'In the Wake of Naxalbari'

This new and third edition of  Sumanta Banerjee's 'In the Wake of Naxalbari' has an updated Introduction and a new Postscript. One of the classics of contemporary revolutionary history, it was first published in 1980 by Subarnarekha and a slightly abridged edition was reissued in 1984 by Zed Books Ltd. of London. This is perhaps the most comprehensive study of the movement till date.

Sumanta Banerjee's book is not an outsider's account. He was a senior journalist with an English daily based in Delhi. He resigned in 1973,  joined the movement and went underground and began to live among poor, landless peasants sharing their adventures before he was arrested in 1975 to be released when the Emergency was lifted in 1977.

Here the author offers insightful profiles of the leaders of the movement and ideologues, chronicles the events and documents the ideological debates and the politics of the time. However, unlike the six celebrated ex-communists, Louis Fischer, André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender and Richard Wright, he isn't recanting or writing the obituary of 'a god that failed'. Banerjee is critical of the failures and the ideological fanaticism and deviations of the movement, but anyone familiar with his recent writings, in English and Bengali, would know that he remains firmly committed to the cause of the oppressed and the marginalized. Those who have read his 'Unish Shotoker Kolkata o Saraswati-r Itor Santan' would perhaps agree with me.

It all began in May 1967 with the peasant uprising at Naxalbari in the Darjeeling district in north Bengal led by Communist revolutionaries, who until then were members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI (M)], a party that represented the established left in India. The uprising at Naxalbari was crushed by the police within a few months, but from then nothing remained the same in Indian politics. The spark that Naxalbari had ignited spread widely to villages and urban centres in many parts of India. Unlike insurgencies in the North East of India or Kashmir this movement wasn't confined within regional boundaries. Interestingly, as a coalition partner, the party in power in the state was the CPI (M) whose senior leader Jyoti Basu was the Home Minister who sent his police to crush the movement. The Communist revolutionaries broke away from the parent party and formed a new party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) [CPI (ML)], under the leadership of Charu Majumdar.

The roots and the birth of the movement can be traced to the global and domestic situation in the 1960s. The war in Vietnam, the radical student upsurge in different parts of the world, the Cultural Revolution in China, the near famine situation in many parts of India (in 1967 the Bihar Government declared one-third of the state as a famine area while the Madhya Pradesh Government declared eighteen districts as famine areas), industrial recession and rising unemployment in the cities with a rapid deterioration in living standards (according to National Sample Survey the percentage of rural people below the poverty line went up from 38% in 1960-61 to 54% in 1968-69) were some of the events and issues that defined India in the sixties. It was a decade of disillusionment and discontent leading to wide-spread protest movements that took both cultural and political forms. A popular slogan heard at the time was 'When order is injustice, disorder is the beginning of justice', a saying attributed to Roman Rolland. (In his 'Jean Christopher Journey's End', Rolland says, 'But he [Olivier} knew also that revolution would achieve its end through defeat as well as through victory : for the oppressors only accede to the demands of the oppressed when the oppressed inspire them with fear. And so the violence of the revolutionaries was of no less service to their cause than the justice of the  cause. Both violence and justice were part and parcel of the plan of that blind and certain force which moves the herd of human kind.').

What began as a peasant movement soon caught the imagination of the students and the youth. The trend was towards a return to the moral fervour and spontaneity of the early days of the revolutionary movement that inspired communists, socialists  and anarchists alike. Marx was re-read to discover the sources of revolutionary humanism that could inspire the individual to sacrifice for a cause. The emergence of a militant student movement promised a renewal of revolutionary politics as well as the arrival of a new social force. The student insurgents rejected established models of political action and directed their struggle against the social system as a whole. The student movements in the US, France, West Germany, Japan, Sri Lanka all soon discovered the necessity to break the isolation bourgeois society had imposed on them in the form of privilege. They sought solidarity with peasants and workers in their struggle against 'imperialism and its local agents'.

In Kolkata, students staged demonstrations in colleges and universities. Inspired by the Cultural Revolution they began to 'bombard the headquarters' asking uncomfortable questions to their teachers in classrooms and accusing them of teaching bourgeois culture and history. They demonised representatives of nineteenth century Bengal 'renaissance' like Rammohon and Vidyasagar and soon began to behead their statues.

Thus urban guerrilla action began, initially targeting the State machinery and its forces. Retaliation from the State soon came in the form of more brutal repression and indiscriminate torture and killing. Violence led to further violence. Meanwhile the movement had drawn into its fold many young men, angry and frustrated, but without the burden of an ideology. Annihilation programme approved by the party  offered them an outlet to release their pent up anger and frustration. Even more dangerous was that the underworld of the city was gradually drawn into the movement. Their purpose was to kill policemen they disliked as well as suspected informers and to smuggle in arms for the revolutionaries. And it was all done in the name of an ideology and its politics. Soft targets like defenceless traffic police constables and, petty traders were killed. Thus the process of lumpenization of an ideologically driven movement had already begun.      

Many of the city students left for villages to work among peasants. The movement was rapidly spreading to other districts of West Bengal like Birbhum and Medinipur and to other Indian states like Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and eastern Uttar Pradesh. The general picture in the villages was one of nightmarish poverty, humiliation and brutal oppression, inflicted upon more than half of India's rural population by a minority of rich landlords and moneylenders. However, the popular belief that rural India had always been a mass of sleeping villages accepting and acquiescing in every form of injustice and oppression is historically untrue. The early years of British rule in India were marked by widespread peasant rebellions in Bihar and Bengal. The Sannyasi Rebellion (1770) and the Wahabi uprising (1831) in Bengal, the Ho tribal peasants' rebellion (1820) and the Kol tribals' insurrection (1831-32) in Bihar, the Santhal uprising (1855-57) in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa are only some of the examples. However, unlike the tribal-based agrarian uprisings, the Naxalbari movement's theoretical framework and practical programme embraced much wider aspects of the country's agrarian situation.

In villages poor peasants formed armed squads for self defence, but soon these became action squads in their fight against landlords and their hired armed gangs. Peasants with their traditional weapons and rudimentary fire arms fought an unequal war of resistance against the organised forces of the State and the landlords. However, these forces were often quite ineffective in the face of the guerrilla tactics the peasants adopted. Meanwhile the CPI (ML) encouraged individual annihilation of class enemies which led to a never ending cycle of violence in both cities and countryside.

Finally, the Indian State's savage suppression of the Naxalite uprising (at dead of night on August 12 and 13 1971 the Congress government headed by Siddhartha Shankar Ray killed over a hundred young men, allegedly Naxalites, at Barannagar and Kashipore and their dead bodies were tarred over and thrown into the Ganga), and the imposition of the Emergency by the Indira Gandhi-led Congress government in June 1975, which snuffed out all opposition activities, smothered the last embers of the Naxalite movement, bringing to an end its first phase.

The CPI (ML) gradually fragmented into many factions each fighting against the other. The differences were often less ideological, and had more to do with turf war over areas of control, or ego problems and personal rivalry among individual leaders. The two contending groups that eventually grew out of the erstwhile CPI (ML) are CPI (ML) Liberation and CPI (Maoists) While the former has joined electoral politics, the latter still follows the path of guerrilla warfare. The CPI (Maoists) betray certain ominous trends which have led to an erosion of their bases. Loss of sensitivity to the humanitarian concerns of the common people and arbitrary and violent actions that reproduce the repressive culture of the State threaten to alienate them from their followers and deprive them of the moral sympathy that they once enjoyed among sections of Indian civil society.