Naxalites of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), Maoists in short, abducted the district collector (head of the administration) of Malkangiri, Orissa, Ravella Vineel Krishna, on February 16, 2011. This is the first spectacular strike by the Maoists in the current year. The choice of Krishna is intriguing. He is popular among the locals, particularly the tribals and his abduction along with a junior engineer saw spontaneous demonstrations and mass rallies across the district.

Abduction is an old tactic of the Maoists to arm-twist the State and get its demands conceded. Over the years, they have either abducted or waylaid, and later killed, several security personnel and public representatives. The highest raking person who became a victim of the Maoists’ mindless brutality was D Sripada Rao, Speaker of the Andhra Pradesh State Legislative Assembly.

Ideology of the Maoists, except for a handful of seniors and top-ranking leaders, has degenerated into crass, organised violence and chilling massacres of security personnel in order to hit at their morale. Through extortions, Naxalites collect upto Rs 2,000 crore annually in their areas of influence.

Barely, two per cent of the estimated 15,000 Maoist cadres are ideologically motivated, a senior IPS officer involved in Anti-Maoist operations in Andhra Pradesh told me in Hyderabad last month (January). A survey showed that hardly two percent of the cadres were pump primed by ideological moorings. Cadres signing up are those with personal scores to settle (five percent), difficult personal life (20 percent), and lured by the prospects of making quick money and power (10 percent). Just the thrill of wielding a weapon – even if it is a country-made gun and not the dreadful AK rifle, or SLR has brought in five percent of the cadres.

In its earlier avatar as the People’s War Group (PWG), the outfit conducted its last (ninth) Congress in March 2001, in the infamous Abuj Maad forests, in the Bastar region of the Central Indian State of Chhattisgarh. The composition of the delegates at the conclave was the first real give away to the changed character of Indian Maoists.

Just 13 per cent of the delegates were either poor peasants or working class persons, while 50 percent had an urban bourgeois background. Women constituted 10 percent of the delegates. The Political and Organisational Review (POR) adopted at the Congress admitted in so many words that the Maoists have not been able to train women to assume leadership roles.

What was left unsaid in the review was a harsh reality that women cadres have been quitting the extremist group in large numbers because of physical humiliation and sexual exploitation. There are also instances when women cadres had quit for exposing the higher leadership.

Women Maoist cadres are the first to succumb in direct clashes during exchange of fire, according to a Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIG), who is engaged in anti-Naxal operations. It is not uncommon to find couples among Maoist ranks. Good looking women cadres are married-off to senior Maoist leaders. So much for what is claimed to be an ideologically motivated movement!

In the Malkangiri District Collector’s abduction, the Maoist demands are striking! They have demanded the release from jail of nine colleagues. Of them three are women, whose husbands are very high ranking leaders. They are Padma (wife of Akkiraju Haragopal alias Rama Krishna, former AP State Committee Secretary and presently Politburo member), Sheela (wife of Prasanth Bose alias Kishanda, the No 2 in the Maoist outfit, and General Secretary of the erstwhile Maoist Communist Centre of India, MCCI), and Easwari (wife of Modem Balakrishna alias Bhaskar, the boss of the Andhra-Orissa Border Special Zone Committee, in whose jurisdiction Malkangiri lies.

The above illustration pops up the question- whether the Maoists care for their foot soldiers! There is a visible disconnect between the leaders and cadres. The cadres join the underground for various reasons, as pointed out at the outset. On the other hand, the leadership is wedded to the aim of seizing/capturing political/state power through the barrel of the gun. Every action of the Maoists is by design meant to further their goal.

In an internal document, ‘Strategy and Tactics’, the CPI (Maoist) unequivocally state that all their actions and programmes should be, and are, intended towards achieving the goal of capturing political power. So, it is hard to believe that the Maoist Movement is a movement meant for the socio-economic amelioration of the downtrodden sections of the society and the vast multitudes of rural and tribal population.

In fact, in the aftermath of the Naxalbari uprising, Charu Mazumdar said: “Militant struggles must be carried on, not for land, crops, etc., but for the seizure of State power”.

In October 2004, on the occasion of the founding of the CPI-Maoist, its two top leaders made a similar assertion: “The immediate aim and programme of the Maoist party is to carry on and complete the already ongoing and advancing New Democratic Revolution. This revolution will be carried out and completed through protracted people’s war with the armed seizure of power remaining as its central and principal task.”

Put differently, to quote a senior retired IPS officer, who wrote on Naxalite movement extensively, the real aim of the Naxalites is neither the domain of economics nor state welfare. ‘It is a political movement with its goal as the seizure of political power i.e. state power. Agrarian uprisings with the help of landless peasants and poor tribal people using guerrilla warfare tactics have their ultimate aim in capturing state power and then establishing a totalitarian regime’.

The Maoist killing machine will do anything to further its objectives; fairness and humane touch are a  red herring to them. It is therefore essential to see the Naxalites through plain glasses, free from ideological blinkers. Intellectuals and civil rights activists should factor in the Maoists ‘plain speak’ lest the long forgotten Leninsque sobriquet of their class will get a fresh currency.

-P V Ramana,
Research Fellow, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi