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Maoists take Revenge on Mass Murdering Gang Rapists in India

by Steven Argue
[Photo: Poet Gaddar addresses pro-Maoist rally. A popular song in India has Gaddar’s words "Stop Rickshaw-walla; I am coming; You work from morning to night, but your stomach cannot be filled; So much blood and sweat, yet you earn hardly anything…" ]
0000_gaddar.jpg
Maoists take Revenge on Mass Murdering Gang Rapists in India

By Steven Argue

On May 25th, Mahendra Karma and Nandkumar Patel were the targets of a Maoist attack on a Congress Parivartan rally which left several people dead, including those intended. The ruling politicians who were killed have played a leadership role in Salwa Judum, which are anti-insurgency death squads that have carried out mass rapes and murders to inflict terror on the poverty stricken people of India’s tribal regions. Mahendra Karma was the founder of Salwa Judum. His role was similar to Dick Wilson’s on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation of the United States where Dick Wilson’s GOONs carried out mass murder of at least 61 innocent civilians.

Unlike Dick Wilson (coddled and supported by the FBI in the mass murder of civilians), Mahendra Karma has paid the ultimate price for his crimes. Indeed, whatever else may be said of this action by the Maoists, those targeted were mass murderers, rapists, and defenders of a system of extreme poverty and capitalist injustice in the tribal regions of India. While taking responsibility, the outlawed Communist Party of India (Maoist) expressed their regret that innocent Congress workers were also killed in the attack, but went on to say:

“Both the BJP and the Congress are equally responsible for repression in tribal areas”

“The mayhem in Bastar, precipitated by the Salwa Judum, is incomparable to any gory incident taken place in the history”

“The purpose was to punish Mahendra Karma who had launched the anti-Naxal armed movement Salwa Judum and some other Congress leaders”

“during Salwa Judum, hundreds of tribal women were allegedly gangraped and several innocent villagers were killed”.

“Through this attack, we have taken their revenge,”"

The CPI(Maoist), adivasi people, and their armed uprising should be defended from the brutal repression of the Indian government and their lackey thugs in Salwa Judum.

Yet, the political strategy of the CPI (Maoist) provides no long term solution for India’s oppressed masses. Like other Stalinist parties in India, the Maoists seek an alliance with a mythical “progressive” wing of the capitalist class in the first supposed stage of a "two-stage" revolution. Communist Party of India (Maoist) General Secretary Ganapathy doesn't hide this flawed program:

“We have a clear-cut understanding to unify all revolutionary, democratic, progressive, patriotic forces and all oppressed social communities including oppressed nationalities against imperialism, feudalism and comprador bureaucratic capitalism. Our New Democratic United Front (UF) consists of four democratic classes, i.e. workers, peasants, urban petty-bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie.”
—Sanhati, January 2010

Yet, as all of history has shown, and as the program of Lenin and Trotsky points out, that national bourgeoisie is a deadly enemy of proletarian liberation. Far from being allies, the national bourgeoisie is in league with imperialism. Far from being a class to bring into the revolutionary government, they are the primary class that needs to be overthrown.

The same Maoist perspective in Nepal recently led to the betrayal of that revolution. Through great sacrifices by Nepal's fighting peasants, the Nepalese Maoists had seized 80% of the country, seized land and factories, legalized the languages of oppressed nationalities, and made great strides towards women's liberation. Yet, in 2006, the Nepalese Maoists gave all of that back as price of admission into the capitalist government of Nepal, giving back seized land and factories and dismantling the People’s Liberation Army, the "people’s courts”, and “people’s committees”.

This type of betrayal flows from thinking that there should be a stage in the revolution where some non-existing progressive layer of the national bourgeoisie plays a leading role in the revolution.

Similar thinking comes from another Indian party, the CPI(Marxist). As a result of their Stalinist two stage theory of revolution, the Communist Party of India Marxist (CPI(M)) in power has had no program for the overthrow of capitalism. Holding office without such a program, they become defenders of the capitalist state, to the point of doing the capitalist’s dirty work. In fact, the CPI(M) razed the village of Nandigram to silence opposition to the industrial giant Tata Motors, killing 14 and injuring 200.

At least at present, India’s Maoists in the CPI(Maoist) are on the right side of the barricades and they should be defended from government repression. The road forward, however, can only be forged on the program of Lenin and Trotsky, written by Trotsky in "Results and Prospects" and adopted by Lenin in the "April Thesis". This is a program that recognized that the era of a "progressive" bourgeoisie was over and opposed all two stage theories of revolution, calling for the immediate overthrow of the capitalist class, capitalist state, and of the capitalist system itself. Such a revolution should also take steps to encourage workers democracy, allowing the freedom of speech, organizing, and press of all political tendencies that do not take-up arms against the working class, peasantry, and the revolution. This would be very different from Mao who rounded-up all of China’s known Trotskyists, along with their friends and families, and jailed them. Some were never seen again, others were finally released in 1976.

Despite Mao’s contradictory program where he tried to align himself with a non-existent progressive nationalist bourgeoisie, he finally did carry out a sweeping socialist revolution which brought enormous gains including a doubling of life expectancy during Mao’s rule, incredible advances in women’s rights and literacy, and the abolition of slavery in the most backward regions like Tibet. The Chinese still benefit from that revolution, but lacking workers’ and peasant’s democracy, there is little ability of the Chinese working class and peasantry to correct the corruption and dangerous capitalist inroads being made in China.

Communists should learn from the negative and positive examples of China which include:

1) The positive example that a truly anti-imperialist revolution with massive benefits for the working class and peasantry was only possible through the total overthrow of the capitalist system and liquidation of the national bourgeoisie;

2) China offers the negative example that a lack of workers’ and peasants’ democracy has helped create and maintain the rule of a corrupt and brutal privileged bureaucratic layer that has allowed for dangerous capitalist inroads that have overturned many gains of the 1949 revolution and threaten to overturn them all in a capitalist counter-revolution. Today a political revolution is needed in China to bring workers democracy and defend the gains of the 1949 revolution. In India and elsewhere, workers’ and peasants’ democracy should be seen as an essential tool in maintaining the health of any future communist revolution.

-Steven Argue of the Revolutionary Tendency

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