Was it worth it, what Ganeshi Dusadh did? He and his comrades rose up; they risked everything. Why? Well, the truth is that a Dalit could be beaten, raped, or killed at the whim of an upper-caste landlord and virtually nothing would be done about it. The coming of age to political consciousness of the Dalits brought on more severe repression by the ruling upper caste-class combined against them. In Kilvenmani, a village in Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu, forty-four Dalits—men, women and children—were forcibly herded into a hut and burned to death by hired hoodlums of the landlords on the night of December 24, 1968, because they struck work for higher wages. Predictably, the landlords who organized the massacre were exonerated by the courts for lack of evidence. What would anyone born into such a life have done? Who would blame the victims if they took up guns to deliver justice?
The “ideologue” of the Bhojpur movement, Subroto Dutta, known as “Jwahar” among the peasants, became general secretary of a reconstituted CPI(ML), operating in Bhojpur, in 1974. An “ardent follower of Charu Mazumdar”—as Sumanta Banerjee calls him—Jwahar “sharpened the party’s military line,” stressing “the need for building up a standing force,” this in order to “forestall the ‘encirclement and suppression’ of guerrilla bases by the military, by attacking [the enemy’s troops] … when they were on their way to the bases.” Recruits to the Indian army from the oppressed castes, when they came home, found their fellow folk rising in revolt against landlordism, and many of them left the army to join the guerrillas. But with the declaration of the State of Emergency in June 1975, and the launching of “Operation Thunder” to liquidate the Naxalites and smash their strongholds, Jwahar was killed on November 25, 1975, when the police raided his hideout in a Bhojpur village.30 In a sense, this marked the end of the first phase of the Naxalite movement. For with the passing of Jwahar, the CPI(ML)(Liberation), with Vinod Mishra as its new general secretary, was not inclined to follow the path of “protracted people’s war” that leaders like Jagdish “Master,” Rameshwar Ahir, Ganeshi Dusadh, and Jwahar had embarked upon. Mind you, it was not merely the Maoist consciousness of Subroto Dutta “Jwahar” that gave the Bhojpur uprising its revolutionary character; this essential quality was shaped by the actions and deeds of persons like Ganeshi Dusadh and Rameshwar Ahir.
“DOING IS ITSELF LEARNING”
What then of this phase of the Naxalite movement? April-May 1969 witnessed the birth of the CPI(ML)—the significance of the fact that it was the revolutionary struggle which created this political party must be emphasized. But inexplicably, though the program of the Party envisaged a worker–peasant alliance, the Party organization had not been built among the urban proletariat. As Asit Sen, who presided over the May-Day rally that made the public announcement of the formation of the Party, was to put it: “The working class … is still completely isolated from the present armed struggle.”31 Serious debate, however, didn’t get a chance as bitter internal divisions and state repression did the movement in. By 1972, after the arrest, and later death, upon denial of proper medical treatment, of Charu Mazumdar in police custody on July 27, the CPI(ML) disintegrated. Having gotten India’s most wanted radical, the establishment must surely have heaved a sigh of great relief.
Charu Mazumdar “often failed to give the correct lead,” but “his ideas still live on.” When he claimed in the autumn of 1967 in the immediate aftermath of the defeat at Naxalbari that “Naxalbari has not died and will never die,” he was saying something “about the ability of his followers to survive, continue and expand their movement in the face of the most ruthless repression launched by the Indian state.” Born in a landlord family in Siliguri, Charu Mazumdar gave up his studies for the Intermediate examination and became a full-timer in the then outlawed CPI in the late 1930s in the party’s Kisan Sabha (peasant front) and took a leading part in Jalpaiguri in the Tebhaga movement in undivided, mainly north, Bengal in1946 to enforce the demand of the bargadars (sharecroppers) for a reduction in the rent paid to the jotedars (landlords) from half to one-third of the crop.
Embracing Mao’s thought as early as 1948, he was well known in the CPI in Jalpaiguri and Siliguri for the anti-“revisionist” positions he took. Going against the tide of national chauvinism in the wake of India’s China war in 1962, he was imprisoned for his views but stood his ground even after his defeat as a CPI candidate in a 1963 by-election for the Siliguri seat of the West Bengal State Assembly. When the party split in 1964, he joined the CPM as a Maoist in its ranks, but was censured the very next year when the first of his “Eight Documents” appeared. For him, the real fight against “revisionism” would begin when the poor and landless peasantry took the revolutionary road.
It was, however, only later that a fervent follower of Charu Mazumdar, Kondapalli Seetharamaiah (KS), would advance this political agenda. KS’s efforts—relentless groundwork—eventually led to the formation of the CPI(ML)(People’s War)—CPI(ML)(PW), on April 22, 1980. He and his close comrades made a major contribution to keeping alive the politics of the area-wise seizure of political power and the armed agrarian revolution following Charu Mazumdar’s death and the subsequent disintegration of the original CPI(ML). They also tried to overcome the sectarian tendencies and adventurist tactics that had befallen the Party led by Mazumdar. KS (1915–2002)32 was a veteran of the Telangana armed peasant struggle of the 1940s, who led a CPI unit in the fight against a minor zamindari at the border of Krishna and Nalgonda districts. Early on, he was recognized for his organizational abilities, especially in taking the Party to the masses (implementing the mass line). Later, inspired by the Cultural Revolution in 1966, he began organizing students in Warangal, establishing a strong base in the Regional Engineering College there.
Following Naxalbari, KS propagated the Charu Mazumdar line, became a member of the Andhra State Committee of the CPI(ML) upon the formation of that Party, and coordinated with the Srikakulam unit. He played a leading role in the collective learning from the defeat of the movement in Srikakulam and in the review that diagnosed the basic lacuna of that struggle in its failure to implement the mass line. Indeed, KS had a big hand, along with the Digambara (naked), Thirugubati (revolt), and Pygambara (prophetic) poets, in the formation of the Revolutionary Writers’ Association (Viplava Rachayitala Sangham in Telugu, Virasam, in short) in 1970 and the Jana Natya Mandali, along with radical cultural activists Narasingha Rao and Gaddar, inspired by the songs of Subbrao Panigrahi,33 in 1972. He also nurtured the Radical Students’ Union in 1974 and its “go to the village” campaigns that spawned many a professional revolutionary, and the Radical Youth League in May 1975, just before the declaration of the State of Emergency when all civil liberties and democratic rights were suspended.
For KS, “annihilation of class enemies” was only one form of struggle, one tactic among others.34 Indeed, the collective review conducted by KS and his close associates in Andhra Pradesh culminated in the formulation of a fresh tactical line called “Road to Revolution,” whose first seeds began to sprout in the peasant movement in Karimnagar and Adilabad districts soon after the Emergency was lifted.35 A legend in the period 1970–87, so his followers would say, KS inspired radical Telugu youth right from 1966 and had a major role in building the CPI(ML)(PW) from scratch.
He played a stellar role in the creation of a gateway to “Spring Thunder,” Phase II, which we examine in chapter 4. It is time then to touch upon the essence of the Maoist strategy that the CPI(ML)(PW) intended to implement. Although there were bitter differences over tactics, there was a remarkable unanimity about the revolutionary strategy the original CPI(ML) chose, which was that of the Chinese Revolution. Lin Biao, in his 1965 pamphlet, “Long Live the Victory of People’s War!,” had famously summed up the essence of this strategy of protracted people’s war (PPW) in the following words: “To rely on the peasants, build rural base areas, and use the countryside to encircle and finally capture the cities—such was the way to victory in the Chinese revolution,” which “broke out in a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country.”36 Likewise, in the CPI(ML)’s view, India was also then a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country, with the big landlords and the comprador-bureaucrat capitalists the ruling classes. The main instrument of the PPW must be the