Читать книгу India after Naxalbari - Bernard D'Mello - Страница 9

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Naxalite! “Spring Thunder,” Phase I

… [W]hen my child

Returns from school,

And not finding the name of the village

In his geography map,

Asks me

Why it is not there,

I am frightened

And remain silent.

But I know

This simple word

Of four syllables

Is not just the name of a village,

But the name of the whole country.

—AN EXCERPT FROM “THE NAME OF A VILLAGE,” A HINDI POEM BY KUMAR VIKAL¹

Tomar bari, aamar bari, Naxalbari, Naxalbari.

Tomar naam, aamar naam, Vietnam, Vietnam.

The name of the “village” was Naxalbari, situated at the foot of the Himalayas in the Darjeeling area of north Bengal, bordering Nepal to the west, Sikkim and Bhutan to the north, East Pakistan (now, Bangladesh) to the south. Naxalbari, Kharibari, Phansidewa and parts of the Siliguri police-station jurisdiction are where it all began in March 1967, and Naxalbari came to stand for this whole area. (Map 1 will be of help throughout this chapter; see pages 24 and 25.) Indeed, there was a time when conservative parents didn’t want to send their sons/daughters to Kolkata’s elite Presidency College for fear that—like the group of rebel-students who came to be known as the “Presidency Consolidation”—they might be “indoctrinated” by the “Naxalites,” Maoist revolutionaries who were given that naam (name) from the village where the movement came into being. Indeed, the term Naxalite came to symbolize “any assault upon the assumptions and institutions that support the established order in India,” and soon found “a place in the vocabulary of world revolution.”²

Map 1: Political Geography: “Spring Thunder,” Phase I (1967–75)

Note: Bolder lines indicate state/national boundaries. Thinner lines indicate district boundaries. Map is only indicative and not to scale.

Source: Map adapted from www.d-maps.com using information in Census of India.

The ’68 generation had arrived, so to say, with the Cultural Revolution in China; the “Prague Spring” (that provoked the Soviet invasion) in Czechoslovakia; the Naxalbari uprising in India; a regenerated communist party and its New People’s Army in the Philippines; soixante-huitards that were against the French establishment and the PCF (the French Communist Party); the German SDS (socialist German student league) that took on the West German establishment and the SPD (the German social-democratic party); the Civil Rights movement, fountainhead of the Black Panther Party, and the anti-(Vietnam) War movement in the United States; unprecedented student unrest, guerrilla war in the state of Guerrero, a militant labor movement, and land occupations by impoverished peasants, in Mexico, all pitted against the ruling establishment, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), entrenched in power for decades. Revolutionary humanism was in the air; political expediency evoked derision; Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital exposed the Affluent Society for the delusion that it was; and youth, in political ferment, began to perceive the established (establishment?) left as having stripped Marxism of its revolutionary essence. Naxalbari was part and parcel of a (then) contemporary, worldwide impulse among radicals, young and not-so-young, embracing the spirit of revolutionary humanism.

But, today, all that remains of Naxalbari, in insurgent geography, is a memorial column erected by the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), the CPI(ML), in honor of the eleven who were killed in the police firing on May 25, 1967—seven women, Dhaneswari Devi, Simaswari Mullick, Nayaneswari Mullick, Surubala Burman, Sonamati Singh, Fulmati Devi, and Samsari Saibani; two men, Gaudrau Saibani and Kharsingh Mullick; and “two children,” actually infants, whose names have not been inscribed. And, of course, there are the busts of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Charu Mazumdar, the latter, the Naxalite movement’s “ideologue” and leader in its first phase. But even as the Indian Establishment made sure that the Naxal way of life was obliterated from Naxalbari, the name acquired a symbolic meaning. It came to stand for the road to revolution in India.

The ramifications of what happened at Naxalbari, what the poor peasants’ armed struggle over there triggered, have not yet been fully deciphered. The Naxalbari armed struggle began in March 1967; by the end of July of that year, it was crushed. But, soon thereafter, in the autumn, Charu Mazumdar, who subsequently became the CPI(ML)’s General Secretary, said: “… hundreds of Naxalbaris are smoldering in India…. Naxalbari has not died and will never die.”³ Certainly, he was not daydreaming, for the power of memory and the dreams unleashed a powerful dynamic of resistance that, ever since, has alarmed the Indian ruling classes and the political establishment. Indeed, an editorial in the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily on July 5, 1967, hailing the creation of the “red area of rural revolutionary armed struggle” in Naxalbari as “Spring Thunder over India,” called it a “development of tremendous significance for the Indian people’s revolutionary struggle.”⁴

In 2017, the fiftieth year of the Naxalite movement in India, Charu Mazumdar’s statement seems almost prescient. In 1968, an ongoing struggle in Srikakulam led by two schoolteachers, Vempatapu Satyanarayana, popularly known as “Gappa Guru”—who had married and settled among the tribes—and Adibhatla Kailasam, and organized under the Ryotanga Sangrama Samiti (peasant struggle committee) with guerrilla squads in self-defense, had mobilized “almost the entire tribal population in the Srikakulam Agency Area.”⁵ And Warangal, Khammam, Mushahari, Bhojpur, Debra–Gopiballavpur, Kanksa–Budbud, Ganjam–Koraput, Lakhimpur, and other “prairie fires” were not far behind. The origins of the CPI (Maoist), reckoned by the political establishment in July 2006, in the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s words at a conference in New Delhi, as India’s “single biggest internal security challenge,” must be traced to its roots. After all, the Maoist armed struggle in India, alongside the one in the Philippines, is one of the world’s longest surviving peasant insurgencies.

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

In March 1967, in the “semi-feudal” setting of Naxalbari, tribal peasants organized into peasant committees under the leadership of a revolutionary group within the CPI(Marxist)—CPM hereinafter—one of the main two of India’s parliamentary communist parties,⁶ and with rudimentary militias armed with traditional weapons, undertook a political program of anti-landlordism involving the burning of land records, cancellation of debts, the passing of death sentences on oppressive landlords, and the looting of landlords’ guns. By May of the same year, the rebels established certain strongholds, Hatighisha (in Naxalbari), Buraganj (in Kharibari), and Chowpukhuria (in Phansidewa), where they were in control. But by the end of July, the movement collapsed under the pressure of a major armed-police action.

Be that as it may, in the Maoist view, Charu Mazumdar had not merely rebelled against the “revisionism” (stripping Marxism of its revolutionary essence) of the CPM in his writings—“Eight Documents” penned between January 1965 and April 1967⁷—but had also given a bold call for armed struggle in the rural countryside, and his followers in Naxalbari had heeded this appeal. The West Bengal state assembly elections were held in February 1967, and in keeping with Charu Mazumdar’s suggestion that the revolutionaries should take advantage of the polls to propagate their politics, they took the benefit of the period of electoral campaigning to raise the political consciousness of the poor peasants, mainly Santhals, Oraons, and Rajbanshis, and the tea-garden workers, also tribal persons who had migrated largely from areas now part of the province of Jharkhand.

A Siliguri sub-division peasant convention and rally in mid-March 1967 swelled the ranks of the Krishak Samiti (peasant organization), which now began to prevent police from entering those villages that were considered strongholds. Any such attempt by the police led “thousands of armed peasants” accompanied by “hundreds of workers from the tea-plantations,” to foil the endeavor. “On many occasions, the police were forced to retreat. Women also played a glorious role in the revolt.… In hundreds or more, the peasants raided the houses of several landlords, seized all their possessions and snatched their guns. They held open trials of some landlords and punished a few of them. It was only in a case like that of Nagen Roychoudhuri, a notorious landlord who fired on the peasants injuring some of them, that death sentence was awarded at an open trial and was carried out. The line adopted at Naxalbari was not to annihilate landlords physically but to wage a struggle to abolish the feudal order.”

“The peasants formed small groups of armed units and peasant committees which also functioned as armed defense groups. Between the end of March and the end of April (1967) almost all the villages were organized.”⁸ The peasants resolved that after establishing the rule of the peasant committees in the villages, they would take possession of all land that was not owned and tilled by the peasantry and redistribute it. They did not seem to have reckoned what they would do when the armed forces of the state came to defend landlordism. On May 23, when a large police party tried to enter a village to make some arrests and the peasants resisted, a police officer was hit by arrows and he succumbed to his injuries in hospital. The police retreated but came back on May 25 in larger numbers and fired upon a group of mostly women and children when the men-folk were away, killing the eleven whom the martyrs’ memorial column honors.

The Naxalbari peasants were actually doing what the leadership of the West Bengal Krishak Sabha, controlled by the CPM, had been recommending when the party was not in office. But, now, they were advised by the same leaders, in office as part of a United Front government, to abandon their armed struggle and depend on the state machinery to settle the land question, the same state bureaucracy that had been hand-in-league with the landlords. They were even warned (threatened?) that if they didn’t give up political violence by such and such date, the police would deal harshly with them.

And, this the United Front government carried out—“Operation Crossbow” was unleashed from July 12 onward. “The entire area … was encircled by armed police and thousands of paramilitary forces. Police camps were set up in the villages. Constant patrolling of the area by armed men was carried out. The order to shoot Kanu Sanyal at sight was issued. Seventeen persons, including women and children, were killed. More than a thousand warrants of arrest were issued and hundreds of peasants were arrested.”⁹ According to a then superintendent of police, Darjeeling, “‘a powerful Army detachment was standing by on the fringe of the disturbed area.’”¹⁰ Indeed, even after the operation was successfully accomplished, thousands of armed police remained in the Naxalbari area, even until 1969. Perhaps what unnerved the Establishment was the “very remarkable” coming together of the tea-plantation workers and the peasants, for on many an occasion, the peasants and the plantation workers, both essentially armed with their traditional weapons, “together forced the police to beat a retreat.”¹¹

But, despite such high points, the Naxalbari uprising, unable to take on the might of the repressive apparatus of the state, met quick defeat. The local leaders of the movement—Kanu Sanyal, Khokan Mazumdar, Jangal Santhal, Kadam Mullick, and Babulal Biswakarma—did not initiate the building of armed guerrilla squads nor did they establish a “powerful mass base,” as Sanyal later wrote in self-criticism. So they could not maintain their strongholds, even temporarily. The consequences of the uprising were, however, far-reaching. The rural poor in other parts of the country were inspired to undertake militant struggles. As Sumanta Banerjee, who has penned one of the most moving and authentic accounts of Naxalbari and what happened in its aftermath, put it: “It was like the premeditated throw of a pebble bringing forth a series of ripples in the water…. The world of landless laborers and poor peasants … leapt to life, illuminated with a fierce light that showed the raw deal meted out to them behind all the sanctimonious gibberish of ‘land reforms’ during the last 20 years…. [Indeed, in keeping with the gravity of the situation, in November 1969] the then Union Home Minister, Y. B. Chavan warned that ‘green revolution’ may not remain green for long.… A general belief in armed revolution as the only way to get rid of the country’s ills was in the air, and the possibility of its drawing near was suggested by the Naxalbari uprising.”¹² And, as the other authoritative, independent account of the movement, that of Manoranjan Mohanty, put it: “… the Naxalbari revolt became a turning point in the history of Independent India by challenging the political system as a whole and the prevailing orientation of the Indian Communist movement in particular.”¹³

Be that as it may, with defeat right at the time of the launch of the strategy of area-wise seizure of power staring the Maoist leadership in the face, the intent, the area-wise seizure, was glossed over by sympathizers, and the movement was depicted as one intending mere land redistribution. Nevertheless, “revisionism” came under severe attack, especially in West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh, where the Naxalite movement first established some strongholds, for the rebellion exposed the parliamentary left’s, in particular the CPM’s, politics of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. The armed police that suppressed the peasant uprising at Naxalbari in 1967 were under orders from a coalition government of which the CPM was a prominent partner. The positive fallout was, however, the fact that some CPM members were deeply moved by Naxalbari. They posed the question as to why the party, even as it swore by “people’s democratic revolution,” refused to make any preparations—ideological, political, organizational and military—whatsoever to bring it about.

But instead of bridging the gap between the party’s stated revolutionary intention and its actual “revisionist” practice, the CPM leadership threw the rebels out of the party. Operation Expulsion involved not only the purging of Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal, and the other local leaders of the Naxalbari uprising, but also Sushital Roy Chowdhury, a member of the West Bengal State Committee of the CPM, as well as the removal of other prominent party members such as Saroj Dutta, Parimal Dasgupta, and Pramod Sengupta who supported the Naxalbari uprising. At one point, the State Secretary of the CPM, Pramod Dasgupta, even branded the Naxalites as CIA agents! But for these comrades, dismissal from the CPM was a badge of honor. As Suniti Kumar Ghosh, de facto editor of what became the CPI(ML)’s central organ, Liberation, from November 1967 up to April 1972, put it: “Naxalbari [had] restored to the communist movement in India its soul.”¹⁴

Indeed, a glimpse of the political life of one of the local leaders of the Naxalbari uprising, Babulal Biswakarma (Biswakarmakar), gives a sense of their identification with and commitment to the cause. Born in 1938 in a landless-peasant family, at the age of fifteen he took part in a demonstration of sharecroppers against a landlord-cum-moneylender charging even more than the going usurious rate of interest, and was injured and arrested. At seventeen, he became a full-time organizer in the CPI’s Krishak Samiti in Phansidewa, and the very next year, a full-fledged member of the party. In 1967 he was a leading figure in the Naxalbari uprising, faced solitary confinement in jail and expulsion from the CPM, but as soon he was released on bail, he jumped bail and went underground to reorganize the Naxalbari armed struggle. What is generally recalled is the four-hour gun battle at midnight in the Naxalbari area on September 7, 1968, with a large posse of armed policemen, in which Babulal Biswakarma, unmindful of his own safety, made it possible for his comrades to move away but was riddled with bullets soon thereafter.¹⁵

SRIKAKULAM—GUERRILLA WARFARE TAKES HOLD

This was the spirit of Naxalbari, and it spread and struck in another ongoing, deep-rooted tribal-peasant struggle in the Agency area—parts of Parvathipuram and other taluks in the Eastern Ghats—of the then Srikakulam district in northeastern Andhra Pradesh. Organized by communist school teachers Vempatapu Satyanarayana and Adibhatla Kailasam, the Girijan Sangam (hill people’s association) led several militant struggles in the 1960s. These fights were for the restoration of Girijan lands grabbed by merchant-moneylenders who had thereby become landlords. The Sangam also fought for the distribution of cultivable banjar (forest) lands, abolition of debt-peonage, fair prices for minor forest produce collected by the tribes, lifting of the prohibition on the use of forest timber by the Girijans, and Agency autonomy under local tribal governance. Indeed, the land grabbing from tribal people, which was illegal as per the Agency Tracts Interest and Land Transfer Act of 1917, further buttressed by the Andhra Pradesh Land Transfer Regulation of 1959, must be kept in mind.

With the split in the CPI in 1964, the leaders of the Sangam pitched their tents with the CPM. But, in the wake of Naxalbari in May 1967, the mass movement against exploitation and oppression by landlords, moneylenders, merchants, forest and revenue officials, and the police acquired a new resolve. The police also stepped up patrolling when the landlords sought enhanced protection. Following clashes, Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, namely, unlawful assembly, was declared in late July. It was in this setting that two peasants were shot dead by the agents of the landlords on October 31, 1967 in Levidi (in the Parvathipuram block) and by early 1968 special police camps dotted the area and an armed police offensive began, accompanied by mass arrests.

In September 1968, a court acquitted the accused in the Levidi case, confirming the reasoning of the tribes that, besides the police, the legal system too was on the side of the landlords. The Girijans had a tradition of militancy. In the adjoining Agency area, from 1922 to 1924, under the leadership of the legendary Alluri Sitaramaraju, they had waged a guerrilla war against British colonialism and local oppressors,¹⁶ and now they were geared up for it once more. The crucial factors here were not only the nature of the economic exploitation, social oppression, political domination, and the brutal state repression, but the volition and the reasoning of the tribal peasants, their political and social consciousness that motivated the armed resistance and the struggle for a just order that they were keen to embark upon. So, the Srikakulam district committee of communist revolutionaries, which supported the struggle led by the Sangam, decided to take the Naxalbari road.

In consultation with Charu Mazumdar in October 1968, they opted for an armed struggle and set up the Ryotanga Sangrama Samiti as an organ for the seizure of political power in the villages. Incidents like the November 25, 1968 raiding of the premises of the notorious landlord-cum-moneylender Teegala Narasimhulu, taking possession of hoarded paddy and other food grains, and seizing promissory notes and other legal records related to the debts the peasants had incurred over the years were emblematic of the radical politics of anti-landlordism that was brought into play.

It was in this setting that Charu Mazumdar’s controversial tactic of “annihilation of class enemies” was applied, which was to generate a lot of differences regarding the question of tactics among the revolutionaries. But unlike Naxalbari, in Srikakulam, guerrilla squads were in operation in “strategic defense” and the movement was extended to the forests of the adjoining Koraput and Ganjam districts in the province of Orissa (Odisha since 2011).¹⁷ The landlords had fled, the guerrilla squads and local militias were protecting the villages, and the Ryotanga Sangrama Samiti was in power and about to undertake land redistribution. Charu Mazumdar visited the area in March 1969 with high hopes that Srikakulam would emerge as “India’s Yenan.”¹⁸

Indeed, red political power did emerge; for a brief period, in around 300 of the 518 villages in the Agency area of Srikakulam, no forest or revenue official or panchayat (village council) person dared step in to claim any authority. The area was administered by the Ryotanga Sangrama Samiti, which had replaced the Girijan Sangam, and the praja (people’s) courts were the legitimate judicial authority. The guerrilla squads not only defended the villages but also sought to resolve the people’s problems, organize them, propagate revolutionary politics, and set up village defense squads. The Ryotanga Sangrama Samiti set up praja courts and the guerrillas conducted raids “directed against big landlords, moneylenders, police informers, and sometimes police camps.”¹⁹

State repression inevitably followed, including “encounters” (extra-judicial killings). In October 1969, a 12,000-strong armed contingent of the Central Reserve Police Force encircled the zone where red political power prevailed and launched a brutal offensive. In retrospect, one might then say that the “encountering” of the brilliant young communist Panchadri Krishnamurthy, who had joined the Srikakulam guerrillas, and six of his comrades on May 27, 1969, was a precursor to a pattern of cold-blooded murders that were to become part and parcel of the “standard practice” of counterinsurgency.²⁰ In June 1969 the Agency parts of the district of Srikakulam were declared a “disturbed area” under the Andhra Pradesh Suppression of Disturbances Act, 1948. The guerrillas and the village defense squads, nevertheless, faced up to the huge “encirclement and suppression” campaign of the armed police that began in October 1969.

Tragically, however, some of the leading comrades, such as Nirmala Krishnamurthy, Panchadri Krishnamurthy’s wife, who joined the Srikakulam guerrillas after her husband was “encountered,” and Subbarao Panigrahi, the people’s guerrilla-poet, were killed by the police in December 1969 in what were calculated murders. The two school teachers, Vempatapu Satyanarayana and Adibhatla Kailasam—who had joined the CPI(ML)—were captured and murdered on the night of July 10–11, 1970, marking the tragic beginning of the end of the movement in Srikakulam.

MANY NAXALBARIS

But besides Srikakulam, there were many other political eruptions in the wake of Naxalbari, in

• some of the northern Telangana districts, like Khammam, Warangal and Karimnagar, of Andhra Pradesh during 1969–71, organized independently by the CPI(ML) and the Andhra Pradesh Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries, the latter led by Tarimela Nagi Reddy, Chandra Pulla Reddy, D. Venkateswara Rao, and Kolla Venkaiah;

• parts of Ganjam and Koraput districts of Orissa adjoining the areas of the Srikakulam movement;

• Mushahari block in Muzaffarpur district of Bihar in 1968–69;

• the Palia area in Lakhimpur-Kheri district of Uttar Pradesh in 1968–1970;

• Pulpally in the then Wayanad block of Kerala in 1968–69;

• Debra and Gopiballavpur in Midnapore district in 1969–70 and in Birbhum in 1970–71, both in West Bengal;

• some of the villages of Bhatinda, Hoshiarpur, Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Patiala, and Sangrur in Punjab during 1970 and 1971;

• Kanksa and Budbud in Burdwan district at the border with the Birbhum district of West Bengal between the early 1970s and 1974, led by Kanhai Chatterjee, Amulya Sen, and Chandrashekar Das (they were the founders of what became the Maoist Communist Centre);

• the Bhojpur area in the then Shahabad district of Bihar between 1971 and 1975;

• the upsurge of youth in Kolkata and other cities and towns of West Bengal in 1970–71, which came into the limelight for vandalizing the pictures and statues of political/cultural icons such as M. K. Gandhi, the preeminent leader of India’s independence movement, Rammohun Roy, founder of the socio-religious reformist Brahmo Sabha movement in the late 1820s, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, a key figure of the 19th century “Bengal Renaissance,” and Vivekananda, best known for introducing Hinduism at the “Parliament of the World’s Religions” in Chicago in 1893;²¹

• the struggles of political prisoners in various jails in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal.

The Birbhum armed struggle was one of the most significant that the CPI(ML) led, so much so that the Indian Army was deployed in every thana (police-station jurisdiction) of the area of struggle to crush it. In general, the ruthless offensive knew no bounds. The revolt of youth in Kolkata and other cities and towns of West Bengal in 1970–71 was followed by the massacre of more than a hundred young persons with CPI(ML) leanings in Baranagar-Kashipur (north Kolkata) on August 12–13, 1971. This took place soon after the proclamation of President’s Rule in West Bengal in late June 1971, with the aristocratic, wealthy barrister and Congress Party politician Siddhartha Shankar Ray exercising presidential power in the state. Using hired hoodlums, euphemistically called “resistance groups,” the police went on a rampage, searching house-to-house to ferret out youth suspected of CPI(ML) affiliation or simply party sympathizers, blocking all escape routes, rounding up and killing them in a most brutal and cruel manner. Indeed, an elderly man was doused with petrol and burnt alive because he didn’t inform the killers of the whereabouts of his alleged Naxalite nephew; and the hoodlums chopped off the hand of a school girl in her teens just because she said she didn’t know the whereabouts of her brother. The bodies of the slaughtered were dumped in a nearby canal. And then, the very next day, August 14, S.S. Ray visited the scene of the massacre, shown around the place, as one who was deeply concerned at what happened, “by the killers themselves”!²²

Ray’s right-hand man was Ranjit Gupta, then Inspector General of Police, West Bengal, who devised the counterrevolutionary tactic of “polluting the ocean.” He created “secret squads who killed small businessmen, robbed ferries, and bumped off a variety of individuals with a police carte blanche, if they were strict about shouting Naxalite slogans while acting.”²³ And, of course, there were the “encounter” killings in which the cowardly cops aimed their guns at Naxalites precisely when they knew the latter couldn’t shoot back, and then turned the victims into criminals. In his Calcutta Diary, the distinguished economist, political activist, writer, and columnist, Ashok Mitra, has this to say about the “encounter” deaths: “corpses are incapable of issuing rejoinders…. The corpse … [is] given an unsavory name … [extremist] … retroactive justification of trigger happiness. [From the second quarter of 1970 onward, the police assumed] summary powers to hunt down and kill ‘undesirable’ elements … point-blank killing … The British might have caviled at this ‘something’, but not us … You must not turn into a dreamer of extravagant dreams … [sacrifice] everything so that a new society could emerge … [For those who do, the powers-that-be have decided] that [such folks must be] shot like dogs under the canopy of the open sky in concocted encounters with the police.”²⁴

The Bengali woman of letters and political activist Mahasweta Devi’s Hajar Churashir Maa (No. 1084’s Mother) was written around the same time when Ashok Mitra penned those words. Translated into English by Samik Bandopadhyay, and later adapted to Hindi cinema by Govind Nihalani in Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa, the novel tells the story of Brati, unearthed by his apolitical mother, Sujata Chatterjee, in her quest to know her martyred Naxalite son. She had not known the true Brati ever when he was alive, but now she is determined to know what he stood for, more so in the face of the Chatterjee family’s, and especially her husband Dibyanath’s systematic denial of Brati and his politics. Brati was a Naxalite, and for the “crime” of being one, the Indian state reduced him to dead body number 1084. In Mahasweta Devi’s novel, Sujata, the upper middle-class working woman, oppressed at home by her husband, finds solace in her son’s comrade-and-lover Nandini, and in Brati’s dead comrade Somu’s mother, who belongs to the wretched of the Indian earth whose cause the Naxalites stood for.

BHOJPUR—THE WRETCHED STAND UP

The very mention of the damned of the Indian earth, however, reminds one of the movement in Bhojpur, which was greatly influenced by Charu Mazumdar’s ideas about taking the struggle from armed resistance to armed offensive—annihilation of class enemies, especially the most notorious landlords, attacks on police camps and on troops on the move, and attempts to carve out liberated zones. Bhojpur, particularly its southern part, is irrigated by the river Sone, and it thus became a “green revolution” area, where Dalit (literally oppressed, used to depict India’s “untouchables” who were “outside” the caste hierarchy)²⁵ landless laborers, either casual or bonded (through indebtedness), toiled at extremely low wages and suffered a denial of basic human dignity—their wives and daughters constantly subjected to sexual tyranny—in the fields and other domains of the upper-caste landlords, Rajputs and Bhumihars.

The latter wielded not only economic but also political power, their links with the state apparatus underwriting such coercive dominance. Their upper-caste status not only assured them access to the means of production that the green-revolution techniques required but also structured the relations of production vis-à-vis the Dalit landless laborers. In such a milieu, it was taken for granted that “unfree labor” would coexist with the landlords’ capitalistic drive for profit maximization. So full of themselves, the upper-caste landlords even took liberties with middle-class Shudra jati (the fourth social category within the caste hierarchy)²⁶ persons, with not infrequent assaults on their sense of dignity. In what seemed an irremediable situation, it was the ingenuity of the CPI(ML) that perceived a way out, by bringing the landless laborers and these oppressed sections of the middle class/castes onto a common political platform.²⁷

A series of annihilations of the most hated landlords and their mercenaries and snatching of arms marked the launch of the Bhojpur movement in February 1971. What a unique blend of leaders it had—Jagdish Mahato, a former school teacher; Rameshwar Ahir, a former dacoit (a member of a band of armed robbers) who turned to Maoism while in prison; Ramayan Chamar and his nephew Jwahar, both Dalits; Ganeshi Dusadh, also a Dalit, the son of a bonded landless peasant; and Subroto Dutta, a Maoist intellectual who became the ideologue of the movement, known as “Jwahar” to his followers. The coming together of an upper-caste Maoist intellectual, a socially oppressed middle-class radical, a poor/middle peasant of an oppressed shudra caste, and persons who came from the wretched of the Indian earth (Dalits)—that is what Sujata must have grasped about the movement of which her dead son Brati was a part, when she met his dead comrade Somu’s mother, in Hajar Churashir Maa. And ex-army personnel from the shudra-jati, middle-peasants, helped train the members of the armed squads, something lacking elsewhere in the Naxalite movement.

The biographies of some of the leaders of this movement might give us a hint about the making of Naxalite revolutionaries in India. Jagdish Mahato, the son of a peasant of Ekwari village in the Sahar block of Bhojpur, was a science teacher at a school in the town of Arrah. In the 1967 elections, on polling day, having campaigned vigorously for the CPI candidate, he resisted in the face of a concerted rigging of the vote for the candidate who was sponsored by the landlords, was brutally assaulted, and had to be hospitalized for the next five months. He then organized a wage strike of the landless laborers, started publishing a periodical to propagate the ideas of the sole Dalit-architect of India’s Constitution, B. R. Ambedkar, but nothing seemed to have come of his political interventions until he gave up his job as a teacher and became a full-time Naxalite with comrades like Rameshwar Ahir.

One day in 1971 the “Master”—that is what Jagdish Mahato came to be called—in conversation with one of his former colleagues of the Arrah school, said: “I know … that I am going to die one of these days. But I will die partly satisfied. For one change that our movement has brought about is that the landlords do not dare now to touch the women of the poor. And that is not a small change.” Reportedly, the Master would prevail upon his Dalit followers to go forth to “force [their] acceptability as human beings.” His practical lesson was: “This is a gun, the weapon of subjugation. Hold it straight, [and] go and deliver justice.”²⁸

That was the “Master.” His close comrade, Rameshwar Ahir, also one of the founders of the Bhojpur movement, was the son of a poor peasant. Rameshwar was driven by upper-caste persecution to join a gang of dacoits, but while in jail he was influenced by Naxalite co-prisoners, and he joined the movement upon his release from prison. And one can never forget Ganeshi Dusadh, the son of a bonded landless peasant from Chauri village in the Sahar block. He was an outstanding guerrilla fighter under whose leadership the CPI(ML) guerrillas annihilated several notorious landlords and moneylenders, confiscated their lands, organized the peasants to sow those fields, sniper attacked government troops, and seized and distributed the food grains of big traders. Indeed, for six months, Chauri remained under the control of a revolutionary committee. But, on May 6, 1973, a posse of armed policemen entered the village and a twelve-hour battle ensued, with the guerrillas and the villagers on one side, the police and the landlords’ henchmen on the other, in which, among others on both sides, Ganeshi was killed.²⁹

Was it worth it, what Ganeshi Dusadh did? He and his comrades rose up; they risked everything. Why? Well, the truth is that a Dalit could be beaten, raped, or killed at the whim of an upper-caste landlord and virtually nothing would be done about it. The coming of age to political consciousness of the Dalits brought on more severe repression by the ruling upper caste-class combined against them. In Kilvenmani, a village in Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu, forty-four Dalits—men, women and children—were forcibly herded into a hut and burned to death by hired hoodlums of the landlords on the night of December 24, 1968, because they struck work for higher wages. Predictably, the landlords who organized the massacre were exonerated by the courts for lack of evidence. What would anyone born into such a life have done? Who would blame the victims if they took up guns to deliver justice?

The “ideologue” of the Bhojpur movement, Subroto Dutta, known as “Jwahar” among the peasants, became general secretary of a reconstituted CPI(ML), operating in Bhojpur, in 1974. An “ardent follower of Charu Mazumdar”—as Sumanta Banerjee calls him—Jwahar “sharpened the party’s military line,” stressing “the need for building up a standing force,” this in order to “forestall the ‘encirclement and suppression’ of guerrilla bases by the military, by attacking [the enemy’s troops] … when they were on their way to the bases.” Recruits to the Indian army from the oppressed castes, when they came home, found their fellow folk rising in revolt against landlordism, and many of them left the army to join the guerrillas. But with the declaration of the State of Emergency in June 1975, and the launching of “Operation Thunder” to liquidate the Naxalites and smash their strongholds, Jwahar was killed on November 25, 1975, when the police raided his hideout in a Bhojpur village.³⁰ In a sense, this marked the end of the first phase of the Naxalite movement. For with the passing of Jwahar, the CPI(ML)(Liberation), with Vinod Mishra as its new general secretary, was not inclined to follow the path of “protracted people’s war” that leaders like Jagdish “Master,” Rameshwar Ahir, Ganeshi Dusadh, and Jwahar had embarked upon. Mind you, it was not merely the Maoist consciousness of Subroto Dutta “Jwahar” that gave the Bhojpur uprising its revolutionary character; this essential quality was shaped by the actions and deeds of persons like Ganeshi Dusadh and Rameshwar Ahir.

“DOING IS ITSELF LEARNING”

What then of this phase of the Naxalite movement? April-May 1969 witnessed the birth of the CPI(ML)—the significance of the fact that it was the revolutionary struggle which created this political party must be emphasized. But inexplicably, though the program of the Party envisaged a worker–peasant alliance, the Party organization had not been built among the urban proletariat. As Asit Sen, who presided over the May-Day rally that made the public announcement of the formation of the Party, was to put it: “The working class … is still completely isolated from the present armed struggle.”³¹ Serious debate, however, didn’t get a chance as bitter internal divisions and state repression did the movement in. By 1972, after the arrest, and later death, upon denial of proper medical treatment, of Charu Mazumdar in police custody on July 27, the CPI(ML) disintegrated. Having gotten India’s most wanted radical, the establishment must surely have heaved a sigh of great relief.

Charu Mazumdar “often failed to give the correct lead,” but “his ideas still live on.” When he claimed in the autumn of 1967 in the immediate aftermath of the defeat at Naxalbari that “Naxalbari has not died and will never die,” he was saying something “about the ability of his followers to survive, continue and expand their movement in the face of the most ruthless repression launched by the Indian state.” Born in a landlord family in Siliguri, Charu Mazumdar gave up his studies for the Intermediate examination and became a full-timer in the then outlawed CPI in the late 1930s in the party’s Kisan Sabha (peasant front) and took a leading part in Jalpaiguri in the Tebhaga movement in undivided, mainly north, Bengal in1946 to enforce the demand of the bargadars (sharecroppers) for a reduction in the rent paid to the jotedars (landlords) from half to one-third of the crop.

Embracing Mao’s thought as early as 1948, he was well known in the CPI in Jalpaiguri and Siliguri for the anti-“revisionist” positions he took. Going against the tide of national chauvinism in the wake of India’s China war in 1962, he was imprisoned for his views but stood his ground even after his defeat as a CPI candidate in a 1963 by-election for the Siliguri seat of the West Bengal State Assembly. When the party split in 1964, he joined the CPM as a Maoist in its ranks, but was censured the very next year when the first of his “Eight Documents” appeared. For him, the real fight against “revisionism” would begin when the poor and landless peasantry took the revolutionary road.

It was, however, only later that a fervent follower of Charu Mazumdar, Kondapalli Seetharamaiah (KS), would advance this political agenda. KS’s efforts—relentless groundwork—eventually led to the formation of the CPI(ML)(People’s War)—CPI(ML)(PW), on April 22, 1980. He and his close comrades made a major contribution to keeping alive the politics of the area-wise seizure of political power and the armed agrarian revolution following Charu Mazumdar’s death and the subsequent disintegration of the original CPI(ML). They also tried to overcome the sectarian tendencies and adventurist tactics that had befallen the Party led by Mazumdar. KS (1915–2002)³² was a veteran of the Telangana armed peasant struggle of the 1940s, who led a CPI unit in the fight against a minor zamindari at the border of Krishna and Nalgonda districts. Early on, he was recognized for his organizational abilities, especially in taking the Party to the masses (implementing the mass line). Later, inspired by the Cultural Revolution in 1966, he began organizing students in Warangal, establishing a strong base in the Regional Engineering College there.

Following Naxalbari, KS propagated the Charu Mazumdar line, became a member of the Andhra State Committee of the CPI(ML) upon the formation of that Party, and coordinated with the Srikakulam unit. He played a leading role in the collective learning from the defeat of the movement in Srikakulam and in the review that diagnosed the basic lacuna of that struggle in its failure to implement the mass line. Indeed, KS had a big hand, along with the Digambara (naked), Thirugubati (revolt), and Pygambara (prophetic) poets, in the formation of the Revolutionary Writers’ Association (Viplava Rachayitala Sangham in Telugu, Virasam, in short) in 1970 and the Jana Natya Mandali, along with radical cultural activists Narasingha Rao and Gaddar, inspired by the songs of Subbrao Panigrahi,³³ in 1972. He also nurtured the Radical Students’ Union in 1974 and its “go to the village” campaigns that spawned many a professional revolutionary, and the Radical Youth League in May 1975, just before the declaration of the State of Emergency when all civil liberties and democratic rights were suspended.

For KS, “annihilation of class enemies” was only one form of struggle, one tactic among others.³⁴ Indeed, the collective review conducted by KS and his close associates in Andhra Pradesh culminated in the formulation of a fresh tactical line called “Road to Revolution,” whose first seeds began to sprout in the peasant movement in Karimnagar and Adilabad districts soon after the Emergency was lifted.³⁵ A legend in the period 1970–87, so his followers would say, KS inspired radical Telugu youth right from 1966 and had a major role in building the CPI(ML)(PW) from scratch.

He played a stellar role in the creation of a gateway to “Spring Thunder,” Phase II, which we examine in chapter 4. It is time then to touch upon the essence of the Maoist strategy that the CPI(ML)(PW) intended to implement. Although there were bitter differences over tactics, there was a remarkable unanimity about the revolutionary strategy the original CPI(ML) chose, which was that of the Chinese Revolution. Lin Biao, in his 1965 pamphlet, “Long Live the Victory of People’s War!,” had famously summed up the essence of this strategy of protracted people’s war (PPW) in the following words: “To rely on the peasants, build rural base areas, and use the countryside to encircle and finally capture the cities—such was the way to victory in the Chinese revolution,” which “broke out in a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country.”³⁶ Likewise, in the CPI(ML)’s view, India was also then a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country, with the big landlords and the comprador-bureaucrat capitalists the ruling classes. The main instrument of the PPW must be the people’s army, which had to be built on the political base of the Party. That army had to master the art of guerrilla warfare and apply tactics flexible enough to adapt to every twist and turn in the war and in keeping with the movement’s resources and the principle of self-reliance. The revolution had to begin with a “New Democratic” stage, led by the workers in a worker–peasant alliance, and would only transit to the socialist stage upon taking power at the national level. So, it was to be a “revolution by stages” and an “uninterrupted revolution.” In the New Democratic stage, not only was the peasant question extremely important, but, as Lin Biao had reiterated, the “countryside, and the countryside alone, can provide the broad areas in which the revolutionaries can manoeuvre freely … [and] provide the revolutionary bases from which [they] … can go forward to final victory.”³⁷

In practice, however, the “adventurist” tactical line had led to defeat, the main reasons for which were the following:

• Rash optimism and neglect of the long, hard and patient underground organizational work that should have preceded the launch of armed struggle;

• Absence of an organization among the urban proletariat, though the Party had envisaged a worker–peasant alliance;

• Neglect of military requirements;

• Failure to integrate the “mass line” (“from the masses, to the masses”) and mass organizations as necessary complements to armed struggle;

• Assigning of an undue importance to the tactic of “annihilation of class enemies,” making it doubly difficult to undertake the kind of political work that was essential for the expansion of the movement;

• Gross underestimation of the retaliatory power of the Indian state, which turned out to be the most monstrous repression unleashed on a political movement in post-Independence India;

• No democratic means to resolve internal contentions over tactics, given that there was a remarkable intra-party consensus over strategy; and

• Inexplicable isolation of the students—youth, more generally—in the urban areas from the struggles of the urban working class.

A revolutionary war, nevertheless, as Mao put it, was “not a matter of first learning and then doing, but doing and then learning, for doing is itself learning.”³⁸ Those who didn’t learn from what they had done, were wiped out; those who learned from what they had done, recovered and lived to fight another day, and they have persevered right to this day, but their numbers are still very small compared to the size of this country.

In this account of the movement in its first phase, the focus has been on the armed struggles, not on the process of party formation and organizational matters. The latter began with a Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries within the CPM, composed of Naxalites who wanted to give up the parliamentary path. This was followed by the formation of an All-India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries after severing all links with CPM. Despite internal differences, the process culminated in the formation of the CPI(ML) on April 22, 1969, and the first Party Congress in May 1970. In all these, there were significant internal differences. Frankly, in the absence of an archive, as regards such differences, and too many unknowns and unknowables, it may be better to refrain from comment.

INSURGENT POETRY

Instead, there is a need to bring to the fore the political good and the political evil in Indian society, for invariably, both have been obscured. The good, by the false or unwarranted accusations made against uncompromising left politics and against anyone who questions the assumptions and institutions that support the established order in India. The evil, effectively hidden by the claim that the Indian state is simply upholding “law and order” in the face of the violence of the Naxalites, deemed to be a “cancerous growth on the body of (Indian) democracy.” That the most vulnerable sections of the people, Dalits and adivasis (tribal or aboriginal),³⁹ and those who couldn’t remain unmoved at their plight and thus took up their cause, were subjected to the worst of the state’s and the landlords’ terror-with-a-vengeance, and that this could happen in a liberal-political democracy, no matter how reactionary, is hard to believe.

A lot can be gained by listening to the voices of some of the poets who came on the scene in the wake of Naxalbari, the Telugu verse writer Cherabanda Raju, for instance. One of the sympathizers of the Srikakulam armed struggle, Cherabanda Raju played a part in the formation of Virasam, the Revolutionary Writers’ Association, and was charge-sheeted in the Secunderabad Conspiracy Case, instituted in May 1974, against the poets of Virasam. Believe it or not, this conspiracy case involved poets and their poetry, on the ground that they believed in violence and hence were subject to the normal course of criminal law. In the following, Cherabanda Raju conveys the shattering of the hopes that one had at the time of Independence, in a “bitter-sad tribute paid to Mother India”:⁴⁰

Oh my dear motherland!

…

Yours is a beauty that

pawns its parts in the world market-place.

Yours is a youth that

sleeps in the ecstasy of a rich man’s embrace.

…

Yours is a sadness that

fails to comfort the children crawling over

your barren breasts.

…

Mother India,

What is your destiny?

In another poem, written from jail, Cherbanda Raju, again:⁴¹

Instead of removing

the filth I hate to see

they try to pluck out my eyes.

…

My voice is a crime,

my thoughts anarchy,

because

I do not sing their tunes,

I do not carry them on my shoulders.

…

Prisoner I may be

but not a slave.

Though battered and broken

like a wave of the sea

I will be born

again and again.

And, Cherabanda Raju, once more, in red salute to the two peasants, Gunal Kista Gowd and Jangam Bhoomaiah, radical political activists who were charged with the annihilation of landlords in Adilabad district of Andhra Pradesh in 1970, sentenced to death, and executed on December 1, 1975 during the State of Emergency when lawyers defending the accused were also under detention:⁴²

…

The gallows are trembling,

unable to take away your breath.

This edifice cannot stand any longer

after robbing you of your life.

…

Kista Gowd and Bhoomaiah were political prisoners, a category recognized by the leaders of India’s freedom struggle in colonial times, but now, in Independent India, the law treated them as common criminals. It must be mentioned that Kista Gowd and Bhoomaiah did not consider their actions as criminal; they acted destructively but justly, nevertheless, to invert the old social order; this, publicly and collectively, and in solidarity with the oppressed. Had they not been Naxalites, subject to the worst kind of political prejudice, they would not have been victims of the Indian state’s terror, for they had acted in the manner that they did “because they were appalled by the injustice of the massive suffering and suppression of the poor and they wanted to shock and shake the custodians of the status quo.”⁴³ Indeed, on the eve of their execution, both of them “donated their eyes for transplantation for the needy. They said: ‘Our eyes could not see the victory of the revolution. But those who will receive our eyes will surely watch that victory.’”⁴⁴

There was an incident during the Non-Cooperation Movement against British colonialism—large-scale civil disobedience in 1920–22 led by M. K. Gandhi for the grant of “Swaraj” (self-government)—in Chauri Chaura in Gorakhpur district of eastern United Provinces on February 5, 1922, in which peasants, when at least two of their comrades were killed in police firing, set a police station on fire, which caused the death of twenty-two (some reports say twenty-three) policemen. This led Gandhi to withdraw the whole civil disobedience struggle, with the peasants condemned as “murderers” and traitors, the latter because they had broken their vow of non-violence, which was Gandhi’s precondition for their participation. As many as nineteen persons were hanged in July 1923, including some of the leaders—Nazar Ali, Lal Mohammad, and Bhagwan Ahir—and there were many life sentences. The Congress government in the United Provinces, which assumed office in 1938, did not even bother about the pitiable conditions of the persons suffering life sentences or their near and dear ones; the lifers had to wait till 1942–43 to get released. And, to add insult to injury, after Indian independence, the Chauri Chaura militants were initially not even recognized as freedom fighters, and thus not entitled to pensions. Nevertheless, Chauri Chaura was a turning point in the nationalist movement for independence, for it inspired revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh and his comrades, and many others.⁴⁵

Bhagat Singh (1907–1931) “is to South Asia what Che Guevara is to Latin America,” an iconic figure of the radical left tradition. In a trial by a special tribunal which chose to violate basic principles of law and criminal procedure for colonial-political ends, he was convicted of the charge of assassinating an assistant superintendent of police, John Saunders, in 1928.⁴⁶ Singh (along with his comrades Sukhdev and Rajguru) was executed in Lahore (now in Pakistan) on March 23, 1931. Having come from the revolutionary strand of India’s struggle for independence, the elite nationalist leadership, Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, remained ambivalent about him, and nationalist historiography has marginalized his political contribution. The substitution of the slogan “Vande Mataram!” (Salutations to Mother India!) with the rallying cries “Inquilab Zindabad!” (Long Live the Revolution!), “Samrajyawad Ka Nash Ho!” (Death to Imperialism!), for which Bhagat Singh is credited, was alien to the political sense of the elite nationalists.

Clearly, Bhagat Singh had truly made the transition from the Hindustan Republican Association to the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. He really hit the nail on the head when he wrote—and in this, he has proved prophetic—in a communication to young political workers on February 2, 1931, at a time the Congress Party was contemplating a compromise with the British government: “[W]hat difference does it make to them [workers and peasants] whether Lord Reading is the head of the Indian government or Sir Purshottamdas Thakurdas? What difference for a peasant if Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru replaces Lord Irwin!”⁴⁷ In the adoption of the hunger strike as a political weapon, he and his comrades took inspiration from their Irish counterparts, progenitors of this political tactic. Indeed, Jatin Das (1904–29), one of Bhagat Singh’s comrades, died on September 13, 1929, after a sixty-three-day hunger strike in Lahore jail, and civil liberties and democratic rights activists and the Naxalites, in and outside the walls of prisons, to this day, commemorate that day as political prisoners’ day.⁴⁸ It must be said that, unlike the parliamentary communist left, the Naxalites embraced the revolutionary traditions of the Ghadarites (we will come to them in chapter 2)—whom the colonial state treated viciously in the first Lahore Conspiracy Case, initiated in 1915—Bhagat Singh and his comrades, and even groups like the Anushilan Samiti that advocated “revolutionary terror” to end British rule in India.

“Naxalbari exploded many a myth and restored faith in the courage and character of the revolutionary left in India…. [T]he very problems they [the Naxalites] raised and tried to solve in a hurry had never been raised with such force of sincerity before or after Telangana. That is their achievement.”⁴⁹ That was how the post-Tagorean poet and editor of the radical weekly Frontier, Samar Sen, summed it all up. Dedication and devotion of a high order, one might add, and immense perseverance, because of which, in Suniti Kumar Ghosh’s words, “Naxalbari held out a promise—the promise of the liberation of … [the Indian] people from oppression and exploitation. [But] (t)hat promise is yet to be fulfilled.”⁵⁰

“ORDINARY PEOPLE IN EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES”

Neither the lives of the individuals who came to the fore in “Spring Thunder,” Phase I, who have been profiled here, nor their “present as history,” can be understood without comprehending both. The powers-that-be regarded these ordinary people as the greatest danger to India’s liberal-political democracy and did what was expected of them to preserve the set-up. Given the positions of the Ranjit Guptas or the S.S. Rays, or indeed, the then prime minister Indira Gandhi, in the institutional structure of the system, it does not seem possible that they could have been sensitized to the consequences of their actions, although, five decades on, those repercussions are still unfolding. This narrative has tried to understand “Spring Thunder,” Phase I, from the perceptions of the revolutionary participants themselves, to figure out the motives and actions of the tribal- and Dalit-peasant protagonists.

Yes, there is a political intent to what I am doing but this does not mean that I cannot do it objectively. Certainly, my politics has shaped what I have written; my own experience and political participation in Indian society has influenced what I have penned. I detest the condescension of many Indian Marxists to the Naxalites, as if the Naxalites have been ignorant of Marxism, as if their politics had been nothing but “petty-bourgeois left adventurist,” and that what they needed, metaphorically speaking, was an appointment with these Marxist intellectuals to provide them with good theory, which will then, in turn, lead to “correct” practice! Sheer arrogance, this treatment of ordinary people almost as things. I can sense the manner of their contemptuous scorn when they read what I have written, as if writing with deeply felt emotions is always bereft of objectivity.

Pray, how can anger and indignation, empathy and compassion, this in the face of terror and inhumanity, be considered out of place? Are not passion and rage the stuff that drives revolutionaries to make them what they are? Aren’t all revolutionaries emotionally charged with fury, revulsion, and moral indignation against the powers-that-be? Isn’t it the case that they cannot but raise objections and thus refuse to remain silent in the face of the myriad injustices and indignities that the poor are made to suffer, no matter the cost to themselves? Aren’t revolutionary moments precisely those when the fetters of intuitive self-preservation are thrown to the winds? Why obfuscate such matters? I am writing about “ordinary people … in extraordinary circumstances,” just like Sumanta Banerjee did, and I have strong opinions of the Naxalites who brought some of those ordinary people together in what became their joint radical political project. Perhaps my opinion has been shaped by the manner of the Maoist intellectuals I have known and trust, mainly those from the civil liberties and democratic rights struggle—here one comes across communists who are radical-democratic and libertarian, both qualities Marx associated with the word communist.

The Naxalites have been people with a revolutionary Marxist commitment; their politics has been the expression of their hopes for a better world. They have had a sense of shared interests among themselves, and against the Indian state and ruling classes; they developed a revolutionary consciousness that has been radical-democratic, and this awareness has come from their own values and experience, in the course of their struggles, as they, mostly, lost against the repression and anti-democratic ethos of the Indian state and ruling classes. It was the fusion of the revolutionary romanticism of revolting middle-class youth with the class consciousness of toiling poor peasants and landless laborers that made “Spring Thunder,” Phase I, what it was—both, the rebel youth and the poor peasants/landless laborers, could not have been made solely by the “vanguard” that came out of the CPM.

That vanguard as well as the rebel youth, both of whom had given up the comforts, the safety, and the privileges that came from their middle-class social origins, chose to pitch their lot with the deprived peasants and laborers; they took up the revolutionary cause, and thus risked their very lives. Unlike the leaders and cadre of the parliamentary left parties, they were hounded by the repressive apparatus of the Indian state; many of them remained in detention without trial for years, brutally tortured in police interrogation cells; some of them were cold-bloodedly assassinated in the forests of Srikakulam or “shot like dogs under the canopy of the open sky” on the Kolkata maidan, like the communist poet and leader of the West Bengal unit of the CPI(ML) Saroj Dutta was, on the midnight of August 4/5, 1971.

Despite the positive resolve of the leaders and the resolute support that they got in some of the areas of armed struggle, the Naxalites erred, both in the adoption of appropriate tactics and in correctly responding to the course of events. But what of the existing conditions on the ground and the context, what of the then “present as history”? What was new in India in the decade of the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s and what was part of the longer process? It is time to turn then to “‘1968’ India as History.” One aspect that needs to be kept in mind, though, about “Spring Thunder,” Phase I, while looking at India after Naxalbari, can be stated thus: In the failure of armed struggle and mass mobilization to come together, in the inability of the developing class consciousness and evolving revolutionary romanticism to find a common cultural home,⁵¹ something was lost. What and how much, I really cannot say for sure, but certainly, the Indian people and the Naxalite movement were among the losers. Basically, the process of democratization lost what would have possibly been one of its most imaginative allies. Charu Mazumdar had encouraged urban youth, especially students—revolutionary romantics—joining the revolutionary movement to go to the countryside and “integrate with workers and poor and landless peasants,”⁵² learning from them and teaching them, and in the process build a common cultural home. But this was not to be, at least during “Spring Thunder,” Phase I. The process had, however, begun, for instance, in Srikakulam with the guerrilla-poet Subbarao Panigrahi’s attempts to reach out to people through their own cultural forms. Some of these youngsters, not within the gaze of the “Stalinist” leaders, and hence not constricted by the fiat of the Party, could allow their creative energies and those of the poor peasants and landless laborers to unfold. Both could then emerge as historical persons, responsible for their actions.

Marx famously expressed the thought that people, in the process of changing the world, at the same time change themselves. The poor and landless peasants—from tribal, Dalit or lower caste social backgrounds—made an attempt to overthrow their oppressors and change the class structure and institutions of Indian society. In undertaking these tasks, alongside middle-class, romantic revolutionaries in the making, their own conceptions of Indian society had begun to evolve, so also their values, their needs, their abilities, their aspirations. But abrupt defeat cut all of these short. Marx also famously said that human beings make their own history, but he was quick to add that they cannot and will not be allowed to do so in the manner of their own choosing. Nevertheless, “Spring Thunder,” Phase I, was an indication, a portent, of a section of the Indian people reemerging, gathering strength once again, augmenting their forces to engage in a struggle that was going to be protracted, hard, and cruel over the years to follow.