To understand the collapse, you have to go back to the beginning. Because the insurgency in central India was never a spontaneous uprising like the other regions.
Illustration by Manjul
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13 May 2026, 6:36 am
For decades, the Naxalite-Maoist insurgency was described as India’s gravest internal security problem. Grave enough that Manmohan Singh as prime minister called it the single biggest threat the country had ever faced from within. At its peak in the late 2000s, the movement touched nearly 180 districts across a belt of central and eastern India that came to be called the Red Corridor.
By 2024, that number had fallen to 38.
But the forest heartland of Dandakaranya, straddling Chhattisgarh and parts of Odisha, remained the last redoubt, sheltering the bulk of the party’s Central Committee.
This is the story of how that stronghold finally came apart.
The Bharatiya Janata Party government in Delhi had staked a public claim on the outcome. Through 2024 and 2025, Home Minister Amit Shah repeated the same deadline of March 31, 2026, at event after event. Talks were ruled out. The only offer on the table was surrender. Whether the deadline was strategic pressure or electoral theatre, it concentrated resources on a single geography. How that deadline came to be met is more complicated than the government’s account suggests.
But to understand the collapse, you have to go back to the beginning. Because the insurgency in central India was never a spontaneous uprising like the other regions.
It learnt from failures
The movements in Bengal, Bihar, and Andhra Pradesh were, at their core, anti-landlord rebellions. Their leadership was drawn from educated, urban, middle-class communists, but those regions also produced organic tribal leaders. In Naxalbari, the movement that lent its name to all that followed included Adivasi figures like Jangal Santhal alongside Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal.
The Naxalbari uprising began in 1967 but was crushed by the police within five years. In 1977, survivors gathered for a reckoning. The central question on the table was stark: We believed we had found the correct line in 1967. How did it all end so quickly?
The Maoist presence in central India’s tribal belt grew from the other failures. That review in 1977 produced the “Rear Area Document”. Drawing on Mao’s doctrine, it argued that the party needed a sanctuary, a rear area where fighters could regroup during difficult periods and return to the struggle once conditions improved. Dandakaranya, the forested heartland of central India, was chosen as that sanctuary. The Maoists established a presence there in 1980.
For the first decade, they operated less like a revolutionary vanguard. They challenged the Forest Department’s exploitation of tribal communities, secured fairer prices for tendu leaves and other forest produce, and sought to stop the sexual harassment of tribal women by government officials.
By 1990, when the situation in other states had not improved, the Maoists sent to Dandakaranya for shelter made a decisive break. They declared they would work for the revolution from within Dandakaranya itself, and argued that the party’s assumption that local tribals lacked political consciousness was simply wrong.
The two catalysts
Unlike in other regions, Dandakaranya had no landlords and no landless labourers. The conditions that typically ignite Maoist movements were absent. What fueled their growth here was, ironically, the State itself.
The first catalyst came in the 1990s, when the BJP government launched what it called the Jan Jagran Abhiyan – the “Public Awakening Movement” – which became a tool to harass anyone who had assisted Maoists over the previous decade. Adivasi leaders, operating through the collective decision-making that is central to their culture, addressed their communities: These people helped us for 10 years. Those of you who can no longer return home because of Jan Jagran are welcome to join the party.
That was how the Maoist movement in Dandakaranya truly began.
The second catalyst came in 2005, when the government launched Salwa Judum, roughly translated from Gondi as “peace march,” though it was anything but. It was a State-sponsored militia campaign that forced Adivasis to either join government camps or face violence. Thousands joined the Maoists simply because it was the only alternative to abandoning their homes. The party swelled.
Between 2005 and 2015, the Maoists were at the height of their power in Dandakaranya, executing several large-scale attacks. But by 2015, the same tribal social leaders who had brought communities into the movement began to step back. Their message was: The Dadas (the Maoists) are good people, certainly better than the police. But in the long run, their path of violence is not in the best interests of our society.
Exhaustion sets in
Since 2004, I have been working on an experiment in media democratisation in Dandakaranya, training local people in citizen journalism. In our meetings, people began saying something that surprised us: This work is valuable. But what we need most from you is something else entirely. We want to leave the Maoist movement.
For three years, we deferred and delayed. We then reached out to urban figures — intellectuals and activists close to the movement or familiar with it. Nearly everyone agreed that a peace process should begin. But no one did anything.
From 2018, we set aside our media work and began facilitating a peace process. Meetings were held, padayatras (foot marches) were organised, bicycle rallies were conducted. Gradually, Maoist leaders began making contact. The pattern was always the same — a press statement denouncing us in the morning, a call from a new, untraceable number in the evening.
Their position, expressed again and again, was: You are asking us to surrender. You are asking us to accept the Indian Constitution. We can never do either.
We told them we could find other words if words were the obstacle. The Union government showed no interest in engaging.
Meanwhile, on the ground, a new military strategy was working where Salwa Judum had failed. The government was establishing Forward Operating Bases – permanent camps pushed deep into Maoist territory – steadily shrinking the space in which the movement operated.
The turning point
As the government’s March 31, 2026 deadline approached, I travelled toward Kutul in Abujhmad – long considered the Maoists’ undeclared capital, where their top leader, Basavaraju, had lived for years. He had been killed the previous year, and the movement had been weakening ever since.
On the way, I met Robinson Gudiya, the Superintendent of Police for Narayanpur district. Over the past two years, Robinson had led operations deep into what had been considered impenetrable Maoist territory. I asked him how it had happened so quickly — how did a movement that had held for decades collapsed like a house of cards.
“Human intel,” he said. “Eighty percent human intelligence, 20% everything else.”
And the 20%? “Amit Shah, the double-engine government, drones, satellites, funding, the DRG.” The District Reserve Guard is a battalion composed of local recruits and former Maoists who have surrendered.
The real story, though, began on January 16, 2024.
By then, the BJP had formed the government in Chhattisgarh, and the camp-establishment strategy, already accelerated under Amit Shah as Home Minister, was in full swing. To counter it, the Maoists ordered fighters from West and South Bastar to converge on a single target: the Central Reserve Police Force’s (CRPF) Cobra Battalion, stationed at Dharmavaram in Bijapur district.
The planning was meticulous. A mock-up of the Cobra camp was constructed along the banks of the Talperu River. Fighters were fitted with grass camouflage. Extensive reconnaissance was conducted. And yet the attack failed completely. The Maoists issued a press statement claiming 35 security personnel were killed. In reality, not one died.
The reason for the failure was significant: the local population did not, or could not, participate in large numbers, as they had in every previous major attack.
But the failed assault produced an unintended consequence. For the first time in a long while, key tribal Maoist commanders had gathered in one place. In reviewing what had gone wrong, they crossed a threshold that had never been crossed in 45 years of the movement in Dandakaranya: every tribal Maoist leader in that room said aloud, to one another, what they had privately believed for years: Society wanted them to change course, society wanted them to lay down their arms.
They drafted a letter to the Central Committee, the supreme body of the Maoist party. It read, in effect: The security camps are making it impossible to meet with people or maintain their support. The party must change its strategy. We should temporarily lay down our arms.
The Central Committee met, considered the letter, and rejected it.
The letter that changed everything
But the letter had already done something irreversible. The fighters who drafted it had asked their principal commander, Hidma, perhaps the most formidable armed figure in the movement, to circulate it to all factions within the party.
It is worth pausing here on a fact: though 99% of the fighters in Dandakaranya were tribals, and half of them women, not a single tribal person or woman had ever held a seat in the Central Committee. The party’s leadership remained overwhelmingly non-tribal and Telugu-speaking. Hidma circulated the letter regardless.
The first senior leader to express agreement with the letter’s sentiments was Venugopal, the Central Committee’s spokesperson. Gradually, General Secretary Basavaraju followed. With Hidma having built support across factions, he was inducted into the Central Committee — a historic moment.
Basavaraju then began holding dialogue with communities about peace. Members of the Central Committee, including Hidma and Rupesh, attended these meetings. I suggested involving a few journalists in the process; my wife’s illness prevented me from participating directly.
Then came the blow that threatened to unravel everything. A DRG team comprising local youths, many of them former Maoists, assassinated Basavaraju. The anti-peace faction immediately blamed the pro-peace faction. Yet the peace process survived his death.
Through a journalist friend, contact was made with Chhattisgarh’s Home Minister, Vijay Sharma. Rupesh traveled to Raipur to negotiate. He returned with agreement on three points: no legal prosecution for Maoists who returned to mainstream society; no coercion to join the police; and the lifting of the ban on the Mulwasi Bachao Manch (Save the Indigenous People Forum), the Maoists’ legal front organisation.
Hidma was furious about this agreement. “I am not fighting for myself,” he said. “I am fighting for my community. There is nothing in this agreement for the community.” He took roughly 70–80% of the remaining fighters with him into the anti-peace faction.
Venugopal’s pro-peace faction – approximately 20% of the fighters – surrendered on the three agreed conditions.
The endgame
The split was now total and public. The Adivasi communities living in the forests knew it too, and the intelligence they began providing to police became extraordinary in its precision. Small police squads were able to locate and neutralise the most senior leaders and return safely. The targeted killings of prominent Telugu commanders accelerated.
Some people in the state’s urban corners were alarmed by what appeared to be an oncoming bloodbath. They made fresh attempts to mediate. But the intelligence flowing from the ground had rendered the security situation decisive.
And then Hidma, too, was killed.
According to the Times of India, his final letter reached the community on the day he died. In it, he expressed his wish to engage the government in dialogue on tribal issues.
The surviving senior leaders of the anti-peace faction surrendered, in much the same way the pro-peace faction had before them. The sanctuary of Dandakaranya, built over 45 years, collapsed almost overnight.
What destroyed the Maoist movement in central India was not, in the end, drones or satellites or superior firepower, though these played their part. It was the withdrawal of the one thing that had made the movement possible in the first place: the quiet, durable consent of the Adivasi communities it claimed to represent.
The writer is a former journalist with BBC and the founder of CGNet Swara – a voice-based online news portal focussed on central Gondwana region. He was also the convener of the New Peace Process.
Views expressed are the author’s own.
This report was originally published in the Newslaundry and can be accessed here.
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Struggle against Left adventurism in India by comrades DV Rao and T.Nagi Reddy
by MA Krishna
14/07/2026
July is the month people of Telugu states recall, on their death anniversaries, Com Doddi Komarayya (the first martyr of Telangana) who died on July 4 1946, veteran communist revolutionaries (CRs) Com DV Rao on July 12, 1984 and Com T. Nagi Reddy on July 28, 1976. TN’s is being observed also as the 50th death anniversary.
A well-attended meeting was held on July12 at Hyderabad Press Club, to mark the occasion, in which several speakers explained the revolutionary roles played by DV and TN, including their struggle against Right and Left deviations.
This article focused on their principled ideological struggle against Left Adventurism is being published to mark the occasion. The subject in this installment is of particular interest in the context of the collapse of Left Adventurism, and well-publicized formal “surrenders” of hundreds of Maoist party cadres, including dozens of their top leaders, in recent past.
It is not well known, and least told even to leaders of ML parties and groups, that Andhra communist revolutionary leaders, DV Rao and TN, CC Members of the undivided CPI, went all the way to Calcutta (now Kolkata), and met Charu Majumdar (1918-1972 July 28). Andhra comrades met him twice within four months, beginning in Oct 1968, and held discussions, including on Telangana’s (1946 july-1951 October armed struggle) experiences and its lessons for Indian revolution. They also pointed out ‘Left’ mistakes in the line and practice, soon after the mass upsurge in Naxalbari, of Charu-led group, who also indulged in such activities elsewhere, Srikakulam in particular.
There was a decade-old (from late 1950s) ongoing militant mass movement of the adivasis of Srikakulam, led by Andhra CRs, which was disrupted by the Charu group’s ‘Left’ line and factionalism from late 1968, as explained elsewhere by DV Rao. In view of the differences on related questions of line and practice, they originally wanted to discuss this before the AP-CCCR (Co-ordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries) joined the (All India body, the AICCCR, and sought wider discussion in the latter. Charu Majumdar, Darjeeling district leader of the erstwhile CPI, however, did not agree with them. (The APCCR formally merged in AICCCR in Oct 1968; “it was a conditional merger, in practice, with our plain-speaking on the various subjects,” DV explained elsewhere, as in a Review.)
Majumdar, who knew little about Telangana, had the audacity to assert, subjectively, that the understanding, about Telangana people’s armed struggle, of DV Rao, veteran leader of Telangana, was “wrong”. That he did – so as to support his own ‘Left’ adventurist line on armed struggle. (Charu Majumdar was for “armed struggle as the only form, for the whole country, as well as the entire stage of the revolution,” DV explained elsewhere, based on among other things, the writings in the magazine Liberation.)
Andhra comrades, even while rejecting the parliamentary path, differed on elections which they said is a ‘tactical question’ as opposed to the ‘Left’ line of ‘boycott elections’ as a question of strategy, applicable to entire India, and for the entire stage of PDR. (To defend their wrong approach, they branded, with no basis, Andhra comrades as upholding parliamentary path. Now decades later, some of the top leaders claimed they changed their position, and see it as part of tactics.
DV and TN opposed the ML’s slogan China’s chairman Mao is our Chairman. DV Rao wrote, ‘mere chanting of Mao’s name is not internationalism’. The Charu group listed this (“not loyal to CPC”) as one of the reasons they dissociated the APCCCR. (Liberation, March 1969).
Organizationally, DV explained, there was disruption of the Srikakulam dt Committee, and the Charu group set up a Rival Centre with them: Charu had visited Andhra in Feb 1969. The decade-long adivasi mass movement was deviated into Left adventurism, and it was suppressed by 1971-72.
Charu Majumdar (CM) did not want any discussion on such questions of line in the AICCCR, and hence ‘dissociated’, unilaterally and arbitrarily, (DV Rao wrote it was “so-called expulsion on flimsy grounds”) the APCCCR from the former on Feb 7, 1969, prevented any discussion in the AICCCR, and went ahead to announce the formation of a party, the CPI-ML, on 22nd of April 1969. Thus the merger in Oct 1968 meeting of AICCCR ended by Feb 1969, in the second meeting: The representative from AP to that meeting was given a “copy of the decision of expelling” the APCCCR. (Liberation, in March 1969 issue, reported the decision to “part with” APCCCR.) There were comrades and units who differed with CM, and they too faced “expulsions”: The Maharashtra unit opposed his arbitrariness regarding APCCCR, and dissociated itself from AICCCR. Thus began the saga of splits, which later on degenerated into factionalism in the ML movement. Scores of ML groups emerged and survived till date.
The APCCCR thus never joined CPI-ML. It held its own separate AP state Convention in the same month, 1969 April, and formed its own organization based on a revolutionary mass line, and adopted an Immediate Program, which explained among other things, the APCCR view of armed struggle linked to agrarian revolution, and based on mass line.Taking that Immediate Program as the basis, DV Rao, TN and some others were arrested on 19th of December 1969, by the Andhra police, and framed up in the Hyderabad Conspiracy Case, the first such major case, in India post-1947. There were in all 48 leaders framed up and arrested. They were in jail for years, 18 of them (DV TN included) were convicted. until they got conditional bails in 1972. It was in the jail DV Rao and TN wrote their classic works, later published in the form of books: India Mortgaged by TN, PDR by DV Rao, were in fact written in the form of their Defence Statements in the Court. DV Rao’s statement was signed by nine others including TN, and was read out in full in the Special Addl Sessions Court from Dec 14 to 18, 1971.
The criticism on Left adventurism, dated Oct 1970, was published in book form (about 150 pages) in Telugu in 1973, later reprinted; and also in English a little later. The English version was also published in the Proletarian Line (issue No.4 in Nov 1979,) a magazine of communist revolutionaries founded by DV Rao (1917-1984 July 12), as a supplement.
Several leaders from Odisha, Kerala, Karnataka, Bengal, UP etc, of the ML parties, who were erstwhile associates of the Charu Majumdar line, had read it for the first time in recent years only. They were surprised and exclaimed, ‘Oh DV Rao raised all this in 1970 itself!’ They said they were too “prejudiced” to read it earlier: they ‘shunned anything by DV Rao for decades’. Some of them said, ‘it is a tragedy that we read it so late’. Communist veteran from Kerala com Gouridasan Nair (1920-2005 July 15), was one such, and said he would compensate by translating it into Malayalam; he did it, but could not publish it.
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Left Trend Among Indian Revolutionaries: Book by DV Rao
(A few extracts from the book of 150 pages, with the above title, are given here, slightly edited, with emphases added. They are significant, worth study, in the context of the collapse of Left adventurism, recent surrenders of dozens of top leaders of the Maoist Party.)
Section 14: Mao’s Thought and the Telangana armed struggle
During the period of 1946-51, armed struggle was carried on under the leadership of the Communist Party in Telangana. In the beginning it was carried on against the Nizam’s military, and against the Congress military after September, 1948. The people of Telangana as well as the revolutionaries were very much influenced by the Chinese revolution. Also it was the first attempt to apply the experiences of the Chinese revolution to the Indian conditions. Basing on the experiences of the Telangana armed struggle (1946-51), the then Andhra Communist Committee, which led the Telangana armed struggle, had made it clear that like the Chinese revolution the Indian revolution has to be a protracted war, that the political power could not be seized as in the case of Russia through insurrection in the semi-colonial and semi-feudal India and that as in China the New Democracy has to be established in India. This is anybody’s knowledge (an important document connected with this was even published in Liberation, magazine of the Charu group those days}. It was in Telangana itself that Mao’s Thought was for the first time applied to the Indian conditions. Therefore it should be said that the Telengana armed struggle is the form of people’s war in India.
The leadership of the CP (M.L.) who refuse to recognise this historical truth say :
Naxalbari represents the first-ever application of Mao’s Thought on the soil of India. It was in Naxalbari that the peasants, for the first time, launched their struggle for the seizure of state power. For this reason, Naxalbari symbolises the path of liberation for exploited masses of the Indian people, thus ushering in a new era in the political history of India, (Charu Majumdar, Liberation, Sep 1969.)
It is indisputable that the Naxalbari struggle has got historical significance. It has clearly proved that the parliamentary system in India has become outdated in India, that there is a revolutionary situation in the country and that the conditions for the armed struggle are mature in several parts of the country. it has also reiterated the fact that the Chinese path is the only path for the liberation of India and that it is the path of people’s war. This served as a warning for all the Indian revolutionaries and on this warning they started to prepare the masses for armed struggle in their respective areas.
In the course of this armed struggle, the people under the leadership of the revolutionaries established village Soviets (Grama Rajyas) in 3000 villages of Telangana. They organised the people’s armed forces. They distributed 10 lakh acres of land of the landlords among the poor and landless peasants, and introduced many revolutionary reforms in -the interest of the masses. They laid foundations for the People’s Democracy. In Telangana it was proved in practice that the Indian revolution would be in the form of protracted war to achieve the People’s Democracy (then known as New Democracy).
Just because the then leadership of the Communist Party of India betrayed the revolution in 1951 and took to the parliamentary path, the significance of the Telangana armed struggle does not become unimportant in any way. The valuable experiences gained by applying Mao’s Thought in the armed struggle are also very essential for the revolutionary struggles and the armed struggles going on today. To refuse to accept them is to refuse to learn the lessons of the Indian revolutionary struggles. This is a thing that no revolutionary should do.
The Naxalbari armed struggle which has so much of significance has not however continued as a protracted war. They have even accepted the mistakes that have led to the failure of this struggle as follows:
1. Lack of strong party organisation.
2. Failure to rely whole-heartedly on the masses to build a powerful mass base.
3. Ignorance of military affairs.
4. Thinking on old lines and a formal attitude toward the establishment of political power and the work of revolutionary land reform.
(While we accepted the teachings of Mao in words, we persisted in revisionist methods in practice. Party organisation in every area actually remained inactive.)
5. Party members were all active at the beginning of the struggle but they were swept away by the vast movement of the people.
6. We did not politically assess, nor did we propagate among the people, the significance of the great tasks performed by the heroic peasants. We now admit frankly that we had no faith in the heroic peasant masses who were swift as a storm, organised themselves, formed revolutionary peasant committees, completed the 10 great tasks and advanced the class struggle at a swift pace during the period from April to September 1967.
(Kanu Sanyal Report on Terai, 1968 Oct 24.)
(In this Terai Report, com Kanu Sanyal was constrained by the Left adventurist line he too shared. Later in April 1973, he came out with a fresh document, More about Naxalbari, which was published in Proletarian Path, (1974 May issue), a magazine of CRs founded and edited jointly by DV Rao and Moni Guha (of Bengal), with a small Intro. It was also published in Telugu journal of CRs, Jana Shakti (1974 Oct 5), with a small intro by the editors (TN and DV Rao), who stressed its importance. They said it was self-critical, carrying forward the understanding contained in the “six-man Letter” that revealed the discussions ML comrades, Kanu sanyal and Souren Bose, had with CPC leaders led by Zhou enlai; Mao himself was present for some time. The CPC was critical of the “Left” mistakes of Naxalbari. The six comrades had the benefit of discussions with Andhra comrades while all of them were in Visakhapatnam jail, in connection with Parvatipuram conspiracy case related to Srikakulam adivasi struggle (1968-72). Com TN himself was the chairman of the (Legal etc) Defence Committee, and could interact with some of them.
(See the section ‘Spring Thunder’ and the ‘Six-man letter’: Fraternal criticism made by the CPC in the article mentioned below:
Remembering Comrade D. Bhuvan Mohan Patnaik, veteran communist revolutionary leader of Odisha, on his Birth Centenary
(28/10/2025)
In this 1973 Review, Sanyal presented Naxalbari’s original mass revolutionary line as opposed to the “Left sectarian line,” that later crept in, and how the two lines “clashed” on the ground. He corrected, based on ground realities, the “Left” conclusions drawn in the Terai Report. .
The leadership of CP (M.L.) accepted Mao’s Thought in words and followed revisionism in practice. (In section 15, of the same work, DV explained revisionism has a Left variant too. Rejection of agrarian revolution by the Right revisionists and by the Left revisionists too, together with its link with people’s armed struggle are common.)
We now go back to DV’s writing:
Even today this leadership is merely chanting Mao’s quotations but they are not in actual fact applying Mao’s Thought to the Indian conditions. (We have already explained as to how they are not taking the Indian conditions into consideration and working contrary to Mao’s Thought).
They themselves admit (in Terai Report etc) that they did not rely upon the masses. The position with them is same even today. The experiences of Naxalbari show that no leadership can successfully lead the people’s struggles without fully relying upon the masses. In spite of their loud talk about relying upon the masses, they are not in actual fact still prepared to undertake the revolutionary mass mobilisation. Therefore this self-criticism of theirs has come to be nothing but formal.
On the one hand, they admit that they did not realise the significance of revolutionary land reforms. But on the other hand, they are formulating that the Naxalbari struggle is not a struggle for land but for political power. They have gone back on this question which is one of the items of their own self-critical report and thus refuse to admit it.
The Naxalbari leadership could have in fact avoided these mistakes, had they studied and correctly grasped the experiences of the Telangana armed struggle…
It is clear that it is only for the purpose of refusing to take the experiences of Telangana armed struggle that they are refusing to admit the fact that the Telangana armed struggle was guided by Mao’s Thought.
It is indisputable that the revolution today would also be guided by Mao’s Thought. But for a revolutionary to reject the experiences of the armed struggle, especially the Telangana and Tripura armed struggles, that went on during the period of 1946-51, under whatever pretext, is unpardonable.
Similarly, drawing correct lessons from the experiences of the Naxalbari, Srikakulam and other armed struggles going on today, the revolutionaries should enrich their revolutionary experiences. Only then would they be able to provide correct leadership to the armed struggle going on in their respective areas..
The leadership of CP (M.L.) have failed to take correct lessons not only from the experiences of Telangana armed struggle but also from the experiences of struggles under their leadership. They have given up the task of building the revolutionary mass movements. They are portraying their “annihilation of the class enemy” as guerilla warfare, and thus depriving the armed struggle of its necessary mass base or at least weakening it.
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Section 15. Deviation from Marxism-Leninisim and Mao’s Thought
DV Rao continues:
If we have to correctly understand this deviation in the Indian revolutionary movement, we should study what Mao has said about the “Roving Rebel Bands” during the armed struggle in China as well as what Lenin has said about “terrorism”.
In saying that “Some People want to increase our political influence only by means of roving guerilla actions but are unwilling to increase it by undertaking the arduous task of building up base areas and establishing the people’s political power”, Mao explained one of the characteristics of the Roving Rebel Bands. In order to rectify this tendency, he says that we should, besides conducting propaganda about this deviation in the party and the revolutionary people’s army, “Draw active workers and peasants experienced in struggle into the ranks of the Red Army so as to change its composition”.(Mao: Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party).
We have explained that though the leadership of the C.P. (M.L.) wish to build the base areas and to establish people’s political power, the slogans that they advance are in no way useful for this purpose. On the basis of the momentary enthusiasm that their “actions of annihilation of the class enemy” create among the masses, they have claimed in unmistakable terms that such actions would rouse the masses and enhance the influence of the revolutionary forces.
Thus the “actions of annihilation of the class enemy” that they carry on disregarding the building of revolutionary mass movements are similar to the actions of the Roving Rebel Bands that Mao pointed out. Mao says that the active workers and peasants with struggle experience should be drawn into the revolutionary people’s army in order to rectify this tendency. For this reason Mao attaches great significance to the struggle of the peasantry and the working class.
Besides what Mao has said above about the Roving Rebel Bands, it is essential to study what Lenin had said about “terrorism”..On “terrorism”, in one of the resolutions of the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, Lenin writes thus:
“The Congress decisively rejects terrorism, i.e., the system of individual political assassinations, as being a method of political struggle which is most inexpedient at the present time, diverting the best forces from the urgent and imperatively necessary work of organisation and agitation destroying contact between the revolutionaries and the masses of the revolutionary classes of the population and spreading, both among the revolutionaries themselves and the population in general, utterly distorted ideas of the aims and methods of struggle against the autocracy”. (Collected Works. Vol.6, page 474).
While writing about the struggle of the Bolshevism against the petty bourgeois semi-anarchical revolutionism, he explains the struggle within the Socialist Revolutionary Party on this question, as follows.
“..This party considered itself particularly “revolutionary” or ‘Left1 because of its recognition of individual terrorism, assassination — something that we Marxists emphatically rejected. It was, of course, only on grounds of expediency that we rejected individual – terrorism(Collected Works. Vol.31, Page 33)
“Without in the least denying violence and terrorism in principle, we demanded work for the preparation of such forms of violence as were calculated to bring about the direct participation of the masses and which guaranteed that participation”. (Collected Works V0l 6, Page 195).
This is what Lenin has said about the struggle against individual terrorism that stood in the way of preparations for the 1905 insurrection. Notwithstanding the fact that we are now following the path of people’s war and not insurrection, the basic principle that there should be mass participation in the revolution and that we should prepare the masses to this end remains the same in both the cases. The insurrection is a form of struggle in which the working class seize the political power through an armed insurrection, while the people’s war is the form of struggle in which the political power is seized through protracted (peasant) war. Viewing from this angle, and analysing our experience, we should find it inescapable to prepare the masses, the party and the armed forces in order to launch and carry on the armed struggle. It is on this that our victory solely depends.
Lenin did not merely reject violence and terrorism as a matter of principle. He directed that all Marxists should reject violence in the form of individual terrorism. He pointed out that while not being useful, it is extremely harmful to the revolution. Thus he denounced terrorism as unacceptable.
Like all the other revolutions, our people’s war is also undoubtedly a violent revolution. All the people’s armed struggles going on in different parts of our country today are also likewise violent struggles…It is only the actions which are going on in the form of “actions of annihilation of the class enemy” that we are opposing. We oppose this form because, in our opinion, the indiscriminate actions without preparing the masses for armed struggle would be harmful to the armed struggle.
Not only the “actions of annihilation of the class enemy”, carried out by the followers of the C.P. (M.L.) in the Circar, Rayala-seema and Telangana districts of Andhra Pradesh, possess the characteristics of “roving rebel bands” and terrorism as pointed out by Mao and Lenin, but also they have yielded exactly the same results..They have caused irreparable losses to the revolutionary movement..It is clear that the revolutionary movement in different parts of the country has suffered to the extent this programme was implemented by their cadres.
We have explained that the “programme of annihilation of the class enemy” does not reflect a correct understanding of the armed struggle and that it is opposed to Marxism-Leninism and Mao’s Thought. We have also shown that it does not conform to what-ever experiences of armed struggle we have. The experiences that have already been acquired clearly show as to how harmful is this deviation… If they fail to analyse their own experiences in the light of Maxism-Leninism and Mao’s Thought and rectify this deviation, they would travel in the same wrong path and ultimately become divorced from Marxism-Leninism and Mao’s Thought.
(More on the subject in the next installments.)
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Related articles:
1. Comrade DV Rao: Unique Role In Indian Communist Movement
(12/07/2020)
(2. For more on the exploitation of adivasis of Srikakulam, the adivasi movement against it, and the Conspiracy cases, see the article published in counter currents, 2019 July 28:
T.Nagi Reddy On Adivasis And Their Struggles- Recalling Srikakulam Girijana Peasant Revolt 50 Years Later (2019)
3. See the section ‘Spring Thunder’ and the ‘Six-man letter’: Fraternal criticism made by the CPC in the article mentioned below:
Remembering Comrade D. Bhuvan Mohan Patnaik, veteran communist revolutionary leader of Odisha, on his Birth Centenary
(28/10/2025)
(Author MA Krishna is a media person, who occasionally contributed to the counter currents.org.)
Tags:
DV Rao, Left Adventurism, MA Krishna, T Nagi Reddy
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