Naxalism-- Views from the other side
Sumanta Banerjee
THE NAXALITES: THROUGH THE EYES OF THE POLICE. Select notifications from the Calcutta Police Gazette. 1967-1975., Edited by Ashoke Kumar Mukhopadhyay; Dey’s Publishing, Kolkata, India; 2006; P. 215; ISBN:81-295-0696-3
This book appears at the right time. The Indian state is today besieged again by the spectre of Naxalism – in its new incarnation as the CPI(Maoist). The Maoists hold sway over a long stretch of territory that is wider than the isolated pockets in India that were occupied by their predecessors, the Naxalites, in 1967-75 – the period covered by the present book. Selections from the contemporary police records brought together within the covers of the book, pose three challenges for the policy makers. One, the state can adopt the short-term measure of intensive police operations to suppress a localized Naxalite insurgency (in which it was successful in Calcutta in the 1970s). Two, even after such suppression in one part of the country, the state will continue to face similar insurgencies in other parts (as evident from the spread of the armed Maoist movement from Bihar in the north, across parts of Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, and down to Andhra Pradesh and Tamilnadu in the south during the last several decades). Three, instead of resorting to police operations, the state can use the democratic and humanitarian option of addressing the basic concerns of the people that have given rise to the Maoist insurgency, and enter into a dialogue with the Maoists.
At least three books, looking at the Naxalite movement in Bengal through the eyes of the police, have appeared in the market till now – one by Amiya Kumar Samanta, who was a senior officer in the Intelligence Branch of the West Bengal police in 1974-75, later to become the Deputy Inspector General of Police in the Central Reserve Police Force of the state; the second by Ranjit Kumar Gupta, who was the Commissioner of Police of Calcutta from 1970 till 1971, later to become the Inspector General of Police of West Bengal. Both have given their versions of the tumultuous events of that period, as experienced by them in their official positions. Their accounts are often marred by a rather biased interpretation based on a selective approach, and are therefore – despite full of historically important data – likely to be judged as partisan. The last one, published very recently and therefore would be mentioned here without any comments, is titled Maoist `Spring Revolution'. Its author Arun Prosad Mukherjee was posted in Naxalbari in 1967 as a senior police officer.
The present book stands out in contrast from these two books, since the editor Ashoke Mukhopadhyay is no stakeholder in the controversy over the merits or demerits of the Naxalite movement. He is a corporate communications professional, but likes to spend his spare time on researching and delving into old police records – pertaining both to the pre-Independence militant nationalist movement and the Naxalite period. It is this academic interest of his that has led him to collect the relevant documents of that period from the Calcutta police archives, and bring them out in the shape of the present book. He refrains from attempting any personal interpretation of the events, and prefers to leave it to the readers to draw their own conclusions from the various notifications that were periodically issued by the authorities in the Calcutta Police Gazette (CPG), a daily official publication that was intended for circulation among all police officers and their subordinates. In his introduction, Mukhopadhyay humbly acknowledges that he is not claiming to uncover secret documents from Home (Political) files, “which might have tracked and recorded various aspects of the Naxalite movement in the city and related individuals in a more insightful manner.” The CPG, on the other hand, is a public document, circulated far and wide among police cadres at all levels. The contents of the daily issues of CPG of those days (1967-75) reveal, in Mukhopadhyay’s words: “ the various contours of the police policy, ranging from an initially defensive mindset to a subsequent flurry of activities in building up a team to cope with the crisis…”
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The CPG notifications, as quoted in the book, do indeed throw an interesting light on the social and political life of Calcutta of those days. The city was passing through a historically critical period. The 1967 state assembly elections in West Bengal for the first time broke the monopoly of Congress rule and in March that year brought to power a united front government consisting of ex-Congressmen and Left parties. Soon after, in Naxalbari, peasants under the leadership of dissident sections of the CPI(M) (who were soon to break away and form a separate party) occupied lands on which they had been working without getting their due share from the landlords, cancelled hypothecary debts which had bound them to work for the landlords without wages, and formed armed groups to drive out the landlords and set up parallel administration. Alarmed by the turn of events, the newly elected chief minister Ajoy Mukherjee (an ex-Congressman) issued a statement on May 16, where referring to “disturbing reports” of forceful occupation of land, he said that his government was “determined to take strong steps against the law-breakers and instructions have been issued to the police and concerned Government officials to take appropriate action in each such case.” Following this, a police force raided a village in Naxalbari on May 23, and in a clash with armed peasants a policeman was killed. Two days later, the police retaliated by firing upon a crowd of villagers in the area killing nine, including six women and two children. On May 30, the CPG published the May 16 instructions of Ajoy Mukherjee for general guidance of the police. From then onwards, there was no looking back, and the CPG became a regular medium for conveying reports of daily happenings in Calcutta in the aftermath of the Naxalbari uprising and for issuing necessary guidelines for the police to tackle the situation.
As events began to move at a fast pace from the late 1960s, the role of the Calcutta police acquired a new dimension. Although till 1968, Calcutta remained comparatively free from violent Naxalite activities (which were mainly concentrated in the countryside), increasing trade union agitations in the city kept the Calcutta police busy – as evident from the CPG circulars. Further, following the dismissal of the United Front Government by the Centre in November 1967, a civil disobedience movement by the ousted United Front all throughout 1968 invited police intervention. Fresh elections in February 1969 brought back the United Front to power. In April the same year, the Naxalites officially announced the formation of their party – the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) – in Calcutta. Henceforward, Calcutta was to become the centre from where they began to publish and circulate their literature. Significantly, one of the first anti-Naxalite steps to be taken by the Calcutta police was to forfeit these publications - in accordance with orders issued by the Delhi administration in July that year. The CPG of September 18, 1969 issued a notification by the Deputy Commissioner of police of the Special Branch, Calcutta, quoting the orders forfeiting copies of LIBERATION, the Naxalite monthly organ carrying articles by Charu Mazumdar and others. Thus, from the very beginning of the anti-Naxalite operations, the Calcutta police targeted both the communication media and the armed wing of the rebels. The latter became the main threat in 1970, following the first congress of the CPI(M-L) in May that year, which called upon its followers to launch attacks on the police, seize their arms and build up an arsenal. The response to this call by the youth in the city caught the Calcutta police off-guard. The CPG issues of 1970 make interesting reading – revealing the extent of widescale attacks on policemen and the panic that gripped the force. Almost every issue mourned the death of policemen, either stabbed or gunned down or killed in bomb explosions. By the end of October 1970, at least twenty five policemen were killed, and trhee hundred and fifty injured in these urban actions. Their bosses while expressing sympathy for the loss of their colleagues, also berated them for negligence of duties. Thus R.K. Gupta, the newly appointed Commissioner of Police (who was to write later a book on the Naxalite movement that has been referred to at the beginning of this review), in one his orders complained: “Very often it is found that officers and men on duty though equipped with firearms, gas guns, steel helmets, etc., they stand or sit in such a way that the behaviour of the force betrays lack of alertness. In the morning it is a common sight that picket force sits on the ledge of he premises or on the footpath reading newspapers and books.” He then ordered that “the officers on whom the responsibility of keeping the deployed force alert, as indicated in course of instructions, do their jobs properly.” (CPG, July 28, 1970). Analyzing the state of affairs of the Calcutta police during those days, Ashoke Mukhopadhyay, the compiler of the present volume rightly points out: “In fact all the seven signs of alarm – surprise, insufficient information, escalating events, loss of control, increased outsde scrutiny, siege mentality, pance – that appear at a criis situation could be traced in the City Police organization….”
The next few years saw the police regaining their ground in Calcutta – thanks to a number of measures undertaken by the authorities. First, several draconian laws were either revived or enacted to arm the police with indiscriminate powers with impunity (e.g. West Bengal Prevention of Violent Activities Bill of 1970, Maintenance of Internal Security Act of 1971). Secondly, the police force was toned up with the imposition of strict discipline and control over their movements. Thus, the redoubtable police commissioner R.K.Gupta felt compelled to issue an order denying his men and their families even normal entertainment: “Going to cinemas, theatres or in such functions where officers and men are to stay for a considerable period of time, should be avoided. In this regard even if the family members are insistent, they should be dissuaded from such simple desires of theirs….” (CPG, October 22, 1970). Thirdly, the police were encouraged to liquidate Naxalites through `encounters’ – a catchword invented to palm off unilateral extra-judicial killing of suspects as an outcome of a fierce battle between the police and the Naxalites ! The publicity department of the Calcutta police circulated highly exaggerated reports of such false encounters in the newspapers. Thirdly, policemen who scored points in such `encounters’, were amply rewarded by the authorities. Thus, we find the CPG of November 29, 1973 announcing the award of the police medal for gallantry to sub-inspector Ranajit Guha Neogy for killing a Naxalite on September 9, 1971, praising him for displaying “exemplary courage and devotion to duty at a great personal risk.”
Those at the receiving end of the bravery of Guha Neogy (who acquired notoriety as a brutal torturer in the interrogation cell of the Lalbazar police headquarters of Calcutta in the 1970s) and survived his atrocities have a different story to tell – how his force used to raid Naxalite hideouts , select some young boys, make them stand in a single file and then riddle them with bullets. The fourth factor that helped the police to regain control was the dissension within the leadership and ranks of the Naxalite movement, which confounded its original ideological motive and blunted its militancy.
By 1973, the city police was feeling more secure and had begun to describe the situation in Calcutta as normal. Although sporadic Naxalite actions (e.g. attacks on police stations or snatching of arms from traffic police constables) continued for sometime in 1974, the imposition of the Emergency in 1975 sealed the fate of the Naxalite movement in Calcutta, with the police being successful in eliminating the leadership and cadres and putting behind bars thousands of their supporters. The narrative in the present compilation thus brings to an end a major phase in the history of Calcutta’s political and social life – giving us a rare peep into the psyche of the police top brass and their minions.
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Utpal Dutt, Charu Mazumdar, Pabitra Sengupta, Tapas Sen and Souren Bose |
But besides the revelations brought out by the sequence of CPG documents, the present book offers the readers another unique piece of information in the form of two appendices. The first is the full text of an unsigned statement that was alleged to have been made by Charu Mazumdar in police custody after his arrest on July 16, 1972, and the second the comments made on that statement by Suniti Kumar Ghosh (a comrade of Mazumdar’s in the 1970s) who was interviewed by Ashoke Mukhopadhyay in the course of his compiling the CPG documents for the present book. A reading of the two would reveal to the readers how so-called confessions or statements made by prisoners in police custody are manufactured to suit the case of the prosecution. Words were put in the mouth of Charu Mazumdar, which were found to be unauthenticated and historically improbable and inconsistent. Suniti Ghosh, in a blow by blow account, tears to shreds the police-manufactured statement of Charu Mazumdar’s, countering it with facts from his own experience. Referring to the statement, Ghosh says: “I have gone through it several times. I am sure this is a concoction of the police variety, which has four main ingredients: 1. fruits of investigation by police intelligence (the base of which was formed by ill-paid, semi-literate or illiterate men), which was of a low level and the results of which were of a very inferior type; 2. gleanings from statements of persons already arrested…; 3. certain things that Charu Babu said to the police in the course of long interrogation; and 4. inventions of fertile police brains.” These observations by a veteran revolutionary should be a warning to those research scholars of today who are too eager to use as their primary sources the so-called confessions and statements left by prisoners in police custody – whether in the pre-Independence militant national movement, or the post-Independence armed Communist movement.
Ashoke Mukhopadhyay has produced an immensely valuable book through years of painstaking research, by bringing together important official documents that throw light on the strategy and tactics adopted by the Calcutta police to cope with one of the biggest political and military challenges in its history. The compilation will remain a major source of information for future historians of the Naxalite movement.
TAG ARCHIVES: CHARU MAJUMDAR
India: Spring Thunder and After…
The following article by Debdutta Ghosh, Mou Chakravarty and Drimi Chaudhuri is from theHindustan Times:
Charu Majumdar is dead for about 40 years. Kanu Sanyal is 78, ill and infirm, staying at his native village in north Bengal. Asim Chatterjee has mellowed. But Naxals — in their new avatar — are coming back to Kolkata.
On June 28, 1967, Radio Peking (in China) called it ‘The Spring Thunder’. The occasion was the May 1967 rebellion in north Bengal’s Naxalbari by a small breakaway faction of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
Later, on April 22, 1969 — Russian revolution leader V.I. Lenin’s birthday — the rebels formed the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). But the announcement was made earlier at a public rally in Calcutta (the old name of Kolkata) by Kanu Sanyal on May 1 that year. The thunder fizzled out by 1972.
After spending about 35 years in the wilderness, the Marxist-Leninists morphed into the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in 2005 — after dividing and reuniting several differing factions operating almost independently.
Electoral Politics: Imperialism and the Mass Line
The following is by Josh Sykes, member of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
Recently, the Kasama Projectattacked the Freedom Road Socialist Organization based on a statement published on the Fight Back! News website concerning the 2012 presidential elections.
The basic orientation of the attack is to accuse the FRSO of deliberating confusing the issue, in order to “give the green light” to cadres to work for the Obama campaign. The Kasama Project’s view is that the FRSO is sheepishly “still” endorsing Obama, even though the organization remains under direct attack from the FBI following the raids and Grand Jury investigation began in late September, 2010.The basis for this claim is the drawing out of one sentence in the statement on the 2012 elections that says, “In terms of voting in the presidential election, it is better to vote against Romney, especially in swing states.”
The Kasama article claims that this “green light” is actually the purpose and main point of the whole article. Fortunatly, however, Kasama is honest enough to reprint the statement so that it can be read in full. I’m sure any honest reader, upon reading the entire statement (which is much longer than this “hidden” sentence) will get what the real point is.
In 2009, I went to Brussels to speak to the International Communist Seminar, a gathering of Marxist-Leninist parties and organizations from around the world, about the Student Movement in the United States. While I was there, I was also part of a panel discussion on the U.S. presidential elections in 2008. I spoke about our position on the 2008 elections and our work organizing thedemonstration at the Republican National Convention.
I began my brief talk by saying that our position was based on two principles: First, it was based on an understanding that the class character of the United States is imperialist, that is, that it is ruled by the monopoly capitalist class and in the interests of that class, and that this character cannot and will not miraculously change over night through an election, despite many people’s hopes to contrary. Second, it was based on an understanding of the mass line. On the one hand, we have an understanding that it is the people who make history, and not the politicians. On the other hand, we understand that people are paying attention to and engaging elections as their main form of political engagement during an electoral period, and that revolutionaries have to engage people where they are at rather than at where we would like for them to be.
Following these fundamental points, it becomes clear that revolutionaries who are actually engaged in mass organizing with broad forces in trade unions, the student movement, and so on, must actually say something about elections. We could say simply, “don’t vote for the bourgeois candidates”, but what would be the point? Most people who care about politics are going to go vote, and as much as they would be interested in our opinions on Libya, they would also be interested in our opinions on what to do in the voting booth. “Who, then, are the people’s candidates that we should vote for?” they will ask. To this, we don’t have a real answer.
Then there’s the question of why. In my brief talk in Brussels, I tried to emphasize the point that we wanted to elevate people’s consciousness through struggle, beginning where people are and summing things up as we go forward together. We advocated defeating McCain as a way of engaging people’s progressive political views, and we took the advanced to protest outside of the RNC to emphasize that the power to change the course of history lies in the streets with the people rather than in the conventional hall. As our pamphlet on the Mass Line puts it:
We hold that it is through these particular battles that people learn about the nature of the enemy, how this system works and what are the effective methods of struggle. This in turn allows us to: Land blows which weaken and confuse the enemy while winning all that can be won; to accumulate forces for future battles (i.e. to build the respective movements by raising the general level of organization and consciousness) and to create favorable conditions for people to take up revolutionary theory.
Despite the setbacks that came as a result of the attacks from the FBI, certainly we accomplished the goals as best we could given the conditions before us, and the FRSO is certainly stronger now than ever before. The line put into practice at that time has been proven correct in practice.
This election cycle, we of course find that the same Marxist-Leninist principles hold true. What’s the real point of the statement on the 2012 elections?
OPINIONWe think the conditions are right in this electoral cycle to emphasize instead the nature of the two party, one ruling class system and talk about why what we have is not democracy and not good enough. We do think it is still important for progressives to go to the polls to oppose concrete attacks on democratic rights, such as Voter ID and anti-gay amendments. In terms of voting in the presidential election, it is better to vote against Romney, especially in swing states. In other states like California, the Republicans are unlikely to win. In these cases, it would be positive to have a strong third party vote total.Our main message is that no matter how hopeful we are for change to come through electoral politics, this is not the venue for real change. Citizens United, and its ruling that corporations are free to openly buy the allegiance of politicians, makes more clear what has always been true: those who have the gold, make the rules. During this particular election cycle progressives should emphasize and talk about the problems inherent in the system, while placing demands on politicians from both parties. Our faith and our future are in the people’s struggle, not the ballot box.
What Charu Majumdar did wrong
24 May 2012, New Delhi, Sankar Ray
CM was not alone responsible for inculcating the anti-Marx personality cult; Mao's blessings were underneath.
Forty-five years ago on this day, 25 May, nine subalterns, Dhaneswari Devi, Simaswari Mullick, Nayaneswari Mullick, Surubala Burman, Sonamati Singh, Fulmati Devi, Samsari Saibani, Gaudrau Saibani, Kharsingh Mullick and 'two children' embraced martyrdom at Prasadjote in Naxalbari. At Naxalbari, a plaque mentioning them remains uncared for. But every year Naxalites and Maoists pay tribute to Charu Majumdar who, to be very frank, sacrificed Marxist temper for the sake of deifying 'Chairman Mao'. True, CM – the acronym he used to be addressed by – was instrumental in raising the land question in favour of tillers more boldly than the Telengana and Tebhaga days. But he introduced among thousands of youths who plunged into the historic Naxalbari struggle a mendicant culture of canine subservience to Mao Tsetung.
Innocent youths were to chant a slogan, 'Victory awaits us as the path of China is our path and the Chairman of China is our chairman', CM and his comrades who comprised the top brass of CPI(Marxist-Leninist), founded on May Day of 1969 did not care to remember Marx's famous letter to Wilhelm Bloss expressing his profound dislike of personality cult. 'From my antipathy to any cult of the individual, I never made public during the existence of the [1st] International the numerous addresses from various countries which recognised my merits and which annoyed me. I did not even reply to them, except sometimes to rebuke their authors. Engels and I first joined the secret society of Communists on the condition that everything making for superstitious worship of authority would be deleted from its statute.'
Small wonder, the Eight Documents penned by CM – issued from 1965 – comprising 15000-plus words – and still considered a bible by various groups of CPI(ML) have not a single sentence of Marx or Engels. On the contrary, Chairman Mao appeared 16 times with quotations while Lenin is mentioned not more than 12 times. However, the slogan – 'the Chairman of China is our chairman' – was criticised after the fall of Lin Piao in 1970. In a marathon conversation with the central committee member Sourin Bose, Chou Enlai, categorically condemned the attitude of converting a communist party as an appendage of another CP of a different country. But fact remains that during the high-voltage days of Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, every bulletin of Radio Peking used to begin with the monotonous sermon – 'We begin with a quotation from Chairman Mao Tsetung… We repeat it.' So CM was not alone responsible for inculcating the anti-Marx personality cult. Mao's blessings were underneath.
Needless to say, today no Naxalite group, not even CPI (Maoist) would write a poster stating 'Victory awaits us as the path of China is our path and the Chairman of China is our chairman'; but the mindset remained unchanged. In the early 1990s, CPI(ML) Liberation general secretary, the late Vinod Mishra wrote a piece extolling Mao as 'forever our chairman'.
It's time to script a candid revaluation of CM although parties like CPI(ML) lack the moral courage to undertake this which may begin with a critical look at the Eight Documents and their penumbral points. Let me just jot down a few of them.
In the first document, our tasks in the present situation (28 January 1965), CM perceived the principal conflict of Indian bourgeoisie is not one 'between monopoly capitalists and the national bourgeoisie' but 'between the trading community and the monopoly industrialists'. His argument was ludicrous. In a country of backward economy, trade in foodstuff and essential commodities is inevitable for the creation of capital, and control creates obstacles in the creation of this capital, and as a result of that, internal conflict takes the form of internal crisis'.
CM was implicitly afraid of inner-party debate, obviously because of deification of Mao. In the second document, he wrote, 'The Marxist truth of democratic centralism is that the Party directive coming from higher leadership must be carried out. Because the Party's highest leader is he (read CM-SR) who has firmly established himself as a Marxist through a long period of movements and theoretical debates.'
CM's utter submission to Mao – in direct contrast to warming against cult by Marx – has it reflex in the Sixth Document - The Main Task Today is the Struggle to Build up the True Revolutionary Party through Uncompromising Struggle against Revisionism (12 August 1966). 'After Lenin, Comrade Mao Tsetung has today filled Lenin's position. So the struggle against revisionism cannot be carried out by opposing the Chinese Party and Com. Mao Tsetung. The purity of Marxism-Leninism cannot be maintained. By opposing the Chinese Party, the Indian Party leadership has forsaken the revolutionary path of Marxism-Leninism. They are trying to pass off revisionism by putting it into a new bottle'.
The Eighth one - Carry forward the peasant struggle by fighting revisionism – states, that organically the very first imperative 'is establishing the leadership of poor and landless peasants in the peasant movements'. Elsewhere, it was reiterated that 'Marxists must always try to establish the leadership of the poor and landless peasants over the entire peasant movement.' But this remained on paper as CM stuck to the top slot until breathed his last, never expressed his desire to step down in favour of any poor peasant comrade. It was a reflection of sheer hypocrisy.
It will be unfair to hold CM alone responsible thousands of youths who were killed during five years of 'prairie fire'. The instigation came from Mao in his power struggle in the name of GPCR. But the photograph culture is a crude form of personality cult. Naxalites can never rid themselves of anti-Marx habit and revolutionary goal will remain will-o-the-wisp.
Sankar Ray is a Kolkata based veteran journalist.24 May 2012, New Delhi, Sankar Ray
CM was not alone responsible for inculcating the anti-Marx personality cult; Mao's blessings were underneath.
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Innocent youths were to chant a slogan, 'Victory awaits us as the path of China is our path and the Chairman of China is our chairman', CM and his comrades who comprised the top brass of CPI(Marxist-Leninist), founded on May Day of 1969 did not care to remember Marx's famous letter to Wilhelm Bloss expressing his profound dislike of personality cult. 'From my antipathy to any cult of the individual, I never made public during the existence of the [1st] International the numerous addresses from various countries which recognised my merits and which annoyed me. I did not even reply to them, except sometimes to rebuke their authors. Engels and I first joined the secret society of Communists on the condition that everything making for superstitious worship of authority would be deleted from its statute.'
Small wonder, the Eight Documents penned by CM – issued from 1965 – comprising 15000-plus words – and still considered a bible by various groups of CPI(ML) have not a single sentence of Marx or Engels. On the contrary, Chairman Mao appeared 16 times with quotations while Lenin is mentioned not more than 12 times. However, the slogan – 'the Chairman of China is our chairman' – was criticised after the fall of Lin Piao in 1970. In a marathon conversation with the central committee member Sourin Bose, Chou Enlai, categorically condemned the attitude of converting a communist party as an appendage of another CP of a different country. But fact remains that during the high-voltage days of Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, every bulletin of Radio Peking used to begin with the monotonous sermon – 'We begin with a quotation from Chairman Mao Tsetung… We repeat it.' So CM was not alone responsible for inculcating the anti-Marx personality cult. Mao's blessings were underneath.
Needless to say, today no Naxalite group, not even CPI (Maoist) would write a poster stating 'Victory awaits us as the path of China is our path and the Chairman of China is our chairman'; but the mindset remained unchanged. In the early 1990s, CPI(ML) Liberation general secretary, the late Vinod Mishra wrote a piece extolling Mao as 'forever our chairman'.
It's time to script a candid revaluation of CM although parties like CPI(ML) lack the moral courage to undertake this which may begin with a critical look at the Eight Documents and their penumbral points. Let me just jot down a few of them.
In the first document, our tasks in the present situation (28 January 1965), CM perceived the principal conflict of Indian bourgeoisie is not one 'between monopoly capitalists and the national bourgeoisie' but 'between the trading community and the monopoly industrialists'. His argument was ludicrous. In a country of backward economy, trade in foodstuff and essential commodities is inevitable for the creation of capital, and control creates obstacles in the creation of this capital, and as a result of that, internal conflict takes the form of internal crisis'.
CM was implicitly afraid of inner-party debate, obviously because of deification of Mao. In the second document, he wrote, 'The Marxist truth of democratic centralism is that the Party directive coming from higher leadership must be carried out. Because the Party's highest leader is he (read CM-SR) who has firmly established himself as a Marxist through a long period of movements and theoretical debates.'
CM's utter submission to Mao – in direct contrast to warming against cult by Marx – has it reflex in the Sixth Document - The Main Task Today is the Struggle to Build up the True Revolutionary Party through Uncompromising Struggle against Revisionism (12 August 1966). 'After Lenin, Comrade Mao Tsetung has today filled Lenin's position. So the struggle against revisionism cannot be carried out by opposing the Chinese Party and Com. Mao Tsetung. The purity of Marxism-Leninism cannot be maintained. By opposing the Chinese Party, the Indian Party leadership has forsaken the revolutionary path of Marxism-Leninism. They are trying to pass off revisionism by putting it into a new bottle'.
The Eighth one - Carry forward the peasant struggle by fighting revisionism – states, that organically the very first imperative 'is establishing the leadership of poor and landless peasants in the peasant movements'. Elsewhere, it was reiterated that 'Marxists must always try to establish the leadership of the poor and landless peasants over the entire peasant movement.' But this remained on paper as CM stuck to the top slot until breathed his last, never expressed his desire to step down in favour of any poor peasant comrade. It was a reflection of sheer hypocrisy.
It will be unfair to hold CM alone responsible thousands of youths who were killed during five years of 'prairie fire'. The instigation came from Mao in his power struggle in the name of GPCR. But the photograph culture is a crude form of personality cult. Naxalites can never rid themselves of anti-Marx habit and revolutionary goal will remain will-o-the-wisp.
Mint Lounge(Wall Street Journal India). March 12, 2011. On revisiting the town that lent its name to the Naxal movement.
(Naxalbari is a village in West Bengal. Because Naxalbari was the location of a 1967 peasant rebellion, the village’s name came into the English language in the form of the word ‘Naxalite’.).
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Heir to a rebellion
The Siliguri office of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), or CPI(M-L), Liberation is a tiny room with big posters of Lenin, Stalin and Mao. One poster exhorts “workers of the world—unite”. Yet another declares “the proletariat have nothing to lose but their chains”.
The low-roofed room’s walls haven’t been painted in a while. There is a rusty table in the centre. There are a couple of trunks by the walls. A weak bulb shines dimly. There are no computers, nor is there any trace of technology. In this single-room office, I wait for Abhijit Majumdar.
I’m in Siliguri in north Bengal en route to the nearby village of Naxalbari, which is the origin of the words Naxal and Naxalite, because it was the location of a 1967 peasant rebellion. I’m visiting Naxalbari to try and understand how a localized rebellion snowballed into a movement with national significance in the 1960s and 1970s.
My host in Siliguri, Prodip Sarkar, has suggested I meet Abhijit, the son of Charu Majumdar, one of the leaders of the 1967 Naxalbari rebellion. Abhijit is also the secretary of the CPI(M-L) Liberation for Darjeeling district in West Bengal.
On one wall of Abhijit’s CPI(M-L) Liberation office is a framed photograph of a wiry, bespectacled, almost malnourished-looking man with the caption “Comrade Charu Majumdar at Lal Bazar Police Headquarters, 1972”. That is the year and location of Majumdar’s death in police custody.
Rather, as Abhijit puts it in an emotionless voice, “That was when my father was murdered by the police.” Abhijit is a suave, articulate man, his sophistication looking oddly out of place in the ramshackle office.
Yet Abhijit’s brand of activism is not quite like his father’s. Charu Majumdar had famously said, “He is not a true Communist who has not dipped his hands in the blood of the class enemy.” Abhijit, as district secretary, has led protests against land acquisition for industries and for farmers’ rights. While these protests have been vocal, they haven’t resulted in anything close to the violence or bloodshed that happened in the Naxal movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Abhijit maintains that the proletariat revolution is inevitable, and class enemies will be overthrown—yet expressions denoting violence or killing are guardedly absent from his talk.
Split within the party
The story of the Naxalbari rebellion is intertwined with the history of communism in India. Far more important than the revolt itself were its chief cause and effect—a rift among Indian Communists and the widespread violence of the Naxal movement, respectively.
During the 1960s, there were ideological disagreements within the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM. Extremist factions of the CPM advocated the armed overthrow of landowners by means of a workers’ and peasants’ revolt. They proposed direct violent action against “petty bourgeoisie” as the only way to change an unjust society, and sought to follow in the footsteps of the Chinese and Russian revolutions.
The Naxalbari rebellion of 1967, then, was a trigger for the extremist factions of Communists to bring their ideologies into the open. When agrarian land issues arose in Naxalbari, extremist Communists saw an opportunity to begin a violent overthrow of landowners.
Naxalbari 1967 was to become the first step in the great Indian proletariat revolution.
A village that has moved on
After a lunch of rice and fish curry, I enter a rattling, ramshackle bus whose conductor loudly advertises “Panitanki-Nepal, Naxalbari”.
The bus’ destination is across the Nepal border, but it is due to pass through Naxalbari on its way. The vibrations of the rickety bus are amplified by the potholed road. Soon, the bus goes past a road to Darjeeling. On the narrow road to Nepal, tea gardens flank the road, rolling away in a green expanse into the horizon.
Naxalbari lies 25km from Siliguri. Right at the entrance to it is a solitary building named “Block Land & Land Reforms Officer”, rather appropriately for a place linked with land struggles. The locked building looks desolate and abandoned on Sunday afternoon.
Naxalbari is a one-road village—nearly all activity centres around this road. Single-room shops line it, selling sweets, cellphones, provisions, computer education and more, with what could be frenetic commercial activity for a place of Naxalbari’s size.
There are no obvious memorials or mentions of the 44-year-old rebellion that made Naxalbari famous. When a place comes with associations attached, as Naxalbari does, it is easy to project one’s own expectations on to it. I expect to see overt signs of the past—signboards narrating stories of the historical incident, or libraries or memorials, but there are none to be readily seen. Naxalbari wears no clues to its past on its shoulder.
It has moved on from 1967.
A retired revolutionary
At Naxalbari, I have to meet Nathuram Biswas, one of the few surviving Naxalite activists from the 1970s. I have been told that the best way to find him would be to “ask anyone in Naxalbari”. With typical city-slicker scepticism, I wonder if that will work. But I get directions from the first man I ask.
Biswas, 60, is a bespectacled, balding man. His face is untouched by the wrinkles of age—my first reaction is that the person in front of me is far too young to be him.
As we talk, and he narrates the story of the revolt, I realize there is considerable blood, violence and grief behind the seemingly innocuous euphemism “peasant revolt”.
A rebellion unfolds
Biswas tells me the spark of the violence in Naxalbari was lit when a landlord, Ishwar Tirkey, ousted a labourer Bighul Kissan from his land in April 1967. Since many leaders of the extremist factions of CPM were from the region, they mobilized thousands of farmers, and laid siege to Tirkey’s farm. Tirkey, though, was politically well connected, and had arrest warrants taken out for the leaders of the farmers’ protests.
The next stone was cast when another landlord faced with a protest, Nagendra Roy Choudhury, took out a gun and fired in the air. Nearly a thousand farmers seized his crops and captured him. Biswas tells me in a matter-of-fact way, without a change in tone, that Choudhury was then tried by a people’s court and promptly executed.
The CPM, which was part of a coalition government in Bengal, was alarmed. The government could neither be seen as condoning the violence, nor disowning fellow comrades who were leading the agitation.
Naxalbari came under unprecedented focus and attention. The then land revenue minister Harekrishna Konar stayed nearby to negotiate with the agitators. Seven ministers came to the area and kept watch. Police and paramilitary forces were employed in huge numbers. Landowners sought special police protection. There was an uneasy calm in Naxalbari.
An uneasy calm is but ammunition awaiting a flame. After one police search operation, word spread that a village leader’s pregnant wife had been attacked. This was all that was needed to ignite the already explosive atmosphere.
In one confrontation with policemen, a protester shot an arrow into the police ranks and killed inspector Sonam Wangdi. Tension escalated, and the police launched ruthless combing operations for leaders of the farmers’ agitation. It was in the hamlet of Bengai Jote near Naxalbari, Biswas tells me with an air of finality, that the event which Naxalbari 1967 is most known for occurred—nine women and two children were shot dead in police firing.
The flame spreads
The extremist factions of the CPM thought the police action and shooting was an act of betrayal, more so since the home minister was fellow comrade Jyoti Basu. They announced that the shooting at Naxalbari was a clarion call for the beginning of the proletariat revolution in India. The extremists decided that violent overthrow of “class enemies” was the only way ahead. The People’s Daily of Beijing declared, “A peal of spring thunder has crashed over the land of India”, giving ideological justification to the activists.
Extremist activists had debated theories of class action and revolution for years. After the Naxalbari shooting, they felt their time had come. CPM had party offices across rural Bengal and Bihar—the party’s extreme factions had local leaders and cadres everywhere. Their influence and grass-roots support became evident in the aftermath of the Naxalbari shooting. The leaders of the extreme factions, in particular Charu Majumdar, attained cult status. The activists named themselves after the place where it all began, and began calling themselves Naxals.
Agitations and protests began fanning across West Bengal and Bihar. Farmers and workers responded to the call of local Communist leaders for class action. Landowners, government officials, everyone perceived to be “class enemies”, began to be annihilated.
It wasn’t just the villages—Kolkata became a hotbed of Naxal activity. Young men and women joined what they were convinced was the cause of revolution. Many dropped out of college, some went to live in the countryside to “sow seeds of revolution among peasants” and become “foot soldiers of revolution”.
Historian Dilip Simeon, now 62, who was an activist in the Naxalite movement, writes in his essay “Rebellion to Reconciliation” (2006) about what made young people join the Naxal movement. “Somehow it felt as if we had no option, that this was like the freedom movement all over again, that if young and committed Indians did not do what was necessary to change the dreadful conditions in which most of our fellow countrymen and women lived, we would be betraying the most precious values of life.”
There was perhaps a sense of historical inevitability, as he adds, “(1968) was the year of the Prague Spring, the Tet offensive by the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, the May uprising by students and workers in France, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the Cultural Revolution in China, the Black Power salute by US athletes at the Mexico Olympics.”
It wasn’t easy for young people to go into villages for the sake of revolution. Young people who’d grown up in cities found the rough-and-tumble village life a shock. Many couldn’t cope with the spartan lifestyle. Much of what it was to be young in those tumultuous times is powerfully portrayed in Sudhir Mishra’s heartbreaking film Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, as also in Simeon’s 2010 novel Revolution Highway, about young people involved in the Naxal movement.
As the Naxal movement intensified in violence, the rift in the CPM became official. In 1969, at a rally in Kolkata, Charu Majumdar announced the formation of a new party —the CPI (Marxist-Leninist). The schism was so evident that the official break-up was but a formality.
Underground
Biswas and Simeon both dropped out of college to join the Naxal movement, albeit in different circumstances and places. Biswas took his first step in 1968 after he read an essay by Charu Majumdar exhorting students to spend a summer vacation among the rural poor in villages. Simeon was a student at St Stephen’s, New Delhi, when he went on a trip with the college’s Social Service League to famine-hit Palamau in present-day Jharkhand. This was his first step.
It wasn’t difficult to quit college, Biswas tells me, because he was clear he didn’t want “bourgeoisie education”. Simeon tells me on email about his decision to leave the security of college life and career prospects: “Most of us didn’t think about the long term, and of what we would be doing after 10 years—the passions of the moment were enough to carry us. The revolution would have been accomplished by then—if we bothered to think about time at all.”
I ask Biswas if it was easy to kill or engage in violence for the first time. He smiles and says, half-jokingly, “My leaders said that if I didn’t take part in ‘action’ in a week’s time, that’d mean I’m petty bourgeoisie.” He adds that having seen the villages and empathized with peasants’ conditions, it wasn’t so difficult to go out there and engage in “action” for their sake.
“Once you’ve been involved in action,” Biswas shrugs his shoulders, “you have no choice but to go underground.” It was not like he had to stay in jungles, he adds—underground activists stayed in sympathizers’ houses. He stayed for sometime in Nepal, and for some time in Bangladesh.
Today, Biswas is a businessman, owning a cellphone and a furniture shop—both ironically capitalist establishments. He’s still a member of the CPI(M-L) Liberation, and has led farmers’ protests in the last few years.
Simeon works with Aman Trust, which seeks to mitigate the effects of violent conflict.
The waning
Naxal activists defined “class enemies” rather broadly. Government employees, judges and a vice-chancellor were among those killed in Kolkata in “class action”. At the height of the movement, traffic policemen were stabbed on the streets of Kolkata.
Police reprisal was brutal. The government of West Bengal gave wide-ranging powers to the police. Naxals were picked up from houses, horrific tales of police torture spread, encounters became commonplace. The death blow for the movement came, though, when the police started to pick on the leaders of the movement—Charu Majumdar was killed in police custody, Saroj Dutta was killed in an encounter.
The ideological basis of the revolution was gradually eroding too. China backed the Pakistan army’s crackdown in East Pakistan, China and the then USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) supported the quelling of the JVP (People’s Liberation Front) insurrection in Sri Lanka, Mao engaged in a dialogue with former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger even as the Vietnam war continued. As Simeon puts it, “From 1971 onwards it became clear that the cut and dried formulations of Indian Maoism would not work.” China, whose revolution the Indian Maoists aspired to inherit, was itself veering off the path of Marxism and being opportunist.
This ideological confusion showed not only among the young activists, but also in the party lines. The CPI(M-L) split into more than 30 factions during the 1970s, torn apart by ideological differences.
By the mid-1970s, what was to have been the Indian proletariat revolution had all but collapsed.
The remnants
Biswas introduces a middle-aged man as Comrade Manik, adding, “He’ll show you Shaheed.” The Shaheed Vedi is 2km from the Naxalbari bus stand. This is the only memorial in the place. This is where the nine women and two children were shot in 1967.
I take a cycle rickshaw that stumbles over stony, unpaved roads to Bengai Jote, where the memorial is situated. Bengai Jote is a single-road village too, but unlike Naxalbari, this road hardly has vehicular traffic. Right behind the row of huts with bamboo compound walls is a railway track on one side and a stream on the other. Beyond the houses, at the far end of town, is the Bengai Jote primary school, a small building with a couple of rooms.
Beside the school’s closed gates is a small clearing. The lawn is untrimmed and has a stubble and undergrowth, there’s dust and bits of paper strewn about—it clearly hasn’t been cleaned in a while. There are four busts—of Mao, Lenin, Charu Majumdar and Lin Biao. These busts haven’t been painted or cleaned in a long time. There’s a faded red board announcing through flaking-off paint that this is the “Tiananmen square of India”.
A river twists its way through the fields behind the memorial, quietly gurgling past. In an open field in front of it, children run about, playing without a care. Tiny shops in the lane leading up to the memorial unfurl cloth banners advertising Vodafone, Maaza and Hero Cycles.
Acknowledgements: Prodip Sarkar, Bibek Sarkar, Abhijit Majumdar (all in Siliguri), Nathuram Biswas (in Naxalbari), Dilip Simeon, Sourabh Datta Gupta.
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