1949
24th November 2004, 18:11
This is for revolutionindia, who PMed me when I posted these articles in a thread in the History forum since he is not capable of responding to them there. -1949
"Naxalbari Zindabad!" means "It's Right to Rebel!"
Thirty years ago, the armed rebellion of the peasants of Naxalbari, a village in the State of West Bengal, sparked off a revolutionary conflagration in India. Centuries-old shackles of oppression and exploitation were attacked. Revisionist appeals to continue living as obedient slaves were scornfully ignored. The poor and downtrodden peasants dared to seize political power and expropriate the fruits of their toil from the hated feudal landlords.
Naxalbari literally shook up the whole country. The pent-up fury of the lowest of the low in Indian society, of Adivasis and Dalits (tribals and “untouchables” of caste society) besides other poor and landless peasants, burst out as raging storms of revolution in numerous places all over the country. The gusty winds of Naxalbari blew away a decades-old revisionist stench and stirred up hundreds of cadres trapped in parties like the CPI and CPM 1 into rebellion. In Calcutta and a number of smaller industrial centres whole sections of workers and the urban poor broke away from trade unionist hacks. A large number threw themselves into battle, fighting in the van of armed agrarian revolution as class-conscious proletarians. People from all walks of life, professionals, academics and others, joined the revolutionary festival of the masses. Naxalbari swept across a whole generation of youth and students and channelled the revolutionary vigour of thousands of youth fired by communist ideals of serving the people and self-sacrifice for the cause of revolution.
Despite long spells of revisionist domination before Naxalbari, the communist movement in India also had an inspiring history of revolutionary struggle. Notable was the five-year-long Telengana armed struggle of the late '40s which succeeded in establishing red power in hundreds of villages during its high tide but was later betrayed by the CPI leadership. Groups of revolutionaries had sided with Mao Tsetung in the struggle against Soviet revisionism. But Naxalbari marked a leap. It was the product of a conscious grasp of Mao Tsetung Thought as a qualitatively new stage of Marxism-Leninism and its application to Indian conditions in initiating the revolutionary armed struggle of the masses. This is the distinct and key element which catapulted Naxalbari into centre stage. Led by Charu Mazumdar, a group of revolutionary cadre within the CPM organization in Darjeeling district had consciously fought to deepen te struggle against revisionism and centrism. Drawing valuable lessons from the ideological struggle led by Mao Tsetung against Khrushchevite revisionism and further from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, Charu Mazumdar succeeded in making a thorough rupture with revisionism (including recognizing the then-existing Soviet Union under revisionist leadership as an enemy) and launching the armed agrarian revolution aimed at the seizure of political power bit by bit through the path of protracted People's War. Naxalbari was seen as part of the world proletarian revolution. It fuelled revolutionary struggle in other countries in the region and received enthusiastic support from the Communist Party of China and other proletarian revolutionaries the world over.
Naxalbari raised the process of rupturing from the revisionists and forging a genuine communist vanguard to a new and higher level. In 1969 the bold step was taken of forming the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) under the leadership of Charu Mazumdar. The founding congress of the CPI (ML), held in 1970 amidst the advance of the armed struggle, adopted a program which characterized Indian society as semi-feudal, semi-colonial and identified the targets of revolution as feudalism, comprador-bureaucrat capitalism, imperialism and social-imperialism (as represented by the then-existent Soviet bloc). It laid down the tasks in the stage of New Democratic revolution and the path of protracted People's War.
Revolution is not a dinner party but, as Mao put it, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. The new vanguard had to be forged in and through the intense revolutionary upheaval unfolding in large parts of India. Deeply entrenched revisionist thinking and styles of work had to be continuously fought out, thousands of youth had to be remoulded and trained as proletarian fighters and leaders, the wealth of experience gained at the cost of blood had to be synthesized to develop the line and raise the level of the party's work — and all of this had to be done while making bold advances in the armed struggle and fighting off the murderous suppression of the enemy. The loss of a number of experienced cadres in the early days of the new party evidently put a big strain on its capacity to tackle these tasks. Serious difficulties caused by setbacks were further compounded by a rightist wind which tried to reverse the correct orientation of the party, seizing on some real weaknesses in its line and practice.
Much has been said about the so-called “sectarianism” and “adventurism” of Charu Mazumdar which supposedly “isolated” the party from the masses and caused setbacks. Yes, elements of one-sidedness, spontaneity and subjectivism which run counter to Charu Mazumdar's overall Marxist-Leninist-Maoist stand, viewpoint and method are evident in his works. But what strikes one most forcefully while reading them now is the resolute clarity in his criticism of revisionism, a keen grasp of the key question of seizing power, deep faith in the masses and robust revolutionary optimism. Far from isolation, his leadership deeply entrenched the party among the masses and created a vast reservoir of support which is still being tapped by genuine revolutionaries. His name continues to haunt the ruling classes and inspires revolutionaries.
Following the dastardly murder of Charu Mazumdar in 1972 by the Indian rulers abetted by the CPI-CPM revisionists, the CPI(ML) failed to continue as a single, united party. Since then there has been a lot of struggle over the summation of experiences and attempts to unite. The 1976 capitalist roaders' coup in China caused new divisions, greatly strengthened the rightist tendencies in the CPI(ML) and added complexities. But it also created important and new obligations and opportunities to deepen the grasp of ideology which in turn could give a new thrust to the struggle for a correct summation and unity. Unfortunately these opportunities were either missed, or ended up misused in cases where they were initially begun. Over the past years the genuine revolutionary forces have developed a better understanding of the significance of the internationalist struggle to defed Mao Tsetung's qualitative development of Marxism-Leninism to a whole new stage and to fight the capitalist usurpers in China initially led by Hua Kuo-feng and Deng Xiao-ping as well as Hoxhaite revisionist attacks on it. Yet this issue, which has direct implications for successfully completing the task of uniting Maoist revolutionary forces into a single centre, still remains to be fully resolved.
During this whole period, revolutionary forces who were part of the united CPI(ML) as well as others have heroically continued to hold high the red banner of Naxalbari. In Andhra, Bihar and Dandakaranya 2 armed revolutionary struggle has made significant advances, won wide-spread support from the masses of people and accumulated important experience.
Over the past 30 years the conditions which made the armed agrarian rebellion of Naxalbari possible and necessary have ripened even more. Aggressive imperialist penetration in all sectors of the economy coupled with the exploitation and oppression of the Indian ruling classes is causing an all-round intensification of the misery of the masses. Most importantly, it is calling forth resistance and struggle, including armed struggle, in diverse regions and sectors of society. Divisions among the ruling classes are increasing. Moreover, the initiation of People's War in neighbouring Nepal by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) gives a direct and intensifying impetus to revolutionary ferment within India.
This situation clearly demands a daring and mighty push to unite the communist revolutionaries into a single centre based on a correct Marxist-Leninist-Maoist line capable of uniting and leading all the streams of revolt and struggle into a mighty People's War. In the struggle to achieve this goal, which necessarily implies a synthesis of the rich experiences of the past 30 years, the revolutionary communist forces in India can and must draw strength from the experience of the whole class internationally, especially the higher understanding concentrated in Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Concretely this means fighting to forge a single vanguard party united in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement.
Proletarian revolutionaries throughout the world cannot afford the slightest indifference to the advances and difficulties of our comrades in India. In the first issue of this journal we pointed out that: “If you are talking about world revolution, you are talking about India.” In the diverse languages of India, “Naxalbari Zindabad!” means “Long Live Naxalbari!”. But, for the oppressed in India and beyond, it also means “It's Right to Rebel!”
1 Communist Party of India, CPI, the pro-Soviet revisionist party in India. Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) is a centrist split-off from the CPI in 1963 which criticized the CPI and Khrushchev as revisionist but which never adopted a genuine revolutionary program.
2 A vast forest region comprised of parts of four states in central India.
----
30 Years Since Spring Thunder: The Naxalite Uprising in India
Revolutionary Worker #922, September 7, 1997, posted online at http://rwor.org/a/v19/920-29/922/spring.htm
Thirty years ago--in 1967--a "Spring Thunder" of revolutionary struggle broke out in Naxalbari, India. Poor and landless peasants, tea plantation workers and tribal people in the northern part of West Bengal, near the border with Nepal, rose up against centuries of poverty, brutality and humiliation. They armed themselves with bows and spears, snatching guns when they could. And they took up the most advanced ideas--Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
The Naxalbari uprising ushered in a new chapter in the struggle of the masses in India. And it was part of the worldwide upsurge in revolutionary struggle in the 1960s. Led by revolutionary communists, the peasants of Naxalbari rose up with the idea not just of taking land, but of taking power and changing the whole world.
Oppression in the Countryside
An Indian journalist described what the peasant rebels of Naxalbari rose up against: "The small peasants, to begin with, were gradually being pauperised. They were too poor to feed themselves, let alone the soil, which needed inputs like irrigation and fertilizers that were too expensive for the subsistence peasants. At first they mortgaged their small plots to the big landlords, and later had to sell them, reducing themselves to the position of tenants or sharecroppers.
"Dispossessed of the land, and reduced to a tenant, the erstwhile small peasant now entered an even more precarious stage of existence. In many states, his rights were not even nominally defined by law, and the rent he had to pay to the big landlord was exorbitant, ranging between one-half and two-thirds of the crop he produced. In some places, it was as high as 70-80 percent of the crop....
"Forms of exploitation of the tenants were varied. `Begar' or forced work for the landlord's private chores, and imposition of levies on the tenants to make them bear the costs of ceremonies in their employer's house on special occasions, were fairly common in the countryside.
"But at the lowest rung of the rural hierarchy were the rural laborers or landless peasants.... Besides poverty, the rural poor also suffered from social exploitation and oppression, since a large number of them also belonged to lower castes [a form of class and social division in India] and the aboriginal community.... I remember having met some landless laborers belonging to the Chamar caste, who worked the farms of the local big landlords, but were not allowed to draw water from the village well which was reserved for the upper castes. They were not even permitted to enter the compounds of the house of their employer--pukka houses made of bricks and cement, often fitted with the latest gadgets, standing in sharp contrast to the dingy hovels where the landless were condemned to live. In South India villages, lynchings and burning of low-caste peasants on the flimsiest excuses, reminiscent of the witch-hunting days of the Inquisition, were common occurrences." (From In the Wake of Naxalbari, by Sumanta Banerjee, Subarnarekha, 1980.)
Applying the Path of Maoist People's War
Before Naxalbari, the communist movement in India was dominated by revisionism (phony communism). The revolutionary internationalist journal A World to Win (1987/9) explained: "The Communist Party of India (CPI) had long before abandoned even the pretext of revolution in favour of the `parliamentary road' to power. Under the pressure of the criticism of revisionism begun by Mao Tsetung and the Communist Party of China in the early 1960s, a section of cadres and members of the CPI had split off and formed the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM. In West Bengal, especially, a great number of genuine revolutionaries took part in the formation of the CPM as a result of the latter's vocal criticism of the CPI revisionist leaders."
The CPM even took control of the state government in West Bengal. But as A World to Win pointed out: "It soon became apparent that the CPM itself had not really broken with revisionism. On an international plane, the CPM tried to steer a `middle road' between Soviet revisionism and the Marxist-Leninist line that was represented at the time by the Communist Party of China... On the practical front the CPM was content to uphold the necessity of armed struggle in words while making the `tactic' of participating in the parliamentary arena its actual main focus of work."
It was in this context that in 1965, Charu Mazumdar began developing a revolutionary opposition to the revisionist CPM leadership. He began training the cadre of the Darjeeling district committee of the CPM in a radically different line. In his writings, Mazumdar stressed that the revolution in India must follow the path charted by Mao for revolution in oppressed countries--the path of protracted people's war and surrounding the cities from the countryside.
The Outbreak of Armed Struggle
The result of the revolutionary line was the outbreak of armed struggle in Naxalbari in the spring of 1967. As In the Wake of Naxalbari described it: "From March 1967 to April 1967 all the villages were organized. From 15,000 to 20,000 peasants were enrolled as whole-time activists. Peasants' committees were formed in every village and they were transformed into armed guards. They soon occupied land in the name of the peasants' committees, burnt all the land records `which had been used to cheat them of their due,' canceled all hypothecary debts [mortgages], passed death sentences on oppressive landlords, formed armed bands by looting guns from the landlords, armed themselves with conventional weapons like bows and arrows and spears, and set up a parallel administration to look after the villages....
"By May that year, the rebels could claim as their strongholds Hatighsha under the Naxalbari police station, Buraganj under the Kharibari police station, and Chowpukhuria under Phansidew police station, where no outsider could enter without their permission."
For three liberating months, the old way in Naxalbari was driven out by the Spring Thunder. In 2,000 villages, revolutionary mass organization of peasants held political power, administering affairs according to their revolutionary interests under the leadership of communist revolutionaries.
The Naxalite Movement Shakes India
In July, the government's military encirclement and suppression campaign finally snatched back the political power that the masses had seized. But the Naxalbari uprising sparked a revolutionary movement that flared throughout India.
Another Indian journalist wrote: "You are not considered a man at all. Born a slave, your life is strictly tied to spade, sickle and the lord's feet. You produce everything that the lord boasts of, yet your children are drumming the aluminum plates. Everyday one landlord or the other takes away your wife and daughters... How long, you will ask yourselves, will I live like this? Is this my fate? No! And that means Naxalbari.... `Naxalite' had become, in the vocabulary of the police and landlords, a word to describe any landless or poor peasant walking with his head high and talking like a man, not as a slave." (From Naxalbari and After, a Frontier anthology, Kathashilpa, 1978.)
The Naxalite movement drew in many millions of peasants, proletarian revolutionaries who led battles in the fields and hills and in the cities, and students who went to the countryside at least a million strong. They shook India's big landowners and capitalists and the imperialists who dominate this country. They challenged everything reactionary--from the semi-feudal relations in the countryside to literature, from the moneylenders to the Soviet revisionists. When U.S. Secretary of Defense McNamara landed in Calcutta, a massive demonstration at the airport against U.S. imperialism and in support of the Vietnamese people forced this hated war criminal to take off again.
The Naxalbari struggle had a profound effect on the political landscape in India. Both CPI and CPM were widely exposed, as they openly sided with the central authorities who responded to the Naxalbari movement with massacres and terror. At the same time, young people came forward throughout the country to take up the Maoist banner and join the armed struggle. Charu Mazumdar was at the center of efforts to group the genuine revolutionary communists. And his line became the basis for the formation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) in April 1969.
The Indian ruling classes were able to defeat the Naxalbari movement in the early 1970s. At least 10,000 men and women gave their lives for the movement's revolutionary goals. And many times more than that were imprisoned.
In July 1972 Charu Mazumdar was arrested in Calcutta. On the night of July 27-28 he died at the hands of the police. After Mazumdar's death, serious political differences and the attacks of the enemy led to the collapse of the organized center of the party--and the revolutionary movement in India suffered a setback.
*****
The lessons of Spring Thunder are still very much relevant in today's India.
This year marks not only the 30th anniversary of the Naxalbari rebellion, but also the 50th anniversary of the formal independence of India from British colonial rule. India is sometimes called "the world's biggest democracy." But in reality, the ruling system in India is nakedly corrupt and brutal, controlled by big capitalist and land-owning classes while about half the population lives in poverty--about the same proportion as 50 years ago. Imperialist powers, especially the U.S., continue to dominate India. The Indian rulers also act as an oppressive regional power over Nepal and other smaller neighboring countries. The further opening up of India to the world capitalist market in the past several years has brought new wealth to a small section of the privileged elite. But hundreds of millions of peasants in the Indian countryside still suffer from the heavy chains of semi-feudal oppression. And the cities are immense concentrations of poverty and misery.
As A World to Win wrote: "No proletarian internationalist can be indifferent to the development of the revolution in India. Its immense population, the intensity of class contradictions, its existence as a weak link in the world imperialist system all mean, as we pointed out in the first issue of A World to Win, `if you're talking about world revolution, you're talking about India.... It is certain that the next high tide of struggle will not be a mere repetition of the movement of the past--it must and can be deeper, richer and more powerful still. But it is also certain that when the saga of the liberation of India is finally completed the songs of Naxalbari will be among those that fill the air."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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"Naxalbari Zindabad!" means "It's Right to Rebel!"
Thirty years ago, the armed rebellion of the peasants of Naxalbari, a village in the State of West Bengal, sparked off a revolutionary conflagration in India. Centuries-old shackles of oppression and exploitation were attacked. Revisionist appeals to continue living as obedient slaves were scornfully ignored. The poor and downtrodden peasants dared to seize political power and expropriate the fruits of their toil from the hated feudal landlords.
Naxalbari literally shook up the whole country. The pent-up fury of the lowest of the low in Indian society, of Adivasis and Dalits (tribals and “untouchables” of caste society) besides other poor and landless peasants, burst out as raging storms of revolution in numerous places all over the country. The gusty winds of Naxalbari blew away a decades-old revisionist stench and stirred up hundreds of cadres trapped in parties like the CPI and CPM 1 into rebellion. In Calcutta and a number of smaller industrial centres whole sections of workers and the urban poor broke away from trade unionist hacks. A large number threw themselves into battle, fighting in the van of armed agrarian revolution as class-conscious proletarians. People from all walks of life, professionals, academics and others, joined the revolutionary festival of the masses. Naxalbari swept across a whole generation of youth and students and channelled the revolutionary vigour of thousands of youth fired by communist ideals of serving the people and self-sacrifice for the cause of revolution.
Despite long spells of revisionist domination before Naxalbari, the communist movement in India also had an inspiring history of revolutionary struggle. Notable was the five-year-long Telengana armed struggle of the late '40s which succeeded in establishing red power in hundreds of villages during its high tide but was later betrayed by the CPI leadership. Groups of revolutionaries had sided with Mao Tsetung in the struggle against Soviet revisionism. But Naxalbari marked a leap. It was the product of a conscious grasp of Mao Tsetung Thought as a qualitatively new stage of Marxism-Leninism and its application to Indian conditions in initiating the revolutionary armed struggle of the masses. This is the distinct and key element which catapulted Naxalbari into centre stage. Led by Charu Mazumdar, a group of revolutionary cadre within the CPM organization in Darjeeling district had consciously fought to deepen te struggle against revisionism and centrism. Drawing valuable lessons from the ideological struggle led by Mao Tsetung against Khrushchevite revisionism and further from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, Charu Mazumdar succeeded in making a thorough rupture with revisionism (including recognizing the then-existing Soviet Union under revisionist leadership as an enemy) and launching the armed agrarian revolution aimed at the seizure of political power bit by bit through the path of protracted People's War. Naxalbari was seen as part of the world proletarian revolution. It fuelled revolutionary struggle in other countries in the region and received enthusiastic support from the Communist Party of China and other proletarian revolutionaries the world over.
Naxalbari raised the process of rupturing from the revisionists and forging a genuine communist vanguard to a new and higher level. In 1969 the bold step was taken of forming the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) under the leadership of Charu Mazumdar. The founding congress of the CPI (ML), held in 1970 amidst the advance of the armed struggle, adopted a program which characterized Indian society as semi-feudal, semi-colonial and identified the targets of revolution as feudalism, comprador-bureaucrat capitalism, imperialism and social-imperialism (as represented by the then-existent Soviet bloc). It laid down the tasks in the stage of New Democratic revolution and the path of protracted People's War.
Revolution is not a dinner party but, as Mao put it, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. The new vanguard had to be forged in and through the intense revolutionary upheaval unfolding in large parts of India. Deeply entrenched revisionist thinking and styles of work had to be continuously fought out, thousands of youth had to be remoulded and trained as proletarian fighters and leaders, the wealth of experience gained at the cost of blood had to be synthesized to develop the line and raise the level of the party's work — and all of this had to be done while making bold advances in the armed struggle and fighting off the murderous suppression of the enemy. The loss of a number of experienced cadres in the early days of the new party evidently put a big strain on its capacity to tackle these tasks. Serious difficulties caused by setbacks were further compounded by a rightist wind which tried to reverse the correct orientation of the party, seizing on some real weaknesses in its line and practice.
Much has been said about the so-called “sectarianism” and “adventurism” of Charu Mazumdar which supposedly “isolated” the party from the masses and caused setbacks. Yes, elements of one-sidedness, spontaneity and subjectivism which run counter to Charu Mazumdar's overall Marxist-Leninist-Maoist stand, viewpoint and method are evident in his works. But what strikes one most forcefully while reading them now is the resolute clarity in his criticism of revisionism, a keen grasp of the key question of seizing power, deep faith in the masses and robust revolutionary optimism. Far from isolation, his leadership deeply entrenched the party among the masses and created a vast reservoir of support which is still being tapped by genuine revolutionaries. His name continues to haunt the ruling classes and inspires revolutionaries.
Following the dastardly murder of Charu Mazumdar in 1972 by the Indian rulers abetted by the CPI-CPM revisionists, the CPI(ML) failed to continue as a single, united party. Since then there has been a lot of struggle over the summation of experiences and attempts to unite. The 1976 capitalist roaders' coup in China caused new divisions, greatly strengthened the rightist tendencies in the CPI(ML) and added complexities. But it also created important and new obligations and opportunities to deepen the grasp of ideology which in turn could give a new thrust to the struggle for a correct summation and unity. Unfortunately these opportunities were either missed, or ended up misused in cases where they were initially begun. Over the past years the genuine revolutionary forces have developed a better understanding of the significance of the internationalist struggle to defed Mao Tsetung's qualitative development of Marxism-Leninism to a whole new stage and to fight the capitalist usurpers in China initially led by Hua Kuo-feng and Deng Xiao-ping as well as Hoxhaite revisionist attacks on it. Yet this issue, which has direct implications for successfully completing the task of uniting Maoist revolutionary forces into a single centre, still remains to be fully resolved.
During this whole period, revolutionary forces who were part of the united CPI(ML) as well as others have heroically continued to hold high the red banner of Naxalbari. In Andhra, Bihar and Dandakaranya 2 armed revolutionary struggle has made significant advances, won wide-spread support from the masses of people and accumulated important experience.
Over the past 30 years the conditions which made the armed agrarian rebellion of Naxalbari possible and necessary have ripened even more. Aggressive imperialist penetration in all sectors of the economy coupled with the exploitation and oppression of the Indian ruling classes is causing an all-round intensification of the misery of the masses. Most importantly, it is calling forth resistance and struggle, including armed struggle, in diverse regions and sectors of society. Divisions among the ruling classes are increasing. Moreover, the initiation of People's War in neighbouring Nepal by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) gives a direct and intensifying impetus to revolutionary ferment within India.
This situation clearly demands a daring and mighty push to unite the communist revolutionaries into a single centre based on a correct Marxist-Leninist-Maoist line capable of uniting and leading all the streams of revolt and struggle into a mighty People's War. In the struggle to achieve this goal, which necessarily implies a synthesis of the rich experiences of the past 30 years, the revolutionary communist forces in India can and must draw strength from the experience of the whole class internationally, especially the higher understanding concentrated in Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Concretely this means fighting to forge a single vanguard party united in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement.
Proletarian revolutionaries throughout the world cannot afford the slightest indifference to the advances and difficulties of our comrades in India. In the first issue of this journal we pointed out that: “If you are talking about world revolution, you are talking about India.” In the diverse languages of India, “Naxalbari Zindabad!” means “Long Live Naxalbari!”. But, for the oppressed in India and beyond, it also means “It's Right to Rebel!”
1 Communist Party of India, CPI, the pro-Soviet revisionist party in India. Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) is a centrist split-off from the CPI in 1963 which criticized the CPI and Khrushchev as revisionist but which never adopted a genuine revolutionary program.
2 A vast forest region comprised of parts of four states in central India.
----
30 Years Since Spring Thunder: The Naxalite Uprising in India
Revolutionary Worker #922, September 7, 1997, posted online at http://rwor.org/a/v19/920-29/922/spring.htm
Thirty years ago--in 1967--a "Spring Thunder" of revolutionary struggle broke out in Naxalbari, India. Poor and landless peasants, tea plantation workers and tribal people in the northern part of West Bengal, near the border with Nepal, rose up against centuries of poverty, brutality and humiliation. They armed themselves with bows and spears, snatching guns when they could. And they took up the most advanced ideas--Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
The Naxalbari uprising ushered in a new chapter in the struggle of the masses in India. And it was part of the worldwide upsurge in revolutionary struggle in the 1960s. Led by revolutionary communists, the peasants of Naxalbari rose up with the idea not just of taking land, but of taking power and changing the whole world.
Oppression in the Countryside
An Indian journalist described what the peasant rebels of Naxalbari rose up against: "The small peasants, to begin with, were gradually being pauperised. They were too poor to feed themselves, let alone the soil, which needed inputs like irrigation and fertilizers that were too expensive for the subsistence peasants. At first they mortgaged their small plots to the big landlords, and later had to sell them, reducing themselves to the position of tenants or sharecroppers.
"Dispossessed of the land, and reduced to a tenant, the erstwhile small peasant now entered an even more precarious stage of existence. In many states, his rights were not even nominally defined by law, and the rent he had to pay to the big landlord was exorbitant, ranging between one-half and two-thirds of the crop he produced. In some places, it was as high as 70-80 percent of the crop....
"Forms of exploitation of the tenants were varied. `Begar' or forced work for the landlord's private chores, and imposition of levies on the tenants to make them bear the costs of ceremonies in their employer's house on special occasions, were fairly common in the countryside.
"But at the lowest rung of the rural hierarchy were the rural laborers or landless peasants.... Besides poverty, the rural poor also suffered from social exploitation and oppression, since a large number of them also belonged to lower castes [a form of class and social division in India] and the aboriginal community.... I remember having met some landless laborers belonging to the Chamar caste, who worked the farms of the local big landlords, but were not allowed to draw water from the village well which was reserved for the upper castes. They were not even permitted to enter the compounds of the house of their employer--pukka houses made of bricks and cement, often fitted with the latest gadgets, standing in sharp contrast to the dingy hovels where the landless were condemned to live. In South India villages, lynchings and burning of low-caste peasants on the flimsiest excuses, reminiscent of the witch-hunting days of the Inquisition, were common occurrences." (From In the Wake of Naxalbari, by Sumanta Banerjee, Subarnarekha, 1980.)
Applying the Path of Maoist People's War
Before Naxalbari, the communist movement in India was dominated by revisionism (phony communism). The revolutionary internationalist journal A World to Win (1987/9) explained: "The Communist Party of India (CPI) had long before abandoned even the pretext of revolution in favour of the `parliamentary road' to power. Under the pressure of the criticism of revisionism begun by Mao Tsetung and the Communist Party of China in the early 1960s, a section of cadres and members of the CPI had split off and formed the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM. In West Bengal, especially, a great number of genuine revolutionaries took part in the formation of the CPM as a result of the latter's vocal criticism of the CPI revisionist leaders."
The CPM even took control of the state government in West Bengal. But as A World to Win pointed out: "It soon became apparent that the CPM itself had not really broken with revisionism. On an international plane, the CPM tried to steer a `middle road' between Soviet revisionism and the Marxist-Leninist line that was represented at the time by the Communist Party of China... On the practical front the CPM was content to uphold the necessity of armed struggle in words while making the `tactic' of participating in the parliamentary arena its actual main focus of work."
It was in this context that in 1965, Charu Mazumdar began developing a revolutionary opposition to the revisionist CPM leadership. He began training the cadre of the Darjeeling district committee of the CPM in a radically different line. In his writings, Mazumdar stressed that the revolution in India must follow the path charted by Mao for revolution in oppressed countries--the path of protracted people's war and surrounding the cities from the countryside.
The Outbreak of Armed Struggle
The result of the revolutionary line was the outbreak of armed struggle in Naxalbari in the spring of 1967. As In the Wake of Naxalbari described it: "From March 1967 to April 1967 all the villages were organized. From 15,000 to 20,000 peasants were enrolled as whole-time activists. Peasants' committees were formed in every village and they were transformed into armed guards. They soon occupied land in the name of the peasants' committees, burnt all the land records `which had been used to cheat them of their due,' canceled all hypothecary debts [mortgages], passed death sentences on oppressive landlords, formed armed bands by looting guns from the landlords, armed themselves with conventional weapons like bows and arrows and spears, and set up a parallel administration to look after the villages....
"By May that year, the rebels could claim as their strongholds Hatighsha under the Naxalbari police station, Buraganj under the Kharibari police station, and Chowpukhuria under Phansidew police station, where no outsider could enter without their permission."
For three liberating months, the old way in Naxalbari was driven out by the Spring Thunder. In 2,000 villages, revolutionary mass organization of peasants held political power, administering affairs according to their revolutionary interests under the leadership of communist revolutionaries.
The Naxalite Movement Shakes India
In July, the government's military encirclement and suppression campaign finally snatched back the political power that the masses had seized. But the Naxalbari uprising sparked a revolutionary movement that flared throughout India.
Another Indian journalist wrote: "You are not considered a man at all. Born a slave, your life is strictly tied to spade, sickle and the lord's feet. You produce everything that the lord boasts of, yet your children are drumming the aluminum plates. Everyday one landlord or the other takes away your wife and daughters... How long, you will ask yourselves, will I live like this? Is this my fate? No! And that means Naxalbari.... `Naxalite' had become, in the vocabulary of the police and landlords, a word to describe any landless or poor peasant walking with his head high and talking like a man, not as a slave." (From Naxalbari and After, a Frontier anthology, Kathashilpa, 1978.)
The Naxalite movement drew in many millions of peasants, proletarian revolutionaries who led battles in the fields and hills and in the cities, and students who went to the countryside at least a million strong. They shook India's big landowners and capitalists and the imperialists who dominate this country. They challenged everything reactionary--from the semi-feudal relations in the countryside to literature, from the moneylenders to the Soviet revisionists. When U.S. Secretary of Defense McNamara landed in Calcutta, a massive demonstration at the airport against U.S. imperialism and in support of the Vietnamese people forced this hated war criminal to take off again.
The Naxalbari struggle had a profound effect on the political landscape in India. Both CPI and CPM were widely exposed, as they openly sided with the central authorities who responded to the Naxalbari movement with massacres and terror. At the same time, young people came forward throughout the country to take up the Maoist banner and join the armed struggle. Charu Mazumdar was at the center of efforts to group the genuine revolutionary communists. And his line became the basis for the formation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) in April 1969.
The Indian ruling classes were able to defeat the Naxalbari movement in the early 1970s. At least 10,000 men and women gave their lives for the movement's revolutionary goals. And many times more than that were imprisoned.
In July 1972 Charu Mazumdar was arrested in Calcutta. On the night of July 27-28 he died at the hands of the police. After Mazumdar's death, serious political differences and the attacks of the enemy led to the collapse of the organized center of the party--and the revolutionary movement in India suffered a setback.
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The lessons of Spring Thunder are still very much relevant in today's India.
This year marks not only the 30th anniversary of the Naxalbari rebellion, but also the 50th anniversary of the formal independence of India from British colonial rule. India is sometimes called "the world's biggest democracy." But in reality, the ruling system in India is nakedly corrupt and brutal, controlled by big capitalist and land-owning classes while about half the population lives in poverty--about the same proportion as 50 years ago. Imperialist powers, especially the U.S., continue to dominate India. The Indian rulers also act as an oppressive regional power over Nepal and other smaller neighboring countries. The further opening up of India to the world capitalist market in the past several years has brought new wealth to a small section of the privileged elite. But hundreds of millions of peasants in the Indian countryside still suffer from the heavy chains of semi-feudal oppression. And the cities are immense concentrations of poverty and misery.
As A World to Win wrote: "No proletarian internationalist can be indifferent to the development of the revolution in India. Its immense population, the intensity of class contradictions, its existence as a weak link in the world imperialist system all mean, as we pointed out in the first issue of A World to Win, `if you're talking about world revolution, you're talking about India.... It is certain that the next high tide of struggle will not be a mere repetition of the movement of the past--it must and can be deeper, richer and more powerful still. But it is also certain that when the saga of the liberation of India is finally completed the songs of Naxalbari will be among those that fill the air."
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