Observe July 28 as All India Martyrs Day!
It was on 28 July that Comrade Charu Majumdar (CM), leader of the Naxalbari Uprising and the first General Secretary of CPI (ML), became martyr in Calcutta police lock-up. Since then, 28 July is being observed by Communist Revolutionaries in India as All India Martyrs Day. During the Naxalbari uprising and in the prolonged struggles all over India against the oppressive and anti-people ruling system, many thousands were subjected to state terror including police repression and imprisonment. In the course of the resistance against state terror, large number of communist revolutionaries had to sacrifice their lives. Hence, together with Comrade CM, all martyr comrades are also commemorated on July 28 at the All India level.
Of course, it was in accordance with CM’s perspective on developing peasant struggles based on consistent ideological fight against ‘modern revisionism’ that the historic Naxalbari Uprising had begun in May 1967 in which landless and poor peasants organized in peasant committees started forcible capture of land from jotedars, militantly resisting State repression and sacrificing their lives in the process. The police firing at struggling peasants on 25th May 1967 in the Naxalbari block of Siliguri subdivision in Darjeeling district resulting in the martyrdom of many including 9 women and 1 child was only one of the instances of the horrors unleashed by the regime in which both CPI (M) and SUCI were constituents of the coalition government of West Bengal at that time. The Naxalbari struggle, though brutally suppressed, inspired the communist revolutionaries to initiate similar struggles across India. And, within a short span of time, the organisational initiatives on the part of Revolutionaries led to the formation of All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR) followed by declaration on the founding of CPI (ML) by Comrade Kanu Sanyal at a mass meeting held in Calcutta on 22 April 1969.
Today, when we are observing All India Martyrs Day on 28 July, the RSS, world’s largest fascist organisation which is celebrating its Centenary in 2025, through its political tool BJP, is engaged in a maddening pace towards the ultimate goal of establishing a unitary, majoritarian, Manuvadi Hindu Rashtra in which Muslims will be second-class citizens and Dalits as subhuman. As part of this fascist goal, backed by the series of already accomplished Constitutional, legal and administrative measures, Saffron goons backed by police and administration are unleashed on the oppressed and vulnerable sections of the population for committing no holds barred atrocities including even lynching. Coupled with this, the far-right and pro-corporate Modi government, merging itself with the most corrupt crony capitalists, has initiated a series of anti-labour and anti-farmer draconian laws such as Labour Codes and Farm Laws, which though kept in abeyance at the Central level, are profusely taken up by fascist ‘double engine’ state governments. The RSS/ BJP regime, acting as a ‘corporate facilitator’ has brought about a whole set of investor-friendly tax and environmental policies at the diktats of imperialist regimes and neoliberal centres, regarding which policy-decisions are taken in corporate board-rooms even as parliament is being kept as a mere spectator. In the process, all dissent and criticism are targeted as anti-national and even cases are charged under UAPA and other draconian laws. While one percent of the super-rich, including a few billionaires like Adani and Ambani, owns more than 40 percent of India’s wealth, the bottom 50 percent of the population holds only 6 percent of it. As such, India, one of most corrupt and unequal countries of the world, has transformed into a citadel of global poverty and a wasteland of unemployment.
This horrific situation calls for an uncompromising resistance against RSS fascism. Obviously, today the resistance against RSS fascism is inseparably linked up with Indian people’s strategic and prolonged struggle against imperialism and the ruling system too. However, as all know, during the colonial period, when the people had been waging all-out offensive against British imperialism, RSS with its ‘cultural nationalism’ was keeping aloof from the anti-colonial struggle claiming Muslims as Enemy No.1. And under postwar US-led neocolonialism, the Yankee orientation of Indian fascists is becoming all the more self-evident, as is clear from Modi’s revealing silence on Trump’s supercilious claims over India’s foreign and domestic policies. Therefore, in the context of the historical nexus of Indian fascists with imperialism both in the colonial and neocolonial phases, the long-term struggle against neofascism today is inseparable from the Indian people’s anti-imperialist struggle itself.
However, the Revolutionary Left, which from the perspective of the working class and all oppressed, is duty-bound to lead the anti-fascist and anti-imperialist resistance, is ideologically, politically and organizationally, weak in shouldering this task on account of the setbacks it suffered both at the international and domestic levels. This is reflected in the failure on the part of many Communist parties to have a concrete understanding of even the 21st century neo-fascist situation including flourishing RSS fascism in India. It has enabled the fascists and reactionary ruling classes to tide over the crisis and postpone their collapse by dividing and disorienting the working class and oppressed through a whole set of reactionary postmodern and post-Marxist ideologies. Thus while serving a tiny corporate and upper caste Brahmanical elite through all means at its disposal, the RSS-sponsored neofascist regime, is diverting people’s attention from the horrific levels of wealth concentration and inequality, poverty and deprivation, unemployment, price rise and corruption, by using ideologies of anti-Communism and Islamophobia to spread extreme hatred and polarization of the social fabric and unleashing regular massacres and atrocities on Minorities, Dalits, Tribals and Women.
It is in this horrific fascist situation that Indian Communist Revolutionaries are observing the Martyrdom of Comrade CM along with commemoration other departed revolutionary leaders including Comrade Nagi Reddy whose death anniversary also comes on 28 July. At a time when the CPI (M), following the 1964 split, also began toeing the revisionist path, degenerated to ruling class positions, embracing neoliberalism and even becoming apologists of neofascism, the task of Communists in India is to uphold the revolutionary traditions of Charu Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal, Nagi Reddy, Kolla Venkaiah and others who took the initiative for once again bringing back revolution to the agenda of Indian Communists.
However, while the well-known Eight Documents of CM played a major role in the uncompromising ideological struggle against CPI (M), the conceptualisation on agrarian revolution in them were based on the assumption that India was still a a semi-feudal, semi-colonial country like pre-revolutionary China. Accordingly, the path of “protracted people’s war” pursued in China under the leadership of Mao Tsetung during the 1930s and 1940s was put forward as the strategic line of India’s liberation. Mechanical copying of this Chinese line including Mao’s 1938 statement “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” without focusing on mobilising working class and oppressed people in movements and struggles, and without concretely analysing the postwar neocolonial Indian situation, led left adventurism and disintegration of the Party since the seventies. Further, though Comrade Nagi Reddy’s pioneering work, ‘India Mortgaged’ that unraveled the postwar neocolonial penetration of US-led imperialism and other imperialist powers and the consequent transformations in India, little effort was there to develop the revolutionary line of the Communists in conformity with that.
Today, when we observe All India Martyrs Day on 28 July, as already mentioned, in the background of surging far-right neofascism at a global level, India is under the firm grip of RSS fascism. With pro-imperialist RSS stranglehold over both state power and street power and on every sphere of economy, polity, culture and education in India, the anti-imperialist and anti-fascist tasks of progressive-democratic forces are being intertwined today. At this critical juncture, the revolutionary tasks on the part of Communist revolutionaries, are to develop both theoretical understanding and practical approach according to the concrete Indian situation and from the broader perspective of emerging international context. broader context understanding , becomes all the more arduous and significant. No doubt, this ideological-political- organisational task is to be taken up by appropriately joining with all like-minded progressive and democratic forces.
On this occasion, the Central Committee of CPI (ML) Red Star while extending it’s revolutionary tributes to all martyr comrades, appeals to all Party Committees at all levels to come forward taking up the initiative for observing July 28 as All India Martyrs Day.
Red Salute to Martyrs!
Resist and Defeat RSS!
Down with Imperialism!
Strive for People’s Democracy and Socialism!
P J James
General Secretary
CPI (ML) Red Star
New Delhi
27 July 2025
