UPSC GK: How a peasant uprising in Naxalbari triggered a pan India political movement? (POLITY)

In the summer of 1967, a tiny village on the foothills of the Himalayas was making headlines. Located in the Darjeeling district in West Bengal, Naxalbari lit a fire that would spread across large parts of India and burn till today in the form of the Maoist movement. The peasants of Naxalbari, who mainly worked on tea plantations and at large estates, had for centuries been exploited by the landowning classes and the moneylenders. On March 25, 1967, when one of the sharecroppers in the village tried to till the land from which he had been illegally evicted, the landlord got him brutally beaten up and took away his belongings. Exasperated by the exploitation of the landlords, peasants across the village got together and rose in rebellion.

In the two years before 1967, the seeds of rebellion in Naxalbari were being nurtured by the cadres of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M). A splinter group from the Communist Party of India (CPI), the CPI-M was convinced that a real socialist revolution was possible only when the workers and peasants would launch an armed uprising against the moneyed classes. After the March 25 incident at Naxalbari, they were convinced that the moment had arrived. Charu Mazumdar, one of the leaders of the CPI-M, is believed to have held that “there was an excellent revolutionary situation in the country with all the classical symptoms”. On May 25 that year, he along with the two other key leaders, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal, launched the peasant uprising in Naxalbari. The movement was quick to face the wrath of the state government with the police dealing with protesters with an iron hand. Nonetheless, in the next few days, months and decades, the Naxalbari uprising would go on to determine the very nature of armed revolution in India.

The movement in its current form has altered significantly, both in its nature and objectives. In the late sixties and early seventies, the Naxalbari uprising ignited a fire in the hearts of both the urban youth and the rural masses. In the next few months, similar movements became common in pockets of Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal, in parts of Odisha, all the way till Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. “For the first time in post-independence India the movement asserted the demands of the poor and landless peasantry in a way that shook the then atrophied Indian political scene,” writes historian Sumanta Banerjee. Also significant was the way the movement appealed to the urban youth, particularly students, from some of the most esteemed universities of the country, for whom the movement exemplified the precise way in which the establishment could be challenged.

Naxalbari and the restless urban India youth

“People are reacting. Naxalbari is an inspiration. It’s an impetus for change,” says Udayan, the fictionalised character of Jhumpa Lahiri in her book “The Lowland.” A student of Presidency University, Udayan’s euphoria at the outbreak of the uprising was evident in the way he challenged his family and joined a group of simmering revolutionary intelligentsia in supporting the Naxal cause. Lahiri’s protagonist set in the background of Calcutta in the 1960s is a reflection of a similar character set in Delhi in Sudhir Mishra’s “Hazaron Khwaishein Aisi”.

Mishra’s protagonist Siddharth Tyabji (played by Kay Kay Menon) was a student in Delhi University. A firebrand Naxalite of the seventies, he decides to leave his life of luxury to move to a village in Bihar in the hope of bringing revolution against the oppressive tendencies of upper caste landlords. Both the characters of Lahiri and Mishra are reflective of a generation of young people, affected beyond measure by the Naxal movement, despite being far removed from the site in which the uprising primarily took place.

In the immediate aftermath of the Naxal uprising, the urban youth of India, several among them being from the privileged sections of society, were remarkably inspired to rise in revolution. Descendants of a generation that had seen Independence, for those in their twenties in the 1960s and 70s, Naxalbari was their moment of bringing change in the way in which their parents’ generation had risen against the colonial state. It was not uncommon to see posters of Naxalbari hanging across the walls of colleges in Calcutta and Delhi. Many students left college to join the Naxalites.

Charu Mazumdar took a number of steps as well to entice students into joining the Naxal movement. He declared that the revolution was not just for the rural masses but rather a fight against everyone who was a ‘class enemy’ which included University teachers, businessmen, police and, of course, the government. Naxalites took over Jadavpur University and Calcutta University. Presidency College in Calcutta and St. Stephens in Delhi became hotbeds for Naxalite activities.

The state, too, could not remain immune for long from the ‘disruptive’ activities of the students and went after them. Reportedly, it was at the house of Congress MLA Somen Mitra where students were held up illegally by the police and government officials. Till date, several upper-middle-class families belonging to these urban centres narrate tales of family members and friends who had to be flown outside the country, or somehow suppressed, in order to escape the wrath of the state.

Naxalbari and the agitating rural masses

The real achievement of the movement, however, lay in the way it shook up rural India. “It continues to arouse them to protest and take up arms against their feudal oppressors, and even take on the Indian state whenever it sends its police to protect these feudal interests, whether in the villages of Bihar or the tribal hamlets of Andhra Pradesh,” writes Banerjee.

In the days immediately following the Naxalbari uprising, a similar uprising took place at Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh. Believed to have its roots in the Telangana rebellion of 1946, the uprising at Srikakulam in October 1967 is said to be inspired by the Naxalbari episode. Two men associated with the communists, Koranna and Manganna, were killed here by the local landlords. In retaliation, the tribal population of the village rose up in arms, looting the landlords of their land and grains. The movement escalated by 1968 when groups of tribal peasants organised themselves into guerilla squads to attack police officers.

Bihar was influenced as well. Movements modeled along the lines of Naxalbari sprung up in the Mushahari region of Muzaffarpur district in north Bihar, in parts of Bhojpur and Patna districts in central Bihar, and in Hazaribagh, Ranchi, Singhbhum and Dhanbad districts of south Bihar. Kerala saw a period of time when the movement was backed by students and resulted in a violent crackdown by the authorities.

Fifty-one years later, the movement is mainly operating in parts of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and Andhra Pradesh. It was dealt with severely, particularly during the Emergency period under the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi. In the ensuing decades, despite a strong surveillance by the Indian police, the movement managed to remain alive although in a significantly altered form.

“The programme of agrarian revolution and anti-imperialist mobilisation have acquired a fresh appeal in the era of globalisation and economic reforms seen in the past two decades and also since the US-led ‘war on terror’ that began in 2001,” writes political scientist Manoranjan Mohanty in his article “Challenges of revolutionary violence: the Naxalite movement in perspective.” He goes on to say that in such an atmosphere tribal people increasingly find themselves distressed by shrinking access to forest resources and large-scale displacement by mega-mining projects. Sumantra Banerjee adds that “if the movement is still surviving, the credit is due not so much to prescience of its leaders, as to the Indian state which, with its abysmal failures in socio-economic areas, persists in nourishing the soil for the continuation of the Naxalite movement.”

Credit: Indian Express Research (http://indianexpress.com/article/research/51-years-of-naxalbari-how-a-peasant-uprising-triggered-a-pan-india-political-movement-5191046/)  

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GK: Post independence history of Left Politics in India - Part 2 (HISTORY)

Part 1 Link: https://sheriasacademy.blogspot.in/2018/04/gk-understanding-history-of-left.html

Left-wing politics supports social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy. It typically involves a concern for those in society whom its adherents perceive as disadvantaged relative to others as well as a belief that there are unjustified inequalities that need to be reduced or abolished (by advocating for social justice).^[1] The term left-wing can also refer to "the radical, reforming, or socialist section of a political party or system"

Post-Independence though, the party sprung back to form leading armed struggles in several principalities where the princely rulers were reluctant to give up on power. Most noteworthy among these was the rebellion against the Nizam of Hyderabad. In Manipur and Bihar too, the party made its ideological impact felt strong in terms of the agrarian and trade union movements they led. By 1952, it realised the need to occupy the space of governance rather than just the streets and decided to embrace parliamentary politics. Having been successful in garnering enough support among some sections of the Indian population, it soon emerged as the first leading opposition party that the Congress faced.

Soon after, the party experienced its first-ever electoral success in the state of Kerala in the 1957 Legislative Assembly elections. Two decades later the party gained a footing in West Bengal and soon after in Tripura.

By the early 1960s, however, the international conditions affecting Communism had altered yet again, the ripples of which would be felt strongly in the Left politics of India. The Soviet Union and China (two most important Communist powers of the world) were at daggers drawn over ideological implications of Left politics. The Chinese, led by Mao Zedong, denounced the Russians for leaning towards the West as a diplomatic means of spreading Communism, rather than leading to an armed struggle. The ideological conflict between the two countries had its immediate effect on the CPI, drawing sturdy lines between those who leaned towards a Soviet philosophy and those who supported the Chinese. The political soil in India too was conducive to the conflict within the CPI. The Indo-China border war in 1962 affected the politics within the party with one section backing Nehru, while the other radical section opposed to what they believed was an unqualified aggression towards China.

The party splits

The internal politics within the CPI soon manifested itself in the famous split of 1964, when the radical section leaning towards China walked out of a meeting held in Delhi, calling themselves the ‘real communist party’. Soon after they would form the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M), which eventually overshadowed the CPI in parliamentary politics.

Three years after the split of 1964, however, there was yet another dissension within the CPI-M, with a faction of radicals claiming that the party, engrossed in parliamentary politics, had given up on the original cause of armed revolution. In 1969, this group, led by Charu Mazumdar led violent attacks at Naxalbari in North Bengal in an effort to replicate a Chinese revolution. The movement was soon crushed when the CPI-M, which was at that moment part of a coalition government in Bengal, came down heavily upon it, ironically accusing it of drawing inspiration from Mao, rather than following what India stood for. Despite the failure of Mazumdar’s movement though, the revolution he attempted to ignite, established the roots of what is now the Maoist movement in the country.

The recurring splits within the party, primarily based on what precisely the Marxist ideology entailed, however, could not shake the Left’s influence on the three states it had gained control over in the 50s and 60s. In Kerala the Left Front kept alternating with the Congress in presiding over the government, in West Bengal the CPI-M, once elected to power in 1977 under Jyoti Basu’s leadership, held on to power for the three decades. In Tripura too the CPI-M came to power in 1988, and except a brief moment of Congress rule between 1992 and 1998, the state was governed by the Left up until the overthrown by the BJP earlier this month.

The saffron challenge

Interestingly, while the Congress and the Left kept tussling for power in these three states, they were rather insulated from the approach of saffron in their territory for years. “The sort of ideological disposition that Jan Sangh had it was not culturally conducive to draw on Bengali psyche. For instance, in Bengal Ram Navami has no appeal because Bengalis don’t have anything called Ram Navami in our cultural universe,” says Chakrabarty explaining why the Jan Sangh could not effectively make space for itself in West Bengal in opposition to the Congress. He extended the same argument to Kerala as well, where he said historically, a rich cultural tradition of internationalism existed that could not cohabit with the ideological leanings of the Jan Sangh or the BJP that was rooted in a nationalist spirit.

However, what is noteworthy is that cultural tradition and ideological positioning of a certain community can never decide the fate of a party in electoral politics. This was first made evident when the Left suffered a drastic loss of power in West Bengal in 2011 to the All India Trinamool Congress led by Mamata Banerjee. The policy of rapid industrialisation of the state since 1994, leading to a spree of forcible land acquisitions soon alienated large sections of the rural population, made space for an alternative political party to take center stage.

But a ruder shock for the Left was yet to come in March 2018, when the BJP made history by introducing saffron to the land of red in Tripura. The trouncing of the ruling party has raised serious questions over both the future of Left politics in India and the extent to which the ideology of Marx has been effective in improving the practical realities of everyday life in India. “When you think of elections in India, they are decided not on the basis of ideological priorities but on the basis of people’s disillusionment with the ruling authority. If you look at Tripura, do you think BJP has got any cultural authority there? I doubt it. BJP has won because people are disillusioned with the incumbent Left Front government,” says Chakrabarty.

As Narendra Modi’s party makes its first-ever inroads into a Left bastion, the real question on everyone’s mind is if the era of Left politics in India is about to meet its end. “In India Left ideology has evolved in contrast with the prevalent system of government led by Congress. Since it is oppositional politics, conceptually it cannot be over ever,” explains Chakrabarty.

Credit: Indian Express Research