When Hitler & Stalin divided up Poland between them, Communists in India sided with Congress against the British Viceroy & War Effort. However, once Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, they turned their coats and began to prosper under the patronage of the British more especially in Provinces where the Congress administrations had resigned. During this period the ideas of the American Communist, Earl Browder, gained traction. Perhaps Communists should align with the left wing of the Bourgeois parties and form 'United Fronts'. Many Communist idealogues- e.g H.N Goshal (in Burma)- opposed Browderism. After all, Chairman Mao had defeated the KMT and taken power through the barrel of a gun. Indian Communists should launch an armed struggle and take over the villages and encircle the towns- etc. Sadly, the Indian State was vastly more powerful than the cadres. Stalin advised collaboration with the left wing of Congress to achieve land reform. The Americans too were great believers in land reform.
The mainstream of the Communist movement entered parliamentary politics and did well. In Kerala, they were able to form a government- the first time a Communist government had been established in a legal, democratic, manner. The problem was that those who gained Parliamentary seats or Ministerial office might come to be seen as 'revisionists' by those toiling at the grass-roots level.
The Sino-Soviet split was bound to cause a split in the Indian Communist party. The pro-Moscow faction tended to see Nehru & his daughter as 'progressive'. The other faction- which couldn't be too pro-Beijing after the 1962 war with China- was more militant. However, within three years of the split, it was willing to make common cause with the Bangla Congress (i.e. leftists who had split from the main Congress party) and was able to come to power as part of a United Front coalition. A senior Communist was now in charge of Land Revenue- in other words, there was a legal path to redressing the grievances of the landless labourer and the sharecropper. Unfortunately, for geopolitical reasons (China and Pakistan had an incentive to create trouble in India's strategically vital 'chicken neck' or Siliguri gap) there was outside support for an insurgency in Darjeeling district.
This was the supposed 'Naxalbari' uprising whose aim was to split the CPM by creating a Maoist party which rejected Browderism and embraced the fantasy that 'armed struggle' could lead to the conquest of the country. It was fanatical pro-China. In its Bangladeshi incarnation, this involved approving of the Pakistani army (which was allied to China) committing genocide on Bengalis while condemning Sheikh Mujib as a Soviet puppet. This stupid, puerile, sociopathy attracted 'intellectuals' and ''artists' but it could be easily suppressed with a brutality it had itself displayed.
Killers can establish themselves in any sort of territory provided they can extort money and buy arms. Pockets of Naxal activity could establish themselves in backward parts of India where the State had little presence. But, if locals were paid to kill Naxals, the State prevailed. The question was whether it was worth making such payments. After all, the Naxals might sell the resources of territory they controlled at a cheaper price. After all, the world needs rare earths and other valuable minerals to be found in backward districts. If the local people control their own territory, they may insist on environmentally sustainable development. Indeed, that's the problem with Democracy and the Rule of Law. Compliance costs are too high. It would be cheaper to deal with gangsters or Al Qaeda or Maoists or whatever.
In an article title 'once upon a time in Naxalbari', Cultural historian Sumanta Bannerjee wrote
Covering an area of 300 square miles, Naxalbari, Phansidwa, and Kharibari were the three important bases in the Darjeeling district,
which the British had taken from Sikkim and Bhutan.
where the peasants were mainly comprised of the tribals – Santhals, Oraons,
immigrants from the South and South West. They were a minority.
and Rajbanshis.
who were autochthonous as were the Lepchas in the hilly regions. Some were landowners or head tenants (jotedars)
Exploited by the jotedars under the adhiar system
because they were descended from immigrants fleeing famine. Being exploited meant having almost enough food to eat. Not being exploited meant starvation.
they were mainly employed on contractual basis. The landlords provided seeds, ploughs and bullocks, in exchange for which they cultivated the plots and got a share of the crops.
They took their share when the harvest came in and prices were low. Since they had the means to store and transport grain, they could sell when the price was high or just lend to the needy at high rates of interest.
Disputes over shares leading to evictions of the peasants were quite common,
especially if a new Government was promising to pass laws favourable to tenants
and increased with the coming to office of the United Front.
This happened in early 1967. Congress had lost, for the first time since Independence, to a coalition of leftist parties including erstwhile members of Congress. Some of these people returned to the fold after Indira Gandhi asserted herself and broke with the 'Syndicate'- i.e. the older stalwarts of the party.
To quote Harikrishna Konar,
who was the new Minister in charge of Land Reform
“No sooner than the United Front had formed the government, the jotedars
i.e. richer tenants who possessed local influence. Speaking generally, they paid much lower rent in return for helping the landowner extract higher assessments from the small fry. Could party cadres take the place of the jotedars- i.e. run the village- and thus help up prop up the Administration in Calcutta with rural votes? But, from time to time, there would have to be a show of force. Ultimately, those best at beating people would prevail regardless of which party claimed their allegiance.
and other reactionary elements began to spread the lie that the United Front government would rob small and medium owners of their land.”
Konar wasn't able to spread the lie that the reactionaries would bite off their own heads and die horribly. Sad.
The first response of all the land owners — whether big or small — to such a propaganda was to get rid immediately of the sharecroppers who worked on their plots and who might, they were afraid, demand possession of these blocks.
In other words, they acted rationally.
As a result, there was a spate of evictions in the countryside. In fact, right in Naxalbari, just after the United Front came to office, a sharecropper, Bigul Kishan, was evicted by a landlord
a Congress politician by the name of Ishwar Tirkey. Since his party lost the election, he could expect trouble from the new administration. Bigul Kishan was a member of Konar's wing of the Communist Party's Agriculturalists Association which had decided to withhold the entire crop rather than give half to the landlord.
in spite of a court judgment which favoured the sharecropper. The landlord and his gang attacked Bigul Kishan and got away with it. If anything else was needed, the incident coming fast on the heels of the United Front’s assumption of office, opened the eyes of the peasantry to the futility of expecting the coalition government to help them.
This is unfair to Konar. There were legal steps which could be taken to redistribute surplus land. Indeed, over a million acres were in fact redistributed. Interestingly, British law permitted the taking of evidence from the local residents so as to establish the facts of the case even if they contradicted documentary evidence. In other words, this was a problem which could have been tackled at any time since 1937 when a popular elected government took power in Bengal.
Konar understood that if legal steps were not taken, anything the sharecropper took by force could be taken by force from him. Moreover, the District was ethnically mixed. There was a risk that Bengalis would be disintermediated as Nepali speaking people reasserted their rights. China and Pakistan might sponsor anti-Bengali ethnic cleansing. As a matter of fact, in the Eighties, the Nepalis did begin asserting themselves by demanding 'Gorkhaland'. But, speaking generally, all the local people were unhappy with Calcutta's misrule. Subsidiarity or devolution of power was vital for development.
There was also a considerable number of workers in the tea gardens, most of whom were also tribals who worked as sharecroppers on the tea Garden owners’ surplus land.
They had been brought in a century previously
Used for Paddy cultivation, these lands were shown as tea Gardens to escape the ceiling on paddy lands. The sharecropper cum plantation workers were often retrenched by the employers, and they were thrown out of their homes. The CPI (M) dissidents wanted to draw in the tea garden workers into the peasants’ struggle. Kanu Sanyal claimed later that tea garden workers armed themselves and participated in every struggle from May 1967, which “helped the tea garden workers to come out from the mire of simple trade unionism and economicism.”
They remained very poor. Tea bushes should be replanted every 45 years or so. Currently, many estates in the region have bushes which are 150 years old. The youngest are 80 years old. Thus quality has declined and estates often go bankrupt. There are notable exceptions, but, by and large, the plight of the 70,000 plantation workers is pitiable. The Trinamool administration in Calcutta has written off the district. It is said that Government funds are looted by party goons.
Naxalbari had a strategic importance too. A look at the map of West Bengal would reveal that the northern tip of the state has only a slender and vulnerable connection with the rest of India, through the Naxalbari neck.
This is the crux of the matter. In 1962, the Chinese invaded. This coincided with the Sino-Soviet split which Ho Chi Minh had told Konar about. Might the Red Army come to the aid of a pro-Beijing splinter group in the CPM? Moreover, since Pakistan's generals were very friendly to Mao's China, might they give money and weapons to pro-Beijing insurrectionists? After the 1965 war with India, some Pakistani military officers thought the 'chicken neck' (i.e. Siliguri gap) represented Indian vulnerability. Insurgency there could cut India off from its North Eastern States. Thus a lot of troops could be tied up in that area thus reducing the odds faced by the Pakistani infantry on the Western border.
Naxalbari wasn't important in itself. Nobody cared about its poor people. But, if China invaded then those who supported it would become powerful and wealthy. Sadly, China's Cultural Revolution had been a disaster. It wasn't concerned with spreading its crazy ideology. The US used Pakistan to get closer to Mao. But the US didn't rescue Pakistan from defeat in the Bangladesh war. Ludicrously, Bengali Maoists thought Sheikh Mujib was evil because he was allied with the Soviet Union whereas the Pakistani Army was virtuous because it was obsequious towards Beijing! Bernard Henri Levi, the French philosopher, had gone to Bangladesh and was working for the new government. Then he had to leave after publishing an interview with a crazy Maoist praising Pakistan and condemning Sheikh Mujib!
The neck is sandwiched between Nepal on the west and then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) on the east. Between Naxalbari and Nepal flows the Mechi river, which in winter, can be crossed on foot. All these conditions render the area ideal for rebel activities, providing them with an opportunity to set up a liberated base area for some time, and with an escape route to foreign countries if things became too hot.
Would China supply guns? There's a lot of profit in gun running.
The Siliguri subdivision peasants’ conference proved to be a great success. The peasants, quickened and strengthened by their earlier militant struggles, looked forward expectantly. Faces, deadened and dulled with the grinding routine of labor on the jotedars’ fields in sun and rain, glowed with hope and understanding. According to Kanu Sanyal’s later claims, from March 1967 to April 1967, all the villagers were organized. From 15,000 to 20,000 peasants were enrolled as full-time activists.
Kanu Sanyal met Mao in October 1967. The Chinese are very rich- right? They'll give us lots of money.
Peasants’ committees were formed in every village and they were transformed into armed guards. They soon occupied land in the name of the peasants’ committees, burnt all land records which had been used to cheat them of their dues, cancelled all hypothecary debts, passed death sentences on oppressive landlords, formed armed bands by looting guns from the landlords, armed themselves with conventional weapons, like bows, arrows and spears, and set up a parallel administration to look after the villages.
Mao had first given land to the peasants and then taken it back again. Stalin had done the same thing. This was also the plan of Charu Mazumdar who fancied himself the Indian Mao. He was killed. His wife lost about 12 acres of inherited 'surplus' land.
Charu Mazumdar addressed a meeting of party cadres of the area on 13th April 1967. Clarifying the attitude towards middle and rich peasants, he said, “We shall always have to decide on whose side or against which side we are. We are always on the side of poor and landless peasants. If there is a conflict of interests between the middle peasant on the one hand and the landless peasant on the other, we will certainly be on the side of the landless peasant. If there is a conflict of interests between the middle peasant and the rich peasant, we will then be on the side of the middle peasant.”
In other words if you get any land, we will kill you because you are now a 'kulak'.
He then added, “Our relations with the rich peasant will always be one of struggle. For, unless the rich peasant’s influence is weeded out from the village, the leadership of the poor and landless peasants cannot be established, and the middle peasant cannot be drawn over to us.”
Moreover, the country should have a massive man-made famine of the type Stalin and Mao inflicted on their people.
Finding the situation going out of control, Harikrishna Konar came to Siliguri and met some of the dissident leaders. According to Konar, it was agreed that all “unlawful activities” would be suspended. The peasants would submit petitions for the land vested with the government, and land would be redistributed through official agencies in consultation with the local peasants’ organizations. It was also agreed that all the persons wanted by the police, including Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal would surrender. The dissidents of North Bengal, however, denied that there was any such agreement. They complained that the CPI(M) ministers in the government were attempting redistribution of land through the same official agencies, which were in league with the local feudal interest, and were respecting the same old colonial laws, and describing any violation of such laws as ‘unlawful activities’.
They wanted 'revolutionary justice'- i.e. chopping off heads. But landless people want title to land. Cut off heads and you put a target on your own back.
The CPI (M), in the face of the obduracy of the rebels, pleaded helplessness. It seemed to have lost control over the police also.
Once police officers get killed by your people, they will either stop policing or else turn against you.
In a statement released on 30th May 1967, by the West Bengal State Secretariat of the party, the latter expressed its inability to “understand why immediately after the return to Calcutta of Mr Hari Krishna Konar, a police camp was opened instead of pursuing the agreement arrived at.”
The CPM was in alliance with the Bangla Congress. It wanted to run with the hare while hunting with the hounds. This was a successful strategy when it came to driving businessmen out of the State. The problem was that extreme 'Naxals' were equally keen to drive the CPM out. After all, they had committed the sin of 'Browderism'- i.e. stood for election and entered the Cabinet. True Communists must seize power by violent means.
Charu Mazumdar at this stage felt it was necessary to warn his comrades of the impending attack by the state. In a letter to one of the comrades, he stressed the need for rousing hatred against the police. “The police obey orders; the moment the orders come they will launch the attack. They will get scared only when we attack them… explain this to the peasant masses.”
The problem with killing policemen is that there are plenty more where they came from. They might even be joined by the army. Soldiers are trained to kill. The Naxals would meet the same fate as the Telengana revolutionaries.
He reminded him, “The jotedars are still there in the villages; they will guide the police and take them into the villages and indiscriminately kill the peasants. So we must drive out these class enemies from the village; they are secretly maintaining contact with police thana; the police will launch attack with their help.”
Kill those slightly richer than you. Sadly, this means you then become the relatively rich and thus must be killed.
He also urged his followers to make preparations to ambush police parties and snatch rifles from them.
Those deaths will be avenged one way or another. Control of land will revert to those most efficient at killing.
The first serious clash between the peasants and the state machinery occurred on 23rd, May 1967, when a policeman named Sonam Wangdi
An Inspector. He belonged to the erstwhile Bhutanese ruling class. There was an ethnic dimension to this. He was killed by a woman named Shanti Munda. Mundas had immigrated to the region from the Chota Nagpur area.
was killed in an encounter with armed tribals, after a police party had gone to a village to arrest some wanted leaders. On 25th May the police retaliated by sending a force to Prasadjote in Naxalbari and fired upon a crowd of villagers killing nine including six women and two children. While the police version of the incident was that the rebels had attacked them from behind a wall of women and children, forcing the police to open fire, the dissident Marxist leaders alleged that the police deliberately killed the women and children.
More money would become available for this. The question is whether money is a better motivator than ideology. In a poor country, money is more important when it comes to doing dirty jobs.
Later, several peasants were arrested. In the face of persistent police interrogation as to their leaders’ hideouts and the reasons for their confrontation with the police force, their stubborn and laconic reply was that they came out “for a breath of fresh air”.
This reduced the incentive to kill them just in case they broke under interrogation and let slip valuable information.
The incident created tensions both within and outside the United Front.
The Bangla Congress was beginning to regret allying with lunatics.
The West Bengal State Secretariat of the CPI (M) at a meeting on 29th May condemned the police firing and demanded a judicial inquiry into the incident. It added that “behind the peasant unrest in Naxalbari lies a deep social malady – malafide transfers, evictions and other anti-people activities of jotedars and tea gardeners.” It also accused the chief minister, Ajoy Mukherjee, an ex-Congressman, of laying one-sided stress on the police measures to maintain law and order.
So, there was no United Front. But the Communist party too was going to split. The Naxal faction split a further 40 times. One anti-Lin Biao faction decided to enter mainstream politics. It has 2 MPs and about 17 Assembly seats. It is part of the Congress/ RJD coalition fighting the Bihar election.
The next day, walls in the College Street area – the scene of the Presidency College agitation in the previous year – were littered with posters carrying the slogans “Murderer Ajoy Mukherjee Must Resign!” It was evident that these were the handiwork of the CPI (M) students, who were becoming disenchanted with their parliamentary leaders.
Back then Maoism was super-cool. What was important was that students were helping to chase away their potential employers.
Meanwhile, reports of clashes between the rebel peasants and landlords kept pouring in from Naxalbari. According to official sources, only between 8th and 10th June, there were as many as 80 cases of lawlessness,13 dacoities, two murders and one abduction, and armed bands were reported to have been dispensing justice and collecting taxes. The West Bengal chief minister told newsmen on 12th June that ‘a reign of terror’ had been created in Darjeeling. The Centre immediately took up the cue, and the next day, the then Union Home Minister, Y. B. Chavan, told the Lok Sabha that a state of ‘serious lawlessness’ prevails in the area.
Tea production was falling. Sri Lanka was overtaking India in exports. India was desperately in need of foreign exchange. Also, the Siliguri gap represented a strategic vulnerability. By the end of July, the police had the district under control.
He added that the government had reasons to suspect that extremists were playing a prominent role in it,
Which was true enough. Sanyal really had gone to China to meet Mao. He was conspiring with an enemy power. In September of 1967, Chinese troops clashed with Indian troops in Nathu La. Sanyal met Mao in early October. Could his band be helpful to China? Perhaps the Pakistanis might be interesting in arming and training them.
thus dissociating them from the official CPI (M) leadership. It was evident that the entire establishment was ganging up. To them Naxalbari was the signal of popular retribution at last arriving.
It was a signal that Charu wanted to split the party and revive the anti-Browder line of boycotting parliamentary elections so as to just focus on killing kulaks.
Finally, the United Front government sent a cabinet mission to Naxalbari, consisting among others of Harikrishna Konar and the CPI peasant front leader, Biswanath Mukherjee, who was then the Irrigation Minister
he gained that post much later on in the Eighties.
but their appeal to the rebels to give up violence did not yield any result.
So, Communists didn't heed the appeal of other Communists. There was bound to be a further split in the party.
Two of the CPM's leaders- Benoy Chaudhury Hare Krishna Kunar- understood that redistributing land in excess of the ceiling and registering sharecroppers could create a reliable vote-bank. It could also boost agricultural output. This became the basis of 30 years in power for the Left Front. The administrative work involved wasn't glamorous. Kunar enlisted an IAS officer ,Debaratha Bandhopadhyay, to identity and take possession of surplus land. A decade later the same officer worked with Benoy on 'Operation Barga'. Work of this sort was not romantic. It received no praise from Radio Peking or Ivy League professors. But it was useful. It raised welfare. If the reward for agricultural labour is raised, it appears that output goes up by about 20 percent. Presumably, the cost of surplus extraction, too, falls. The other side of the coin is that West Bengal lost industry which depressed 'transfer earnings' for agriculturists. In particular, the failure to get rural girls into big factory dormitories prevented demographic transition. Bengal paid a high price for its romanticization of Revolution. But, the truth is, there was a piratical aspect to the Bengali activist. Debratha says-
But an ugly feature of this magnificent effort (i.e. gaining a million acres of surplus land) was the fierce internecine fight among the UF partners for the occupation of vested land.
i.e. nobody really cared about the poor. They wanted to create a loyal vote-bank or client-base.
Konar who was so insistent on the legality of vesting, took a completely different line so far as distribution of vested land was concerned. Instead of going through any established procedure, he encouraged extra legal occupation by peasant groups.
The strongest would get the pick of the land- i.e. would be able to defend what they gained. This is the Darwinian, ruthless aspect of the buddhijivi. His ancestors had acquired land not just through sharp practice. There was also what Niradh Chaudhuri called an element of 'power worship'.
This resulted in competition among the UF partners to occupy vested lands, which caused bloodshed among the partners and ultimately the second UF cracked under internal pressure.
That was inevitable once Indira broke with the Syndicate.
Whatever the internal dynamics of the second UF, the fact remains that Konar succeeded in weaning away the poor peasantry from the naxalite movement.
Konar & Benoy actually benefitted some poor people.
When they found that they could get land legally by joining one of the recognised political outfits, without any militancy, they promptly eschewed the violent mode of naxalism.
& when the Left Front discovered that if you drive industry away, capitalists can't finance your rivals. Instead you can go in for crony capitalism. Also, if you have a rural vote-bank, you don't need to bother with governance.
Naxals raved and ranted against this land reform, calling it a sham exercise for defrauding the struggling peasantry. They almost abruptly stopped it when Charu Mazumdar' s ceiling surplus land of 12 acres or so got vested. Charu Mazumdar's wife wrote an angry letter denouncing the 'corrupt' bureaucracy for denying her the only means of livelihood.
Naxals turned urban terrorists soon after.
Sadly, China did not invade. Pakistan did not extend its genocide into West Bengal. Kulaks weren't killed. Once again, the Indian people had let down the Bengali buddhijivi.
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