This was the spirit of Naxalbari, and it spread and struck in another ongoing, deep-rooted tribal-peasant struggle in the Agency area—parts of Parvathipuram and other taluks in the Eastern Ghats—of the then Srikakulam district in northeastern Andhra Pradesh. Organized by communist school teachers Vempatapu Satyanarayana and Adibhatla Kailasam, the Girijan Sangam (hill people’s association) led several militant struggles in the 1960s. These fights were for the restoration of Girijan lands grabbed by merchant-moneylenders who had thereby become landlords. The Sangam also fought for the distribution of cultivable banjar (forest) lands, abolition of debt-peonage, fair prices for minor forest produce collected by the tribes, lifting of the prohibition on the use of forest timber by the Girijans, and Agency autonomy under local tribal governance. Indeed, the land grabbing from tribal people, which was illegal as per the Agency Tracts Interest and Land Transfer Act of 1917, further buttressed by the Andhra Pradesh Land Transfer Regulation of 1959, must be kept in mind.
With the split in the CPI in 1964, the leaders of the Sangam pitched their tents with the CPM. But, in the wake of Naxalbari in May 1967, the mass movement against exploitation and oppression by landlords, moneylenders, merchants, forest and revenue officials, and the police acquired a new resolve. The police also stepped up patrolling when the landlords sought enhanced protection. Following clashes, Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, namely, unlawful assembly, was declared in late July. It was in this setting that two peasants were shot dead by the agents of the landlords on October 31, 1967 in Levidi (in the Parvathipuram block) and by early 1968 special police camps dotted the area and an armed police offensive began, accompanied by mass arrests.
In September 1968, a court acquitted the accused in the Levidi case, confirming the reasoning of the tribes that, besides the police, the legal system too was on the side of the landlords. The Girijans had a tradition of militancy. In the adjoining Agency area, from 1922 to 1924, under the leadership of the legendary Alluri Sitaramaraju, they had waged a guerrilla war against British colonialism and local oppressors,16 and now they were geared up for it once more. The crucial factors here were not only the nature of the economic exploitation, social oppression, political domination, and the brutal state repression, but the volition and the reasoning of the tribal peasants, their political and social consciousness that motivated the armed resistance and the struggle for a just order that they were keen to embark upon. So, the Srikakulam district committee of communist revolutionaries, which supported the struggle led by the Sangam, decided to take the Naxalbari road.
In consultation with Charu Mazumdar in October 1968, they opted for an armed struggle and set up the Ryotanga Sangrama Samiti as an organ for the seizure of political power in the villages. Incidents like the November 25, 1968 raiding of the premises of the notorious landlord-cum-moneylender Teegala Narasimhulu, taking possession of hoarded paddy and other food grains, and seizing promissory notes and other legal records related to the debts the peasants had incurred over the years were emblematic of the radical politics of anti-landlordism that was brought into play.
It was in this setting that Charu Mazumdar’s controversial tactic of “annihilation of class enemies” was applied, which was to generate a lot of differences regarding the question of tactics among the revolutionaries. But unlike Naxalbari, in Srikakulam, guerrilla squads were in operation in “strategic defense” and the movement was extended to the forests of the adjoining Koraput and Ganjam districts in the province of Orissa (Odisha since 2011).17 The landlords had fled, the guerrilla squads and local militias were protecting the villages, and the Ryotanga Sangrama Samiti was in power and about to undertake land redistribution. Charu Mazumdar visited the area in March 1969 with high hopes that Srikakulam would emerge as “India’s Yenan.”18
Indeed, red political power did emerge; for a brief period, in around 300 of the 518 villages in the Agency area of Srikakulam, no forest or revenue official or panchayat (village council) person dared step in to claim any authority. The area was administered by the Ryotanga Sangrama Samiti, which had replaced the Girijan Sangam, and the praja (people’s) courts were the legitimate judicial authority. The guerrilla squads not only defended the villages but also sought to resolve the people’s problems, organize them, propagate revolutionary politics, and set up village defense squads. The Ryotanga Sangrama Samiti set up praja courts and the guerrillas conducted raids “directed against big landlords, moneylenders, police informers, and sometimes police camps.”19
State repression inevitably followed, including “encounters” (extra-judicial killings). In October 1969, a 12,000-strong armed contingent of the Central Reserve Police Force encircled the zone where red political power prevailed and launched a brutal offensive. In retrospect, one might then say that the “encountering” of the brilliant young communist Panchadri Krishnamurthy, who had joined the Srikakulam guerrillas, and six of his comrades on May 27, 1969, was a precursor to a pattern of cold-blooded murders that were to become part and parcel of the “standard practice” of counterinsurgency.20 In June 1969 the Agency parts of the district of Srikakulam were declared a “disturbed area” under the Andhra Pradesh Suppression of Disturbances Act, 1948. The guerrillas and the village defense squads, nevertheless, faced up to the huge “encirclement and suppression” campaign of the armed police that began in October 1969.
Tragically, however, some of the leading comrades, such as Nirmala Krishnamurthy, Panchadri Krishnamurthy’s wife, who joined the Srikakulam guerrillas after her husband was “encountered,” and Subbarao Panigrahi, the people’s guerrilla-poet, were killed by the police in December 1969 in what were calculated murders. The two school teachers, Vempatapu Satyanarayana and Adibhatla Kailasam—who had joined the CPI(ML)—were captured and murdered on the night of July 10–11, 1970, marking the tragic beginning of the end of the movement in Srikakulam.
MANY NAXALBARIS
But besides Srikakulam, there were many other political eruptions in the wake of Naxalbari, in
• some of the northern Telangana districts, like Khammam, Warangal and Karimnagar, of Andhra Pradesh during 1969–71, organized independently by the CPI(ML) and the Andhra Pradesh Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries, the latter led by Tarimela Nagi Reddy, Chandra Pulla Reddy, D. Venkateswara Rao, and Kolla Venkaiah;
• parts of Ganjam and Koraput districts of Orissa adjoining the areas of the Srikakulam movement;
• Mushahari block in Muzaffarpur district of Bihar in 1968–69;
• the Palia area in Lakhimpur-Kheri district of Uttar Pradesh in 1968–1970;
• Pulpally in the then Wayanad block of Kerala in 1968–69;
• Debra and Gopiballavpur in Midnapore district in 1969–70 and in Birbhum in 1970–71, both in West Bengal;
• some of the villages of Bhatinda, Hoshiarpur, Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Patiala, and Sangrur in Punjab during 1970 and 1971;
• Kanksa and Budbud in Burdwan district at the border with the Birbhum district of West Bengal between the early 1970s and 1974, led by Kanhai Chatterjee, Amulya Sen, and Chandrashekar Das (they were the founders of what became the Maoist Communist Centre);
• the Bhojpur area in the then Shahabad district of Bihar between 1971 and 1975;
• the upsurge of youth in Kolkata and other cities and towns of West Bengal in 1970–71, which came into the limelight for vandalizing the pictures and statues of political/cultural icons such as M. K. Gandhi, the preeminent leader of India’s independence movement, Rammohun Roy, founder of the socio-religious reformist Brahmo Sabha movement in the late 1820s, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, a key figure of the 19th century “Bengal Renaissance,” and Vivekananda, best known for introducing Hinduism at the “Parliament of the World’s Religions” in Chicago in 1893;21
• the struggles of political prisoners in various jails in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal.
The Birbhum armed struggle was one of the most significant that the CPI(ML) led, so much so that the Indian Army was deployed in every thana (police-station jurisdiction) of the area of struggle