The Red Sunset: Analysing the Decline of the CPI (Maoist)

Satya Sagar

The recent surrender of top leadership figures within the Communist Party of India (Maoist) marks the most decisive failure yet in their decades-long armed struggle against the Indian state. This collapse signals the strategic end of a movement that consciously sought to replicate the great revolutionary success of Mao’s China on the complex, fractured canvas of India.

While the Indian state views this through the lens of successful counter-insurgency, a deeper analysis reveals that the Party’s decline is self-inflicted—rooted in a dogmatic adherence to imported templates, a misreading of India’s changing political economy, and a “fetish” for violence that severed their organic links with the very masses they sought to liberate.

The decline of the Maoists though is not the final verdict on the core principles or relevance of Maoism in India. On one hand, it is a devastating judgment on a strategically rigid application of those principles by the CPI (Maoist) leadership. And on the other hand it is an invitation to completely new players to learn the right lessons from the setback to adapt, think afresh and surge forward towards yet another attempt to bring radical change in India.

The Abandoned Blueprint: The Failure of the New Democratic Revolution

The central tragedy of the CPI (Maoist) lay in the chasm between its theoretical blueprint and its ground reality. The Party, as per its published documents, claims to strictly adhere to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM), aiming to execute a “New Democratic Revolution” (NDR). Theoretically, this revolution is defined by a “United Front”—a strategic alliance led by the proletariat, mobilizing the peasantry as the main force, and supported by the petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie against imperialism and feudalism.

However, in practice the Party completely failed to operationalize this strategy. Instead of building a broad-based movement among the vast Indian peasantry or the industrial proletariat, the Party retreated into the deep, forested hinterlands of Dandakaranya and the Adivasi belts of central India. The Party’s own organizational review admits a critical failure to build a strong movement in urban areas or among the industrial working class, acknowledging this as a vulnerability for any future insurrection[i].

By confining themselves to the Adivasi heartland, they neglected the critical demographic groups that constitute the overwhelming majority of the Indian population: the general peasantry, the urban poor, and the unorganized labour force. The “United Front” remained a paper concept. The Party transformed from a vanguard of the proletariat into an isolated guerrilla force operating in a sociological vacuum, effectively abandoning the original program of the NDR in favour of survival in geographically difficult terrain.

The Trap of Repression and the Fetish of Violence

Undeniably, the Indian state’s “all-round offensive” played a decisive role in the Maoist movement going from open, democratic struggles to focusing on armed squad based action. For example, a turning point in the tactics of the Kondapalli Seetharamiah-led People’s War Group (which later formed the the CPI (Maoist) by merging with the Maoist Communist Center in 2004), operating in undivided Andhra, came following the Indravelli massacre on April 20, 1981. In this incident, a peaceful gathering of Gond Adivasis organised by the Girijana Rythu Coolie Sangham (a PWG front organization), were fired upon by police killing anywhere between 100 to 250 innocent civilians[ii].

Subsequently, the state launched coordinated military campaigns, such as the Greyhounds in Andhra Pradesh and Operation Green Hunt in Chhattisgarh, alongside state-sponsored counter-insurgency militias like Salwa Judum, which brutally cleared villages to isolate revolutionaries. This long history of repression forced the Party to withdraw into remote forests to protect its leadership and cadres.

However, to blame state repression alone is to miss the dialectical error within the Party’s own strategy. The repression was aggravated by the Party’s “uber-revolutionary” posture and its strategic “fetish” for armed struggle. For whatever reason, the Maoists allowed the reduction of the intricate science of revolution—which requires mass organization, legal struggles, and democratic manoeuvring—to a single, inflexible instrument: the gun.

Mao Zedong famously stated that “power flows from the barrel of a gun,” but the CPI (Maoist) ignored the corollary of mass work he prescribed too because he understood that food, water, education, and justice do not flow from the barrel. By prioritizing military logic over political mobilization, the Indian Maoists failed to utilize existing democratic spaces. They dismissed open mass organizations, trade unionism, or militant non-armed struggles as “reformist” or “Gandhian. This rigidity prevented them from expanding systematically in the “plains” or urban centres, allowing the state to label them purely as a security threat rather than a political movement, thereby justifying the massive use of force against them….

https://countercurrents.org/2025/12/the-red-sunset-analysing-the-decline-of-the-cpi-maoist/

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