Nepal and Bhutan in the north and Pakistan in the south...

...The Communists regarded it as a people's war against fascism and supported the Allied war effort, especially after Hitler had invaded Russia...

...Historical experience as well as objective conditions probably explain the difference between the Naxalites and the Telengana insurrectionists...

...First, it took stern administrative and police action against the insurrectionists...

...Anything different from the Russian brand was heresy to all Communists, and the only true road to revolution was the one Russia had shown...

...Many people give them a hand when they voice, even if by distasteful methods, protest against social and economic injustice...

...Elections are largely a game of numbers...

...In the Naxalite view, a frontal blow is impractical...

...There is evidence that they are receiving some: small quantities of Chinese arms have been found in their hideouts in West Bengal...

...The Communists failed to hold their gains, because the government was able to act against them...

...The Naxalities or the CPI(ML) are the latest to peel off from the Communist movement...

...you cannot play unless you have numbers on your side...

...In this the Communists themselves helped him immensely by their previous support of a war that had been unpopular in India and by Moscow's continued denunciation of Nehru as the "running dog of imperialism...

...Labor unrest has simmered here for quite some time, especially among tribal workers...

...But this will not last...

...the Chinese was not yet an established success, was little known and even less understood...

...justice was dealt out in people's courts and, for all practical purposes, a parallel government was set up...

...The two had come to a clash over their interpretations of World War II...

...The Naxalites work differently...

...The same thing is now happening to the Naxalites...

...So they started picking off individual British officers with the bullet or knife...

...T T HERE IS MORE TO THIS DIFFERENCE than tactical refinement...

...It does not prevent them, much less deter them, from doing their deeds...

...Several heads of landlords were paraded through the streets...

...What harms them as much as their support for China, India's enemy since 1962, is their senseless destruction of such institutions as universities, examination centers, Gandhi peace exhibitions, hospitals, and family planning clinics...

...But it is a well-known principle of Chinese-inspired insurrection that the rebel must rely on himself, and if he needs any arms he must capture them from the enemy...