India after Naxalbari. Bernard D'Mello

warfare and apply tactics flexible enough to adapt to every twist and turn in the war and in keeping with the movement’s resources and the principle of self-reliance. The revolution had to begin with a “New Democratic” stage, led by the workers in a worker–peasant alliance, and would only transit to the socialist stage upon taking power at the national level. So, it was to be a “revolution by stages” and an “uninterrupted revolution.” In the New Democratic stage, not only was the peasant question extremely important, but, as Lin Biao had reiterated, the “countryside, and the countryside alone, can provide the broad areas in which the revolutionaries can manoeuvre freely … [and] provide the revolutionary bases from which [they] … can go forward to final victory.”³⁷

      In practice, however, the “adventurist” tactical line had led to defeat, the main reasons for which were the following:

      • Rash optimism and neglect of the long, hard and patient underground organizational work that should have preceded the launch of armed struggle;

      • Absence of an organization among the urban proletariat, though the Party had envisaged a worker–peasant alliance;

      • Neglect of military requirements;

      • Failure to integrate the “mass line” (“from the masses, to the masses”) and mass organizations as necessary complements to armed struggle;

      • Assigning of an undue importance to the tactic of “annihilation of class enemies,” making it doubly difficult to undertake the kind of political work that was essential for the expansion of the movement;

      • Gross underestimation of the retaliatory power of the Indian state, which turned out to be the most monstrous repression unleashed on a political movement in post-Independence India;

      • No democratic means to resolve internal contentions over tactics, given that there was a remarkable intra-party consensus over strategy; and

      • Inexplicable isolation of the students—youth, more generally—in the urban areas from the struggles of the urban working class.

      A revolutionary war, nevertheless, as Mao put it, was “not a matter of first learning and then doing, but doing and then learning, for doing is itself learning.”³⁸ Those who didn’t learn from what they had done, were wiped out; those who learned from what they had done, recovered and lived to fight another day, and they have persevered right to this day, but their numbers are still very small compared to the size of this country.

      In this account of the movement in its first phase, the focus has been on the armed struggles, not on the process of party formation and organizational matters. The latter began with a Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries within the CPM, composed of Naxalites who wanted to give up the parliamentary path. This was followed by the formation of an All-India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries after severing all links with CPM. Despite internal differences, the process culminated in the formation of the CPI(ML) on April 22, 1969, and the first Party Congress in May 1970. In all these, there were significant internal differences. Frankly, in the absence of an archive, as regards such differences, and too many unknowns and unknowables, it may be better to refrain from comment.

       INSURGENT POETRY

      Instead, there is a need to bring to the fore the political good and the political evil in Indian society, for invariably, both have been obscured. The good, by the false or unwarranted accusations made against uncompromising left politics and against anyone who questions the assumptions and institutions that support the established order in India. The evil, effectively hidden by the claim that the Indian state is simply upholding “law and order” in the face of the violence of the Naxalites, deemed to be a “cancerous growth on the body of (Indian) democracy.” That the most vulnerable sections of the people, Dalits and adivasis (tribal or aboriginal),³⁹ and those who couldn’t remain unmoved at their plight and thus took up their cause, were subjected to the worst of the state’s and the landlords’ terror-with-a-vengeance, and that this could happen in a liberal-political democracy, no matter how reactionary, is hard to believe.

      A lot can be gained by listening to the voices of some of the poets who came on the scene in the wake of Naxalbari, the Telugu verse writer Cherabanda Raju, for instance. One of the sympathizers of the Srikakulam armed struggle, Cherabanda Raju played a part in the formation of Virasam, the Revolutionary Writers’ Association, and was charge-sheeted in the Secunderabad Conspiracy Case, instituted in May 1974, against the poets of Virasam. Believe it or not, this conspiracy case involved poets and their poetry, on the ground that they believed in violence and hence were subject to the normal course of criminal law. In the following, Cherabanda Raju conveys the shattering of the hopes that one had at the time of Independence, in a “bitter-sad tribute paid to Mother India”:⁴⁰

      Oh my dear motherland!

      …

      Yours is a beauty that

      pawns its parts in the world market-place.

      Yours is a youth that

      sleeps in the ecstasy of a rich man’s embrace.

      …

      Yours is a sadness that

      fails to comfort the children crawling over

      your barren breasts.

      …

      Mother India,

      What is your destiny?

      In another poem, written from jail, Cherbanda Raju, again:⁴¹

      Instead of removing

      the filth I hate to see

      they try to pluck out my eyes.

      …

      My voice is a crime,

      my thoughts anarchy,

      because

      I do not sing their tunes,

      I do not carry them on my shoulders.

      …

      Prisoner I may be

      but not a slave.

      Though battered and broken

      like a wave of the sea

      I will be born

      again and again.

      And, Cherabanda Raju, once more, in red salute to the two peasants, Gunal Kista Gowd and Jangam Bhoomaiah, radical political activists who were charged with the annihilation of landlords in Adilabad district of Andhra Pradesh in 1970, sentenced to death, and executed on December 1, 1975 during the State of Emergency when lawyers defending the accused were also under detention:⁴²

      …

      The gallows are trembling,

      unable to take away your breath.

      This edifice cannot stand any longer

      after robbing you of your life.

      …

      Kista Gowd and Bhoomaiah were political prisoners, a category recognized by the leaders of India’s freedom struggle in colonial times, but now, in Independent India, the law treated them as common criminals. It must be mentioned that Kista Gowd and Bhoomaiah did not consider their actions as criminal; they acted destructively but justly, nevertheless, to invert the old social order; this, publicly and collectively, and in solidarity with the oppressed. Had they not been Naxalites, subject to the worst kind of political prejudice, they would not have been victims of the Indian state’s terror, for they had acted in the manner that they did “because they were appalled by the injustice of the massive suffering and suppression of the poor and they wanted to shock and shake the custodians of the status quo.”⁴³ Indeed, on the eve of their execution, both of them “donated their eyes for transplantation for the needy. They said: ‘Our eyes could not see the victory of the revolution. But those who will receive our eyes will surely