But when he stood up to speak, he faced a sea of ominous black flags. Among the hundreds of thousands forming the tightly packed mass were Satyam and his friends—who, since they didn’t have any flags to bring, came equipped instead with black umbrellas.
Nehru looked out uneasily at the vast, unruly throng. They were chanting something he couldn’t make out, but it didn’t have a friendly ring.
He started to speak, confident that his oratory would win over and silence any hostile voices. But his microphone failed. He looked about helplessly. No one seemed to know what the problem was. In desperation, he tried doing without the sound system, but his voice was hoarse from the strain of the tour, and the crowd kept growing louder.
Enraged, Nehru turned to the local Congress leaders seated behind him and took them to task for not having arranged a working public address system, not to mention a more disciplined audience. As he yelled, the microphone mysteriously started working, picking up his bitter, contemptuous tirade and transmitting it through the loudspeakers for all to hear.
When Nehru realized what had happened, he tried to resume his speech. But after a minute, his microphone failed again.
So he went on without it, addressing the crowd in Hindi and English, trying to make himself heard as best he could. But his frail, aristocratic cadences were drowned out by the thunderous slogan echoing from every corner like a war cry:
“We want Andhra State! We want Andhra State!”
Nehru walked off. He had been scheduled to speak for an hour but lasted only twenty minutes. On his way out, he called the disturbances an insult to the many people gathered to hear his words. But everyone knew he’d been shouted down.
Police officials escorted him from the scene. It was dangerous for him to be in town at all. He was whisked to the train station in a jeep.
But the waving black flags of the multitude followed Nehru like death, swarming around the special train waiting to take him away. Satyam and his friends found a spot right along the tracks.
As the train pulled out, Nehru made a show of waving goodbye to his supporters from an open door. Waiting at the side of the track as the prime minister’s car was passing, Satyam saw his chance. He darted forward to grab Nehru’s arm and pull him down. The old man withdrew his hands with a look of utter terror and disappeared into the car.
At Guntur that day, Satyam met more Communists than he had ever before seen in one place. He learned that it was the Communists who had brought in the angry anti-Nehru throngs. And a Communist, working as an audio technician, had sabotaged the public address system.
Satyam received a Communist booklet explaining how the Telugus had been hindered from blossoming culturally and economically. How their growth was stunted, their resources stolen. The waters of the Kaveri River, which flows through Telugu country into Kannada country, were called sisuvu ku dakkani stanyam, “mother’s breast milk denied to the infant,” in a poem by Sri Sri that concluded the booklet.
No slogans like “Out with the Indian army!,” “Down with the doras’ rule!,” or “Land to the tiller!” were raised at Guntur that day. The protesters had been mustered around the watchword Visalandhra (Greater Andhra), a call to carve out a Telugu state from Madras and merge it with Telangana. It wasn’t a new slogan for the Andhra Communists, but it had turned into their principal one. Visalandhra had meant little to the impoverished rural masses who rallied to the Communist banner in the days of the armed struggle—it did not touch their concerns. But the Communists were now appealing to different sections of society. They launched a new party newspaper and called it Visalandhra.
Satyam asked the Communists he met at Guntur how he could work for the party. They gave him two tasks. One was to organize the landless madiga laborers in Telaprolu into an agricultural union. The other was to spread propaganda throughout the surrounding area in a folk style called burra katha, which combines singing, dancing, storytelling, and social commentary. Party youth were going from village to village in burra katha troupes to agitate for socialism and a “separate Andhra.” Sri Sri even set up a workshop in the village of Pedapudi to train these performers. Satyam quickly picked up the style on his own and formed a troupe with the thief Subba Rao as the main singer.
*
IN SATYAM’S MIND HIS WORK among the laborers in the madiga goodem and in the villages with his burra katha troupe was all in preparation for a renewal of the armed struggle throughout the region. He was excited when, one afternoon, Senagala Viswanatha Reddy came to see him at the tea stall. The leading Communist of Telaprolu, Reddy had gone underground when the Nehru government started hunting party members, only to be tracked down and jailed. He had recently been released and had returned to live with his family in Telaprolu.
Senagala Viswanatha Reddy took Satyam aside to tell him the party would be holding a secret meeting in the village. It was the first time Satyam had ever been invited to a party meeting. When he inquired about its agenda, he was told, “Ahh, that is top secret.”
Some forty members from twenty or thirty villages, among them the most important comrades from the whole Gannavaram area, were invited to the secret meeting. It was held in the place police would least expect to find a gathering of Communists, the Rama Temple.
On the day of the meeting, those invited arrived at the temple one by one. They were led into a spacious, gloomy room in back. Everyone sat on straw mats laid out on the floor except for the speaker, who took a seat at a little table in front. Another chair beside him was for the chairman of the meeting.
But there was no consensus as to who should act as chairman. Senagala Viswanatha Reddy was nominated, but others objected on the grounds that he had some internal charges pending against him. Another senior comrade, Pulla Reddy, was proposed. But Pulla Reddy also had some charges pending. Everyone whose name came up seemed to have some charge or other pending.
At last it was decided that Satyam, though only twenty and not nearly as senior a cadre as many of those present, was the most fit to act as chairman. No charges of any kind were pending against him, and he’d been the sole party activist in Telaprolu for the past couple of years.
So the meeting was called to order and the speaker, Anjaneya Shastri, began his report. Satyam observed that Shastri had typical brahmin looks and mannerisms. His teeth protruded a little beyond the bounds of his lips, and when he spoke, the words came out in such a rush that it was hard to catch them.
Shastri started by describing the origins of the people’s movement in Telangana. Those assembled listened with interest. He wasn’t saying anything they didn’t already know, but they thought surely he must be leading up to some important news.
Shastri recounted the heroic course of the struggle, how many cadres fought, how many troops were raised, how many squads were organized, how many rifles they carried, and so on. His audience kept waiting to hear the purpose of the meeting. As the speaker came to the end of his allotted two hours, he turned from the greatness of the struggle to the difficulties faced by the people’s army, the vicious repression it had endured. His audience was by now exhausted from the effort of following this long speech.
Surveying the puzzled group before him with satisfaction, Shastri sped on to his conclusion. Nehru’s army was strong and well equipped. The people’s army had only this many rifles left, it had lost this many troops. “And so it has been necessary to withdraw the armed struggle,” he said in closing.
The words “withdraw” and “armed struggle” jolted everyone out of their stupor. But they were all too stunned to speak.
The first to find his voice was Subba Rao. He was not a literate man, but he had been Satyam’s friend for two years now, and everything Satyam read or heard about he explained to Subba Rao.
Satyam had heard from this mouth and that mouth that the leaders of the party had split over whether to continue the armed struggle. The two factions were so deadlocked they finally resolved to ask Stalin himself to settle the question. Posing as crew mem
bers on a Soviet ship leaving from Calcutta, four of the top leaders of the Communist Party of India sailed to Moscow. They returned with a report of their discussions with Comrade Kishen (their code name for Stalin) and his top deputies. No one Satyam knew had ever laid eyes on this legendary Kishen Report, but its conclusions were well known: the people’s army must make a tactical retreat, regroup, and then march on Krishna, Guntur, and the other coastal districts. Satyam and his friends had been waiting to take up guns and join this struggle. They knew it was coming, the only question was when.
But what Shastri had just told them didn’t seem to allow for this scenario. So Subba Rao stood up and asked, “Okay, sir, we will retreat, but only to march forward, is it not?”
Shastri answered, “Don’t entertain any hopes! If you do, we take no responsibility for it.”
Satyam felt sorry for his friend. Subba Rao must have used the wrong tone. His question had been misunderstood. As chairman of the meeting, Satyam interceded, entreating, “Oh, Mr. Shastri, please don’t be angry. We know Comrade Stalin said to retreat only to regroup, but you only spoke of retreating. Can you please explain, for our sake, what comes after this retreat?”
Shastri rapped on the table. “There is nothing to explain!”
That made it clear. He wasn’t there to discuss the decision he was handing down. After that, no one had anything else to say, and the meeting soon concluded.
Shortly after the temple meeting, Satyam met Thuppeta Subba Rao, an untouchable schoolteacher from Krishna district who had gone to fight in Telangana.
When the party announced that the armed struggle was being withdrawn at the advice of Stalin, Thuppeta Subba Rao was furious. He could not believe Stalin would say such a thing. He insisted on seeing the Kishen Report with his own eyes. The leaders had to show him a copy. He showed it to Satyam.
Satyam read the report and saw the party had not been lying. Stalin wanted the peasants to put down their guns.
With this report from Stalin the party leadership was able to silence the many cadres who bitterly opposed ending the armed struggle. The leadership gave in to Nehru without even demanding amnesty for the ten thousand party members who were rotting in detention camps. The leaders were eager to campaign in the upcoming elections.
Thuppeta Subba Rao had a lot to tell Satyam. To members such as him who had risked their lives and sacrificed their livelihoods, the party had nothing to offer. They were forced to live by hard labor—pulling rickshaws, carrying loads of bricks on their heads, and laying roads—while still on the run from the police.
Yet the party did make arrangements to protect the top leaders who remained in hiding. Cunning arrangements. They realized that everyone would expect to find them hiding out in poor neighborhoods among their untouchable followers. That’s the first place police would go looking for Communists.
So the party leaders did the opposite, hiding out in the most luxurious circumstances imaginable. They installed themselves in fabulous mansions that had until recently belonged to Muslim aristocrats who had been ousted along with the Nizam, now converted into hotels. To fit into these surroundings convincingly, they went so far as to outfit themselves in expensive clothes and sunglasses.
These things that Satyam heard from Thuppeta Subba Rao made him think. He thought about what he’d seen with his own eyes since coming to Telaprolu.
The reddys of Telaprolu were all Communists. And every one of them owned sixty or seventy acres of land. Papa’s classmates wore silk and gold and lived on butter and curds.
He heard these things, saw these things, but what did they mean? According to the laws of dialectics as Hanumayya had explained them back at A.C. College, all things contain contradictions. That is because they are always in motion, either arising and developing or disintegrating and dying away.
Both rich peasants and landless laborers were in the party. Was it necessary for the laborers to ally with the rich peasants to defeat the big landlords? Which was the horse and which was the rider?
Elections were coming. The Communist candidates filed their nominations while still hiding out in the jungles. This was the first election in India with no property requirement to participate. The poor people were eager to vote for the heroes who’d led an armed struggle under the slogan of “land to the tiller.” And the rich peasants who supported the uprising against the Nizam now rallied to the slogan closest to their hearts: “Separate Andhra.” By banning Communist candidates, Nehru would only undermine the legitimacy of the whole system. He decided to let them run.
The Communists held an election rally in Telaprolu. They led a procession through the village to draw in support. Satyam marched in front with a red flag. One of the landlords whose estates they were passing ran up and stopped the march, demanding to speak to the leaders. One of the landlord’s palerus (bonded laborers) had left his work to join the rally, and the landlord wanted his slave sent back. The Communists asked the paleru why he had joined without the landlord’s permission. The man replied he had asked permission that morning but the landlord had refused. When the laborer saw the people marching past with their flags and banners, shouting slogans, he was inspired to join them. The Communists took the paleru by his arms, returned him to his master, and marched on.
Satyam was stunned. He lowered his red flag. “What is this?”
He was told that the servant belonged to his master. When the paleru became a paleru, he must have entered an agreement. An agreement between two people cannot be dissolved by a third party.
“But the purpose of a Communist party is to break those agreements,” Satyam pointed out.
The leaders had nothing to say to that.
Satyam saw the contradictions. But he led the rally onward. What was more important in the end, that the paleru be allowed to join the rally? Or that there was a party whose rally this paleru and millions like him longed to join in defiance of their masters? Who was it for, this red flag Satyam waved?
Poor peasants, rich peasants, they all came out to support the Communist candidates. They came out in the hundreds of thousands in their bullock carts adorned with mango leaves, turmeric, and vermilion. To cheer them on, troupes of young people sang and danced with their costumes and their cardboard props. A beautiful and talented seventeen-year-old madiga girl in Satyam’s troupe by the name of Akhilabai drew all eyes to their performances. They started early, at five in the morning, going around to the different caste colonies with four drums. They sang to wake up the public, to welcome the sun:
Go, brother, go!
Go and see
How the world goes on.
Go, brother, go!
This so-called Rama’s kingdom
Is a kingdom of demons only.
Go fire up your fury
Until this very government
Lies dead.
On the day before elections, Communist supporters from all the surrounding villages gathered in one huge rally in Telaprolu. At the end of the day Satyam was the speaker at a public meeting. He began by saluting the martyrs of the armed struggle and explained the need for a separate state. The crowd broke out in cheers. Then, even though it had no place in the program the party was running on, Satyam called for a fight for a socialist society, “which alone can make bloom Kalahari lo kalulavu” (lotuses in the Kalahari). Papa teased him about that line: “Is this a speech or a poetry reading?”
For a party coming off a military defeat, with their candidates hurrying from jail cells to campaign platforms, the Communists polled spectacularly well. While they did not take power in the state, they entered the legislature as the main opposition party.
*
ONCE THE ELECTIONS WERE OVER, Satyam had to find other outlets for his militant spirit.
During the months leading up to and following the elections, Andhra faced severe food shortages. Food riots broke out in many places along the coast, with hungry mobs pillaging grain banks.
According to the proponents of the Separate And
hra movement, the lack of a Telugu state was to blame for the suffering. There were rumors that food was being shipped out of Andhra to Tamil-speaking areas within the Madras Presidency.
Whatever the truth, people were hungry and the central government was doing nothing to help them. Conditions were especially desperate among those who in ordinary times had the least. Satyam and his friends were determined to do something.
Day and night, lorries ran along Trunk Road. Lorries full of rice.
And then one night, at one in the morning, a dog barked. A thin man emerged from the dark and stepped into the headlights of a speeding lorry.
The lorry made a sharp turn and screeched to a stop, blocking the road and stopping a caravan of lorries behind it. Satyam climbed into the back of the first lorry he had stopped.
The dog barked again. An emaciated ghost sitting on its haunches behind the bushes along the one-lane highway rose to his feet and ran silently toward the lorry. Then another ghost and another, tens of them, moved out from the shadows.
As they gathered on the highway, Subba Rao, the onetime thief, dispatched the thirty young men who formed the vanguard to take control of the fifteen lorries in teams of two. Their weapons were sticks.
The lorry drivers may or may not have been sympathetic to the plight of the hungry looters. The madiga men bound their hands and led them off to the roadside.
Sulaiman’s first bark meant “Be ready.” His second meant “Appropriate the food.” Having removed the drivers, the men quickly climbed inside the lorries and handed down sacks of rice to the women waiting outside in a line, who passed them from one to the other to a lowlying spot that could not be seen from the road. Long ditches had been dug in advance to conceal the plunder.
At 4:30 a.m. at an emergency meeting of the goodem labor union, the action was declared a success, but retaliation was expected. As it had been Satyam’s plan, he was the first one the police would be looking for. He had to leave immediately.
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