NAXALITE MOVEMENT IN INDIA

Dear Civil Service Aspirants.I am posting this Article ,which is a topic of PAPER-II SOCIOLOGY,as well as  a topic of SOCIAL ISSUES and a common but frequently asked question in interview.




NAXALITE Movement in india

- Saroj Kumar Samal

   M.A(Gold-Medalist) M.Phil(Sociology) & LL.B

   Director, Saroj Samal’s I.A.S, New Delhi

   Email: sarojksamal@gmail.com

          The Naxalbari peasant struggle was launched in March-April 1967. This movement had Tebhaga (1946) peasant movement as its torch bearer. The light provided by Tebhaga inspired the Naxalbari movement. The prime objective of this movement was to change the whole society, not the conditions of peasants only. Then, the Naxalbari movement was highly charged by the ideology of violence. The idiom of the movement was that power comes from the barrel of the gun and not by slogans and non-violence. The movement was aimed at the total annihilation of the big farmers, landlords and jagirdars. Northing short of it could change the structure of society. Naxalbari is a police substation in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal. It is in the name of the police substation that the movement is known all over. At a later stage it took an ideological flavour.

          One principal feature of the region of Darjeeling is the high percentage of sharecroppers. It is because of this that the Naxalbari movement was essentially a movement launched by sharecroppers. In the beginning the movement remained restricted to three police stations only, namely, Phanisidewa, Naxalbari and Khoribari, having a population of about one lakh. The percentage of sharecroppers in and around these three police stations came to be 65 and 50 respectively. The commonly grown crops by the people predominantly include paddy and jute.

          The Rajbansis are the most preponderant community of the region. They constitute more than 50 per cent. It is said that earlier this community was a tribal group known as Koch. With the growing influence of Brahminism in the region, some affluent sections of Koch adopted the nomenclature of Rajbansis. This created social differentiation among the Kochs - one section became Rajbansi, another converted to Islam, and the third one adhered to the original Koch stock. In the process of political development which took place in the Tarai region, the Rajbansis acquired larger portion of land and came to be known as Jotedar. A Jotedar is a person who holds in severality, joint or in common, a piece of land for which he pays revenue directly to government through his agents. At a later stage, the Jotedar legally became the owner and controller of jotes. Jotes could also be purchased or acquired as gift.

          The Jotedar was the peasant proprietor. He leased-out lands to tenants - raiyats, who paid annual rents to him. He also granted land to tenants-at-will, praja. The praja paid rent in kind. The tenants-at-will, as elsewhere in the country, were fully dependent on Jotedar for their seed, plough, cattle and agricultural implements. The seed advanced was deducted at harvest time from the produce and the balance was shared equally. Below the Jotedar were small farmers, adhiaris who cultivated small patches of land on equal share basis.

          The production relations in the Darjeeling district, where the uprising was concentrated, consisted of the nexus of Jotedar-rayat-praja-adhiar. Under this system, the cultivator was merely reduced to the status of a sharecropper. The sharecropper was completely in a state of dependency, and suffered exploitation and succumbed to bondage.

          While writing anything on the Naxalbari peasant movement it must be observed categorically that the movement was started by sharecroppers. Second, it was inspired by Tebhaga, the region now being in Bangladesh. Following are some of the important causes of the movement:

     (1) The landlord used to take a larger share out of the produce made by the sharecropper. The general share taken by the landlords varied from one-half to one-third. It was quite excessive. The sharecroppers, which included rayat, praja and adhiar, demanded reduction of the share of produce.

     (2) Another cause of the movement was the demand for the regulation and distribution of benami lands in an appropriate way by the peasants.

     (3) The sharecroppers had no power with them. They were helpless under the bondage of the big landholders. It was the major cause for the uprising.

     (4) The Naxalbari movement was admittedly a movement of the peasants but above all the major cause of the movement was the class war, between the big farmers and the ordinary peasants.

     (5) The sharecroppers alleged that they were against their dependency on the big farmers. The big farmers were guided by the motto: “I will feed you, you produce for me”. Such a kind of dependency was not acceptable to the tenants-at-will, the praja and the landless labourers.

     (6) The praja had to submit to begar, that is, to work as Hali or Vetti.

     (7) The judiciary of the district was in all cases in favour of the big farmers. The praja were always victimized by the judiciary.

          The production relations between the Jotedar, that is, former Rajbansis with the praja, adhiar, that is, sharecroppers were strained. The exploited masses of peasants were groaning to engineer a revolutionary struggle.

          The course of events that led to the Naxalbari movement can be described as under:

     (1) Charu Majumdar was the leader of Naxalbari movement. There was a group of revolutionary leaders known as Siliguri group. This group gave out six documents known as the guidelines for the peasants. The document advocated the ideology which worked behind the Naxalbari movement. The sum and substance of the six documents include that militancy was the guiding ideology for capturing power. Majumdar and his group preached violence to the peasants saying that land was to be given to the tiller and Congress was to be defeated. The mobilization of the peasantry was made on the lines of class consciousness. It was planned to establish a people’s government after annihilating the jotedar-jamindar through armed revolution. The participants to the struggle were the peasants who were sharecroppers and who identified big farmers - jotedars as their class enemy. Thus, the movement was mobilized against the landed propertied class. For this movement it can safely be said that the broad-based peasantry, inclusive of all its strata, was involved in the struggle.

     (2) During the month of March 1967, the violent leaders of the movement killed a moneylender within the jurisdiction of Naxalbari police station. This murder was followed by a series of other murders and one after another the jotedars, sahukars were killed by the participants of the movement.

     (3) The messages of the movement were given through several slogans. Some of the slogans were borrowed from Tebhaga peasant movement. Throughout the area the leadership to movement was given by Panchnam Sarkar, Kanu Sanyal and others.

     (4) In course of time the movement got ablaze in different parts of West Bengal. College students including female participated in the movement. The movement, thus, was not only a movement of the peasants but the society at large.

            The Naxalbari movement was essentially against the big farmer, that is, jotedar. Though there was no immediate gain of the struggle, it definitely influenced the course of peasant movements in the country. The Naxalbari movement was a specific struggle ideologically oriented to Marxian socialism. In the jotedar adhiari relation there was a visible contradiction in capital and labour. The deprivation of adhiari and for that matter for rayat and praja was due to the process of differentiation resulting from the force of history and modernization. The rank and file of the Communist Party had made the adhiaris conscious of the contradiction which turned them to pauper. Yet another outcome of the Naxalbari movement was that like other movements of the country, it did not stand for or put the demand for structural changes in the old feudal system. Instead, the movement, ideologically and operationally too, stood for a systematic change which could end exploitation and operation inherent in the semi-feudal system.

POLITICAL ASPECT OF NAXALITE MOVEMENT

On 2 March 1967, the first non-congress United Front (UF) government was sworn in West Bengal, comprising the CPI, CPM, and Bangla Congress, a breakaway group from Congress. It decided to expedite the implementation of land reforms. Harekrishna Konar, veteran CPM peasant leader, as land revenue minister announced a programme of quick distribution of surplus land among the landless and an end to eviction of sharecroppers. He also called for peasants’ initiative and organized force to assist the process of implementation. This raised expectations among the poor but also frightened many middle and small owners that their land would be given to sharecroppers. There were many problems with distribution of land, however, as much of it was under litigation, and, once in office, the CPM could not ignore the legal constraints. Besides, verification of claims, adjusting of rival claims, grant of pattas, was a time-consuming process, which the party was only now about to learn. Some comrades, however, had other ideas, and had no desire to learn. Among these was the group in Naxalbari.

The Naxalbari area of Darjeeling district in north Bengal had been organizing sharecroppers and tea estate labour, mostly to the Santhal, Oraon and Rajbansi tribal communities, since the 1950s. The sharecroppers worked for jotedars or landlords under the ‘adhiar’ system, in which the jotedars provided the ploughs, bullocks and seeds and got a share of the crop. Disputes over shares followed by evictions were commonplace and increased with the coming of the UF government because of the fear that sharecroppers would be given the land. Tea garden labour also often worked as sharecroppers on tea garden owners’ paddy lands, which were shown as tea gardens to escape the ceiling laws on paddy lands.

Charu Mazumdar was a major leader of this area and it had been clear for some time, at least since 1965, that his ideas about agrarian revolution and armed struggle, apparently based on Mao Zedong’s thoughts, were different from the official CPM position. He not only did not believe that land reform was possible through legal methods, but argued this path only deadened the revolutionary urges of the peasants. To be politically meaningful, land had to be seized and defended through violent means. To concretize their ideas, he and his associates, Kanu Sanyal and the tribal leader Jangal Santhal, organized a peasants’ conference under the auspices of the Siliguri subdivision of the CPM in Darjeeling district only sixteen days after the UF government had come to power. They gave a call for ending of landlords’ monopoly on land, land distribution through peasant committees and armed resistance to landlords, the UF government and the central government. According to some claims, all the villages were organized between April and May 1967. Around 15,000 to 20,000 peasants became full-time activists, it is said, and peasants’ committees formed in villages became the nuclei of armed guards, who occupied land, burnt land records, declared debts cancelled, delivered death sentences on hated landowners, and set up a parallel administration. Bows, arrows and spears were supplemented by whatever guns could be seized from landlords. Hatigisha, Buraganj, and Chowpukhuria under Naxalbari, Kharibari and Phansidewa police stations respectively were the reported rebel strongholds.

CPM leaders could easily see that the Naxalbari peasants were being led into a suicidal confrontation with the state, of which Communists were now a part. The CPM could not remain in the government and sanction the action of the Naxalbari comrades. Persuasion was tried first, and Harekrishna Konar went to Siliguri and, according to his version, got the leaders to agree to surrender all persons wanted by the police and to stop all unlawful activities and to cooperate in the legal distribution of land in consultation with local peasant organizations. The local leaders denied any agreement and, anticipating repression, began to incite the peasants against the police. After this, things took their predictable and inexorable course, with a vicious circle of attacks on police, police reprisals, further clashes, and so on. The CPM was in an unenviable position, trying for some time to steer a middle course between support for rebels and police repression, and making further attempts at conciliation by sending a cabinet mission of the UF government. It appears from some sources that the peasants did want to negotiate, but were brushed aside by Charu Mazumdar. The CPM had to ultimately condemn and expel the dissident leaders or resign from the government. It chose the former and this triggered the process of the coming together of the extreme left forces, first into a committee to help the Naxalbari peasants, and later in the CP(ML).

            Meanwhile, repression had its effect, and by July the peasant movement was over and most of its activists and leaders including Jangal Santhal in jail. The Naxalite movement then remained only in the towns with students as its main force, and it came increasingly to be characterized by street warfare between armed gangs of Naxalite and CPM or Congress youth supporters. A far cry from the romantic visions of peasant revolution!