In the early 1960s, it also had the third-largest Communist Party (PKI) in the world outside of the USSR and China.
The Dutch East Indian Company (VOC from its Dutch initials), one of the motherships of capitalist colonialism, was founded in 1602. It soon established itself in the city of Batavia on the large island of Java, now part of Indonesia.
The VOC itself represented a new type of power in the region: it formed a single organization, traded across a vast area, possessed superior military force, and, in time, employed a bureaucracy of servants to look after its concerns in the East Indies. In sum, it could impose its will upon other rulers and force them to accept its trading conditions. Under the governor-generalship of Jan Pieterszoon Coen and his successors, particularly Anthony van Diemen (1636–45) and Joan Maetsuyker (1653–78), the company laid the foundations of the Dutch commercial empire and became the paramount power of the archipelago. (1)
Sukarno, Suharto and the PKI
The Netherlands expanded their colonial control over Indonesia through the 19th century. Indonesia was a commercial colony, not a settler colony based on the displacement of indigenous population. A type of nationalist resistance against Dutch colonial control began in 1908 with formation of the Budi Utomo (Noble Endeavour), though it focused on cultural rather than political goals. Indonesia remained a Dutch colony until Japan seized it in 1942. The nationalist leader Sukarno persuaded Japan to allow him to head a Japanese puppet government. But after Japan’s defeat he became the head of an independent Indonesia, though the Dutch attempted to reassert control militarily but finally agreed in 1949 to recognize Indonesia’s independence.
Sukarno ruled over what he called Guided Democracy (i.e., “illiberal democracy”) based on a compromise of interests between the PKI and the army from 1949 until 1966, striking an anti-imperialist tone which was broadly consistent with China’s position. Military conspirators calling themselves the September 30th Movement attempted a coup in 1965, which was quickly suppressed by the army General Suharto.
Suharto blamed the coup on the PKI, which denied responsibility for it. Estimates of the number of Indonesians killed in the campaign against real and accused Communists ranged as high as one million. The army carried out a massive campaign of repression aimed at the Communists, and in March of 1966 Suharto took over power from Sukarno and was formally became President in 1968, an office he held for the next 30 years.
Lovell argues that China saw Indonesia as a text case for its foreign policy after their ideological and political split from Soviet concepts. She argues that the militancy promoted by China among the PKI led them to continually challenge the military, though that challenge was not in the form of a people’s war or actual armed insurrection. And she contends that this gave the military under Suharto an excuse for their murderous campaign against Indonesian Communists.
She describes the American intrigues against Sukarno (2), unhappy over his from their viewpoint far too friendly attitude toward anticolonial movements and the kind of independent coalitions that groupings of nonaligned countries like those meeting at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955. But the tense balance she describes between the army and the PKI in Sukarno’s government doesn’t present a picture of violent provocations by the PKI. On the contrary, she notes that the Indonesian Communists in the 1950s focused on the prospect of a peaceful transition to a parliamentary system, which was more in the tone of Soviet ideas of the moment than an insistence on immediate people’s war against the government.
And she observes that not only the PKI but a wide range of Indonesian political opinion including Sukarno at that period viewed China as a helpful model of transitioning from colonial subjugation to stable independence. Mao’s China cultivated good relations with Sukarno, and by Lovell’s own account the PKI was the main civilian party supporting his government. It was that latter fact that made Sukarno’s government so suspicious in Washington’s eyes. And she explicitly points out that the PKI did not build that kind of military organization for itself that had been a key element of Mao’s politics since 1927. And she notes that meanwhile the US was encouraging regional uprisings against Sukarno.
Her description of the PKI’s advocacy of measures like land reform based on inspiration form China and of Sukarno’s anti-imperialist tone in foreign policy certainly provide helpful context for understanding the hostility of the US and Indonesian conservatives to Sukarno and his PKI allies. She also notes that Sukarno’s move to nationalize Dutch and British investments didn’t please those governments.
But what she judges to be excessively provocative behavior by the PKI didn’t involve anything much resembling the cultish fanaticism of Pol Pot in China or Sendero Luminoso in Peru. Near the end of the struggle by Suharto to gain full control, China did recommend to the PKI to set up fighting units to resist a coup and offered to provide them arms. But the conservative forces just won in Indonesia, including the anti-Communist massacre that produced far more bloodshed than anything the PKI had taken the initiative to cause. And this was a big setback for China’s strategy for extending its international influence during that period.
Maoism in India
China and India had a long-standing rivalry. And India aligned itself more closely with the Soviet Union than with China. India was and remains in a rival relationship with Pakistan, which was generally closer to China. India and China had a military conflict for a month in 1962 over a godforsaken piece of territory called the Northeast Frontier Agency (NEFA). (3) They also had some minor skirmishes in 2020. (4)
China’s ally Pakistan had and still has a running dispute with India over the Kashmir region.
These long-standing tensions doesn’t mean that India was immune to influence from any ideology associated with China. It was just an important part of the conflict. Maoist-inspirted groups never achieved the clout in India that they did at different times in Indonesia, Cambodia, and Nepal. Lovell discusses the role of Maoist activists in what became known as the Naxalite Revolt. Aljazeera provided this summary in 2017 of Maoist groups in India:
The People’s War Group (PWG) was established in 1976 and was active in Andhra Pradesh, while Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) held meetings away in the eastern state of Bihar.
The Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist-Janashakti was formed in 1992. It has presence in three states – Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra. They command a cadre of about 250 to 300.
The current phase of Maoist rebellion began in 2004, when PWG merged with the MCC to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist) or CPI (Maoist). The group is banned in India.
The Tritiya Prastuti Committee (TPC) is a splinter group of the CPI (Maoist) and is based in Jharkhand – a mineral-rich state. It has about 500 cadres. (5)
But the Naxalite Revolt was more notable:
[T]he term—often given as Naxalism or the Naxal movement—has been applied to the communist insurgency itself.
The name Naxalite is derived from the town of Naxalbari (Naksalbari) in far northern West Bengal state in northeastern India, which was the centre of a tribal peasant uprising against local landlords in 1967. Although the rebellion was suppressed, it became the focus of a number of communist-led separatist movements that sprung up in remote, often tribal areas in India—at first primarily in northeastern India but later more widely in other parts of the country. The rise of Naxalism corresponded to the growth of militant communism in India, particularly the creation of the Communist Party of India–Marxist-Leninist (CPI-ML) in 1969, and to the emergence of such rebel groups as the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) and the Peoples’ War Group (PWG). (6)
Lovell’s account features a description of a strange but memorable character, Charu Majumdar (1918–1972). Majumdar was an emaciated ideologue who also turned out to be a charismatic leader in organizing the Naxalite Maoist movement.
Lovell describes him as obsessed with violence and pictures him as a cultish sort, though nothing on the level of Pol Pot. But she describes him as a key figure in Indian Maoism, noting that both his admirers and his enemies referred to him as India’s Mao.
Coming in Part 7 (final): Wrap-up of the review
Notes:
(1) Leinbach, Thomas R., et. al. (2024): Indonesia. Britannica Online 03/01/2024. <https://www.britannica.com/place/Indonesia> (Accessed: 2024-03-03).
(2) The Eisenhower Administration conducted covert operations of dubious constructive values against Sukarno’s government in the 1950s. Prados, John (2006): Safe for Democracxy: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 166-183. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.
(3) Galbraith, Johm Kenneth (1981): A Life in Our Times, 420-442. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
(4) Tian, Yew Lun & Miglani, Sanjeev (2020): China-India border clash stokes contrasting domestic responses. Reuters 06/24/2020. <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-china-analysis-idUSKBN23U1TX/> (Accessed: 2024-05-03).
(5) India’s Maoist rebels: An explainer. Aljazeera 04/26/2017. <https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/4/26/indias-maoist-rebels-an-explainer> (Accessed: 2024-05-03).
(6) Pletcher, Kenneth. Naxalite. Britannica Online 11/03/2023. <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Naxalite> (Accessed: 2024-05-03).
No comments:
Post a Comment