A Note About Indian Naxalism

 Maoists VS Indian Defense

Any nation, state or territory at the helm of a civil revolution in the modern era faces the threat of inclusion of the armed forces along with the law and order forces for the desecration of revolutionary insurrectionists. India is at the helm of such civil revolution and faces a similar strategic dilemma. One may think that this would be of stifling and demoralizing for the insurrectionists to enter into a struggle with the nation’s armed forces. One might think that the insurrectionists, being small in number and primitive in strategies would easily submerse to a nation’s fully fledged air, naval and army support. What this piece of article brings to light is the outcome of a ‘state of war’ between the armed forces of India and the communist regimes dominant in Eastern and South Eastern parts of India.

Some might even feel appalled by the mere notion of using such a harsh and strong instrument as the Indian army on such a localized and ‘petty’ problem. These people fail to see the bigger picture. These people fail to see that while the Indian Army has only a short history of one or two minor wars fought, the ideology with which these Maoist rebels fight has gone through and been tested in the crucible some of the most gruesome wars over the years. They fail to see that even though the Indian Defense might be high on ammunition, soldiers, strategy experts and military generals, they still fall short to the legendary history of communist struggle. The Bolshevik revolution carved the great Soviet Union from the Tsarist Empire. Out of this struggle, the ideology of communism was born. For obvious reasons, we only take the notion of communist struggle in this article as communism as a whole is too great of a subject to be contained in a single article. People from every walk of life joined under the leadership of Lenin and took to the streets united by the comradeship of communism. Their feeling of power came from their feeling of unity. Communism gave them that unity. Communism was a promise to a better life for them.

Then there was the Cuban revolution, where young revolutionaries like Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, and the great Che Guevara took the Red flag to fight off the dictatorship of Julio Batista. This was a time when the spirit of communism was tested with a nation’s army. This struggle brought to attention the structural composition of a ‘communist guerilla’ band. They were similar to the ferocious tribal warriors like the Apache in their approach. A regular guerilla band did not have the hierarchical structure of an average platoon. The guerilla band generally had one leader who was less of a leader and more of a coordinator. They fought shoulder to shoulder without any prejudice like comrades and this gave them the freedom to use their intellect in the course of warfare. Simultaneously, another revolutionary struggle was going on in China under Mao Zedong. He was nothing more than a community organizing guerilla fighter who had a small band of just over 600 soldiers. He used them to fight against the imperialist forces that prevailed in his country. As the struggle was going on in China, Japanese forces sought to invade China and it was then that Mao came into power. People willfully volunteered to fight under the communist regime of Mao Zedong. The Japanese forces were equipped with modernized weaponry they got from the axis powers like Germany whereas Chinese People’s Republic army of Mao Zedong had to makeshift with weapons sabotaged from the enemy. Same was the case in the Cuban revolution where the guerillas sabotaged the dictator’s regime and used their weapons along with custom made weapons of their own.

In both these cases, it was neither the size of the army nor the power of the army that mattered; it was the spirit of revolution ignited in their hearts and the communist ideology that inspired them. And against all odds, these communist guerilla regimes emerged victorious, by defeating a conventional army.

If that is not evidence enough in favor of these communist guerillas, the Vietnam War is the burning example of how a regime of unconventional communist guerillas defeated a superpower that the world still fears. Under the leadership of communist demagogue Ho Chi Minh who was as learned and scholarly as he was cunning in the art of war. He resisted all the tactics of US, the chemical bombings of Agent Orange, the ‘divide and rule’ policy between the North and the South Vietnam and even the conventional warfare that killed tens of thousands of Vietcong soldiers. He openly declared to the US army that ‘You can kill ten of our men for every one of yours and even at those odds, you will lose and we will win’. And win they did. They used an unconventional system of underground tunnels, jungle warfare and emasculation of the enemy forces through pitfalls, bamboo blockades and booby traps. They beat the most glorified army of the world with nothing but bamboo sticks and weapons sabotaged by the enemy and improvised for better concealment and productivity. The Vietcong boasted of shooting down jet planes with just one round of rifle bullets.

What the government of India and the Indian army has to understand that this is not your average fundamentalist or segregationist insurgency. They are fighting for the right reason which is equality between the rich and the poor, something that is becoming rarer and rarer in this political aristocracy we call democracy. They fight because they have seen development become destruction; democracy become hypocrisy and equality become a joke at the hands of rich landowners, corrupt politicians and foreign capitalists. Due to this, they have the local support. The government also needs to understand that each and every rebel or Leftist has ten times the intellect and knowledge as any of the army’s soldier, General or Lieutenant because they have chosen to raise arms only after acquainting themselves through the widest literature and philosophy of communism, Leftism, radicalism, socialism and strategic politics. Every communist leader has left some substantial literature for the future generation to take inspiration from, like Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Goldman, Stalin, Mao, Che, Kamenev and many others. They were men of the highest intellect and scholastic abilities. All that, added to the impeccable knowledge of the terrain in which these communist rebels fight makes them a force to be reckoned with. They have the legacy of jungle warfare and survival tactics left to them by revolutionaries like Che Guevara and Pol Pot. Granted that the Defense has the technological prowess to wage a far superior war on communist insurgency but these Leftists have acclimated themselves to operate under complete radio silence and electronic immobility through analogue tactics, hand gestures, clandestine cells, pre-planned assimilations and individualist tactics. A conventional army is not enough to defeat the Maoists. Even if the Maoists are defeated, their legacy will not die. Because you can kill people, you can even erase their ideals from the minds of the people in due course of time, kill their ideology but what you can’t kill is history. And history shows us all that whenever the Red flag with the sickle and hammer rose among the struggling masses, it had begot change.