In Warangal and Khazipet, the mill and railway workers were incredulous to see this Andhra chap championing their movement. Satyam and his squads successfully defended themselves as well as ordinary Andhra families and students against the well-funded militias backed by the police. Since Satyam’s side was disadvantaged, his idea was “we should be the ones to attack first.” Whenever he got the slightest clue that an anti-Andhra pogrom was being organized, his squads took the hooligans by surprise. Satyam called this strategy “offensive defense.” He revised the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed is he who attacks first, for he shall inherit the earth.”
At a time when Andhras across the region were fleeing or hiding, Maniamma calmly went out to shop for groceries. The shop owner joked with her, “Amma, all your Andhra people are leaving everything and running away. You must have guts to be walking around in the streets!”
She replied, “Andhras may be fleeing, but we Andhras here have the business of organizing the Telangana agitation. If not for us Andhras, where would you be? This whole movement is ours, my old man is working for it day and night. Why would we flee?” The shop owner didn’t know what she was talking about, but he remembered her words, and years later, people in Khazipet were still talking about this incident.
Seetharamayya visited every ten days. He would listen to Satyam’s reports with excitement, with joy, and with a hint of envy. Seetharamayya, whose family was among those buying up Telangana farmland, could hardly take a leading role in this agitation.
As long as Telanganas were killing and raping Andhras, government officials and police were content to join in the violence. But once these mobs were driven away under Satyam’s direction and poor and working people started making off with food and clothes, the authorities suddenly became alert to the “law and order” situation. Indira Gandhi, who had been elected prime minister in January 1966, ordered the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) deployed to Telangana. Shootings occurred in the streets, and all the known leaders of the agitation were rounded up and taken to the Central Jail in Warangal. Satyam, who had been operating clandestinely, was not among them.
So the agitation continued full force. The public at large as well as the police were puzzled. Who was the invisible leader behind this unrest?
*
IN THE SUMMER OF THE same year, Satyam roused the deeply dormant discontent in the Catholic community in Khazipet. He stirred up this population that religiosity had long rendered servile and incapable of confronting the religious authorities who controlled all the public institutions.
Fatima Nagar, the center of the Catholic community in Khazipet, had not existed seventy years earlier. When Father Rolla, an Italian missionary sent by the Pontificium Institutum Missionum Exterarum, arrived there, it was a thick jungle. No people, except for Lambadi tribals.
With his own hands and with the help of the Lambadis, the Father cleared the forest and established the Cathedral of Our Lady of Fatima. Around the church grew Fatima Nagar, the largest neighborhood in Khazipet. Fatima Nagar was a Catholic nagar (neighborhood), all of it owned by the Catholic mission. There the missionaries built two big and prestigious schools: St. Gabriel for boys and Fatima for girls. They also built St. Ann’s Hospital to rival the big government hospital in Warangal and the one in Hanamkonda. The Catholic mission was the biggest private employer in the town of Khazipet.
The families in Fatima Nagar formed an extremely close-knit community of Catholics whose lives revolved around the Church. They went to mass in the cathedral, were educated in the two schools, and worked in either the schools or the hospital. The church leaders had the final say in everyone’s personal affairs: who married whom, what they named their children, what careers they pursued.
In the summer of 1967, Satyam disturbed the calm surface of this nagar when he instigated his colleagues to unionize.
Until Satyam came along, it had never occurred to the teachers to cross the Church authorities. When Satyam first proposed the idea, they covered their ears and ran away. Union was a blasphemous word.
But by and by, furtively, the female teachers began to listen to him. They wanted better salaries but were afraid to upset the Fathers. So they asked Satyam to negotiate for them.
When Satyam first started teaching at St. Gabriel, the Catholic authorities, seeing him as an asset to their institution, had given him benefits no other teacher had. Now he went to the negotiating table as his colleagues’ representative.
The Mother Superior asked him, “Why are you interested in all this? We gave you everything.”
He looked directly at her. “Consider it my madness.”
First came the protest against the predatory Fathers abusing the boys. Then the Khazipet police informed the Fathers that their prize teacher Satyam might have been the one inciting the REC students to strike. This union business was the final straw. The Fathers decided to get rid of him.
But if they were to fire him, he was sure to tell the newspapers about the teachers’ union drive. They were afraid the Church would lose respect if the salaries and working conditions in their institutions were revealed.
Father John was brought back from retirement to handle the situation. His first move was to meet with the teachers, not as a group but in small batches. “Okay, tell me, what are your problems? I will take care of them.” No need to unionize.
Soon a rumor started circulating in Fatima Nagar. People said that Satyam had declared it his mission to convert the Cathedral of Our Lady of Fatima into a union office. “We shall see how this god can hold out here!” This report shocked all who heard it, including Satyam’s colleagues.
Late one evening, Satyam returned from out of town to find Maniamma in distress. A great commotion had occurred in Fatima Nagar that day. It seemed that a teacher had organized a gang to beat up a student, and the students were planning to go on a strike to demand action against that teacher. That teacher, the student had charged, was none other than Satyam.
The entire population of Fatima Nagar united with the students of the two convent schools to call for the firing of this godless, student-abusing teacher. “We have no protection from this monster unless he is removed from Khazipet!” The Khazipet police joined in.
Satyam’s family was ostracized. When they stepped out of their house, they were met with angry glares, with spitting and snarling. No one would speak to them. Shop owners ignored them. The three children were scared.
Satyam went to see Omkar, the CPI(M) leader in Warangal. When Satyam had started organizing teachers, Omkar had encouraged him, thinking it would help win votes in future elections. But when Omkar heard about the situation Satyam found himself in, he was not happy. “You are butting heads with the Catholic management! Do you know how mad that is?”
“Well, what has happened has happened. What am I to do about it now?”
With his feet up on the table and leaning way back in his chair with a cigar in his mouth, Omkar gave a simple order: “Withdraaaaw!”
Denied the party’s support, Satyam returned home. Satyam and Maniamma stayed up all night, fearing an attack on their house.
The next day Satyam left for Secunderabad to meet Iyer, the state secretary of the Telangana Private Schools Union. Iyer was a Communist who had also left the old party. When Satyam explained his predicament, Iyer gave Satyam his assurance. “They cannot touch you.”
While Satyam was visiting Iyer, Carey received word of the trouble his brother was in. He got together with his friend Kumar, who was a big dada (muscleman). They got drunk and rode a borrowed motorcycle to Fatima Nagar. When they arrived, it was already dark. Carey and Kumar strutted through the streets, stopping in front of the bishop’s lodge and calling out, “Hey, you bastards! Come on out of your holes. Let’s see who has the guts to lay hands on my brother. Come on! I challenge you to pluck a single hair from my brother’s crotch.”
The lights came on in every house in Fatima Nagar. People stood at their windows to gawk. The dr
ill teacher at St. Gabriel, a well-built man named Marianna, came out, walked up to Carey, and punched him in the face. Carey, already unstable on his feet, went down. His nose was broken and there was a lot of blood.
As he struggled to get to his feet, Carey spotted Satyam returning home. “Anna [big brother], I challenged those buggers. They don’t know how to fight honorably. They punched me, I fell down, I am bleeding.”
All the assurance Iyer had offered evaporated in an instant. Here was an aggravating circumstance.
When the word got out that the Catholics were harassing Satyam, the people he had organized for the sake of the new party—railway workers and young agricultural laborers—came to his aid.
The following night some fifteen of them paid a visit to drill teacher Marianna’s house. He was not home, so they beat up his brother and left. In the morning, news of the assault on Marianna’s brother spread. Satyam realized the danger he was in. He could not approach the police. It was no longer safe to remain in Khazipet. In the dark of night, the family left Fatima Nagar and went to stay with Carey in Warangal.
At school the next morning no one—no one—would talk to Satyam.
In the evening he went back to Warangal. As he entered the house, Maniamma was waiting for him outside. “Let us go back to our own place. I’d rather die there than stay here.”
While Satyam had been at school, Carey’s wife had returned home in her nurse’s uniform, mad as fire. At the hospital everyone was talking about a badly beaten patient brought in from Fatima Nagar. The story was that he was a Catholic and the brother of a teacher at St. Gabriel, and was mercilessly beaten on the orders of an Andhra. And that Andhra was a Communist.
Carey’s wife, Premalatha, was furious with her husband. “Is this true? Is your brother behind this? Do you know how difficult it is for me already as the wife of an Andhra? Now your brother has to go and do this? What happened? I am sure you had something to do with this! Tell me, did you go there with your useless bastard friend Pratap? Did you two start this nonsense?”
When Premalatha lost her temper, she was hell’s fury. And when a woman acted insolently, Carey showed no tolerance. She punched him, he threw a kitchen knife at her. Maniamma got in the way. The knife gashed her hand. She said nothing and waited quietly for her husband, pressing a cloth on her wound.
Satyam decided to take his family back to Fatima Nagar. The party once again refused to help him. Neither would his neighbors. He stood accused of “swearing to depose God in the church” and of beating up a student and now the drill teacher’s brother. He found no sympathy anywhere.
At school the students surrounded him, shouting slogans and shoving him. Even small children joined in and threw punches at him. As he went home along Fatima Nagar Road, a group of students came at him with iron chains and lashed at him, tearing his shirt, his skin. He was drenched in blood. Maniamma and the kids stood watching from the house. Satyam walked a little distance to a cigarette kiosk, bought a soda, and lit a cigarette.
When he came home, six-year-old Sri Devi asked her father, “What is this, Nanna? They came to beat you up and you didn’t try to run away.”
Maniamma cried, “Masteroo!” (O Teacher!)
“Array, are you a madwoman or a sane woman?” Satyam asked. “What is there to cry about? This is nothing.”
The next day he was given a dismissal letter. In the evening, police came to his house, handcuffed him, and loaded him into their van. Inside, he met three other teachers who had actively supported the union.
As soon as the news of Satyam’s arrest reached the capital, the teachers in every Catholic school in the twin cities went on strike. It lasted six weeks. Manikya Rao, still a member of the old party (whose leaders were now advisers to Indira Gandhi), had been elected a member of the Legislative Council and in that role worked closely with the department of education. He brought pressure on the school to take Satyam back.
Finally the Catholic management yielded. They revoked Satyam’s dismissal but refused to allow him to return to St. Gabriel. “If you want your job, go to Nalgonda”—a district in Telangana where the church had a school.
Satyam was still weighing his options when some engineering college students barged into his house one morning and woke him up. Standing around his bed, they told him what they had heard on the news.
*
ON JULY 5, 1967, AN editorial in the People’s Daily, the newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, declared:
A peal of spring thunder has crashed over the land of India. Revolutionary peasants in the Darjeeling area have risen in rebellion. Under the leadership of a revolutionary group of the Indian Communist Party, a red area of rural revolutionary armed struggle has been established in India.… The Chinese people joyfully applaud this revolutionary storm.
A week earlier, a broadcast on Radio Peking had described this uprising of poor tribal peasants in the northernmost Darjeeling district of West Bengal, centered in the village of Naxalbari, as “the front paw of the revolutionary armed struggle launched by the Indian people.”
Satyam’s sense of the CPI(M)’s betrayal was complete when, like the CPI, it had renounced armed struggle in favor of a parliamentary path. He was not alone. In West Bengal, where CPI(M) was strongest, a man named Charu Majumdar organized a faction opposing this revisionism.
Satyam was disgusted when the party stooped to a new low by allying with bourgeois parties to win elections in West Bengal. And they won, making West Bengal the second state in India where Communists captured the legislature (Kerala was the first, in 1957).
Satyam’s cothinkers in Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal, challenged the new government: “Now you are in power. You control the police force. If there were to be a peasant revolt, to whose aid would you send your police? The landless or the landowners?”
As if to put the party to the test, poor peasants rose up under the leadership of two men, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal, based in a village called Naxalbari. Tea workers from all over Darjeeling launched a strike in support. Charu Majumdar joined the revolt, supporting it from the city.
Sure enough, the CPI(M) government massacred the peasants. In a matter of weeks, the Naxalbari revolt was stamped out.
Declaring “Naxalbari will never die! From its embers will rise a thousand Naxalbaris,” Charu Majumdar went underground to organize a new movement.
The REC students came at once to see Satyam. He was still in bed. “Wake up, wake up!” they said. “Our time has come. We must begin.”
They couldn’t wait to abandon their bright futures, to pick up weapons and go into the jungles. All the engineering and medical students, the mill workers and railway workers and peasant youth Satyam had organized in Warangal for the CPI(M) became Naxalites—adherents of the peasant-guerrilla line put in practice in Naxalbari—that morning.
Various Communists, veterans of the Telangana revolt who had come to Warangal with their followers waiting for an opportunity to start an armed revolt, were jump-started by the news of Naxalbari. They joined together in the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP).
Meanwhile, in Srikakulam district, on the northern border of Andhra, Satyam’s university friends Panchadi and Tejeswara Rao were way ahead. They convened the Naxalbari Solidarity Committee. They sent a representative off to Calcutta to ask Charu Majumdar to be their leader and seek his guidance for their plan to start an armed revolt in Srikakulam district. They also sent a message to Satyam: “There will be a meeting soon.” He was ready to put all else aside as soon as this connection with the Calcutta comrades was made.
As Satyam waited, Seetharamayya’s daughter Karuna and his son-in-law Ramesh, who had both recently finished medical school, would come to Satyam’s house three, four times a day and pester him. “Where is the armed struggle? Naxalbari happened in Bengal, but there is no movement here.” The delay was unbearable for them.
“Soon, soon,” Satyam told them. “We are waiting for a message.”
A ninet
een-year-old brahmin REC student named Mallikarjuna Sharma, who had already quit his studies, sulked and pouted. He harassed Satyam day and night, not letting him sleep. “Sundarayya promised armed struggle. He betrayed us, and now you, too? When do we start?”
“O my husband!” Satyam told him fondly. “Just because you and I want it, it is not going to happen this minute.”
The RCP called an emergency meeting in Warangal. The meeting was held at midnight in a village far away from Warangal city called Peddammagadda. There, inside a large thatched meetinghouse in the madiga goodem, students, railway workers, mill workers, and laborers gathered in secret.
While they all supported Naxalbari, many were opposed to the launching of an immediate armed revolt in Srikakulam. Satyam and Seetharamayya were the only two leaders who disagreed.
Representing the majority was Chandra Pulla Reddy. He arrived fashionably late, flanked by two glamorous girls who looked like cinema stars. As a respected veteran of the Telangana revolt, he spoke first, giving a long, repetitious speech. When the first rays of daylight appeared in the sky, he was still talking. “We cannot fight in the rain, we must have training, we must first occupy land and then arm ourselves, this is our Telangana experience.”
When he finished, Satyam had only a few minutes to say a few carefully chosen words in favor of taking up arms immediately.
Pulla Reddy was annoyed. “All right, then. If the daughter-in-law needs to pop the baby, what can the mother-in-law do? Go ahead and start your insurrection!” The cinema stars giggled. Pulla Reddy was alluding to the traditional authority of the mother-in-law (attha) over her daughter-in-law. The attha can stop her daughter-in-law from eating, from sleeping, from relaxing, but how can she stop her from going into labor?
Satyam was ready with his reply: “The relation between a comrade like Pulla Reddy and the revolution cannot and should not be that between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. Pulla Reddy is not that attha. He must lead, he must support, he must encourage.”
After that meeting, the RCP split into two splinters, each one claiming the same name: CPI(M-L)—M-L for “Marxist-Leninist.” They were distinguished by two additional letters, the initials of their respective leader’s name.
Ants Among Elephants Page 27
