Naxalite! “Spring Thunder,” Phase I
… [W]hen my child
Returns from school,
And not finding the name of the village
In his geography map,
Asks me
Why it is not there,
I am frightened
And remain silent.
But I know
This simple word
Of four syllables
Is not just the name of a village,
But the name of the whole country.
—AN EXCERPT FROM “THE NAME OF A VILLAGE,” A HINDI POEM BY KUMAR VIKAL1
Tomar bari, aamar bari, Naxalbari, Naxalbari.
Tomar naam, aamar naam, Vietnam, Vietnam.
The name of the “village” was Naxalbari, situated at the foot of the Himalayas in the Darjeeling area of north Bengal, bordering Nepal to the west, Sikkim and Bhutan to the north, East Pakistan (now, Bangladesh) to the south. Naxalbari, Kharibari, Phansidewa and parts of the Siliguri police-station jurisdiction are where it all began in March 1967, and Naxalbari came to stand for this whole area. (Map 1 will be of help throughout this chapter; see pages 24 and 25.) Indeed, there was a time when conservative parents didn’t want to send their sons/daughters to Kolkata’s elite Presidency College for fear that—like the group of rebel-students who came to be known as the “Presidency Consolidation”—they might be “indoctrinated” by the “Naxalites,” Maoist revolutionaries who were given that naam (name) from the village where the movement came into being. Indeed, the term Naxalite came to symbolize “any assault upon the assumptions and institutions that support the established order in India,” and soon found “a place in the vocabulary of world revolution.”2
Map 1: Political Geography: “Spring Thunder,” Phase I (1967–75)
Note: Bolder lines indicate state/national boundaries. Thinner lines indicate district boundaries. Map is only indicative and not to scale.
Source: Map adapted from www.d-maps.com using information in Census of India.
The ’68 generation had arrived, so to say, with the Cultural Revolution in China; the “Prague Spring” (that provoked the Soviet invasion) in Czechoslovakia; the Naxalbari uprising in India; a regenerated communist party and its New People’s Army in the Philippines; soixante-huitards that were against the French establishment and the PCF (the French Communist Party); the German SDS (socialist German student league) that took on the West German establishment and the SPD (the German social-democratic party); the Civil Rights movement, fountainhead of the Black Panther Party, and the anti-(Vietnam) War movement in the United States; unprecedented student unrest, guerrilla war in the state of Guerrero, a militant labor movement, and land occupations by impoverished peasants, in Mexico, all pitted against the ruling establishment, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), entrenched in power for decades. Revolutionary humanism was in the air; political expediency evoked derision; Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital exposed the Affluent Society for the delusion that it was; and youth, in political ferment, began to perceive the established (establishment?) left as having stripped Marxism of its revolutionary essence. Naxalbari was part and parcel of a (then) contemporary, worldwide impulse among radicals, young and not-so-young, embracing the spirit of revolutionary humanism.
But, today, all that remains of Naxalbari, in insurgent geography, is a memorial column erected by the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), the CPI(ML), in honor of the eleven who were killed in the police firing on May 25, 1967—seven women, Dhaneswari Devi, Simaswari Mullick, Nayaneswari Mullick, Surubala Burman, Sonamati Singh, Fulmati Devi, and Samsari Saibani; two men, Gaudrau Saibani and Kharsingh Mullick; and “two children,” actually infants, whose names have not been inscribed. And, of course, there are the busts of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Charu Mazumdar, the latter, the Naxalite movement’s “ideologue” and leader in its first phase. But even as the Indian Establishment made sure that the Naxal way of life was obliterated from Naxalbari, the name acquired a symbolic meaning. It came to stand for the road to revolution in India.
The ramifications of what happened at Naxalbari, what the poor peasants’ armed struggle over there triggered, have not yet been fully deciphered. The Naxalbari armed struggle began in March 1967; by the end of July of that year, it was crushed. But, soon thereafter, in the autumn, Charu Mazumdar, who subsequently became the CPI(ML)’s General Secretary, said: “… hundreds of Naxalbaris are smoldering in India…. Naxalbari has not died and will never die.”3 Certainly, he was not daydreaming, for the power of memory and the dreams unleashed a powerful dynamic of resistance that, ever since, has alarmed the Indian ruling classes and the political establishment. Indeed, an editorial in the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily on July 5, 1967, hailing the creation of the “red area of rural revolutionary armed struggle” in Naxalbari as “Spring Thunder over India,” called it a “development of tremendous significance for the Indian people’s revolutionary struggle.”4
In 2017, the fiftieth year of the Naxalite movement in India, Charu Mazumdar’s statement seems almost prescient. In 1968, an ongoing struggle in Srikakulam led by two schoolteachers, Vempatapu Satyanarayana, popularly known as “Gappa Guru”—who had married and settled among the tribes—and Adibhatla Kailasam, and organized under the Ryotanga Sangrama Samiti (peasant struggle committee) with guerrilla squads in self-defense, had mobilized “almost the entire tribal population in the Srikakulam Agency Area.”5 And Warangal, Khammam, Mushahari, Bhojpur, Debra–Gopiballavpur, Kanksa–Budbud, Ganjam–Koraput, Lakhimpur, and other “prairie fires” were not far behind. The origins of the CPI (Maoist), reckoned by the political establishment in July 2006, in the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s words at a conference in New Delhi, as India’s “single biggest internal security challenge,” must be traced to its roots. After all, the Maoist armed struggle in India, alongside the one in the Philippines, is one of the world’s longest surviving peasant insurgencies.
WHERE IT ALL BEGAN
In March 1967, in the “semi-feudal” setting of Naxalbari, tribal peasants organized into peasant committees under the leadership of a revolutionary group within the CPI(Marxist)—CPM hereinafter—one of the main two of India’s parliamentary communist parties,6 and with rudimentary militias armed with traditional weapons, undertook a political program of anti-landlordism involving the burning of land records, cancellation of debts, the passing of death sentences on oppressive landlords, and the looting of landlords’ guns. By May of the same year, the rebels established certain strongholds, Hatighisha (in Naxalbari), Buraganj (in Kharibari), and Chowpukhuria (in Phansidewa), where they were in control. But by the end of July, the movement collapsed under the pressure of a major armed-police action.
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