A few days ago, Aniruddha Chakraborty, a young man presently working in a news portal, sent me a post. It was about the commemoration of the fifty years of what is known in history as Naxalbari Movement. It started in a non-descript village in Darjeeling district of north Bengal, the block known as Naxalbari because of the abundance of ‘Naxal’ tress. As I was in north Bengal for many years, working for The Statesman, I went to the village many a time, looking out for traces of the movement that engulfed West Bengal in turmoil and later spilled over in other parts of the country. But I was disappointed, as I failed to find even smouldering embers of the fiery movement that left a sanguinary trail in its wake- violence, mayhem and elimination of ‘class enemies’- all idealized under the concept of class struggle, set to herald a golden era for the oppressed through armed revolution.
I talked to Kanu Sanyal who- the legendary leader of the movement- along with Charu Majumder, Jangal Santal and a galaxy of other idealism-charged leaders took the red flag of promised revolution to other parts of the State and the country. I found Kanubabu a thoroughly disappointed man, given in to the inevitable-the inglorious petering out of the movement in the mire of time. He despairingly attributed the collapse of the movement more to faulty planning by some impetuous hotheads than to the repression unleashed by the Governmental machinery. He later died under tragic circumstances.
Things started on May 25 1967, when a band of agricultural labourers raised the flag of revolt against the exploitative agrarian system prevailing then in Bengal that reduced them to all but slaves to the mighty landowners. Eight of them, including women and children, were gunned down in retaliatory attack. However, something happened a day before on May 24 when a police officer Sonam Wangdi, accompanied by the lathi-wielding army of the landowners, raided the village and was killed by the angry villagers. The following day saw the state power at its worst with the disarmed villagers being indiscriminately sprayed with bullets.
The fire that was kindled in a tiny village morphed overnight into a conflagration, engulfing state after state with the anarchist revolutionaries taking up the batons from the fallen arms of the slain villagers with the dream of ushering in a better world, sans exploitation of man by man, firing them to tread the path splattered with gore and blood.
This is how the ‘revolution’ started. But the post by Aniruddha who seems to have a distinct leaning to leftism set me thinking what I should write back to him, for I knew he expected feedback from me on the post he so painstakingly wrote. I wrote to him that I was afraid I had no sympathy for the movement. However, at the same time, I wrote that he was right in commemorating the occasion while glorifying those who fell to the bullets, waging a war against the exploitative landowning system. I felt that my reply was far from convincing to the young idealist who perhaps still believes like Kanubabu that the movement fizzled out because of some grave faults in the execution of the grand plan of revolution. I decided to unfold my view of the so-called revolution. I wrote that linking a class struggle- that was though fully justified, given the unjust landowning system- to an all-out revolution as envisioned by some woolly-headed idealists was fallacious. It was nothing but a Utopian fallacy to believe that a revolution would bring about a rule by farmers/working class under the vanguard of a revolutionary party.
History stands witness to the fact that even when a Communist Party rules it does not mean a rule of the farmers/working class people. Those who are competent to rule by their inherent nature rule while those who are destined to be ruled are perpetually ruled over. Besides, a utopia would ever remain a utopia, a chimerical fantasy, as those who sweep to power riding the crest of revolution change with passing time. Things are bound to finally return to the old grooves a la Swami Vivekananda who likens human society to a dog’s tail. No matter how much pains one takes to straighten out a dog’s tail it would revert to its crookedness.
This view might be rubbished as cynicism. But this must be accepted as the normal order of things, as long as life remains as it is, until something like a higher life emerges through spiritual evolution of the race as vouched for by some mystics. That appears a far-off, uncertain thing, a kind of crystal-gazing. Yet, there is no short- cut to the luminous consummation we, in our deeps, devoutly long for.