India After Independence: 1947-2000 (70 page)

Rarewala’s ministry also collapsed without passing the agrarian legislation, and it was the introduction of President’s Rule that brought about a qualitative change in the situation, as the President issued the PEPSU Occupancy Tenants (Vesting of Proprietary Rights) Act (1953). Under this act, occupancy tenants could become owners of their land by paying compensation amounting to twelve times the land revenue, an amount which (given the war-time and post-war inflation and the fact that land revenue continued to be assessed at the pre-war rates) was none too large. This legislation, though it did not meet fully the Communists’ demand of transfer of proprietary rights without compensation, was obviously found acceptable by the tenants, and no further resistance was reported.

The Communists continued, however, to condemn the new agrarian legislation as inadequate because the biswedars’ lands were not being confiscated without compensation. This resulted in their growing isolation from the peasants, a process that was also furthered by their desertion of their erstwhile comrades-in-arms in the muzara movement and the Praja Mandal, the left-wing Congress group led by Brish Bhan. In the long run, the Communists were also the losers in this game, because they were too weak to struggle effectively on their own against the gradual ascendancy of the Akalis and other communal and semi-communal and right-wing groups. This was most poignantly expressed by an 85-year-old grassroots Communist worker to the authors in 1981: ‘These people for whom we fought so hard do not even offer us a drink of water these days.’
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On 2 March 1967, the first non-Congress United Front (UF) government was sworn in West Bengal, comprising CPI, CPM, and Bangla Congress, a breakaway group from Congress. It decided to expedite the implementation of land reforms. Harekrishna Konar, the veteran CPM peasant leader, as land revenue minister announced the programme of quick distribution of surplus land among the landless and 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, 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.

In Naxalbari area of Darjeeling district in North Bengal, Communists had been organizing sharecroppers and tea estate labour, mostly belonging to the Santhal, Oraon and Rajbanshi tribal communities, since the early fifties. 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 United Front 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 was clear for some time, at least since 1965, that his ideas about agrarian revolution and armed struggle, apparently based on Mao Ze-Dong’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 sub-division 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 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. 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. 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. CPM had to ultimately condemn and expel the dissident leaders or resign from the government. It chose the former and this triggered off 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!

But in far away Srikakulam, another group of romantic revolutionaries claiming to be inspired by Mao Ze-Dong were about to lead another group of tribals into a suicidal confrontation with the Indian state. Strangely, it never occurred to them to ask the Naxalbari tribal peasants what they thought of a leadership that used them as guinea pigs for experiments with revolution and pushed them, armed with only bows and arrows and spears, to face a modern police force. The Srikakulam tribals, mostly illiterate, living deep in forests, with little exposure to the outside world, had no way of knowing about the tragedy of Naxalbari when they began to enact their own.

Srikakulam was the northern-most district in Andhra Pradesh, bordering on Orissa, and among the least developed. The local tribal population, comprised of the Jatapu and Savara tribes, had been organized by Communists working in the Parvatipuram, Palakonda, Patapatnam and Kottur areas since the early fifties. From 1957-8 to 1967, a movement that organized tribals into Girijan Sanghams and Mahila Sanghams had secured many gains, including restoration of land illegally taken over by non-tribal moneylenders and landlords, wage increases, better prices for forest produce, reduction of debts, and free access to forests for timber for construction of houses and other daily needs, Tribals had gained in self-confidence and participated in rallies in nearby towns with enthusiasm. There is no evidence that there was any push from within the tribals or Girijan (forest people) towards greater militancy or use of violence.

As in Naxalbari, extremist dissident CPM leaders, who were unhappy with the party line, decided to shift over to a line of armed struggle, guerilla warfare, and later, much more than in Naxalbari, annihilation of individual ‘class enemies’. Inspired by Naxalbari, but ignoring its experience, the movement began well after Naxalbari had been suppressed. Beginning in November 1967, it reached an intense mass phase between November 1968 and February 1969. Girijans armed with bows and arrows and stones
and sometimes crude country guns chased away police parties that came to arrest activists. Communist revolutionaries roamed the villages asking the people to form village defence squads (dalams) and get whatever arms they could. In April 1969, with the decision at the national level to form the CP(ML), a new party of extreme left activists, a fresh turn was taken with emphasis shifting from mass line to guerilla action and individual annihilation. According to government sources, about forty-eight people were annihilated by the extremists; the rebels claimed about double that figure. These included landlords, moneylenders, police and forest officials. Inevitably, repression too intensified from November 1969 and by January thirteen leaders were killed and several arrested. By mid-June 1970, a massive police operation was launched in which 1400 were arrested. On 10 July 1970, V. Satyanarayana and Adibhatla Kailasam, the two major leaders were killed, and that brought the movement to an end. Feeble attempts were made by some Maoist factions to revive the movement from 1971 onwards but, by 1975, these seem to have died out. Groups of Maoist youth continue even today in remote, backward pockets, often inhabited by tribals or very poor low-caste cultivators and agricultural labourers, in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh, trying to build their model of revolution. But now this effort appears to have little more to it than violence as its sole motif.

The farmers’ movements burst on to the national political stage in 1980 with the road and rail roko agitation in Nasik in Maharashtra led by the Shetkari Sangathana of Sharad Joshi. Two lakh farmers blockaded road and rail traffic on the Bombay-Calcutta and Bombay-Delhi route on November 10 demanding higher prices for onions and sugar cane. Thousands were arrested, two killed in police firing, and prices of onions and cane enhanced. The leader was an ex-UN official, Sharad Joshi, who articulated the ideology of the movement in terms of India versus Bharat or urban, industrial India versus rural, agricultural Bharat. In 1986, in Sisauli village in Muzaffarnagar district of U.P., Mahinder Singh Tikait, a middle-school-educated, medium-size peasant, Jat by caste, and head of the Jat caste panchayat or Khap, presided over a gathering of lakhs of villagers before which the chief minister of U.P. had been forced to appear in person to announce his acceptance of their demand for reduction of electricity charges to the old level. These were only the more dramatic moments in what had emerged in the eighties as a widespread grassroots mobilization of rural dwellers. Led by the Vivasayigal Sangam in Tamil Nadu, the Rajya Ryothu Sangha in Karnataka, Bharatiya Kisan Union in Punjab and U.P., Khedut Samaj and Kisan Sangh in Gujarat and the Shetkari Sangathana in Maharashtra, farmers in their thousands and lakhs, at different times for different demands, stopped traffic on highways and train routes, withheld supplies from cities, sat on indefinite dharnas at
government offices in local and regional centres, gheraoed officials, prevented political leaders and officials from entering villages, especially at election time, till they agreed to support their demands, refused to pay enhanced electricity charges, and interest on loans, and cost of irrigation schemes, resisted confiscation proceedings in lieu of debt, and even de-grabbed confiscated goods and land.

The basic understanding on which the movements rested is that the government maintains agricultural prices at an artificially low level in order to provide cheap food and raw materials to urban areas, and the consequent disparity in prices results in farmers paying high prices for industrial goods needed as inputs into agriculture and receiving low returns for their produce. As a result, farmers are exploited by urban interests, and are victims of internal colonialism. They need not pay back loans or charges for infrastructure costs as they have already paid too much and are in fact net creditors. This basic philosophy is articulated in different forms by all the leaders and organizations; it provides the legitimacy for the movement in the farmers’ consciousness, along with the traditional propensity of the Indian peasant to resist what they perceive as ‘unjust’ government demands. (The most common issue on which resistance surfaced among the landowning peasants in the colonial period was payment of one or another government demand. This is also true of peasants in other parts of the world.
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These ‘new’ farmers’ movements that have attracted much media and political attention, especially in the eighties, have focused mainly on demanding remunerative prices for agricultural produce, and lowering or elimination of government dues such as canal water charges, electricity charges, interest rates and principal of loans, etc. This has brought on them the charge that they are mainly vehicles for demands of rich or well-to-do agriculturists most of whom are beneficiaries of post-independence agrarian development, including the Green Revolution, and have little or no room for the concerns of the rural poor. This is hotly denied by the leaders and ideologues of the movement, who point as proof to the diverse social base of the movement among medium and small peasants, as well as some other features such as inclusion of demands for higher minimum wages for agricultural labour and the insertion of women’s and dalits’ issues, for example, by the Shetkari Sangathana of Maharashtra. The fact, however, remains that, apart from the Shetkari Sangathana, no other organization has really gone beyond what can be described as landowning peasants’ issues. These organizations have shown scant concern for the landless rural poor or rural women. It is, however, true that they are broad-based among the peasantry and not confined to the upper sections, as alleged by some critics, for smaller-holding peasants are as much interested in higher prices and lower rates of government dues since they too produce for the market and pay government dues.