Inside the crisis of the Maoist movement: contradictions and aberrations

By Harsh Thakor* 

While condemning the liquidators and examining the CPI(Maoist), it is necessary to objectively identify the major aberrations that have shaped the trajectory of the Maoist movement in India.

The recent surrender of leaders and members of the CPI(Maoist) marks a significant moment, reflecting both the severe setbacks faced by the organisation and the internal contradictions that have accumulated over decades. These surrenders are not solely a response to recent losses in leadership but stem from long-standing problems in theory, strategy, and practice.

The CPI(Maoist) continues to project an image of ideological steadfastness, emphasising adherence to the protracted people’s war and portraying surrender as an unrevolutionary act. The organisation's statements reiterate commitment to armed resistance despite severe repression, arguing that political consciousness and mass support—not weapons alone—determine the course of a revolutionary struggle. The party maintains that surrender disconnects class struggle from the masses and weakens the political objectives of the movement.

However, the surrender of senior leaders raises serious political questions. While these leaders had the opportunity to express disagreements internally, their exit instead signals organisational weaknesses. The incident unfolded during intensified state operations, including 'Operation Kagar', aimed at weakening Maoist structures. Even so, the political position of the party remains that abandoning armed struggle amounts to relinquishing its foundational principles.

The episode underscores a broader pattern: moments of sacrifice and defection coexist in any prolonged conflict, and such turning points must be assessed in historical and theoretical terms. The CPI(Maoist) argues that although weapons are indispensable, political clarity and leadership shape the direction of struggle. This interpretation reinforces the idea that people’s consciousness and political direction—not military capability alone—determine long-term outcomes.

Major aberrations in the party’s practice have now surfaced more sharply. The CPI(Maoist) has struggled to build a broad-based mass movement that effectively synthesises working-class, peasant, and Adivasi struggles. From early experiments in Karimnagar and North Telangana to Lalgarh and Bastar, the movement has not developed stable revolutionary base areas grounded in sustained agrarian transformation. 

The relationship between armed squads and mass organisations has remained uneven, and internal security failures have led to repeated leadership losses—such as the killings of Mahesh, Murali, Shyam, and later Kishenji—weakening both operational strength and mass support. Recruitment to the guerrilla forces has also declined, limiting the capacity to replenish cadre.

The party's mass organisations have not evolved into autonomous platforms with independent initiative. Even the Janatana Sarkars, while achieving certain local gains, remain bound to the party’s directives rather than functioning as democratic organs shaped by the people themselves. Despite drawing from the Chinese model of people’s war, the CPI(Maoist) has not consistently applied a mass-line approach. 

Successes in plains regions such as North Telangana have not translated into sustained linkages between Adivasi areas and the poor peasantry in surrounding regions. Mobilisations often involve limited activists rather than broad participation.

Strategically, the continued call to boycott elections as an unchanging principle does not always reflect the political consciousness or needs of the wider population. The organisation also did not undertake comprehensive reviews after major security lapses, including the two large-scale losses in Gadchiroli, where police infiltrated or monitored meetings and launched decisive attacks. Although some retaliatory actions followed, the Maoist forces have struggled to counter increasingly sophisticated security operations. At critical moments, assessments of subjective conditions for advancing armed struggle were inadequate.

While the dissenting leaders who surrendered pointed to genuine gaps—such as weaknesses in mass work and the absence of stable base areas—their departure has been interpreted by the party as politically harmful. Nonetheless, their criticisms highlight persistent structural issues, including an imbalance between militarisation and mass political work and a mechanical application of the Chinese revolutionary model without sufficiently adapting it to Indian conditions.

A broader intellectual debate remains on whether subjective factors for launching armed struggle truly existed in earlier decades and whether the errors associated with left adventurism in the Charu Mazumdar period were fully corrected. Comparisons with the line advanced by T. Nagi Reddy and D.V. Rao—which emphasised that conditions for armed struggle had not matured in India due to an underdeveloped agrarian movement—offer an important analytical counterpoint.

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*Freelance journalist