Making a case for India's MaoistsBook: Red Star Over India; Author: Jan Myrdal; Publishers: Setu Prakashani (Kolkata); Pages: 224, Price: Rs.295.
The
Swedish leftwing author makes no attempt to hide his sympathies as he
returns to India to foray into the Maoist heartland in Bastar where he
interacts with the dominantly tribal guerrillas and holds extensive
discussions with Ganapathy, the elusive general secretary of the
CPI-Maoist. "I am biased," Jan Myrdal says candidly. "We all are; there
is no such social animal as an unbiased observer."
In comparison
to the Maoists he met in 1980, Myrdal finds the CPI-Maoist a hardened
lot - ideologically and militarily. "The People's Liberation Guerrilla
Army," he says, using the Maoist nomenclature for their armed wing, "is
already strong enough to inflict real and heavy military losses on
government forces".
His role, he says, is to help people abroad
and in India understand why the Maoists are waging war. In his view,
freedom in India is for a privileged few; the majority of the rest are
steeped in poverty. The romantic India is a figment of imagination of
novelists, tourist industry and movie makers. Hunger, oppression and
poverty-driven suicides form the "other India", a country where tribals
and Dalits "are hounded and murdered and their women raped and mutilated
for the profit and security of the ruler".
His own journey in
the Dandakaranya region helps him realize that despite official claims,
there is no "liberated area", only rebel zones. Maoist leaders frankly
admit that while the CPI-Maoist is relatively strong in some rural
areas, it is weak in urban centres, among the petty bourgeoisie (the
bulwark of the original Naxalite movement) and even among industrial
workers. Myrdal would want the CPI-Maoist to succeed but he concedes the
reverse is possible. This is because the core strength of the
present-day Maoists is mainly confined to the tribal community. "One
should never forget the negative possibility."
Myrdal weaves in
and out of his political life and global history as he makes a case for
Indian Maoists. The book carries a detailed interview with the
CPI-Maoist chief. Yet this can't be called the best of Myrdal's works.
It certainly is no comparison to Edgar Snow's "Red Star Over China", an
iconic work that introduced to the world Chinese Communists led by the
then unknown Mao Zedong.
Making a case for India's Maoists
