The armed Maoist project in central India is facing a severe crisis. The successive elimination of
almost the entire top leadership, including Basavaraju, Hidma, and dozens of central and state
committee members, has taken place alongside the collapse of territorial control across the
former “red corridor.” A cascade of surrenders and the near-total absence of significant
offensive operations since 2023 mark a dramatic contraction of the forty-year attempt to build
“liberated zones” in the Dandakaranya forest belt.
Whether this represents a terminal decline or another cyclical setback remains to be seen,
particularly given that the movement has weathered previous crises But the current situation
exposes the political and theoretical bankruptcy of a paradigm that has systematically prevented
the emergence of autonomous proletarian organisation and substituted the armed party for the
self-activity of the class itself.
I. The Theoretical Core of Indian Maoism and Why It Is Already Dead
The CPI(Maoist) programme rests on four inseparable pillars:
- India remains a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society under a neo-colonial form of rule.
- After 1947, power passed not to an independent national bourgeoisie but to a comprador
bureaucratic bourgeoisie and big landlords who act as agents of multiple imperialist powers
(principally the United States). - Because capitalism never overthrew feudalism in the countryside, agrarian relations remain
essentially semi-feudal (landlordism, tenancy, bonded labour, usury, rural indebtedness,
mercantile exploitation). - Therefore India is an oppressed nation requiring a New Democratic Revolution, the first stage
of the Indian revolution, led by the proletariat but carried out through a bloc of four classes
(workers, peasants, petty bourgeoisie, and national bourgeoisie) that will destroy imperialism,
feudalism, and comprador-bureaucratic capitalism. Only after this stage is completed can the
second stage, socialism, begin.
This entire construction collapses the moment it is confronted with the real nature of imperialism as the global form of capitalism itself.
This entire construction collapses the moment it is confronted with the real nature of imperialism
as the global form of capitalism itself.
“It showed that the process of capital concentration and centralisation had reached such
proportions that henceforward the cyclical crises which had always been an intrinsic part of the
process of capital accumulation would be global crises, resolvable only by world war. In short, it
confirmed that capitalism had entered a new historical era, the era of imperialism where every
state is part of a global capitalist economy and cannot escape the laws which govern that
economy. Imperialism is therefore not merely a policy of the stronger capitalist powers applied
against the weak, it is the inescapable process by which the financial and industrial tentacles of
the highly developed capitalist centres absorb surplus value from the peripheral areas. This
process recognises no state frontiers and commands no national loyalties from the indigenous
bourgeoisie of the peripheral zones. These latter are part of an international capitalist class and
are just as enmeshed in the machinations of international finance capital as the bourgeoisie of
the traditional (and newer) capitalist metropoles.”
This single passage from the ICT platform destroys the Maoist conception of semi-colonialism
and the idea that the Indian bourgeoisie is a distinct class that can be “national,” “blocked,”
“prevented from developing,” or temporarily aligned with the proletariat. Imperialism is not an
external imposition upon a backward, oppressed stage. It is the global form of capitalism itself.
All nation-states, including India, are already integral components of the world capitalist system.
The Indian bourgeoisie is not comprador because it serves foreigners; all national bourgeoisies
are now structurally global and operate through international capital. There is no blocked
national capitalism waiting to mature. Capitalism in India has already developed through
integration into the world market.
The Maoist claim that India is semi-feudal rests on equating non-wage exploitation with feudal
relations. Tenancy, usury, landlords, rural indebtedness, and mercantile exploitation are taken as
proof that capitalism failed to abolish feudalism. In reality, usury, informal credit, subcontracting
labour, peasant debt peonage, and smallholder production are forms of capitalist accumulation
under uneven development. Capitalism does not abolish pre-capitalist forms when they remain
profitable. It subsumes and repurposes them. Imperialism, as capitalism at its highest stage,
absorbs all forms of labour extraction into the capitalist logic, even where the legal form appears
backward. The existence of landlords, debt bondage, or unpaid family labour does not imply
feudalism. It signals capitalism reducing labour costs by externalising social reproduction into
pre-capitalist forms. The Maoists therefore misinterpret economic backwardness as evidence of
an incomplete bourgeois revolution instead of uneven capitalist development within global
imperialism.
The strategic conclusion that flows from this analysis, the New Democratic Revolution as a
separate first stage, is equally bankrupt. The assumption of a progressive role for a national
bourgeoisie, a revolutionary alliance across classes, and a stepwise progression from
bourgeois-democratic to socialist revolution has no foundation. There is no national bourgeois
class in India capable of playing a progressive, anti-imperialist role because it is already fully
integrated into global capitalism. The New Democracy formula replaces proletarian revolution
with national capitalist development carried out through a bloc of classes and the state. In China
itself, New Democracy did not lead to socialism. It led to state capitalism, wage labour, trade
unions as state organs, and the repression of independent working-class struggle.
Finally, the Maoist reduction of the central contradiction of the epoch to “imperialism versus
oppressed nations” replaces the proletariat as revolutionary subject with nations, patriotic
classes, and multi-class alliances. This is nationalism, not proletarian internationalism.
Imperialism is global capitalism. Workers everywhere face the same class enemy, not “national
capital defending independence.” The contradiction remains capital versus labour
internationally.
II. The Real Social Base: A Single, Hyper-Exploited Proletariat
The social base of the Maoist insurgency was never a pre-capitalist tribal population defending
a traditional way of life. Decades before the first guerrilla columns arrived, land alienation, dams,
forest reservations, sanctuaries, and early mining projects had already proletarianised large
sections of the Adivasi communities of Bastar, Surguja, Koraput, and surrounding districts.
Today that same proletariat is scattered across the entire illegalised mining-and-extraction belt
that stretches the length of central and eastern India.
Its members load coal in the rat-hole shafts of Meghalaya, where children descend three to four
hundred feet to fill thirty to forty buckets a day. They break stones on highway projects. They
labour without contracts in the sponge-iron belts of Raipur and Jharsuguda. They survive as
seasonal migrants in the brick kilns of Uttar Pradesh and Telangana. They dig illegally in the
abandoned and officially closed collieries of Dhanbad, Hazaribagh, Giridih, and Bokaro. They
disappear, unregistered and uncompensated, in mine collapses that are declared non-existent
because the mines themselves are illegal. Death here is not recorded as an industrial accident.
It is a statistical non-event.
And whenever these workers attempt to organise independently, the same accusation is ready:
“Maoist”. The label is older than the CPI(Maoist) itself. As early as 2–3 June 1977, in the
Dalli-Rajhara iron-ore mines that fed the Bhilai Steel Plant, police fired on thousands of
unarmed contract workers who had gathered to prevent the arrest of their leader Shankar Guha
Niyogi. Ten were killed, including a woman and two children; dozens were wounded. The
previous day the president of the management-recognised, CPI-controlled union had publicly
declared that “Naxalites have struck a reign of terror” in the area. That single press conference
gave the state the pretext it needed. An ordinary strike for wages, housing, and safety became,
overnight, a counter-insurgency operation.
Nothing has changed. Yesterday, 4 December 2025, in the forests of Bijapur district, twelve
more “suspected Maoists” were shot dead by DRG, STF and CoBRA forces; families of the
dead and human rights observers insist they were village labourers gathering tendu leaf or
working fields, not guerrillas, yet the official count of “275 Maoists killed” in Chhattisgarh this
year rises anyway. The accusation remains the licence to kill without evidence or trial.
This pattern has never stopped. From Dalli-Rajhara in 1977 to Salwa Judum in the 2000s, to the
thousands of Adivasi and Dalit contract labourers jailed today under UAPA for “Maoist links”
after organising wildcat stoppages in the mines or construction camps, the accusation serves
the same function: to criminalise elementary class struggle and justify lethal repression without
negotiation. The state, the parliamentary left, the mine-owners, and later the Maoist party itself
all benefit from the same fiction: any worker who steps outside recognised channels and fights
directly is automatically a guerrilla, never simply a worker.
Workers in these zones come from everywhere. Adivasi villages in Chhattisgarh and Odisha,
Dalit hamlets in Bihar, Bengali-speaking Muslim areas of Jharkhand, Nepali-speaking border
regions, Assam, and even the Garo and Khasi hills all contribute to this workforce. Capital has
integrated them into a single regional circuit of hyper-exploitation, coordinated by the same coal
mafia, contractors, and company agents who move labour and ore between legal and illegal
sites with complete impunity.
This is the real class that fed the Maoist guerrilla army for two generations. It is a single, deeply
segmented proletariat united only by the same fundamental relation to capital and by the same
state that shoots it in the forest and ignores it when it is buried alive in a rat-hole mine, or guns it
down in a village and calls it “anti-Naxalite action”
.
III. Substitutionism in Practice
The CPI(Maoist) never organised this proletariat as a class. It organised it as “Adivasis,” as
“sons of the soil,” as victims of “Brahminical settler colonialism” or “corporate-feudal loot.” By
tying the struggle to regionalist and indigenous-identity narratives, first the Jharkhand statehood
demand and later the jal-jangal-zameen slogan, the movement reproduced and deepened the
very ethnic, territorial, and legal fragmentations that capital itself imposes.
Instead of uniting migrant miners, contract labourers, unemployed youth, and displaced villagers
across every imposed border, Maoist practice reinforced those borders. It sometimes did so
through outright anti-outsider agitation. It sometimes did so through tactical alliances with the
same regional contractors, union bureaucrats, coal mafia, and rich-peasant politicians who profit
from the segmentation.
The party taxed contractors, trucking companies, and small mine-owners instead of organising
the workers they exploited. It physically liquidated or intimidated every attempt to create
independent rank-and-file structures outside its chain of command. And when workers did
organise on their own, the state was always ready to brand them “Maoist” and crush them, while
the party itself often stood aside or even echoed the accusation against “renegades” who
refused its leadership. Thus the same label that the state used at Dalli-Rajhara in 1977 to
murder independent trade-unionists was later wielded by the Maoists themselves to suppress
any proletarian initiative that escaped their control.
It transformed class struggle into a permanent negotiation or war between an armed caste and
regional capital, while the working class remained a passive reservoir of recruits, porters,
informants, and taxpayers.
When the movement was isolated, it retreated deeper into identity politics and alliances with
sections of the local bourgeoisie. When it was stronger, it simply became another extractive
power inside the same system of illegal mining and precarious labour. This is pure
substitutionism. The party fought instead of the class. It decided instead of the class. It taxed
instead of the class. In the end it surrendered or died instead of the class.
IV. There Is No Separate Forest Road
Capital has already unified the field of exploitation. Bauxite ripped out of Panchpat Mali or
Surjagad hills ends up in the same aluminium smelters that employ the Odia migrant who was
yesterday a porter for a PLGA squad. Coal scraped by children in a Meghalaya rat-hole is
burned in the power plants that supply the steel mills of Rourkela and Bhilai, where Adivasi
contract labourers from Bastar pour the concrete for the highways that carry security forces to
crush the guerrilla zones they once fled.
The material unity of the proletariat already exists. What is missing is its political unification.
That unification will not come from a guerrilla general staff. It will not come from a mass party
that seeks to hegemonise an inter-class people’s war. It will only come from rank-and-file
committees in the illegal collieries, the construction camps, the brick kilns, and the factories.
These committees must bring together permanent and contract workers, Adivasi and
non-Adivasi, local and migrant under the same banner and the same direct control. These
committees must link up in regional and national assemblies where workers themselves, not
party secretaries, debate and decide strategy. Only on that basis can armed self-defence
emerge as an auxiliary of the class rather than as its substitute.
V. Conclusion
The collapse of Maoism in Bastar is not a tragedy for the working class. It is the collapse of yet
another substitutionist illusion that claimed to fight imperialism and feudalism while preventing
the proletariat from fighting on its own class terrain.
The real tragedy would be to conclude that the answer lies in more disciplined armed struggle,
better alliances with progressive national capital, or a return to indigenous traditions.
The only valid conclusion remains the one the Communist Left has defended since 1917. The
emancipation of the working class will be the act of the working class itself, or it will not be at all.
The graveyard of the PLGA in Dandakaranya is not the end of the communist programme in
India. It is the grave of the last great illusion that a vanguard could substitute itself for the
self-activity of the class and still claim to be fighting for communism.
The real struggle begins precisely where the armed intermediary has been swept away. It
begins in the direct, unmediated confrontation between a proletariat that is learning to organise
itself in the mines, kilns, construction sites, and factories and a capitalist order that can no
longer tolerate even the old forms of mediation, yet still reaches for the same worn-out
accusation – “Maoist” – every time a worker raises a demand without permission.
Only the international self-organisation of the proletariat, armed with the communist programme
and constituting its own organs of direct power, can usher in the sole alternative to decadent
imperialism: a society without classes, without a state, without exploitation, and without borders.
No War But the Class War Initiative in South Asia 
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