Suicide by a Naxalite Will Maoists Live Long?

Suicide by a Naxalite Will Maoists Live Long?

Written by

SOROOR AHMED

Published on

August 11, 2022

In the wake of the suicide of Kanu Sanyal, SOROOR AHMED traces the history of Naxalism and Maoism in India, the ups and downs it faced and its present influence and clout.

When Marxism is gasping for breath and Maoism making all out efforts to revive, a leading light of Marxism-Leninism committed suicide in a place in West Bengal, where the first shot was fired way back in 1967.

Knowingly or unknowingly Kanu Sanyal (78) hanged himself to death – many see some foul play in it – on March 23, the day three revolutionaries of the Indian freedom struggle, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru, were hanged by the British in 1931 for killing a police official. He killed himself not far away from Naxalbari, the village in Siliguri sub-division of Darjeeling district of West Bengal where the peasants’ insurrection began in May 1967.

Ironically, that was the time when the United Front government, with CPI(M) as a major constituent, was in power. Today once again when a Naxalite bids good-bye to the world and the re-birth of Maoism in its new avatar is taking place the Left Front is in power. And if the current political trend continues till 2011 assembly election, it is most likely that a non-Left government may come to power in the state. And the job to ‘crush’ the ultra Communists may, once again, be left on it as it happened in the early 1970s, when the Congress ruled the state.

To understand these complex contradictions within Communism one needs to go back to the formation of the Communist Party of India (CPI) in 1920s when initially M.N. Roy and then Muzaffar Ahmad and others were the leading lights. The CPI, as Communists elsewhere in the world, initially believed in the armed struggle. During the World War-II they sympathised with the then Soviet Union.

A year after independence in 1948 they revolted in Telangana, and in the regions that are now called Kerala and Tripura. The party was banned and the revolt crushed by the government. After the ban was lifted a couple of years later the CPI became an open organisation and for the first time a Communist government came to power in Kerala in 1957. This was the first case of Communists coming to power with the help of ballots not bullets anywhere in the world.

Two years later this government led by E.M.S. Namboodiripad was dismissed by democratic Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. It is said that Nehru then came under the pressure of her daughter, Indira Gandhi, who the same year became the president of the Indian National Congress. So the imposition of the President’s Rule in Kerala was the first instance of the gross misuse of Article 356 by the Centre. Namboodiripad was the only non-Congress chief minister of the country then and his dismissal speaks of Nehru’s ‘democratic’ track record.

SPLIT IN CPI

Another turning point in the Communist movement came after the Indo-Chinese war of 1962. A strong section of Communists openly held Nehru, and not the Chinese leadership, directly responsible for that war and the humiliating defeat of India. The Communist Party of India split in 1964 and a breakaway faction, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), came into existence. This faction gradually grew powerful in West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. The role of the then Soviet Union also contributed to this split. It wanted the Communists of India not to go all out against Nehru as India was in its camp. However, a large number of Communists considered Nehru’s India as a semi-feudal country and were openly against the policy enunciated by the first Indian Prime Minister. The CPI(M), therefore, tilted towards China while the rump CPI continued to follow the Soviet line.

Though the Naxalite movement led by Charu Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal, Aziz-ul-Haq and others started in 1967, its origin can be traced in the 1964 split of the CPI. Those who went on to become Naxalites were initially a part of the same CPI and CPI(M), but developed serious differences with the party. They were stoutly opposed to revisionism, that is, electoral politics.

‘LIBERATION’ OF NAXALBARI

It was Sanyal, who actually led the May 1967 peasants’ revolt by declaring the ‘Liberation’ of Naxalbari village after which the movement came to be known as Naxalite. He finally left the CPI(M) after police firing on peasants killed 11 of them on May 24, 1967. The peasants were demanding ‘land to the tillers’. So the United Front bloodied its hands 40 years before its next version, the Left Front repeated it in Singur and Nandigram.

The outfit founded by Charu Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Aziz-ul-Haq, etc. in 1967 came to be known as All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries. The Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) actually came into being on April 22, 1969.
Sanyal, who was born in Kurseong, had worked as a revenue clerk at the Kalimpong and Siliguri courts. Charu, who became the first general secretary of the new outfit, was born in Siliguri. Thus Naxalbari, not far away from there, became the hotbed of their movement. Unlike today’s Maoists, who are more active in southern part of Bengal, the Naxalites of yesteryears had strong roots in North Bengal. Naturally Sanyal was in favour of separate Gorkhaland state.

Sanyal was arrested in 1970 and spent about seven years in various jails in Bengal and Andhra Pradesh. This was the time when the movement was being crushed in West Bengal by the Congress government of Siddharth Shankar Ray. It was only in 1977 when Jyoti Basu – who incidentally died just two months before Sanyal – became the chief minister of the first Left Front government that Sanyal was released. The new chief minister took personal initiative in his release. Charu, however, died in Alipur Jail in 1972. Aziz-ul-Haq is still alive.

Though Sanyal maintained a relatively low profile after 1977 he had always been campaigning for the rights of farmers and the tea garden workers in north Bengal. He started dissociating himself from the original ideology of armed struggle. He had been critical of the Maoists of today.

Sanyal was among the first Communists to go to China to learn politics from Chairman Mao Tse Tung (now spelled Mao Zedong) for three months. Yet the Naxalites then were quite different from the Maoists of today. Though they too toed the Maoist line, they named their party after Marx and Lenin and not the CPI (Maoist) as the new avatar is known. According to Sanyal and other Naxalites of that age Aziz-ul-Haq, Santosh Rana, etc., the Maoists of today have digressed from the actual path. Though Sanyal believed in armed struggle, he was against the individual target killings and did not accept that violence is the only way. Both he and his old associates opposed the land acquisition in Singur and Nandigram and publicly criticised the CPI (M).

 

SPREAD OF LEFT EXTREMISM

After the Naxalites were crushed in West Bengal, many of the party cadres fled to Bihar and even far away to Andhra Pradesh, the earlier nursery of the Communist movement. In Bihar they gradually started working secretly in villages of Gaya, Muzaffarpur and Bhojpur districts. Different outfits came up and the CPI (ML) got split into several factions after the ban was lifted in 1977. In Bihar Dr. Vinayan, an ideologue originally from Agra in UP, founded Mazdoor Kisan Sangram Samiti. Later CPI (Party Unity) and Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) started spreading their tentacles. Then there were Peoples War and CPI ML (Chandra Pulla Reddy group), active mostly in Andhra Pradesh, and CPI ML (Liberation) under Vinod Mishra and then Dipankar Bhattacharya in Bihar, West Bengal and Assam. The Liberation faction came over-ground in December 1992.

The MCC was a slightly different outfit and, strictly speaking, not an off-shoot of the CPI ML under Charu Majumdar. It is said that the MCC came up in 1966 in South Bengal and has always been considered the most secretive, dreadful and ruthless organisation. It gradually spread deep into Bihar by mid-1980s and shot into limelight by massacring 54 Rajputs in Dalelchak-Bhagaura village of Aurangabad district in May 1987. The MCC gradually eliminated other Naxal groups in Bihar and emerged strongest. In Andhra Pradesh the Peoples War grew stronger. However, by the turn of the century the MCC, which was banned, and Peoples War decided to merge and formed the CPI (Maoist).

So the Naxal movement of late 1960s, which started in the highland of North Bengal, gradually shifted towards the plains of Bihar. It became Maoist by the time it reached the plateau of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh. So the Naxal movement, which started when India was a Socialist country, grew to become Maoists when India became a capitalist nation. Though the Maoists of today have spread themselves from Nepal down to deep south in India and virtually control one-third area of the country, the idea they are espousing, in the words of Kanu Sanyal and many other political observers, is not Maoist.

The irony of the situation is that Maoism is growing in India while Chairman Mao died in China long back in 1976. They have increased their area of operation to a large part of the plains, mineral rich regions, tribal and Dalit pockets, and plateau of central India. But has Maoism of the 21st century reached its own plateau? Only time will tell.