Separatist Movements in India: An Introduction


Among the only things we seem to have retained from the days of our freedom movement is the use of anti-government tactics to get our demands fulfilled. The goals and faces of the extremists may have changed but their method still remains the same: violence.


We cannot even complain that we were caught unawares because even as India became independent, her cultural and religious diversities prompted many critics to predict that she would not survive as a single state for too long. Many attempts have been made since 1947 by various groups to break the nation into fragments: by the jihadis in the north who want Kashmir as a part of Pakistan while the north-eastern states have been turned into a battleground by various tribal communities who each want an independent state for themselves.



But the one movement that has gone from strength to strength over several decades is the Naxal movement. Ideologically, the movement is based on one of the various branches of Maoism. While it started in West Bengal in 1967, in recent years it has created a base for itself in rural and tribal areas of states such as Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh.



The movement has spread to almost 40% of India's geographical area and is concentrated in the "Naxal Belt", an area of 92,000 square kilometers across four states. According to the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) of the Government of India, 20,000 insurgents are currently active as Naxals. The recent acts of terrorism in West Bengal and Jharkhand have prompted Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to declare Naxalism as the most serious threat to India's national security.

The Naxal Movement: Tracing Its History

‘LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION’

To understand class struggle of any kind it is important to be familiar with its history first. The term Naxalism comes from Naxalbari, a small village in a norther district of West Bengal. The foundation of Naxalism in India was laid by a young communist called Charu Majumdar in the early days of independent India. So in a way, separatism is not a new trend that has emerged recently as the government would have us believe but has been a part of our nation ever since Partition.



Born in 1918 to a humble freedom fighter’s family in Siliguri, West Bengal, Charu Majumdar dropped out of college at an early age against his family’s wishes. From 1946 till 1962, he was a part of the Tebhaga movement and was imprisoned once.

In the mid 1960s Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal started an extremist left bloc within the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in West Bengal. By 1967 the Majumdar-Sanyal faction organised a militant peasant revolt in Naxalbari to protest against some local goons who had attacked a farmer over a land dispute. Later in the same year, they broke away from CPI (M) and started the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries which organized violent revolts in many parts of the country.



An ardent follower of Mao Zedong of China, Majumdar advocated that the Indian peasantry follow his footsteps and overthrow the government and the land holding upper classes who were responsible for their sad plight. He was an avid reader and writer who was able to revolutionise and recruit young blood through his essays and speeches. His ‘Historical Eight Documents’ helped fashion the Naxalite ideology.



Until 1960 armed revolution was the sworn ideology of the Communist Party of India. It was in 1962, following the post-Stalinist revisionism of the CPSU in 1956, that they adopted the plank of ‘peaceful transition’. Therefore, Charu Mazumdar’s CPI-ML only tried to resurrect an abandoned ideology, only a few years after it was abandoned. The current “movement” can also be seen as a reversion to ‘old-style’ or traditional communism, which is not what it used to be.



In 1969, the AICCCR founded the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) from which nearly all Naxalite groups have originated. But there were separate factions within this faction such as the Maoist Communist Centre, which later merged with People's War Group to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist).
It was in this year that they held all of West Bengal to ransom. They were brutally put down with an incredible amount of State violence and also with street violence by the Youth Congress and CPI(M) cadres, particularly in Calcutta.
By the 1970s, there was a lot of dispute within the AICCCR leading to the rise of several different factions. By 1980, around 30 Naxalite groups were active, with a combined membership of around 30 000.



For his anti-government activities Majumdar was captured on July 16, 1972. He died the same year in police custody at the Alipore Central Jail on July 28.
But what started as an initiative to speak on behalf of the downtrodden on the part of two young men turned into a full fledged armed revolution in later years.



Today some groups have become legal organisations participating in parliamentary elections, such as Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation. Others, such as Communist Party of India (Maoist) and Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Janashakti, are engaged in armed guerrilla struggles. It is the latter groups that provide the ideological base for the current phase of armed resistance to the State machinery that has so dominated public consciousness in recent months.