Today, Indian bourgeois news outlet The Hindu published yet another article describing the police’s and military’s practices of endorsing ‘fake surrenders’. According to sources in the CRPF’s supervision committee for such surrenders, more than 90% of them are found to be constructed by police and military personal itself. The goal is obvious: Claiming promotions and benefits for high surrender quotas by giving false promises to poor peasants to lure them in.
The so-called Fake surrenders are a well know and documented phenomenon in Indians class struggle, aiming towards undermining the moral and combative spirit of the masses. Bourgeois media, reproducing and rephrasing police and military statements of surrendering “Maoists”, “Naxals” or “Left-Wing Extremists (LWE)”, often attempts to convey the idea that, for so many “Maoists” to “surrender”, the situation of the revolutionary movement in India must be very bad.
Yet again, each year new scandals boil over, forcing the very same media outlets to print articles about how the surrenders (they reported on for most of the year) were most likely faked by the police and military. In 2014 The Indian Express had the headline: “70% Chhattisgarh Naxal surrenders are neither ‘Naxal’ nor ‘surrenders’”. In 2015 Hindustan Times reports with the headline: “Chhattisgarh cops stage ‘fake surrender’ of ‘Maoists’ for publicity” and Headlines Today produced at TV segment called “Fake Naxal Surrender Scam: The Manufactured Maoists”. Today, the Hindu (maybe following up on their 2012 story “CPI (Maoist) terms surrender of militia members fake”?) yet again produced an article, stating that the CRPF’s [sic!] “screening committee found that more than 90% of the people who had surrendered did not conform to the definition of ‘Maoist cadre.’”
“During an assessment, it was found that most people who had surrendered were not active Maoist cadres. They had no cases registered against them or were not involved in any encounter,” said the official.
Police posing with "fake Maoists surrendering"
Who are those “surrendering Maoists”?
Mostly poor peasants given a gun, a rifle or an IED and some uniforms and the false promise, that turning themselves in as Maoists will result in a job for them (through the state sponsored program of giving incentives to actual maoist militants or PLGA members so they’ll betray their class and their people – a program not much stained by participants). Police and military, like the notorious police commander of Chhattisgarh’s Bastar region or the infamous special forces command COBRA are well know for taking advantage of the poor peasantry, promising them work, if they turn themselves in claiming to be Maoists. Often times, these peasants then spend some months in jail and on release are send back to the countryside without any work or money whatsoever. In some cases people even pay the police or military so their claim of being a “surrendering Maoist” is more likely to be accepted and hence their chance to enter the program (and get work) increased.
Revolutionaries all over the world have to be very clear on this matter and have to ask themselves how the term “surrender” fits to being a Maoist. We cannot allow ourselves to be driven into defeatism by the reaction’s propaganda, especially not when the attempts are so obvious and the reality so differently.
Indian news segment from 2015
