Calcutta (50 page)

A result of this rivalry was that the 1967 elections were
contested
, roughly speaking, by three political cohorts. One consisted of P. C. Sen’s ruling Congress. A second was called People’s United Left Front and was a combination of Bangla Congress, Communist Party of India, Praja Socialist Party, Bolshevik Party, Gorkha League, Forward Bloc and Lok Sevak Sangha. The third called itself United Left Front and included Communist Party of India (Marxist), Forward Bloc (Marxist), Revolutionary Socialist Party, Revolutionary Communist Party of India, Workers Party of India, Socialist Unity Centre and Samyukta Socialist Party. In some constituencies the two popular fronts fought each other, but always they opposed Congress and between them they brought it down. In the 1962 elections, the undivided Communists in West Bengal had collected 50 seats in an Assembly of 280. In 1967 the CPI (M) took 43 seats, the CPI took 16 seats, Bangla Congress took 34 seats and Forward Bloc took 13 seats; the rest of the popular front parties could number their elected representatives in ones and twos. Against this combination of 140 new members of the Legislative Assembly, Congress now had 127. Numerically it was, therefore, quite a close-run thing. Psychologically, it was a crushing blow. Almost all the senior Congress Ministers had been defeated. A former Finance Minister of the Central
Government
in Delhi had been put out by a nephew of Subhas Chandra Bose. Atulya Ghosh had been ejected by an unknown trade
unionist. P. C. Sen had been toppled by Ajoy Mukherjee.

There was a rapid settling of differences between the bits and pieces of popular frontage and a United Front emerged, with Ajoy Mukherjee as the new Chief Minister of West Bengal, largely in grace and favour for personally removing the previous incumbent. Mukherjee was an elderly man who had built his political life on the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, which he has since topped off with some notably Gandhian mannerisms. He has been seen as little more than a respectable figurehead and, while this probably does him rather less than justice, he has quite clearly been bewildered by many of the subsequent events with which he has been politically associated. From the moment he obtained office it was obvious that the real power in his
Government
resided immediately in the person of the Deputy Chief Minister, Jyoti Basu, of the CPI (M).

Basu is the kind of man from whom Bengali legends are created. He was a doctor’s son and he was first educated by the nuns of the same Loreto Convent to which Mother Teresa
belonged
when she came to Calcutta from Albania. After that, the Jesuits of St Xavier’s College had him until he spent time at university before going to London to read law. It was there, in the late thirties and early forties, that he picked up his political training at the hands of the British Communist Palme Dutt. He returned home in time to be put into prison for his politics by an Indian Government and after that he was never anything but a full-time politician, particularly responsible for organizing activity among the railway workers of Calcutta. Like many a Bengali before him, he is idolized by people with whom he has apparently little in common. He is a neat, fastidious-looking man in his early fifties and it is quite impossible to tell whether his bearing and his mannerisms come naturally or whether they are carefully cultivated to fulfil a role. He is never known to smile in public and it is widely believed among the rank and file of party workers that he is a totally ascetic man who has never in his life touched drink; which certainly isn’t true. The point is that he looks ascetic, striding purposefully from the public platform, his hair carefully oiled in an impeccable quiff, his dhoti always
immaculately
white, his eyes forever hooded by their upper lids.

There is a tension in him that he never conveys in public. Catch him behind a Ministerial desk, or in an armchair at home, and the foot of his crossed leg never stops moving up and down. Yet on a public platform he stands out from every other Communist leader merely by virtue of his control; he has none of the rhetorical tricks, he does not harangue, he is generally thought slightly dull as a speechmaker in Bengal. But there is no questioning his power. And there is little doubt that the
exercise
of power satisfies him. Before you are half across his threshold his greeting is ‘Yes?; the impatient gesture of the headmaster who has just been disturbed in his study by some lowly fourth former. He never melts. Every reply he makes is brisk and brief. He gives absolutely nothing away. He makes you feel that you are unforgivably interrupting the world’s work upon which he alone is engaged. Ajoy Mukherjee rambles on for half an hour in reply to just one question, without ever coming within a mile of its point. Jyoti Basu answers fifteen in ten minutes flat and, before you know where you are, you are down the stairs and out into the yard of his thoroughly unpretentious little house, where half a dozen stout party workers are lounging as
watchfully
as the guardians of Birla Park. You have barely been given time to notice the three plaster ducks flying across the living room wall, or the tubular chrome armchair that would look very nice in the front room of a semi in Enfield.

This new Government of fourteen political parties began with a sense of flair. It announced that the police would no longer be required to protect the Ministers of West Bengal. It reduced the Chief Minister’s salary from Rs 1,150 a month to Rs 700 and the salaries going with every other portfolio were cut from Rs 900 to Rs 500. It let Calcutta know that air-conditioning would now be shut down in the Writer’s Building, the Government
secretariat
, as a gesture of solidarity with the poor people. At a mass rally on the Maidan shortly after taking office, it sought and
obtained
something it called ‘formal approval’ from its supporters for an 18-point programme. According to this document, high on the United Front’s list of priorities were particular attention to the plight of the peasants and to land reform generally, educational reforms and a liberation of the forces of freedom and progress.

Within a month, the Central Committee of the CPI (M) had produced its own April Resolution on the new situation in West Bengal. This was curiously at odds with the Government’s 18 points. ‘The particular immediate task,’ it decided, ‘is that of educating, reorganizing, rebuilding, consolidating and
expanding
the Party organization … of proper selection, promotion and grading of cadres and their proper deployment in different class and mass fronts …’ It was, nevertheless, highly conscious of the party role in Government. ‘Our Ministers, without either undue illusions about giving relief in a big way or courting despair that nothing can be done under the present set-up, should always bear in mind that they are the Party’s representatives, should strive to tender our bona-fides to the people. Any failure on this score compromises the Party’s political line … will not help us to resist and overcome the vacillations, wobblings and sometimes even possible backsliding of some democratic parties in the United Front … In a word, the UF Governments that we now have
*
are to be treated and understood as instruments of struggle in the hands of our people, more than as
Governments
that actually possess adequate power, that can materially and substantially give relief to the people. In clear class-terms, our Party’s participation in such Governments is one specific form of struggle to win more and more people, and more and more allies, in the cause of People’s Democracy and at a later stage for Socialism.’

There was much novel activity in the first few weeks of the United Front. Calcutta Corporation was instructed to reduce the tax on bustees and to raise it on buildings with an annual valuation of Rs 15,000. The State Transport Corporation was ordered to reinstate over six hundred workers who had been
dismissed
for sabotage, violence or theft during the previous few years. The police budget was cut by Rs 4.8 millions and the Commissioner of Police in Calcutta was informed that in future, when a gherao of management by workers was reported, it should be referred to the Labour Minister before any other police action was taken. The refugee families who had spent the best
part of twenty years in appalling conditions on Sealdah Station and elsewhere, were finally rehabilitated. And a start was made on a reform of the land question. This was to lead to yet another division within the Communist ranks and to what may be the most crucial political event in India since Independence.

The average size of land-holding in West Bengal at this time was 3.88 acres, a smaller area than anything else in the country, with the exception of Kerala. There were, nevertheless, 53,000 holdings of between 15 and 30 acres and another 3,000 holdings of more than 30 acres, although an early statute of the new
republic
had declared that no one could legally own more than 25 acres. That figure is, in effect, a nonsense, for it has been possible to inflate it by dividing a large holding among innumerable
members
of a family. The system of cultivation, moreover, has scarcely changed in West Bengal since the Permanent Settlement. A petty landlord, or jotedar, leases ground to a bargadar on a
crop-sharing
basis. If the jotedar provides seed, bullock, plough and manure he takes half the crop; if he provides only land he takes forty per cent of the crop. It is a primevally miserable
arrangement
, inviting dishonesty on both sides and offering no security at all to the bargadar. This was the territory into which the United Front swiftly took an important step under a manifesto composed by the Land Minister, Hare Krishna Konar, a senior member of the CPI (M). ‘The primary task,’ this declared, ‘is abolition of large-scale landholding and distribution of land to the landless. The next step would be for the Government to explain to the peasants the disadvantages of cultivating small holdings. The peasants will then voluntarily take to collective farming. Private ownership of land will then be done away with.’

The method used to abolish the large landholdings was quite simple. Landless peasants were encouraged to march on selected jotedars. A procession would stream upon its target behind a red banner, its members armed with lathis, spears, bows and arrows. They frequently shouted ‘Mao Tse Tung Zindabad’ as they went. On reaching their objective they marked its four corners with red flags, declared it forthwith to be in the possession of their citizen’s committee and, as often as not, looted whatever grains or other crops were in store. If the jotedar was brave enough to
get in the way, he was beaten up and sometimes killed. At first, the police took steps to intervene in this procedure, but they were instructed by the Government in Calcutta that this was
legitimate
and democratic struggle and must not be interfered with. Inside six months the CPI (M) found that its peasant
membership
had risen by 450,000 in West Bengal. Then Naxalbari
happened
, and the issue was no longer a simple and straightforward struggle for possession between landless and landed peasants.

Naxalbari is a police district lying in the narrow strip of West Bengal that is enclosed by Nepal on one side and East Pakistan on the other; Tibet and the Chinese are only eighty miles away. This is tea garden and jungle hill country, perfect for guerrilla warfare and admirable for infiltration by anyone so inclined; there are no towns, scarcely a village containing more than one thousand people. Its population consists almost entirely of
tribes-people
and, never having been nourished with fertilizers which are monopolized by the tea gardens, the yield from their various efforts in cultivation is approximately a third of the average for West Bengal. There has been a long history of peasant militancy in the district. The hill country flowing away from Darjeeling, of which this is part, was almost permanently unsettled when the British were here. There was an uprising in the Naxalbari area in 1939, another in 1959; and on the second occasion it was largely an insurrection against the fraudulent conversion of land to family holdings when the Indian Government had established its limit of twenty-five acres. A few months before the United Front took office in Calcutta in February 1967, the local wing of the CPI (M) had told the Central Committee that it was not very happy with the party’s new taste for parliamentary
procedures
. For the next three months this was to be the scene of West Bengal’s most vigorous redistribution of lands. There is some reason to believe, from subsequent events, that the new Government itself by the middle of May thought the situation up there was getting a little out of control. On 17 May, Hare Krishna Konar went up-country to meet local party leaders. As he arrived at the nearest railhead in Siliguri, he was met with a huge poster which read ‘This movement can only succeed by the armed struggle and resistance of the working class. Resistance
is meaningless without guns – let the working class collect guns and be vanguards in the struggle.’

On 23 May a police inspector was murdered in an ambush. The police heard that an attack might be expected on the
Naxalbari
police station and a force of twenty constables, a sergeant and an officer set off from Siliguri to intercept it. Two days later they reached Prasadjote, where there was a small bustee, a tea stall and a railway ganger’s hut by the level crossing. A crowd appeared on the road ahead of them. At the back were men
shouting
revolutionary slogans; at the front were women and children, and a subsequent enquiry established that at least one woman had been forced to stand in the front row or else have her baby strangled. While the two groups were eyeing each other at a standstill, a man at the tea stall signalled to the police that
another
crowd had now appeared to cut off their retreat. An arrow hit the sergeant in the arm. The police stood back to back and the officer ordered both crowds to disperse. When this had no effect he ordered his men to fire. Ten rounds went into one crowd and thirteen into the other. Several people were killed and most of them were women and children. Almost a month later, on 19 June, the West Bengal Committee of the CPI (M) met in
Calcutta
to review the peasant warfare and particularly to take stock of the Naxalbari affair. It noted that there were extremists in the party who had ‘already organized themselves into anti-Party groups’ and it expelled nineteen members of the Naxalbari cell; the West Bengal party secretary, Promode Dasgupta, even alleged that the American CIA had infiltrated the Naxalbari group in order to create discord. Discord, in fact, was already being initiated from another direction.