Naxalbari is a police district lying in the narrow strip of West Bengal that is enclosed by Nepal on one side and East Pakistan on the other; Tibet and the Chinese are only eighty miles away. This is tea garden and jungle hill country, perfect for guerrilla warfare and admirable for infiltration by anyone so inclined; there are no towns, scarcely a village containing more than one thousand people. Its population consists almost entirely of tribes-people and, never having been nourished with fertilizers which are monopolized by the tea gardens, the yield from their various efforts in cultivation is approximately a third of the average for West Bengal. There has been a long history of peasant militancy in the district. The hill country flowing away from Darjeeling, of which this is part, was almost permanently unsettled when the British were here. There was an uprising in the Naxalbari area in 1939, another in 1959; and on the second occasion it was largely an insurrection against the fraudulent conversion of land to family holdings when the Indian Government had established its limit of twenty-five acres. A few months before the United Front took office in Calcutta in February 1967, the local wing of the CPI (M) had told the Central Committee that it was not very happy with the party’s new taste for parliamentary procedures. For the next three months this was to be the scene of West Bengal’s most vigorous redistribution of lands. There is some reason to believe, from subsequent events, that the new Government itself by the middle of May thought the situation up there was getting a little out of control. On 17 May, Hare Krishna Konar went up-country to meet local party leaders. As he arrived at the nearest railhead in Siliguri, he was met with a huge poster which read ‘This movement can only succeed by the armed struggle and resistance of the working class. Resistance is meaningless without guns – let the working class collect guns and be vanguards in the struggle.’
On 23 May a police inspector was murdered in an ambush. The police heard that an attack might be expected on the Naxalbari police station and a force of twenty constables, a sergeant and an officer set off from Siliguri to intercept it. Two days later they reached Prasadjote, where there was a small bustee, a tea stall and a railway ganger’s hut by the level crossing. A crowd appeared on the road ahead of them. At the back were men shouting revolutionary slogans; at the front were women and children, and a subsequent enquiry established that at least one woman had been forced to stand in the front row or else have her baby strangled. While the two groups were eyeing each other at a standstill, a man at the tea stall signalled to the police that another crowd had now appeared to cut off their retreat. An arrow hit the sergeant in the arm. The police stood back to back and the officer ordered both crowds to disperse. When this had no effect he ordered his men to fire. Ten rounds went into one crowd and thirteen into the other. Several people were killed and most of them were women and children. Almost a month later, on 19 June, the West Bengal Committee of the CPI (M) met in Calcutta to review the peasant warfare and particularly to take stock of the Naxalbari affair. It noted that there were extremists in the party who had ‘already organized themselves into anti-Party groups’ and it expelled nineteen members of the Naxalbari cell; the West Bengal party secretary, Promode Dasgupta, even alleged that the American CIA had infiltrated the Naxalbari group in order to create discord. Discord, in fact, was already being initiated from another direction.
For on 5 June, although the United Front Government was still telling its police headquarters in the Darjeeling district to keep out of disturbed areas as far as possible and to avoid action, the Peking People’s Daily had accused the ‘so-called non-Congress Government of West Bengal’ of ‘bloody suppression of the revolutionary peasants’. On 28 June, the party expulsions having been announced, Peking Radio made its own summary of the Indian situation. ‘Under the leadership of the revolutionaries of the Indian Communist Party (Marxist) the tens of thousands of local peasants, who have small pieces of land or have no land at all and suffer the cruel exploitation of landlords and plantation-owners, began to arm themselves. They established their own political power and organized peasant societies, thus rebelling against the reactionary Indian Government and the landlord class. Defying laws, human and divine, and trampling underfoot the reactionary Government’s law which protects landlords, plantation-owners, and the reactionary Government, they ploughed the land, drove away the plantation owners, used force to harvest the paddy in the fields of the landlords, seized grain, guns and ammunition from the homes of the big landlords, collected money and grain from the landlords and eliminated hoarding and speculation. They established people’s courts to put on trial and punish the stubborn local bullies … The emergence of this struggle in India … signifies a new state in the Indian people’s surging struggle against reactionary rule. This forecasts the approach of a great people’s revolution in India with armed struggle as its major force … The Indian people must proceed along the path pointed out by Chairman Mao … this is the road of armed revolution, to oppose armed counter-revolution, the establishment of rural bases, the concentration of forces in the villages, using the villages to encircle the cities and finally taking over the cities.’
If this was intended as some kind of olive branch to Jyoti Basu and his immediate colleagues, it was already too late. That same day, the expelled Communists tried to seize the party newspaper, but were prevented by police. A week later they added yet another publication to West Bengal’s already respectable tally of 1,024 newspapers and periodicals, with the first issue of their own journal. Its first editorial declared that ‘Our Party, which was born out of the struggle against revisionism, is sought to be captured again by the revisionists. The Party, which is not the personal property of the leaders, must be saved from their hands.’ From now on, peasants on the march against jotedars had another slogan to add to their collection of chants; ‘Naxalbari Lai Salaam [Red Salute to Naxalbari]’. And from now on, the vocabulary of Communism could include the word Naxalite immediately after Bolshevik and Red Guard.
The revolutionary mood was just as evident in Calcutta as it was in the countryside, particularly among the industrial workers. The gherao was not unknown in West Bengal before the United Front took power. Every autumn it was customary for workers to lobby managements for a bonus on the eve of Durga Puja and frequently this led to demonstrations; occasionally it resulted in the police being called to free an employer and his executives who had been confined to their rooms in a genuine gherao. But there had never been anything approaching the scale of the gherao movement that broke out from the moment the new Government instructed the police to stay put after such an emergency call until the Labour Minister himself had cleared them for action. By September, no fewer than 1,016 gheraos had been staged in the state, for a wide variety of reasons. They were held to force the reinstatement of workers who had accepted a scheme of voluntary retirement and who had already collected compensation. They were held to support a demand for recruitment of more staff when management held that there were already too many staff; to back a demand for wages during unauthorized absence; to force the dropping of an inquiry into theft by workmen; to demand the promotion of certain people and the removal of others; to demand the reinstatement of workers who had been dismissed for misconduct two-and-a-half years previously after an official enquiry. There were gheraos laid on to demand an improvement in the statutory bonus of four per cent payable even when a firm does not make a profit in any year; the Labour Minister himself let it be known that, although the matter was in Delhi’s hands and not his, the figure should be eight per cent; but gheraos backed demands for anything up to twenty per cent.
Gheraos were now not only much more common; they lasted longer. Two or three hours had previously been a general limit. But now, the manager of a factory just behind Park Street was forced to stand in the sun for seven hours without any water and without being allowed to use the lavatory, while the girl on the switchboard was threatened with violence if she tried to call the police. The manager of a jute mill and his assistant were made to stand in their
yard for twelve hours, and kept fainting. The longest recorded gherao had a manager confined to his office for seven days. The Labour Minister, Subodh Banerjee, was perfectly clear about what was now generally happening in industrial West Bengal. On 19 June he told trade unionists in Rourkela that ‘I have allowed a duel between the employees and employers in West Bengal and the police have been taken out of the picture so that the strength of each other may be known.’ There was some indication that the whole apparatus of law enforcement had been pressed to get out of the picture. Without the police to help them, managements began to look to magistrates for aid and, sometimes finding them less beneficial than they might have hoped, took their complaints to the High Court. It was there that Mr Justice Das was severely critical of the Sub-divisional magistrate in Alipore, who had refused an application for relief from a gherao after the police had also declined to intervene. His order, said the Judge, ‘betrays a lack of understanding of the seriousness of the allegations made affecting personal liberty’. Then he added,’ I wonder if the learned magistrate was aiding and abetting the commission of offences likely to lead to lawlessness.’
The situation had become so bad by the end of summer that the High Court had a number of applications before it for injunctions against the Government’s instructions to the police. Chief Justice Sinha created a Special Bench of himself and four colleagues to hear the evidence; and while they were sitting, the High Court itself was one day subjected to the gherao, which was lifted only when the Chief Justice telephoned Ajoy Mukherjee and threatened to suspend the courts of West Bengal sine die if the police did not move in and shift the culprits. On 29 September, he issued the High Court’s judgement. It quoted a variety of English lawyers on industrial action, from Lord Hewart to Lord Denning. It also distinguished carefully between English law that was still applicable by legacy in India and that which was no longer valid in the republic. The heart of the judgement was that the Government instructions were invalid and therefore quashed. It went on to say that ‘There can be little doubt that encouragement from high quarters has resulted in a small group of militant trade unionists creating for themselves an enviable notoriety which they would otherwise not have achieved. Emboldened by such encouragement, they have become successful in rendering the forces of law and order ineffective, so that they could with impunity use violent methods against the management and terrorize them into submission. Thus, a small group of determined and violent men are holding up the whole industrial world to ransom. There is no doubt in my mind that the Labour Minister has deliberately assisted in the spread of this evil in the industrial world, and the two impugned circulars are in aid of it. ‘The Chief Justice had one more quotation to offer before his judgement finished. It was from a Tagore Law Lecture that had been delivered in Calcutta sometime earlier by the American Justice Douglas, who had said;’ The judiciary is in a high sense the guardian of the conscience of the people as well as of the law of the land …’ Almost the last words in Chief Justice Sinha’s eighty-seven pages of ruling were: ‘It is this public conscience that we have proceeded to exercise in this judgement of ours, hoping that it will contribute to the restoration of peace in West Bengal. In the gathering darkness I hope its voice shall be heard and obeyed.’
Within a few days, the Labour Minister retired to hospital, to be treated for the early stages of leukaemia, having left behind a substantial wreckage in industry. By then, 43,947 workers had been laid off in West Bengal since the beginning of the year because production had been disrupted by gheraos and strikes; another 4,314 had been made unemployed because their factories had decided to close down altogether. It was estimated that Rs 2,500 millions in capital had been withdrawn from the state during those first seven months of the United Front. These were only a few shades of Chief Justice Sinha’s gathering darkness. Between March and October, 147 murders had taken place in which the motive was reckoned to be chiefly political; eighteen of the victims were active trade union leaders.
At this point the first signs of strain within the United Front became obvious. The Communist members of the Cabinet had lately taken to public criticism of the non-Communist members. Ajoy Mukherjee actually devised a code of conduct to inhibit his Ministers from speaking harshly of each other before the electorate. He also discovered that on more than one occasion his own authority had been bypassed by Jyoti Basu or by someone even lower in the hierarchy. He therefore decided to resign on Gandhi’s birthday, 2 October. Later he was to give four reasons for this; there was widespread discontent and sometimes inhuman treatment in industry, too much force was being used to settle the land question, lawlessness generally was dislocating life in West Bengal and ‘A wing of a political party is openly inviting China to help the party in bringing about an armed revolution, starting in West Bengal. Such a tendency should be nipped in the bud.’ Ajoy Mukherjee was not, in fact, proposing to vanish into political obscurity. He still had contact with many of his old Congress colleagues and he was proposing to form a new Government with their aid, provided that his old enemy Atulya Ghosh could be kept out of it. Unfortunately for the Chief Minister, his political skill remained far inferior to that of Ghosh. He was outmanoeuvred behind the scenes, the plan was stillborn and the resignation never took place. Instead, there was a public reconciliation between the disjointed parts of the United Front at yet another rally on the Maidan.
No sooner had the cheers died down after that, than the Chief Minister was once more discovered in a sidelong shuffle away from his Communist colleagues. One of his Bangla Congress supporters had initiated a new national party consisting of all moderate men who had been disillusioned by the excesses of both Congress and Communism. It was to be entitled Bharatya Kranti Dal and it now held an inaugural session at Indore. This was attended by Ajoy Mukherjee and his supporters, together with another group from West Bengal, which had become disaffected from the Bangla Congress and its increasingly indecisive leader. And a memorable meeting it was, when 350 more Bengali delegates than the allotted number turned up, stormed the conference hall and came to blows. Almost as much confusion was now reigning politically in Calcutta. The Minister of Food, an Independent, decided to resign and took sixteen United Front supporters into Opposition with him.
It was now early November and the Governor of West Bengal, Dharma Vira, moved onto the fringes of a scene he was to occupy alone before very long. The legislative Assembly, which had not sat since mid-summer, was not due to meet again until February, but the Governor asked for a new session to start without delay, in order that the balance of power in West Bengal, if nothing else, might be decided. The United Front said that this would be impossible before mid-December. The Governor insisted that it should be much earlier. The United Front then asked the President of India in Delhi to define the Governor’s powers through a judgement of the Supreme Court. Ajoy Mukherjee hastened to Delhi to add his personal weight, such as it was by then, to the United Front’s request. He was told that his Government stood in peril of dismissal and, backed by his Cabinet, he suggested that if this happened there might well be a bloody revolution in West Bengal. Delhi was in no mood to accept threats from Calcutta. Within a few days the United Front was dismissed and a conglomeration of Congressmen and United Front defectors was pressed into service in its place. For a few tumultuous weeks it seemed likely that Ajoy Mukherjee’s threat might just materialize, until the makeshift Government died of its own incapacities and Delhi stepped in once more. West Bengal was placed under President’s Rule, which meant that Governor Dharma Vira, sitting where Lord Curzon had once sat, now administered the state alone with the authority of the whole republic behind him.
*
Just 371 days later, the United Front was back in office. With a police force in full commission, the year of President’s Rule had been marked by gradually diminishing violence, though the loud cries of political outrage against Delhi’s impositions continued. Otherwise nothing had changed. Nothing had been done to remedy the fundamental ills
of Calcutta. When Delhi announced that in February 1969, West Bengal might share midterm elections with the Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, it was almost inevitable that the voters should restore the dismissed Government; very few of them, after all, had been on the receiving end of gheraos and other unpleasant manifestations of Communist rule. They restored their Government with an overwhelming majority this time. Where Congress had 127 seats in the previous Assembly, now it had only 55; where the CPI (M) had first enjoyed power with 43 seats, now it was swollen with 80; where the CPI had made do with 16 seats, now it advanced to 30; the Forward Bloc rose from 13 to 21, and of the major parties only the Bangla Congress stood virtually still with 33 seats, one fewer than before. Almost the same collection of men took office a second time. Ajoy Mukherjee reappeared as Chief Minister and Jyoti Basu as his deputy; but this time it was Basu and not Mukherjee who took possession of the Home portfolio, and with it control of the police.
Once again it was announced that the air-conditioning would not be required in the Writers’ Building. Once again there was an inaugural rally on the Maidan; a million people turned out to hear the two leaders warn industrialists and big landlords to take note of the changed political situation and act accordingly if they did not want the Government helping the workers and the peasants in their struggle. Someone on the platform also suggested that Governor Dharma Vira had conspired to remove the United Front. The Government proceeded to settle its score with him when it drafted the inaugural address that he was obliged to read to the new Assembly. The Governor, however, could be as bloody-minded as anyone in the United Front and he coolly skipped two paragraphs that were quite pointedly offensive to his person and to the part he had played in the dying days of the first United Front. At which there was great uproar and a demand that he should be removed from office immediately. Within a month, Delhi took the hint and Dharma Vira left for a post in more tranquil surroundings.
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