Although the most extreme manifestations of Left Wing Extremism is today to be seen perhaps in parts of Chattisgarh , Bihar and parts of Andhra Pradesh, the history of the same lies embedded in the history of the Leftist movement in India with its initial roots in the extremist politics of Bengal and Punjab. Extremist ladders like Surya Sen started secret societies as far back as 1916 where arms training were given and youth were inducted to fight the British colonial power.
Many others were influenced by him and others like him and notable among them were Jatin Das[1] who would later be a prison mate of Bhagat Singh and others like Batukeshwar Dutt, Rajguru and Chandrasekhar Azad who joined the Hindustan Republican Party and later renamed it as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Party. They collaborated with pioneering Punjab communists like Sohan Singh Josh to form youth bodies like the Naujawan Bharat Sabha all of which were wedded to independence using armed struggle as a tactic.
The communist party of India which was established around 1924 in the UK by Rajni Palme Dutt and others was from its earliest days committed to struggle against the class enemies and through out the Gandhian era kept getting banned on and off for its armed struggle stance. Even at the time of independence, its stated position was yeh azadi jhootha hai and that true independence would come to the toiling masses only when the levers of power passed to them.
This thought known as the Ranadive line led to the establishment of “liberated enclaves” in Srikakulam and adjoining parts of Andhra Pradesh. This experiment though was short lived and Randive’s line of “adventurism” was officially abandoned by the undivided Communist Party of India in the 50s. But the seeds had been sown way back in Bhagat Sigh’s time and after and would periodically surface though the mainstream Leftists adopted the parliamentary route.
The first time it surfaced in the manner we recognize it today was in Naxalbari in West Bengal as a peasant movment but with wide support from students and left leaning intellectuals who were fed up with the declining standards of governance and the fact that a stock taking in the post Nehruvian era showed that his brand of gentler, persuasive socialism had not made the lot of the peasants any better and a remnant of those mainline communists who believed in the validity of the armed struggle broke away to form the CPI-ML, the umbrella body of the Naxalites as they came to be called.
This was an idealistic time and the essence of the time has been extensively captured in books and films. Two come to mind – the award winning Hazar Chorasee Ki Maa where Jaya Bhaduri plays the mother of a young man killed in an encounter and the body is tagged in the mortuary with the number of 1084(yes- encounter killings began back then). A more recent movie has been the equally acclaimed Hazaro Khwaishen Aise which more eloquently captures eloquently the contribution and sacrifices of the young educated student intellectuals.
Unfortunately this same involvement led to the eventual decline and fall of the Naxalite movement as the intellectual leadership of the movement got divided over semantic interpretations of Maoist principles and dogma leaving the foot soldier alienated and perplexed. This fragmentation provided room for a disunity that was fully exploited by the ruling dispensation of Siddhartha Shankar Ray who used brutal repression and the period of the emergency and its own climate of censorship and tyranny to infiltrate, divide and suppress the movement. The leftist sympathies of the population found expression in the post emergency election to the State Assembly in power, a dispensation that continues in power till this day.
Although the coming to power of a left front government in West Bengal provided a via media in providing a foot old to the moderate left, the radical left did not get eliminated. They regrouped and as they dispersed, they took the movement along with them and found a warm welcome in other fertile grounds where exploitation was rampant – caste and feudalism ridden Bihar, the tribal belts of the then undivided Madhya Pradesh and Bihar and of course the Telengana area of Andhra Pradesh where B.T.Ranadive had set up his “liberated zones” decades ago and where a low intensity conflict never really died out even though the liberated zones collapsed.
Today the Naxalite movement is largely presented to us a law and order problem but the ideological drives that drive it are rarely mentioned, at least in the discussions and debates that are presented to us in the present day. But the left in India has hoary roots and figures that we revere today like Bhagat Singh were leftists, were extremists and believed in violence to bring about a change in the exploitive social order and were hanged for those beliefs by the British colonial masters of the time.
Today when other leftists with similar convictions and beliefs go the path of arms, the Indian state declares them to be terrorists and often uses tactics like encounters and ambushes. I am no votary of violence but I believe that the action of the Maoists and Naxalites who have now a sphere of influence that is gradually increasing and consists of what is called the “red corridor” deserve a better analysis and treatment of their motives than being bunched together with criminal gangs and goons and their kind of terrorism
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