Consider the early political set of circumstances affecting Sushil Roy, later in his life a politburo member of the CPI(Maoist), who, after being incarcerated and treated callously in jail for almost a decade, passed away in July 2014 at the age of 76. Active in the communist movement since the early 1960s, Roy joined the CPM in 1964 after the split in the CPI, energetic in the working-class front, and hoping that the new party would take the revolutionary road. The mid-1960s were years of successive droughts, severe shortages of food-grains and other necessities such as edible oil and kerosene, high inflation in the midst of industrial stagnation, with declining real wages only partially and belatedly compensated if one worked in a factory in which the workers had an effective union.
Roy participated in the 1966 food uprising, in the pitched battles with the police in Kolkata and its suburbs, when hunger stalked the land, and in the “street fights” of the ’68 period. Those tumultuous years were also the times of “Tomaar naam, Aamar naam, Vietnam, Vietnam,” the expression of wholehearted solidarity with the people of Vietnam in their struggle against U.S. imperialism. Indeed, one of the first acts of the CPM when it came to power in a coalition government with the Bangla Congress and other parties in March 1967 was to rename Harrington Road in what was then Calcutta after the Vietnamese communist revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh, thereby changing the address of the United States Consulate there to 7 Ho Chi Minh Sarani! But then Naxalbari happened in May 1967, only to be crushed by the repressive apparatus of the state, as we have seen in the previous chapter, exposing the parliamentary left’s, especially the CPM’s, politics of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. It led to a rejection by the revolutionary left of the cultural, moral, and political values that the establishment left had imbibed, since 1951, from the dominant classes.
Sushil Roy was deeply moved by the Spring Thunder of Naxalbari, even hailing its line—“Naxalbari Ek Hi Raasta” (Naxalbari is the only way). At a general body meeting where the CPM bosses were in command, he asked why the party, even as it has made “people’s democratic revolution” its “word of worship,” refused to make any preparations—ideological, political, organizational, and military—to bring it about. A founding politburo member of the CPM, chairing that meeting, was said to be so annoyed that he asked Roy to get out. For the latter, this was a blessing in disguise, for the episode marked a new beginning. Roy went on to become a professional revolutionary, joining Dakshin Desh, the precursor of the Maoist Communist Centre.
Roy was a communist, but more generally, communist or not, ’68ers looked forward to a society wherein the basic needs of everyone for food, clothing, and shelter, potable water and sanitation, healthcare, education, and cultural enjoyment would be met. It was clear to them that all these needs could be fulfilled with Indian society’s inherent strengths, resources, and capacities; the creativity, ingenuity, and productivity of common people. To begin with, the movement would have to take on the establishment and the ruling classes, which were the greatest hindrance to such a process of development. The ’68ers dreamt of a just and humane society, but what distinguished the Naxalites among them was not only that they had a strategic goal for the long haul—New Democracy leading on to socialism—but that they were organizing the wretched of the Indian earth to achieve that goal, for they believed very seriously in their dream. And Dalits, defined more inclusively, were at the core of this damned of the Indian earth.
BLACK PANTHERS, DALIT PANTHERS
In 1972, in the wake of two widely publicized outrages against Scheduled Caste persons—the official caste designation of the Ati-Shudra Dalits—in the state of Maharashtra, the Marathi Dalit–Buddhist writer Raja Dhale, bitterly condemning the social order that was responsible for such atrocities, went on to characterize the 25th jubilee of independence as a black anniversary.19 Predictably, the caste-Hindu establishment castigated Dhale as an anti-national and demanded that the government take action against him for “showing disrespect to the national flag.” The Dalit poet Namdeo Dhasal forcefully came to Dhale’s defense in an interview published in the Marathi daily, Navakal: “Is a national emblem like a flag more valuable than human beings? In a society as ridden with discrimination and divisions as Indian society is, what is the significance of a common national emblem?”20
Earlier that year, in May, the militant Dalit protest organization and movement, Dalit Panthers, was founded by Namdeo Dhasal and the poet/writer J. V. Pawar. Dhasal’s defense of Dhale led the latter to join the Panthers. The Dalit Panthers were inspired by the African-American Black Panther Party. The latter, founded in October 1966 in Oakland, California, played an important part in the black liberation struggle, this despite the dirty tactics of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation that did them in. Dhasal issued a Manifesto of the Dalit Panthers,21 which defined Dalits as
(m)embers of scheduled castes and tribes, neo-Buddhists, the working people, the landless and poor peasants, women and all those who are being exploited politically, economically and in the name of religion … [and identified its friends as] (r)evolutionary parties set to break down the caste system and class rule. [These are] (l)eft parties that are left in the true sense.… [Well aware of the consequences, the Manifesto unambiguously states that] (t)he struggle for the emancipation of the dalits needs a complete revolution … [and as part of its program, it is clear that] dalits must live, not outside the village in a separate settlement, but in the village itself.
Left radicalism was in the political DNA of some of the young Dalit writers and poets, mixed as this was with anger and disgust at the opportunistic tactics of the mainstream Dalit politicians of the Republican Party of India (RPI), co-opted as they were by the Congress Party. The mainstream communist parties, the CPI and the CPM, seemed to have failed to sense the deep frustration of the Dalits, this most deeply socially oppressed section of Indian society. Indeed, liberal-political democracy in a country like India, without the abolition of the caste system, and thus without a polity of equal citizens in a “fraternity” (comradeship) of the people, has been rotten. The bitterness and resentment that the “semi-feudal” caste order aroused in its inflamed victims found expression in the militant protests of tens of thousands of volatile Dalits, a potential reservoir for radical change. The Panthers’ successful call for the boycott of a by-election to the Lok Sabha (the lower house of Parliament) from the constituency of Central Bombay in January 1974 unnerved the political establishment. The RPI leadership, on its part, resolved to crush the Panthers wherever they were, its task made easier by the Congress government-directed police force that mercilessly suppressed militant Panther protest with brute force.22
The harsh, yet candid, social realism of Namdeo Dhasal’s poems, in unembellished form, are an expression of the feelings of this most oppressed and downtrodden section of Indian society. Here is an excerpt.23
Dog, leashed dog,
He howls and barks from time to time.
This is his constitutional right.
He lives on stale crumbs.
His mind is calloused with enduring injustice.
If at a rebellious moment it becomes unbearable
And he jerks at his leash, tries to break his chain,
Then he is shot.
—NAMDEO DHASAL, excerpt from “Song of the Republic and the Dog,” translated by Vidya Dixit, Gail Omvedt, Jayant Karve, Eleanor Zelliot, and Bharat Patankar
Article 17 of the Indian Constitution states: “Untouchability is abolished and its practice in