Despite the positive resolve of the leaders and the resolute support that they got in some of the areas of armed struggle, the Naxalites erred, both in the adoption of appropriate tactics and in correctly responding to the course of events. But what of the existing conditions on the ground and the context, what of the then “present as history”? What was new in India in the decade of the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s and what was part of the longer process? It is time to turn then to “‘1968’ India as History.” One aspect that needs to be kept in mind, though, about “Spring Thunder,” Phase I, while looking at India after Naxalbari, can be stated thus: In the failure of armed struggle and mass mobilization to come together, in the inability of the developing class consciousness and evolving revolutionary romanticism to find a common cultural home,51 something was lost. What and how much, I really cannot say for sure, but certainly, the Indian people and the Naxalite movement were among the losers. Basically, the process of democratization lost what would have possibly been one of its most imaginative allies. Charu Mazumdar had encouraged urban youth, especially students—revolutionary romantics—joining the revolutionary movement to go to the countryside and “integrate with workers and poor and landless peasants,”52 learning from them and teaching them, and in the process build a common cultural home. But this was not to be, at least during “Spring Thunder,” Phase I. The process had, however, begun, for instance, in Srikakulam with the guerrilla-poet Subbarao Panigrahi’s attempts to reach out to people through their own cultural forms. Some of these youngsters, not within the gaze of the “Stalinist” leaders, and hence not constricted by the fiat of the Party, could allow their creative energies and those of the poor peasants and landless laborers to unfold. Both could then emerge as historical persons, responsible for their actions.
Marx famously expressed the thought that people, in the process of changing the world, at the same time change themselves. The poor and landless peasants—from tribal, Dalit or lower caste social backgrounds—made an attempt to overthrow their oppressors and change the class structure and institutions of Indian society. In undertaking these tasks, alongside middle-class, romantic revolutionaries in the making, their own conceptions of Indian society had begun to evolve, so also their values, their needs, their abilities, their aspirations. But abrupt defeat cut all of these short. Marx also famously said that human beings make their own history, but he was quick to add that they cannot and will not be allowed to do so in the manner of their own choosing. Nevertheless, “Spring Thunder,” Phase I, was an indication, a portent, of a section of the Indian people reemerging, gathering strength once again, augmenting their forces to engage in a struggle that was going to be protracted, hard, and cruel over the years to follow.
“1968” India as History
This stain-covered daybreak, this night-bitten dawn,
This is not that dawn of which there was expectation;
This is not that dawn with longing for which
The friends set out, (convinced) that somewhere
they would be met with,
Somewhere must be the stars’ last halting-place,
Somewhere the verge of night’s slow-washing tide,
Somewhere an anchorage for the ship of heartache.
—FAIZ AHMED FAIZ, “DAWN OF FREEDOM,” AUGUST 1947, TRANSLATED BY VICTOR G. KIERNAN.1
The keepers of the past cannot be the builders of the future.
—PAUL A. BARAN, “ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF BACKWARDNESS,” 19522
The extremes of violent state repression of the Naxalite movement in its first phase suggest that the colonial state, especially its repressive apparatus, remained firmly embedded in its successor in independent India. Independence in 1947 was, above all, a mere transfer of power. The threat to liberal-political democracy was from the establishment and the ruling classes, not from the Naxalite movement. “1968” India—when the spirit of revolutionary humanism came to the fore but was striven to be extinguished by extraordinary state repression—must, however, be grasped, and this can best be done by comprehending it as history. Certainly, those times, from the latter half of the 1960s right through the 1970s, have long passed, so nobody can influence their shape and outcome, but they are still breathing as history, and with an idea of where India has gone since then, it is possible to write more wisely about them. It would be more difficult to write wisely about India in the present, because for that it would be necessary to figure out where India is proceeding. This would be the challenge in this book, to sense where India is making its way so that one can write wisely about its present and thereby possibly be of some help to a collective socialist endeavor to influence its shape and outcome. As Paul Sweezy wrote in the preface to his book, The Present as History:3
Everyone knows that the present will someday be history. I believe that the most important task of the social scientist is to try and comprehend it as history now, while it is still the present and while we still have the power to influence its shape and outcome.
Like the present, “1968” India is an historical problem. It can be understood by making use of history. The Indian establishment, the ruling classes, the wretched of the Indian earth, and those who couldn’t remain unmoved by what was happening, all of them did what they did, not merely because they were compelled by history, the unique conditions existing on the ground at the time, and the context, to do what they did. History and the existing conditions and context certainly determined the range of possible outcomes, but the actual outcome was the result of the respective moves of the principal opponents and how each of them responded to the course of events then unfolding.
In sharp contrast to such an approach, the historian and writer Ramachandra Guha, in his account of the history of India as an independent nation, explains what happened by attributing much of it to the volitions and the personalities of key figures in the establishment. For instance, Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, is depicted as an authentic liberal who, more than any other personality at the helm until his death in 1964, is said to have shaped the “democratic” foundations of the Indian political system. All was supposedly more-or-less well with Indian democracy until an authoritarian personality, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, took office as India’s third prime minister. She is said to have ultimately let down “the world’s largest democracy,” indeed, even subverting it from June 26, 1975, to January 18, 1977, during the Emergency,4 but “government by the people” bounced back into shape soon after!5
Guha, nevertheless, is restrained; some other liberal writers really go overboard, for instance, Salman Rushdie, in his novel Midnight’s Children, pillorying Mrs. Gandhi as the witch-like Widow “responsible for everything that’s wrong in India.” Her son Sanjay, who is depicted as a villain called “Labia Lips,” accuses his mother of having caused his father’s death by “cruelly and selfishly neglecting him.” The case of Rushdie assumes relevance because he has claimed that Midnight’s Children is “‘imaginatively true,’” “actually about history and the ways in which memory recovers and recreates the past.” Of course, a post-modernist narrative claiming to be “imaginatively true,” without a shred of corroboration, accusing Mrs. Gandhi of being responsible for her husband’s death, this by making up what her son is claimed to have charged her with, is all part of a larger plot to depict her as the culprit responsible for the mess that India was in.6 As the eminent historian Ranajit Guha said, more generally, of the liberal critics of Mrs. Gandhi at the time—they even engaged in “character-assassination in order to cover up their own failure to understand and explain the Emergency,” peddling “the myth that all had been well with Indian democracy until