[Marxism] Indian Maoist Interview: Mainstream Politics are Not for Us

[milongonsinga <milongonsinga@xxxxxxxxx>]

Indian Maoist Interview: Mainstream Politics are Not for Us
Posted by n3wday on June 4, 2009
Many thanks to Ka Frank for passing this to us. This article can be found 
atLivemint.com.
Mainstream politics not for us, says Koteshwar Rao
This is a rare interview with  Koteshwar Rao, a member of the politburo of the 
Communist Party of India (Maoist), the partyâs  highest decision-making body. 
He is also head of the partyâs guerilla operations in West Bengal, Jharkhand 
and Orissa.  The original comments on this article said âThe 51-year-old 
Maoist leader refused to be photographed and set his own terms for the meeting. 
Mintâs reporters were asked to arrive at a school in Chakadoba where they 
waited for around 5 hours. At around dusk, they were escorted to where Rao 
wasâa clearing in the jungle that was reached after a brisk 30-minute walk. 
In a conversation that lasted at least 5 hours, Rao, who greeted the reporters 
with the Maoist âLal salaamâ or red salute, explained the Maoist 
philosophy. And his groupâs ultimate objective.â
Edited excerpts:
The administration alleges that you ambush people and run awayâthat you 
donât have the courage to fight themâ
Absolute rubbishâthey know we donât run away, but say so because  they can 
neither ignore us nor can they fight us. Even on 2 November, when 
Buddhababuâs (West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee) convoy was 
attacked, I was within a kilometre of where the blast took place. Huge forces 
were deployed, the area was combed, but I did not run away. All our comrades in 
(West) Bengal are sons and daughters of the soil. Where will they run away? For 
the last five years, I am camping here and helping the organization grow. The 
Intelligence Branch knows everything. They know what I look likeâthey even 
have a picture taken last year. We are not scared of appearing before people. 
Lakhs of villagers and tribals know what I look like since I interact with them 
regularly.

That we do not go out of the area controlled by us is because our central 
committee has decided that the strategic leadership team would stay put in the 
forests. Thatâs out of concern for our security. I hide only from a select 
few, such as the police and completely unknown persons.
How do you forge ties with locals?
We play very diverse roles, which the people donât get to know. Because they 
have lost faith in the administration, villagers approach us with their 
day-to-day problems. We organize camps in villages so they can voice the 
grievances. We deal with the villagers with a lot of compassion and kindness, 
which is why they love and protect us. We also work for womenâs liberation. 
There are many women who are tortured by their (parents) in-law, husbands or 
parents. But they cannot protest because they are dependent on them. We fight 
for liberation of such women. Women are very important for our movement. Many 
oppressed women have joined us in our struggle across the country.
They have led from the front in many a battle that we have fought. However, in 
terms of the strength, our women cadre in (West) Bengal is slightly weaker 
compared with other areas such as Jharkhand, Dandakaranya and Andhra Pradesh. 
Whereas elsewhere the ratio of men to women is 50:50, and even 60:40 in favour 
of women, in Bengal, the ratio is around 70:30 (in favour of men). Besides our 
guerilla operations, we also lead strong mass movements in many parts of West 
Bengal such as Lalgarh and Nandigram. A lot of women are participating in such 
movements, though they may not be members of the party. Exposure to such 
movements leads to political maturity. We need mature organizers for the party 
and would look to recruit women who have actively participated in these 
movements.
How do you fund your operations?
We mainly depend on donations and mass collections. Mass collections are of two 
types. In the harvest season, we go door to door collecting quintals (1 quintal 
is 100kg) of rice. In (West) Bengal, we depend on cooked food from villages and 
so donât go for collection of foodgrain, but in Dandakaranya, Chhattisgarh 
and Bihar, where we have bigger camps and run our own kitchen, collecting 
foodgrain is essential.
Apart from this, we also collect cash. We appeal to villagers, who earn their 
living by selling kendu leaves (used to roll bidis) or by selling bamboo to 
paper mills, to donate a dayâs wageâtypically Rs50-160 each a month. That 
apart, we impose fines on rich peasants and charge 2-5% levy on government 
contractors.
We punish corrupt landlords and drive them out from the village. The properties 
that we seize from themâsuch as farm equipment and cattleâare used for 
village development in places where we run a parallel administration.
But we donât charge anything from peopleâs pay from NREGA (National Rural 
Employment Guarantee Act), or (from) contractors building infrastructure such 
as roads and schools for the poor. We also loot banks, both government and 
private banks, from time to time. The last time (we) robbed a bank it was a 
branch of ICICI Bank in Ranchi. We got Rs5 crore from the operation and we 
attacked another bank to seize the weapons of the security guards.
Majority of our weapons have been seized from the administration. In (West) 
Bengal, for instance, 60% of our weapons have been snatched from the police. We 
have bought only 10% on our own; the rest has come from other states. Yet, I 
would say we donât even have a small fraction of the cache of arms and 
ammunition that parties such as the Trinamool (Congressâ it won a significant 
victory in the recent Lok Sabha polls and is a rival to the Communist Party of 
India-Marxist, or CPM, one of the ruling parties in the state) and the CPM have.
We donât even have a small fraction of arms and ammunition that parties such 
as the CPM and Trinamool have.
You see, power doesnât come through weapons alone. Look at the people of 
Lalgarh (where tribals seized administrative power after the police allegedly 
tortured some of them on the suspicion that they were harbouring 
Maoists)âwith just home-made bows and arrows, they have stalled police. 
Guerilla operations depend a lot on peopleâs support and because people are 
with us, we have managed to keep the police from reaching us. Our party runs on 
an annual budget of Rs15-20 crore. Thatâs what we spend on our operations 
across the country, and itâs almost the same amount that we raise through 
donations, seizures and heists. Most of the money is raised in Dandakaranya, 
Bihar and Jharkhand.
In (West) Bengal, we spend around Rs1 crore a year, but we manage to raise only 
10% of that amount locally. So, the rest comes from other states such as 
Jharkhand and Orissa.
How do you recruit people for your movement?
We donât recruit from the villages on our own. We have a party-controlled 
mechanism under which we receive proposals from the locals. After obtaining the 
consent of the parents of the applicants, we forward the proposals to one of 
our committees. It vets them and takes a final call on whether or not to 
recruit, based on the personâs antecedents, class and disposition towards 
others in his or her village. The responsibility of the group that I lead is to 
train the new recruits. Many of them are initially intimidated by the difficult 
life we live, but most of them eventually learn to cope with it.
How do you see this movement ending? Would you join mainstream politics?
There is no end to revolution. There is no time frameâit seems it will take 
timeâ But, if the war strategy is right, weâll reach our goal soon. 
Otherwise, we will have to retreat and change course. But we are strictly 
against joining mainstream politics. Over the last few years, politicians such 
as Sonia Gandhi and Buddhababu have been advising us to follow the example of 
Maoists in Nepal, but look at what happened to them. I met Prachanda several 
times and told him that they were on the wrong track and urged him to change 
his political stance. We wonât make the same mistake.
Didnât your party play a key role in mobilizing a mass movement in Nandigram 
(where the state government started acquiring land for a petrochemical hub, but 
had to abandon this in the face of strong protests by local farmers)?
We were there in Nandigram from the very beginning, in January 2007. One of our 
local leaders, Narayan, who lives in Haldia, had started mobilizing the local 
population ever since the government first announced its intention to acquire 
land there and prepared the ground for a mass uprising.
We are still active there since the people of the area want us to be there. The 
main resistance in Nandigram came from the local youth who took up arms to 
protest against state-sponsored oppression.
Our decision to go to Nandigram was based on our political ideologyâto defend 
the people against state oppression. We were there right from the 
beginningâJanuary 2007, when the government announced plans to acquire land 
there. Initially, Narayan was our only person in Nandigram, but after the 
police killed people on 14 March, we started sending more people and armsâwe 
sent some 150 rifles if I remember correctlyâto sustain the fight. Narayan 
taught the local youth how to use firearms and how to face police firing. But 
even before we sent arms into Nandigram, the Trinamool Congress activists had 
gathered a huge cache of arms in the area. The CPM, too, was well equippedâin 
fact, they had more arms than we did. But in the end, the administration took 
the help of some retired army officers and attacked us from various points in 
November 2007 and drove us from there.
Your party was there in Singur (where a Tata Motors plant was to come up. The 
plan was abandoned after land had been acquired for the project because of 
widespread protests led by the Trinamool Congress) too, wasnât it?
We were the first to take on the Tata (Motors) officialsâwe attacked their 
cars on the day they came for the first site survey. But we could not carry the 
movement forward because the central committee decided not to get involved. We 
are an underground political party and it is difficult for us to join a 
movement in which there are a lot of other political parties involved. We 
pulled out, but now, with the Trinamool having given up in Singur, I think we 
are going to intensify our movement there.
The conditions are rightâthe CPMâs Hooghly district unit is in a shambles. 
Our kind of movement thrives in places such as Lalgarh, where the terrain is 
favourable and thereâs mass support.
How did your family react to your joining a militant organization?
My father was with the Socialist Party of Congress and I joined the Communists 
during my college days. He made it clear that two divergent political currents 
cannot exist under the same roof. So, I left home. But my parents have been my 
greatest inspiration. Like Jijabai supported Shivaji through all his battles, 
my mother has always been a great source of inspiration for me. The last time I 
met her was in 1984, after I got married. She told me that if I were to die, it 
should be the death of a hero on a battlefield.
My wife Maina is now at Dandakaranyaâshe is in charge of a group in Bastar 
(district of Chhattisgarh). We met in Hyderabad when I was state secretary (of 
Andhra Pradesh) and she was a comrade. The last time we met was two years ago. 
We communicate through lettersâuse of mobile phones has been banned by our 
central committee. I write poems to her and make sure the Indian postal 
department delivers them to her. I wrote poems after the landmine attack on 
Buddhbabuâs convoy and also on the day somebody hurled a shoe at (George) 
Bush.
Have you ever thought of having children?
I donât have kids. Our party doesnât support the idea of having children. 
There is no ban as such, but the leadership expects the women in our party to 
undergo sterilization after marriage. This is done to ensure that their 
political careers are not compromised.
Tell us about your daily lifeâ It must be difficult being a militant, isnât 
it?
We live a difficult lifeâconstantly on the move and with a 15kg load of arms, 
ammunition and water. I remember walking seven years ago some 116km in 24 hours 
without any rest. I sleep very littleâmaximum four hours (a day) and at times 
as little as 10 minutes. But because we live a disciplined life it doesnât 
matter.
No matter how late I sleep at night, I rise by 5. The first thing that I do in 
the morning is tune in to BBC (Radio) for its bulletin at 5.30. By 6, we start 
our physical training and military drillsâwe need to be fighting fit always. 
So, even at 51, I donât need glasses to read and can walk for hours without 
rest. We eat whatever we get. I love eating rice with mashed potatoes and green 
chillies, but at times, even that is difficult to come by. I was a south Indian 
Brahmin before joining the party and a strict vegetarian. But I have turned 
non-vegetarian after I left home. I love eating mangoes and wild fruits that 
are abundantly available in the forests that we inhabit. I am a dreamer like 
all revolutionaries, and work hard to realize them. My dreams are about the 
people in the villagesâthe people around me. We are soldiers, but we too have 
emotions such as love, kindnessâ
But without hatred, it is difficult to keep alive the fire of class struggle 
and to fight against oppression.
http://southasiarev.wordpress.com/2009/06/04/indian-maoist-interview-mainstream-politics-are-not-for-us/
 
"When words cannot be better than silence, it's better to shut up." Eduardo 
Galeano

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