JOIN USMaoist depredations in eastern India suggest a new social twist to Marx’s prediction of an epic struggle between the proletariat and bourgeoisie. Class goes a long way in explaining the recent attack on an Eastern Frontier Rifles camp in a West Bengal town where 24 jawans were butchered, and Dalit and Adivasi support for the “Bon (Jungle) Party”, as they call the CPI(Maoist).
Mohit Sen, the son of a Calcutta High Court judge who joined the undivided Communist Party of India, says in his memoirs that Ranjit Gupta, one of the last of British India’s IP (not today’s IPS) officers, was “a strong sympathiser” of the Communists and kept him informed in the late Forties of official security plans. Now old and ill, Gupta acquired fame — some say notoriety because of the methods used — for liquidating Naxalites when he was Calcutta’s Police Commissioner in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Sen passed on Gupta’s information to the radical Oxford-trained historian Susobhan Sarkar “resulting in almost all the top leaders of the CPI escaping by going underground” when the “crackdown” came in 1948.
Arrest warrant
Incidentally, the “underground” for Indrajit Gupta, a Cambridge graduate who became Union Home Minister under H D Deve Gowda, was my grandmother’s flat in Calcutta. He lived there comfortably — my grandmother was his aunt — while the police supposedly searched high and low with an arrest warrant. His brother, also Ranjit Gupta but of the ICS, was then West Bengal’s Home Secretary. Less well-connected Communists went to jail.
I am dredging this up to illustrate how law enforcers and lawbreakers can be linked. The Gupta-Sen-Sarkar nexus highlighted the power of class ties. They came from similar upper middle class backgrounds, had gone to English-medium schools and the same college where Susobhan Sarkar taught. They were what Lady Thatcher called “people like us”. There are PLUs at all levels, bound by similar ties of kinship and friendship.
At the height of the Naxalite troubles a much younger and fitter I accompanied the Army on a combing operation in West Bengal’s Birbhum district, tramping precariously along the slippery ridge between waterlogged paddy fields night after night. It was a lark for the soldiers. Even the local magistrate strode gamely along with a walking stick. But the bedraggled policemen accompanying us whined unceasingly and complained bitterly of the military victimising them because they were Bengali. The Army officer’s warnings that they could be heard across the fields only made them talk louder.
I thought it was Bengali lyricism when they burst into Rabindrasangeet before dawn broke. But, no, as a light flashed in the distant dark and went out, to be repeated in another clump of trees, I realised the singing (like their loud chatter) was to warn Naxalites lurking in the outlying huts. Apparently, a band of Naxalites had turned up to demand the ammunition only hours after the police confiscated a jotedar’s gun.
Collusion might still be common. Birbhum’s policemen were locals like the Naxalites. Commonalty may also have been a factor in the attack on the EFR. It wouldn’t have been easy otherwise for 50 Maoists in an SUV, a pick-up truck and a fleet of six motorcycles to raid the camp in the heart of a crowded township. The surrounding shopkeepers obviously knew what was afoot and had disappeared. They had been warned. But by who?
Few in West Bengal’s villages regard the Maoists as untouchables. I am not talking of opportunistic politicians like Susanta Ghosh, a CPI(M) minister from West Midnapore, or Mamata Banerjee who have both been known to play footsy with them. I mean Dalit and adivasi villagers who regard them as saviours. While nothing is heard of the Rs 400-crore development package announced last year for the area, Maoist cadres have reportedly dug wells, built roads and dams and set up health centres in remote places.
Ideological rebels
Class manifests itself somewhat differently in Bihar. Going to Arrah district once because of reports of Naxalite activity, I found only illiterate landless Dalit peasants whose crime was to ask for the minimum legal wage. Their employers at once summoned the police and denounced them as ideological rebels. Moustachioed village elders stalked me as I talked to the Dalits, and ordered me to write they should be allowed firearms without licenses. Physically, these worthies looked like the village daroga.
A veteran former Communist, Jolly Mohan Kaul, writes that people looked up to Jyoti Basu because he was an England-returned barrister. The CPI co-opted many such men into its central committee without making them go through the ranks as local recruits had to. But these gallants or comrades like Prakash and Brinda Karat or Sitaram Yechury hardly qualify as “indigent wage-earners”, “labouring classes” or the “lowest class of community” whom Marx held to be the only “really revolutionary class”. Dalits and adivasis do, explaining their misguided support for the Bon Party.
The so-called “red corridor” is not a manifestation of the proletarian revolution. It speaks of adivasi and Dalit resentment of society’s traditional upper caste leaders, and of Maoist exploitation of this festering grievance.