NAXALBARI BEFORE AND AFTER: REMINISCENCES AND APPRAISAL By Suniti Kumar Ghosh, New Age Publishers, Rs 495

“The road to world revolution”, Lenin supposedly predicted, lay through “Peking, Shanghai and Calcutta.” Like so many of his other predictions, this too proved to be wrong. For a few years between the late Sixties and the early Seventies, though, it seemed as if Calcutta was indeed ushering in the Red India of Lenin’s dream. But the real dream merchant of the time was the Communist Party of China, which set 2001 as the year that will celebrate the “brilliant festival of the worldwide victory of the proletarian revolution, the brilliant festival of the worldwide victory of Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong’s Thought”.

In Naxalbari, a previously unknown village in north Bengal, an armed peasant uprising began the rehearsal for the Indian revolution. At its founding rally in Calcutta on the May Day of 1969, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) referred to the Chinese party’s oracle about the coming world revolution and took it as a “historic directive” to fulfil its task in India. Killings of “class enemies” such as policemen, landlords and cadre of the “revisionist” Communist Party of India (Marxist) and other collaborators of the bourgeoisie were the order of the day in Calcutta and the villages of West Bengal. The graffiti on the city’s walls proclaimed “China’s chairman is our chairman” and called upon the people to make the Seventies “the decade of liberation”.

The leader of the movement, Charu Mazumdar, who hailed from Siliguri, the town closest to Naxalbari, and who had been a leader of the CPI(M) in the area before being expelled by the party for advocating armed struggle, swore by Mao in all he thought and did. Following Mao on his prophecy about the year of the worldwide revolution, he set 1975 as the year of the end of the old order and the coming of communism in India. He was arrested and died in police custody in 1972, the year Mao shook the world, not by revolutions, but by his historic handshake with communism’s arch-enemy and American president, Richard Nixon. It was also the year the brief history of the Naxalbari revolt ended. But few political movements in post- independence India generated as much hope — and fear — as it did.

Suniti Kumar Ghosh was a member of the central committee of the CPI(ML) and worked closely with all other leaders, including Mazumdar, Saroj Datta, Sushital Roychoudhuri, Kanu Sanyal and Ashim Chatterjee. He belonged to the section of the urban intelligentsia that joined the movement out of deep ideological and intellectual convictions and gave it a romantic aura almost equal to the one surrounding the sacrifices of poor peasants and idealist students of some of the best colleges in Calcutta, Hyderabad and Warrangal.

The story of the movement’s failure has been told and retold by its leaders, sympathizers and critics. Yet, Ghosh’s account has a freshness that is born of genuine intellectual honesty. Although the story is mainly based on his reminiscences, it is totally unsentimental and the analysis almost clinical. He traces the evolution of the Naxalbari revolt into the larger ideological battle, shows the unbridgeable gap between the theory of armed struggle and the peaceful, parliamentary road to socialism as preached and practised by the Communist Party of India and the CPI(M) and also lays bare the schisms within the CPI(ML).

For any credible critique of the movement, the central point of inquiry has to be the role of Mazumdar’s strategies and leadership. There have been critical assessments of Mazumdar as a revolutionary leader, some by his erstwhile comrades. But Ghosh’s critique offers valuable insights into the leader’s persona and style of functioning, while it has no overtones of factional rivalry or personal bitterness. To Ghosh, Mazumdar made the seminal mistake of overemphasizing the line of annihilation of the class enemy and underestimating the importance of mass mobilization. It is a familiar criticism of the Naxalbari movement. But Ghosh makes more fundamental criticisms — “Charu had Mao Zedong’s name always on his lips, while his policies were at complete variance with Mao Zedong’s teachings”.

Even more damaging is his accusation that Mazumdar suppressed from the party the criticism of his line by Zhou Enlai and Kang Sheng, the two top CPC leaders, when the former’s emissary, Souren Bose, met them in Beijing in mid-1970. Ghosh provides a useful document for future chroniclers of the movement by putting the Chinese criticism in the book’s appendix. The other document — in fact, his other charge that Mazumdar saw himself as the one and only authority in the party — should be familiar stuff to readers of the history of communism.

But for all these criticisms, he remains an admirer of Mazumdar as a communist leader, just as his faith in the “basic line” of the communist revolutionaries — the theory of the armed struggle as opposed to parliamentary democracy — remains unshaken. The book is a big disappointment in that it leaves today’s Maoist rebellion in India completely out. In so many ways other than the invocation to Mao, the current uprising is a continuation of the Naxalbari movement. But this omission takes nothing away from the book’s historical value.