Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Naxalbari uprising, which has been mythologized as the fount from which Indian Maoism emerged. On May 24, 1967 an unarmed police party was attacked by armed peasants in North Bengal. Those events have left a deep imprint on the Indian state.
Dilip Simeon was a college student in the late 60s and deeply inspired by the revolutionary churn. He joined the Naxalite movement in 1970, left it in 1972 in the wake of the Bangladesh crisis, and has been an observer even since. In a conversation with News18, Simeon recounted the momentous events of the past half century.
Q: What was the historical context that led up to May 1967?
A:There are two ideological strands of Indian Maoism. One is an offshoot of the Indian Communist Movement and this movement was heavily Stalinized. There was an insurrectionary wing within the Communist movement. The first such event was the Telangana uprising, which was explicitly conceived by certain Communist leaders as being the harbinger of a Maoist style revolution in India. Telangana was referred to as the Yan’an of India, because of the impact of the Chinese revolution, which had just succeeded. It was the CPI which launched the Telangana movement. This movement was put an to end on the orders of Stalin. Some top leaders of the Communist Party visited Moscow and finally, after some years, the entire ambience of insurrection that surrounded the Telangana movement was put an end to on the orders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that this kind of adventurism will not succeed and the Communist movement should work within Nehruvian democracy.
Even then there were people who disagreed with that. Arms were buried to use at a future date. The extremist wing within the Communist movement remained and this fault line in the Communist movement is marked by a difference between immediate insurrection and an inclination to work within Parliamentary democracy. The CPI always had this internal division, which goes back to deeper fault lines about the difference between the Russian revolution and the Chinese revolution, the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s and more.
This fault line was again brought to the fore during the Sino-Indian conflict of 1962. There was a split even then between those who sided with China and those who opposed the Chinese military action. That marked the beginning of the split that led to the emergence of the CPI(M) from the CPI. When the parties split, the extremist factions (which were pro Maoist) were in the CPI(M). The CPI(M) was an uneasy home for many disparate tendencies.
With the advent of the Communists in the United Front government in Bengal, various jotdars and middle level land owners in Bengal began to take aggressive action as a protective measure for themselves because they thought there might be land reform. There was a lot of tension in the class relations in the country side.
1966-67 was a period of intense class warfare in Bengal. This led to the emergence of the more articulate nature of the Naxalite ideology. There was a section within the CPI(M) which was calling for immediate action. Kanu Sanyal had a trade union in North Bengal in Siliguri subdivision and Charu Mazumdar was an ideologue who was the district committee head of Darjeeling. Kanu’s movement became the basis for the Naxalbari uprising in May 1967.
Q: What Happened on May 24, 1967?
A:There were a series of incidents, not just one, throughout May 1967. On May 24 a police party, which wasn’t armed, was attacked and a policeman killed. The next day the police took retaliatory action in which many peasants were killed. There was also seizure of grain and confrontations between peasants and landlords.
May 24 is an arbitrary and iconized date. There was a series of events. May 24 was an attack by peasants and tribals on policemen, so it is taken to be the “iconic” date because it signifies in the mythology of Naxalism an armed action by the people against the state. They interpreted this event as the start of a peasant revolution along Chinese and Maoist lines that would culminate in the formation of a peoples’ army which would overthrow the State. It was taken to be a confrontation by an insurrectionary peasantry against a semi-feudal, semi-colonial state. These adjectives are added on by ideology. What ideological spin you give it is your choice.
Simeon's novel 'Revolution Highway' (Picture: Tushar Dhara)
Q:What happened to the movement after the event?
A:Thereafter, Charu Majumdar converted this event into a signifier of a theoretically conceived idea he had of India undergoing a peasant democratic revolution.
Basically, the ideology was that Indian independence was a fraud and that Constitution, legal system and elections were fraudulent and that India was a semi-feudal and semi-colonial country much like China had been in the 1920s. The attempt was to cast India in the theoretical format that the Chinese Communist Party had cast China in the 1920s. In short, India in the 60s was what China had been in the 20s and 30s, according to this vision. Always there is an attempt to use some pre-existing model and impose it on Indian reality, which shows a subjugated mentality and that people are not thinking for themselves.
Q: How has the Naxalite movement evolved since 1967?
A: The CPI(ML) began to break up within a year of being set up in 1969 because of a major geopolitical confrontation, the Bangladesh war. The CPI(ML) was being used by the Chinese for their own political aspirations. The Chinese government was furious that Pakistan was being broken up. There was an uprising and guerrilla warfare going on in Bangladesh, but it wasn’t a Maoist uprising, it was a Bengali nationalist uprising. Many Naxalites were attracted to it, but the party took the Chinese line which was basically supporting the Pakistani army. This cause a terrible moral, political and ethical crisis for the Maoist movement and it collapsed. It was smashed, physically and ideologically.
If it arose again, there are powerful reasons for it. There is always room for ultra left, ultra right and extremist ideologies in any democracy, but why do they get traction?
The Maoist movement thereafter grew in Bihar, where it hadn’t grown before. In Bihar there were places where there was severe repression by landed classes. The reasons for a violent and extremist ideology to persist is that violence is an aspect of class existence in the villages. The Indian ruling class do not respect the rights of citizens, or the notion of human dignity as envisaged in the Constitution. This has contributed to the violence of extremist left wing ideologies of resistance.
After the Naxals grew in Bihar, you find private vigilante armies like the Sunlight Sena and Ranveer Sena. There were vicious movements which were enabled by the State or armed by the State. The Salwa Judum is nothing new. There is a long tradition of crushing popular movements that are non-violent and within the bounds of the Constitution.
Q:So does the violence of the state justify the counter violence by the Naxalites?
A:A socialist movement has to hold itself to a higher moral standard than the behavior of the ruling classes. A theoretical and logical framework where violence becomes the crux of your activism is self-defeating. You are basically annihilating people. It’s a form of vigilantism where you take the law into your own hands. It’s a tyrannical politics, which can rebound on you. That’s why the Naxalites have attacked so many people from within their own ranks.
Factionalism is inherent in Leninism because of the doctrine that the Party is always right, which basically means that the leader is always right. Over and above that there is the violence, where you start annihilating people and over and above that is the inertia inherent when you put up an army or vigilante force. You have to get into the act of logistical support, communications and collection of money, arms, ordnance. The whole thing becomes self-sustaining and generating. You become a mirror image of the system you oppose. You replicate tyranny, authority, whimsical killings without having a trial, without human rights. There is no human rights commission within the Maoist movement. Most of the people they have killed are who they deem informers, more than the number of capitalists, landlords and police. Violence is not justified either politically or morally. The best defense against Naxalism is the implementation of the Constitution, but the ruling class is not interested. In fact, it is not the Maoists who will succeed in overthrowing the Constitution, but the RSS which will succeed in overthrowing the Constitution.
Q:What does the future hold?
A:The Maoists are always going to be on the retreat, but they cannot be completely crushed because they’ve successfully learned the art of guerilla warfare in some areas. Between the Maoists and the state machinery, they’ve wrought havoc in those areas. If you [the Naxalites] kill 25 or 75 people in a CRPF camp what the reaction is going to be. The government will send another 75. If it comes to resources they can conjure up more resources than you. But they will come down with a heavy hand on the local people.
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