But despite all these efforts, the life of the Adivasis is still far from better. As a tribal Maoist rebel, Comrade Kosa told the writer Satnam22 in the year 2001 in a guerilla camp in Bastar: Would you like to know what we eat here? Fish, rice, wild fruits, etc., appear sumptuous, and from a distance, one might imagine jungle life to be ideal, where there is no dearth of food. But, if you go out of this camp and look around in the villages, you won't find many elderly men or women—our people rarely reach the age of 50, as far as I know. Death begins chasing us right from birth and seizes us as we approach 50 years of age.' In the early part of this decade, efforts to establish complete guerilla bases were sharpened by the constitution of Revolutionary People's Committees (RPCs). The base is an area where the police or other organs of the state cannot enter at all. It serves as the basic organ of the liberated zone. In Dandakaranya, the most prominent liberated base is Abujhmaad that the Maoists call the Central Guerilla Base.
The Party's Organisational Structure
In February 2007, the CPI (Maoist) held its ninth Party Congress called the Unity Congress (the highest body of the Maoists is the Party Congress). It was held in high secrecy in the jungles of Bihar's Bheembandh area. The Congress was held in a huge area with a number of facilities available for those who attended it. Almost every senior Maoist leader, including its top brass attended the Congress. The area had a parade ground and a huge hall where strategies were discussed and debates held. It had a computer room with a team of operators and translators. Generators were put up that ran for 15 hours a day to enable computers, photocopiers and other electronic appliances to function. The Congress was set up next to a stream from where water was taken, boiled and then used for drinking purposes. An open kitchen ensured two meals and multiple rounds of tea for the 'delegates'. Various groups had been formed that were in charge of security, cultural performances, kitchen, health, media and even electric supply. The security was handled by senior Maoist leader and head of the eastern military command, Misir Besra alias Comrade Sunirmal (he was later arrested in September 2007 in Jharkhand and subsequently rescued by his men from a court in Bihar in June 2009). Many important strategies were discussed and announced during the Congress. It was agreed that till the establishment of Base Areas it is destruction (of enemy power) that will be the primary task and construction that will be secondary, and that in the process of establishment of Base Areas and their consolidation, the relation between destruction and construction gradually undergoes a change. The question of the nature and extent of the changes that have taken place in developed rural areas like Punjab was discussed and also whether in a country like India the election question was one of strategic significance or just another tactical question (it was decided finally that it is of strategic significance). Then a resolution was passed that called for the arming of the People's Liberation Guerilla Army with better weaponry and the arming of militia. It called for intensifying the war in the nine guerilla zones and four Red Resistance Areas and also spreading the war to new areas. Finally, it gave call for the immediate development of Dandakaranya and B-J (Bihar-Jharkhand) into Base Areas.23
In the period between two Congresses, the Maoists consider the Central Committee (CC) as their highest body. The Central Committee elects a general secretary of the party who acts as a sort of supreme commander. It also elects a Politbureau (PB). Between one Central Committee meeting and the next, the Politbureau is authorised to take political, organisational and military decisions that need to be later ratified in the subsequent central committee meeting. The general secretary also acts as the in charge of the Politbureau. The PB and CC are on the same level but the PB has special duties and responsibilities which it will fulfill on behalf of the CC in between two CC meetings. In the current PB, there are 14 members half of whom are either in jail or have been eliminated recently. In the Central Committee, there are about 40 members. The CC also forms the Central Military Commission and then there are state military commissions as well.
In the political structure of the party, below the Central Committee there is a Central Regional Bureau that is handled by a PB member. Below this comes various State Committees or Special Zone Committees or Special Area Committees. For instance, Andhra has a State Committee, Dandakaranya has a Special Zone Committee and there is a Special Area Committee in Bihar-Jharkhand. Below this comes the Regional Committee. Dandakaranya has three Regional Committees. After that comes the District Committee—two or three under a Regional Committee. After that there is an Area Committee, followed by a Village Party Committee. The most basic organ of the party is a party cell, comprising of about five people.
The People's Liberation Guerilla Army comprises of three main sections. The main force consists of armed battalions and companies of Maoist guerillas. A battalion has 250 guerillas while a company consists of about 90 soldiers. The secondary force is made of platoons and local guerilla squads. There are about 30 soldiers in a platoon whereas a squad has about eight to ten guerillas. In the last comes the base force that comprises of civil militia, members of the Gram Rakshak Dal and mass militia also known as Bhumkal Militia. The base force is mainly used to cut the supply lines. In a typical ambush in which, say, a hundred Maoists may take part, more than half will belong to the base force. After the initial assault by the main or secondary force, the base force will snatch weapons or prevent enforcement to come to the aid of ambushed security men. Of the base force, the Bhumkal Militia is mostly used to deal with Salwa Judum, the civil militia supported by the police to counter the Maoists, and they usually carry only traditional weapons. The strength of the hardcore fighting force of the PLGA is estimated to be around 10,000.
The supreme military organ of the CPI (Maoist) is its Central Military Commission (CMC). Various State Military Commissions report to the CMC, followed by various Regional Commands. A number of Regional Commands come under District or Division Commands. The basic military organ is the Village Command. Dandakaranya, for example, has ten divisions.
The Party Congress is held to take care of the following tasks:
• It undertakes the political and organisational review of the party since the preceding Congress.
• It adopts and amends the party programme, party constitution and the strategy and tactics and financial policy and formulates other policy matters.
• Appraises the domestic and international situation and lays down the tasks.
• Decides the number of Central Committee members and elects the Central Committee and alternate CC members. For example in the last Congress, Anuradha Ghandy was elected as a Central Committee member and till her death she was the only woman in the CC (apart from CC member Shiela Didi who is under arrest in Chaibasa jail in Jharkhand).
Funding
The Maoists say that most of their money comes from the taxes or levies they collect from various government agencies or businessmen who work in their area of influence. So, if a government contractor is working on a project in, say, Latehar district of Jharkhand, he has to pay a percentage of his expenditure to the local Maoist leadership. Some believe that in various areas, the Maoists even take a cut from the money available for development schemes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). It is a different matter that while the Maoists may be content with a ten percent cut, the government official may take even twenty. Of late, the Maoists have also been accused of having a nexus with corporates such as mining companies. A recent report24 by the Asian Centre for Human Rights cites intelligence reports that at least three Jharkhand-based corporate houses have paid 2.5 million rupees each to the Maoists in 2007-08. It also cites a newspaper report of October 2010 quoting Jharkhand's secretary for rural development, M.K. Satpathy saying that the Maoists had blocked 21 road construction projects sanctioned by the government when the contractors refused to pay them levy. It quotes what it calls the 'secret service reports' of the Government of India according to which the iron ore, mines and crusher units of Jharkhand contr
ibute Rs 500 crore to the Maoists. The Maoists, however, vehemently deny allegations of their nexus with the corporates. 'They (the government) are even alleging that we are collecting 5,000 crores of rupees annually … In fact, our party mainly collects donations from the people and funds from the traders in our guerilla zones. We have a clear people's financial policy. And our party also collects rational levy from contractors who take up various works in our areas. A considerable part of these funds is spent for welfare of the people through our people's power organs. As for mining organisations, our people are fighting their best not to allow them into our strong areas. Our party is leading these struggles, it is supporting them. So the issue of collecting funds from them does not arise,' said Ganapathi. There have also been unconfirmed reports of Maoists encouraging poppy cultivation, particularly in Bihar, to raise money.
Weapons
Most of the grass-root Maoist cadres carry rudimentary weapons such as muzzle-loading rifles or country-made revolvers apart from traditional weapons such as bows and arrows. Over the years, however, the PLGA has acquired a huge cache of weapons, mostly through raiding police armouries or snatching them from policemen killed in encounters. In a series of daring raids on a police training school, district armoury and three police stations in Orissa's Nayagarh district on 15 February 2008, Maoist guerillas looted more than a thousand sophisticated arms including Kalashnikov rifles and light machine guns. The raids lasted for about five hours. Later, some of the outdated rifles were found abandoned in the forests since the Maoists could not carry them. In February 2004, in the state's Koraput district, the erstwhile PWG cadre had seized more than 500 rifles. The Maoists have also developed expertise in preparing deadly IEDs—Improvised Explosive Devices. The experts among the Maoist guerillas can trigger them with the help of rudimentary things like syringes, camera flashbulbs or even V-shaped twigs scattered in the forest. Reports25 suggest that they have also developed expertise to clone modern rifles like the AK-47 in factories run by them in their areas of influence.
Over the past few years, the Maoists have developed working relations with various north-east insurgent groups like the Assam-based ULFA or the Nagaland-based NSCN-IM or the Manipur-based Revolutionary People's Front (RPF). In fact, in a joint statement released on 22 October 2008, the Maoists and the RPF declared 'full moral and political support to each other in the liberation struggles to overthrow the common enemy, the Indian reactionary and oppressive regime, respectively.' Police sources say that the Maoists also buy arms that are smuggled mostly through Bangladesh and Myanmar. There have been reports26 of senior Maoist leaders including Kishenji meeting ULFA leaders, and the Maoists setting up bases for their overground workers in Dibrugarh and Tinsukia districts of Assam. There have also been reports of the NSCN-IM cadre travelling to a Maoist base in Chhattisgarh and offering to provide them with superior training. Security agencies fear that the Maoists may also be looking at some kind of working relationship with the Islamic Jihadis. Ganapathi denies this. 'By propagating the lie that our party has links with groups linked to Pakistan's ISI, the reactionary rulers of our country want to prove that we too are terrorists and gain legitimacy for their brutal terror campaign against Maoists and the people in the areas of armed agrarian struggle,' he said. However he believes that 'it is only Maoist leadership that can provide correct anti-imperialist orientation and achieve class unity among Muslims as well as people of other religious persuasions. The influence of Muslim fundamentalist ideology and leadership will diminish as communist revolutionaries and other democratic-secular forces increase their ideological influence over the Muslim masses. As communist revolutionaries, we always strive to reduce the influence of the obscurantist reactionary ideology and outlook of the mullahs and maulvis on the Muslim masses, while uniting with all those fighting against the common enemy of the world people—that is, imperialism, particularly American imperialism.'
Prominent Leaders and Ideologues of the Maoist Movement
• Mupalla Laxman Rao alias Ganapathi is the supreme commander of the CPI (Maoist). He is from the Beerpur village of Andhra's Karimnagar district. Around 60, he is a science graduate and holds a B.Ed degree as well. A former teacher, he is presently married to a Maoist commander. A photo of his surfaced for the first time when a few videos of the 2007 Maoist Congress were recovered from the laptop of an arrested Maoist rebel. He wears spectacles and changes his location frequently.
• Mallojula Koteshwara Rao alias Kishenji is the man behind the Lalgarh rebellion. He is aged about 60 and hails from Naachpalli village of Karimnagar district. He joined the Maoist movement at a very young age, when as a college student he was drawn to the Telangana movement. He was believed to have been seriously wounded in an encounter in Lalgarh in 2010. But Maoist sources say he is safe but lying low to evade arrest. He is married to a Maoist commander.
• Prashant Bose alias Kishan alias Nirbhay da was the chief of MCC before the party merged with the PWG to form the CPI (Maoist). He is aged nearly 72. Not much is known about him.
• Kobad Ghandy, arrested in Delhi in September 2009. (See 'The Rebel' p. 135)
• Sushil Roy, aged 72 is the senior-most Maoist leader in jail, arrested in May 2005 from Kolkata. He is the nephew of the legendary revolutionary of Bengal, Dinesh Gupta.
• Venugopal Rao alias Sonu is Kishenji's younger brother and is one of the first few Maoist cadres to have entered Bastar.
• Amitabha Bagchi, arrested in Jharkhand on 24 August 2009. The Maoists had named him along with Sushil Roy and Kobad Ghandy to talk with the government on behalf of the CPI (Maoist).
• Bansidhar Singh alias Chintan da arrested from Kanpur in February 2010 (See 'The Urban Agenda' p. 153.)
• Sabyasachi Panda, aged about 42, believed to be the mastermind behind the Nayagarh raid of 2007 and the attack on Greyhound commandos in Balimela reservoir, resulting in the death of 38 of them. Both his father and brother are politicians. The most wanted Maoist leader in Orissa, he has many admirers including politicians. Orissa's deputy leader of the Opposition, Narsingha Mishra said of him, 'His voice is the voice of 57 per cent people in Orissa who have only Rs 12 to spend per day. It's this injustice against poor, which made him a Naxal. I admire his ideas but disapprove of his violence.' His wife Subhashree Panda alias Mili was arrested in January 2010.
• Narla Ravi Sharma, arrested from Patna in October 2009,along with his wife Anuradha, also a Maoist leader. He has a doctorate in agricultural science and was active in Jharkhand.
• Akkiraju Haragopal alias Ramakrishna is a former teacher who led the talks with the Andhra Pradesh government in 2004. His wife Padmakka, who worked as a teacher was arrested in November 2010.Ramakrishna is believed to be active on the Andhra-Orissa border.
• Malla Raja Reddy, arrested from Kerala in December 2007. He was later released on bail owing to ill-health. He escaped and is believed to have rejoined the Maoists in Bastar.
• Lanka Papi Reddy alias Ranganna, in his late forties now, surrendered to the police in February 2008. He said he surrendered due to ill-health and also because he was disillusioned. The Maoists later said that he was demoted because he had misbehaved with women comrades and that is why he surrendered.
Other senior leaders who are still underground include the chief of the Central Military Commission, Nambala Keshava Rao alias Ganganna, Varanasi Subramanium, Misir Besra, and Gudsa Usendi.
Some of the senior leaders killed in recent times (most of them in alleged fake encounters with the police) include Patel Sudhakar Reddy, K. Saketh Rajan, Cherukuri Rajkumar alias Azad, Sande Rajamouli, Sakhamuri Appa Rao, Solipeta Kondal Reddy, and Wadkapur Chandramouli. Almost all of them are from Andhra Pradesh. This is another criticism the CPI (Maoist) faces that the party leadership mainly consists of members from Andhra Pradesh and that there is little presence of women, Adivasis and Dalits in the Maoist leadership. Ganapathi contests this, saying, 'It is very natural for more comrades to be elected where our movement i
s strong.' He further goes on to say, 'Though we are striving to have more leadership from the oppressed classes, we had lost a majority of them in the enemy offensive and we want to clearly say that it is becoming a hindrance in achieving this goal. For example, in Andhra Pradesh more than 400 women comrades were killed by fascist governments. Most of them were from the background of oppressed classes and castes. Many educated women comrades who came from a middle-class background were killed too. Many martyred women comrades were quite capable of developing and were supposed to come into state committees and central committees of the party. Not just in the CC, but in the state committees too we have comrades from such backgrounds. It is obvious that it is these comrades who would be elected to the higher committees in the future.'
There also have been concerns about the senior Maoist leaders approaching old age and the subsequent question of whether there was a second-rung leadership in place and if it was capable of effective leadership. 'It is a fact that some of the party leaders at the central and state level could be described as senior citizens according to criteria used by the government, that is, those who have crossed the threshold of 60 years. You can start calling me too a senior citizen in a few months,' Ganapathi said in an interview with me in 2009. But he said that the party did not consider old age a serious problem. 'You can see the “senior citizens” in our party working for 16-18 hours a day and covering long distances on foot,' he said.
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