India, Fannon and Naxalbari
Whenever the conversation goes towards Maoism and the Indian Maoist movement, either one of the three or all of the three arguments together crop up as an qttack against the on-going New Democratic Revolution:
a) Maoists are terrorists.
b) Violence is an unacceptable tool to attain political aims, even if they are legitimate, and
c) We have already attained Independence. Why is there any need to fight against the government of a country that is for all intents and purposes, independent?
I’m here to tell you that not only are these arguments fallacious but that they are alao quite eaaily debunkable. And to help us, we will take the help of the writings of Frantz Fannon, specifically Wretched of the Earth.
A little context to frame such an essay: a few weeks ago, Red Menace, a programme of Revolutionary Left Radio, aired an episode on Fannon and Wretched of the Earth. Being a Maoist who has read Mao on an extensive basis and having read the works of many Maoist comrades after Mao, I noticed that in Fannon’s writings there’s a touch of Mao to be seen; this was also pointed out by the comrades running the show on the episode who repeatedly stated how there is an overwhelming influence of Mao on Fannon. As I am an Indian and I support the revolutionary project in my country, I thought that it’s plausible that I should tackle these “arguments” (read, spineless cop-outs) from the perspective of Fannon’s writings. I shall, first of all, deal with the aspect of terrorism from a revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist viewpoint by briefly citing what Fannon had to say on the matter.
Where does on draw the line between terrorism and revolutionary violence that is an inevitable part of any revolutionary or national liberation project? Does revolutionary acts become terrorism when it targets so-called “innocent” people? And are these “innocent” people really that innocent where their annihilation invites allegations of terrorism?
In contemporary discourses on international relations, geopolitics and political science, the word “terrorism” often gets thrown around a lot. This thing isn’t entirely new, as at least as old as the French Revolution, the Jacobin regime under Maxmillien Robeispierre was (and continues to be) dubbed as the “Reign of Terror”.
In all of this mudslinging, a very common definition of terrorism is brought up. The Oxford English Dictionary defines terrorism as:
the unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.
However, there does not seem to be a consensual definition of terrorism, even on ad-hoc basis. As with any term that is used to describe the actions of different people living in different conditions and different times, what is objectively an act of terror becomes increasingly difficult to define. Allegations of terrorism are always tied to a notion of political and moral legitimization, so if an individual or group is somehow able to secure political and/or moral legitimacy, regardless of the violence that they commit their actions wouldn’t be called an act of terror.
And as a rule, revolutions or national liberation struggles are always “the unofficial and unathorized use of violence” - at least for the ruling classes, anyway.
Time and again, there have been individuals who like to state that revolutions or national liberation struggles need not be violent. They point out to how Clement Atlee changed the lives of working-class British people in a “revolutionary” way or how Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi acieved “national liberation” for India by non-violent means. While Atlee and Gandhi are two entirely different cans of worms and their hypocrisy is beyond the scope of this essay, suffice it to say that Fannon dispels the myth of a non-violent revolution or decolonization struggle by explicitly stating that revolutions and decolonization struggles are inherently violent. Fannon elaborates that the process of colonization leaves a deep, psychological scar on the colonized population through their reduction to mere dehumanized objects, itself achieved through violent and savage means. The only way through which a colonized population can reclaim their alienated humanity is by dismantling the system of exploitation and oppression that degrades and humiliates them - a process that is only possible through violent means. Therefore, more than anybody else, Fannon makes a clear distinction in the kinds of perpertrated violence, based on the overall and long-term purpose: reactionary violence and revolutionary violence.
Revolution and violence go hand in hand. Chairman Mao said:
A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.
Therefore, even though revolutionary acts and decolonization struggles are inherently violent and that though they are often (at least, from the point of view of the class enemy) “unofficial and unauthorized”, they cannot be termed as terrorist acts. Doing so causes an infinite regress, as adhering to such a framework of terrorism leads to an infinite regress; to the extent that even acts committed within the context of the American and French Revolutions could be termed as acts of terrorism, especially in the case of the latter where violent acts preceded Robespierre’s Reign of Terror. However, since these revolutions are - to borrow the term from J. Moufawad-Paul - world-historic revolutions, retroarctively applying the paradigm of the use of violence as an act of terrorism merely because they were “unofficial and unauthorized” becomes problematic at best and untenable, at worst.
If the inherently violent nature of a seemibgly unsanctioned act of revolution or national liberation cannot be deemed as an act of terrorism, then surely enough, the violence meted out to individuals who are apparently innocent of a direct oppressive or exploitative act can be considered as an act of terrorism?
I shall cite an incident from the Indian anti-imperialist struggle to contextualize the answer to this question.
The Indian Statutory Commission, commonly known as the Simon Commission (after its chairman, Sir John Simon) was a commission composed of 7 MPs from the British Parliament, who were directed to review and recommend changes to the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms (incoroprated into the Government of India Act, 1919). Since in this seven-member commission there was no Indian member, the nationalist intellectuals and political activists vehemently oppossed the Commission and its presence in British India. In Lahore (which was then in British India and now in Pakistan), Lala Lajpat Rai led a protest against the Simon Commission and on the orders of James A. Scott, the Superintendent of Police of Lahore ordered a lathi-charge and deliberately inflicted grievious injuries on Lala Lajpat Rai. Due to old age and the psychological trauma of such an act of savage violence, he passed away merely a month after the protest. It was here that Comrade Bhagat Singh and the members of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association decided to avenge the veteran politician’s death. However, in a case of mistaken identity, they shot and killed one John Saunders, an Assistant Superintendent of Police.
Let’s move some four decades ahead, towards the end of the 1950s and the start of the 1960s; Algeria was fighting its war of national liberation against the French colonial rule. The National Liberation Front of Alegeria (Front de libération nationale, FLN) was carrying out armed struggle against the French military presence, often targeting French soldiers who were unarmed, off-duty or otherwise not directly involved with cracking down on the Algerian national liberation struggle.
In both cases, the targets of revolutionary violence are seemingly innocent people, individuals who had nothing to do with repressing and torturing the colonized. The first one was clearly a case of mistaken identity, the second case was that of conscious and deliberate targetting. Since seemingly innocent blood had been spilt, surely now can in the same vein can the Maoists be called terrorists.
Unfortunately, the answer is no. Fannon makes it clear that the forces of colonization rely solely upon the active use of police, military and paramilitary forces to violently suppress and subjugate the colonized population, making an example of anybody who dare to question or even challenge the status-quo. If this status-quo is the product of reactionary violence that enables the exploitation of millions, then justice is served if those oppressed millions take up arms and exact vengence upon those instruments that are responsible for their marginalization and dehumanization. Whether a person is individually innocent or not, as a member of a repressive apparatus at the hands of the class enemy, they are liable to face the wrath of the revolutionary masses either seeking liberation from domestic parasites or imperialist dominion.
And this nicely segues into answering the third question. How innocent can these “innocent” people be? Sure, most people in the Government and Army may not be directly responsible for looting, bullying, raping or murdering Indigenous communities in the states where the People’s War is at its most intense. However, give them the chance and soon these seemingly innocent individuals would end up committing the most horrific crimes at the behest of the State and these “innocents” would not baulk from committing them, as they too have been indoctrinated to see anyone questioning the legitimacy of their oppressive collaboration with the class enemy, as “terrorists”.
As long as one is consciously and consensually deciding to serve the interests of the few over the interests of the many, while eliciting material benefits from the oppression and colonization of Indigenous and nationally oppressed peoples at the hands of the Indian ruling class and its state apparatus, they can never be innocent. They can try to term the Maoists as “terrorists” all they want, but every person who has studied history and the history of anti-imperialist struggles know that the actual brutes hide behind the veneer of officiality and authorization.
It is the political and moral legitimization of the Indian State and its armed forces that allows them to heroically paint acts of terrorism against their own colonized Indigenous peoples and occupied national groups, such as the Kashmiri nation.
The discussion given above proves one thing and one thing only: the ruling classes will always paint those who fight against brutal inequality and structural violence as “terrorists”, while continuing to inflict irreparable material, psychological and environmental damage on the lives of those communoties whose exploutation it feeds upon.
Thus, Maoists aren’t terrorists. But, the government being run by the Ambani-Adani-Modi-Shah Hindu fascist clique are definitely more insidious, more vile and more dangerous than all of the religious fundamentalist terrorists in the world combined.
But I assure you, this isn’t the end. If there is a state ruled by the exploiting classes, then we can’t afford to miss out on the voices of its sycophants existing in the privileged sections of Indian society; and we’ll see that in the next essay.
