There is a popular saying in Southasia: 'Your closest kin is your worst enemy.' The fratricidal war between the Kauravas and the Pandavas in the Mahabharata bears testimony to this. Yet in the modern era the tradition continues, the best example of which is the unelevating fight – both political and physical – between the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India (Maoist). Both were born of the same parent, the Indian communist movement. While the CPI (M) was delivered in 1964, CPI (Maoist) followed soon after, baptised first as the CPI (Marxist-Leninist) in 1969, and adopting its present name in 2004.
This new book, a polemical assault by the CPI (M) on the CPI (Maoist), is an outcome of the raging battle between the two distanced siblings. The subtitle gives the impression that it represents various views from a wide spectrum of the Indian left movement and ideological positions; but in fact, it simply offers four essays reflecting the official views of the CPI (M). There are other components of the Indian left, of course – the Communist Party of India, the Forward Bloc and the Revolutionary Socialist Party of India, to name a few – which hold completely different, and sometimes far more sympathetic, views about the Maoists. There have been no attempts to accommodate such views in this collection, with Prasenjit Bose, who describes himself as the convenor of the Research Unit of the CPI (M), making it clear that the 'rights to this work rest with' his party alone. Under the circumstances, it would have been more honest to subtitle the book, 'A critique from the CPI (M)'.
In his introduction, Bose describes the current Indian variant of Maoism as a manifestation of the old dangerous and deviationist tendency of 'left sectarianism'. This had always plagued the international communist movement, and was something against which Vladimir Lenin sounded a specific warning. When he comes to the present period, Bose describes the modus operandi of the CPI (Maoist) cadres. Their special targets, he writes, are the activists and supporters of the CPI (M), 'mostly belonging to the toiling classes and socially deprived sections … especially in the CPI (M) stronghold of West Bengal.' Bose's criticism of the Maoist propensity towards senseless destruction of 'railway tracks, roads, power stations, telecom facilities, and even schools and health centres' is certainly valid. This reviewer also sympathises with his bitter complaint, 'No political party anywhere in India has lost as many activists and supporters to Maoist terror as has the CPI (M) in West Bengal since 2008.'
What is missing in this account, however, is the other side of the picture. Attempting to trace the tradition of present-day Maoist violence to the legacy of anarchist acts of the past, Bose approvingly quotes Lenin, who described such acts as a manifestation of 'petty bourgeois [tendency] driven to frenzy by the horrors of capitalism'. He also quotes Lenin's warning, 'Anarchism was not infrequently a kind of penalty for the opportunist sins of the working class movement. The two monstrosities complemented each other.' It is this other monstrosity – the 'opportunist sins' – that Bose ignores, to his argument's detriment. He never questions the role of his party's armed cadres in Singur, Nandigram and other parts of West Bengal in 2008-09, where they went on a rampage, killing members of the same 'toiling classes and socially deprived sections' who opposed the acquisition of their land by the CPI (M)-led Left Front government for the setting up of industrial projects by corporate interests. These incidents, which were well-documented by the media, expose the character of the ruling CPI (M) in West Bengal, which is no less intolerant and extremist than the CPI (Maoist).