Many saw it as a repeat of the infamous 1975 Emergency. After all, it was not very long ago that Binayak Sen, a doctor and an activist working in Chhattisgarh had been incarcerated for eighteen months on charges of being a Maoist. Scores of other people had been put behind bars on similar charges. Many others were wary that they would meet the same fate. And subsequently, towards the end of 2010, a local court in Chhattisgarh found Binayak Sen guilty of sedition and sentenced him to life imprisonment. These were indeed dark times. Across the world, personalities like the political activist-philosopher Noam Chomsky and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen had condemned Sen's arrest and subsequent sentencing. But it would not move the government. On the other hand, the tribals suffered terribly, caught as they were, between the Maoists and the State. In many pockets, though, the tribals supported the Maoists. In their areas of influence, the local population acted as the eyes and ears of the Maoists. As a senior police officer who had served in the Naxal-affected Chandauli district of eastern Uttar Pradesh said: 'The line between a Maoist and a tribal has blurred. So, the Adivasi you saw plucking dead tree branches during the day might turn into a gun-toting Naxal in the night'
The void created by the State had been filled by the Maoists.
1The Hindu, 7 May 2010.
2A survey conducted by AIIMS.
II
HISTORY'S HARVEST
To remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born is to remain a child.
—Cicero
Everything repeats itself and everything will be reincarnated, And my dreams will be your dreams.
—Arseny Tarkovsky
Sometimes history acts like a housewife. It whispers in the ears of the present what bearing events of the past could have on the future. It is up to the present to pay heed to it. But those who represented India's present always acted as arrogant husbands. They never listened. They never took note. In the case of the Maoist insurgency, the writing on the wall was clear even before India's present could take shape, even before India could attain what it thought was freedom from its colonial masters. The colonial masters indeed went away but for the poor of India freedom remained elusive.
The handful of men and women who hid in the bushes near a field in a remote village in West Bengal on a hot May morning in 1967 would know it in a few minutes' time. Spread over an area of about 500 sq km, the Naxalbari area of West Bengal was covered by three police stations: Naxalbari, Kharibari and Phansidewa. The Naxalbari area lay along Nepal and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and was inhabited mostly by tribals from the Santhal, Oraon, Munda and Rajbansi communities. Most of them were landless peasants, who worked on a contractual basis on the land owned by zamindars. It was not a peaceful coexistence. The landlords provided seed and agricultural tools like ploughs but would take a lion's share of the crop. The tribal peasants after working like oxen in the fields would not even get enough to eat. Disputes over the sharing of crops were very common.
In the mid '60s India was facing a severe food crisis. Millions of people were affected by the shortage of food. Many died of starvation. The government, as usual, refused to accept that people in independent India were dying because of lack of food. When the situation turned grim, the babus in New Delhi called these deaths a result of malnutrition. More than 40 years later, New Delhi is still in denial mode. Whenever starvation deaths are reported from Orissa and even from non-Maoist areas like Rajasthan, the officials go to great lengths to show that the deaths had in fact occurred due to, say, cholera or diarrhoea. What they do not know or will not admit is that these diseases kill because the body of the victim is badly weakened by lack of food. Even as it sends missions to the moon and boasts of being a nuclear power, India has so far failed to ensure that nobody goes hungry. There have been cases where foodgrains were left out in the open to rot while the godowns of the state-run Food Corporation of India were rented out to liquor companies to store alcohol.
So, yes, in the '60s the cultivable land in the country was owned by a small group of people, mainly big landlords. According to a survey3 of land ownership conducted around that time, it was revealed—and these were termed as conservative estimates—that 40 per cent of the land was owned by only five per cent of rural households. Life was a constant challenge for India's landless poor. On top of it, famines struck across India, in states like Bihar and Madhya Pradesh.
To tide over the food crisis, the government envisaged and implemented the Green Revolution. While it did increase India's foodgrain output, the Green Revolution also created further disparities in society. It benefited only those farmers who could afford to buy chemical fertilisers and modern agricultural equipment.
It took the government two years to realise this. Speaking at a conference of state chief ministers in New Delhi in 1969, the then Union home minister Y.B. Chavan warned that the Green Revolution may cease to remain green if it were not accompanied by measures for social justice.4
In Naxalbari, long before those men and women hid themselves in bushes on that hot May morning, a man had been closely examining these developments. From the early '60s in his hometown in Siliguri, the bespectacled man would lock himself for hours in his room and read of a revolution brought about in neighbouring China by a peasants' army led by Mao Tse-tung. The man was deeply influenced by Mao's ideas and believed that similar conditions existed in India wherein militant peasants and youth could be mobilised to overthrow the government through armed struggle.
Like his hero, Charu Mazumdar also believed that war was nothing but politics with bloodshed. He particularly liked to quote one statement from Mao: 'Revolution is not a dinner party, nor an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly, and modestly. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.'
By 1965, whatever he read and thought had taken shape and in the villages of north Bengal, young men inspired by Charu Mazumdar's ideology were propagating it and organising the poor and landless peasantry.
Earlier, the Communist Party of India (CPI) had split, and a more radical Communist Party of India (Marxist) had taken shape. But even within the CPI (M), there were comrades who were disillusioned with the party's politics and thought that the party had become revisionist. (The word 'revisionist' is perhaps the most commonly used term of censure within the Communist movement, and when one group accuses another of retreating from a particular revolutionary position, it dubs it as revisionist.) Such comrades got in touch with Charu Mazumdar. He in turn set down conditions for those who wanted to join him and there were four prerequisites. First: Acceptance of Mao Tse-tung as the leader of the world revolution and his thoughts as the highest form of Marxism-Leninism of that era. Two: Belief in the view that a revolutionary situation existed in every corner of India. Three: Area-wise seizure of power as the only path for taking forward the Indian revolution. Four: Guerilla warfare as the only means of advancing the revolution.
Charu Mazumdar had an invincible belief that revolution could be brought about by the formation of underground organisations that would then wage a war against the State and bring it to its knees. He remained dismissive about 'open' organisations such as trade unions or farmers' associations. Backing him were two other prominent leaders of that area: Kanu Sanyal, who had very strong organisational skills and was very popular among the tea workers in the area, and Jangal Santhal, a popular tribal leader who unsuccessfully contested the 1967 election, coming second only to the winning Congress candidate.
With their backing, three cultivators supported by a few CPI (M) party workers armed with crude weapons lifted the entire stock of paddy from a landlord's granary, without leaving a single grain for him.
In the next few months the Communist cadres forcibly occupied land, seized granaries and burnt land records. Any resistance was brutally put down.
The landlords acted swiftly, getting rid of those who worked
on their fields. In some cases the landlords took the help of the police. This would be another constant recurrence in the history of independent India: the police mostly acted and worked for the influential and rich or their political masters.
This is what the men and women who had hidden themselves in the bushes realised. A few days earlier, some peasants had gone to work in the fields. In the evening they did not return. A day later, other men went to the fields and they also failed to return home. So, some men and women hid in the nearby bushes to see what was happening. No sooner had another lot of men begun to till the fields than a police party appeared and took the men away. When confronted the police said that the landlord didn't want them to work in his fields and had asked the police to arrest them. This aroused a great anger in the peasants and it was then that they organised themselves into underground squads like Charu Mazumdar's followers had wanted.
Soon, a bloody war was to follow that would make Naxalbari the foundation stone of the Maoist movement in India and also give it a name: the Naxal movement. On 23 May 1967, Inspector Sonam Wangdi led a police party to arrest the leaders behind the agitation. In a confrontation with angry tribals, some arrows were shot at Wangdi, leading to his instant death.
Two days later, a bigger police contingent arrived. Men and women armed with whatever they could lay their hands on came out to confront the police. In the ensuing confrontation, the police fired at the tribals killing nine, including six women and two children.
A full-fledged war was now on.
China was quick to respond to the happenings in Naxalbari. An editorial in People's Daily, the mouthpiece of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, termed the happenings in Naxalbari 'a peal of spring thunder'. It further added: '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. This is a development of tremendous significance for the Indian people's revolutionary struggle.'
But back home, Charu Mazumdar's actions irked the CPM leadership. During party meetings he was termed as mentally sick and even accused of being a police agent. Some said he was working at the behest of New Delhi to destabilise the Communist–led United Front government in West Bengal. Others branded him an American agent. But undeterred by this criticism, the Naxalbari group of Communists went about doing their job, according to the principles laid down by Mao. In mid 1968, Kanu Sanyal, Jangal Santhal and another comrade Sourin Bose went to China along with two others to receive military and political training from the Communist Party of China.
In 1969, on Lenin's birth anniversary, Charu Mazumdar announced the formation of a new Communist party—the CPI (Marxist–Leninist) or the CPI (ML).
Meanwhile, the Congress government led by Indira Gandhi decided to send in the army and tackle the problem militarily. A combined operation called Operation Steeplechase was launched jointly by military, paramilitary and state police forces in West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.
In Kolkata, Lt General J.F.R. Jacob of the Indian Army's Eastern Command received two very important visitors in his office in October 1969. One was the army chief General Sam Manekshaw and the other was the home secretary Govind Narain. Jacob was told of the Centre's plan to send in the army to break the Naxals. More than 40 years later, Jacob would recall5 how he had asked for more troops, some of which he got along with a brigade of para commandos. When he asked his boss to give him something in writing, Manekshaw declined, saying, 'Nothing in writing,' while secretary Narain added that there should be no publicity and no records.
In 72 days, the Naxalbari upsurge was over. Most of the guerilla leaders were arrested while Charu Mazumdar continued to evade arrest.
The China factor played a big role in the failure of the Naxalbari struggle. The Naxal leaders had come up with a slogan: 'China's Chairman [Mao] is our Chairman.' The Chinese prime minister Chou En-lai later spoke of this as 'a folly' to guerilla emissary Sourin Bose who had gone to China to seek help once again. While criticising Charu Mazumdar's policy of class annihilation, Chou En-lai also pointed out that China's leader could never motivate the people of India in the same way as a leader from their own soil: they needed to have their own Mao. That was why, he said, the revolution had failed to move Indians in the way it ought to have done.
Charu Mazumdar realised that the movement had failed in Naxalbari. Now they sought a new area from where the revolution could be brought about and the power struggle could go on. For this purpose the Naxalbari revolutionaries chose Midnapore. At that time the largest district in India, Midnapore lay next to the industrial and railway hub of Kharagpur, and was known for its revolutionary activities during British rule. It was there that the young revolutionary Khudiram Bose was born in 1889, and later became the youngest revolutionary to face the gallows at the age of 19 for a failed assassination attempt on a British magistrate.
In Midnapore, the guerillas were led by a Dalit leader, Santosh Rana, who had a Master's degree from Kolkata University and was actively involved in deep Red politics. He was helped by another student leader Asim Chatterjee popularly known as Kaka, who had a huge following in Kolkata colleges, and like most of the Naxalbari leaders had been expelled from the CPI (M).
Under the guidance of Santosh Rana, who only worked upon strategies laid down by Charu Mazumdar, a large number of squad actions were planned and executed. The first one against a landlord Khagen Senapati was led by Santosh Rana himself on 21 September 1969. The most spectacular action took place on 1 October 1969 at a village where thousands of armed tribals attacked a landlord's house. He made good his escape but his house was ransacked.
But even this could not be sustained for long. The losses among the guerilla cadre were too many, far more than those sustained by the class they were seeking to annihilate. This led to frustration among the leadership. In a letter to Charu Mazumdar, published in the CPI (ML)'s Bengali mouthpiece Deshabrati, Asim Chatterjee expresses it clearly. It so happened that a few comrades were returning after a squad action. On their way, they were killed by militant goons hired by a powerful landlord. 'The comrades gave their lives. It is unbearable asking comrades to lay down their lives like this. I want to know where we are making mistakes.' Later another prominent leader, Satyanarayana was to say in an interview given to the Hindustan Standard on 20 May 1974, We now hold that annihilation of individual enemies is nothing but individual or squad terrorism and has nothing [in] common with Marxism-Leninism. It turns the masses into silent spectators and robs the revolution of mass support.'
The Naxalbari movement might have failed but it inspired a whole generation of youth and served as an initiation to radical politics. In fact, the late '60s were heady days for the youth all across the world. In China a cultural revolution was in the offing. America was receiving a beating in Vietnam. On the streets of Kolkata, angry, restless youth were hurling crude bombs at police vans. Students from affluent families, studying in prestigious institutions were bidding goodbye to lucrative careers and going to the forests of Bihar and elsewhere to participate in the revolution. For such youth in India, Naxalbari became the shining light.
Apart from Naxalbari, the leaders of the current Maoist movement were inspired by the sacrifices of their predecessors, first in Telangana and then in Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh. In fact, the movement in Telangana took shape even before India became free.
In the Telangana region of the then princely state of Hyderabad, popular sentiment was against the Nizam, the ruler of the state. Like most of the feudal lords of British India, the Nizam ruled with an iron fist, oppressing the people he ruled. The administrative structure was feudal. The ruler and the ruling class were Muslims, the population was Hindu. Forced labour was common and the people suffered severe oppression.
Since the Nizam had banned Communist parties, the Communist leaders got together under the banner of the Andhra Mahasabha in 1946. The Niz
am tried to suppress it but was met with stiff resistance by peasants, who rose against the Nizam under the guidance of the Communist rebels. Within a year of the insurrection, the three districts of Nalgonda, Warangal and Khammam came under the control of the insurgents. A peasants' guerilla army was raised which comprised 5,000 members. The feudal landlords were driven away and their land seized.
Feudalism is one big factor that contributed to the rise of Naxalism since the beginning. In his jail diary, Naxal ideologue and poet Varavara Rao describes the plight of women working as labourers in the fields of a feudal landlord, Visunuru Deshmukh. Once the women begged him to let them off for a while to enable them to breastfeed their children who lay outside the fields. He is believed to have ordered them to fill a few earthen pots with their milk. Then he snatched away the pots and threw that milk over his fields.
By mid 1948, about one-sixth of the Telangana region had come under the control of Communist guerillas. In 1948, the Indian state sent its army to tackle the Nizam and overthrow him. Hyderabad was made a part of the Indian dominion.
With the the entry of the Indian Army in Telangana in September 1948, the Communist rebels were faced with several questions. Should the armed struggle be continued as a war of liberation against the troops? Who would then be the allies in such a struggle? Till now the middle-level peasants and the small capitalists had been supporting the anti-Nizam struggle; but now would they support the Indian government hoping for a better future in the Indian Union? This created a division among the Communists. While one section favoured the withdrawal of the armed struggle, the other wanted it to continue against the Indian Army. In 1951, the Communist rebels withdrew the struggle, leaving the poor sections of the rural population in the lurch. This division led to the military weakness of the rebels.
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