India After Gandhi (73 page)

As da Costa saw it, this fourth general election would inaugurate a ‘second Non-Violent Revolution in India’s recent history’. The first was begun by Mahatma Gandhi in 1919, and culminated in Independence in 1947. Since then, the Congress had held power in the centre as well as all the states, except for a very brief spell in Kerala. Now, this election would signal ‘the disintegration of the monolithic exercise of power by the Congress Party’. Da Costa’s conclusion is worth quoting: ‘To the candidates this is, perhaps, a struggle for power; to the political scientist it is, as nearly half a century ago, the beginning of a break with the past. It is by no means yet a revolt; but it may in time be a revolution.’
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Poll predictions are notorious for being unreliable – in India perhaps even more than elsewhere. But when the actual results came in, da Costa must have felt vindicated. In the Lok Sabha the Congress’s seat tally had dropped from 361 to 283, while its losses in the state assemblies were even greater. The party’s decline is summed up in Table 19.1.

The most humiliating defeat suffered by the Congress was in the southern state of Madras. Here, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)
swept the polls, winning 138 seats out of a total of 234 in the Assembly. The Congress won a mere 50. The DMK leader C. N. Annadurai was sworn in as chief minister.

Madras had long been a Congress stronghold; many national leaders, past and present, hailed from the state. Now, even the venerable K. Kamaraj was washed away in the landslide. He lost in his home town, Virudhunagar, to a 28-year-old student activist named P. Srinivasan. When the news reached Madras, jubilant DMK cadres found a namesake of the victor, placed him on a horse and paraded him through the city. Of the Congress president’s defeat, a respected weekly wrote that ‘in terms of political prestige, here and abroad, it was beyond any doubt, the worst blow ever suffered by Mr. Kamaraj’s party, before or after independence’.
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The Congress had a fairly good record in the state; its administration was known to be clean and efficient. Some commentators thought that the DMK rode to victory on the back of the anti-Hindi agitation of 1965. However, that movement itself was made possible by patient organizational work over the past decade. The DMK had fanned out into the towns and villages, creating local clubs and party branches. Crucial here were its links with the hugely popular Tamil film industry. One of its main leaders, M. Karunanidhi, was a successful scriptwriter. More important, it had the support – moral as well as material – of the great popular film hero M. G. Ramachandran (MGR).

Originally from Kerala, but born to a family of plantation labourers in Sri Lanka, MGR had a fanatical following in the Tamil countryside. In his films he vanquished the forces of evil, these variously represented by policemen, landlords, foreigners and the state. The movies he starred in played to packed houses, with viewers seeing them over and over again. Many of his most devoted fans were women.

All across Madras, MGR
manrams
(fan clubs) had been established. These discussed his films and also his politics. For MGR was a longtime supporter of the DMK. He gave money to the party, and was always at hand to speak at its rallies and conferences.

A month before the 1967 elections, MGR was shot and wounded by a rival film star named M. R. Radha (the two, apparently, had fallen out over what men in general, and Indian film stars in particular, usually fall out over). Photographs of the wounded hero were abundantly used in the election campaign. MGR himself decided to stand – he won his seat in a canter, and his party did the same.
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In power, the DMK practised what one scholar has called an ‘assertive and paternalist populism’. Where the Congress brought large industrial projects to the state, the DMK focused on schemes that might win it immediate support. Thus it increased the percentage of government jobs reserved for the lower castes who were its own chief source of support. Greater control was exercised over the trade in cereals, and food subsidies granted to the urban poor. Meanwhile, to foster regional pride, the government organized an international conference on Tamil culture and language, in which scholars from twenty countries participated, and where the chief minister expressed the hope that Tamil would become the link language for the whole of India.
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The Congress also lost in Kerala, to an alliance of the left. In 1963 the Communist Party of India (CPI) had split into two fractions, the newer one called the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM. It was the CPM which had the more dynamic leaders, including E. M. S. Namboo-diripad. Now the CPM won 52 out of the 133 seats in the Kerala State Assembly; the Congress 30, and the CPI 19. The communists came together to form the government, with EMS being sworn in for his second term as chief minister.

The Congress had previous experience of losing in Kerala but, to its distress, it also lost power in West Bengal, where the party had held undisputed sway since 1947. The winners in that state were the United Front–Left Front alliance, its main members the Bangla Congress (as its name suggests, a breakaway from the mother party), and the CPM. In the assembly elections the Congress won 127 seats out of a House of 280. On the other side, the CPM had 43 and the Bangla Congress 34; joined by an assortment of left-wing groups and independents, they could just about muster a majority.

The Bangla Congress leader Ajoy Mukherjee became chief minister. The deputy chief minister was Jyoti Basu, an urbane, London-educated lawyer who had long been the civilized face of Bengali communism. Basu and some others thought that their party could shape the government’s policies from within. Other CPM members, notably its chief organizer Promode Dasgupta, thought that the party should never have joined the government at all.
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Whole books have been written on doctrinal disputes within the Indian communist movement. Here, we need know only that the Communist Party of India split in 1963 on account of two differences: one external to the country, the other internal to it. The two issues were connected. The parent party, the CPI, was closely tied to the apron strings of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; one consequence of this was that it had forsworn armed revolution, if only because the Soviets wanted good relations with the government of India. The breakaway CPM believed in fraternal relations with both the Russian and Chinese communist parties. It saw the Indian state as run by a bourgeois–landlord alliance and parliamentary democracy as mostly a sham; to be used when it suited one’s purposes, and to be discarded when it didn’t.
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The decision of the CPM to join the government was preceded by a bitter debate, with Jyoti Basu speaking in favour and Promode Dasgupta against. Ultimately the party joined, only to create a great sense of expectation among the cadres. An early gesture was to rename Harrington Road after a hero of the world communist movement, so that at the height of the Vietnam War the address of the United States Consulate was 7 Ho Chi Minh Sarani, Calcutta.

That was easy enough; but henceforth the decisions became harder. In the spring of 1967 a land dispute broke out in Naxalbari, in the Darjeeling district, where India’s borders touched Nepal on the west and Pakistan on the east, with Tibet and the semi-independent kingdoms of Bhutan and Sikkim not far away. The economy in these Himalayan foothills was dominated by tea plantations, many run by British-owned companies. There was a history of land scarcity, and of conflicts over land – with plantation workers seeking plots of their own, and indigenous sharecroppers seeking relief from usurious landlords.

In the Naxalbari area, the rural poor were mobilized by a
krishak samiti
(peasants’ organization) owing allegiance to the CPM. Its leader was a middle-class radical named Kanu Sanyal, whose rejectionof his social milieu in favour of work in the villages had won him a considerable following. From late March 1967 the
samiti
organized a series of demonstrations against landlords who had evicted tenants and/or hoarded grain. These protests became more militant, leading to skirmishes with the police, which turned violent. A constable was killed; in retaliation, the police fired on a crowd. The peasant leaders decided to take to arms, and soon landlords were being beheaded.

The protests had their roots in the deeply inequitable agrarian structure of northern Bengal. But they may not have taken the form they did had the CPM not joined the government. Some activists, and perhaps many peasants, felt that now that their party was in power, they were at liberty to set right the feudal structure on their own. To their surprise, the party reacted by taking the side of the forces of law and order. By the late summer of 1967 an estimated 1,500 policemen were on duty in Naxalbari. Kanu Sanyal and his fellow leaders were in jail, while other rebels had taken refuge in the jungle.
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Naxalbari quickly came to enjoy an iconic status among Indian revolutionaries. The village gave its name to the region and, in time, to anyone anywhere who would use arms to fight the Indian state on behalf of the oppressed and disinherited. ‘Naxalite’ became shorthand for ‘revolutionary’, a term evoking romance and enchantment at one end of the political spectrum and distaste and derision at the other.
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Among those who approved of the Naxalites were the leaders of communist China. In the last week of June 1967 Radio Peking announced that

A phase of peasants’ armed struggle led by the revolutionaries of the Indian Communist Party has been set up in the countryside in Darjeeling District of West Bengal State in India. This is the front paw of the revolutionary armed struggle launched by the Indian people under the guidance of Mao Tse-tung’s teachings. This represents the general orientation of the Indian revolution at the present time. The people of India, China and the rest of the world hail the emergence of this revolutionary armed struggle.
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While the first sparks of revolution were being lit in Naxalbari, another group of Maoists were preparing for action in Andhra Pradesh. The Andhra ‘Naxalites’ were active in two regions: Telengana, where there had been a major communist insurgency in 1946-9, and the Srikakulam district, bordering Orissa. In both regions the areas of dispute were land and forests. In both the main agents of exploitation were the state and landlords, the main victims peasants and (especially) tribals. And in both, communist mobilization focused on free access to forest produce, better wages for labourers and the redistribution of land.

In Srikakulam the struggle was led by a school teacher named Vempatapu Satyanarayana. He led the tribals in a series of labour strikes, and in seizing grain from the fields of rich farmers and redistributing it
to the needy. By the end of 1967 the landlords had sought the help of the police, who came in and arrested hundreds of protesters. Satyanarayana and his men now decided to take to arms. The houses of landlords and moneylenders were raided and their records and papers burnt. The state’s response was to send in more police; by early 1969 there were as many as nine platoons of Special Armed Police operating in the district.

The struggle in Telengana was led by Tarimala Nagi Reddy. He was a veteran of the communist movement who had spent years organizing peasants and also served several terms in the state legislature. Now, he proclaimed the futility of the parliamentary path; resigning from the assembly as well as from the CPM, he took once more to the villages. He linked up with grass-roots workers in mobilizing peasants to ask for higher wages and for an end to corruption among state officials. Young militants were trained in the use of arms. The district was divided into zones; to each were assigned several
dalams
or groups of dedicated revolutionaries.
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Back in West Bengal, the coalition government had fallen apart in less than a year. President’s Rule was imposed before fresh elections in early 1969 saw the CPM substantially increase its tally. It won 80 seats; making it by far the biggest partner in a fresh alliance with the Bangla Congress and others. Ajoy Mukherjee once more became chief minister, the CPM preferring to keep the key Home portfolio and generally play Big Brother.

These were years of great turmoil in the state, as captured in the titles of books written about the period such as
The Agony of West Bengal
and
The Disinherited
State.One axis of conflict was between the centre and the state. The government of India wasworried about the law-and-order situation, the ruling Congress peeved about its own loss of power in West Bengal. The governor became a key player, communicating the concernsof the centre (and, less justifiably, of the Congress) to the local politicians. The assembly was disrupted regularly; on one occasion, the governor was physically prevented from delivering his customary opening address, having to flee the premises under police escort.
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A second axis of conflict was between the two main parties in the state government. Where Ajoy Mukherjee and his Bangla Congress tried weakly to keep the machinery of state in place, the CPM was not above stoking street protest and even violence to further its aims. In factories in and around Calcutta, workers took to the practice of
gherao
– the mobbing of their managers to demand better wages and working
conditions. Previously the management had been able to call in the police; the new government, however, insisted that any such stoppage of work had to be referred first to the labour minister (a CPM man). This was an invitation to strike: according to one estimate, there were more than 1,200
gheraos
in the first six months of the first UF–LF government.
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