Towards The Impossible Dream: A Framework for Nonviolent Revolution in India’s Maoist Conflict

The government of India has routinely depicted the Communist Party of India (Maoist) as a brutal and authoritarian adversary that threatens the security, development and democracy of the nation. The government’s primary response to the Maoist insurgency has been to try to militarily clear areas of Maoist influence, and then advance a programme of so-called development designed to wean away the movement’s support base. The Maoists, by contrast, condemn the ruthless and exploitative Indian state-corporate nexus which, they argue, is advancing elite interests at the expense of the marginalised and impoverished. The Maoists endorse armed struggle and the capture and control of state power as the only vehicles through which a revolution can occur. In contrast with the approaches of both the government and the Maoists, this thesis explores the idea of nonviolent revolution, interrogating how, in contexts of violent conflict, radical social change might be pursued and protected. I advance the idea of nonviolent revolution as a synthesis of constructive anarchistic prefiguration and obstructive nonviolent action. I draw upon three examples – the Sarvodaya movement, the Zapatistas and the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado – and develop a flexible framework for action which challenges assumptions of revolution as a process necessarily involving violence and the capture of state power. The emerging framework developed involves three key components. First, it involves the core role of prefiguration, and the idea that such action is best guided not by totalising objectives, but by flexible and adaptive principles which help prompt and inspire ongoing projects geared to meeting human survival and flourishing. Second, it includes a focus on the social unit or scale at/in which such prefigurative action might best occur, and the privileging of place-based struggle which then employs a range of inter-scalar supports and solidarity so as to not only bolster the local initiative, but to suggest and assert an alternative socio-political-spatial imaginary. Third, it explores how nonviolent action might protect such radical prefiguration against the inevitable threats that will arise, and suggests that any such protective possibility involves and combines processes of both conversion and coercion