Gender and Radical Politics in India

Magic Moments of Naxalbari (1967-1975)

Mallarika Sinha Roy

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781138886278
• eBook ISBN: 9781136930898
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Naxalbari movement marks a significant moment in the postcolonial history of India. Beginning as an armed peasant uprising in 1967 under the leadership of radical communists, the movement was inspired by the Marxist-Leninist theory of revolution and involved a significant section of the contemporary youth from diverse social strata with a vision of people's revolution. It inspired similar radical movements in other South Asian countries such as Nepal.

Arguing that the history and memory of the Naxalbari movement is fraught with varied gendered experiences of political motivation, revolutionary activism, and violence, this book analyses the participation of women in the movement and their experiences. Based on extensive ethnographic and archival research, the author argues that women's emancipation was an integral part of their vision of revolution, and many of them identified the days of their activism as magic moments, as a period of enchanted sense of emancipation. The book places the movement into the postcolonial history of South Asia. It makes a significant contribution to the understanding of radical communist politics in South Asia, particularly in relation to issues concerning the role of women in radical politics.

1
Introduction

In search of the definition of Naxalbari

A peal of spring thunder has crashed over the land of India. Revolutionary peasants in the Darjiling 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. This is a development of tremendous significance for the Indian people’s revolutionary struggle.

Peking Review, 14 July 1967¹

Che, your death makes me guilty

Childhood to a mature youth – I look back

Even I was to stand by you and armed

Even I had to be in a jungle and marshland and a cavern – seeking refuge … hiding

Gearing up for the final struggle.

Sunil Gangopadhyay (1997)²

These fragments of news reports and creative literature emerged from the radical leftist uprising in Naxalbari and its aftermath in West Bengal, India, during the 1960s. These fragments indicate the international attention to the movement and also reflect the willing engagement of Bengali youth with radical politics in the 1960s and 1970s.³ These years saw a redefinition of Marxist theory and practice and large-scale mobilisation of students and youth against state power as represented through student movements in France, anti-Vietnam war protests in the United States, Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia and various leftist radical movements in Latin America and Asia (Cockburn and Blackburn 1969; Jameson 1984). The Naxalbari movement shared this common thread of radical leftist politics. The principal Naxalite journal Deshabrati (The Patriot) contained a regular column on international theoretical debates on Marxism–Leninism–Maoism, and through out 1968 this column summarised events of student movements across Europe and the United States, especially anti-Vietnam war protests all over the world. Naxalites debated over these events to delineate the revolutionary path of their own. Particular socio-economic, political and cultural contexts in specific places, however, significantly influenced qualitative differences among these movements. For Naxalbari, these particular impetuses were provided by the socio-economic and political crises in postcolonial India, particularly in West Bengal.

Though there have been thorough studies of the cause, nature and impact of the Naxalbari movement, a critical review of academic historiography reveals the conspicuous absence of gender issues and women participants (B. Dasgupta 1974; A. K. Roy 1975; Mohanty 1977; S. Banerjee 1980; 1984; Duyker 1987; R. Ray 1988). These studies discuss the movement from various angles, and though some of them focus considerably on the socio-cultural contexts as well as the emotional profile of activists, gender remains a significant omission in these academic endeavours. There is need to reread the discourse of Naxalbari, with its larger significance in the postcolonial history of South Asia, from the erstwhile marginalised point of view of its women participants. Though the existing historiography underlines the importance of Naxalbari, the gender politics of the movement has remained relatively unexplored. The aim of this book is to investigate this silence through a critical engagement with the gender dimension of this movement from the year 1967, when the Naxalbari movement began, to 1975, the year when a state of internal emergency was declared in India to contain the increasing political unrest. This book engages with the nature of women’s participation in the Naxalbari movement in West Bengal with a threefold purpose: one, to capture varied nuances of gender-based oppression and women’s resistance in the context of the unique moment of the Naxalbari movement; two, to describe and analyse women’s experiences of their participation and their interpretations of the movement; three, to deploy gender as an analytical category to study this movement as this was marginalised in previous studies.

Through particular focus on two regions – viz. northern West Bengal and Birbhum district in southern West Bengal – this book analyses the continuous fluidity of domination and resistance in the lives of women from various class and caste backgrounds: tribal peasantry, small-town middle class and metropolitan middle class. My sources consist of a composite portfolio of oral narratives, autobiographies, archival documents, creative literature and film. The sources are multiple and uneven since the gross oversight of gender issues in archival documents and academic historiography necessitates rereading the gender perspective from disparate materials. This variety of sources also allows one to read the movement at different levels of ideology, activism, academic as well as cultural representation, and collective and personal memory.

Historical context of the Naxalbari movement

The Naxalbari movement marks a significant moment in the postcolonial history of West Bengal in particular, and India in general. Various dimensions of this movement include a major shift in the communist movement in India, vast student and youth involvement with a vision of people’s revolution, an armed struggle in rural and urban West Bengal, and a stern retaliation by the state. The political situation in West Bengal in the 1960s and the larger trajectory of the communist movement in India are crucial factors to situate the movement in its specific historical location. In 1964 the Communist Party of India (CPI) underwent a split, giving birth to the second communist party in India – the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M)). The divide was precipitated by the Sino-Indian war in 1962, but it was also the result of a long ideological debate within the communist movement in India. This debate bore evident marks of the contemporary international situation concerning various trends and debates in Marxist politics. Following the international Sino-Soviet debate on different interpretations of Marxist revolution, the Indian communists became divided into two sections – pro-Soviet and pro-China (Ram 1971). While the pro-Soviet faction participated in the electoral process and discouraged violent revolutionary methods, the pro-China faction harboured a more militant revolutionary ideology and had an ambiguous relationship with parliamentary democracy. During the Sino-Indian war in 1962 the difference between the pro-Soviet section and the pro-China section became too wide and in 1964 the new party was launched by the pro-China faction.

The socio-political situation in West Bengal was undergoing rapid change in the 1950s. By the beginning of the 1960s a militant political mood had already set in and was marked by a number of different radical Left movements in the previous few decades and years. For instance the Tebhaga movement (1946–8), militant left agitations in demand of the release of political prisoners (1948–9), the Kakdwip episode of the Tebhaga movement (1949–50) and many other smaller episodes, such as violent mass protests against the increase in tram fares in Calcutta (1953), the school-teacher’s movement (1954) and protests against the proposed unification of Bihar and West Bengal (1956).⁴ All these found a culminating point in the Food movement of 1966. The year 1966 experienced a severe food shortage, and violent food riots broke out in West Bengal when a large section of the people took to the streets. Tramcars were burned on the roads of Calcutta, students threw home-made bombs at the police, demonstrations and rallies against the state government, at times, helped to develop political solidarity between the working class, lower middle class, and students (Sengupta 1997). This series of events fuelled an upsurge in leftist student politics, and student leaders, influenced by Maoism, formed the core of the radical student movement. It seemed that the entire state was poised on a violent outbreak of mass fury.

Following this explosion of popular discontent against the ruling Congress government, the United Front of oppositional parties was voted to power in 1967 Legislative Assembly elections. Though the CPI (M) could not secure an absolute majority, it was the second largest party in the Assembly. The United Front government was a coalition government with leftist parties and Bangla Congress (a breakaway faction from the original Congress Party), where the CPI (M) was a leading partner. Popular expectations from the new government were riding high since it was the first non-Congress government in the state after independence. But implementation of major policies like land reform, food redistribution and wage increment for agricultural labourers proved to be complicated and was inevitably delayed by long drawn-out administrative procedures (Samanta 1984; Bose 1998). This administrative delay generated further discontent among local communist leaders and the rural poor (Bose 1998).

In May 1967 a major confrontation on the issue of crop harvest broke out between armed peasants and police in the Naxalbari area of Siliguri subdivision in Darjiling district. On 24 May 1967 a group of armed marginal peasants and agricultural labourers claimed the harvest and defied local landowners in Barajharujote village. The police were called in. During the confrontation, police inspector S. Wangdi was injured by arrows and succumbed to his injuries that evening. On 25 May 1967 the police opened fire on nearly two-thousand peasant activists in Prasadujote village, killing seven women, one man and two children (Mukherji 1979 [2002], 48). This incident, instead of repressing the uprising, added more fuel to it. Peasants of the entire Siliguri subdivision, supported by local tea-garden labourers, erupted into an armed rebellion. Naxalbari was no longer the name of an insignificant area but a hallmark of a new dream of ‘people’s war’ to the communist revolutionaries of India. The communist leaders and party workers – Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal, Jangal Santal, Souren Bose, Khokan Majumdar – who were at the helm of this confrontation, belonged to the pro-China section and had joined the CPI (M) in 1964. Charu Mazumdar and Kanu Sanyal, veteran communist leaders of this area, were the main architects of this peasant uprising.⁵

In Calcutta, Naxalbari O Krishak Sangram Sahayak Samiti (Naxalbari and Peasant Struggle Assistance Committee – NKSSS) was formed under the leadership of Sushital Roychoudhury of the CPI (M). Many intellectual and creative artists showed solidarity with the victims of police firing, and students became deeply involved in this peasant struggle through organising mass meetings and rallies in support of the movement (Samaddar 1983; S. Mitra 1987). A Cabinet Mission was sent by the United Front government to settle the issue with the local leaders of Naxalbari but no amiable solution could be found. The CPI (M) felt embarrassed by the militancy of these local leaders and expelled them from the party. At the initiative of NKSSS, however, the expelled members of the CPI (M) formed the Coordination Committee of Revolutionaries (CCR) under the leadership of Darjiling District Committee. Similar coordination committees were set up in Punjab, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Jammu-Kashmir and Kerala. In Andhra Pradesh the militant section of the CPI (M) deferred the formation of their CCR until they were expelled in 1968. Soon the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR) was formed with these state-based CCRs to lead the Naxalbari movement in different regions of the whole country. In April 1969, AICCCR leaders decided to form the third communist party in India, the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) (CPI (ML)), and the new party was formally launched on 1 May 1969 in a May Day rally in Calcutta.

Naxalite ideology

The prime ideological inspiration behind this movement came from the Maoist interpretation of Marxism and the Chinese Revolution of 1949. Following Mao’s analysis, Naxalites explained the Indian socio-economic structure as ‘semi-feudal’ and ‘semi-colonial’, which earned much theoretical acclaim (Mitter 1977, 33–6; R. Ray 1988, 176–97). They also declared that the national independence from British colonial rule in 1947 had been a sham as it had failed to deliver freedom from class exploitation to the majority of Indian people. They claimed that exploitation of the peasantry had intensified to such an extent in the years after decolonisation that the time was ripe for launching an armed people’s war. Naxalites identified the Indian state as their principal enemy, which, for them, was a lackey of ‘US imperialists and Soviet neo-colonialists’ rather than a sovereign nation state. The political resolutions of the CPI (ML), drafted in 1969, were greatly influenced by Charu Mazumdar’s eight documents, written between the years1962–6. These documents were the important theoretical basis of the Naxalite understanding of Maoism – the applicability of Maoism in the Indian context, and the Maoist critique of the existing Indian communist movement. Mao’s writings, particularly ‘On Contradiction’ and ‘On Practice’ were also extensively read in the Naxalite study circles in the1960s. Later, however, The Little Red Book became the only intellectual basis for recruiting activists in the movement.

The Naxalite idea of Indian revolution was envisaged as a ‘people’s democratic revolution’ to establish people’s democracy. The revolutionary unity of oppressed classes was to be led by the workers and landless peasants, and the working class was to be the vanguard of the revolution. ‘The path of India’s liberation, as in the case of all other colonial and semi-colonial and semi-feudal countries,’ stated the party programme of the CPI (ML) in 1970, ‘is the path of People’s War. As Chairman Mao has taught us, The Revolutionary War is the war of masses; it can be waged only by mobilising the masses and relying on them’ (S. K. Ghosh 1993, 15). The Party Programme also identified guerrilla warfare as the path to people’s war as that only could:

unleash the initiative and rouse the creative genius of the Indian people, make them perform miracles, function in various ways … expand the small bases of armed struggle to large, extensive areas through mighty waves of People’s War and develop the People’s Army which will overthrow the reactionary rule.

(S. K. Ghosh 1993, 15)

Naxalites identified the principal class contradiction to be between the landless peasantry and landed gentry. Their mode of organising the revolution was to share the everyday life of the rural and industrial poor. They deployed their political energies to instil class consciousness among landless peasants and inspire them to commence the armed struggle for the capture of state power (Mazumdar 2001, 112). Naxalites also made an effort to imitate the Chinese model of ‘Cultural Revolution’ through a severe critic of the colonial reformist movements and the Gandhian nationalist movement. Naxalite ideologue Saroj Dutta’s scathing criticism of the doyens of Bengal Renaissance and national heroes such as Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose⁶ and Gandhi was endorsed by the activists in the most literal form – by demolishing their statues and portraits (S. Banerjee 1984, 172–82).⁷

Violence in the Naxalbari movement

By the end of 1970 the Naxalite definition of people’s democratic revolution took a different direction when all mass organisations were abandoned and discouraged. ‘Annihilation of class enemies’ through sudden guerrilla actions was identified as the only revolutionary activity (Mazumdar 2001, 95). The earlier path of people’s war through mobilisation of the masses turned into a path of secret organisation as Charu Mazumdar insisted that the process of organising a guerrilla squad must be completely conspiratorial (Mazumdar 2001, 89–96). The Naxalite support base of poor peasants, industrial workers, and the lower middle class suffered due to the conspiratorial nature of activism (S. Banerjee 1984, 266–7). The police repression of Naxalite supporters became severe. The paramilitary forces and the military were deployed to crush the movement, and the human rights of suspected activists and sympathisers were grossly violated by the police.⁸ Ideological dissention within the CPI (ML) began by the end of 1970 as several Naxalite leaders such as Sushital Roychoudhury and Satyanarayan Singh began to question Charu Mazumdar’s authoritarian position and his directives. The movement became factionalised and many Naxalite groups lost touch with the central leadership (S. Banerjee 1984, 161; 181; 270–4).

Naxalites, in spite of such organisational problems, gained a strong foothold in certain districts. There were instances of spontaneous participation of villagers in armed processions, in public law courts to try local landowners/ police informers, and in resisting the police from entering their villages. Birbhum district experienced such activism in 1971, but after the military was deployed to quash the Naxalite influence in this district, mass participation ebbed in the face of state terror (B. Dasgupta 1974, 113–15; Sen et al. 1978, 110–27; S. Banerjee 1984, 220–9). In many urban areas, especially in Calcutta, Naxalites targeted small industrialists, petty businessmen, police constables, alleged police informers, and those political activists who organisationally opposed Naxalites (A. K. Roy 1975).

In the face of brutal police repression, internal factionalisation and dwindling popular support, the movement began to lose its momentum. By 1972 the first phase was over as most of the major Naxalite leaders were either dead or imprisoned, and several thousands of activists were in jail. The movement, however, lingered on until 1975 when the state of internal emergency was declared in India to quell the political unrest and all civil liberties were curtailed.

Impact of the movement

There was a time when the word Naxalite was not just a characterization of another political tendency by the media, a casual throwaway phrase conveying broadly a belief in political violence in the interests of the dispossessed, but a word loaded with nameless fears and aspirations, stirring hopes or despair, and always strong passions

(R. Ray 1988, 3)

These words of Rabindra Ray, one of the most sensitive historians of the Naxalbari movement, warn us against setting a clear-cut and unambiguous definition for Naxalbari. Was it a stillborn revolution, a peasant movement, a crusade of exemplary idealist middle-class youth against state power, or a crescendo that the communist movement in India reached between 1967 and 1972 only to plunge into an abyss of terror for the next five years? Perhaps it was all of them, and much more.

‘The disillusionment of the Midnight’s Children (a generation so named in a brilliant stroke of apt self-description by one of its most inventive children) … in the 1970s’, writes Ranajit Guha, ‘could truly be ascribed to a disillusionment of hope’ (R. Guha 1997, xii). Guha elaborates tha...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in South Asian History
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Through the looking glass of gender
• 3 Multiple patriarchies
• 4 Speaking silence
• 5 Acts of agency
• 6 Weapons and wounds
• 7 Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index