India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

by Ramachandra Guha

  IV

  The Congress also lost in Kerala, to an alliance of the left. In 1963 the Communist Party of India (CPI) had split into two fractions, the newer one called the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM. It was the CPM which had the more dynamic leaders, including E. M. S. Namboo-diripad. Now the CPM won 52 out of the 133 seats in the Kerala State Assembly; the Congress 30, and the CPI 19. The communists came together to form the government, with EMS being sworn in for his second term as chief minister.

  The Congress had previous experience of losing in Kerala but, to its distress, it also lost power in West Bengal, where the party had held undisputed sway since 1947. The winners in that state were the United Front–Left Front alliance, its main members the Bangla Congress (as its name suggests, a breakaway from the mother party), and the CPM. In the assembly elections the Congress won 127 seats out of a House of 280. On the other side, the CPM had 43 and the Bangla Congress 34; joined by an assortment of left-wing groups and independents, they could just about muster a majority.

  The Bangla Congress leader Ajoy Mukherjee became chief minister. The deputy chief minister was Jyoti Basu, an urbane, London-educated lawyer who had long been the civilized face of Bengali communism. Basu and some others thought that their party could shape the government’s policies from within. Other CPM members, notably its chief organizer Promode Dasgupta, thought that the party should never have joined the government at all.8

  Whole books have been written on doctrinal disputes within the Indian communist movement. Here, we need know only that the Communist Party of India split in 1963 on account of two differences: one external to the country, the other internal to it. The two issues were connected. The parent party, the CPI, was closely tied to the apron strings of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; one consequence of this was that it had forsworn armed revolution, if only because the Soviets wanted good relations with the government of India. The breakaway CPM believed in fraternal relations with both the Russian and Chinese communist parties. It saw the Indian state as run by a bourgeois–landlord alliance and parliamentary democracy as mostly a sham; to be used when it suited one’s purposes, and to be discarded when it didn’t.9

  The decision of the CPM to join the government was preceded by a bitter debate, with Jyoti Basu speaking in favour and Promode Dasgupta against. Ultimately the party joined, only to create a great sense of expectation among the cadres. An early gesture was to rename Harrington Road after a hero of the world communist movement, so that at the height of the Vietnam War the address of the United States Consulate was 7 Ho Chi Minh Sarani, Calcutta.

  That was easy enough; but henceforth the decisions became harder. In the spring of 1967 a land dispute broke out in Naxalbari, in the Darjeeling district, where India’s borders touched Nepal on the west and Pakistan on the east, with Tibet and the semi-independent kingdoms of Bhutan and Sikkim not far away. The economy in these Himalayan foothills was dominated by tea plantations, many run by British-owned companies. There was a history of land scarcity, and of conflicts over land – with plantation workers seeking plots of their own, and indigenous sharecroppers seeking relief from usurious landlords.

  In the Naxalbari area, the rural poor were mobilized by a krishak samiti (peasants’ organization) owing allegiance to the CPM. Its leader was a middle-class radical named Kanu Sanyal, whose rejectionof his social milieu in favour of work in the villages had won him a considerable following. From late March 1967 the samiti organized a series of demonstrations against landlords who had evicted tenants and/or hoarded grain. These protests became more militant, leading to skirmishes with the police, which turned violent. A constable was killed; in retaliation, the police fired on a crowd. The peasant leaders decided to take to arms, and soon landlords were being beheaded.

  The protests had their roots in the deeply inequitable agrarian structure of northern Bengal. But they may not have taken the form they did had the CPM not joined the government. Some activists, and perhaps many peasants, felt that now that their party was in power, they were at liberty to set right the feudal structure on their own. To their surprise, the party reacted by taking the side of the forces of law and order. By the late summer of 1967 an estimated 1,500 policemen were on duty in Naxalbari. Kanu Sanyal and his fellow leaders were in jail, while other rebels had taken refuge in the jungle.10

  Naxalbari quickly came to enjoy an iconic status among Indian revolutionaries. The village gave its name to the region and, in time, to anyone anywhere who would use arms to fight the Indian state on behalf of the oppressed and disinherited. ‘Naxalite’ became shorthand for ‘revolutionary’, a term evoking romance and enchantment at one end of the political spectrum and distaste and derision at the other.11

  Among those who approved of the Naxalites were the leaders of communist China. In the last week of June 1967 Radio Peking announced that

  A phase of peasants’ armed struggle led by the revolutionaries of the Indian Communist Party has been set up in the countryside in Darjeeling District of West Bengal State in India. This is the front paw of the revolutionary armed struggle launched by the Indian people under the guidance of Mao Tse-tung’s teachings. This represents the general orientation of the Indian revolution at the present time. The people of India, China and the rest of the world hail the emergence of this revolutionary armed struggle.12

  While the first sparks of revolution were being lit in Naxalbari, another group of Maoists were preparing for action in Andhra Pradesh. The Andhra ‘Naxalites’ were active in two regions: Telengana, where there had been a major communist insurgency in 1946-9, and the Srikakulam district, bordering Orissa. In both regions the areas of dispute were land and forests. In both the main agents of exploitation were the state and landlords, the main victims peasants and (especially) tribals. And in both, communist mobilization focused on free access to forest produce, better wages for labourers and the redistribution of land.

  In Srikakulam the struggle was led by a school teacher named Vempatapu Satyanarayana. He led the tribals in a series of labour strikes, and in seizing grain from the fields of rich farmers and redistributing it to the needy. By the end of 1967 the landlords had sought the help of the police, who came in and arrested hundreds of protesters. Satyanarayana and his men now decided to take to arms. The houses of landlords and moneylenders were raided and their records and papers burnt. The state’s response was to send in more police; by early 1969 there were as many as nine platoons of Special Armed Police operating in the district.

  The struggle in Telengana was led by Tarimala Nagi Reddy. He was a veteran of the communist movement who had spent years organizing peasants and also served several terms in the state legislature. Now, he proclaimed the futility of the parliamentary path; resigning from the assembly as well as from the CPM, he took once more to the villages. He linked up with grass-roots workers in mobilizing peasants to ask for higher wages and for an end to corruption among state officials. Young militants were trained in the use of arms. The district was divided into zones; to each were assigned several dalams or groups of dedicated revolutionaries.13

  Back in West Bengal, the coalition government had fallen apart in less than a year. President’s Rule was imposed before fresh elections in early 1969 saw the CPM substantially increase its tally. It won 80 seats; making it by far the biggest partner in a fresh alliance with the Bangla Congress and others. Ajoy Mukherjee once more became chief minister, the CPM preferring to keep the key Home portfolio and generally play Big Brother.

  These were years of great turmoil in the state, as captured in the titles of books written about the period such as The Agony of West Bengal and The Disinherited State.One axis of conflict was between the centre and the state. The government of India wasworried about the law-and-order situation, the ruling Congress peeved about its own loss of power in West Bengal. The governor became a key player, communicating the concernsof the centre (and, less justifiably, of the Congress) to the local politicians. The assembly was disru
pted regularly; on one occasion, the governor was physically prevented from delivering his customary opening address, having to flee the premises under police escort.14

  A second axis of conflict was between the two main parties in the state government. Where Ajoy Mukherjee and his Bangla Congress tried weakly to keep the machinery of state in place, the CPM was not above stoking street protest and even violence to further its aims. In factories in and around Calcutta, workers took to the practice of gherao – the mobbing of their managers to demand better wages and working conditions. Previously the management had been able to call in the police; the new government, however, insisted that any such stoppage of work had to be referred first to the labour minister (a CPM man). This was an invitation to strike: according to one estimate, there were more than 1,200 gheraos in the first six months of the first UF–LF government.15

  These stoppages created a ripple in the British press, in part because many of the great Calcutta firms were British owned, in part because this had once been the capital of the Raj. ‘West Bengal expects more lawlessness’ ran one headline; ‘Riot stops opening of West Bengal Assembly’, ran another. The response of many factory owners, Indian as well as European, was to shut down their units. Others shifted their business elsewhere, in a process of capital flight that served to displace Calcutta as the leading centre of Indian industry.16

  Apart from capitalists worried about their profits, the prevailing lawlessness also disturbed the chief minister of West Bengal. He saw it as the handiwork of the CPM, whose ministerial portfolios included Land and Labour – where the trouble raged – and Home – where it could be controlled but wasn’t. So in protest against the protests that old Gandhian Ajoy Mukherjee decided to organize a satyagraha of his own. He toured the districts, delivering speeches that railed against the CPM for promoting social discord. Then, on 1 December, he began a seventy-two-hour fast in a very public place – the Curzon Park in south Calcutta. In the rich history of Indian satyagrahas, this must surely be counted as the most bizarre: a chief minister fasting against his own government’s failure to keep the peace.17

  A third axis of conflict was between the CPM and the Naxalites. The latter had now formed a new party, called the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). In district after district, cadres left the parent party to join the new kid on the block; just as, back in 1963–4, they had left the CPI to join the CPM. The rivalries between the two parties were intense; and very often violent. The leader of the CPI(ML), Charu Mazumdar, urged the elimination of landlords, who were ‘class enemies , as well as of CPM cadres, who were ‘right deviationists’. On its part, the CPM raised a private army (euphemistically termed a ‘volunteer force’) to further their version of the ‘people’s democratic revolution’.18

  As in British times, it is the reports of the Intelligence Bureau that best capture the contours of political unrest. One IB report listed 137 ‘major cases of lawlessness in West Bengal’; this over a mere six-week period between 19 March and 4 May 1970. These were classified under different headings. Several pitted two parties against each other: ‘CPM vs CPI’, ‘CPM vs Congress’, ‘CPM vs CPML’. Sometimes the ire was directed against the state:’CPM vs Police Party , for example, or ‘Extremists vs Constables’ , this a reference to an attack on a police station in Malda district in which Naxalites speared a constable to death and looted the armoury. Then there was a case listed as ‘Extremist Students vs Vice Chancellor’, which dealt with an incident in Calcutta’s Jadavpur University, where radical students kept the vice-chancellor captive for several hours before damaging the furniture and scribbling Maoist slogans on the walls of hisoffice.19

  In the villages, Naxalites had hoped to catalyse unrest by beheading landlords; in the city, they thought that the same could be achieved by random attacks on policemen.Kipling had once called Calcutta the ‘City of Dreadful Night’; now the citizens lived in dread by day as well. The shops began closing in the early afternoon; by dusk the streets were deserted.20 ‘Not a day passes in this turbulent and tortured city’, wrote one reporter, ‘without a few bombs being hurled at police pickets and patrols’. The police, for their part, raided houses and college hostels in search of the extremists. In one raid they seized explosives sufficient to make 3,000 bombs.21

  V

  Tamil pride was resurgent in the south; class warfare on the rise in the east. But the Congress consensus was crumbling elsewhere as well. In the state of Orissa the Congress had been routed by a partnership between Swatantra and the party of the local landed elite. Their election campaign had targeted two leading Congress figures, Biju Patnaik and Biren Mitra, for their alleged corruption and opulent lifestyles. It was alleged that, while in power in the state, Patnaik and Mitra hadtaken bribes from businessmen and allotted lucrative government contracts to their friends and relatives.22 A popular slogan, a local variant, so to say, of the one shouted in distant Dehradun, was ‘Biju Biren kauthi/ mada botal jauthi’ (Where there are liquor bottles, there you will find Biju and Biren). On coming to power, the Swatantra–Jana–Congress alliance immediately constituted a commission of inquiry to look into the corruption of the previous government.23

  Challenged by parties of left and right, the Congress also found itself bleeding from inside. In most states in northern India it had won slender majorities. These became prey to intrigue, with the formation of factions by ambitious leaders seeking to become chief minister. In the states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Bihar, Congress governments were formed, only to fall when a group of disgruntled defectors moved across to the other side. In a political lexicon already rich in acronyms a new one entered: ‘SVD’, Samyukta Vidhayak Dal, or the United Legislators Party – as the name suggests, a Rag, Tag and Bobtail outfit, a coalition of legislators left, right and centre, united only by the desire to grab power.

  These SVD governments were made up of the Jana Sangh, socialists, Swatantra, local parties and Congress defectors – this last often the key element that made a numerical majority possible. At one level the SVD phenomena signalled the rise of the lower castes, who had benefited from land legislation but been denied the fruits of political power. In the north, these castes included the Jats in Haryana and UP, the Kurmis and Koeris in Bihar, the Lodhs in MP and the Yadavs in all these states. In the south, they included the Marathas in Maharashtra, the Vokkaligas in Mysore, the Vellalas in Madras and the Reddys and Kammas in Andhra Pradesh. These castes occupied an intermediate position in the social hierarchy, below the Brahmins but above the Untouchables. In many areas they were the ‘dominant caste’, numerically significant and well organized. What they lacked was access to state power. The DMK was chiefly fuelled by such castes, as were the socialists who had increased their vote share in the north. Notably, many of the Congress defectors also came from this strata.

  At another level, the SVD governments were simply the product of personal ambition. Consider the state of Madhya Pradesh. Here, the Congress’s troubles started before the election, when the Rajmata (queen mother) of Gwalior left the party because she had not been consulted in the choice of candidates. With her son Madhavrao she campaigned energetically against the Congress. An intelligence report claimed the Rajmata spent Rs3 million during the election. Although the Congress came back to power, in the Gwalior region the party was wiped out. Now, claimed the report, the Rajmata was planning to spend more money ‘to subvert the loyalties of some Congress legislators . . . [and] bring about the downfall of the new Congress Ministry’.24

  The chief minister, a canny operator named D. P. Mishra, was quite prepared for this. He was wooing defectors from other parties himself – as he wrote to the Congress president, he had ‘to open the door for all who wish to join the Party’.25 Eventually, though, the Rajmata was successful, when the prominent Congress defector Govind Narain Singh got twenty-eight others to leave the party with him. Before the crucial vote in the House, Singh kept his flock sequestered in his home, watching over them with a rifle in c
ase they be kidnapped or otherwise seduced.

  Not sure how long their tenure would last, the SVD government had to make every day count. Or every order, rather. Ministers specified a fee for sanctioning or stopping transfers of officials. Thus ‘orders, particularly transfer orders, were issued and cancelled with bewildering rapidity’. Characteristically, the Jana Sangh wanted the Education portfolio, so that ‘they could build up a permanent following through the primary schools’. They eventually got Home, where they maintained the communal peace by keeping their followers in check, yet took great care ‘to see that no key post in any department went to a Muslim’.26

  Despite the defections and the corruptions they engendered, what transpired after the 1967 elections was indeed what E. P. W. da Costa had called it – India’s second non-violent revolution. One could now take a train from New Delhi to Calcutta, a journey of 1,000 miles right through the country’s heartland, and not pass through a single Congress-ruled state.

  VI

  The late 1960s saw a fresh assertion of regionalist sentiment. Parts of the old Hyderabad state, merged with Andhra Pradesh in 1956, now wanted out. The movement was led by students of the Osmania University, who complained that Andhra was run for the benefit of the coastal elite. The new state they demanded would centre on the neglected inland districts. To be named Telengana, it would have Hyderabad as its capital. Strikes and processions were held, trains stopped and claims advanced of ‘colonization by Andhras’ and ‘police zulm’ (terror).27