Social Movements and State Repression in India

Abstract

State repression is particularly likely when social movements target property relations that cause ordinary citizens to suffer. Whether these movements are violent, and whether the state is a liberal democracy is a contingent matter. This is illustrated by India’s ‘Maoist movement’ (which is also known as the Naxalite movement because it originated in an area called Naxalbari, located in India’s West Bengal State). Where necessary, sections of this movement use violent methods to fight for justice for aboriginal peoples and peasants. This strategy, which the author, incidentally, does not endorse, has been seen by the state as the greatest internal military threat to it. Such a perception invites state violence. What is often under-emphasized or ignored is that the movement is an economic, political and ideological threat, and not just a military threat, and it is so through its localized alternative developmental activities, and this is also a reason for the state’s violent response to it.

Keywords

India Maoist movement state development repression

A social movement which is informed by Maoism has mobilized poor people against sections of the propertied class (e.g. landlords, traders, mining companies) for social justice in India. This movement has conferred limited benefits upon the poor. It is not averse to using violence to get these benefits and to fight against injustice. The Indian state seeks to violently repress it. This raises wider conceptual questions about the relation between social movements and the state. Why does a state kill its citizens?

It must be made clear at the outset that a critique of the Indian state’s violent response to the Maoist movement does not at all mean an endorsement of how Maoists undermine society and seek to change it. This paper takes the position that long-term structural changes in society require active participation of politically conscious masses in villages and cities in social-political mobilization against injustice, and that emphasizing violent methods of destruction cannot construct conditions for social justice, even though such methods may yield short-term localized results.

The first section of the paper briefly and critically discusses the existing conceptual literature on state repression of social movements, and presents a preliminary attempt at an alternative approach to the topic. The next three sections provide some empirical evidence, including from newspaper reports,¹ which supports this approach. While the second section discusses the origin of the movement in the 1960s in an Indian province and its (uneven) geographical spread in recent times, the third section looks at the state’s ideological-cum-repressive response to the movement. The penultimate section examines why the state deploys violent means against it. The final section draws out some conceptual implications of the discussion.

Social movements and the state: a conceptual discussion

There is a large literature on why social movements occur, both in rural and urban contexts (Anderson and Seligson, 1994; Castells, 1983; Houtzager, 2000; Oslender, 2004; Paige, 1975; Skocpol, 1982) and in society at large (Auvinen, 1997; Dudley and Miller, 1998; MacCulloch, 2005; Miller, 2000; Morris, 2000). This paper focusses on the state’s response to social movements: in particular, its violent response (Della Porta, 1995, 2014; Fominaya and Wood, 2011; Hess and Martin, 2006; Ondetti, 2006²; Ortiz, 2013). Among the various explanations, I will deal with two: state form (i.e. whether it is liberal democratic) and social nature of protestors.³

Lack of democracy is said to cause state repression. In democracies, agents of repression are less able to function without some form of civilian oversight, compelling them to exert greater effort in justifying their action (Davenport, 2004: 542).⁴ Repression may hurt politicians’ prospect of returning to office. Democracy creates spaces for non-violent methods of resolving conflicts through political parties and elections (Henderson, 1991). Effective democracy also provides citizens – at least those with political resources – with the tool to oust potentially abusive leaders from office (Henderson, 1991). The democratic state can also use non-coercive measures –reforms/concessions – to meet challenges from internal opposition (Gurr, 1988: 55). ‘[T]he more libertarian a state is, the less intense its violence can and tends to become’ (Rummel, 1984: 443). A libertarian state guarantees not only basic civil liberties and political rights but also economic freedom. Indeed, if the state regulates economic affairs less, there will be less violence: ‘the more government, the more violence’ (Rummel, 1984: 461).⁵

In sum, democracy pacifies. But this argument suffers from several problems. That democracy provides citizens with the tool to oust potentially abusive leaders from office (or to force them to change their policies significantly) assumes the following: people’s resistance is in a form that is approved by the state, and that electoral participation is an effective way of redressing inequalities. But most importantly, the ‘democracy pacifies’ argument fails to properly recognize the constraining effect of private property relations on the exercise of democratic rights of ordinary people and on the state’s power to address their problems by giving meaningful material concessions. State repression of those protesting austerity and of the Occupy movement points to this fact. As Dryzek (1996) argues, business demands on the state, whether in India or the USA, restrict its political options, more or less, to those that support capitalist interests, even if these are anti-democratic. Further, repression may not hurt chances of returning to office if all major political parties agree on the legitimacy of repression of given movements for social justice, and they will agree if they believe in the sanctity of private property and free markets. Further, to say that a state which controls economic affairs less will be less violent is to suggest that we should expect a saintly state and peaceful society under what has been called neoliberalism (Harvey, 2003). Instead, the ‘more’ capitalist the state becomes in its day-to-day activities, the less scope it has to meet the demands of ordinary people, and therefore the more violent it tends to be in response to those demands.

People’s democratic right is a valuable gain (Bobbio, 2005) obtained and sustained through struggle. A capitalist society with liberal democracy is better than one without.⁶ But democracy, which is a form of class rule, generally does a good job of amicably resolving material-ideological conflicts that are internal to (a) the ruling classes (i.e. conflicts among various fractions of ruling classes over access to state support) and (b) the political elite which is broadly supportive of these classes. Democracy may cause a time lag between a movement’s beginning and onset of repression. But it is unlikely to stop the state from using repressive measures against a radical social movement that challenges certain aspects of class relations.⁷

In the second explanation of state violence, protestors using non-institutional and confrontational tactics⁸ are seen by the state as a greater threat, so they face greater repression than the dissidents not using these tactics (Davenport, 2004; Poe and Tate, 1994). These kinds of protest provide authorities with a legitimate mandate to sanction them as a law and order measure. But this explanation is also inadequate: peaceful protests (e.g. Occupy protests) have been routinely repressed.⁹

An alternative explanation of state repression of social movements must critically build on these two approaches. It must, at the minimum, look at the class character of the state and of mobilizations/protestors. First the latter. One must recognize two things here. For one thing, it is the subordinate strata of proletarian and semi-proletarian classes, who have little (informal) access to state power, that tend to use non-institutional tactics. For another, these classes or class-strata are considered a serious threat not just because of the way in which they rebel (i.e. the non-institutional method of protest) but because of what they rebel against: the fact that they rebel against what the state must protect (i.e. aspects of the private property system such as dispossession, super-exploitation, etc.).

In understanding why the state represses social movements, one must stress the class character of the state as well.¹⁰ Whatever else it may be, ‘the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order”, which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression’ within a given territory (Lenin, 1977a: 11). Its most fundamental objective is to protect exploitative private property relations and sustain/promote the associated mechanisms of accumulation (Draper, 1977: 251; Das, 2006). Class relations are fundamentally coercive, even under capitalism which celebrates individual freedom (Das, 2012). For example, the reproduction of capitalist class relations (including the market imperative) is based on the continuing separation of labourers from means of production. This separation has to be reproduced continuously. People are dispossessed of their land (and indeed access to common property and the state’s limited benefits), and often through state and private force. This happened during Marx’s times (Marx, 1977: 874–876), and this happens now (Harvey, 2003; Donnelly, 1989; Farid, 2005).¹¹ People have to work under the ‘despotic’ control of property owners as well (Marx, 1977: 477, 548–550), surrendering much of the fruit of their labour to capital. This despotism often takes the form of violence against the masses, including proletarian and semi-proletarian women.

Every social movement or mobilization is not directly against the existence of private property relations as such. A social movement can fight against the ways in which these relations work or against the actual effects produced by these relations. For example, they can be against property owners not paying (minimum) wages or extending the working day much beyond the normal. When labourers have the right to get minimum wages and employers have the right to set the wage the way they want, or whenever peasants have a right to live and work in an area and companies want that area for factories or to extract minerals, it is often the case that ‘[b]etween equal rights, force decides’ (Marx, 1977: 344). And this force is generally (and in the last instance) the force of the state used on behalf of the property owners. The regime of low wages is coercively reinforced. If lower classes challenge the right to private property, or the ways in which property owners really accumulate wealth/income, this would be framed by the state as non-negotiable or difficult to negotiate. So, the movement faces violence. Whether the mode/form of such a movement is non-institutional/confrontational/violent is generally immaterial as far as the cause of state violence is concerned. The content of the movement, its class content, is moot. And the state being democratic or not is largely beside the point.

It would be inaccurate to state that the state rules only by coercion. It does not, as Gramsci has suggested. Sometimes it does introduce measures to alleviate the negative effects of private property relations and of mechanisms of class-based accumulation. Decentralized governance which moves the government administration to people’s doorsteps, some redistribution of income and assets, employment creation through public works, and so on, are implemented by the state. The state does this often in response to (violent and non-violent) social movements.¹² The state introduces these measures for its legitimacy. Legitimacy comes from the mere introduction of the measures (measures on paper, the very discourse of measures or of development). It also comes from their limited implementation, the actual concessions (e.g. developmental benefits). Many measures do remain on paper or under-implemented because their implementation will hurt the economic elite (for example, a rise in wages that is mediated/enforced by the state will adversely affect profits, and state-enforced land redistribution will affect the interests of landlords). If a movement of subordinate strata fights for the implementation of pro-poor policies beyond a given limit, the state tends to make the movement a target for attack. Whether there is liberal democracy and whether protestors are violent is, once again, beside the matter.

And finally, we must bear in mind the scalar character of the state in relation to effects of democracy on repression. Both economic reproduction of class relations and the state’s support for these relations happen at different scales . There are property owners (e.g. landowners, mining business) whose economic operations are more locally oriented and others which are more nationally and globally oriented. State activities also exist on different levels: local, provincial and national (Cox, 1990). Challenges to capitalist relations and the state happen on different levels, therefore. A nation-state may be liberal democratic as indicated by its national constitution and by social-political practices at the national level, but at the local level, state institutions may be far less democratic. This partly reflects the interests of ruling classes at the local level and the ways in which their interests support, and are supported by, undemocratic relations of gender and racial and caste inequalities. The argument that democracy reduces violence must be tempered by the fact that at the local level, there may be very little democracy in practice and therefore any resistance against the state, violent or not, will tend to meet with a violent response from the state. Of course, the actual level of violence depends on the place-specific balance between state power and the power of the subordinate classes/class-strata.

The beginning and the spread of the Naxalite Movement

The balance between state power and the power of the subordinate classes/class-strata is often upset in many places. The northern region of West Bengal State in India was such a place. Like many other regions of India, it has a long history of peasants’ and workers’ movements (Kennedy and Purushotham, 2012). From the early 1950s, a radical section of the Communist Party of India (CPI) organized peasants in West Bengal’s Naxalbari subdivision of Darjeeling district. Local peasant associations encouraged their members to harvest crops on landlords’ lands; peasants were armed in order to protect their crops, and to defend themselves against police attacks (Banerjee, 1980). Landlords responded by evicting the sharecropping peasants, including by hiring hoodlums. Police did not take any action despite the fact that communists were a part of the provincial government. This added fuel to peasant militancy. Between 15,000 to 20,000 poor peasants in about 2,000 villages were enrolled as full-time activists, supported by urban educated youth (Jalal, 1995). Peasant committees were formed in every village. They were transformed into armed guards, possessing conventional weapons like bows, arrows and spears. They not only occupied landlords’ land and seized their crops, but also they burnt all land records. For three liberating months (March to May 1967), feudalism was driven out of Naxalbari. The Naxalite movement, named after Naxalbari, was born. The revolutionary mass organization of peasants held political power. Controlling rural spaces was a mechanism of exercising class power. Peasants’ control over Naxalbari was so complete that no outsider could enter without their permission. Following the killing of a policeman on 23 May 1967, a major police action was launched in July by the provincial united front government, of which the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M) was a part, with the full support from the federal government in Delhi. The government’s repressive intervention crushed the movement in its place of origin. The CPI(M) leadership denounced supporters of the Naxalbari upheaval as counter-revolutionaries and expelled them from the party.

Map 1.

INDIA: LWE Conflict Map 2015.

The immediate aim of the Naxalite movement was to fight against landlords and demand redistribution of their land to the poor. It also fought against moneylenders and rural traders. Its ultimate political aim was to bring about a revolution against imperialist powers, and against feudal landlords and comprador bureaucratic capitalists, and therefore against state power which protects these classes. A successful revolution would usher in a people’s democratic government. The movement has sought to mobilize its class base: proletariat, peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and national bourgeoisie (although the latter class, according to the discourse of the movement, is vacillating and cannot be fully relied upon).¹³ The movement sparked a revolutionary movement including land seizures throughout India. There were more than 5,000 localized militant struggles between 1967 and 1970 (Government of India (GOI), 1969). A Coordinating Committee, and later, a party called Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (CPI(M-L)) was formed on 22 April 1969 to coordinate these localized struggles into a mass movement for social justice in rural areas. Naxalism was accepted as the ‘brand name’ for CPI(M-L). A revolutionary threat to the state’s security began. Samir Amin (2005) says that ‘in spite of tactical errors of judgment’, the Naxalite offensive ‘has reawakened revolutionary awareness among the peasantry in vast areas . . . of India’. The movement now covers over 40% of India’s land area, encompassing 20 of the country’s 28 major provinces, including 223 districts out of a total of 640; in 2003, only 55 districts were affected (Ismi, 2013) (see Figure 1). It is the fastest growing social movement in India. All social movements are informed by one or another ideological framing, consciously or not. The Naxalite movement is a part of a larger trend in which social movements are shaped by Maoism in the global South (Dirlik, 2014). In post-Naxalbari times, at least 40 Naxalite (or Marxist-Leninist) groups emerged (Chaudhuri, 2001). These can be broadly divided into two main streams:

The CPI(M-L)-Liberation and other similar CPI-ML organizations (e.g. New Democracy) have moved away from an emphasis on killing individual class enemies to the militant organization of lower classes. These groups make use of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary methods. They do not rule out the use of violence, however.

The People’s War Group (PWG) merged in 2004 with the Maoist Communist Center (MCC) to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist), or CPI (Maoist). This party has been banned. It adheres to the original formulations of staging armed struggle, carrying out guerrilla operations and liquidating ‘class enemies’; like other groups, it also engages in developmental and mobilizational activities. Often, by the term ‘Maoist’, some refer to the activities of the CPI (Maoist). I use the term ‘Naxalite’ and ‘Maoist’ as a generic category to refer to the social movement in India that is ideologically informed by Maoism, which originated in Naxalbari, and which includes the activities of the CPI (Maoist).

Figure 1.

Fatalities of Maoists in India (1994–2014).

The state response to the Naxalite Movement

The Indian state has responded to the Naxalite movement by mainly two means: a developmental means which aims to produce consent of the affected masses to the legitimacy of the state, and a non-developmental (coercive) means. The priority is, generally, given to the latter, although there is no unanimity on this among the governing elite. The deployment of the non-developmental means is supported by state’s ideological struggle against the movement. Ideologically fighting against the movement, the state is keen on ‘bracketing the Naxalite movement with the terrorism of . . . different religious, ethnic or linguistic varieties’ (Banerjee, 2002). At one time, the Home Ministry described Naxalism as a ‘more formidable threat than [that posed by] Islamic fundamentalist groups’. The state describes the movement as a ‘menace’ and as ‘left-wing extremism’ . It engages in the domestic othering of the Naxalite area of influence (‘the Red Corridor’) as ‘unpatriotic’, ‘undemocratic’, a ‘diseased zone’ (Malreddy, 2014). For the state,

The perversion of Naxalism has to be traced to its very roots in the ideological concepts like class struggle and class violence and a demonology created by them. It is this demonology that then leads to terrorist acts . . . It is easy to understand that these concepts and the acts of violence that flow from these concepts have no sanction whatsoever . . . in Indian philosophy and culture . . . Naxalism is a crime against humanity. (GOI, 1998)

In a speech in 1998, India’s Home Minister who belongs to the Hindu right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), said that Naxalism ‘has blurred the distinctive nature of a war on the borders by making every street and every home a frontier of the nation¹. . . . In April 2006, addressing a day-long meeting of chief ministers of the provinces hit by Naxalism, the then Prime Minister Singh, of the Congress Party, said: ‘It would not be an exaggeration to say that the problem of Naxalism is the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country’; it is also ‘a threat to democracy and to our way of life’ (quoted in rediff.com, April 13 2006). Thus in the eyes of the state, the Naxalite struggle is ideological and is against the nation’s cultural tradition. According to both of the biggest parties of the ruling classes, Naxalism is a threat not to the oppressive practices of certain property owners but a threat to the nation as a whole, and one that exists everywhere within the national space. In other words, the Naxalite threat is scaled up: it is ‘nationalized’. This allows the state to exaggerate the level of threat it poses, so that consent can be produced to the national-scale mobilization of military forces against the movement.¹⁴

Extraordinary police powers and draconian laws have been used against Naxalites (South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre, 2002). The Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance (POTA) of 2001 was promulgated during the BJP rule. It has now been repealed under public pressure. When civil society activists toured six districts of Jharkhand State between 29 January and 3 February 2003, they found that most of those arrested under POTA were farmers, students or daily wage earners. A majority of them were booked because they had provided food to Naxalites or possessed Naxal literature. When asked how a Naxalite is identified, a senior police official told reporters: ‘Anyone caught with a copy of the Communist Manifesto or Mao’s Red Book becomes a suspicious character. We then watch him and often find clinching evidence’ . A police officer said to Arundhati Roy (2009) that if people in the forests have malaria tablets and Dettol bottles which come from outside, they must be Maoists, and his ‘boys’ kill them. State killing of Naxalites continues (see Figure 2). Between 1994 and the end of October in 2014, security personnel killed 29,904 Maoists/Naxalites, producing an annual average death rate of 1,424, or 4 deaths a day (one every 6 hours). ¹⁵

Figure 2.

Security personnel fatalities in India (1994–2014).

‘Encounters’ are usually faked by the police to cover up the torture and subsequent murder of Naxalite suspects and sympathizers. These are extra-judicial killings by the liberal democratic state. In many areas, hundreds of young men attend police stations every week. Sympathizers of Naxalites are picked up at midnights (Murali, 2003). The state has deployed civilian militias which have been involved in rape, torture and displacement of aboriginal people. Currently, Operation Green Hunt – a massive mobilization of 81,000 paramilitary forces – is underway. The army could be directly involved anytime. Militarized zones are produced in parts of India: ‘Today Jharkhand [a province in eastern India] is a fully militarized zone. There are over a hundred bases with a total of 50,000 official paramilitary troops involved in military action. There are Indian Army bases, too, but these are not involved in direct action yet’ (Dias, in Ismi, 2013).

State violence is reinforced by, and complements, the direct violence of the wealthy class. In many parts of the country, they hire private forces to attack anyone who challenges their super-exploitative practices (and upper caste hegemony). They also have easy access to police which is often bought with money and/or political connection. If industrial and mining businesses have private security forces, landlords have their own armies. In many places, they kill pregnant women because they would ‘give birth to Naxalites’ (Liberation, 2003), making bodies of women from subordinate classes a terrain of class struggle. The violent activities of landlords and business people are often not penalized by the state.

Why does the state repress the Naxalite Movement?

Why is there so much state repression in a society which claims to have, and which undoubtedly does have, some elements of a liberal democracy? One answer is that Naxalites use violent methods. This is to some extent true. Naxalites squarely place violence – armed agrarian struggle – on the agenda as a justifiable means to fight the Indian state with the objective of a radical transformation (Banerjee, 2002). They challenge the state’s monopoly of violence, and assert the right of its opponents to resort to the same against the propertied classes and the state.¹⁶ Some Naxalite groups (e.g. CPI (Maoist)) have continued their near absolute commitment to violence. But this is not true of other groups. For example, the CPI(M-L) (Liberation), says: ‘we do not subscribe to any theory of “excitative violence” and still less to “individual assassination”’. But ‘the rural poor cannot be denied their right to organise their own resistance forces to counter the attacks of landlord armies’ (Arvind Das, 1997).

The Naxalite violence is real. In many areas of the country, ‘The local administrators, especially the policemen are afraid to venture out of the main towns or their homes and offices’ (Ray, 2002). And, in other areas, local level officials pay Naxalites money out of the development funds (e.g. 30% or so) in exchange for peace (Srivastava, 1997; Shah, 2006). Numerous members of the legislature and regional and local politicians are provided with round the clock security in view of the Naxalite threat. Apart from rich traders and landlords, more than 225 political leaders, including those of parliamentary Marxist parties, were killed by a Naxalite outfit (PWG) only in Andhra Pradesh between 1993 and 2003 (Hindustan Times, 2003). As Figure 3 shows, security personnel have been regularly killed by Naxalites. Between 1994 and 2014 (end of October), Naxalites have caused 9424 security personnel deaths, producing an annual average of 452 (or more than one a day).¹⁷

That the Naxalites use violence, and therefore the state is violent towards them, is only a part of the story, however. There is another reason for state violence: Naxalites’ political development activities and political mobilization of people through these activities. In many areas, poor people (especially aboriginal people) are either led by Naxalites, or receive sympathy from them (see Harriss, 2011). Naxalites articulate grievances against what the state has done (e.g. expropriation of people’s land) and against what it has not done (e.g. its failure to satisfy people’s basic needs) (Harriss, 2011; also Vanaik, 2011). Naxalites do promote various development activities within their limited means: they construct an alternative landscape of development in socially and spatially marginal areas (Table 1). This landscape includes a variety of developmental activities which might put many NGOs to shame.

Table 1.

Naxalite development activities.

● Building/maintaining irrigation infrastructure	● Education
● Community kitchen	● Health-services
● Land distribution among the poor	● Crime-control; administration of justice
● Abolition of bonded labour	● Implementing minimum wage policy
● Stopping exploitation of tribal women	● Punishing corrupt officials
● Fighting for fishing-community’s right to fish	● Relief-measures
● Protection of peasant-tenants against eviction	● Making politicians declare their assets
● Protesting displacement of (tribal) people caused by capitalist development projects
● Making sure low caste labourers/peasants can vote without fear

Source: Various newspaper reports and other documents.

Where domestic or foreign big business is seeking to control natural resources (e.g. minerals; land), Naxalites mobilize the aboriginal peoples against the land grab and against the destruction of their environment (see Kujur, 2006; Roy, 2011).¹⁸ They provide protection to forest-dwellers against oppression by government officials who themselves behave as landlords (Balagopal, 2006: 2185-86; Roy, 2011). With their help, aboriginal people can enjoy access to state-controlled forests in some areas. Naxalites have taken up issues of fixing prices for forest produce collected and sold by aboriginal communities, including by mobilizing them to strike for a higher price. In many areas under their influence, the price of tendu leaves (used to make country cigarettes), for example, increased from Rs. 2–3 for 100 bundles (each bundle has 50 leaves) in the early 1980s to Rs. 80–100 by the mid-1990s.

In some places, the granaries of landlords are ransacked and records of peasants’ debts to moneylenders burnt. Naxalites occupy the ceiling surplus land (the land owned by landowners beyond the legal limit) and defend it by using force, if necessary, and distribute the land among the poor.¹⁹ Naxalites have also secured minimum wages fixed by the State government for labourers (Behera 2002; also Louis, 2005; Wilson, 1999: 340). They are involved in the protection of rights of agricultural tenants and have fought to abolish bonded labour. They run schools, health systems, and community kitchens (Navlakha, 2006: 2188; Chaudhuri, 2001). They force doctors to attend to patients and make truant teachers teach classes. Naxalites have worked against social oppression. The viciously patriarchal dowry system has become less of a problem in many Naxalite areas (Bhatia, 2006). In Andhra Pradesh, PWG campaigns against gambling and prostitution (Singh, 1995: 112). Kunnath (2006: 116) reports that from the mid-1970s, the Naxalite movement took up dalit grievances and organized struggles against caste and class oppression, and dalit communities formed the primary support base of the movement. Naxalites have managed to roll back powerful upper caste militias in some areas. The social basis of CPI(M-L) (Liberation) in Bihar has been centred on the dalits’ struggle for dignity (as well as for land and wages). They have organized separate anti-caste mass organizations and fought for socio-economic benefits, including reservation of jobs for lower castes in the private sector (Gudavarthy, 2005). Inter-religious and inter-caste marriages are being promoted. Parents and relatives who oppose such alliances are educated about the need to change their outlook (Bhelari, 2003). One Naxalite outfit (MCC) arranged at least 2,000 such marriages in Chatra (Jharkhand State). Many Naxalite groups participate in elections. As Arvind Das (1987) writes, the setting up of Voters’ Protection Committees by CPI(M-L) (Liberation) aims to ensure that the low caste, poor people can vote without fear. Naxalites also mobilize people to demand that politicians announce publicly their assets both before and after becoming members of legislature, a demand that has led to the police shooting down many Naxalites (Misra, 1994). Punishing corrupt state officials who eat up the government money meant for the poor is another part of the Naxalite development agenda. They have organized rallies against crimes, corruption and communalism.²⁰ Thus Naxalites have produced an alternative landscape of development at the local/regional level, however limited the developmental benefits for the poor may be. This landscape is an economic, political and ideological threat to the state, and therefore this fact is a major explanation of state violence. The alternative landscape of development hurts the economic interests of ruling classes (e.g. when employers are forced to pay minimum wages or to surrender land), whose interests the state is to protect.²¹ They also hurt the economic interests of the state directly when, for example, state-owned forests are taken over by poor people. Nearly 10.03 million hectares of forests in the country – which is about one seventh of the forest land – are said to be under Naxalite political military control. This has caused loss of revenue. Naxalite ‘disturbances’ happen in a large area which is rich in minerals which are worth billions of US dollars (bauxite deposits alone in Odisha are worth $4 trillion, and this is more than three times India’s entire annual gross domestic product). Any restriction imposed by the Naxalites on the use of this area, in the form of stopping the entry of mining companies or ‘taxing them’,²² hurts the economic interests of big business and of politicians/officials associated with it. Interestingly, on 18 June 2009, the Indian Prime Minister told the parliament: ‘If left-wing extremism continues to flourish in parts which have natural resources of minerals, the climate for investment would certainly be affected’ (quoted in Roy, 2009). Economic interests of rural property owners are also hurt: this occurs when the ceiling-surplus land of landlords is taken away for redistribution among the poor, when individual oppressive landlords who lease out land to poor peasantry for high rent and/or employ rural labourers at low wages are disciplined and are forced to give concessions. In all these ways, Naxalite developmental activities are an economic threat to the state and ruling classes, which is why the state responds to them in a violent way. When ruling classes fight to defend their interests (e.g. mining rights; payment of low rural wages and high rents, etc.), or when the state fights in defence of ruling class interests, Naxalites fight back, which invites (further) state violence.²³

Naxalites’ alternative development landscape is not just an economic threat; it is also a political threat. This is in two ways. One is the fact that the alternative development landscape can cause – and has caused, to some extent – a potential transformation of the poor from being passive citizen subjects to active class subjects or from being merely local political actors to political actors at the provincial and national levels.²⁴ This happens when the movement makes demands that are legitimate/legal but ‘difficult’ to implement (e.g. land redistribution; payment of minimum wages) because of the class constraints on the state. Such a political transformation can happen and does happen when, for example, the movement actually constructs an alternative development landscape by mobilizing people’s labour to construct irrigation reservoir or to force local traders to pay more for the forest produce and when it uses political power to defend that alternative landscape. While the Naxalite developmental activities can potentially organize the poor, the state’s agenda, however, is different: it is depoliticization (or fragmentation) of the exploited classes (as Poulantzas, 1968 argued decades ago) by converting citizens to passive clients of its limited benefits/services; or it is very limited ‘politicization’ in which people join voter queues every few years, as atomized individual citizens (groups of citizens), not as class subjects. Any greater politicization which challenges the proprietary classes and politicians/officials about their undemocratic actions is not and cannot be on the state’s agenda, given the state’s own class character.²⁵ To the extent that Naxalite developmental activities can cause a high level of politicization of the masses, they attract state violence.

There is another threat from Naxalite development activities, which is closely related to the threat from the politicization issue. The idea that the capitalist state is formally separated from the proprietary classes (Wood, 1995) does not hold in many areas. India may be a liberal democracy in Delhi and on the pages of the constitution, with its characteristic separation of political and economic power. At the local level, things are different: businesses and landowners directly use political power and means of violence in order to enforce exploitation, making a mockery of the bourgeois separation of the economic from the extra-economic. Here the authority of the state is that of, for example, the landlords, mining businesses and other businesses which deal in forest produce. Their class interests are locally fixed and cannot be moved. The state machinery often comprises of a non-official apparatus of moneybags and landed interests and their private armies. In this case ‘the local state’ sides with the rich upper caste landlords in their dispute with the lower caste (or aboriginal) landless poor (Roy, 2002) and with other sections of the propertied class. The Naxalites undermine the political power that the ruling classes utilize to enforce economic exploitation. For example, in many districts in Bihar where Naxalites are active, ‘The price of labour [power] in the “flaming fields” is determined by the balance of forces between the armies of [landlords of] the upper castes (usually with police support) and the armies of the labouring poor’ (Corbridge and Harriss, 2000: 206. The parentheses are in original). Naxalites side with the labouring poor in their political struggle. What all this means is this: any struggle against moneybags for economic benefits (e.g. lower rents; higher wages; higher prices of commodities produced/sold by poor people) tends to become an extra-economic or political (and often military) struggle against the state which, however, claims monopoly over extra-economic coercion, and any struggle against the state for some economic gains hurts the interests of landlords.²⁶

The Naxalite alternative development landscape – the fact that the movement has tried to help the poor – has posed an ideological threat to the state as well, and not just a political-economic and military threat. As mentioned, Naxalites make difficult demands on the state. Most of their demands – including the demand that aboriginal communities’ land should not be alienated without the consent of the people – are legal from the standpoint of the bourgeois laws. They are bourgeois democratic demands, the demands which, if met, would make the system a little more tolerable for some time. Through the national constitution and through its laws at national and provincial levels, the state has promised various measures for the poor (e.g. education, land redistribution, freeing bonded labour, and minimum wages) which, more or less, remain on paper. The implementation of these measures by the state will hurt the ruling class interests in one way or the other. But Naxalites demand that the state implement these. And when the state fails, they implement the legal measures, if and when necessary, through the use of force. By forcing the state to implement its own measures and sometimes implementing these measures themselves, where necessary by force (e.g. claiming land held by landlords beyond the legal limit and giving it to poor people), Naxalites show in practice that the state, the so-called trustee of development (Cowen and Shenton, 1996), is no longer able to derive legitimacy and pacify poor people merely by the fact that it can write/utter a pro-poor development policy. Written or spoken words do not satisfy the need for food, for that need is not just an idea. Naxalite development activities – and those organized by other progressive groups – indicate to some people that there is an agency which is somewhat anti-state but which can do things that the state is supposed but fails to do. The movement is forcing the state to see that the poor will not always and everywhere accept the gap between ‘development proper’ that the post-colonial state has been promising and ‘development on paper’, and that the poor will use arms to wrest and to defend the limited gains that they have achieved through struggle. By providing palpable benefits, albeit limited, to the poor, the movement gets consent from them, including to their violent means. And the state loses poor people’s consent.²⁷ The state’s loss is the Naxalites’ gain. The Naxalite movement gaining the consent of the people cannot be tolerated by the state, however. If the state loses the consent of people, then its claim of monopoly over violence, its dominant form of survival, is undermined.

In Naxalite areas of influence, people do believe that Naxalites are doing something for them, something that the state has not been able to do. For example, the dalits of Dumari village in Bihar, where Kunnath (2006) conducted his fieldwork, did not object to the militant character of the Maoist campaign against the landlords and the local state, and indeed they ‘wanted the Maoist armed squads to remain in the area as they feared that the landlords would re-establish their domination if the Maoist arms were withdrawn’ (205). Once a landless labourer bonded to a middle-caste landlord family in Dumari, Rajubhai (Kunnath’s respondent) grazed his master’s cattle in exchange for 25 rupees (less than half a US dollar) per month and food. Daily ‘humiliation, overwork and abusive words’ were the staples on which he was compelled to subsist, yet he felt that ‘silence was the best option’ (112). However, once the Maoists arrived, Rajubhai attended their secret meetings in the paddy fields, led the dalits against a particularly oppressive landlord, and eventually became the commander of a Maoist armed squad (113). The Maoist squad fought pitched battles with the landlords’ army and were able to beat the landlords into submission (113–115). Interestingly, district-level econometric research shows that Naxalite activity has a dampening effect on the level of violence (violent crime and crimes against women), and that poverty attracts Naxalism (Borooah, 2008).

Because of Naxalite material interventions, they are able to mingle among masses and get their support, thus multiplying the effect of their revolutionary violence against injustice and state violence, which is why they are a threat to the state. Sundar, a sociology professor at Delhi University who does not support Naxal violence, says that the movement does show ‘more commitment to people’s development than the government’ (2006: 3190). Prakash Singh, who worked in Naxalite areas as a senior police officer, wrote: ‘shorn of polemics, it [Naxalite movement] represents the struggle of the . . . social and economic survival [of the poor]’. In addition, an expert group appointed by the Planning Commission of India said that in terms of day-to-day activities, the movement ‘is to be looked upon as basically a fight for social justice, equality, protection, security and local development’ (see also Gupta, 2003; Banerjee, 2008). That there is a threat of an alternative development landscape by Naxalites – the idea that a war is going on over consent/legitimacy – is inadvertently corroborated by none other than the police chief in charge of he region that is under the influence of a militarized section of the Naxalite movemen: ‘I can fight the Naxals but not Naxalism. That has to be done only through development’ (quoted in Chakrabarti, 2009: 376; italics added).²⁸

The fact that an alternative development landscape posing a multi-pronged threat to the state is an important reason for state violence is performatively proved by the state itself. Not only does the state burn villages and kill/harm Naxalites and their (academic) sympathizers. It also destroys the landscape of development constructed by them. Mohanty, a retired Professor of Political Science in Delhi University, reported that:

police and paramilitary forces destroyed a big irrigation bund [an embankment] near Mahboob Nagar [in Andhra Pradesh] . . . built by voluntary labour since the inspiration came from the Naxalites. Police also destroyed five bus stops in Karim Nagar and Warangal district since they were built by sympathisers of the Naxalite movement. (Gatadae)

Such an act of destruction allows the state to continue to frame the movement (and other similar movements for justice) merely as a violent movement. But it is also strongly suggestive of the ideological (not – or not just – military) threat that Naxalites pose to the capitalist state.

Conclusion

Let us briefly see the Naxalite movement through the lens of the social movement literature which uses the language of cultural frames, mobilizing structures and political opportunity structure (McAdam, McCarthy and Zald, 1996). Clearly, ideological framing or representation of the Naxalite movement as terrorist, as a menace, as a security threat, as ultra-left extremism, along with the state’s own democratic shell, give some legitimacy to the state to repress. And this is not just specific to India (see Pion-Berlin, 1989 on Latin America). Part of the state’s ideological framing is the coercive agencies’ ethos that Gurr (1986) had identified. In the Naxalite case, this is the fact that they are a communist movement and that a communist movement is automatically seen as a threat to the security of the capitalist state (Subramanian, 2004). This ethos, supported by many middle class people, helps state repression. Further, the state has access to its own expanding mobilizing structures – network of police and paramilitary agencies, police informers, anti-Naxalite civilian militias that the state supports – complementing the private coercive means available to propertied classes. Most importantly, the political-economic-ideological threat from Naxalites offers the political opportunity for repression.

There is no doubt that Naxalites use violent methods. One should also remind oneself that: landlords and some business houses use daily violence against ordinary people; Hindu mobs burn Christians’ houses, destroy mosques and massacre Muslims with the covert/overt support of politicians, and Islamic terrorists kill innocent Hindus; higher castes also kill lower castes (see Nandy, 2003: 124–125). Yet, Naxalite violence is seen as the greatest threat to the state and to the class order which the state must protect. This is because their violence is against sections of the property-owning class (e.g. landlords, traders, mining companies), the excesses of the capitalist class-system, and state personnel and laws that support the property owners. If ‘repressive forces are themselves the most consistent initiators and performers of collective violence’ (Della Porta, 2014), then the idea that the state represses Naxalites just because they are violent is inadequate, if not untrue. State violence is rooted in its own class content and the class content of the rebels, not primarily from their mode of rebelling, which reflects that class content.

Once again, the physical threat from Naxalites is not the only reason for state violence. Holloway advocates the ‘emphasis . . . on saying “No”, refusing, puncturing capitalist command and (within that) constructing alternative ways of doing things’, ‘the immediate creation of an alternative society’, the creation of ‘autonomous spaces’, and thus saying ‘yes’ as well (Holloway, 2005: 271–272; 269; stress added). The Naxalite movement says both no and yes. They say no to some aspects of dominant power relations. They say yes to constructing alternative modes of living within capitalism.²⁹ It conforms to the post-Marxist (e.g. Gibson-Graham, 2006) idea of production of post-capitalist spaces within capitalism. Arguably, the movement is a part of a worldwide tendency of lower classes in the capitalist periphery struggling for land, culture, democracy and employment (Hristov, 2005; Chatterton, 2005). They are not just an agency of resistance (backed by force where necessary); they also play a positive, albeit limited, developmental role. In a sense the Maoists are mimicking state practices of governmentality (Sundar, 2014b), or rather what I will call ‘state developmentality’. The latter can be seen as developmental governmentality, which signifies the deployment of developmental activities to discipline people and shape their consciousness that in turn legitimize the capitalist state. Naxalites promote an alternative developmentality which produces consent of common people to Naxalites and thus potentially enhances their politicization, posing a serious threat to the state. State violence is partly directed at destroying this consent.

The state, which generally functions as one arm of the structure of private property relations, intervenes on behalf of the propertied classes, if ordinary citizens fight against: (a) this structure; (b) the mechanisms through which this structure works (e.g. competitive drive for profits; dispossessing people of their land); and (c) the concrete effects of these mechanisms (e.g. extreme poverty; ecological destruction), and if they fight against powerful agents of the state (e.g. parties; officers, police) who support these relations/mechanisms. The state, which is to a large extent an armed body of people, separate from workers and peasants, is basically an institution of class violence, functioning on behalf of the ruling classes and against ordinary people.³⁰ Whether ordinary people are engaged in peaceful mobilization or not is generally beside the point. And when the inequality level rises, the mask of democracy is increasingly difficult to wear. There are 150,000 US dollar millionaires and 70 US dollar billionaires in India and 83% of India’s directly elected members of the national parliament own assets worth at least $200,000, whereas 800 million Indians live on a daily budget of 50 cents. In this country a farmer kills himself every half an hour because he cannot pay the bills, a child under five dies every 15 seconds because of lack of food and health care, and the economic elite regularly kills/harms people for exercising their democratic rights, including fighting against low wages and dispossession of the only thing they have (a small piece of land). In such a country, state violence against ordinary people and those who mobilize them is an intervention on behalf of the ruling classes and their political spokespersons, whether or not the mobilization of ordinary people is violent.

The state impersonates guerilla tactics of a section of the Naxalite movement to fight it (Sundar, 2014b). By doing so, it is turning the ‘homo sufferer’ (working masses) into Agamben’s ‘homo sacer’: those people who one could kill without being guilty of committing murder. In India’s so-called red corridor,³¹ there is an important contradiction: the red corridor’s monetary value is multiple times the nation’s annual income, and yet it contains the world’s most impoverished people (especially among low castes and aboriginal communities). The state is trying to ‘resolve’ this kind of exceptionally intense contradiction, and the contradiction between a small elite and the majority of the population, by creating a (quasi-) ‘state of exception’, ‘a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reasons cannot be integrated into the political system’ (Agamben, 2005: 2). The state is able to do this by producing an epistemological exaggeration: a political-geographic overestimation of the threat to the state, a knowledge claim, a ruling class ideology, which would justify the increased level of violence by the state. By saying that the Naxalite threat can be anywhere anytime, the state of exception can potentially be produced anytime anywhere within the nation. The border moves inside, so the military can be engaged.

There are three forms of violence (Zizek, 2008). Symbolic violence is ‘embodied in language’ which is imposed through ‘a certain universe of meaning’ (1–2). The state labelling the Naxalite movement as a menace, as criminal, as unpatriotic, etc. is symbolic violence, as is its tendency to see any social justice movement as Naxalite and therefore violent. Someone who is seen as an enemy of the state is equated to an enemy of the people in order to justify penal interventions. This seeing does not see that the state belongs not to the people but to a tiny minority of the population: propertied classes. The state must create its enemy, its other, to justify its own existence and to deflect attention from the state’s real enemy (nation of workers and peasants, the majority of the population), whose interests are antagonistic to the ruling classes which the state must protect. The state cannot overtly declare the majority of the nation as its enemy, but its actions treat the majority as the enemy, or as if it is the enemy: anyone who resists the class rule and its effects is labelled a Naxalite and can be harmed, whether or not they have anything to do with Naxalism. So the state has de facto launched a war against the enemy within, against the majority of the people, via its war against the localized Naxalites. Just as the state is generally a false protector of common people’s interests, the enemy it constructs is also generally false, or not as true as portrayed.

Symbolic violence can create a condition for what Zizek calls ‘subjective violence’, which is the violence performed by ‘a clearly identifiable agent’ (Zizek, 2008: 1, 10). This agent can be the agent of the ruling classes (their security agents or hired hoodlums) or of the state apparatus. The state’s subjective violence is reinforced by, and complements, the subjective violence of the ruling class, to which the Naxalite movement responds with its own subjective violence.

Systemic violence refers to the ‘catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems’ (Zizek, 2008: 2). This is the violence that prompts the other two forms of violence. Class rule is behind systemic violence and the state supports the class rule. The state is launching a violent war on people because they are fighting against systemic violence (i.e. they are fighting against a war on their livelihood and their democratic right to protest injustice). State violence against Naxalites is an instance of a general violence, a violence that is necessary to thwart all forms of actual/potential opposition to systemic violence (i.e. to class rule).

The government claims that its troops are there to counter the Maoists, but in actuality it is the democratic movements such as people resisting land grabs or fighting police repression that are intimidated into silence. By creating this drastic panic among the people, the corporations are free to suck out the minerals and forest resources. (Dias in Ismi, 2013)³²

This paper has been critical of state violence, the scope of which has been expanding. There is another aspect of the reality which cannot be denied. This is that the Naxalite theory and strategy are self-limiting (Das, 2010, 2015). The Naxalite movement is not fundamentally anti-capitalist. Naxalites do not say ‘no’ to capitalism as such, for according to them India lacks the dominance of capitalist production relations. India, for them, is still a semi-feudal (and semi-colonial) country.³³ A democratic capitalism, i.e. a capitalism which is free from neo-colonialism and feudalism and which uses free labour always and everywhere, is yet to exist. Such a capitalism must first be made to exist under the tutelage of Maoists. Many ‘conscious capitalists’, capitalists with a conscience, and their ideologues (e.g. Amartya Sen; Vandana Shiva) would like to address the problems which Naxalites talk about and fight against: social and geographical inequality, corruption, poverty, landlessness, illiteracy, social discrimination, and fraudulent business practices.³⁴ Besides, a part of their protest against mining capitalists taking away people’s land is the idea that they can control capitalist businesses in a more people-friendly way. Even Arundhati Roy, an enthusiastic supporter of Naxalites, who believes in going beyond communism and capitalism, thinks that Naxalite industrialization policy is ‘woolly’ (2011: 210).

Another reason why the Naxalite social movement is self-limiting is the stress on violent methods on the part of certain sections of the movement. The stress on violence does dilute the emphasis on democratic, class-based, political-ideological education and organization of the masses, opportunities for which do exist. As Lenin (1978: 11) said: ‘without the working people all bombs are powerless, patently powerless’. Political power of the masses to challenge the whole capitalist system does not come from the Maoist ‘barrel of the gun’. Nor does it come from ‘semi-spontaneous consciousness’ (of peasants, etc.) (see Guha, 1983). The latter is, more or less, a reaction to desperate conditions needing some urgent change. But revolutionary consciousness is a different matter: it reflects the imperative of destroying the relics of capital’s history (e.g. feudal landlordism) and of transcending the capitalist system along with the undemocratic and imperialist ways in which that system operates. Such a consciousness, including among sections of the peasantry, has to be actively worked for. Such a process must not at all denigrate consciousness (of peasants and others) in its ‘embryonic form’ (Lenin, 1977b: 113), including the consciousness which is the raw material of, and which is expressed in the form of, the Naxalite movement.

And the Naxalites’ practice is mistakenly based on the assumption that the rural oppressed classes (peasants) can lead a revolution, forgetting that the peasantry are stratified into different classes including a class which exploits poor peasants/labourers, and that the peasantry are geographically dispersed in thousands of villages. They do have the ability to fight against exploitation and oppression by landlords, moneylenders and state officials, but they cannot lead a revolution against the system of private property relations as such. Peasants’ class instinct is generally proprietary; it is not coherent and collectivist as the class instinct of the urban proletariat potentially is. This fact is demonstrated by cadres of the Naxalite movement. Kunnath’s Maoist respondent, Rajubhai, very much wanted a piece of private property, as did the hero of the celebrated Indian novel, Godaan [The Gift of a Cow]. Any future success of the movement will be limited by its denial of the dominance of, and therefore the need to remove, capitalist class relations as such. Its success will also be limited by its actual neglect of the role of the wage earners in factories and offices as the pre-eminent anti-capitalist force, whose interest lies in their political independence vis-à-vis all sections of the business class (compradore or not). In class terms, the Naxalite movement is not as threatening, as the state and some intellectuals think it is.³⁵ However, by producing the image that it is the single biggest security threat and by labelling any movement for justice as Naxalite, the state is using its fight against movements such as Naxalism, which are much less radical than they appear to be, as an excuse to eliminate any opposition to class rule, including the possibility of the Naxalites’ fight for democratic capitalism from becoming a fight against capitalism as such.

To conclude: the liberals’ argument that democracy pacifies the state collapses when one considers how repressive the liberal democratic state is towards a movement such as the Naxalite movement, even if this movement is not seeking to go beyond capitalism. This is symptomatic of a wider tendency in the contemporary world: states are turning to authoritarian methods to suppress dissent. This is because they are increasingly unable to buy legitimacy by producing policies for the benefit of the majority, and they are unable to do so because of a fundamental contradiction between big business profit interests and working masses’ need for food, shelter, culture and sustainable environment. The pacifying effect of democracy that some social movement theorists stress will work if the ordinary people remain pacified and do not exercise their (class) agency in the face of exploitation and oppression and wait indefinitely for some benefits from above (e.g. the state, NGOs, etc.). But, if ordinary people have to remain pacified, what value does democracy indeed have?

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Raju J Das is an associate professor at York University, Toronto, Canada. His research interests include political economy, development studies, geographically uneven development, rural labor, state theory, class theory, and radical social movements. He is on the editorial board and on the manuscript collective of Science & Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis (Guildford, New York). In 2014, he published a book entitled A Contribution to the Critique of Contemporary Capitalism: Theoretical and International Perspectives. His new book Marxist Theory of Class for a Skeptical World will be published by Brill, Leiden.

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