[Reprinted from Liberation, Vol. I, No. 10 (August 1968).]
In the July 21 issue of People's Democracy, the central organ of the neo-revisionist clique, appeared two reports on Andhra — both quite illuminating. They once again unmask the real face of the "Marxists" and the role they are playing in the bitter class struggle now raging in several Andhra districts and elsewhere.
One of these reports, entitled "Stop this Landlord-Police-Congress Terror in Telengana", informs the readers that in a letter to Brahmananda Reddy, Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, P. Sundarayya has cited innumerable instances of brutal attacks on peasants and Communists in Nalgonda, Khammam and Warangal, perpetrated by landlords' armed gangs, Congressmen and the police since 1956. The neo-revisionist chieftain "has requested" the Congress Chief Minister to instruct the police officials and the special police that are posted in these areas, not to aid the village landlords and their hired henchmen "in committing these atrocities." Sundarayya has appealed to the Congress Chief Minister to instruct the police officials and the special police "to do justice evenly and not to treat 'Communist supporters' as non-citizens, as sub-humans, against whom anything and any kind of atrocity can be perpetrated and justified and encouraged." Sundarayya's heart seems to be overflowing with the milk of human kindness!
The other report on "Andhra State Committee Decisions" enlightens the readers on the various steps taken by Sundarayya, Basavapunniah and Co. to dissolve District, Taluk and other Committees of the CPI(M), organize new ones in their place and expel a large number of members from the party. What was their crime? Many of the rank and file comrades had raised the banner of revolt against the Sundarayya-Ranadive-Namboodiripad faction, insisted that the assessments of the Indian and the world situation by this clique must change and urged that not prayer, petition and "parliamentary" methods but resistance and revolutionary violence alone can smash the violent attacks of the landlord-police-Congress combine and overthrow their regime of plunder and oppression.
Between 1954 and 1964 about forty communist workers were murdered in Telengana and another ten to fifteen in Andhra area by the landlords. During the last two years about twenty Communist workers, ten of them in Telengana, were murdered. Some idea of the nature of the attacks by the landlord-police-Congress combine may be had from the following two instances:
"In Chandrugonda village (in Warangal) during the 1965 parliamentary by-election, a Lambodi peasant supporter of CPI(M), Boda Bikya, was assaulted, his hands and legs were broken, his house was set on fire and his 7 year-old son Rajya was tied hand and foot and burnt alive by Congress supporters.
"It was again in this same taluk that in August 1965 in the village Maheswarpuram, in connection with the dispute about a field-path between the peasants and the village landlords, the police opened fire, wounding a CPI(M) worker, Chenna Reddy, who died in Warangal hospital, handcuffed, with no medical care whatsoever....
"It was after this shooting that the Reserve Police camped in the village, tortured 1000 persons, poured urine into the wounded persons' mouths when they asked for water, and raped 26 women including some who were pregnant."
All this resembles the vicious attacks of Diem on the people of South Vietnam. Naturally, in Srikakulam and the districts of Telengana the question of resistance, the question of using revolutionary violence to combat these attacks, was raised by rank and file comrades. But the opportunist scum represented by Sundarayya-Ranadive-Namboodiripad-Rammurty clique would not have anything to do with resistance on the ground that the legality of the party would then be endangered. Instead, they have now chosen to request the Congress Chief Minister to ask the police to do justice evenly to the oppressors and the oppressed, the exploiters and the exploited, the wolf and the lamb. The scum that calls itself Marxist has become Gandhian in its ideology! For it, the class struggle does not exist, or if it exists, the Congress Chief Minister and the police that is a part of the reactionary state machinery are all above classes!
The truth is, Sundarayya's letter is a sort of device to deceive the masses at a time when this gang is purging the party of all militant, revolutionary elements who alone can help the peasantry to defend itself. While keeping the peasantry defenseless in the face of attacks of the landlords and the police, they feign love and concern for the peasant victims and appeal to the Chief Minister, a leading member of the Congress Party — the main party of the big landlords and the big bourgeoisie — to intervene!
These sham "Marxists" are not non-combatants during the fierce class-struggle now raging in the country. Their entire tactics amount to this: while pretending to express love for the peasantry, they keep them defenceless and throw them to the wolves of landlords and the police and direct their fire against those comrades who stand by the peasantry. In Naxalbari when the heroic peasants took up arms to defend themselves and overthrow the regime of oppression and plunder, these impostors as the biggest partner of the U.F. Government in West Bengal did not hesitate to use the reactionary state machinery in its attempt to suppress the brave peasantry. At the same time they came down upon revolutionary comrades who led the peasants with disciplinary measures and violent slanders. So, like the Gandhites, they are waging the class struggle with a vengeance — as henchmen of the reactionary classes and as enemies of the toiling people.
The brave peasants and the revolutionary comrades of Telengana and Srikakulam have to fight on two fronts — the landlords' gangs and the police as well as reaction's agents masquerading as Marxists — in order to achieve victory. Communist revolutionaries of other parts of India send them their revolutionary greetings and express their firm solidarity with them.