Tuesday, May 02, 2017

Three on Naxalbari type struggles

Rahul Banerjee on April 30, 2017 Fifty Years of Spring Thunder:
"So fifty years after the first revolt in remote Naxalbari in West Bengal, which was then hailed as the "Spring Thunder" by the Communist Party of China, the Maoists are still at it playing out a politically obsolete side drama which has now been limited to the remote jungles of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, sustained by extortion from the industrial interests that operate there to mine natural resources like iron and coal. Historically it has had a role in highlighting the oppressive nature of the Indian state but has not had much impact in reducing oppression. Not that any other movement has had much impact in mitigating the oppressive nature of the Indian state but that just underlines the difficulty of fighting the huge power of modern capitalism which has now entered a resurgent neo-liberal phase on the strength of global outsourcing of economic activities and contractualisation of labour both physical and intellectual and near complete control of the minds of the masses through the media and academia."
Puja Modal, date unknown http://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/sociology/naxalbari-peasant-struggle-contemporary-and-observation/31980/. From a long conclusion, a couple of points
"(1) The struggles of the peasants, it should be amply clear, are not the struggles of the deprived and relentlessly exploited landless labour­ers or untouchables which simmer ominously beneath the apparent stillness of the countryside. Not, again, it is the localised caste-based rural resurgence.
(2) The peasant struggles as we find in the contemporary India in different states are rooted in the process of modernisation. Their lead­ership is provided by the kulak peasants, rich farmers and the boggy of ex-jagirdars and jamindars. The struggles are mobilised to fulfil the vested interest of the better off segments of the country."

Ajoy K.Mehra in a long paper 2008 India's experiment with revolution:
"The most crucial and significant contribution of the Naxalism to Indian politics, however, is that they have kept alive the agrarian demands of the rural poor through persistent but not-always successful struggles at the ground level. "
 A previous discussion from 2010 in this blog with some links to K.Balagopal Agrarian struggles in India 

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