Recent developments in the Naxalite movement - communists in India

For more than a decade, the Indian media have been printing sensational stories about armed members of the Naxalite movement who run "parallel" governments in the parts of the country in which they have effective control. Paradoxically, the media have at the same time sought to dismiss the Naxalite movement as "infantile terrorism" indulged in by a handful of extremists with no mass base.

Both of the above depictions distort the reality. Most Indian "Marxist-Leninists" (the term commonly used to differentiate them from the two older Communist Parties) would readily agree that the militant struggles of the rural poor which they lead have yet to reach the stage of guerrilla warfare and the establishment of guerrilla zones. The stories about parallel governments are often planted by opposition groups from the ruling classes to defame the governing party for its failures on the law and order front. This kind of news also partly reflects the growing "yellow" cast of a press that caters to a market in which suitably lurid stories of Naxalite violence sell well.

Though the Marxist-Leninist movement in India has without doubt a pronounced armed character, it would be silly to paint it as "terrorist." Massive people's rallies and the continual expansion of mass struggles organized by various Marxist-Leninist groups during the last fifteen years, particularly in the large states of Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, bear eloquent testimony to their increasing political support. In short, while the Indian revolution is not exactly around the corner, there is no denying that the struggles led by Marxist-Leninists of today are more sustained and widespread than ever before.

I

When Charu Majumdar, the chief ideologue of the Naxalbari armed peasant upsurge and later the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) died in police custody in July 1972, the initial attempts of the party to develop armed revolution had already been defeated. In his last writing shortly before his arrest Majumdar conceded that the "armed struggle in our country has, after reaching a stage, suffered a setback."(1) It was with that setback, that the first split in the CPI (M-L) had occurred by the end of 1970. After Majumdar's death the Party further broke into many factions, and sharp polemics among the factions continue to this day, as they seek to understand the reasons behind past failures and to plot out correct tactics and strategy for the Indian revolution.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is now of course easy to scorn many of the naive assumptions of the CPI (M-L) in its formative period. Resisting the temptation to try to sound wise after the event, one can briefly note in passing that all the major Marxist- Leninist groups now attribute the debacle, in varying degrees, to an adventurist tactical line adopted by the Party in its initial phase.

Before passing over to the contemporary happenings in the Naxalite movement, one important point deserves mention. Communists who supported the Naxalbari upsurge in 1967 were not members of the CPI (M-L), which was not formed until two years later. Notably, a large proportion of the Andhra Naxalites remained outside the new party because of serious political differences. These sections, later organized under the banner of the Andhra Pradesh Revolutionary Communist Committee (APRCC), while sharing in the main the programmatic concepts of the CPI (M-L) and its assessment of the national and international situation, put forth a less adventurist tactical line for building a revolutionary peasant struggle.

For instance, whereas the CPI (M-L) ignored the unevenness of Indian society, rejected mass organizations and mass movements as breeding grounds for economism and legalism, and sought to initiate guerilla war by attacks on notorious landlords carried out by secret armed squads, the APRCC argued for unleashing an armed popular struggle to defend the gains achieved by various mass movements. The APRCC also favored building mass organizations and stressed the need to combine illegal and secret forms of struggle with open and legal forms. This formation too, in time, got divided into a number of groups, and the strongest among them, led by Chandra Pulla Reddy, merged with one CPI (M-L) faction in 1975. Interestingly, as we shall see, the current tactics pursued by the major Marxist-Leninist organizations bear a closer resemblance to the line of the APRCC than to that of the CPI (M-L) of the first phase.

II

A story circulated on April 10, 1993, by India's biggest news agency reports that the Home Ministry of the central government has "asked the governments in the Naxalite-infested states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, and Maharashtra to follow an integrated regional strategy" to contain "the extremist violence and help address the economic and social problems being exploited by the Naxalites." (The Times of India, Patna Edition, April 11, 1993) The report goes on to add that "Ieft-wing extremism showed a distinct sign of revival since the mid-eighties" and "in the recent past the movement has become very violent and spread to wider areas through mass mobilization on a significant scale." The report, given prominent coverage by most national newspapers, pinpoints Bihar and Andhra Pradesh as the "center-stage of extremist activity" and names five of the Marxist-Leninist groups as being in the "forefront of violent activities." These organizations, according to the story, are CPI (M-L) (People's War), CPI (M-L) (Liberation), CPI (ML) (Party Unity), CPI (M-L) (led by Ramchandran), and the Maoist Communist Center (MCC).

In spite of its obvious hostility to the Marxist-Leninist groups, the report is unusually near the mark. For one thing, it correctly locates the geographical spread of the agrarian movement under Naxalite leadership and names the most active organizations within it. For another, it recognizes the broad mass character of the movement and errs only in timing its revival. The resurgence, to be precise, began in 1977 when these groups began to take advantage of the somewhat more relaxed political atmosphere following the defeat of Indira Gandhi's government in the aftermath of her nineteen-month "emergency rule." Most of these groups started fielding legal and semi-legal mass organizations around 1977 to lead the rural masses in their struggles on economic and social issues. While efforts were made, sometimes successfully, to build mass platforms on student, youth, working class, women's, and cultural fronts, the emphasis was unmistakably on developing the peasant struggles in the countryside.

Although 1977 was a watershed year for Indian politics, in the sense that the era of the Congress Party's monopoly over the central government came to a close and a new epoch of relative political instability began, this phenomenon can be linked with the revival of the Naxalite movement only in a limited way. Similarly, though the economic condition of the vast rural poor was steadily worsening over the years, there was nothing special about the year 1977 to connect it to the movement's resurgence. But the rethinking within these groups about tactics and the regrouping of forces after the setback had by then reached a stage at which a fresh initiative was really in the cards. Certain favorable objective factors of the moment no doubt lent added impetus to this new wave of struggles.

When the first non-Congress government in Delhi was successfully pressured in 1977 to fulfill its campaign promise to release large numbers of imprisoned activists and leaders, including Naxalites, the Marxist-Leninist camp was strengthened. The banner of democracy unfurled by the parliamentary opposition parties to fight Indira Gandhi's "emergency" regime also made it difficult for them to unleash a reign of terror against the Naxalites immediately after coming to power. And at the level of consciousness, the denial of all legal avenues of protest during the "emergency" rule perhaps helped these groups to appreciate a little better that the Indian form of bourgeois democracy does offer some space, however restricted, for openly mobilizing the people on immediate issues. More importantly, from the movement's point of view, the promises made through the years with monotonous regularity by the parliamentary opposition to implement land and tenancy reforms and to alleviate poverty, while giving nothing very concrete, had tremendously aroused the aspirations of the rural poor. And unfulfilled aspirations, more than poverty as such, had made the downtrodden masses receptive to the Naxalite politics of militant struggle.

III

In the Indian Marxist-Leninist movement of today, there is no doubt an element of continuity linking it to an earlier stage. As in the past, the contemporary M-L organizations, by and large, view Indian society as semicolonial and the Indian state as being run by the comprador-bureaucratic bourgeoisie and the big landlords. Based on these premises, they continue to envisage the building of a broad united front of all anti-imperialist and anti-feudal classes for accomplishing the people's democratic revolution, with agrarian revolution as its axis. Ideologically, these organizations persist in upholding Mao's thought as a development of Marxism- Leninism and steadfastly support the positions taken by the Communist Party of China in its great debate with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the 1960s. As in the past, they persevere in their conviction that the Naxalbari peasant upsurge signified a turning point in the Indian communist movement, a break with the revisionists. The reader will note that this theoretical structure inherited from the past has been borrowed from the Chinese. One must, however, add that there is now a growing awareness of the need to develop a specific theoretical model for the Indian revolution among the Indian Marxist- Leninists.

Going beyond this theoretical continuity which keeps the various groups together, the contemporary Marxist-Leninist movement has a new look in a number of ways. To begin with, the movement today is headed mainly by a new generation of leadership, most of whom began their political life in the post-Naxalbari period, inspired as they were by the call for an armed revolution in India. Police killings, arrests, torture in custody, and the rigors of a long underground existence have cut short the lives of many of the pioneers of the movement. Though a few of the old guard are still active, the change is conspicuous, with mixed consequences.

The geographical spread of the movement has also undergone significant change. West Bengal, the birthplace of the Naxalbari, no longer occupies a prominent place. The state, uninterruptedly ruled since 1977 by a Left Front government headed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), has been hailed by many as a unique model of communists sharing power within a bourgeois form of democracy. Without detaining ourselves in an assessment of this experiment, which now seems to have entered a blind alley, suffice it to record that the reform program of the Left-Front government has so far been rather successful in blunting the Naxalite challenge in West Bengal. Meanwhile, as mentioned earlier, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh have emerged as the main theater for militant struggles of agricultural laborers and poor peasants. The Andhra struggle has spread to neighboring regions in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Crissa, and Marxist-Leninist organizations are quite active in parts of a number of other states. But there is no enduring agrarian movement of comparable intensity over large areas of those regions.

Most important of all, the immediate objective of the movement has been scaled down from that of launching guerrilla war against the state to a more practicable task of building the militant struggles of the rural poor over a vast area. Most serious Marxist-Leninist organizations agree that the present stage of the movement is that of politicizing the masses and waging partial struggles in order to create conditions for taking the struggle to a higher level. The armed squads formed by these organizations are generally viewed as instruments for helping the mass struggles and for defending their gains in the face of an armed onslaught by landlord gangs and police forces. Though these squads often punish those landlords and their henchmen that are considered to be particularly oppressive and occasionally launch attacks on police or paramilitary forces to seize arms and ammunition, the intent is to scale the armed activities so that they correspond to the existing lower stage of the movement. But there is apparently a considerable gap between precept and practice, and most organizations acknowledge that due to inadequate political education of the cadres and squads some unnecessary, even harmful, armed actions do take place from time to time.

Within this common tactical framework, there indeed exists a variety of shades with different emphases on legal and illegal aspects of the movement. The Naxalites also remain sharply divided on the question of utilizing the parliamentary form of struggle. But on the whole, the old tactics of all-out armed offensive in isolation from mass movements have been discarded. And the retreat in the realm of concepts has facilitated an advance in the real movement. A look at the Bihar and Andhra Pradesh struggles clearly shows that the moderate success achieved so far in building a relatively stable mass base has been achieved by combining armed activities with mass struggles of the rural poor. And these tactics, while far removed from the practice of the original CPI (M-L), fairly approximate the line advocated by the APRCC faction led by Chandra Reddy.

IV

In India, the conventional index for judging party support has been the votes polled in elections, but this method does not help much in forming an idea about Naxalite influence. The difficulty arises in the first place because out of the three major Marxist-Leninist groups in Bihar, for example, only one participates in elections, indirectly through a people's front. The biggest organization in Andhra Pradesh - the CPI (M-L) (People's War) - boycotts elections as a matter of strategy. Moreover, for the rural poor the freedom to vote is itself a right that can only be earned through fierce struggle. That the Indian Peoples Front (IPF) affiliated to the CPI (M-L) (Liberation) could poll about one million votes in the last Bihar legislative elections and send seven of its representatives to the state assembly gives only a glimpse of the Naxalite strength in that state.

The large following behind the Marxist-Leninists in Bihar and Andhra Pradesh is better manifested in the incessant struggles carried out by agricultural labor and poor peasants. It is also well expressed through the massive processions and meetings organized in the towns of Bihar and Andhra Pradesh by the mass organizations attached to the M-L groups. The mammoth rally organized by the Rythu Cooly Sangham (Peasants and Agricultural Labor Association), attached to CPI (M-L) (People's War) in May 1990, for instance, is deemed by many to be the biggest political show of strength in recent history by any party in Andhra Pradesh.

V

Recognizing that the Naxalite movement has made appreciable progress in the period under review, it is necessary to point out its localized nature. Despite efforts to break fresh ground, their agrarian struggles have remained mainly confined to regions where the pre-capitalist socio-economic structure is stronger. Moreover, the extent of the Naxalite mass base, though impressive in absolute terms, still appears rather narrow when viewed in the context of a country of 884 million. Even within their sphere of influence, no broad peasant unity has developed. While the Marxist-Leninists describe the rural movements under their leadership as "revolutionary peasant struggles," it might be more appropriate to term them as struggles of agricultural laborers and the poorest sections of the peasantry, who usually also toil in the fields of others. Though some expansion of the movement is continuously taking place around the present Naxalite strongholds, a number of Marxist-Leninist organizations report that a sort of stagnation has crept into many of the old areas of struggle.

Looking beyond the agrarian struggles, one finds a host of other problems confronting the Naxalite movement. The industrial working class, middle-class employees, and other sections of the urban petty bourgeoisie have until this date not shown much inclination towards Naxalite politics. Lack of urban influence, localized rural work, underground existence, and the divisions of the movement have also prevented the Marxist-Leninist voice from being adequately heard on the national plane. Thus, in spite of a long tradition of heroic struggle and countless sacrifices, the movement has, as yet been able to make only a marginal impact on the general course of Indian political and economic development. To appreciate this point, one only has to note the swift and phenomenal growth of the Hindu communal forces in the last five years. Reference can also be made to the fact that the Congress Party-led minority central government has so far been remarkably successful in taking the country along the disastrous IMF path. Thus the tasks of deepening the agrarian movement and raising it to a new height and the need for boldly intervening in the ongoing political battles on the all-India plane constitute the major challenge before the Indian Marxist-Leninists today. The bewildering plurality of a multi-national, multi-religious, and caste-divided Indian society of course poses a host of other obstacles to forging class unity and advancing class struggle. It goes without saying that any successful revolution will have to take care of all these peculiarities in its strategic framework.

VI

It is almost impossible to capture the many colors in the Naxalite spectrum that are grappling to respond to these diverse challenges ahead. At the risk of making a very broad generalization, one can identify two major trends.

One trend, best represented by CPI (M-L) (People's War), the most influential group in Andhra Pradesh, is seeking answers to the new problems within the old strategic framework. For them, all enrichment of tactics must serve the cause of building a people's army and guerrilla zones in the countryside. With this objective, the group has deployed its main strength in the contiguous forest areas covering parts of Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh. To overcome the present lull in the movement that has occurred due to ruthless state repression, the armed squads under its leadership have already begun guerrilla-type counterattacks against the police and paramilitary forces. It considers legal party and parliamentary forms of struggle incompatible with the path of a people's war, and would go only so far in that realm as to an All-India People's Resistance Forum (AIPRF) to propagate the politics of agrarian revolution and to convey its views on contemporary national political issues. It rejects any unity or alliance with those it considers revisionists (the CPI, CPI (M), and even some M-L groups) but shows a willingness to form a united front with various nationality struggles seeking secession from the Indian state. So far, this organization seems to be convinced that, apart from some small regions of capitalist development in agriculture, a Chinese model of agrarian revolution remains valid for the country.

Notwithstanding its theoretical rigidity, the People's War group has taken commendable initiative in waging political struggles and organizing urban work. In fact, it ranks ahead of others in organizing the students, youth, intellectuals, and cultural workers on different mass platforms and has been able to secure a foothold among the coal miners in Andhra Pradesh. This group also appears to have done better in mobilizing the owner-cultivators in anti- government struggles. The political campaigns it has waged against the danger of Hindu communalism and against caste discrimination are also indicative of its desire to integrate a variety of struggles into the revolutionary peasant movement.

On the other hand, a highly exaggerated notion about the revolutionary possibilities of the present national and international situation, coupled with the narrowness of its experience in regions where precapitalist forms of exploitation and oppression were acute, has often led the group to an adventurist course. Its excessive reliance on armed activities in promoting peoples struggles and undue emphasis on spectacular armed actions in resistance to state repression have taken the group, perhaps prematurely, beyond the stage of partial struggles without a corresponding preparedness among the masses. One should, however, emphasize that the Andhra Pradesh government's brutal attempts to crush all legal and open activities by the group and its associated mass organizations have further provoked them towards an adventurist course. One only hopes that the CPI (M-L) (People's War), presently engaged in self-criticism, will come out with a more flexible theoretical model as well as a set of tactics based on a realistic assessment of the current situation.

The other trend, most articulately expressed by CPI (M-L) (Liberation), is, on the contrary, making efforts to break out of the old theoretical-strategic model of the Naxalite movement. For instance, its decision in 1988 to stop calling the erstwhile Soviet Union a social-imperialist country and to offer a guarded welcome to the Gorbachev reforms in fact caused a furor in the Marxist- Leninist camp. It also stands apart in regarding the Chinese Communist Party as a fraternal party when others have dubbed it revisionist.

Curiously, this group, while being the last among the major M-L organizations to give up the old adventurist line, has gone ahead of others in effecting far-reaching changes on tactical questions. It maintained an underground existence until recently but developed a legal face under the name of the Indian People's Front (IPF) for the purpose of open political work. The IPF, combining parliamentary struggles with political mobilizations on important national issues, has become the best-known among the Naxalite front organizations across the country. Since 1982, this formation has been arguing in favor of a shift in emphasis from armed resistance to mass political movements, as the present conjunction of class forces, in its view, is not conducive to the former. This organization, however, continues to retain its armed squads in the rural areas of Bihar due to the necessity to defend the agrarian movement from enemy attacks.

More to the point, its understanding of the substantial growth of capitalist relations in Indian agriculture, the centralization process of the Indian economy, and the state, which is headed by a relatively powerful Third World bourgeoisie, has made this group reconsider the strategic path of revolution in India. In the early 1980s it came out with an alternative path combining armed agrarian revolution with the urban insurrection of workers. More recently, in its first open All-India Party Congress at Calcutta, in December 1992, the Liberation group, while asking the ranks to prepare themselves for winning the ultimate decisive victory in an armed revolution, did not rule out the possibility of a relatively peaceful transfer of central power to revolutionary forces under exceptional circumstances. Moving away from the Naxalite camp, the CPI (M-L) (Liberation), has also given the call for a left confederation to be built jointly with the mainstream communist parties - the CPI and the CPI (M).

These changes have, of course, helped the group to become a partner in the left national alliances that have mobilized to combat the communal danger or to oppose the IMF-dictated economic policies and thus, to play a more meaningful role at the national level. Simultaneously, it has landed the organization in an identity crisis because of its increasing theoretical proximity to the very party, the CPI (M), against which the Indian Marxist-Leninists rebelled in 1967.

That aside, the reference to the possibility of the seizure of power through peaceful means, though usually explained as a tactical ploy to secure conditions for a prolonged period of legal struggles, has been in the Indian context a signal for a shift towards parliamentarianism. While one should not hastily pass a final judgement, the growing preoccupation of the group with national level political initiatives and parliamentary tactics seems to be adversely affecting the further development of militant agrarian movements under its leadership. But to be fair, it must be conceded that the group's evaluation regarding the difficult national and international situation and the urge for an orderly tactical retreat to gain strength and fight another day has considerable merit.

It is of interest to note that though the "mode of production" debate within the country's left-leaning academic circles during the 1970s suggested that today capitalism rather than semi-feudalism dominates Indian agriculture, there have been very few takers of some scholars' prescription for a socialist revolution in India. The essentially pre-capitalist political life of rural India, the still unfinished business of land reform, and the preponderance of petty ownership in agriculture have made socialist revolution an as yet non-viable proposition for the Indian left, including the Naxalites. The few smaller Naxalite groups who have opted for a socialist-revolution model have so far failed to evolve corresponding tactics and to implement them in practice. But the academic debate, itself partly a fallout of the Naxalbari upsurge, has prompted a number of other Marxist-Leninist organizations to modify or reinterpret some of their programmatic formulations.

VII

Addressing a conference of revenue ministers last year, the Prime Minister, Narsimha Rao, sounded touchingly self-critical about the failure of land reform in India. "That means," said Rao, "that what we promised to the people before independence, after independence, election after election after election, all parties, has not been done."(2) The hypocrisy of such rhetoric apart, the Indian Prime Minister, hailing from Andhra Pradesh, has reasons to be apprehensive. Going through the motions of land redistribution has once again become imperative for the ruling classes to preempt the rising Naxalite challenge in the Prime Minister's home state and beyond.

That brings us to one of the major achievements of the Naxalites and shows their continued relevance as well. Truly, it is they alone who have kept the crucial agrarian question in India alive through their valiant struggles over the years. The Naxalites' success in actually redistributing land has been, however, only modest. The record of left governments in Kerala and West Bengal is indeed much more impressive on that score. But the whole point is that the land distribution by the Naxalite movement has come from hard struggle, from below, enhancing the consciousness of the rural poor.

And therein lies the other remarkable achievement of the Naxalite movement. When the bigger mainstream communist parties were too busy counting their votes and making tactical adjustments with one or the other party of the ruling classes, it fell upon the Naxalites to preserve the fighting spirit of Marxism. And it is only due to their movement that the agricultural laborers and the poorest strata of peasantry have, for the first time, made it to the political arena as an independent force freed from the apron- strings of the upper strata of peasants. The emergence of these classes as a separate political constituency, when it becomes a national phenomenon, is indeed pregnant with momentous possibilities for bringing the long-awaited leftward shift in the Indian polity.

VIII

A revolutionary transformation of Indian society, however, cannot be a mere agricultural labor/poor-peasant affair, nor can land be the only issue for mobilizing the various sections of the toiling people. Moreover, though a vast part of rural India is comparable with Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, there is also a large territory where agrarian class relations have undergone significant change. Given this backdrop, has the Naxalite movement the potential to break out of its present social and geographical confines to occupy the center-stage of Indian politics? This is a tough question to answer. Basically, it would depend upon a major theoretical break-through on the part of Indian Marxist-Leninists to resolve the accumulated problems of the Indian revolution and its ability to unify the movement on that basis.

Without going into the details of working out a new theoretical model - a task best left to the actual practitioners of class struggle - one would, however, wish to make a few general observations about the direction of such theoretical inquiries. To begin, many agrarian studies have shown, and even the Naxalite experience confirms, that the scope for the old model of all-in peasant unity against landlordism has become quite restricted due to the abolition of intermediaries between the Indian state and the cultivating and non-cultivating owners of land. A new theoretical model that can win over the toiling sections of owner peasants from the grip of rich landowners and integrate their anti-big- bourgeoisie orientation with the anti-landlord struggles of rural poor is thus urgently called for.

Moving beyond the agrarian sector, the crucial task is to sort out, from a multitude of social contradictions, the key slogans that best match the Indian people's aspirations. In China, the land hunger of the tens of millions of peasants, the autocratic Kuomintang rule, and the attempt of Japanese imperialism to turn the country into its colony gave birth to the popular slogan of "land, democracy, and independence." Will the same slogans, as the Naxalites tend to believe, capture the Indian people's imagination too? India is a country characterized by a parliamentary form of government, a relatively strong bourgeoisie, a changing agrarian structure due to capitalist development, and invisible external enemies (unlike the Japanese imperialists in pre-liberation China). One may therefore venture to suggest that there is a need to search for new categories to depict the exact nature of the Indian state and the corresponding slogans for the Indian revolution. But that, of course, is easier said in an essay than done in actual practice.

The other point is that the Naxalites, or for that matter, the Indian left, despite their many blunders, cannot really be accused of failing to bring about the revolution. The major contradictions of Indian society, while getting sharper by the day, have not reached the flash point yet. The working class, for example, is still disinclined to respond to a revolutionary call or to go for major political battles. Maybe the ominous growth of Hindu fascist-communal forces and the attack on the people's living standards in the name of the structural readjustment of the Indian economy will aggravate the crisis sooner than is expected. But meanwhile one also yearns for a minimum interim program that would stretch the reform possibilities within the system to its limits in order to bring about a more favorable correlation of political forces.

If the Naxalites succeed in these endeavors, having steeled themselves through militant struggle, they would perhaps be in a better position than the mainstream Communist parties - turned flabby due to long parliamentary practice - to rise to the occasion when the political crisis deepens. But that does not mean that the Naxalites will prove to be the only revolutionary force among the Indian left at such a juncture. In all likelihood it would be a joint venture in which the Naxalites would occupy a place of honor.

NOTES

(1.) Majumdar's last writing is reproduced in Samar Sen, et al. (eds.) Naxalbari and After: A Frontier Antholog, vol. 11 (Calcutta: Kathashilkpa). Fellow MR readers may fruitfully go back to Lawrence Lifschultz, "The Problem of India," Review of the Month, February 1981, for a background to the first phase of the Naxalite movement. The present article draws considerably on the underground literature of the major Naxalite groups. (2.) See Harkishan Singh Surjeet, Land Reforms In India, Promises and Performance, (1992), Annexture VII.

Tilak D. Gupta is a free-lance writer for a number of Indian Newspapers and he contributes to the Economic and Political Weekly. He has had a long association with the Naxalite movement in Bihar. The author wishes to record his thanks to Bernard D'Mello for his valuable suggestions during the preparation of the draft as well as for editorial help. The responsibility for any shortcomings, of course, lies entirely with the author.

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