Calcutta (53 page)

‘The feeling of panic, at least, was no piece of commercial propaganda by then. There had been one demonstration after another since the Cossipore riot and, like the gheraos, they had become increasingly vicious. People squatted on railway lines to stop trains from running and they placed barricades of stones across roads to bring buses and trams to a standstill. Two
hundred
headmasters held a demonstration throughout one night to protest against being gheraoed by their students and fifteen thousand jute growers marched on the Writers’ Building one day to demand a fair price for their crops. There was a pitched battle at the National Medical College and Hospital between employees striking for the removal of the hospital superintendent and volunteers of the CPI (M) and the Revolutionary Socialist Party; twenty-two hospital patients were injured when bombs began to explode in some of the wards and a group of tubercular patients were almost suffocated when the police arrived and lobbed tear-gas in their direction by mistake. There was a riot at Eden Gardens, during a Test match between India and Australia, and six people lay dead at the end of the day’s play. There was even a riot by policemen inside the state Assembly. Two of their colleagues had been killed in street battles a couple of days earlier and
esprit
de
corps
had turned to maddened resentment against the politicians. First, a handful of them wrecked the office of their superintendent and then marched upon the
Assembly
, where they smashed more furniture and knocked two or three politicians about before being placed under close arrest by a larger body of more orderly policemen. They had uttered threats against Jyoti Basu, and he responded with more threats a few days later at a rally of United Front supporters on the Maidan. His
Government
, he said (and by now Jyoti Basu was invariably
speaking
of the United Front as a personal possession), would be making a political enquiry into the conspiracy behind the police raid and such terrorism would be totally uprooted. At the same time he warned his vast army of supporters that ‘acts of
vengeance
against us’ might follow the dismissal of some policemen. Tactfully – for he was, after all, Minister in charge of police affairs, as well as much else – he told the crowd that they must not
take law and order into their own hands, that they must help the police to perform their duty. And the crowd, responding to the mood of the leaders on the platform, shouted back ‘No pardon for the conspiring policemen, ordinary policemen need not fear.’

It was only the beginning of August, yet there was already much to fear. If there was no one else to frighten a law-abiding citizen in Calcutta by then, there were certainly the Naxalites. On May Day they had come in force to the city and there they had held their own rally beneath the Ochterlony Monument. The purpose of this meeting was to announce the formation of yet another arm to the Left-wing body politic. This one was called the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) and it had been born thus a week before, on Lenin’s birthday,
somewhere
in the jungle of West Bengal. The Maidan meeting,
however
, offered a rare chance for wellwishers to clap eyes on one of the two Naxalites-in-chief, Kanu Sanyal, a landless man who had been involved in the 1967 struggles around Naxalbari,
although
he did not come from that area. There were apologies for the absence of Charu Mazumdar, who carried even more weight in the new party, a veteran of the pre-war struggles in the hill country, who lives in Siliguri when he is not away in hiding from authority; a landed peasant who, according to the whispers of political enemies, owns rather more land than he is strictly entitled to in law. Sanyal told the May Day rally that Mazumdar was to be compared to Mao Tse Tung in his revolutionary
wisdom
, that under his leadership it was important for the Naxalites to take part in revolutionary peasants ‘struggles in this
semi-colonial
, semi-feudal country’. The Naxalbari movement had been ‘a successful application of Mao’s teaching in a specific case’, and people could now look to a bright future, provided they shunned the ‘petty-bourgeois revolution-mongering’ of Jyoti Basu and his comrades. The Naxalites proposed to differ from existing forms of Indian Communism not only in fine
philosophical
distinctions but in their organization; they would
headquarter
themselves in the village, not the city, and they would have no permanent stronghold; they would shift their bases in accordance with the needs of the revolutionary struggle. Already,
said Kanyal, their fire was to be seen blazing beyond West Bengal. And it was. There had been much Naxalite activity in the hill country of the Srikakulam district of Andhra Pradesh, far to the South. By December there were to be 3,500 policemen combing those hills in search of Naxalite guerrillas who were becoming uncomfortably popular with their mixture of terrorism and
redemption
. Peasants were warming to them because they were in the habit of publicly burning mortgage deeds and promissory notes in village squares; landlords and moneylenders were, one by one, being decapitated before a not particularly mournful populace.

The same sort of savagery had now been occurring in West Bengal for the best part of two and a half years. And the most terrible retribution was apt to fall not upon landlords and
moneylenders
, but upon those who had left the Naxalite cause for some other form of political action. There was a man called Kamakhya Banerjee, a peasant farmer in a small way, who had once been a member of CPI (M) but who had later joined the Naxalites and become a district leader near Siliguri. He subsequently
rejoined
the CPI (M) and one day in December 1969 he
disappeared
while he was harvesting his paddy. His body was later found by the railway line just outside Naxalbari; they had tied him to a bamboo pole and they had disembowelled him before cutting his throat. In Calcutta the Naxalites were now said to be responsible for many of the killings with bomb and with knife that were increasing in the city. It was very difficult to prove this, usually. There were so many people with other allegiances using the same tactics and in a city where it has always been comparatively easy to hit and then run into the crowd, more often than not a culprit was not caught. Eventually, more and more of the violence in Calcutta was to be blamed upon the Naxalites, partly through police incapacity to track down those responsible, partly because there were good political reasons for placing the blame in their quarter even when it did not justly belong there.

Openly they demonstrated whenever they had a good excuse. Frequently they would converge upon the Soviet Consulate or the Soviet Information Centre, bearing their placards of Mao Tse Tung, shouting their slogans which lumped Russian and
American imperialism together. When Durga Puja arrived, they set up their propaganda stalls among all the other pandals around the Maidan and hoisted portraits of Mao alongside posters advising the people to take the path of armed struggle. In College Square, near the University, it was a little difficult to decide whether the Naxalites or the CPI (M) or one of the other parties in the United Front were responsible for the portraits of Ho Chi Minh and Lenin, for the posters displaying comments on the Vietnam war by Bertrand Russell and U Thant, for the banners telling how obscene books sponsored by the CIA,
together
with American films and bourgeois newspapers, had so corrupted the immaculate youth of Calcutta that people were actually dancing in a Western manner during the Puja. But if, at any time, portraits of Mr Kosygin, Mr Nixon and Mrs Gandhi were publicly burned together, then you could be fairly sure it was the Naxalites who had put torches to them. The police were fairly sure that it was Naxalites who smeared the statue of Mahatma Gandhi with tar one night in October, such a
desecration
that an armed guard cordoned that hallowed corner of the Maidan for several days afterwards; and this was only a hint of what was to come. Within a month or two many other statues in Calcutta had been attacked, not even Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose was spared, and from time to time the citizens would wake up in the morning to discover that yet another Bengali hero had lost his stone or metal head, which was later dredged out of the nearest water tank.

There was a brisk circulation of the Naxalite journal
Libera
tion
, with its regular articles by Charu Mazumdar, and one issue in the New Year was to be a manual of guerrilla tactics. It advocated secrecy in the formation of units, which must never consist of more than seven men. The unit should be kept secret from those among the local people whose vigilance has not yet reached the required level, and even from those party units which have not yet fully mastered the methods and discipline required for illegal work. The method of forming a guerrilla unit has to be wholly conspiratorial. No inkling of such conspiracy should be given out even in the meetings of the political units of the party. This conspiracy should be between individuals and on a
personal 
basis. The petty bourgeois intellectual comrade must take the initiative in this respect as far as possible. He should approach the poor peasant who, in his opinion, has the most revolutionary potentiality, and whisper in his ears ‘Don’t you think it a good thing to finish off such and such a jotedar?’ This is the way the people must be roused and emphasis must be put on liberating their own villages …’ The condescending author of this advice (presumably neither ‘petty’ bourgeois nor poor peasant)
suggested
that the guerrillas should not rely on firearms at this stage in their campaign; the use of spears, javelins, sickles and choppers would do very well for their purposes at present. ‘The petty bourgeois intellectual cadres and those leaders who have to travel far and wide may, however, carry small pistols with them to frighten away, disperse or kill the enemy if they find
themselves
suddenly surrounded by him. But we should never give unnecessary importance to it, because that might encourage us to put our reliance not on the people, but on weapons, which is dangerous.’ As for the slightly more than short-term aims,
Lib
eration
had this advice to offer. ‘We must never be impatient or hasty, especially so in case of the first attack, which has the greatest importance, We should rather be prepared to make several attempts than make a hasty attack and fail. It may be difficult, in the first few actions, to raid the house of the class enemy and confiscate his moveable property. So, it would be better to lay more stress only on killing him. Later, when the masses are roused and take part in various kinds of work and the attacks become regular, easier and more powerful, the enemy can be killed even in his stronghold and his property confiscated. The conditions will gradually become so favourable that after
carrying
out a guerrilla action, the guerrillas themselves will be able to address the masses, explain before them the importance of such actions, and with arms in their hands, even inspire the masses by making fiery speeches.’

The police in Calcutta were not quite helpless in the face of such incitement to violence, but by mid-summer they were rapidly becoming demoralized. They could scarcely be expected to know whether they were coming or going in any direction, given the behaviour and the utterances of the Minister in charge
of police affairs. While the state and civic constabulary lumbered around the city in their heavily meshed trucks, with steel helmets on their heads and floppy shinpads on their legs, with their shields, their lathis, their tear-gas and their rifles at the ready for the next fatal riot, Jyoti Basu continued icily to wield his
portfolio
with some indifference to the disturbance it was causing. Occasionally his personal intervention caused a gherao to be lifted, as happened one day in October after the Shipping Master in the Port of Calcutta had been confined for seven hours by some seamen. But only a few weeks before that, Basu had calmly announced that, since March, 1,010 criminal cases had been withdrawn on the Government’s instructions because it was felt that the situation would improve if thousands arrested during ‘democratic movements’ were released; and he was candid enough to add that political considerations alone had been taken into account. He seemed to be in complete control of the
Government
, and the United Front as a whole was almost reduced to announcing collectively that West Bengal would observe a
holiday
to mourn the death of Ho Chi Minh in September. In fact, the Government had been riddled with internal dissent for some time and it was now on the threshold of disintegration again.

There had been occasional straws in the wind. In April a fight had broken out in one of the ministerial rooms in the Writers’ Building, between supporters of the Bolshevik Party and members of the Socialist Unity Centre, both of which were part of the United Front, over policy on the rehabilitation of refugees. In August, while the CPI (M) leaders were in Delhi for a
meeting
of their Politbureau, a number of their partners in the Government demanded that there should be a redistribution of portfolios, of which the CPI (M) had held the biggest share since the election. But there had been nothing to prepare city and state for what followed on 8 October. The Bangla Congress, with Chief Minister Ajoy Mukherjee presiding, passed a resolution which stated that inter-party clashes in the field, gheraos,
repressive
measures in educational institutions, forcible occupation of land, police inaction, a general deterioration of law and order, activities of anti-social elements protected by various political parties, indignities suffered by women and the indifference of the
administration had all combined to create a deep sense of
insecurity
and uncertainty among the people. The resolution named no names, but everyone in Calcutta knew which politician and which party the Bangla Congress and its remarkable
president
had in mind.