IN MEMORY OF COMRADE V M

The heroes have finally arrived on the stage!

If a colossal miscarriage allowed social democracy to blow in full bloom in the Indian Communist movement, to be sure, social democrats too had to pay a heavy penalty for their victory: doomed as an essentially regional force, they could never really make any dent in the Hindi heartland. What else can one infer from the CPI(M)’s total failure to make any headway in Bihar despite presiding over a full fledged model of social democracy in neighbouring West Bengal for no less than nine years in succession ?

‘Bihar is one of the most backward of Indian States, beset with rigid caste polarisations and devoid of any history of bourgeois reforms worth the name’, argue Namboodiripad and Co. Well, these facts are as indisputable as the law where social democracy ends, revolutionary democracy begins its journey. The same backward Bihar has proved to be a forward post of revolutionary democracy, with the lowest rung of the society being drawn into the vortex of peasant struggles. From Pipra carnage to Arwal massacre, bloodthirsty landlord armies to trigger happy paramilitary forces, protagonists of ‘total revolution’ to ‘His Majesty’s Opposition’ – none could enforce ‘peace’ of the graveyard on the flaming fields of Bihar and none would be able to drive these unconventional actors to the backstage of historical action.

But, will the struggle of the Bihar peasantry really be able to blaze a new trail? Or, will it too go the way of all its predecessors, ending in a disaster or in a halfway compromise? Today this question is haunting all sincere Marxists as well as all who sympathise with the cause of revolutionary democracy. Let us have a glance at the crisscross pattern of the Indian communist movement and then examine the specific course of the Bihar peasantry.

Relations with the peasantry and with the bourgeoisie are two fundamental questions of tactics to be solved by the Communist Parties in backward countries with preponderant peasant populations. Way back in 1921, Lenin had advised the communists of the Eastern countries to work out their own strategy basing on the general lessons of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution. He had warned them that they might not get the answers to their problems in any communist book.

It was precisely this task that Mao Tse tung undertook in right earnest while the Indian Communist Party leadership miserably failed to grasp its significance ... Nevertheless, Telangana remains one of the glorious chapters in the history of peasant struggles led by the Communist Party till date and reminds us of the first serious efforts by sections of the Communist Party leadership to learn from the experiences of the Chinese revolution and to develop a comprehensive line for India’s democratic revolution, taking agrarian revolution as the axis.

...The spirit behind Naxalbari was the same as in Telangana, viz., the spirit of highlighting the role of the peasant struggle in India’s democratic revolution, of drawing on the experiences of China and the teachings of Mao. However, the times had greatly changed. Naxalbari emerged against a new background: there was the great division in the international communist movement, land reforms and the democratic facade of the Congress had by then lost much of their earlier glamour, the country was facing a serious agrarian crisis that was being sought to be resolved through the imperialist strategy of green revolution, and to top it all, there was a grave political crisis as reflected in the first ever defeat of the Congress in the elections to many State Assemblies. In other words, Naxalbari emerged in a fine revolutionary situation when the ruling classes could no longer rule in the old way. It was a direct assault on the discredited and declining power. Moreover, this time revisionist leadership of the party was also clearly on the other side of the fence, presiding over the police as it went on killing the peasants and the revolutionaries.

Different as the circumstances were, the impact was also different. Naxalbari did not stop at Naxalbari. With the building of, first, the AICCCR and then the CPI(ML), it spread like wildfire over many parts of India . The new revolutionary Party emphasized the scarlet thread that ran through Leninism and the entire course of its application in semi colonial China by Mao Tse tung. Making a clear break with the Indian variety of revisionism, it decided to incorporate, apart from Marxism Leninism, Mao Tse tung Thought too in its guiding ideology, and put greater emphasis on the similarities between the Indian and Chinese conditions. However, unlike some people who described themselves as Maoist communists, this new Party never declared itself as a Maoist party, but simply as the genuine Marxist Leninist Party of India. ...

Telangana was resurrected in its spirit and colour. The air was charged with the slogans of guerilla war, red army and Yenan and the songs of long march. The struggle spread to many parts of the country with West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh emerging as the main bastions. Thousands of students and youth jumped into the fray and revolution seemed so close. Naxalism, as a new brand of communist movement, became a national phenomenon and a new word in the political dictionary.

However, the euphoria was soon over. What had seemed to be the final enactment of revolution proved to be no more than a dress rehearsal. With hundreds having sacrificed their lives and thousands languishing in the jails, the gloom set in, and as it always happens, it was accompanied by confusion, splits and disintegration. No one could be sure of the stand of this or that Party leader. People changed their positions in an unbelievable speed. Yesterday’s friends and close comrades became today’s adversaries.

For many, the dreams of liberation turned into veritable nightmares. Appeals were issued by leaders in jail, efforts were made to reorganise the scattered forces, but nothing could check the drift. History rolled on in its due course. For many participants of the movement it was simplify finished and finished for good, others continued to cherish the fond memories of the 70s with the vain hope that a forceful repetition of the old slogans might resurrect the old situation as well, while still others based themselves on the naive assumption that the situation could be saved if only all the old fragments could be united somehow or other.

In its disorganised state, the movement gave rise to all possible trends and groupings and there ensued a protracted polemical war in the bitterest of fashions. All sorts of people, even those considered long dead or permanently silenced began to stage a comeback from oblivion. And with them came back the whole range of questions supposed to have been already resolved once and for all.

The point was how to revive the movement. Some felt it was enough to condemn the ‘line of annihilations’, boycott of elections and trade unions, and so on. Some even went so far as to condemn the CPI(ML) itself and thought that the answer lag in reviving the AICCCR.

...Bihar had an altogether different story to tell. And to be sure, from much earlier periods.

As alternatives to the Gandhian strategy of freedom struggle and in contrast to it, if Bengal excelled in terrorism and in the ‘leftism’ of Subhas veriety and Bombay in the strikes of the working class, Bihar came up with a powerful Kisan Sabha movement right in the 30s.

...(The) objective contradiction of real life forced the interim Congress ministry of Bihar, which assumed office in the wake of the 1937 elections to negotiate a written agreement with the zamindars, an event unparalleled in India ’s freedom movement. By contrast, the Kisan Sabha movements, having begun as a wing of the Congress, gradually detached itself from the Congress and came under the fold of the revolutionary democrats, a sizeable section later joining the Communist Party.

In the post independence period, to prevent the outbreak of Telangana type struggles, once again Bihar was selected as the focal point for Vinoba Bhave’s Sarvodaya strategy. Erstwhile Socialist and an activist of the Kisan Sabha movement, Jay Prakash became the chief exponent of Sarvodaya in Bihar. But the agrarian reality of Bihar prevailed over their high sounding rhetoric, and with Bhoodan ending in a big fiasco Vinoba returned to Wardha and JP, too, temporarily retired from public life. The retreat of Vinoba and JP was followed by the advent of the political crisis of the mid-60s, and it was against this backdrop that Naxalbari immediately found its echo in the Musahari block of Muzaffarpur district in North Bihar. But soon the struggle there suffered a setback and once again JP jumped into the fray armed with his neo Sarvodaya strategy, which later developed into his famous theory of ‘total revolution’.

While JP went ahead with his avowed aim of combating the ‘menace of Naxalism’, revolutionary communists, too, continued with their attempts to develop peasant struggles in different parts of Bihar, though with little success in the beginning. But just when things seemed to be going exactly the Bengal way by the end of 1971, quite unexpectedly the South Bihar districts of Bhojpur and to a lesser extent Patna started sending encouraging signals. Rooted deep in the prevailing social conditions, the struggle in Bhojpur and Patna began on a different note and there emerged a nontraditional indigenous core of leadership.

All the precious blood of our heroic martyrs spilled over the fields and factories, hamlets and lanes, torture chambers and prison cells all over the country rose high in the sky and there appeared a red glow over Bhojpur. And as subsequent years have proved, the glow was not that of a meteor, but of a star, a red star that has come here to stay and shine.

The independent course of the peasant struggle and the Party’s attempt to impart consciousness to it went through a peculiar phase of unity and struggle. The Party worked hard to develop communist elements from among the peasant vanguards, always trying to check the spontaneous negative tendencies of the movement and give it an organised shape. ...

... Attempts have been made and are still being made to formulate a comprehensive ‘left’ line by certain groups, but no such line can be claimed to have been developed so far. Semi anarchism is still at best a tendency debating over forms and methods of struggle and organisation, and a major section of those presently obsessed with this tendency will surely come back to the Marxist Leninist fold as they gain more experience with the passage of time.

... We, (as distinct from the advocates of alliances with rich peasantry), stood for boldly expanding the peasant struggles which no doubt hit substantial sections of the rich peasants, too, who in Bihar do indulge in serious feudal practices. And precisely on the basis of these struggles did we work for developing the revolutionary bloc of the workers, peasants and the petty bourgeoisie as an alternative to the Congress rule even as we left the door open for tactical manoeuvrings with the parties and factions of the bourgeois opposition.

It is in the context of this struggle between the two tactical lines that the peasant struggle in Bihar developed and expanded. ... When the unceremonious death of the poorest among the peasants in the unknown, unheard of, dingy, mud tracked, tiny country town of Arwal begins to shape the political crisis of the powers that be in Bihar , one can safely proclaim that the heroes have finally arrived on the stage.