DEEP influence of the Gandhian ideology leads many people to condemn violence as such and they make no distinction between the counter-revolutionary violence of the landlords and the state and the revolutionary violence of the oppressed peasantry and the revolutionaries. Some of them, who also wear the mask of ‘total revolution’ and maintain spurious links with imperialist-funded voluntary agencies, go so far as to suggest that mindless violence is a creed with the Naxalites. In a recently published piece of yellow journalism, Kuldip Nayar even attributed the terrorist theory of ‘excitative violence’ to a ‘mysterious’ Naxalite leader.

The experience of the ‘peaceful class struggle’ as under­taken by the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini against the Mahant of Bodh Gaya were greatly highlighted in the bourgeois press and by liberals of all hues as a living counter-model against the Naxalite tactics. Well, nobody talks of these experiences any more. The activists of the Vahini and the peasants were severely beaten up by the Mahant’s goons and the police. Strangely enough, few of the activists were even accused of being Naxalites and charged with attempts at seizing rifles from the police. Under persistent demands of the peasants for retaliation, some activists tried to formulate a line of defensive resistance. And this brought the split and the struggle simply petered out. We deliberately kept ourselves away from Bodh Gaya and decided to watch the ‘experiments’ of our friends, while actively opposing every instance of repression on them.

Some people are more clever and oppose revolutionary violence not on idealistic Gandhian pretexts, but on the plea that the modern state being heavily armed, the poor are simply no match and hence revolutionary violence is only suicidal. In practice, this theory leads to the Gandhian ‘tactics’ of abject surrender and ‘heart-transformation’ of class enemies as opposed to devising ways and means for arming the broad masses and dismantling the state.

Yet others, wearing the Marxist and even ‘Naxalite’ garb, oppose revolutionary violence under the pretext of opposing 'anarchism', 'individual assassination' etc.

First of all, we do not subscribe to any theory of ‘excita­tive violence’ or to the so-called creed of mindless violence, and still less, to ‘individual assassination’. Violence, always and everywhere, is perpetrated by the landlords and the police on the rural poor. Everywhere in Bihar, it is the landlords who are armed to the teeth, and derive a sadistic pleasure by beating and killing poor peasants, burning their houses and raping their women. If one wishes to trace the creed of senseless violence, various landlord-Senas and the Bihar Police are the best sources. Pipra carnage, Bhagalpur blinding, Banjhi killings and the latest Arwal massacre—are these not sufficient evidences ?

As for the allegation about our banking on ‘excitative violence’ to rouse the masses, is it not clear enough that they are already on the move ? The point is not to rouse the masses with artificial stimulants, but to prevent them from taking hasty steps and retaliatory actions, to guide them along the road of mass movements and mass resistance. The point will be clear from the following comparison. After the Parasbigha incident, where upper-caste landlords had indiscriminately killed many people of a lower caste, one witnessed lower-caste people from many a neighbouring village assemble together and launch a retaliatory attack on one Dohia village inhabited by upper-caste people in the same brutal fashion, killing a number of people and molesting their women. It is to be noted that no Party organisation was there at that time.

Similarly after the Pipra carnage, in which as many as 13 persons — old, women and children alike — were killed or simply burnt alive by upper-caste landlords, harijans from neighbouring villages came together and started chalking out plans to attack a Kurmi village in exactly the same fashion. But the Party decisively intervened and prevented them from carrying out their plans. Our cadres were taunted as cowards and abused by the masses, some fighters of the armed unit threw away their rifles and left the unit, but the cadres remained steadfast, and acting according to the firm instructions of the Party Central Committee that in no way should any harm be done to innocent Kurmi peasants and their women and children, they did not allow any repetition of the Dohia episode. In subsequent months, one by one many culprits of the Pipra carnage were executed by our squads. If in the given stage of mass movement, awarding death penalties on persistent demands from the people to these infamous killers, each one of whom had murdered scores of people in cold blood and had either not been arrested at all or left scot-free by the courts due to ‘lack of evidences’, is considered ‘excitative violence’ or 'individual assassination', we are helpless.

Secondly, by any human logic whatsoever, the rural poor cannot be denied their right to organise their own resistance forces and to acquire arms so as to counter the attacks of the landlord-armies and even to form their own armed forces, particularly when the police machinery is openly siding with the landlords. No constitution or supreme court has ever accorded the right to revolution to the people. Still revolutions have taken place in world history. The Bolsheviks in Russia were officially branded as terrorists and criminals, and the Communists in China were called 'red bandits'. No wonder that in contrast to the ‘gentlemen communists’, Naxalites are labelled as criminals and all that in our country. We do recognise that the enemy is quite powerful and hence any direct, frontal and immature attack will prove suicidal. And that is why we lay stress on political tactics to change the balance of class forces, on the broadest mobilisation of the masses, on disintegrating the enemy forces, and above all, on the tactics of guerilla warfare, raising the struggle step by step.

Thirdly, if peasant struggle takes violent forms in Bihar, the root must be sought in the forms of oppression. The more severe, violent and brutal the oppression, the sharper will be the edge of the retaliation, no matter what this or that individual may wish. In the past, peasant rebels used to hit back in similar fashion and end up as dacoit leaders indulging in destructive violence. The intervention of the Communist Party has simply channelised this violence along constructive lines, and peasant rebels have been moulded into revolutionary vanguards, and passive peasant masses into active participants in the struggle for progressive social transformation. Violence is forced upon the masses by the reactionaries and not superimposed on 'inherently peaceful' mass movements by the Naxalites as the Gandhians would like everybody to believe.

And finally, when forced to engage in revolutionary violence as the last resort, the communists, unlike the Gandhians, do not refuse to accept the historical responsi­bility on the pretext that violence breeds hate and destruction. On the contrary, they believe that force is the midwife of a new society, that revolutionary violence revolutionises the society, freeing the minds of the people from filth, inertia, staleness and all other vices of the old society.