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Lalgarh and the Legend of Kishanji: Tales from India's Maoist Movement
Автор: Snigdhendu Bhattacharya
Активность, связанная с книгой
Начать чтениеДлина: 439 стр.9 ч
- Издатель:
- HarperCollins
- Издано:
- Nov 10, 2016
- ISBN:
- 9789352640959
- Формат:
- Книге
Описание
'India is an unbroken chain of broken promises.'
In 2009, Lalgarh in West Bengal exploded on to the national consciousness. A tribal upsurge against police atrocities escalated into fierce, full-fledged guerrilla warfare against the Indian state.
Kishanji, the Maoist leader, who had successfully led the movement in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Bihar, was in charge. He masterminded military offensives that shook the state, supervised 'alternative development activities' and repeatedly escaped security dragnets. But what truly confounded the state were his telephonic interviews with the media, often on live television, and the frequent press conferences. Kishanji was indeed the face of the Maoist movement in India - until the tables turned.
Snigdhendu Bhattacharya was on the ground in Lalgarh, meeting Kishanji, speaking to Maoists and reporting on one of the bloodiest Naxal uprisings as it unfolded, right up to its sudden, chilling end. This is an epic tale of war not only between the state and the Maoists but also between a callous state and its desperate citizens.
In 2009, Lalgarh in West Bengal exploded on to the national consciousness. A tribal upsurge against police atrocities escalated into fierce, full-fledged guerrilla warfare against the Indian state.
Kishanji, the Maoist leader, who had successfully led the movement in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Bihar, was in charge. He masterminded military offensives that shook the state, supervised 'alternative development activities' and repeatedly escaped security dragnets. But what truly confounded the state were his telephonic interviews with the media, often on live television, and the frequent press conferences. Kishanji was indeed the face of the Maoist movement in India - until the tables turned.
Snigdhendu Bhattacharya was on the ground in Lalgarh, meeting Kishanji, speaking to Maoists and reporting on one of the bloodiest Naxal uprisings as it unfolded, right up to its sudden, chilling end. This is an epic tale of war not only between the state and the Maoists but also between a callous state and its desperate citizens.
Активность, связанная с книгой
Начать чтениеСведения о книге
Lalgarh and the Legend of Kishanji: Tales from India's Maoist Movement
Автор: Snigdhendu Bhattacharya
Длина: 439 стр.9 ч
Описание
'India is an unbroken chain of broken promises.'
In 2009, Lalgarh in West Bengal exploded on to the national consciousness. A tribal upsurge against police atrocities escalated into fierce, full-fledged guerrilla warfare against the Indian state.
Kishanji, the Maoist leader, who had successfully led the movement in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Bihar, was in charge. He masterminded military offensives that shook the state, supervised 'alternative development activities' and repeatedly escaped security dragnets. But what truly confounded the state were his telephonic interviews with the media, often on live television, and the frequent press conferences. Kishanji was indeed the face of the Maoist movement in India - until the tables turned.
Snigdhendu Bhattacharya was on the ground in Lalgarh, meeting Kishanji, speaking to Maoists and reporting on one of the bloodiest Naxal uprisings as it unfolded, right up to its sudden, chilling end. This is an epic tale of war not only between the state and the Maoists but also between a callous state and its desperate citizens.
In 2009, Lalgarh in West Bengal exploded on to the national consciousness. A tribal upsurge against police atrocities escalated into fierce, full-fledged guerrilla warfare against the Indian state.
Kishanji, the Maoist leader, who had successfully led the movement in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Bihar, was in charge. He masterminded military offensives that shook the state, supervised 'alternative development activities' and repeatedly escaped security dragnets. But what truly confounded the state were his telephonic interviews with the media, often on live television, and the frequent press conferences. Kishanji was indeed the face of the Maoist movement in India - until the tables turned.
Snigdhendu Bhattacharya was on the ground in Lalgarh, meeting Kishanji, speaking to Maoists and reporting on one of the bloodiest Naxal uprisings as it unfolded, right up to its sudden, chilling end. This is an epic tale of war not only between the state and the Maoists but also between a callous state and its desperate citizens.
- Издатель:
- HarperCollins
- Издано:
- Nov 10, 2016
- ISBN:
- 9789352640959
- Формат:
- Книге
Об авторе
<SPAN lang=EN><SPAN lang=EN>
<P>Snigdhendu Bhattacharya is a Kolkata-based journalist who has reported for different national media houses including the <I>Hindustan Times</I>, The Wire and <I>Outlook</I>. He has been writing on politics, security, history, socio-economic and cultural affairs since 2005. His book <I>Lalgarh and the Legend of Kishanji: Tales from India's Maoist Movement</I> was published in 2016<B>.</P></B></SPAN></SPAN>
Связано с Lalgarh and the Legend of Kishanji
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Lalgarh and the Legend of Kishanji - Snigdhendu Bhattacharya
Lalgarh.
INTRODUCTION
Meeting Maoist commander Kishanji in a ‘liberated Lalgarh’ in 2009, and the experiences I encountered thereafter, became a turning point in my life as a journalist. It deeply influenced my understanding of not only Maoist politics but also the ways in which people react.
The meteoric rise and fall of the Lalgarh¹ movement within a span of only three years left an indelible mark on several lives, including mine. Lalgarh was far from being just another Maoist-led movement. It was a new kind of Naxalism² – one that combined mass movement with armed struggle. Thousands of people hit the streets protesting against police atrocities and venting their anger at the leaders of the ruling party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) commonly referred to as CPM³, for their corruption and suppression of voices of dissent. They blocked roads and gheraoed camps of security forces. The police were either locked inside their stations or forced to flee their camps. Panchayat offices were shut down. Hundreds joined hands to implement Maoist-guided local development initiatives. At night, members of armed militia stood guard in every village, often venturing out to mount attacks on CPM party offices and police camps.
Enthused by the developments in Lalgarh, the Maoist leadership called for ‘creating thousands of Lalgarhs across the country’.
I was lucky to be privy to many of the inner workings of the Maoists, even at the height of the conflict with the Harmad Bahini⁴ and the security forces. Most police officers, understandably, considered me pro-Maoist, if not their agent. But my office consistently stood by me, even in the most trying times.
In the three years between 2008 and 2011, I saw war, loss, justice, and the denial of it.
I witnessed a people’s court where Maoist militia leaders were about to execute a ‘Harmad’ without the consensus of the villagers. I got picked up by paramilitary forces from a village, saw them pick up all the adult males of an entire village on the suspicion that some of them were Maoists. I spent nights at a villager’s home that was razed to the ground a few days after I left. I spoke to Kishanji on the phone for hours, often every day, and often argued with him.
I heard hapless villagers curse the CPM and the police, but when the movement degenerated and was headed for a fall, I saw the same people feeling helpless because a section of the Maoist militia was metamorphosing into a ‘new CPM’. The very people who welcomed the Maoists with open arms, gave them food and shelter, started fearing the new leadership.
By the time the insurgency fizzled out after the alleged fake encounter killing of Kishanji on 24 November 2011, the Lalgarh experiment had become one of the bloodiest Naxalite uprisings in India.
A total of 355 civilians died at the hands of the Maoists within the jurisdiction of fifteen police stations in and around Lalgarh between November 2008 and November 2011, as did fifty-three security personnel. On the other hand, roughly eighty Maoists and their supporters died at the hands of the security forces and the CPM’s Harmad Bahini. This is in addition to the deaths of 148 passengers in the Jnaneshwari Express tragedy – the result of a horrific, multi-agency conspiracy and a fallout of the movement itself. The list is, however, far from complete. There are at least three dozen more civilians, both from the CPM and the Maoist camps, who remain missing even today.
At its height the Lalgarh movement had shed more blood than all other Maoist-insurgency-affected states put together. In 2010 the Maoists killed 478 civilians in nine states, of whom 180 were killed in and around Lalgarh (the Jangalmahal area) alone. In 2009 that number stood at 391, of which 134 were in Jangalmahal.
And, finally, the Lalgarh movement ended miserably, with delinquent guerrillas betraying their leader, Kishanji, to the security forces. These guerrillas were inducted into the police force and awarded a lump sum, as per the rehabilitation policy of the state government.
What gave this entire chapter its unique character was the charismatic albeit elusive persona of one of its central figures – Kishanji. A member of the Maoist party’s politburo and central military commission, he was also the spokesperson of the party’s eastern regional bureau comprising Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Bengal and parts of Chhattisgarh. The Communist Party of India (Maoist)⁵ central committee called him ‘a topmost representative of the post 1972 generations’.
In Kishanji’s words, ‘The story of Lalgarh will be incomplete without the tale of the reorganization of the Naxalite movement after its 1972 setback.’ He did not get the time to elaborate on that, but, during the course of my research, I found out that Lalgarh would not have happened without the revival of the Naxalite movement in Bengal in the late 1990s and that the revival was a direct outcome of the progress of the movement in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh (then part of Madhya Pradesh) and Bihar during the 1980s. Kishanji was the main link between these.
In Lalgarh, Kishanji consistently surprised everyone by using his cell phone to frequently interact with journalists and participate in live telephone conversations, on English, Bengali, Hindi and Telugu TV channels, with intellectuals, politicians and bureaucrats from across the country. The people of Bengal got to know more about Maoist politics during those few months than in the past few decades. Whether Kishanji’s politics is right or wrong became a household debate.
Another chapter in Indian history – the change of regime in Bengal after thirty-four uninterrupted years of Left Front⁶ rule – unfolded simultaneously with Lalgarh.
The farmers’ movement against land acquisition for the Tata Nano plant in Singur⁷ and the police brutalities against the masses agitating against the petrochemical project at Nandigram⁸ were key to the anti-CPM wave that swept across the state. Lalgarh rode the wave, which in turn gained momentum with Lalgarh. By the end of 2011, the new chief minister of Bengal, Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee, who had been at the forefront of the movements in Singur and Nandigram reaped the political harvest of the Lalgarh movement.⁹
Kishanji received many a praise from the Maoists ‘as the chief architect’ of the revival of Maoist movement in Bengal. It is also him who has been blamed the most for its collapse. His death exposed that CPI (Maoist) in West Bengal was virtually a one-man party, which many Maoists say should not have been the case.
The origin of Maoism can be traced back to 1928, the year when Mao Zedong first proposed the Protracted People’s War (PPW) model of agrarian revolution for China¹⁰, discarding the Soviet model of insurrection by the working class. The Communist Party of China formally accepted the line in 1935. The Communist Party of India (CPI) has followed the Soviet line right from its inception in 1920. However, the progress of the national liberation movement in China started drawing the attention of a section of Indian communists and Mao’s 1940 article, ‘On New Democracy’, got its first Indian edition in 1944. By 1948-49, CPI leadership in Andhra had started propagating the Chinese path, even though the central leadership of the party disapproved of it.
By 1969, India had two separate Maoist outfits. The CPI (Marxist-Leninist), led by Charu Majumdar¹¹, created a country-wide euphoria over an impending revolution. The Maoist Communist Centre (MCC), led by Kanai Chatterjee¹² and Amulya Sen¹³, preferred to work silently in strategic pockets. The movement has gone through numerous ups and downs since then and encountered innumerable splits and mergers, only to be identified by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2005 as the ‘single largest threat to the country’s internal security’.
By 2016, an estimated 1.5 lakh security personnel (including Central and state forces) were engaged in a deadly fight with the unified Maoist party that consisted of 8,000 to 10,000 guerrillas and has a presence in about eighty of India’s 634 districts. India remains home to one of the largest and longest-running left-wing insurgencies in the world. The extent of bloodshed has been such that, between 2000 and 2015, India was listed among the top ten in the ‘Global Terrorism Index’ fourteen times, the highest number of appearances by a country, surpassing even Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.
Prominent scholars, artistes and civil rights activists have upheld the Naxalite movement as one for social justice and one that reflects the aspirations of the poor and the oppressed. Even an expert committee appointed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh suggested in its report submitted before the Planning Commission in 2008 that ‘the Naxalite movement has to be recognized as a political movement with a strong base among the landless and poor peasantry and adivasis … Though its professed long term ideology is capturing state power by force, in its day-to-day manifestation it is to be looked upon as basically a fight for social justice, equality, protection and local development,’ the report opined.
It also warned the government that ‘protest against police harassment is itself a major instance of unrest’ and that it frequently leads to further violence by the police. The movement against police atrocities broke out in Lalgarh barely six months after the ninety-five-page report was submitted.
This is a story that needed to be told – the story of the aspirations, trials and tribulations of the people of Jangalmahal who displayed immense grit and resilience in the face of the state’s brutal suppression of their movement.
This book attempts to understand the period between 2009 and 2015 and the many lessons it holds. Although the movement met with an abrupt end with the death of Kishanji, the Maoists, even in 2016, consider Lalgarh as a model that should be reviewed and applied wherever necessary. The state considers it a model as well, as Lalgarh is the first major success story of its ‘clear-hold-build’ policy.
Lalgarh lives on.
I
BY THE PEOPLE
There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.
—Vladimir Lenin
‘Kishanji Is Here. He Wants To Meet You.’
7 June 2009. 11 p.m. Chhotopelia.
Lalgarh was burning. The gunfire had finally stopped; a deathly silence prevailed. We were sitting in a small clearing behind a hut, facing thick jungles, with a single oil lamp burning. The man of the house, a septuagenarian sporting a long, white beard, was telling us about Lalgarh.
‘It began as a protest against police atrocities … but gathered strength by the day and now it is a war of identities. We love the feeling of a liberated land. The atmosphere is charged. We have overthrown the police and shut down offices of the panchayat and the CPM. Development activities are taking place all around, and we are doing it all by ourselves. Dada will tell you everything,’ he said.
There was a sound of shuffling feet, and four gunmen took their places at the edge of the clearing followed by three members of the armed guerrilla squad. The eldest of them stepped forward and shook my hand. He was an odd-looking man. Buck-toothed and short-statured, he dangled an AK-47 on his shoulder. He was dressed in a worn-out shirt and trousers. He smiled at me and my colleague, cameraperson Subhankar Chakraborty, and spoke in Telugu-accented Bengali. ‘I am Kishanji. Sorry to have kept you waiting for so long. I had to finish some work and got late.’
Kishanji proceded to sit on a piece of plastic spread out on the ground, and we followed suit. Our host sat beside him. A tall, dark man reclined on a cot, his gun beside his head. Kishanji introduced him as Bikas (Manasaram Hembram), secretary of the Purulia–Bankura–West Midnapore zonal committee of CPI (Maoist).
You could cut the tension with a knife.
Kishanji was already the subject of heated debate in Bengal. While the CPM labelled the Lalgarh uprising as a Maoist-led movement anchored by Kishanji, opposition parties, including the Trinamool Congress, Socialist Unity Centre of India (Communist) aka SUCI(C) and the Congress, maintained that it was purely a people’s movement.
We had come to Jangalmahal to meet the leaders of Pulishi Santrash Birodhi Janasadharoner Committee (PCAPA)¹. This outfit was formed on 8 November 2008, six days after the landmark 2 November landmine explosion that narrowly missed killing Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. This led to a witch-hunt by the police in the villages of Lalgarh. The people retaliated. Protesters in their thousands dug up roads, locked policemen inside the Lalgarh police station and enforced a social boycott of the police, stormed the offices and residences of CPM party members, and ultimately forced the withdrawal of paramilitary forces from thirteen camps in Lalgarh. The CPM insisted upon calling in more paramilitary forces from the Central government to crush the ‘terrorist movement’. But its partners in the Left Front wanted the government to reach a solution through dialogue. Meanwhile, the administration kept losing territory to the PCAPA with every passing day.
Earlier that evening, as we were preparing to leave Lalgarh, an activist had come to me and asked, ‘Could you stay back for the night? Kishanji is here. He wants to meet you.’
It was an offer I could not refuse. In the past seven months, Kishanji had transformed an anti-police movement by some poor villagers into a full-fledged guerrilla war against the Indian state.
‘And please don’t ask him questions like what his favourite food is or what his pastime and favourite movie is. It annoys him. He wants political questions, not questions for a page-three story,’ the activist warned.
My first question to Kishanji was, ‘So is it true that Maoists are leading this movement and Kishanji is in Lalgarh?’
Kishanji smiled and said, ‘Tell me first, what is your impression of the movement? What do you see?’
‘It does seem like a liberated zone. But how can a wanted leader like yourself roam so freely? Are you so sure there aren’t any government intelligence operatives nearby? Your party came out in the open after the lifting of the ban in Andhra Pradesh in 2004 and you know how that was used by intelligence agencies later.’
He seemed unperturbed. ‘Yes, they monitored all our public events, filmed our members, tracked their movements and used this information later to kill some of them. But, you see, Lalgarh is a people’s movement. The Maoist party is with them. The Maoist party is everywhere where people are fighting for their rights and justice. We were present in Singur, we led the resistance movement in Nandigram and we are in Lalgarh too. People want us to be with them. And we never hide from the people. We only keep our organizational structure secret from the state. I have been underground since 1978 and living among the people. Someday I may get killed. But the people will protect me as long as I’m fighting for them.’ His eyes shone with passion.
I told him that the PCAPA’s movement was fast getting an ‘anti-state’ tag and that the Centre would be happy to help the state government in countering a potential Maoist insurgency. They were only deferring it because of the pressure from the Trinamool Congress. ‘How do you plan to fight a big offensive?’ I asked.
Kishanji shook his head affirmatively. ‘I know an attack is impending. But let them try it. The people of Lalgarh will teach them such a lesson that they will never look at Lalgarh again! Just ask him,’ he said pointing towards the old man.
The old man smiled and said, after a brief pause, ‘Let them try coming here.’
I repeated the question. ‘But how do you plan to fight it?’
‘Let me tell you a story,’ Kishanji said, looking calm and confident. ‘In DK², people go to the fields to work but keep their guns close. The moment there is wind of a police raid, they are in position, ready to activate landmines and ambush the police. They create booby traps with sharpened bamboo shoots. Every farmer is a guerrilla fighter. I’m telling you this to drive home the point that when the people are alert and active, the fight reaches a different level altogether.’
‘So, the war is on?’ I asked.
‘We never want a war. But if the government unleashes one on the people, we are prepared.’
Subhankarda asked, ‘Did you really want to kill Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee or did you just want to warn him?’
‘Yes!’ Kishanji nodded and his jaws tightened. ‘Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was personally responsible for the killing of fourteen villagers in Nandigram. The people gave him a death sentence and we were trying to execute it. We had laid a kilometre of cables through the fields. Rats had chewed it up at several places which we repaired. Despite that there was a loose connection and we missed our target by a few seconds.’
‘So where were you at the time of the blast? Police are claiming Shashadhar Mahato masterminded the blast. Is that true?’ I asked.
The response was quick, ‘I personally supervised the attack. I was within one kilometre of the spot of the blast when it happened.’
‘So close! Despite such massive security cover?’
Kishanji seemed to be enjoying the attention. ‘Sometimes no amount of security cover is enough to stop revolutionary activities.’
I told him that India was gradually becoming a superpower and had one of the biggest armies in the world and asked him: ‘The CPI (Maoist) has a presence in less than 20 per cent of the country’s total area. How is it possible to fight the Indian state militarily?’
He responded: ‘A tiny country like Vietnam handed the US one of their worst defeats ever in a war!’ The US will be forced to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan too, he predicted.
We spoke for over three hours. It was well past 2 a.m. when he left. ‘Take care, we’ll meet again,’ he said and disappeared as swiftly as he had arrived.
In the Liberated Land
The forty-kilometre journey from Midnapore to Lalgarh earlier in the morning was a long and tedious one. An indefinite blockade of Jangalmahal, protesting Kolkata Police’s denial of permission for a proposed rally by the PCAPA’s women’s wing, had started that morning. It was the fourth such blockade in seven months, the three others having lasted a month each. Our source had told us to reach Baropelia in Lalgarh by 10 a.m. We were also adviced to exit the car wherever we faced a blockade, find locals and get them to talk to Chhatradhar Mahato over the phone, so that he could identify us. Mahato was the spokesperson of PCAPA and well known to me.
Roadblocks impeded our journey at various points as we passed through Salboni and Lalgarh, the areas worst affected by the blockade. Trees were felled on the road at almost every 100–200 metres. The consequences for removing them could be fatal. Maoist guerrillas had recently set a number of vehicles ablaze for defying such blockades.
Just before crossing over to ‘Maoist territory’, we visited the Pirakata outpost of the Salboni police station that stood at the border between the government and Maoist territories. The officer in charge (OC) sat in his chamber, facing north, with Lalgarh behind him, towards the south.
‘There is no guarantee that tomorrow this outpost will not be attacked or set on fire. But I’m not supposed to look that side,’ he said with a shrug, pointing a thumb at the wall behind him. ‘It was, undoubtedly, police excesses that caused this rebellion. And now it is administrative inaction that is taking the situation beyond control,’ he said, lighting a cigarette.
Barely a month ago the people’s boycott of police and paramilitary forces had left the hundred-odd personnel at the Kalaimuri (in Salboni) Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) camp without any food or water. The forces finally left the camp on 27 April and barely a few days later, a mob of 5,000 people vandalized the camp and set it on fire. All five paramilitary camps within the jurisdiction of Lalgarh police station had already been withdrawn.
The officer warned us against removing the blockades and reiterated that we must return whenever asked to do so by the Maoists and PCAPA members. We obeyed. Whenever we approached a blockade, we exited the car, showed the locals our identity cards and persuaded them to talk to Mahato. The tree would then be removed, our car would pass and the obstruction would be put back in place.
After crossing ten such blockades, we met Prasad, a PCAPA activist in his mid-twenties, at Pirrakhuli, in a local office of the outfit. After speaking to Chhatradhar Mahato on my phone, he agreed to accompany us up to Baropelia, where he had some work too. He brought along a friend, Samir, who seemed a few years older. Our journey became easier thereafter.
We passed through a rugged territory of laterite soil, topographically distinct from most parts of West Bengal and geographically an extension of the Chota Nagpur plateau. Vast fields lay fallow, punctuated by a few ploughed fields here and there, all surrounded by forests. Sometimes, the roads cut through the fields and the forests, which gradually merged with the wildernesses of Jharkhand.
Culturally, too, this place is in tune with Jharkhand. Most of the locals speak Santhali and the lack of Santhali teachers in local schools is a major reason behind the high percentage of school dropouts. Their music, religious and cultural festivals, the paintings on their walls are similar to those in any Jharkhand village, and quite unlike any other part of Bengal, except parts of the adjoining districts of Purulia, Bankura and Birbhum.
While our car moved through a five-kilometre stretch of dense Jhitka forest an interesting conversation took place. ‘Our demands are not the same anymore, they’re much bigger now,’ remarked Prasad. ‘The police superintendent will have to pay the price for the time wasted by the government. Rather, he will have to morph into a horse and Chhitamoni will ride him,’ he said with a naughty smile. Then he mimicked a horse-riding action, chanting, ‘Chal merey ghorey, tik tik tik! (Run my horse, run run run!).
All of us burst out laughing. When that subsided, I asked, ‘Jokes apart, where do your actual demands stand right now?’
Instantly, the smiles disappeared. ‘You think this is a joke?’ Prasad asked.
Two issues had always topped their charter of demands: (i) West Midnapore superintendent of police (SP) Rajesh Kumar Singh will have to apologize publicly, holding his ears, and promise to stop arresting people, particularly women; and (ii) the officers accused of torturing fourteen women in Chhotopelia village on 6 November 2008 will have to crawl from Dalilpur to Chhotopelia, rubbing their noses on the ground. Not surprisingly these demands had not been met by the government.
‘Their demands are ridiculous. They think they can run their own governments with their own rules. Then why is there an elected government and the rule of law?’ district magistrate Narayan Swarup Nigam was quoted as asking in a Tehalka report in April 2009. By now, the people, led by the Maoists, had forced police and paramilitary personnel out of about a 1,000 square kilometre area. The PCAPA was ruling over approximately one quarter of the whole district.
‘But how can a government ask its SP to mimic a horse or have its own men do sit-ups or crawl while rubbing their nose on the road since there is no legal provision for such a punishment?’
The duo stared at me coldly. ‘Do you mean that the police and the politicians have a legal right to beat us up indiscriminately, women and the elderly included?’
I had no answer.
By the time we reached Baropelia chowk, the place was crowded. The chowk was decked out in posters addressing a wide range of issues, including the SP’s punishment. A middle-aged tribal man, clad in a shirt and lungi, was leaning against the mud wall of a tea stall, reading Guerrilla Barta. He was not the only one. This was not any ordinary publication. It was the mouthpiece of the Bengal chapter of the CPI (Maoist)’s armed wing, the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) – one of the largest leftwing guerrilla army in the world.
It’s barely ten years since the erstwhile CPI (ML)(PW) aka the PW, or People’s War, launched its first guerrilla squad in Bengal, equipped with two rifles and three country-made guns. And now the people were publicly reading the mouthpiece of its guerrilla army. There was no police or paramilitary around. The only people who carried guns were the members of the guerrilla squad. But guns were not the only thing the locals were excited about.
The Groundwork
The first phase of the Maoist movement, originating in Naxalbari in north Bengal in 1967, had died down by the late 1970s. Several splinter groups remained without any significant political or military influence.
It was then that the PW rose to prominence in Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and the Bastar region of undivided Madhya Pradesh in the early 1990s. Besides, the influence of the CPI (ML)(Party Unity) aka the PU and MCC had been increasing in Bihar. Members from several CPI (ML) factions in West Bengal took the initiative to contact the PW. In 1993, the PW’s central committee assigned Kishanji the task of reviving the movement in Bengal. By December 1995, Kishanji had formed his first batch of PW organizers, drawn from CPI (ML) factions like the Central Organizing Bureau (COB)³, Lal Jhanda⁴ and Provisional Central Committee⁵. PW gained strength from its merger with PU in 1998.
The unified PW started working in West Midnapore and adjacent areas in Hooghly, Bankura and Purulia districts in 1998. Initially, they tried to consolidate landless farmers in the Lalgarh-Salboni-Garbeta-Belpahari belt by organizing movements to demand a hike in daily wages and a minimum price for potato growers. At Salboni, they demanded regular release of irrigation water in the canals linked to the Shilaboti and Kansaboti rivers. But their focus shifted to Garbeta, which had become a centre of political violence between the CPM and the Trinamool–BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) alliance since an electoral upsurge in favour of the latter in the panchayat elections held in May 1998.
The PW put together their first action squad in 1999 and targeted the Trinamool–BJP coalition’s armed teams that had unleashed a reign of terror in some of the CPM bastions. They hoped to wean the villages away from the CPM and managed to create some panic in the Trinamool–BJP camp. But the tables turned by the end of 2000, when the CPM, with the help of police and administration, launched an onslaught on the Trinamool and BJP and cleared them out of the area. The PW was the next target on their list. In January 2001, five PW members were burnt alive inside a house in Chhoto Angaria village. The PW retaliated instantly by killing a CPM leader and injuring several cadres at neighbouring Jhapur village. By September 2001, two companies of the Central paramilitary forces, specially trained in anti-Naxal operations in north Telangana, had arrived in West Midnapore to tackle the growth of the PW. As armed conflicts between the CPM and the PW escalated, the CPM state committee issued an internal circular in July 2002 for all party members in the West Midnapore, Purulia and Bankura districts. The circular had three directives:
be vigilant of PW cadres and sympathizers;
contact the police immediately with any information about the PW; and
keep the police in front and guide them from behind.
The circular was leaked to the newspapers
The PW focused on annihilating prominent CPM functionaries. The CPM cadres in West Midnapore stopped taking on the PW directly. It was left to the police and paramilitary forces to take on the PW. CPM leaders and members would only provide information to the security forces. This proved to be advantageous to the forces since they had no intelligence network of their own. The CPM would often brand supporters of Jharkhand parties or the Trinamool as Maoists. This helped the PW gain support from a section of the Trinamool and Jharkhand party supporters.
The PW kept growing stronger and by the time the CPI (Maoist) was formed in 2004, the outfit posed a significant threat to the administration in large parts of West Midnapore, Purulia and Bankura districts. They ambushed police contingents and paramilitary vehicles, killed several CPM leaders and disrupted panchayat activities. About three dozen paramilitary camps were set up to tackle the chaos that ensued. The Maoists were waiting for something to spark public outrage against the CPM. But contrary to their expectations, the CPM-led Left Front won the 2004 general elections by bagging a record 83 per cent⁶ of the Lok Sabha seats in the state, following it up with an equally impressive 80 per cent majority in the 294-member state Assembly in 2006. Ruling the state since 1977, the Left Front looked invincible.
And then things changed. The Left Front government’s industrial drive and the subsequent mass protests against acquisition of farmland for industrial projects gave the Maoists the opportunity they needed to make their move.
Singur – Nandigram – Lalgarh
Singur, Nandigram and Salboni (neighbouring Lalgarh) – the sites handpicked for three big industrial projects that the CPM-led Left Front thought would become jewels in their crown – proved to be its undoing. Singur and Nandigram culminated in Lalgarh.
Singur led the way in June 2006 when villagers formed a committee, the Krishi Jami Raksha Committee (KJRC), to lead a mass movement. Political parties soon joined the movement. It subsequently opened branches in all the villages to be affected by the acquisition of 997.11 acres of land for Tata’s Nano car plant. The Maoists could not make significant inroads into Singur. But Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee, who lost miserably in the 2004 Lok Sabha⁷ and 2006⁸ Assembly elections, managed to gain an upper hand in the Singur movement, and the SUCI (C)⁹ had significant influence as well. It was a largely non-violent movement – not a single gunshot was fired by either side. Rallies and gheraos of government offices were the main forms of protest. But a sixteen-year-old activist was brutally raped and killed by the CPM cadre during the movement.¹⁰
On 2 December 2006, the police went on a rampage in the protesters’ villages. Hundreds of farmers – men, women, children and even the elderly – guarded their land, defying Section 144 of the CrPC. The police lathi-charged indiscriminately, fired rubber bullets and used tear gas to disperse the gathering. Arrests were made en masse. Even as people watched the brutalities unfold live on television, the administration seized the entire area within the next couple of days. There were only a few stray incidents of brick-throwing and harassment of Tata employees.
The shadow of these events lay heavy on Nandigram, where the government was to acquire five times as much land as it did in Singur for a chemical plant to be set up by the Indonesia-based Salim group. The easy fall of Singur’s resistance prompted the Bhumi Uchchhed
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