The Death of a Delusion

HE WHO CANNOT DREAM and imbue others to dream, is not a true revolutionary.

— Charu Majumdar, founder and general secretary, CPI(ML)

Charu Majumdar led the Naxalite movement from its launch in April 1969 to his mys­terious death in Alipore Central Jail, Kolkata, in July 1972. But for his weakness for good cigars, he might have escaped identification and arrest. Runu Guha Neogi, the Calcutta Police officer who led the anti-Naxal campaign from the front and whose methods of extracting confessions and making people ‘vanish’—listed as feraari—were bone-chill­ing, writes in his autobiography how he raided a “safe house” and found a man with a Muslim name sleeping on the floor. He had some idea what Charu Mazumdar looked like but wasn’t sure that this person, wearing an unwashed vest and a lungi, and with an unkempt beard, was his quarry. Runu Guha Neogi knew Charu Majumdar was partial towards good cigars—Ho Chi Minh’s weakness was American cigarettes—and offered the man in the vest and lungi a cigar. The man grabbed it greedily. That was confirma­tion enough to make headlines the next day.

The arrest and death in custody of the charismatic Charu Majumdar, who had penned the ideological matrix of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), or CPI(ML), in the form of eight pamphlets which came to be known as the ‘Historic Eight Documents’, foreshadowed the collapse of the Naxal ‘Revolution’ which began in the fields of Naxalbari in the form of peasants demanding a better deal from landlords in 1967. This was three years after the ‘Great Split’ in the Communist Party of India on the issue of aligning with Moscow or Beijing in consonance with the Sino-Soviet ideological breach of the times.

The left of the Left, aligning itself with Beijing, came out to form the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM. Among the theorists in this group was Charu Majumdar, known for his razor-sharp mind and acid-tipped tongue. The CPM’s politics between 1964 and 1969 convinced Majumdar that, like CPI, CPM too would be a revisionist party: What India needed was ‘Revolution Now’ and that would be possible only by a militant far-Left of the Left movement against the ‘class enemy’. This led to the birth of CPI(ML) in 1969, whose foetus had taken form and shape in the paddy fields of Naxalbari two years ago.

The social and political milieu of the times in West Bengal enabled the rapid spread of the Naxal ideology. Like moths drawn to fire, men and women, some as young as high-school students, very bright and very committed, flocked to join the Revolution and wage war on the ‘class enemy’. In those days when information could be suppressed and lies planted with ease in newspapers dependent on government for newsprint, the state struck back with full force. Tales are still told of the horrific rights violations and extrajudicial executions; those whose deaths or arrests were never confirmed continue to be referred to as feraaris, or the missing.

Predictably, the Naxal movement collapsed and by the time Siddhartha Shankar Ray left the West Bengal chief minister’s office in 1977, he had exterminated the Naxalites or pushed them into Bihar or ensured they would be on the run forever. Ashim Chatterjee, the brilliant student from Presidency College who became a legend in his twenties; Azizul Huq, from a wealthy landholding family who looked perpetually hungry; Jangal Santhal who mobilised Adivasis for the cause and Kanu Sanyal, the unsmiling strategist and tactician, all found themselves in jail. By the time they came out of prison, the revolutionary moment had passed; what remained was the bitterness of failure, the disen­chantment of being betrayed. Insiders tattling to the police is not a new phenomenon.

Over the next three decades the Naxalite movement kept splintering like an amoeba, each breakaway faction claiming to be in the vanguard of the ‘Revolution’ which they claimed had survived the perceived failure of what China’s People’s Daily had described as “a peal of spring thunder that has crashed over India”. Charu Majumdar’s ‘revisionist’ comrades won elections—the “ultimate act of perfidy”—in West Bengal and remained in power for close to 35 years. Over those years what remained of the Naxalite movement transmogrified into the rump CPI(ML), the Maoist Communist Centre of India (MCCI), and the People’s War or People’s War Group (PWG). Viciously violent, they began infiltrating and controlling stretches of rural India, especially forests like Abujhmarh in Chhattisgarh, also known as the “Black Forest” as nobody from outside, including government officials, had ever set foot there.

Unlike the Naxalite movement which was centred round the peasantry of rural Bengal and had a defined ‘class enemy’, these groups focused on positing themselves as champions of tribal rights and tapped into the collective angst of Adivasis who had for long been nursing grievances to do with their exclusion from the natural wealth of the land of their forefathers. This was most acute in the Bastar region which formed the single-largest segment of what later came to be known as the Tirupati (Andhra Pradesh) to Pashupati (Nepal) ‘Red Corridor’.

The Bastar region was a princely state with Jagdalpur as its capital. Annama Deva, brother of the last Kakatiya king Prataparudra Deva, left Warangal (in present-day Telangana) to set it up under the tutelage of the local goddess Danteshwari (from whom Dantewada derives its name). She remains the presiding or patron deity of the Bastar region.

The last king was Pravir Chandra Bhanj Deo, who oversaw Bastar’s integration with India after 1947 and dedicated his life to working for the economic and political rights of tribals. He and many of his followers were shot dead by the police at the palace which had become a symbol of tribal resistance to the plunder of Bastar’s natural resources. That was in March 1966, but the anger among the people of Bastar never quite died down, making it receptive to PWG’s propaganda and violent ways against the state.

Crushing poverty and the absence of any sign of development added to the charms of the gun-wielding liberator and his snake-charmer’s mantra of ‘Revolution’ resuscitated from the ashes of the Naxalite movement.

But there were problems that manifested themselves by way of lack of coordination and ideological clarity. The new generation of Left Wing Extremists (LWEs) did not want to be seen as legatees of Charu Majumdar’s ‘Historic Eight Docu­ments’ fame. They wanted to recast them­selves ideologically and adopt an entirely new tactical line on armed insurrection.

Towards this end the three main factions—CPI(ML), PWG, and MCCI—merged to form the Communist Party of India (Mao­ist), or CPI(Maoist) in 2004, insisting this organisation was vastly different from the original CPI(ML). Despite the spike in violent attacks and the audacity with which Maoists began operating, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government remained paralysed though then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh repeatedly stressed that the “Maoists are the biggest internal security challenge”.

Five years after it was formed, CPI(Maoist) was proscribed under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and organised counteroffensive operations began with the affected state governments chipping in. Yet, for all its tough talking and posturing, the UPA government remained the weakest link in the fight against ‘Red Terror’.

An elaborate plan for a counteroffensive aimed at freeing Bastar from the clutches of Maoists, codenamed Operation Green Hunt and prepared by then Union Home Minister P Chidambaram, was called off at the last minute because UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi, whose National Advisory Council (NAC) had quite a few of what are called ‘Urban Naxals’ as its members, did not approve of it and insisted that the problem had to be dealt with compassionately. That compassion vanished into thin air when Maoists slaughtered the top leadership of Congress in Chhattisgarh in a single deadly attack.

The war on Maoists gathered speed after the Modi government came to power and adopted a two-pronged ap­proach of taking development to the affected areas and daring the “Gandhians with guns”, as the marauders were described by a cel­ebrated writer prone to supporting insurrection and insurgency, and marching with them while “listening to grasshoppers sing”.

What the Maoists did not factor in is the primal human weakness for a better life. The tribals, who willingly accepted the overlordship of the non-Chhattisgarhiya Maoist leadership for years, were slowly weaned away with roads, electricity and communications, the symbols of development that brought about a quantum change in their lives. The money spent on de­velopment despite all obstacles was way more than the money spent on counter offensives. First there was a trickle and then there was a sudden surge in the num­ber of tribals wanting to surrender.

They brought with them crucial details of Maoist logistics, details which were collated, analysed and put to use for the government’s ‘Spring Offensive’ in March, followed through in April and May. It fetched the biggest prize since the arrest of Charu Majumdar, bigger than Koteswara Rao aka Kishenji who was killed in West Bengal by security forces on the basis of information provided by Maoists who had surrendered. This time it was Nambala Keshava Rao aka Basavaraju, hunted down in his lair not by security forces but the District Reserve Guard (DRG) comprising surrendered Maoists and local tribal youth.

While exulting over the crushing blow delivered to Maoists in their heartland is justified political triumphalism, the state must not be seen wasting its time in consolidating its hold over the ‘liberated zone’ but aggressively taking the fruits of develop­ment to the tribals. The most remarkable story that has come out of the recent campaign against violent Maoist extremism is about the people of a village in Gadchiroli district in Maharashtra, which was till recently in the grip of Maoists, watching in amaze­ment as the first public transport bus rolled in close to eight decades after Independence—indeed, for the first time in history.

The strongest condemnation of the successful push against Maoists leading to the near-extermination, if not total annihila­tion, of the murderous mob with ideological pretensions has come from the Maoist Party of Turkey (TKP/ML) whose maudlin elegy begins with a quote from Charu Majumdar: “Now is not the time to be sad, comrades, it’s time to stand up like fire!”

Who is to tell the comrades of the twice lost ‘Revolution’ that all that remains are the ashes of the Communist Party of India (Maoist)?

Charu MajumdarCPI (ML)MaoismNaxalbari uprisingWest Bengal