A Siliguri sub-division peasant convention and rally in mid-March 1967 swelled the ranks of the Krishak Samiti (peasant organization), which now began to prevent police from entering those villages that were considered strongholds. Any such attempt by the police led “thousands of armed peasants” accompanied by “hundreds of workers from the tea-plantations,” to foil the endeavor. “On many occasions, the police were forced to retreat. Women also played a glorious role in the revolt.… In hundreds or more, the peasants raided the houses of several landlords, seized all their possessions and snatched their guns. They held open trials of some landlords and punished a few of them. It was only in a case like that of Nagen Roychoudhuri, a notorious landlord who fired on the peasants injuring some of them, that death sentence was awarded at an open trial and was carried out. The line adopted at Naxalbari was not to annihilate landlords physically but to wage a struggle to abolish the feudal order.”
“The peasants formed small groups of armed units and peasant committees which also functioned as armed defense groups. Between the end of March and the end of April (1967) almost all the villages were organized.”8 The peasants resolved that after establishing the rule of the peasant committees in the villages, they would take possession of all land that was not owned and tilled by the peasantry and redistribute it. They did not seem to have reckoned what they would do when the armed forces of the state came to defend landlordism. On May 23, when a large police party tried to enter a village to make some arrests and the peasants resisted, a police officer was hit by arrows and he succumbed to his injuries in hospital. The police retreated but came back on May 25 in larger numbers and fired upon a group of mostly women and children when the men-folk were away, killing the eleven whom the martyrs’ memorial column honors.
The Naxalbari peasants were actually doing what the leadership of the West Bengal Krishak Sabha, controlled by the CPM, had been recommending when the party was not in office. But, now, they were advised by the same leaders, in office as part of a United Front government, to abandon their armed struggle and depend on the state machinery to settle the land question, the same state bureaucracy that had been hand-in-league with the landlords. They were even warned (threatened?) that if they didn’t give up political violence by such and such date, the police would deal harshly with them.
And, this the United Front government carried out—“Operation Crossbow” was unleashed from July 12 onward. “The entire area … was encircled by armed police and thousands of paramilitary forces. Police camps were set up in the villages. Constant patrolling of the area by armed men was carried out. The order to shoot Kanu Sanyal at sight was issued. Seventeen persons, including women and children, were killed. More than a thousand warrants of arrest were issued and hundreds of peasants were arrested.”9 According to a then superintendent of police, Darjeeling, “‘a powerful Army detachment was standing by on the fringe of the disturbed area.’”10 Indeed, even after the operation was successfully accomplished, thousands of armed police remained in the Naxalbari area, even until 1969. Perhaps what unnerved the Establishment was the “very remarkable” coming together of the tea-plantation workers and the peasants, for on many an occasion, the peasants and the plantation workers, both essentially armed with their traditional weapons, “together forced the police to beat a retreat.”11
But, despite such high points, the Naxalbari uprising, unable to take on the might of the repressive apparatus of the state, met quick defeat. The local leaders of the movement—Kanu Sanyal, Khokan Mazumdar, Jangal Santhal, Kadam Mullick, and Babulal Biswakarma—did not initiate the building of armed guerrilla squads nor did they establish a “powerful mass base,” as Sanyal later wrote in self-criticism. So they could not maintain their strongholds, even temporarily. The consequences of the uprising were, however, far-reaching. The rural poor in other parts of the country were inspired to undertake militant struggles. As Sumanta Banerjee, who has penned one of the most moving and authentic accounts of Naxalbari and what happened in its aftermath, put it: “It was like the premeditated throw of a pebble bringing forth a series of ripples in the water…. The world of landless laborers and poor peasants … leapt to life, illuminated with a fierce light that showed the raw deal meted out to them behind all the sanctimonious gibberish of ‘land reforms’ during the last 20 years…. [Indeed, in keeping with the gravity of the situation, in November 1969] the then Union Home Minister, Y. B. Chavan warned that ‘green revolution’ may not remain green for long.… A general belief in armed revolution as the only way to get rid of the country’s ills was in the air, and the possibility of its drawing near was suggested by the Naxalbari uprising.”12 And, as the other authoritative, independent account of the movement, that of Manoranjan Mohanty, put it: “… the Naxalbari revolt became a turning point in the history of Independent India by challenging the political system as a whole and the prevailing orientation of the Indian Communist movement in particular.”13
Be that as it may, with defeat right at the time of the launch of the strategy of area-wise seizure of power staring the Maoist leadership in the face, the intent, the area-wise seizure, was glossed over by sympathizers, and the movement was depicted as one intending mere land redistribution. Nevertheless, “revisionism” came under severe attack, especially in West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh, where the Naxalite movement first established some strongholds, for the rebellion exposed the parliamentary left’s, in particular the CPM’s, politics of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. The armed police that suppressed the peasant uprising at Naxalbari in 1967 were under orders from a coalition government of which the CPM was a prominent partner. The positive fallout was, however, the fact that some CPM members were deeply moved by Naxalbari. They posed the question as to why the party, even as it swore by “people’s democratic revolution,” refused to make any preparations—ideological, political, organizational and military—whatsoever to bring it about.
But instead of bridging the gap between the party’s stated revolutionary intention and its actual “revisionist” practice, the CPM leadership threw the rebels out of the party. Operation Expulsion involved not only the purging of Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal, and the other local leaders of the Naxalbari uprising, but also Sushital Roy Chowdhury, a member of the West Bengal State Committee of the CPM, as well as the removal of other prominent party members such as Saroj Dutta, Parimal Dasgupta, and Pramod Sengupta who supported the Naxalbari uprising. At one point, the State Secretary of the CPM, Pramod Dasgupta, even branded the Naxalites as CIA agents! But for these comrades, dismissal from the CPM was a badge of honor. As Suniti Kumar Ghosh, de facto editor of what became the CPI(ML)’s central organ, Liberation, from November 1967 up to April 1972, put it: “Naxalbari [had] restored to the communist movement in India its soul.”14
Indeed, a glimpse of the political life of one of the local leaders of the Naxalbari uprising, Babulal Biswakarma (Biswakarmakar), gives a sense of their identification with and commitment to the cause. Born in 1938 in a landless-peasant family, at the age of fifteen he took part in a demonstration of sharecroppers against a landlord-cum-moneylender charging even more than the going usurious rate of interest, and was injured and arrested. At seventeen, he became a full-time organizer in the CPI’s Krishak Samiti in Phansidewa, and the very next year, a full-fledged member of the party. In 1967 he was a leading figure in the Naxalbari uprising, faced solitary confinement in jail and expulsion from the CPM, but as soon he was released on bail, he jumped bail and went underground to reorganize the Naxalbari armed struggle. What is generally recalled is the four-hour gun battle at midnight in the Naxalbari area on September 7, 1968, with a large posse of armed policemen, in which Babulal Biswakarma, unmindful of his own safety, made it possible for his comrades to move away but was riddled