Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

214 I Ramnath
condemned now for what it was trying to be, not just for
what it was failing to be. The key questions fo r new social
movement formations then became: If the state model had
fo rfeited its credibility as a medium for representing the will
of the people, and delivering on what they asked of it, what
other routes to social transformation lay beyond it? If the
political party model had f.'liled as vehicle of emancipation,
then what other forms of mobilization could be imagined?
The Nontraditional left
It's a cliche to note that in India, old things don't disappear;
new things just get added, juxtaposing computers with
rustic squat toilets, and SUVs with bullock carts. This may
have much more to do with the acute maldistribution of
wealth than the persistence of tradition, but in any case you
could say it was true of the Indian Left, where the Old Left
never really disappeared; it was simply joined (sometimes
in actual battle) by the New Left.
In 1962, the Communist Party ofIndia (!'.larxis[),
or CPI(M), broke offfrom the CPI (founded in 1924),
following the Sino-Soviet split. (The CPI stayed loyal to
Moscow; the CPI(M) sided with China.) In 1969, the
Maoist Communist Party ofIndia (Marxist-Leninist), or
CPI(ML), peeled away from its Left flank along with an
insurgent wing commonly known as the Naxalites (after
the Bengali village ofNaxalbari, site of a police firing on a
peasant demonstration in 1967). As in many other places
around the world, the late 1960s' revolutionary upsurge