This Sunset is RED: The decline of the Maoists in India
- Independent Ink
- Dec 5, 2025
- 8 min read
There is little evidence that the party adapted Maoist theory to account for the deep-seated role of religion or culture in Indian life, or the intricacies of parliamentary democracy, which, despite its flaws, offers spaces for contestation that did not exist in pre-revolutionary China.
By 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, it completely failed to operationalize this strategy. Instead of building a broad-based movement among the vast Indian peasantry or the industrial proletariat, it 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. (1)
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 Maoists 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 pure 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 (PWG -- which later formed 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. (2)
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 in the dense forests of Chhattisgarh. This long history of repression forced the Maoists to withdraw into remote forests to protect its leadership and cadres.
However, to blame repression alone is to miss the dialectical error within the party’s own strategy. The repression was aggravated by its ‘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 maneuvering—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 and social 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.
Theoretical Insight Meets Practical Paralysis: Caste and Nationality
The decline is particularly poignant because the Party possessed, on paper, a sophisticated understanding of India’s unique social contradictions—specifically regarding caste and nationality.
Its analysis of the ‘Nationality Question’ is incisive. They characterize India as a “prison of nationalities,” rejecting the ‘Idea of India’ as a fabrication of the ruling class and supporting the right to self-determination and secession for Kashmir and the North East. Their goal, they say, to overthrow the current State and establish a “Union of People’s Republics of India”—a voluntary federation where every nationality has the right to secede if they choose.
However, in reality the Maoists do not seem to have paid much attention to coordinating with movements of various nationalities around India and remained confined to pockets of Andhra, Telangana and Bihar. Further, if they believed that the Republic of India was a ‘fabrication’ then which ‘India’ were they a Communist Party of? And if national boundaries are meaningless then why not be a Communist Party of all of South Asia?
Similarly, their document on the ‘Caste Question’ correctly identifies caste not just as a cultural superstructure but as part of the economic base of ‘semi-feudalism’, determining land ownership, production and labour relations. They rightly critique parliamentary Dalit movements for failing to address the land question, which is central to Dalit liberation.
Yet, in practice, the Party failed to mobilize these constituencies effectively by articulating their demands or mobilising them on the ground. You cannot build a ‘mass movement’ against caste oppression or for national liberation from the depths of a forest, disconnected from the daily struggles of the people.
Its clandestine nature meant that their excellent theoretical analysis remained locked in internal documents, with little resonance or application in the lived reality of the social groups they claimed to represent.
The Adivasi Disconnect: A Revolution Misaligned
The Party’s relationship with the adivasi population—effectively their primary base for the last couple of decades—reveals a significant strategic contradiction.
The Maoists essentially “yoked” the adivasi population into the larger, abstract task of the “Indian Revolution,” a project for which the adivasis had little inherent interest or appetite. While talking about the need for “autonomy” for Adivasi populations they did not turn this principle into a real political demand in the areas they operated in.
Instead of empowering Adivasis to govern themselves according to their own traditions, the Maoists sought them into the role of the “peasantry” or a “primitive nationality” in a revolution aimed at capturing central power in New Delhi. By failing to centre the specific demand for adivasi autonomy, it instrumentalized their suffering and exploitation for a distant goal.
The Maoists did defend adivasis against mining corporations and displacement, becoming ‘accidental deep ecologists’. However, this was often a by-product of tactical necessity—seeking ‘tree cover’—rather than a commitment to adivasi indigenous philosophy.
They failed to learn from their deep connection to nature, viewing the forest merely as a bunker rather than an ecological system to be preserved. Consequently, when the state offered marginally better incentives or when the violence became unbearable, the organic bond between the party and the adivasis frayed.
Internal Rigidity and the Misreading of Indian Capitalism
Beyond these strategic errors, the CPI (Maoist) suffered from the organizational sclerosis common to Indian communist parties. The culture of the party, despite its radical rhetoric, remained hierarchical and intolerant of dissent. The lack of open internal debate meant that tactical errors could not be corrected, and differences of opinion were often resolved only through expulsion or the surrender of senior leaders who saw no other exit.
This intellectual rigidity extended to their understanding of the Indian economy. The party’s “Political Programme” insists that India is a “semi-colonial, semi-feudal” country and that the Indian bourgeoisie is “comprador”—meaning it has no independent character and merely serves foreign imperialist interests. This analysis is increasingly disconnected from reality.
To argue that conglomerates like the Tatas, Ambanis, or Adanis are merely “comprador” agents of Western capital is to ignore the evidence of the last three decades. These Indian corporations are aggressive exporters of capital, acquiring assets globally and dominating markets in Africa, Europe, and Australia. They are not merely subservient agents, they are junior partners in global imperialism with their own independent capitalist ambitions.
By failing to recognize the independent, albeit uneven, development of Indian capitalism, the Maoists misdiagnosed the nature of the enemy. They continued to fight a “feudal” ghost in the countryside while modern, aggressive Indian capitalism consolidated its grip on the nation’s resources and policy-making.
The Failure of Adaptation
Ultimately, the failure of the CPI (Maoist) is a failure of adaptation.
India is defined by a staggering complexity of religion, caste, and multiple, overlapping nationalities, which requires a nuanced, flexible approach. There is little evidence that the party adapted Maoist theory to account for the deep-seated role of religion or culture in Indian life, or the intricacies of parliamentary democracy, which, despite its flaws, offers spaces for contestation that did not exist in pre-revolutionary China.
Its repeated call for boycotting elections, for example, was a total failure as ordinary citizens did turn up to vote in large numbers, and the Maoist threat was often used by rival candidates from mainstream parties to their own advantage.
The Patriot’s Tragedy and the Unfinished Revolution
As the CPI (Maoist) fades, perhaps facing eventual dissolution, it is crucial to recognize the spirit that animated it. The Maoists, though wrong-headed in strategy and dogmatic in theory, were patriots of a high order. Their cadres, often leaving comfortable lives to live among the poorest of the poor, made sacrifices that place them in a league well above the careerist and opportunistic streams of mainstream Indian politics. They were the only political force that consistently stood for the most marginalised sections of the Indian population, forcing the nation to acknowledge the ‘Other India’ that globalization sought to erase.
However, the tragedy of the Maoist movement proves that high sacrifice is not a substitute for good politics or correct strategic understanding. Martyrdom does not guarantee social change. A revolution in a country as complex as India requires more than just courage and a gun; it requires a deep, humble, and patient understanding of the land and its people.
The decline of the party, however, does not negate the necessity of the questions they raised. Ironically, the core impulse of Maoism—to empower the rural masses against urban-centric exploitation—while also challenging the predations of neo-colonialism, remains urgently relevant in India today.
The agrarian crisis remains acute; the terms of trade continue to disadvantage the rural population vis-à-vis the urban industrial centres; and the concentration of wealth is at a historic high. The economic power of the peasantry and the rural poor must be fundamentally transformed.
The setback faced by the CPI (Maoist) is not a signal to abandon the cause of the rural or urban poor, but a warning that the path to their liberation cannot be found in the rigid dogmas of the past. It requires a new political imagination—one that is radically democratic and secular, deeply adapted to the Indian context, and capable of fighting for the dignity of the millions who are still waiting for their dawn. In that sense perhaps, the real CPI (Maoist) is still waiting to be born.
Satya Sagar is a journalist and public health worker who can be reached at sagarnama@gmail.com
References:
(1) POLITICAL AND ORGANISATIONAL REVIEW, February 2007, Communist Party of India (Maoist)
Courtesy countercurrents.org