KANU SANYAL: MASTER OF A MIS-TREATED CONCEPT

“Kanu Sanyal is dead…one less headache for India.” A blogger, who should at best remain unnamed for his or her irreverence to history, wrote on the day the last surviving member of the naxalite trio of Charu Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal, died.
All the three died in penury. Majumdar in penury of thought, Sanyal in penury of conviction and Santhal in penury of action. That should sum up the exercise in gun-class communism in India, now in the throes of capitalism. Or,should it?
It was amusing to read the reviews, analyses and obituaries post-Sanyal’s death. It was as if Naksal Bari (that’s how it is still spelt in the local district gazette) was an error of youth fondly remembered in old age; much akin to the trespasses indulged during the college years and hilariously recalled in later reunions.
Some reviews treated Naksal Bari as merely a symbol of in-fighting between the extreme and moderate communist groups in Bengal. Some others, understandably academics, saw it as a logical successor to the Tebagha and Andhra movements of the 1940s. Some international floaters argued that it was the outcome of the vascillation of the Indian communists between the expansionist Chinese and the revisionist Russians (as the two called each other in the 1960s). But nobody saw it as a live symbol of what is still happening in India: the continuing stamping out of the poor by first the zamindars, then the forward castes and now, the capitalist middle class.
Within the communist system, the traditionalists – CPI and CPM – have always arrogated to themselves the right to rule the poor and nurture them as vote banks, copying the Congress, and saw the ‘naxalites’ as an aberration to be dealt with sternly if their interests – the poor – were interfered with. The late Jyoti Basu, who had no problem in forming Bengal’s first non-Congress coalition with a leader of a rightist Bangla Party as chief minister, equally had no problem in dealing death blows on the Majumdar-Sanyal-Santhal trio (a journalist even called them a ‘triad’, a term usually used to describe criminal gangs in China and Japan!). His funeral was mammoth in scale. I wonder if Sanyal’s family could find even four pall bearers.
A political party evolves its own checks and balances, even against the wishes of its leadership. And more often than not, it is always an extremist group from within which tempers the main party. The Congress, for example, has a brutal history of ordering the killings of Indian citizens, whether in Punjab, Kashmir, Delhi, Bihar, Telangana or the North-East. It would have been more brutal but for its skirmish with the radical policies of Subhash Chandra Bose. The communists, perpetrators of the worst kind of oppression in West Bengal for decades, would have rivaled Pol Pot had they not encountered the ‘naxalite’ leaders in the 1960s; having violently suppressed the movement, the mainline communists could not have themselves nurtured extreme thoughts, if, for nothing, at least for public consumption.
We have seen our politicians shed morality as fast as the youth change their I-pods. We have seen the politicians shamelessly baiting the poor into further ignominy with their ‘India shining’ placards. We have seen the politicians turn themselves into an incestuous class blurring distinctions of ideologies and affiliations, the scent of middle class surpluses mentoring their politics.
They have a lot to learn from Naksal Bari.
Naksal Bari caught the attention of India because of the context in which it was orchestrated. The post-China war, Radio Peking’s open congratulations, and important of all, the ‘revolution’ taking place in a communist-run state. Out of this unique triangulation of contexts, hundreds of Naksal Baris have occurred in other regions in India, but never commanded such attention, prompting the movement’s proponents and opponents alike to increase the stakes. The organized gang represented by the communist-led state won the day; the unorganized ‘naxalites’, even today, trying to conserve energy to fight another day.
The ‘naxalites’, simply put, wanted to teach a powerful nexus a few lessons. The nexus was of the local ‘zamindar’ (biggest of landed gentry) naturally from a forward caste, local ‘daroga’ (sub-inspector), the local ‘sarpanch’ (head of the village) and the local money-lender. Between them they ruled the village on behalf of a similar nexus at the ‘taluk’ level, then the district level, then the state level, then the national level. The ruled were the small traders, small or landless peasants and labourers. Despite their mutual interdependence that an agricultural economy dictated, it was the sheer power wielded by the nexus that subjugated the latter as by natural right.
In 1987, when I was working for The Time of India in Bihar, I was invited by a team of CPI-ML (Liberation) to eyewitness the progress they made in emancipating the villagers from the tyranny of the nexus. I was taken by car, tempo and later on foot, in the middle of the night, to a village in Jehanabad district. It was like a Russian or Chinese commissar accompanying the media to a sanitized village. I heard the labourers say how happy they were because they were employed for at least 70 per cent of the year in contrast to a few weeks some years ago. I took some of the villagers out of the earshot of my ‘guides’. Did they get the minimum wage? No. The big farmer’s accountant took his cut, the money-lender took his interest on the labourer’s loan and finally, the local Liberation members forced a voluntary contribution to keep on helping them achieve their freedom. The women obviously were paid less then men. They told me of organized rapes of themselves or their daughters and daughters-in-law and of the futility in going to the police. The landless peasants, working as labourers, told me they were paid mostly in kind. The going rate of payment in kind had not changed sinced the 1950s in the Bengal-Bihar-Orissa regions: It a bojha (sheaf) for every 21 bojhas, for rabi harvesting; 4 kachi seers (local weight) of paddy during sowing time. In the ‘bojha’ system, the peasant can embrace as much of the standing crop a he or she can at one go: that’s his or hers to chaff the waste and eat. Even here, the farmer’s accountant ensured that the person with the shortest hands was allowed to take the ‘bojha’. My guides told me: “These things happen, but the important thing is they get the ‘bojhas’ in each and every season. We ensure this.” I tried to make them understand that the ‘bojha’ system in the region is as old as the caste system itself. It fell on deaf ears.
Are the ‘naxalites’ to blame for the constancy of payment or are they to be commended for ensuring even such payments are at least regular? In my own presence, the brother of the village’s richest farmer went by on a motorcycle. The peasants, as by custom, stood with their heads bowed even as my guides turned their heads away. As we were returning from the village, my guides led me to a tea shop. I gathered it was owned by the brother-in-law of the local sub-inspector. Apparently, my guides and the policeman were not only of the same caste, but the same ‘biradari’ (community) as well. So much for class-less consciousness. Strange but true, in the 1989 parliamentary elections, when I was touring the Bhojpur area – which was to return India’s first naxalite as a parliamentarian – I came across a couple of my former guides sitting in a brand new campaign jeep and smoking filtered cigarettes and wearing North Star keds.
The problem with ‘naxalism’ was and is the theoretical framework not matching the reality on the ground. What may have worked (?) in Russia or China after first forcing the different peoples to become one uniform mass with uniform thoughts, could not have worked in alien culture like India’s where all the parties – the oppressor, the oppressed and the reformer – shared the same diverse culture and could not exist outside it. “In communist Russia even the most minor of state officials is more powerful than the biggest minister,” the late Vinod Mishra, the Liberation leader of Bihar, once acknowledged to me when I went to meet him in Dhanbad after his late marriage even as his armed, underground outfit was falling apart around him after the Liberation’s decision to take part in parliamentary politics.
It is the socio-cultural dynamics and politics of India – the only Indian characteristic that ironically bridges the rich-poor gap in the country – that is least understood both by the ‘naxalites’ and the officialdom of the state. There are a few who realize that the manner of tackling ‘naxalism’ is not by treating it as a criminal matter to be dealt with by the police. But either they choose to remain silent or are silenced.
Throughout my tenure of five years in Bihar, I tried to follow and understand the ‘naxalite’ movement in the state which began when a lower caste school teacher, Jagdish Mahto, was beaten up by the goons of a forward caste candidate in the 1967 general elections in Ekwari village in Bhojpur district. The incident opened Mahto’s eyes to the oppression around him and Jagdish ‘Master’ was born, who did not shy away from organizing the opporessed into a force, trying to end their subjugation even through violence. For the ‘naxalites’ in retreat from Bengal, this was a God (?) send. His wife, Kamaleswari Devi, told me years after his death: “Yes, he became popular. I am proud of him. But the reality is, nothing has changed.” There are some sub-altern historians in Bihar who shy away from seeing ‘Master’ as a naxalite and instead compare him with what are called social brigans (a la Robin Hood) like Nakshatra Malakar, or the many Yadavs from the ‘diara (riverbank, swampy land) areas of Munger and Patna districts and Sasaram. Perhaps it serves their purpose in dishing out a simple social history of oppression without complicating it by introducing the element of ‘naxalism’.
By mid-1988, the Liberation group of CPI-ML was in the throes of a major argument over the continuance of underground armed struggle in Bihar. They were neither moving forward nor going backward. A revisionist group took things in its hand and started a campaign for the party to come overground. I was the only journalist to have written in detail about this exercise, correctly prophesying (on the basis of some truthful admissions from the concerned horses’ mouths) that the party would enter the political fray in 1989. There were many reactions to my article, one of them a sweet telephone call in my office from someone who introduced himself: “I am Kanu Sanyal, speaking. I am in Dhanbad. I read your report. Let us meet sometime.” The meeting happened after the 1989 elections and by then Vinod Mishra was barely three years away from appearing in public for the first time at a rally in Calcutta.
We talked for three or four hours, at a tea shop on Fraser Road in Patna. Sanyal had come to meet the son of a friend of his, a local journalist. Given the image I had of him as the original ‘naxalite’, I was disappointed by his low-key appearance. He was dressed in a white full shirt, blue trousers and Bata chappals and carrying a black plastic bag. He wouldn’t talk much about the Naksal Bari days, but had much to say about the futility of the entire movement in its current shape. India is too big a country to even be ruled, not to talk of staging a revolution, was the gist of his argument. He was promoting education as the only weapon to fight the factors causing oppression. “The world is changing fast. What we did in those days now looks to me as an affair of an affected youth. Guns are not the solution. Only when the poor are aware of their rights can they do something about it.” And on, he went. His utter dislike of the traditional communists was, of course, apparent as most of his analogies were situated in West Bengal or Tripura.
Did he mean to say that the concept of Indian ‘naxalism’ was a blunder, I asked him. He gave me a serious look. I still remember his words which are appearing in print for the first time here and I quote from a distant memory: “You cannot turn back on Naksal Bari. Or the off-shoots of that movement, however lumpenised they may be today. They have created a stir in the hearts of the poor who now realize that they have not been born to be slaves. In time, more and more of them will realize this. And then a change will come.”
Was Naksal Bari then a catalyst for future change? Don’t try to deconstruct the past, he waved a finger at me. As I shook hands with him, Sanyal gave me a toothy smile and patting my back said: “If you can read Bangla, look up a novel called Mahakaler Rather Ghora by Samaresh Babu. It is about my friend, Jangal Santhal, the action man. I was only an organizer and Charu was the ideas man, but Santhal…..”

MULAYAM SINGH YADAV: WRESTLING WITH WOMEN’S WORTH

“Vartmaan swaroop men mahila aarakshan vidheyak pass hua tho sansad men udyogpatiyon evam adhikariyon ki aisi-aisi ladkiyaan aa jayengi jinhe dekhkar ladke peeche se seeti bajayenge.”
(If the Women’s Reservation Bill is passed in its present form, then such daughters of industrialists and officials will enter Parliament who would invite catcalls and whistles from the boys.)
Thus spake Mulayam Singh Yadav, one of India’s senior, surviving socialist leaders and former defence minister of India and former chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh.
Yadav made this comment while unveiling the statue of India’s biggest socialist ever, the late Dr. Rammanohar Lohia, at the eponymous hospital in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh.
The statement reflects the level of thinking of this insolent male chauvinist who would use or throw women for his political ends without any compunction. He perhaps forgot in the heat of the moment that he himself has in the past encouraged daughters and wives of officers and industrialists and even Bollywood actresses, not to talk of his own daughter-in-law, to enter politics by giving tickets to them in parliamentary or assembly elections.
The statement is nothing new. His anti-women stance came to the fore even earlier too, when, on March 14, Yadav described the Women’s Reservation Bill as an “international conspiracy” to weaken democracy. How would that happen?
The IANS news agency reported: “He was of the view that 33 percent reservation for women in legislatures would finally make it a nearly all-women parliament…. ‘just imagine what would be the fate of this nation in the hands of inexperienced leadership, with both Pakistan and China sitting across our borders with their own nefarious designs’?”
“I am not opposed to reservation for women, but I am opposed to the bill in its present form,” he added, perhaps not to be seen as a misogynist. http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/politics/mulayam-fears-an-all-women-parliament_100334553.html
What is interesting is the venue – the unveiling of Dr. Lohia’s statue – Yadav used to vent his sexist bias. For his information, the web site of Dr. Lohia – whose ardent follower he claims to be – says this about the attitude of India’s pioneering socialist leader towards women:
“More than half of our population comprises women. Their condition is pathetic. Cooking food, breeding children and being a slave to her husband -this is woman's fate. A woman is not considered equal to a man, such is the blind belief sustained through the ages. The law has guaranteed equality to women, but that is only on paper. Equality has not been practiced. Hence jobs must be reserved for women in all walks of life. They must be freed from the tyranny of homework. The latent talent of women should be brought to the limelight. Society does not progress as long as women remain oppressed. Society must be rid of deep-rooted beliefs and old practices. Beginning with women in villages every woman should be given justice. Lohia strove for this cause. According to him the emancipation of women was the foundation of social revolution; without this there can be no prosperity.”http://www.drlohiacentenary.org/index_more.html