When Calcutta was gripped by Naxalite violence and police brutality

 

When Calcutta was gripped by Naxalite violence

                         and  police brutality.                                       

          

             Jawhar Sircar, The Wire, 11th March, 2021

 

      On 8th August 1969, I was thrilled as I entered the portals of modern India’s oldest college and the fountainhead of the great Indian awakening, Presidency College, Calcutta. A bright red flag fluttered atop the college from the pole that had hitherto hosted the national flag. Hand-written posters and slogans in bold black ink were plastered all over the walls, proclaiming the arrival of the Indian revolution. There were also large stencil portraits of Chairman Mao on the college walls, though the most overwhelming one was in the canteen. And scrawled in unmistakable thick black letters, both inside the college and outside, were definitive slogans, like “China’s Chairman is our Chairman” and “When Order Stands for Injustice, Disorder is the Beginning of Justice”. 

                As I climbed the solemn, iconic main staircase, I was reminded of the fracas that Subhas Chandra Bose had with a white racist teacher on these very stairs, for which he was expelled. Loud shouts boomed from somewhere near, and all of a sudden, a group of slogan-shouting students appeared at the head of the stairs. I had to stop for them to march down, shouting slogans condemning American imperialism, rather menacingly. They brushed past me, and though this first brush with Naxalites was not so spectacular, the others over the next three years were associated with palpable pain.

      But let us step back a bit to get the picture better. I remember quite distinctly the public euphoria in early 1967, when the first left-dominated United Front (UF) coalition came to power in West Bengal, dislodging the stodgy old Congress. Street lamps were wrapped in crimson cellophane and their red glow matched the sea of red flags, banners, posters and festoons that flapped in the joyous air. Then, all of a sudden, in May that year, armed tribals rose in revolt and killed landlords and policemen in broad daylight, somewhere near Siliguri. It took a while to understand that this was an act of an extreme left group of communists, and not by the left government itself — which was actually embarrassed by it. In quite a short time, these villages where the peasants’ movement had erupted, Naxalbari, Kharibari and Phansidewa, became widely known. So did the leaders of the insurrection, Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal.

  This signalled the entry of political killings in Bengal, that continues as a part of its tradition. The left-led UF government could hardly control either the extremists or the ‘bourgeois backlash’. The UF government was dismissed by the Governor soon enough, but left extremists, who came to be known as Naxals in Bengali and Naxalites in English, had emerged by then as a force to reckon with. College Street and its neighbourhood, that housed Calcutta University and almost a dozen other colleges, were always on the boil, as bands of belligerent students went around establishing the long-delayed Indian revolution. A few months before we joined college, the UF government was re-elected, but it still floundered in tackling the Naxalites, many of who were their own ex-comrades. It faced immense pressure from an almighty central government, steered by Indira Gandhi and personified in West Bengal by a Machiavellian Siddhartha Shankar Ray.

       In April 1969, the (second) UF government released the top Naxalite leaders from jail, as a gesture of goodwill. This, however, rebounded and all the disparate extreme left groups soon grouped together to form a new extremist party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist Leninist). The CPI (ML) became a sworn enemy of its own earlier parent party, the CPI (M) and its nemesis. Calcutta started witnessing regular bloody street battles between the ruling Marxists and their breakaway extremists, the Naxalites. No one was ever sure where bombs would be thrown next and who would die or be injured as ‘collateral damage’.

       It was not just Calcutta or the red pockets in rural Bengal that had taken up the culture of the bomb and the gun: the whole world outside also appeared to be in a turmoil. The ghost of Che Guevara tormented dictators in Latin America, while Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution shook all of China. In the west, several thousand students marched hand-in-hand along Paris’s Champs Élysées, fuming against the imperious French president, Charles de Gaulle. In August 1969, the Woodstock Music Festival took place in the US, shattering all hitherto-upheld norms and shocking many. The Beatles were also at their height in Britain — screaming their lungs out with the anguish of the youth.

     In Presidency College, the Charu Mazumdar line was clear: “Chairman Mao would lead the way and that armed struggle is the only alternative”. One day, I came across a bunch of students in the canteen, passing Mao’s Red Book around with utter religiosity, but I was deprived of the chance to hold it, as I was not one of them. To these boys and girls, the Bengali and Hindi services of Radio Peking were the last word, and they denounced all news in India as the ‘propaganda’ of the feudal-bourgeois state. During classes, we would often hear deafening slogans just outside, ‘Amaar Naam Tomaar Naam: Vietnam, Vietnam’, rising in a crescendo. Teachers would often have to wait, some quite impatiently, as the sloganeers usually took their own  time and would occasionally start giving speeches.  

         It is a fact that some good students from the best colleges of Bengal did join the movement and many went ‘underground’, but frankly, that number was really not very large. In fact, it were the not-so-privileged colleges in the suburbs and in the districts that actually produced more radicals, where the ‘class war’ was really more authentic. Where Presidency College was concerned, quite a few toppers believed in extremist politics, but not many went the whole hog. The Naxal students of the college established an umbilical link with certain villages in the Debra and Gopiballavpur areas of Midnapore district. After all, Chairman Mao had mandated that the revolution would be led by villages that would encircle the cities and throttle imperialist and repressive forces there. Chatting in the main building, one heard, for instance, that one of our students had quit studies to work in the villages of Debra. Someone told us, quite authoritatively, that a former student of Physics was now leading the peasants’ movement in a difficult pocket in the Santhal Parganas. We also heard that some comrades had quietly returned to the city temporarily to ‘take shelter’ in our campus, in the outhouses or abandoned inner recesses of the buildings. Any unnecessary curiosity about such matters was, however, dealt with quite harshly. The revolution continued to stop our classes at its sweet will.

     Though some of our group were considered too vocal and were threatened or thrashed at periodic intervals, we were far too young and stubborn to become wiser. We could not remain quiet when Vidyasagar’s statue was decapitated in College Square. But what could not be destroyed by Mao’s children was the spirit of inquiry and questioning of Presidency College. Students continued to argue as furiously as they done in the preceding one and a half centuries They continued to sit and chat in the same historic ‘arcades’ and under the old classical arches of the main ‘heritage’ building. Addas in the ‘portico’ surely enriched us more than the syllabus, as did peer group exchanges of world-views — that were still being formed in our minds. We pursued preposterous postulates over cups of reasonably-priced lukewarm canteen tea, along with something that resembled toasted bread and omelette. When more resources could be garnered, these arguments would be carried over to the neighbouring Coffee House, over more expensive coffee and decent snacks. Bunking classes was a sacred tradition, and as soon as we had a couple of weeks of ‘normal classes’, bunking began. Grace cinema was our nearest movie hall, but we had to muster a few coins first, without touching our return bus fares. A few reckless students defied the unofficial ban by the Naxalites and did compete in inter-college and university debates and quiz contests. Though we won several laurels and prizes for our college, there was hardly anyone to share the joy, as these had been branded as ‘bourgeois distractions’. Sports and other activities were also not greatly encouraged, though intolerance was less intense where they were concerned.

       By the middle of 1970, urban revolutionaries were getting more restless and had started snatching arms from policemen. They also  began devising more ingenious forms of annihilation of class enemies. It was common those days for men to wrap a shawl over the upper part of the body, as Bengalis were always mortally scared of the cold. Naxalites started carrying crude pipe-guns or a spring-knifes under their shawls, and often fired at close range as they walked past unsuspecting policemen, or dug their knives deep into them.  When nearby policemen picked up their heavy antiquated rifles and gave chase, the fleeing Naxalite would lead them into narrow lanes that were quite common in this old part of the city. Once the posses entered the lanes, they would either be lost or be ambushed. Bhabani Dutta Lane, that skirted the northern boundary of Presidency College, was one such mukta-anchal (liberated zone) and even the police dreaded entering it without adequate protection. This lane often supplied unadulterated anti-socials to our college’s revolution, to carry out unpleasant tasks like smashing up college property and beating up dissenters. They often came inside the campus and college buildings, and some took up positions on the road-facing windows and balconies, to hurl bombs on passing police vehicles or to shoot at the police outside. The latter were prohibited by long-standing orders from entering educational campuses in hot pursuit. College Street was never quiet, and one of the lasting smells we remember is that of pungent ‘tear gas’ that wafted into our classrooms as police frequently fired these shells outside.

       Life continued to be tough and classes became rather irregular. A police firing in Gopiballabhpur in distant Midnapore or one in nearby Kailash Bose Street, in which one of the comrades had been shot, meant that the Naxalites would surely shut down the college. This is when several teachers came forward to offer lessons at their homes, even though these were quite small. I remember how one of our dear professors cramped us all into his tiny verandah (thank god, some ‘bunked’ even these classes, or they would not fit in) and he completed several lessons there.

      In late 1969, the second United Front government was also dismissed by the central government and Governor’s rule re-imposed. The law and order situation, however, worsened and police operations became harsher. But inside the college campus, Naxalites continued to rule without challenge. Elections were not held and they controlled everything and the authorities were keen to avoid clashes and violence. The pro-China Naxalites of our years were stuck in their narrow interpretations and not open to debates or discussions, that had earlier been the hallmark of the earlier generation of brilliant students who had preached radical and revolutionary Marxism. In the 1969 to 1971 period Naxalite students simply scorned all other shades of left belief, such as ours, and branded them without reasoning as decadent and revisionist. Those students who were reckless enough to stand up to them were heckled and often thrashed on some pretext or the other. They claimed they had enough problems with state power that had, incidentally, started hardening its position under Siddhartha Shankar Ray’s ‘proxy government’. With no elected government in power, SS Ray ran the whole show as ‘advisor’ to the Governor and introduced quite ruthless methods to crush left extremism. Police reprisals were carried out systematically and even those of us who were often opposed to the Naxalites in principle were aghast at the sheer brutality.

          In September 1970, after a particularly blood-stained assault by the police somewhere in Bengal, Naxalite students in our college decided to let loose violence within the campus. Some of us were called out of the classrooms and beaten up rather seriously. Though many of our assailants were fellow students, those who were particularly rough and merciless were goons from the neighbourhood. Four of us sustained pretty serious injuries and two had be rushed to the hospital by some girls, as most boys had run for cover. These samaritans had been looking on with horror at the bloodstained mayhem and were waiting for the one-sided beating to end. SS Ray’s government, however, found this clash to be the perfect occasion to withdraw the old standing order prohibiting policemen from entering educational institutions. For the first time, armed policemen marched into our campus and set up fortified positions. This changed the scenario quite drastically and though classes became more regular, no student could really tolerate rifles and bayonets poking at them.

       But then, Naxalite violence elsewhere also showed little sign of abating. In December 1970, some students of Jadavpur University murdered their Vice Chancellor in broad daylight and in cold blood. I was really appalled to learn that two of those had either committed this dastardly act or had a hand in it were my former classmates from our rather our privileged school. Their well-to-do fathers whisked them off immediately, and sent them abroad. By 1971, the killings started coming closer to us as barbaric activities by both desperate Naxalites and a belligerent, vindictive police kept on escalating. We were told, in hushed whispers, how the elder brother of one students had been shot dead by the police last night near his home in the dreaded ‘red zone’ of Chanditala in Calcutta, but not before he could lob at least two bombs at their raiding vehicle. But alarm had cast its long shadow and most students scampered back home before sunset. An undeclared curfew enveloped large swathes of the city. In many areas, families kept praying for their members to return home safely, and once they did, they bolted the doors and windows quite tight. Even lights were often switched off in the contested zones, as gunshots rang through the uneasy night and sounds of bombs shattered the darkness. In the daytime, we heard stories of what happened the night before — of how boys, many quite innocent, were dragged out of their homes before their terror-stricken families. They were then subjected to third degree torture by incensed policemen, either on mere suspicion or to extract information about Naxalites. Some of these victims even lost their senses temporarily or became total nervous wrecks. On the other hand, poor defenceless police constables were regularly hacked to death by Naxalites, just to score their point. The biggest casualty of this darkest phase was the proverbial, swinging night life of Calcutta, that had been made so famous by its crooners and musical bands on Park Street and Chowringhee. The cheeky, raucous evenings and bold cabarets were finished, for all time. 

       But what happened in the autumn of 1971 has hardly been discussed in the public domain. Through that year, the military crackdown in East Pakistan and the genocide and mass-scale rapes there had infuriated people in West Bengal more than other parts of India. People demanded a response and the sight of the army moving in large numbers through the city was a comforting indication that we were preparing to take on East Pakistan. We had no idea that SS Ray’s government had decided to use some of these army regiments to assist civil police in ‘exterminating the Naxalite menace’. As General JFR Jacob of the Eastern Command confessed later on, sections of the armed forces joined hands with the local police to hunt down Naxalites in Calcutta  — in what was branded as Operation Steeplechase. In Calcutta, Naxalite extremists were cornered and holed up in their last ‘red bastions’ like Baranagar and Chanditala. Commandos and armed policemen cordoned off entire areas, with the help of anti-socials, many of who would go on to become Congress leaders later on. The Naxalites were then shot point blank, often tied to lampposts, or at their very own doorsteps. Some were arrested and taken into police vans and many never seen ever again. Stories were rife of how these police vans stopped in the middle of nowhere, late in the night. The police opened the doors of the vans, freed the arrested Naxalites and told them to run away. But as soon as they did so, they were killed, shot in their back. The official story was that they were escaping from police custody.     

     Films like Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta 71 and Padatik (The Guerrilla Fighter) brought out the horror of this period, while Satyajit Ray’s Calcutta trilogy: Pratidwandi (The Adversary), Seemabaddha (Company Limited) and Jana Aranya (The Middleman) dealt with the same frustrations of the young during the Naxalite period, 1970 to 1973, the hopelessness, unemployment and the debasement of morals. Mrinal Sen’s Ek Adhuri Kahani (An Unfinished Story) and Chorus also dwelt with this unforgettably painful era, as did many others later on like Hazar Chaurasi ki Maa (The Mother of Prisoner no 1084). The flames of extremist violence were eventually doused in Kolkata but an entire generation of young men and women had to suffered their different traumas. I remember bumping into a classmate from my school one day and he looked very, very disturbed. I had no idea that he had turned to extremism and so I asked him what was wrong. But he did not reply — but it was clear that he was on the run. A few weeks later, newspapers mentioned that there had been an attempted jailbreak and a few ‘desperadoes’ had to be shot dead by the authorities. He was one of them. When the news was finally confirmed, I was wracked by pain, fury, frustration and a sense of letdown. He was too young to die. As were many others.

    But while the conflagration of Calcutta and Bengal was soon stomped out, the embers that flew from here lit up other ‘prairie fires’ — in different parts of India’s interior. And, many of  these never seem to end.

 

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