The recent surrenders of senior Maoist leaders Mallojula Venugopal and Aasanna have provoked a complex debate about the political meaning of capitulation. For the movement that once proclaimed itself the revolutionary vanguard of India’s oppressed classes, this development is not unexpected. The government branded Maoism as a law and order problem; its efforts are a new phase in the counterinsurgency campaign – and a turning point in the dialectic of revolutionary politics.

Surrender, when viewed through a Marxist-Leninist lens, is not a tactical withdrawal or a personal choice. It’s a symptom of a deeper crisis of political imagination. The question is not why individuals surrender but why a movement that claims a historical mission toward revolution reached such a point of dissolution, instead of crafting alternative modes of political survival.

The Naxalbari uprising of 1967, emerging from a sense of disillusionment with parliamentary gradualism, had quickly evolved into a political organisation that differed from the existing Left parties of the time. It was hailed by its founders as India’s Jinggangshan – a red base in the making. Over the decades, the movement spread across central India’s tribal belt, adopting the strategy of sustaining a protracted people’s war. Its ideology rested on characterising India as a semi-feudal, semi-colonial society – a formulation borrowed from Mao Zedong’s analysis of 1930s China.

It is also important to recognise that this was the period when capitalist production was starting to become the prevailing mode of production in India. A host of academicians had then plunged into debate, popularly known as the mode of production debate, which concluded that India is no longer a feudal or semi-feudal country.

Agrarian class differentiation, the penetration of capitalism into rural areas, the expansion of commodity relations and India’s integration into global capitalism reshaped the countryside. The Maoist framework, however, remained static, unable to reconcile persistent peasant poverty with the dynamics of capitalist development.

Also read: What the Latest Maoist Surrenders Mean for the Party

Its sectarian theoretical understanding created rigidity in practice. The movement swung between strategies – from ‘annihilation of the class enemy’ to mass mobilisation against the state – and ultimately settled on military struggle, even as its political relevance waned. Under such conditions, surrender becomes not merely a defeat imposed by the state but a structural failure of adaptation.

There are crises in every movement for change. Lenin’s response to crisis offers a striking contrast. When faced with the German invasion and the disintegration of the old Russian imperial army in 1917-18, which left the Red Army in a precarious position, he argued for signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918), despite its humiliating concessions. His reasoning was unequivocal: “To carry on a revolutionary war now would mean putting the Soviet Republic at the mercy of the German imperialists.” For Lenin, the preservation of the party and the revolution outweighed territorial loss. Tactical retreat, he insisted, was justified when it safeguarded the political existence of the revolutionary movement.

This tactical foresight was not cowardice but dialectical realism that any political movement requires. Lenin understood that survival meant the possibility of future struggle. The Bolshevik retreat was followed by gradual consolidation of power, economic reconstruction and renewed revolutionary initiative. India’s Maoists, by contrast, lacked such foresight. Instead of launching a unilateral political initiative – a declared ceasefire, reorganisation as a legal political entity and an appeal to the masses – they have allowed the state to dictate the terms of their retreat. Similarly, Gandhi’s experiments with tactics and strategy offer another point of comparison.

Thus, the recent surrenders of senior Maoist leaders represent not a Leninist withdrawal, but a collapse under state pressure, which, in a sense, resembles Tsarist liquidation. The Tsar sought to annihilate the Narodniks through repression, yet they survived. Many later evolved into the Socialist Revolutionary Party and contributed to the revolutionary ferment of 1917. Repression may destroy lives, but rarely ideas. The real danger for India’s Maoists is not physical elimination, but ideological extinction through political neutralisation.

Surrender also carries psychological and social consequences. Once disarmed, cadres face stigma, alienation and purposelessness. A movement lacking any coherent policy to reintegrate ageing comrades or veterans accelerates demoralisation and decay. Revolutionary organisation must care for its own, not abandon them to state bureaucracy.

Also read: CPI (Maoist) Top Leader, Who Stirred a Row With ‘Lay Down Arms’ Remark, Surrenders in Gadchiroli With 60 Comrades

From a broader class perspective, surrender marks a moment when one side loses the capacity for organised representation. The working class and peasantry lose a part of their political expression. Lenin cautioned: “The proletariat needs the truth, and there is nothing so harmful to the cause as illusions.” The illusion here is that the state’s victory over Maoism equals the end of radical politics. In reality, the contradictions that produced it persist – and will reappear in new, perhaps fragmented, forms.

The Indian state’s policy of surrender and rehabilitation is built upon depoliticisation. Once surrendered, former cadres are absorbed into programmes designed for surveillance and political inactivity. A vibrant democracy requires organised dissent, but the Indian state, in its current phase, doesn’t provide such opportunities. Though it thinks it can, suppressing organised revolutionary politics does not create stability; it breeds cynicism and despair.

To understand why surrender has become the dominant mode of exit for many who were otherwise ready to sacrifice their lives for a socially common cause, one must examine the Maoists’ internal crisis of strategy as well as the crisis of theory on which their programme of action is based. Lenin’s method demanded a “concrete analysis of concrete conditions”. By clinging to obsolete categories, the Maoists alienated the working class and urban poor, confining themselves to remote forests.

Lenin’s conception of the vanguard party emphasised flexibility, not dogma. “A party,” he wrote, “is the vanguard of a class, and its duty is to lead the masses and not merely to reflect the average political level of the masses.” Leadership, for Lenin, meant foresight and initiative. The Indian Maoists have been reactive, not proactive. Had they, at the height of their strength, declared a ceasefire and sought political legitimacy, they might have broadened their support base and sustained their mass appeal.

In India, Lenin’s dictum of party organisation could have meant constructing local institutions of people’s governance, cooperatives and cultural movements, alongside participation in legal politics. Mao Zedong, during the Yan’an period, stressed the mass line – to draw from the masses and return to them in a continuous process of consultation and education. A revolutionary movement that abandons this dialectic becomes isolated – and isolation leads inevitably to surrender.

For this, the Maoists should bear the responsibility. Revolutionary movements must transform their organisational form to changing conditions. Their task is to build new institutions of class power rather than remain trapped in the romanticism of militarism. By clinging to guerrilla warfare, the Maoists foreclosed the possibility of building new institutions of class power. A political settlement that preserves ideological survival and enables organisational restructuring would benefit the movement.

The Leninist principle of combining legal and extra-legal work is also instructive: “The combination of legal and illegal work is one of the most difficult, but also one of the most important tasks of our Party.” For the Maoists, this could have provided a bridge – engaging in legal politics allowed under the constitution while maintaining ideological integrity. The failures of the parliamentary Left should not lead to rejecting parliamentary forms altogether, but to synthesising mass politics with revolutionary purpose. A study of the failures of the parliamentary Left is a separate topic altogether.

A constructive alternative would be to facilitate the transformation of the Maoist movement into a legal political entity – one that continues to represent marginalised communities within a constitutional framework. Such a party would expand ideological diversity. This would require amnesty, constitutional guarantees and legal protection for political activity – an approach grounded not in repression but transformation.

At a deeper level, surrender and rehabilitation expose the failures of both the state and the movement. The state reduces politics to policing; the Maoists reduce revolution to individual or small-scale militancy. Both forget that politics, as Gramsci reminds us, is the art of hegemony – of moral and intellectual leadership. By neglecting ideological education and cultural work, the Maoists ceded this terrain to the bourgeois order.

To regain relevance, a revolutionary movement must once again root itself among the masses –not as their military guardian, but as their political representative. It must rebuild trade unions, student fronts, farmers’ associations and cultural institutions. The immediate task is not insurrection, but reconstruction. As Lenin advised after 1905: “It is not enough to be a revolutionary and an advocate of socialism… One must know how to be the patient weaver of new revolutionary organisation.”

The surrender of leaders like Venugopal and Aasanna thus signifies not the end of revolutionary politics, but the exhaustion of a particular form of political activity. Their capitulation reflects a failure to integrate constitutional and extra-constitutional strategies. To survive, revolutionaries must evolve – not ideologically surrender, but tactically transform with course-correction as a part of their programme.

Also read: Has the Maoist Group Split Into Two? And Is One of These Factions Surrendering Arms?

No government can extinguish an idea. What it can destroy are the organisational vessels that give it life. Once those dissolve, ideas drift unanchored. Hence, the task is to preserve organisation in whatever form possible – for, as Lenin observed, “Organisation is the weapon of the weak against the strong.” Without it, even the most passionate ideology disintegrates.

In conclusion, the surrender of Maoist leaders should neither be celebrated as peace nor dismissed as betrayal. It is a dialectical moment – a sign of failed adaptation. The true tragedy lies not in surrender itself, but in the absence of political imagination capable of turning defeat into transformation. A movement that once sought to overthrow the state could, through foresight, have become a radical political force within it.

The circumstances today call for neither blind militancy nor passive resignation, but creative reconstruction. Only by transforming military defeat into political reinvention can the revolutionary project preserve its historical continuity. To survive is not to surrender – it is to reorganise for another stage in the long struggle for emancipation.

I.V. Ramana Rao is part of the editorial team at The Wire Telugu.

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