Ray’s right-hand man was Ranjit Gupta, then Inspector General of Police, West Bengal, who devised the counterrevolutionary tactic of “polluting the ocean.” He created “secret squads who killed small businessmen, robbed ferries, and bumped off a variety of individuals with a police carte blanche, if they were strict about shouting Naxalite slogans while acting.”23 And, of course, there were the “encounter” killings in which the cowardly cops aimed their guns at Naxalites precisely when they knew the latter couldn’t shoot back, and then turned the victims into criminals. In his Calcutta Diary, the distinguished economist, political activist, writer, and columnist, Ashok Mitra, has this to say about the “encounter” deaths: “corpses are incapable of issuing rejoinders…. The corpse … [is] given an unsavory name … [extremist] … retroactive justification of trigger happiness. [From the second quarter of 1970 onward, the police assumed] summary powers to hunt down and kill ‘undesirable’ elements … point-blank killing … The British might have caviled at this ‘something’, but not us … You must not turn into a dreamer of extravagant dreams … [sacrifice] everything so that a new society could emerge … [For those who do, the powers-that-be have decided] that [such folks must be] shot like dogs under the canopy of the open sky in concocted encounters with the police.”24
The Bengali woman of letters and political activist Mahasweta Devi’s Hajar Churashir Maa (No. 1084’s Mother) was written around the same time when Ashok Mitra penned those words. Translated into English by Samik Bandopadhyay, and later adapted to Hindi cinema by Govind Nihalani in Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa, the novel tells the story of Brati, unearthed by his apolitical mother, Sujata Chatterjee, in her quest to know her martyred Naxalite son. She had not known the true Brati ever when he was alive, but now she is determined to know what he stood for, more so in the face of the Chatterjee family’s, and especially her husband Dibyanath’s systematic denial of Brati and his politics. Brati was a Naxalite, and for the “crime” of being one, the Indian state reduced him to dead body number 1084. In Mahasweta Devi’s novel, Sujata, the upper middle-class working woman, oppressed at home by her husband, finds solace in her son’s comrade-and-lover Nandini, and in Brati’s dead comrade Somu’s mother, who belongs to the wretched of the Indian earth whose cause the Naxalites stood for.
BHOJPUR—THE WRETCHED STAND UP
The very mention of the damned of the Indian earth, however, reminds one of the movement in Bhojpur, which was greatly influenced by Charu Mazumdar’s ideas about taking the struggle from armed resistance to armed offensive—annihilation of class enemies, especially the most notorious landlords, attacks on police camps and on troops on the move, and attempts to carve out liberated zones. Bhojpur, particularly its southern part, is irrigated by the river Sone, and it thus became a “green revolution” area, where Dalit (literally oppressed, used to depict India’s “untouchables” who were “outside” the caste hierarchy)25 landless laborers, either casual or bonded (through indebtedness), toiled at extremely low wages and suffered a denial of basic human dignity—their wives and daughters constantly subjected to sexual tyranny—in the fields and other domains of the upper-caste landlords, Rajputs and Bhumihars.
The latter wielded not only economic but also political power, their links with the state apparatus underwriting such coercive dominance. Their upper-caste status not only assured them access to the means of production that the green-revolution techniques required but also structured the relations of production vis-à-vis the Dalit landless laborers. In such a milieu, it was taken for granted that “unfree labor” would coexist with the landlords’ capitalistic drive for profit maximization. So full of themselves, the upper-caste landlords even took liberties with middle-class Shudra jati (the fourth social category within the caste hierarchy)26 persons, with not infrequent assaults on their sense of dignity. In what seemed an irremediable situation, it was the ingenuity of the CPI(ML) that perceived a way out, by bringing the landless laborers and these oppressed sections of the middle class/castes onto a common political platform.27
A series of annihilations of the most hated landlords and their mercenaries and snatching of arms marked the launch of the Bhojpur movement in February 1971. What a unique blend of leaders it had—Jagdish Mahato, a former school teacher; Rameshwar Ahir, a former dacoit (a member of a band of armed robbers) who turned to Maoism while in prison; Ramayan Chamar and his nephew Jwahar, both Dalits; Ganeshi Dusadh, also a Dalit, the son of a bonded landless peasant; and Subroto Dutta, a Maoist intellectual who became the ideologue of the movement, known as “Jwahar” to his followers. The coming together of an upper-caste Maoist intellectual, a socially oppressed middle-class radical, a poor/middle peasant of an oppressed shudra caste, and persons who came from the wretched of the Indian earth (Dalits)—that is what Sujata must have grasped about the movement of which her dead son Brati was a part, when she met his dead comrade Somu’s mother, in Hajar Churashir Maa. And ex-army personnel from the shudra-jati, middle-peasants, helped train the members of the armed squads, something lacking elsewhere in the Naxalite movement.
The biographies of some of the leaders of this movement might give us a hint about the making of Naxalite revolutionaries in India. Jagdish Mahato, the son of a peasant of Ekwari village in the Sahar block of Bhojpur, was a science teacher at a school in the town of Arrah. In the 1967 elections, on polling day, having campaigned vigorously for the CPI candidate, he resisted in the face of a concerted rigging of the vote for the candidate who was sponsored by the landlords, was brutally assaulted, and had to be hospitalized for the next five months. He then organized a wage strike of the landless laborers, started publishing a periodical to propagate the ideas of the sole Dalit-architect of India’s Constitution, B. R. Ambedkar, but nothing seemed to have come of his political interventions until he gave up his job as a teacher and became a full-time Naxalite with comrades like Rameshwar Ahir.
One day in 1971 the “Master”—that is what Jagdish Mahato came to be called—in conversation with one of his former colleagues of the Arrah school, said: “I know … that I am going to die one of these days. But I will die partly satisfied. For one change that our movement has brought about is that the landlords do not dare now to touch the women of the poor. And that is not a small change.” Reportedly, the Master would prevail upon his Dalit followers to go forth to “force [their] acceptability as human beings.” His practical lesson was: “This is a gun, the weapon of subjugation. Hold it straight, [and] go and deliver justice.”28
That was the “Master.” His close comrade, Rameshwar Ahir, also one of the founders of the Bhojpur movement, was the son of a poor peasant. Rameshwar was driven by upper-caste persecution to join a gang of dacoits, but while in jail he was influenced by Naxalite co-prisoners, and he joined the movement upon his release from prison. And one can never forget Ganeshi Dusadh, the son of a bonded landless peasant from Chauri village in the Sahar block. He was an outstanding guerrilla fighter under whose leadership the CPI(ML) guerrillas annihilated several notorious landlords and moneylenders, confiscated their lands, organized the peasants to sow those fields, sniper attacked government troops, and seized and distributed the food grains of big traders. Indeed, for six months, Chauri remained under the control of a revolutionary committee. But, on May 6, 1973, a posse