Communists in denial

There is a popular saying in Southasia: 'Your closest kin is your worst enemy.' The fratricidal war between the Kauravas and the Pandavas in the Mahabharata bears testimony to this. Yet in the modern era the tradition continues, the best example of which is the unelevating fight – both political and physical – between the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India (Maoist). Both were born of the same parent, the Indian communist movement. While the CPI (M) was delivered in 1964, CPI (Maoist) followed soon after, baptised first as the CPI (Marxist-Leninist) in 1969, and adopting its present name in 2004.

This new book, a polemical assault by the CPI (M) on the CPI (Maoist), is an outcome of the raging battle between the two distanced siblings. The subtitle gives the impression that it represents various views from a wide spectrum of the Indian left movement and ideological positions; but in fact, it simply offers four essays reflecting the official views of the CPI (M). There are other components of the Indian left, of course – the Communist Party of India, the Forward Bloc and the Revolutionary Socialist Party of India, to name a few – which hold completely different, and sometimes far more sympathetic, views about the Maoists. There have been no attempts to accommodate such views in this collection, with Prasenjit Bose, who describes himself as the convenor of the Research Unit of the CPI (M), making it clear that the 'rights to this work rest with' his party alone. Under the circumstances, it would have been more honest to subtitle the book, 'A critique from the CPI (M)'.