Naxalbari 1967: The uprising that changed our politics

Hoy Naxalbari noy beshyabari, ekta bechhe nitey habey (Either Naxalbari or brothel, you have to choose one),” quipped legendary playwright and drama director of yesteryears Utpal Dutt in chaste Bengali during the sanguinary beginning of the Naxalbari stir, which exploded on May 25, 1967 when the police (read “state”) went berserk killing nine adivasi women and children.

Egged on by a handful of suave Maoist ideologues, peasants belonging to the class of “the wretched of the Earth” in and around Naxalbari in the foothills of Himalayas and tea estate workers around in Darjeeling districts were up against the repressive jotedars and snatch the latter’s lands, held beyond the statutory upper ceiling.

Political mercury shot up when sharecropper Bigul Kisan was roughed up by hired and armed goons of a local jotedar. The retaliation was violent clashes and forcible seizure of land and confiscation of foodgrains by armed militants of the kisan committee. Resistance from jotedars and their hirelings collapsed. On May 23 peasant militants killed inspector Sonam Wangdi with poisoned arrows at Jharugaon village. Followed a series of snatching of firearms and ammunition at Naxalbari, Kharibari and Phansidewa from the houses of jotedars, raided by armed peasants. People’s courts set up and verdicts like brutal execution and heavy monetary fines were issued. All this forced the frightened landlords and their hirelings to flee their hearth and home, thanks to villagers’ refusal to cooperate with the police in their combing operations.

A huge fillip came from the Radio Peking broadcast on June 28, 1967: “A phase of peasants’ armed struggle led by the revolutionaries of the Indian Communist Party has been set up in the countryside in Darjeeling district of West Bengal state of India. This is the front paw of the revolutionary armed struggle launched by the Indian people...” On July 5 People’s Daily, organ of the Communist Party of China carried an article, captioned “Spring Thunder over India”, stating: “A peal of spring thunder has crashed over the land of India. Revolutionary peasants in Darjeeling area have risen in rebellion. Under the leadership of a revolutionary group of the Indian Communist Party, a red area of rural revolutionary armed struggle has been established in India.” The Daily termed it as a “revolutionary storm of the Indian peasants in the Darjeeling area”.

The rest is history. The CPI(M), the largest constituent of the United Front government with its central committee member and national leader of All India Krishak Sabha Harekrishna Konar as the minister of land and land revenue, chucked out top leaders of armed revolt, including CPI(M)’s West Bengal state committee member Sushital Roy Chowdhury, Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal, Jangal Santhal and Souren Bose. The UF government, mainly under the pressure of CPI(M) and Bangla Congress, went on a repressive mode on July 19, pressing into action a large number of paramilitary forces, mainly of Eastern Frontier Rifles that resorted to a ruthless cordoning and combing operations. Hundreds of militants were beaten up with over 1,000 arrested, including Mazumdar and Santhal. Tribeni Kanu, Sobhan, Ali Gorkha Majhi and Tilka Majhi embraced martyrdom.

The prairie fire had spread to Assam, Bihar, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Punjab. Hundreds of CPI(M) members joined the new wave inspired by the ideology of Mao Zedong. Naxalbari Aid Committee was set up and thereafter the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries was formed in 1967 with the aim of a national revolution through armed struggle. Mazumdar, known as CM inside the party, emerged as the chief ideologue after the third Indian communist party — Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) was born at a massive rally in Calcutta on May Day 1969 with Mazumdar as the general secretary, but at the cost of a split. Nagi Reddy, Asit Sen, Promode Sengupta and a few other leading comrades refused to join the new party as they thought it was premature. Mazumdar electrified the gathering in the name of Mao Zedong. But his slogans such as “Our victory is inevitable as the chairman of China is our chairman too” reflected an unbridled sycophancy of Mao. Whether this was one of the reasons for decimation of Naxalism, inflamed by CM, is for the historians to judge.

But CM wasn’t the lone worshipper of Mao. His ideological critique in the CC, Sanyal, too used to address Mao as “Chairman Mao” as infallible, “illumined by the thought of our beloved leader and great teacher, Chairman Mao”. Both the top leaders never critically judged Mao’s slogan. “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” discordant with the outlook of Mao, miles away from Marx’s libertarian temper. The heroic peasants opposed this armed rule with armed revolt. So the culture of sycophancy overshadowed the party. Numerous graffitis with quotations from “Chairman Mao” were a proof.

Naxalite brass and their fellow travellers often claim that hundreds of brilliant students joined the armed struggle at the call of CM, as if this gravitation by academically meritorious youth justified CM and his sycophancy towards Mao. Only at the fag end of CM’s life, CPI(ML) members came to learn that CPC rejected the CM line. The first premier of “Communist” China, Zhou Enlai in a lengthy interview to Bose who secretly visited China, criticised the slogan, suggesting that the path of revolution be independently scripted by the party concerned and masses. Condemned was also CM’s line of individual terrorism. He infamously issued a sermon: “The annihilation of class enemy does not only mean liquidating individuals, but also means liquidating the political, social and economic authority of the class enemy.” This rejection was a partial endorsement of Sanyal’s critique of CM, in his well-known “Report on the peasant movement in the Terai Region” written and circulated in October 1968, (rewritten in 1973) but never discussed in the AICCCR or CPI(ML) during CM’s lifetime.

Ashim Chatterjee, the lone living member of the first CC of CPI(ML), states that Sanyal played a far more important role than CM in the evolution of Naxalbari struggle which was to happen irrespective of CM. He stresses the difference between CM and Sanyal from those days they were at loggerheads to each other. Sanyal’s difference with CM was more than implicit in his report on the peasant movement in the Terai region, circulated in 1968, but never discussed.

In 1963, when the ultra left-liners of undivided CPI were imprisoned at Dum Dum jail after the Chinese aggression into the Indian territory in October 1963, CM proposed that prisoners observe the anniversary of Chinese Revolution but it was rejected on tactical grounds. CM said aloud, “I consider myself as a member of Communist Party of China,” a statement he made several times despite opposition from Sanyal, Bose and others. Strange enough, Naxalite factions like CPI(ML), Liberation and CPI (Maoist) cultivate personality cult of Mao and CM. Polymath and Marxian scholar of international repute, Pradip Baksi, termed this as “slavish mindset”.

CM’s call for “turning the 1970s into a decade of revolution” ended in a damp squib.

The writer is a Kolkata-based journalist specialising in Left politics and history and the politicoeconomics of India’s neighbours