In February 2010, the Uttar Pradesh police arrested a scholar Chintan alias Bansidhar Singh from a hideout in the industrial town of Kanpur. Chintan held a doctoral degree in social science from Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University, and, according to the police, the 64-year-old man was a senior Maoist leader working towards spreading his party's area of influence. In all, the police arrested 11 people, which included, apart from Chintan, another senior leader, Balraj. Balraj, the police said, had been active in socialist leader Jayaprakash Narain's movement in the '70s in Bihar, and both he and Chintan were assigned the task of spreading the Maoist network to Uttarakhand and Bundelkhand regions. It is believed that Chintan had been in touch with people in the poverty-stricken areas of Bundelkhand where a void had been created due to the elimination of various dacoits. In Uttarakhand, the Maoist cadre hoped to spread their movement by backing protests and agitations against big dams, which had rendered many homeless in the state. The Maoists have been active in the anti-dam agitation in Polavaram in Andhra Pradesh. In March 2010, senior Maoist leader Venkateshwar Reddy alias Telugu Deepak was arrested from West Bengal in Haripur where a resistance movement had been building up against the proposed construction of a nuclear reactor.29 Similarly, in recent years, police have arrested other alleged Maoist sympathisers from Delhi who, the police claim, have been trying to influence jobless labourers and other displaced people in the city.
In fact, the Maoists regard the urban movement as very important since they believe that revolution will occur only when cities are finally taken over. Also, it is from urban areas that the Maoists hope to draw their leaders, and it is here that they plan to shift some of the senior leaders in the wake of sustained military operations in their strongholds like Bastar. A Maoist document prepared in 2007 makes clear the significance of Maoist influence in urban areas: 'We should not forget the dialectical relationship between the development of the urban movement and the development of the people's war. In the absence of a strong revolutionary urban movement, the people's war will face difficulties.' Stressing upon the need to recruit people from urban areas, it says: 'A steady supply of urban cadre is necessary to fulfil the needs of the rural movement and the people's war. This is necessary for providing working class leadership, as well as technical skills to the people's war.'
The Strategy and Tactics document adopted at the last Party Congress (held in 2007) further says: 'However, we should not belittle the importance of the fact that the urban areas are the strong centres of the enemy. Building up of a strong urban revolutionary movement means that our party should build a struggle network capable of waging struggle consistently by sustaining itself until the protracted people's war reaches the stage of the strategic offensive. With this long-term perspective, we should develop a secret party, a united front and people's armed elements; intensify the class struggle in urban areas and mobilise the support of millions of urban masses for the people's war.'
The Maoist leadership believes that India's urban population today is significantly larger in numbers in proportion to the total population, as also in economic weight, when compared to China's urban population at the time of the revolution there. The leadership says that this would mean that India's urban areas would have to play a relatively more important role than the cities in China during the revolution. The document specifies that with the exception of Delhi and its suburbs, much of the north, the east and central India have been by-passed by new India. This vast area covering the eastern half of UP and stretching across Bihar, West Bengal, the north-eastern states, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and the eastern part of Maharashtra remains an area of urban backwardness with old industrial bases and high unemployment.
According to the document, India's liberalisation policies mean that investment is not regulated and only goes to the areas promising the greatest profits. Such areas identified by the Maoist leadership are:
• Ahmedabad-Pune Corridor which includes the top ten cities of Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Pune and Surat, Vadodara and Nashik. The Maoists believe that these cities and adjoining districts attract the largest amount of new investment in the whole country. The working class is the most diverse, having migrated from all parts of the country.
• Delhi region which includes the areas of Gurgaon, Faridabad, Ghaziabad and NOIDA
• Bangalore which the Maoist leadership identifies as a fast-growing centre.
• Chennai which is the industrial hub of the south.
• Coimbatore-Erode belt which has experienced the fastest growing urbanisation in the country hinging on textile mills, power looms, knitwear, etc.
• Hyderabad where the new investments are mainly in electronics and information technology.
• Kolkata where due to slow industrial growth the unemployment rate is relatively higher.
It also points to the cities of the Gangetic plain, cities like Kanpur that are not receiving much new investment and are thus stagnating.
The document says that with closures of industries and the accompanying loss of jobs, many workers are forced to take up casual work or earn on their own through hawking their wares, plying rickshaws, operating roadside thelas. It points out that at the same time new youth entering the work force do not get regular jobs and that the unemployment rate is the highest in the 15 to 24 age group.
'In the liberalisation-globalisation period, however, the ruling classes in most major cities aspiring to make them "global cities" have in a coordinated and planned manner launched numerous measures to push the poor out of the core of the cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai. These measures extend from the old measures of slum demolition and hawker eviction to new forms like closure of polluting factories, banning of protests in central areas, regulations encouraging concentration of development in the richer zones,' says the document.
The document also states that caste violence and caste riots are more numerous, with some towns and cities repeatedly witnessing attacks on Dalits. Such upper-caste violence, it says, has further sharpened the division of many towns by forcing all Dalits to live in separate areas to better organise their self-defence. The Maoists are believed to have taken part in the Khairlanji agitation of 2006 against the lynching of four members of a Dalit family. Some of these protests had turned violent with Maoists at one time even threatening to kill the people behind the killings.
The document also takes into account the plight of Muslims in India. 'Our party in the urban areas has to seriously take the ghettoisation process into account in all plans. Sharp ghettoisation leads to lack of jobs for Muslims and pushes larger sections of them into semi-proletariat. Thus merely organising within industry will not enable us to enter this oppressed community. Unless we base ourselves in the middle of the ghetto, we will not be able to gain entry into organising the community (sic),' the document advises the Maoist cadre.
In the document, the main objectives of the urban work have been categorised under three broad heads:
• Mobilising and organising the masses which involves organising the working class and students, middle-class employees and intellectuals. It must also undertake the task of dealing with the problems of special groups like women, Dalits and religious minorities and mobilise them for the revolutionary movement.
• Building a united front, which involves the task of unifying the working class, building worker-peasant solidarity and alliances and building fronts against globalisation.
• Military tasks which involve sending cadres to the countryside, infiltration of enemy ranks, organising people in key industries, acts of sabotage in coordination with the rural armed struggle, logistical support, etc.
The Maoist leadership also lays emphasis on forming cover mass organisations which may not disclose their link with the party. An example it specifies is the case of unorganised workers where the established trade unions have a limited presence and the party has no option but to set up its own trade union organisation. The document warns that the cadres should be very c
areful not to attract attention by exceeding the socially acceptable limits of militancy for that area. So if knives and swords are used, the cadres should not resort to firearms or they should not normally resort to annihilation in a new area where there has been no history of such actions.
The Maoist cadres are also advised to form legal democratic organisations such as those catering to a particular section like students, lawyers, teachers and cultural bodies. It says that other groups may be formed with issue-oriented programmes focusing on core questions like communalism, violence against women, corruption, regional backwardness and statehood, etc. 'It is necessary that the party in the urban areas should give considerable importance to the task of participating in and building up a strong and broad legal democratic movement,' it says.
Expanding into urban areas has, so far, proved to be tough. In recent years, many of the senior Maoist leaders have either been arrested or killed in urban areas. In March 2010, two senior leaders, Solipeta Kondal Reddy and Sakhamuri Appa Rao were picked up by the Andhra SIB from Pune and Chennai, respectively, and later allegedly killed in fake encounters. The Maoist chief spokesperson Azad was allegedly picked up from Nagpur railway station in July 2010 and killed, as the activists allege, in cold blood.
Despite the perceived difficulties, the Maoists are keen to spread out to urban areas. The urban agenda document urges Maoist cadres to pay attention to organising the workers within the slums and such localities. 'Through this we can get in touch with new workers from various industries, we can draw the families of the workers into the movement, and we can organise the semi-proletariat and other sections of the urban poor living in the slums and poor localities,' it explains.
The document advises cadres to cover themselves by building or joining traditional organisations like chawl committees, sports clubs, cultural bodies and mandalis for Ganesh and Durga puja, for Ambedkar jayanti, etc. The Maoist leadership also points out what it calls the 'problem of imperialist funded NGOs'. It says that such NGOs are in existence in almost all the slums of the major cities and that it is the duty of the Maoist cadre to educate the slum masses and particularly the activists about the sinister role of such organisations and the agencies financing them. 'We should particularly expose them when they stand in the path of people's struggles.' However, the cadres are told that in times of repression they can work within them. Citing the example of the Peru Communist Party's success in creating strongholds in the shanty towns of its capital Lima, the document says that the Maoists should also work at creating such strongholds in India's major cities. It says that the situation of the urban poor in the slums and poor localities is worsening continuously: 'The slum population of India is over four crores, spread in more than 600 towns. The largest mega city, Mumbai has 49 per cent of its population in slums.'
'Propaganda and agitation on issues and incidents of repression on various other urban classes are the main means by which the working class and the party expresses solidarity with the affected sections—issues such as the eviction of hawkers, demolition of slums, suppression of students' rights, funds for teachers' salaries. While it may not be possible to hold a solidarity action on every such issue, the party should be ever alive and respond in whatever manner possible—propaganda pamphlet, press statement, dharna, demonstration, or some more militant action,' the document explains.
The document also says that the Maoist cadres working in urban areas should also try to forge a unity between blue-collar (workers, labourers) and white-collar employees (like bank workers, insurance workers, teachers and other government employees). It says that efforts should be made to oppose the creation of separate 'workers' and 'employees' unions. However, where such separate unions exist already, forces should be allocated for fractional work within them. 'Some industries like transport, communications, power, oil and natural gas, defence production can play a crucial role in the people's war. Disruption of production in these industries has an immediate impact on the enemy's ability to fight the war. If struggles in such industries are coordinated with developments in the people's war they can provide direct assistance to the People's Guerilla Army. Party-led units within such industries can also perform industrial sabotage actions which would provide effective assistance during certain points in the war.' The document says such operations normally will be necessary at later stages in the war. 'But we have to give importance to allocation of cadre for such industries right from the beginning.'
The document also instructs the cadres to focus on workers in industries and try and influence them: 'At level one we can influence the workers in these industries from outside through various forms of propaganda, particularly during the struggles of these industries. This can be done through legal democratic workers' organisations, workers' magazines, and secret pamphleteering and even through party statements.
'At another level we should send comrades to secretly develop fractional work from within the industry. This work should be done with a long-term approach taking care to avoid exposure. The comrades doing propaganda and extending solidarity from outside need not know about the existence of the work being conducted from within. It is also not necessary to do work at both levels at the same unit.
'Due to the critical character of these industries the enemy too is very conscious of the need to prevent any revolutionary or other genuine struggling forces from entering such industries. We therefore have to be very guarded and careful while entering and working within such enterprises. All work in such places should be under cover of some sort.'
The Intelligence Bureau (IB) believes that the Maoists have more than 50 bodies working for them as frontal organisations.30 In March 2010, the Home Minister P. Chidambaram made a statement in the Parliament on this issue. He said: 'Available inputs indicate that organisations such as PUDR, PUCL and APDR take up issues of the CPI (Maoist). Both the central and state governments keep a close watch on the activities of these organisations.' The IB list includes RSU and RYL and organisations like Naujawan Bharat Sabha and Jan Chetna Manch. The IB dossier accuses two organisations based in Delhi, Revolutionary Democratic Front (RDF) and Delhi General Mazdoor Front of being front offices of Maoists. The same report says that the Maoists have formed a committee for Delhi to concentrate on mobilisation and recruitment and protests against the arrest of Maoists.
The Maoist document also lays emphasis on the need for what it calls 'infiltration into the enemy camp': 'It is very important to penetrate into the military, paramilitary forces, police and higher levels of the administrative machinery of the state. It is necessary to obtain information regarding the enemy, to build support for the revolution within these organs, and even to incite revolt when the time is ripe.'
In May 2010, the UP Special Task Force (STF) arrested six persons, including three CRPF personnel for supplying arms and ammunition to Maoists from the CRPF armoury in Rampur, UP. The police recovered a huge cache of arms from the arrested persons, including thousands of live cartridges. Investigations revealed that some of mis ammunition had been used by the Maoists even in the 6 April ambush in Dantewada that killed 76 security personnel. In January 2011, a CRPF jawan, Satyaban Bhoi was arrested for allegedly helping Maoists by giving them information about the troop movement in Orissa's Sundargarh district.
The home ministry believes that while the centre has been successful in containing Maoists in certain places, there are other areas where they are expanding. 'I can tell you that so far we have reclaimed about 10,000 sq km area (from Maoists). Of course, in certain areas, like Orissa, the Maoists have expanded as well,' says Union Home Secretary G.K. Pillai.31 Recently, the Punjab police chief revealed that the Maoists had made deep inroads in the state. He said that the rebels had penetrated into villages and mohallas and were running recruitment drives across Punjab.
The Maoist document also speaks of building city action teams—small secret teams of disciplined and trained soldiers of the Maoist army who are permanently based in the cities or towns to
hit at important, selected enemy targets. It may be the annihilation of individuals of military importance or sabotage actions like the blowing up of ammunition depots, destroying communication networks, damaging oil installations, etc. The Central Military Commission of the CPI (Maoist) is supposed to undertake such tasks and provide training and education to city action teams.
'Since the enemy is centred in the big cities, it is very important that our party develops a network to obtain and analyse political and military intelligence at higher levels. Besides human intelligence, use of internet and other modern electronic means for gathering information by entering the enemy's networks should also be utilised,' the document says. The internet is increasingly becoming an important tool for the Maoists in their fight against the state. The Maoists use the internet for propaganda and also to be in touch with each other. Messages from one place to another, from one senior leader to another in urban areas are often delivered as encrypted messages using data cards. The internet is also used to send press releases and other information to journalists and activists.
The document accepts that throughout the past 30 years there has been a disregard towards the tasks of the urban movement. 'Having understood the formulation that rural work is primary and urban work is secondary in a mechanical way we concentrated most of our leadership forces only in rural work,' the Maoist leadership felt during discussions at the Party Congress. The document says: 'Therefore a culture was created in the organisation where only the rural work was seen as fieldwork or struggle area work, whereas the urban areas were seen to be out of the field, and non-struggle area work. All the best and most committed cadre would therefore opt for (rural work) and be transferred out of the urban field … All this took place despite our understanding that the importance of the urban areas in India is growing and that the urban areas and the working class in India will have a relatively more important role to play in the revolution.'
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