Bhagat Singh (1907–1931) “is to South Asia what Che Guevara is to Latin America,” an iconic figure of the radical left tradition. In a trial by a special tribunal which chose to violate basic principles of law and criminal procedure for colonial-political ends, he was convicted of the charge of assassinating an assistant superintendent of police, John Saunders, in 1928.46 Singh (along with his comrades Sukhdev and Rajguru) was executed in Lahore (now in Pakistan) on March 23, 1931. Having come from the revolutionary strand of India’s struggle for independence, the elite nationalist leadership, Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, remained ambivalent about him, and nationalist historiography has marginalized his political contribution. The substitution of the slogan “Vande Mataram!” (Salutations to Mother India!) with the rallying cries “Inquilab Zindabad!” (Long Live the Revolution!), “Samrajyawad Ka Nash Ho!” (Death to Imperialism!), for which Bhagat Singh is credited, was alien to the political sense of the elite nationalists.
Clearly, Bhagat Singh had truly made the transition from the Hindustan Republican Association to the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. He really hit the nail on the head when he wrote—and in this, he has proved prophetic—in a communication to young political workers on February 2, 1931, at a time the Congress Party was contemplating a compromise with the British government: “[W]hat difference does it make to them [workers and peasants] whether Lord Reading is the head of the Indian government or Sir Purshottamdas Thakurdas? What difference for a peasant if Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru replaces Lord Irwin!”47 In the adoption of the hunger strike as a political weapon, he and his comrades took inspiration from their Irish counterparts, progenitors of this political tactic. Indeed, Jatin Das (1904–29), one of Bhagat Singh’s comrades, died on September 13, 1929, after a sixty-three-day hunger strike in Lahore jail, and civil liberties and democratic rights activists and the Naxalites, in and outside the walls of prisons, to this day, commemorate that day as political prisoners’ day.48 It must be said that, unlike the parliamentary communist left, the Naxalites embraced the revolutionary traditions of the Ghadarites (we will come to them in chapter 2)—whom the colonial state treated viciously in the first Lahore Conspiracy Case, initiated in 1915—Bhagat Singh and his comrades, and even groups like the Anushilan Samiti that advocated “revolutionary terror” to end British rule in India.
“Naxalbari exploded many a myth and restored faith in the courage and character of the revolutionary left in India…. [T]he very problems they [the Naxalites] raised and tried to solve in a hurry had never been raised with such force of sincerity before or after Telangana. That is their achievement.”49 That was how the post-Tagorean poet and editor of the radical weekly Frontier, Samar Sen, summed it all up. Dedication and devotion of a high order, one might add, and immense perseverance, because of which, in Suniti Kumar Ghosh’s words, “Naxalbari held out a promise—the promise of the liberation of … [the Indian] people from oppression and exploitation. [But] (t)hat promise is yet to be fulfilled.”50
“ORDINARY PEOPLE IN EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES”
Neither the lives of the individuals who came to the fore in “Spring Thunder,” Phase I, who have been profiled here, nor their “present as history,” can be understood without comprehending both. The powers-that-be regarded these ordinary people as the greatest danger to India’s liberal-political democracy and did what was expected of them to preserve the set-up. Given the positions of the Ranjit Guptas or the S.S. Rays, or indeed, the then prime minister Indira Gandhi, in the institutional structure of the system, it does not seem possible that they could have been sensitized to the consequences of their actions, although, five decades on, those repercussions are still unfolding. This narrative has tried to understand “Spring Thunder,” Phase I, from the perceptions of the revolutionary participants themselves, to figure out the motives and actions of the tribal- and Dalit-peasant protagonists.
Yes, there is a political intent to what I am doing but this does not mean that I cannot do it objectively. Certainly, my politics has shaped what I have written; my own experience and political participation in Indian society has influenced what I have penned. I detest the condescension of many Indian Marxists to the Naxalites, as if the Naxalites have been ignorant of Marxism, as if their politics had been nothing but “petty-bourgeois left adventurist,” and that what they needed, metaphorically speaking, was an appointment with these Marxist intellectuals to provide them with good theory, which will then, in turn, lead to “correct” practice! Sheer arrogance, this treatment of ordinary people almost as things. I can sense the manner of their contemptuous scorn when they read what I have written, as if writing with deeply felt emotions is always bereft of objectivity.
Pray, how can anger and indignation, empathy and compassion, this in the face of terror and inhumanity, be considered out of place? Are not passion and rage the stuff that drives revolutionaries to make them what they are? Aren’t all revolutionaries emotionally charged with fury, revulsion, and moral indignation against the powers-that-be? Isn’t it the case that they cannot but raise objections and thus refuse to remain silent in the face of the myriad injustices and indignities that the poor are made to suffer, no matter the cost to themselves? Aren’t revolutionary moments precisely those when the fetters of intuitive self-preservation are thrown to the winds? Why obfuscate such matters? I am writing about “ordinary people … in extraordinary circumstances,” just like Sumanta Banerjee did, and I have strong opinions of the Naxalites who brought some of those ordinary people together in what became their joint radical political project. Perhaps my opinion has been shaped by the manner of the Maoist intellectuals I have known and trust, mainly those from the civil liberties and democratic rights struggle—here one comes across communists who are radical-democratic and libertarian, both qualities Marx associated with the word communist.
The Naxalites have been people with a revolutionary Marxist commitment; their politics has been the expression of their hopes for a better world. They have had a sense of shared interests among themselves, and against the Indian state and ruling classes; they developed a revolutionary consciousness that has been radical-democratic, and this awareness has come from their own values and experience, in the course of their struggles, as they, mostly, lost against the repression and anti-democratic ethos of the Indian state and ruling classes. It was the fusion of the revolutionary romanticism of revolting middle-class youth with the class consciousness of toiling poor peasants and landless laborers that made “Spring Thunder,” Phase I, what it was—both, the rebel youth and the poor peasants/landless laborers, could not have been made solely by the “vanguard” that came out of the CPM.
That vanguard as well as the rebel youth, both of whom had given up the comforts, the safety, and the privileges that came from their middle-class social origins, chose to pitch their lot with the deprived peasants and laborers; they took up the revolutionary cause, and thus risked their very lives. Unlike the leaders and cadre of the parliamentary left parties, they were hounded by the repressive apparatus of the Indian state; many