CP of India (Maoist) on the murder of Azad

The following statement from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), North Regional Bureau, from July 3rd 2010, is from the website Banned Thought:

• It is not an encounter at all!! It is a cold blooded murder by AP Police!!
• Red Salutes to Martyrs com. Azad (Cherukuri Rajkumar) and com. Hem Pandey (Jitender)!!
• Let us avenge the killings of the beloved comrades by the khaki clad fascist gangs of AP government!!

Azad was arrested at Nagpur on June 1^st along with com. Hem Pandey

On June 1st, the notorious Andhra Pradesh Special Branch Police for its abductions and cold blooded murders, have arrested com. Azad, Polite Bureau member and Spokesperson of CPI (Maoist), and com. Hem Pandey, a zonal committee level comrade in Nagpur city around 11’o clock when they went to meet a comrade who was supposed to receive them from Dandakarnaya zone. Com. Azad reached Nagpur around 10 am on the fateful day along with com. Hem Pandey, after travelling from long distance.  With specific information, the lawless goons of AP SIB abducted them, perhaps flown them in a helicopter, to Adilabad jungles near Maharashtra border and killed them point block and in cold blood.

Arundhati Roy on Maoist Violence and Structural Violence

Following the April 6 battle in India’s Dantewada district where the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army killed 76 security personnel, activist and author Arundhati Roy in the following interview stands by her sympathy for the Communist Party of India (Maoist) that she expressed in her important article, “Walking With The Comrades“, about her visit with the Maoist guerrillas in their forest base areas.

Revolutionaries Deal Setback to India’s ‘Operation Green Hunt’

The following analysis by David Hungerford is from Fight Back! News:

On April 6 a battle in India’s Dantewada district claimed the lives of 76 government security personnel. A patrol of 80 soldiers was attacked by a 300-person detachment of the People’s Liberation Guerilla Army (PLGA), military wing of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). Eight communists were also killed in the battle.

Most of the government personnel who died were members of India’s Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF.) 15 were members of the Combat Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA.) These forces are organized in battalions, that is, military formations. The distinction between police and soldiers is only technical.

The communists are following the strategy of people’s war in the countryside. The strategy is to surround and eventually capture the cities. The goal is to overthrow the existing government and oppressor classes, bring about a new democratic revolution and the revolutionary transformation of society.

Arundhati Roy: Walking with the Comrades

Arundhati Roy interviews guerrilla fighters of the Communist Party of India (Maoist)

The following article is an important and valuable firsthand account of the people’s war being carried out by the revolutionaries in India and is by the well known Indian progressive intellectual and activist Arundhati Roy. Roy travelled into Central India’s Dandkaranya Forests to meet with the Maoists. This article was posted on dawn.com: 

Arundhati Roy finds a quiet moment to herself during a punishing visit to the forest where she became the first journalist/writer to break the taboo of of interviewing Maoist guerrillas in their lair.

The terse, typewritten note slipped under my door in a sealed envelope confirmed my appointment with India’s Gravest Internal Security Threat. I’d been waiting for months to hear from them. 

I had to be at the Ma Danteshwari mandir in Dantewara, Chhattisgarh, at any of four given times on two given days. That was to take care of bad weather, punctures, blockades, transport strikes and sheer bad luck. The note said: “Writer should have camera, tika and coconut. Meeter will have cap, Hindi Outlook magazine and bananas. Password: Namashkar Guruji.”

India: Spring Thunder and After…

The following article by Debdutta Ghosh, Mou Chakravarty and Drimi Chaudhuri is from the Hindustan Times:

Charu Majumdar is dead for about 40 years. Kanu Sanyal is 78, ill and infirm, staying at his native village in north Bengal. Asim Chatterjee has mellowed. But Naxals — in their new avatar — are coming back to Kolkata.

On June 28, 1967, Radio Peking (in China) called it ‘The Spring Thunder’. The occasion was the May 1967 rebellion in north Bengal’s Naxalbari by a small breakaway faction of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

Later, on April 22, 1969 — Russian revolution leader V.I. Lenin’s birthday — the rebels formed the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). But the announcement was made earlier at a public rally in Calcutta (the old name of Kolkata) by Kanu Sanyal on May 1 that year. The thunder fizzled out by 1972.

After spending about 35 years in the wilderness, the Marxist-Leninists morphed into the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in 2005 — after dividing and reuniting several differing factions operating almost independently.

Indian academic Saroj Giri on the Maoist offer for ceasefire and talks

The following article by Saroj Giri is from Tehelka Magazine:

WITH MAOIST leader Kishenji’s rather bold offer for ceasefire to the Union government, a new situation seems to be unfolding in the red corridor of heartland India. Seeking to place the ball in the Centre’s court, the 72-day offer clearly seems to trump Union Home Minister P Chidambaram’s 72-hour offer. Moreover, it’s the nature of the offer — unconditional, as opposed to earlier Maoist proposals stipulating the release of their key leaders, restoration of land and forests to the tribals, scrapping of Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) with big investors etc, all major irritants for the government — which begs a serious consideration. Practically the only condition set by the Maoists this time is that the State should reciprocate. This is at a time when reports of the CRPF in Lalgarh killing Lalmohan Tudu of the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities (PCAPA) in front of his family members on February 22 are filtering in, over and above the initial propaganda about him being killed during an attack on a CRPF camp.

Chidambaram, instead of welcoming the offer to start a process of negotiation and addressing the substantive issues at hand, responded with a presumptuous and hypocritical statement calling upon the Maoists to abjure violence first. The Planning Commission’s Expert Group on Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas has argued that the government is engaging in peace talks with other rebel groups like the Nagas even though they have not abjured violence and in fact ‘taken advantage of the peaceful conditions to consolidate their parallel government’. So, they ask, ‘why a different approach for the Maoists?’

India: A Year of Struggle in Lalgarh

The following article is from Sanhati:

A Year of Lalgarh
Partho Sarathi Ray, Sanhati

Lalgarh – the name resonates in the hearts and minds of struggling people all over India: adivasis and dalits, farmers and fisherfolk, workers and students. In West Bengal it has taken its place along with Singur and Nandigram in songs and slogans of resolve and resistance. Wherever people are fighting for their livelihoods and their dignity, resisting the onslaught of state and capital, Lalgarh now provides inspiration and courage. Most importantly, for the long-oppressed adivasis, Lalgarh has already entered the annals of legendary struggles of the likes of the santhal “hul” led by Sidhu and Kanhu, and the historic rebellions led by the likes of Birsha Munda, Tilka Majhi and Chand Bhairab.

It has been just over a year since the unprecedented uprising of the adivasi people took place in Lalgarh, triggered by the brutal police raids in the wake of the land mine attack on chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s convoy. It is a good time to look back on this year, and to learn our lessons from Lalgarh.

People’s War in India: Interview with Comrade Anand of the Communist Party of India (Maoist)

This article was published in Maoist Information Bulletin 13, dated December 7, 2009, which is available on Banned Thought:

Interview with Comrade Katakam Sudarshan,  Secretary, Central Regional Bureau, CPI(Maoist)

We are publishing below parts of an interview by our MIB correspondent with comrade Katakam Sudarshan aka Anand, Polit Bureau member and the secretary of Central regional Bureau, CPI(Maoist). He is incharge of one of the two major regions under the CPI(Maoist) where people’s war is raging with great intensity. For almost three decades he has been in the field leading the struggle of the oppressed in the flaming fields of North Telangana to the adivasi-inhabited regions of Dandakaranya. A few years ago, he lost his life-partner, fiery, vocal and highly talented comrade Sadhana, when she was the secretary of Adilabad district in North Telangana.

Short and soft-spoken, comrade Anand answered all the questions very patiently in his native tongue of Telugu. The questions were mainly related to the stand of the CPI(Maoist) regarding the proposal of talks by Union Home Minister Chidambaram, on the question of violence, and the other issues related to the Centre’s war against the Maoists and adivasis.

Blazing Trail: Video on the History and Development of the Naxalite Movement in India

India: War Against the People and the Historic Lalgarh Movement

This article by Amit Bhattacharyya, a professor of history at Jadavpur University in Kolkata was posted by Democratic Students Union on December 31, 2009.

War Against the People and the Historic Lalgarh Movement

-Amit Bhattacharyya 

The Indian ruling classes and the central government they have set up to serve them have very recently declared one of the most unjust and brutal wars against the people which is quite unprecedented in the history of our country. Such a massive mobilization of armed forces, paramilitary forces, police forces and air forces totalling around 1 lakh personnel, along with US-Israel military assistance of various types only highlights the magnitude of the war.

They have identified the Maoists as the ‘greatest threat to the internal security of the country since independence’ i.e, the security of the Indian ruling classes. The entire forested region in central and eastern India have been divided into seven Operating Areas, which they want to ‘clear’ within the next five years of all resistance, including that by the Maoists and other Naxalite organizations. A massive amount of money to the tune of Rs.7300 crore has already been earmarked for meeting the cost of this war.