UPDATED: India: On The Split Between CPI (ML) New Democracy & CPI (ML) Prajapandha

Since many readers have asked us to do so, we have decided to publish not only the pdf of that article we published already, which can be found here, but also to reproduce the text and make it accessible here.

Every progressive doctrine which pushes against the fetters of the old is vehemently attacked and fought against rabidly by a motley crew of persons who aim to preserve the old. The struggle for democracy in the world was accompanied by the emergence of an intellectual push for rationality and reason over theological superstitions during the Enlightenment period, which culminated in the bourgeois democratic revolutions all over Europe. This did not occur in a linear manner but occurred after a bitter ideological and practical struggle. The politics of democracy, initially championed by the bourgeoisie in Europe during their revolutions against feudalism shifted into the hands of the proletariat after capitalism’s advancement into the stage of imperialism, with now the proletariat leading the oppressed nations of the world into establishing New Democracy as a means of moving onwards to socialism and communism. This was the example set by the likes of the various Eastern European countries, China, Vietnam etc. Ideologically, Marxism has come to the fore as the science of proletarian revolution and has been central to the examples mentioned above. But this has not occurred all at once and Marxism too, as a doctrine pushing against the fetters that hold back society, has come into challenge by all forms of alien ideologies. During Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ time, it was the struggle against the Young Hegelians, against Proudhonism, against Michael Bakunin’s anarchism. When Marxism firmly established itself as the ideology of the proletariat in its class struggle against the bourgeoisie and the mode of production that serves that class, the ideological onslaught on Marxism emerged from within, in the form of revisionism. Revisionism aims to ‘amend’ the basic principles of Marxism to defang the proletariat’s ideology into one that serves the interests of imperialism, while still preserving the aesthetics of Marxism. For an example, this great fetter to the progress of society itself, manifested in its first iteration as the revisionism of the Second International of socialist political parties, which promoted reformism and a ‘peaceful revolution’ while still claiming their ideology to be Marxism. This is an odd amendment to an ideology which had clearly established the route of revolution in the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx had written rather clearly, “the very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”[1] Vladimir Lenin, in his struggle against the emergence of revisionism, argued, “revisionism—revision of Marxism—is today one of the chief manifestations, if not the chief, of bourgeois influence on the proletariat and bourgeois corruption of the workers.”[2] He went on to say, “the fight against imperialism is a sham and humbug unless it is inseparably bound up with the fight against opportunism.”[3] For Lenin, anti-imperialism is always incomplete without the fight against revisionism. It is this sentiment which led India’s Charu Majumdar to declare, “revisionism is the main danger in the world today.”[4]

On an international scale, Marxism-Leninism developed in the era of imperialism and was firmly established as the ideology of the proletariat by the Russian Social Democratic Party (Bolshevik) (later, Communist Party of the Soviet Union) in the struggle against the first wave of revisionism, that of the Second Communist International, which culminated with the Great October Socialist Revolution in 1917. After this period, the world entered an era of not one, but multiple states pursuing the goal of communism, with the completion of the historic Chinese Revolution in 1949. Socialism was being constructed in several states, not just in the USSR. Once again, the new is birthed at the precipice of struggle with the old. It was in this period, after the death of Josef Stalin and the rise of Nikita Khrushchev in the USSR, that revisionism struck again, now as modern revisionism. Among other things, modern revisionism propounded the ideas of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism (particularly the now dominating US imperialism), of “peaceful transition” to socialism in a rehash of the original spate of revisionism of the Second International and a restoration of capitalist relations of production within the states pursuing socialism. The restoration of capitalist relations was undertaken under the guise of an attack on the person of J.V. Stalin and a complete condemnation of the period of socialist construction that occurred in the USSR. It was the struggle against modern revisionism that initiated yet another leap in Marxism, with the Communist Party of China propounding up the experiences of the Chinese Revolution as well as the construction of socialism in China, struggling against the restoration of the capitalist road within China while struggling against the emergence of this phenomenon in the USSR after Stalin’s death. At the time, this came to be known as Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought (MLM Thought). Finally, the Communist Party of Peru was the first to sum up the disparate MLM Thought as the third stage of Marxism, and assert it as the Marxism of the present, as Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM), after attempting revolution in Peru through the Maoist way.

In 2024, we stand in a world where there is no socialist state, the erstwhile Soviet Union is dissolved, China has turned into a rising and social-imperialist power after betraying the cause of building socialism and imperialist-induced crisis are breaking the backs of the labouring people. Marxism-Leninism in itself, became inadequate as the ideological weapon to combat a resurgent revisionism, in the form of modern revisionism, with the once socialist USSR itself turning into a social-imperialist power before its collapse in 1991. Since this onslaught, Marxism has only advanced further via rupturing with the lessons of Marxist-Leninist practice in USSR, enriched by the experiences of the Chinese revolution, as Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, to continue its struggle against modern revisionism in a bid to propagate communism in an era where once again, no socialist state exists. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, dealing with the emergence of modern revisionism and neo-revisionism, theorized the existence of two lines, that of the ruling class and that of the proletariat, existing even within the organizations propagating class struggle, to understand what led to the great reversal of socialism in USSR and later even in China after 1976.

In India, these developments have manifested very sharply, with Communist Party of India (CPI) being mired by regressive and revisionist politics for nearly half a century since its first founding in 1921. As Marxism went through the pangs of rupturing from its own limitations and advancing further in the fight against modern revisionism and imperialism in India too, it was the Naxalbari uprising and the subsequent formation of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) in 1970 which encapsulated the essence of these developments in India. CPI ML attempted to put into practice what was then called Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought and brought Marxism in India out of the mire of revisionism and complete focus on parliamentary measures. CPI-ML reaffirmed India as a semi-colonial semi-feudal prison-house of nations where a large number of people lived in the countryside trapped in semi-feudal relations under the yoke of landlords. They characterized India as having undertaken only an incomplete democratic revolution and affirmed the need to establish a New Democratic India through armed argrarian revolution. Dubbed the Naxalites, it was these revolutionaries who first attempted to put Maoism into practice in India. But due to the state’s massive onslaught as part of the anti-communist Operation Steeplechase and the infancy of the experience of putting Marxism correctly in practice, CPI ML suffered various setbacks and found itself split into a myriad of groups staking ownership over its name and legacy but most ending up betraying its political line and its lessons. CPI ML New Democracy (hereon, ND group) is one such group that is still attempting to latch onto and grab the legacy of Naxalbari. It thumps its chest as a Maoist force in India, upholding MLM Thought. It recently underwent a split that was announced in 2022, with its Telangana state committee splitting and forming what is now being called CPI ML Prajapandha (hereon, Prajapandha group). This article is a critical evaluation of the politics of both these groups and aims to establish how the various ML groups which rejected the advancement of MLM Thought into MLM after the setbacks of Naxalbari, have returned to the same parliamentary and modern revisionist practices that the Naxalbari uprising broke the back of, while still paying the classic revisionist lip service to revolution and the Naxalbari path. It will rely heavily on ND group’s chief organ “New Democracy” for the evaluation of ND group’s ideological, political and organizational line.[5]

Mode of Production and the Agrarian Revolution: Eclecticism and Revisionism

In 1951, J.V. Stalin in a meeting with the leadership of the CPI said of the Indian revolution, “we view this revolution as primarily agrarian. This means the liquidation of feudal property and the division of land between peasants into their personal property. This means the liquidation of feudal private property for the sake of establishing private peasant property. As you see, there is nothing socialist here. We do not think that India is on the threshold of a socialist revolution. This is also the Chinese way which they talk about everywhere, that is, an agrarian revolution, anti-feudal without any confiscation and nationalization of the property of the national bourgeoisie. This is a bourgeois-democratic revolution or the first stage of a people’s democratic revolution.”[6] Similarly, the Communist Party of China (CPC) said that “India is a vast semi-colonial and semi-feudal country with a population of 500 million, the absolute majority of which, the peasantry, once aroused, will become the invincible force of the Indian revolution. By integrating itself with peasants, the Indian proletariat will be able to bring about earth-shaking changes in the vast countryside of India and defeat any powerful enemy……. the Indian revolution must take the road of relying on the peasants, establishing base areas in the countryside, persisting in protracted armed struggle and using the countryside to encircle and finally capture the cities. This is Mao Tse-tung’s road, the road that has led the Chinese revolution to victory, and the only road to victory for the revolutions of all oppressed nations and peoples.”[7] When the revolutionary peasants waged the truest independence struggle against the imperialist British Raj and the feudal Nizam in Telangana in 1946, the struggle was led by the CPI. The Andhra Pradesh leadership of the CPI aimed to undertake a similar programme that Stalin talked of (imbibed in the famous Andhra thesis), in contravention to the approach of the central leadership of the CPI led by B.T. Ranadive (elaborated in the Calcutta thesis). The Andhra Thesis of 1948 characterized India as a semi-colonial semi-feudal country, having gained only formal independence on 15^th August 1947 while still being subjugated by imperialism and having never demolished feudalism fully to allow unfettered independent capitalism of the Indian national bourgeoisie to ever thrive (a difference from Stalin’s incorrect analysis of the national bourgeoisie). It called for a New Democratic revolution in India, the same one that Stalin calls a people’s democratic revolution, and an armed agrarian revolution the way of China to achieve the same.[8]

Prajapandha group in its public interviews has rejected this understanding outright and claimed that India is not semi-colonial semi-feudal but ‘backward’ capitalist and ‘developing’ capitalist. ND group, on the other hand, upholds that India is semi-colonial semi-feudal still. In ND group’s critical review of Prajapandha’s programme, ND correctly criticize them for upholding a confused position as one country cannot both be backward and developing capitalist at the same time. Yet, ND group, from whom Prajapandha group is birthed from, itself provided the impetus for this deterioration in position. In its Path Document, ND group states, “Capitalist methods of agriculture have developed to some parts of India in recent times as a result of construction and expansion of various irrigation projects and the so-called reform methods adopted by the ruling classes under the growing pressure from the people and in the interest of imperialism. It means that rich peasant economy in agriculture has developed conditions for the big bourgeoisie and big landlords to avail themselves of the rich peasant social base to maintain their rule. At the same time, better conditions are created in some parts for struggle of the agricultural labourers. It also unfolds anti-government struggles of the entire peasantry, including the rich peasantry.”[9] In simple terms, ND group believes that while India’s mode of production is semi-colonial semi-feudal, in some areas, capitalism is successfully finding a way to emerge.

This is an anti-Marxist and unscientific position for a few reasons. In his seminal work Development of Capitalism in Russia, Lenin decisively established the factors which prove emergence of capitalist relations of production, even in a society which from its appearance may be largely agrarian and backward in nature. The factors are:

1. Concentration of agrarian land into the hands of rich peasants from the hands of poor and middle peasants who own small tracts of land to create a large section of peasants displaced from the rural agrarian sphere.
2. A growing manufacturing industry which will absorb these peasants in the urban sphere and transform them into the industrial proletariat. Lenin pointed out, “it is the development of capitalism in manufacturing industry that is the main force which gives rise to, and develops capitalism in agriculture.”
3. A shift from simple commodity production, labour that isolated and petty like in agriculture with small parcels of land into socialized large-scale industrial production, that is capitalist commodity production.
4. The accumulation of capital, measured by the reinvestment of surplus value generated from agriculture, is another factor as it proves the development of capitalist production which focuses on a continual and rapid growth of capital.
5. The presence of both the capitalists (those who engage in capitalist production and own the means of production) and free wage labour, i.e. labour where the workers own nothing but their own labour power, completely disjointed from the means of production. In agriculture, this would require the presence of both agricultural capitalists and a rural proletariat, with the eradication of the middle sections of the peasantry.
6. The presence of usurer’s capital and moneylending.
7. Continuous rise in the productivity trends, of both agriculture and manufacturing industry. The law of capital dictates a continual rise to compete.
8. The eradication of all forms “personal dependence that constituted an inalienable component of the preceding systems of economy,” such as the caste, clan or tribal systems, into relations based purely on class instead.
9.  Eradication of backward and ancient forms of production and services in favour of capitalist production, though the two can coexist (one’s rise would be characterized with the other’s fall) during the period of industrial growth. But the continual existence of small peasantry would see the continual existence such industries, such as handicrafts, as Lenin identified.

To address Prajapandha group’s analysis in light of these factors first, in contravention to the principles mentioned above, instead of the polarization of agrarian land into the hands of capitalist farmers and the creation of a large section of landless agricultural proletariat, the landlord and rich peasants (holding more than 4 ha of land) held 25% of the agrarian land according to the 70^th NSSO (held 60% in 1960-61) and the ‘nearly landless’ peasants (less than 0.41 ha of land) account for 0.68% of this group (1.59% in 1960-61). Meanwhile the poor peasants (0.41 to 1 ha of land) account for a whopping 29% of agrarian land owned, a rise from their 6% share in 1960-61 period. The middle peasants (1 to 4 ha of land) in fact account for 45% of land owned (33% in 1960-61). Not only have the patterns not largely changed, there is a domination of poor and middle peasantry in land ownership and a reduction in the ownership of land among landlords and rich peasants after the so-called Green revolution! This is diametrically opposite to capitalist development in agriculture as it maintains small parcels of land and petty production, maintains the small peasantry that preserves handicrafts and does not displace the peasantry in a manner that the pre-capitalist relations of production are demolished. The task of demolishing the pre-capitalist agrarian sector is done chiefly by the manufacturing industry’s growth and the absorption of the peasantry into it, a task which is yet to be accomplished by India’s industry, which has only planted the seeds of industry but is not genuine industrialization itself. According to comparison of the NSSO data itself, from 1993 to 2010, the percentage of rural persons employed in manufacturing industries has remained at a steady 7%, while the number of persons involved in agriculture has actually reduced in this period from 78% to 68%. Where did this 10% mass of people go? Not into the agrarian sector but into the informal construction work. Landlordism’s continual presence, a form of personal dependence and a pre-capitalist class relation, continues to rise every year according to the NSSO data, as observed in the continual increase of percentage of area leased in to total area owned (the amount of land a landlord gives off to a tenant, from their total land; the tenant will till the land with no involvement from the landlord and will still have to part with a share of their harvest to give to the landlord) from 7% in 1982 to 11.23% in 2012-13. “The disaggregated 70th round NSSO data suggest that out of total tenant households 57.7 % were from landless or near landless, 22.37 from marginal households, 24.54 % were from small households and rest from the households with more than 2 hectares of land. Therefore, the tenancy market is dominated by the landless or the marginal and small households with 92.61%.”[10] It is clear then that instead of working as free wage labourers for a capitalist farmer, the landless and poor peasants continue to work in pre-capitalist relations of production on the lands of landlords and rich peasants. In terms of surplus reinvested, the biggest of landowners (more than 10 ha of land) reinvest only 10.5% of the surplus they appropriate. None of this indicates any sign of capitalist relations in agrarian India. As Ranjit Sau said in 1973, “agricultural capitalism without capitalist farmer is as much nonsense as capitalism without the capitalist.”

Beyond the nonsense of the Prajapandha group, their position is no different from the likes Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM), CPI and all the grand old revisionist sections of the Indian communist movement, who look at all the above and claim that India has “capitalist relations with fetters/remnants of feudalism.” ND group, while analyzing that these factors are not satisfied for India on the whole, somehow still find ‘capitalist methods’ to prevail in the states most affected by the Green Revolution and the Liberalization-Privatization-Globalization (LPG) policies of the late 1980s and 1990s, i.e. Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh. Yet, even in Punjab, the so-called bastion of this ‘capitalist methods’ thesis by ND group, only 22.3% of the surplus value appropriated by the biggest landowners is invested back into agriculture! While the ownership of agrarian land by landlords and rich peasants in Punjab accounts for 48.8%, significantly higher than the country-wide average, the poor and middle peasants hold 49.2% of the land, while the ‘nearly landless’ section holds negligible 2%, per NSSO 2015. What is to note is that the nearly landless section comprises 53.7% of the rural households in Punjab while the landlords and rich peasants comprise only 10%. This figure is then complicated further with the revelation that from the small peasants to landlords, 85% to 93% of them come from upper caste backgrounds. Even among the ‘nearly landless’ peasants, 55% of them come from upper caste backgrounds. Dalits in general comprise of only 13% of the land-owning peasantry in any form and find themselves predominantly among the landless peasants. Not only is caste a key player in determining ownership of land and class relations, another pre-capitalist system that is prevalent in Punjab is tenancy. Those who push for Punjab as the citadel of capitalist relations in agriculture in India harken on the role of landlords and rich peasants leasing land from other peasants, a trend opposed to rest of India it is the poor and landless peasants who work as tenants. Yet, “there is no conclusive evidence, however, of large-scale reverse tenancy (that is, of a system in which large farmers lease in from small farmers), as has been suggested by some scholars.”[11] So the landlords and rich peasants are not grabbing the lands of the peasants with smaller parcels of land and neither are they breaking up the land-ownership patterns of the poor peasants, therefore affecting no qualitative change in the class relations, since the aim is not at all the concentration of land into the hands of the non-existent capitalist farmer. Capitalism CANNOT arrive without smashing the pre-capitalist, that is feudal, relations of production, a process Marx termed as primitive accumulation. This process lays the seeds for capitalist commodity production and quantitative changes must not be confused with qualitative ones, which are not seen in the land relations in Punjab. Further, the tenancy has only allowed even the rich peasantry to extract surplus via feudal relations as the leasing in of land by rich peasantry and landlords has “pushed average rents up; at the same time, 53% of the value of output was extracted by means of rent from small-tenant households.”[12] Surplus value is not extracted from commodity production but via extending rent through extra-economic means. It is also pertinent to note that like the rest of India, the peasants displaced from agriculture did not really get absorbed by a manufacturing industry on the rise. In the three decades from 1971 to 2001, the number of people in agrarian sector decreased from 79.51% to 64.11% per reports of the Director, Census Operation in Punjab and the NSSO. Where did this 15% of peasants go? Not in manufacturing sector, which actually saw a decline, from 1987-2001 from 9.7% in manufacturing to 7.7%. Instead, just like the rest of India, the informal construction work won the race, with this sector seeing a rise from 2.9% in 1983 to 7.8% in 2001. The hotels and restaurants, particularly the dhabas and other eateries in the rural areas saw a huge rise from 4.1% in 1983 to 8.1% in 2001.[13] Transportation and storage industry also saw a rise of 2.3% during this period. As it should be resoundingly clear, instead of a manufacturing industry on the ascendancy absorbing the displaced peasants, they are forced into semi-proletarian conditions in informal and secondary sectors that have little to do with industrialization and capitalist development. Per a field survey of rural Punjab conducted in 2014-15, 80% of the landless peasants were in debt, with 68% of this debt being owed to landowners with more than 10 ha of land, 12% to moneylenders and traders and only 8% to banks and cooperatives.[14] More than half of these borrowings had interests rates that ranged from 22-28% per annum. Moneylenders also predominantly account for as the largest creditors to Dalits in rural Punjab.[15] The heightened presence of landlords and moneylenders in usurer’s capital as well as the caste-based nature of this capital is another key indication of semi-feudal relations, not ‘capitalist methods,’ prevailing in Punjab.

What then, is the ND group seeing in Punjab and calling agriculture? There is definitely something different about the states most affected by the so-called Green Revolution. The higher holding of land in the hands of rich peasants and landlords in comparison to other parts is one such factor. The higher use of advanced agricultural implements and technology is another symptom. Due to the emergence of the agrarian crisis in semi-colonial semi-feudal countries in the 50s and 60s, the social and political arena itself was becoming a seething volcano at the juncture of a breaking point, characterized by the spate of peasant uprisings and the simultaneous democratic rights struggle in the vein of Naxalbari, Srikakulam and Lakhimpur Kheri. The so-called Green Revolution, planned by the American government’s neocolonial institution US Agency for International Development (USAID) along with the monopoly capitalist Rockefeller Foundation and implemented by the joint nexus of imperialist Ford Foundation and comprador bureaucratic-landlord Indian state first in Punjab, threw in a lot of capital and advanced technology into the agrarian field in Punjab. The problem of semi-feudalism though, is not resolved with merely dumping of foreign finance capital from imperialists, or via technological dependency pushed in the form of advanced implements and HYV seeds, even if it is an attempt to introduce capitalism from above. For capitalism to be truly introduced from above, in what is colloquially called the Prussian path, it would require atleast the gradual eradication of small land-holdings by the state, the redistribution of land itself to break up the pre-capitalist relations of production, and a manufacturing industry on the ascendancy to simultaneously supplement all this and absorb the displaced peasants as new proletarians. Instead, what these methods achieved was intensifying the class disparities in these regions, with poor peasants suddenly unable to sustain themselves in an arena where the already dominating landlords were further strengthened directly by the Indian state and imperialists. A study by Anandita Sarkar, published in the Economic and Political Weekly in 2011 found that even when market exists, it is only functioning on the pre-existing principle relations of production dependent on land ownership.[16] She took the case of groundwater and the ‘advanced’ irrigation systems prevalent in Punjab due to the Green Revolution and found out that the larger the landholding, the deeper the wells. When these large landowners then get their hands on advanced irrigation systems, fertilizers, pesticides and HYV seeds, they cause a rapid fall in the water table which eventually forces the poor peasants to buy water for irrigation in contrast large landowners who just bore their wells deeper and deeper. This eventually leads to situations forcing these peasants into seeking userer’s capital as well as a reduction in the productivity in contrast to large landowners. This also increases the hold of water extraction equipment owners, who are often the rich peasants and landlords or exist within their nexus, who find themselves in a market full of poor and middle peasants seeking their equipment. The study finds that not only does this lead the price of renting this equipment to rise to exorbitant levels, it also leads to an eventual situation where the equipment owners and those who have easy access to groundwater to lease and then buy off the land of the poor and middle peasants, who find themselves in crippling debt and selling at distress prices. This is one such example of how the Green Revolution worsened the conditions of the poor and landless peasants and bolstered the existing ruling class nexus of landlords and comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie, with the rich peasantry also making some gains. Are these ‘capitalist methods?’ No, what this has actually achieved, as the preceding discussion on Punjab established, is displacing a chunk of poor peasants from their lands but instead of demolishing the pre-capitalist relations of production, the displacement itself occurred on the basis of these very pre-capitalist relations. This is an attempt at primitive accumulation which has ultimately been futile, like all such attempts in semi-colonial semi-feudal societies, which create a section of displaced peasants who have no manufacturing industry to absorb them and transform them into an industrial proletariat. This primitive accumulation fails to plant the seeds of any progressive independent capitalism (one which is born at the altar of feudalism), but only creates minor gains for moribund capitalism, that is imperialism, their domestic agents in comprador bureaucratic capitalists and their ruling partners the landlords. In the longterm, this entire process is destructive in nature, coming at the cost of the marginalized sections of the peasantry, which provides no route out for Indian society at large as long as the semi-colonial semi-feudal system persists. They are thus, distorted capitalist relations, due to their adoption of capitalist form (market, imported technology) but remaining semi-colonial semi-feudal in its essence (dominance of pre-capitalist relations in actually driving the market etc.) and must therefore not be confused with actual capitalist methods or even having the potential to ever develop into capitalist methods in the future if they continue at this rate.

It is this erroneous understanding of agriculture by the ND group which allowed them to push for an eclectic understanding of India’s mode of production. For Marxists, incorrect analysis leads to incorrect strategies and tactics of changing society itself. ND group misses out on the basics of Marxism, dialectical materialism when it comes to analysing change. While ND group claims to be upholders of Marxism-Leninism Mao Tse-tung thought, it misses the basic Maoist principle of “when we look at a thing, we must examine its essence and treat its appearance merely as an usher at the threshold, and once we cross the threshold, we must grasp the essence of the thing; this is the only reliable and scientific method of analysis.”[17] ND group must penetrate the form and analyse the essence to come to conclusions and it is these erroneous and eclectic analysis which give way for Prajapandha group-type revisionists to spring forth from within the ND group and find confidence in their wayward political programs. But now that we know how both the parent and child find their problems in their analysis of Indian society itself, driven by un-Marxist and unscientific practices, the issue of strategy and tactics of change itself come into question.

Elections, So-Called Mass Struggles and the Illusive People’s War: How To Avoid Revolution

Prajapandha group does not really elaborate heavily on its strategy and tactics, claiming vaguely that, “the new party would carry out non-Parliamentary and Parliamentary agitations to protect the interests of suppressed sections, labour class, minorities and adivasis.”[18] Given their analysis, it is hard to differentiate whatever they are claiming with any of the other parliamentary MLM Thought political parties. They claim that they see the New Democratic revolution in India occurring in three “sub-phases,” i.e. a “united front/forum” outside elections with all forces who are ready to resist “fascist tyranny,” a “united effort” to resist imperialism if any imperialist power attempts to invate India and a “united front/forum” with all who resist “neo-liberal policies.” Beyond these “sub-phases,” they talk of the need for an “immediate peasant revolution” which will be undertaken by way of forming cooperatives and expropriating the leased lands of “capitalist landlords” (what an oxymoron!) into the hands of the poor peasants who till their land. They demand the restoration of the rights of the peasants and struggles focused on such rights. Prajapandha group aims to achieve all this via a combination of participating in elections to pressure the Indian government, finding alliances with “petty bourgeois parties” and “coming together with them in mass movements.” ND group finds this to mean that Prajapandha wants to ally with the CPM and CPI. ND group correctly criticizes this confused position, characterized perfectly by the phrase “capitalist landlords” but fail to once again find the cause of this parliamentary cretinism within their own right opportunist political line.

We will rely heavily on the “Path Document of CPI-ML” that is available on ND Group’s website to analyse their positions.[19] ND group’s public position is that it will both contest elections and also wage “People’s War based on armed agrarian revolution.” In fact, they state that the latter is “the only path for achieving people’s democracy, i.e. new democracy in our country.” They further add, “the CPI(ML), based on Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, totally rejects the path of parliamentarism, peddled by the revisionists and neo-revisionists of all hues and colours. Experience of all countries in the world has proved that the ruling classes, having complete grip over the economic, political and cultural levels of the people, will never allow the exploited and oppressed  people to come to power through peaceful means.” What’s this now? Here, ND group outrightly shuns the parliamentary path, but on the other hand, they had two longstanding MLAs, Gummadi Narsaiah from Yellandu, Telangana and Umadhar Prasad Singh from Hayaghat, Bihar. The latter was even a long-time member of ND’s central committee. But ND quickly justifies this in their Path Document by “utilization of participation in elections by the Communist Revolutionaries, as and when the situation demands, depending on the level of the people’s movement and the consciousness of the people, has nothing to do with the path of parliamentarism. Its aim should always be to dispel the illusions of the people on the parliamentary institutions and prepare them for Armed Struggle.” In its 35 years of existence, one must then question what exactly ND group has done to ‘dispel the illusions of the people,’ raise the supposed ‘level of people’s movement and the consciousness of the people’ etc? This is where the right opportunism of ND group’s eclectic politics is most exposed. While they harken to the phrases used by the Bolsheviks and Lenin in an imperialist Russia which had already completed its bourgeois democratic revolution and was firmly marching towards socialism, they have made no re-evaluation as to why 35 years have led to no success in actually dispelling the illusions. While ND group claims that they understand that India has not completed its bourgeois democratic revolution, and hence its Parliament is not actually a bourgeois democratic institution, that they understand that India is ruled by the joint nexus of the comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie and landlord class at the service imperialism through preservation of feudalism, they fail to understand that the Parliament in such a country is also a semi-feudal institution. In India, where votes are given at gunpoints, polling booths are regularly captured by lumpen elements serving the landlords and their proxies who contest said elections and who nominate their chief representatives in the form of ministers, the nature of parliament itself is not the same as imperialist Russia. Instead of exposing these realities on a regular basis, which ND group claims it wants to do, it has participated in said elections and even justified their act by saying that their own participation is situational! As Lenin himself said of the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in parliament, “revolutionary democratic phrases to lull the rural simple simons, and bureaucracy and red tape to ‘gladden the hearts’ of the capitalists this is the essence of the ‘honest’ coalition.”[20]

This political line is also in contravention to their desire to ‘build armed struggle.” Lenin encapsulated one of the chief instruments of the revolutionary struggle of communists with that of the ruling class by pointing out that in Russia, they had managed to establish dual power. “What is this dual power? Alongside the government of bourgeoisie, another government has arisen, so far weak and incipient, but undoubtedly a government that actually exists and is growing…… It consists of the proletariat and the peasants…. It is a revolutionary dictatorship, i.e., a power directly based on revolutionary seizure, on the direct initiative of the people from below, and not on a law enacted by a centralised state power. It is an entirely different kind of power from the one that generally exists in the parliamentary bourgeois-democratic republics of the usual type.”[21] Dual power is the basic question of every revolution, per Lenin. Lenin points out that this second government not only divides the power instruments of the ruling class, it also unifies the class conscious masses and frees them from the influence of the ruling class. He clearly points out that it is the likes of Mensheviks, social democrats and revisionists who vacillated on this question and thus “hinder this clarification and emancipation.” Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese revolution did not differ from this at all and established their own means of dual power, “China is in urgent need of a bourgeois-democratic revolution, and this revolution can be completed only under the leadership of the proletariat….. The bourgeois-democratic revolution thus met with a temporary defeat. This defeat was a heavy blow to the Chinese proletariat and peasantry and also a blow to the Chinese bourgeoisie (but not to the comprador and landlord classes, i.e. [the national bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeoisie])…… the significance of the armed independent regime of workers and peasants…….. is definitely not confined to the few counties in the border area; this regime will play an immense role in the process of the seizure of political power.”[22] To quote ND group’s own Path Document, “base areas must be developed while  consolidating and extending them. As stated by Com. Mao the protracted people’s war will pass through many stages first liberating the countryside and finally capturing the cities and towns, thus completing the new democratic revolution.” So at one point, ND group upholds claims to be functioning on Lenin’s principle, at another it claims to be attempting Mao’s methods, but in reality, its political practice implements neither (though the two are not disjointed anyways). Neither has ND’s electoral program actually worked on the Bolshevik’s practice in Russia nor have they worked on the Chinese practice, which are actually both aligned with each other on Marxist-Leninist-Maoist principles, since at the end of the day, they have not been able to establish any embryonic form of red political power to compete with the apparatus of the ruling class found both in USSR and in China prior to the revolution. In this way, ND, while proclaiming high rhetoric, is actually mired in the same Parliamentary path that they claim to be shunning. But due to their line’s confusion, they are unable to properly even commit to this path the way a CPM or a CPI does. The fraction within their party which solely upheld this route, the Telangana state committee, reached its breaking point when ND group established “Pratighatana armed forces to work underground in the forests.”[23] While at one point ND group is claiming that their primary focus is an armed agrarian revolution, they simultaneously hope to contest elections, leading to an inevitable contradiction that ruptured them. Providing no people’s alternative to even their own cadre and in no way attempting to build upto it,  it should then not come as a surprise that while one of their former MLAs passed away, the other one from Yellandu joined CPI ML Prajapandha in Telangana in this split.

ND group’s eclecticism is actually an avenue for right opportunism. This right opportunism is first seen in their analysis of the mode of production, with the claim that some states have ‘capitalist methods’ justifying their deviation from their overall political line. This is why the party has been unable to wage any form of people’s struggle in Punjab which militantly defends the interests and gains of mass movements, propagating a defeatist and pacifist line due to the opportunist analysis of ‘capitalist methods.’ This right opportunism is seen once again in the ‘phases theory,’ which is what Prajapandha carries forward. The phases theory believes that the communist movement needs to first educate the people (remember “level of people’s consciousness?”) through political propaganda, then build some mass movements and organizations before finally going into the long haul of what they said is “protracted armed agrarian revolution.” This is confusing as ND starts with the original conclusion that the people in general are not ready for revolution. Thus from ND’s strategy of ‘phase theory,’ we can ascertain that they don’t think that objectively a revolutionary condition in India exists until they undertake steps for its preparation. To quote ND’s own Path Document, “the Indian revolutionaries must bear in mind that the path of People’s War in its essential features, has several times appeared in our past history and is not something foreign to be copied or subjectively applied. The history of the people’s revolutionary struggles against imperialism and feudalism like the Santhal and Mundas, Mopla and Varli peasant revolts and some other peasant revolts prove irrefutably the validity and necessity of the path People’s War in India. They prove that the revolutionary struggles of the Indian people inevitably take the form of Armed Agrarian Revolution. The great Telengana Struggle of 1946-51, was the first and biggest armed peasant struggle conducted on the basis of People’s War. That struggle taught us how anti-feudal partial struggles of the people, if properly conducted, lead to land struggles armed be conducted and sustained only if it is linked with the land struggle. It also teaches us the necessity of arming the people for resistance against landlord-police-goonda violence from the beginning of the anti-feudal struggles. It also teaches us how village committees have to be built up into organs of local power of the people to sustain prolonged armed struggle. But such a heroic armed peasant struggle was betrayed by the then leadership because it was not firm on the concept of People’s War as the only path for the complete liberation of our people. Later the leadership took to the path of parliamentarism.” Going purely on ND’s own document, their own reading of history contravenes their theory of ‘phases.’ They talk of establishing village level dual power, talk of arming people from the start of anti-feudal struggles and find fault not in the preparation of anti-feudal struggle but in the political understanding of the leadership. Where then, does history itself bring up the requirement of any phases for building upto people’s struggles? All political parties in India who have upheld the call of agrarian revolution in the way ND claims it does have been banned by the Indian state, principally under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967. It should then come as no shock that while having armed squads, such as the “Pratighatana armed forces” mentioned as cause of their split, the Indian state is yet to ban this party, its mass organizations and curtail its legal presence, which is tolerated by the Indian state that ND group wants to demolish. ND group, once again fails to rise upto the standards of its ideologue Mao Tse-tung, who claimed “to be attacked by the enemy is a good thing.”[24] This entire political line of phase theory, thus, ends up becoming a means of relegating revolution to a distant future.

No Connection with Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)

Prajapandha group’s revisionism finds its birthplace in the womb of ND group’s right opportunist politics. But their origin point is actually further up in history. One must delve into the formation of the original CPI ML and the Naxalbari uprising itself to understand this. After the initiation of the Naxalbari uprising in 1967 and the emergence of Charu Majumdar’s Historic Eight Documents which revived the line put forth in the Chinese revolution and in the previously mentioned Andhra thesis, breaking with the parliamentary and reformist politics of CPM and CPI, the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR) was formed to coordinate further such uprisings and carry forward these discussions, which saw the subsequent Srikakulam uprising. The trio of Tarimela Nagi Reddy, D.V. Rao and K. Venkaiah were prominent leaders of the CPM from Andhra Pradesh who were also active during the Telangana struggle and joined the AICCCR even thought they had some differences with Charu Majumdar’s and AICCCR’s line. This group was later joined by Chandra Pulla Reddy (hereon, TN-DR-KV-CPR). Due to their differences, they refused to leave CPM and openly share their differences with CPM’s politics publicly. Their differences with AICCCR amounted to the quartet not seeing USSR as a social imperialist power and them seeing the election boycott call of AICCCR as one that should be tactical while AICCCR understood that this was a strategic call, due to agrarian revolution’s nature not allowing them any practical possibility of contesting in elections. Not only did they not leave CPM when the party itself was part of governments suppressing the peasant uprisings, they also failed to follow up on the Srikakulam uprising and condemned some of the activities of AICCCR, eventually leading to their expulsion from AICCCR in 1969 after which they formed the Andhra Pradesh Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (APCCR) while the AICCCR transformed into the CPI ML in 1970. The APCCR split amongst itself, with its main leadership ending up in prison and Chandra Pulla Reddy seizing power. He was later kicked out by the jailed leadership and he set up his own group by the name of APCCR itself. The original APCCR meanwhile, transformed into Unity Centre of Communist Revolutionaries (Marxist-Leninist) (UCCRI-ML). Meanwhile in the CPI-ML, 7 months after its formation, Bihar state committee secretary Satyanarayan Singh condemned the politics of the CPI ML Central Committee, of Charu Majumdar and set up their own parallel ‘Central Committee,’ which split into another parallel party Provisional Central Committee, CPI ML (hereon, SNS group) in 1971, while the CPI ML itself continued to be in existence in its current form until 1973. SNS group had given up on agrarian revolution while condemning Charu Majumdar and claiming to make a critique of CPI ML. They even returned to the parliamentary route, fielding multiple candidates in Bihar, Punjab and Andhra Pradesh elections. The merger of SNS group and CPR’s APCCR is what gave birth to what is the ND group, a meeting point of the first and foremost revisionists that emerged during the early days of the Naxalbari uprising and its subsequent developments. CPR’s group was already out of AICCCR before the CPI ML was made and SNS split from CPI ML before its collapse. So on what grounds is CPI ML New Democracy using its name to refer to itself? The party is so mired in opportunism that even its name is symbolic of an opportunist attempt at grabbing onto the revolutionary legacy of Naxalbari uprising, without practicing any of its politics. Fittingly, ND group is only able to grab the form of Naxalbari, Charu Majumdar and the politics of New Democratic revolution in India, entirely missing out on its essence.

It is thus this blend of eclectic right opportunist politics of the ND group that has even provided the impetus for a Prajapandha group to have ever emerged. Due to its inability to understand the totality of Marxism’s growth in the struggle against modern revisionism, becoming what is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, ND group has found itself slipping backwards. In the course of the sharpening of the proletariat’s ideology on the whetting stone of class struggle, the old, stagnant and regressive is bound to be thrown into the dustbins of history while the new will continue to cut through the oppressive and exploitative order with a sharpened edge. The genuine and committed cadre of ND group must also make its decision of where it sees itself in the course of history.

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[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/11/06.htm

[2] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/may/00b.htm

[3] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch10.htm

[4] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mazumdar/1970/04/x01.htm

[5] https://www.cpimlnd.org/new-democracy-august-2023/

[6] https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/record-conversation-between-stalin-and-representatives-indian-communist-party

[7] https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/peoples-daily/1967/07/05.htm

[8] Andhra P.S., “Present Stage and Strategy of Indian Revolution,” in Historical and Polemical Documents of the Communist Movement of India, Vol. 1 (Vijaywada: Tarimela Nagireddy Memorial Trust, 2007).

[9] https://www.cpimlnd.org/basic-documents/path-document-of-cpi-ml/

[10] https://www.eur.nl/sites/corporate/files/CMCP_62-Rumba.pdf

[11] https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/308311/files/Tenancy_in_Punjab.pdf

[12] Id.

[13] https://www.nilerd.ac.in/writereaddata/UploadFile/report202013_1857.pdf

[14] Gian Singh, Anupama, Gurinder Kaur, Rupinder Kaur, Sukhvir Kaur, “Indebtedness among Farmers and Agricultural Labourers in Rural Punjab”, EPW, 11/2/2017.

[15] Pallavi Chavan, “The Access of Dalit Borrowers in India’s Rural Areas to Bank Credit”, Review of Agrarian Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 2012.

[16] Anindita Sarkar, “Socio-economic Implications of Depleting Groundwater Resource in Punjab: A Comparative Analysis of Different Irrigation Systems”, EPW, 12/2/2011. This is based on the same author’s “Structural Changes in Irrigation Systems and Access to Groundwater Resources: A Case Study of Punjab”, PhD thesis, 2009, available at http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/handle/10603/18164

[17] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_6.htm

[18] https://telanganatoday.com/telangana-split-in-cpiml-new-democracy-party

[19] https://www.cpimlnd.org/basic-documents/path-document-of-cpi-ml/

[20] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/

[21] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/09.htm

[22] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_3.htm

[23] https://telanganatoday.com/telangana-split-in-cpiml-new-democracy-party

[24] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-6/mswv6_32.htm