Thinking Aloud
Power of class ties
By Sunanda K Datta-Ray
The so-called 'red corridor' speaks of adivasi and Dalit resentment of
society's traditional upper caste leaders.
Maoist depredations in eastern India suggest a new social twist to
Marx's prediction of an epic struggle between the proletariat and
bourgeoisie. Class goes a long way in explaining the recent attack on
an Eastern Frontier Rifles camp in a West Bengal town where 24 jawans
were butchered, and Dalit and Adivasi support for the "Bon (Jungle)
Party", as they call the CPI(Maoist).
Mohit Sen, the son of a Calcutta High Court judge who joined the
undivided Communist Party of India, says in his memoirs that Ranjit
Gupta, one of the last of British India's IP (not today's IPS)
officers, was "a strong sympathiser" of the Communists and kept him
informed in the late Forties of official security plans. Now old and
ill, Gupta acquired fame — some say notoriety because of the methods
used — for liquidating Naxalites when he was Calcutta's Police
Commissioner in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Sen passed on
Gupta's information to the radical Oxford-trained historian Susobhan
Sarkar "resulting in almost all the top leaders of the CPI escaping by
going underground" when the "crackdown" came in 1948.
Arrest warrant
Incidentally, the "underground" for Indrajit Gupta, a Cambridge
graduate who became Union Home Minister under H D Deve Gowda, was my
grandmother's flat in Calcutta. He lived there comfortably — my
grandmother was his aunt — while the police supposedly searched high
and low with an arrest warrant. His brother, also Ranjit Gupta but of
the ICS, was then West Bengal's Home Secretary. Less well-connected
Communists went to jail.
I am dredging this up to illustrate how law enforcers and lawbreakers
can be linked. The Gupta-Sen-Sarkar nexus highlighted the power of
class ties. They came from similar upper middle class backgrounds, had
gone to English-medium schools and the same college where Susobhan
Sarkar taught. They were what Lady Thatcher called "people like us".
There are PLUs at all levels, bound by similar ties of kinship and
friendship.
At the height of the Naxalite troubles a much younger and fitter I
accompanied the Army on a combing operation in West Bengal's Birbhum
district, tramping precariously along the slippery ridge between
waterlogged paddy fields night after night. It was a lark for the
soldiers. Even the local magistrate strode gamely along with a walking
stick. But the bedraggled policemen accompanying us whined unceasingly
and complained bitterly of the military victimising them because they
were Bengali. The Army officer's warnings that they could be heard
across the fields only made them talk louder.
I thought it was Bengali lyricism when they burst into Rabindrasangeet
before dawn broke. But, no, as a light flashed in the distant dark and
went out, to be repeated in another clump of trees, I realised the
singing (like their loud chatter) was to warn Naxalites lurking in the
outlying huts. Apparently, a band of Naxalites had turned up to demand
the ammunition only hours after the police confiscated a jotedar's
gun.
Collusion might still be common. Birbhum's policemen were locals like
the Naxalites. Commonalty may also have been a factor in the attack on
the EFR. It wouldn't have been easy otherwise for 50 Maoists in an
SUV, a pick-up truck and a fleet of six motorcycles to raid the camp
in the heart of a crowded township. The surrounding shopkeepers
obviously knew what was afoot and had disappeared. They had been
warned. But by who?
Few in West Bengal's villages regard the Maoists as untouchables. I am
not talking of opportunistic politicians like Susanta Ghosh, a CPI(M)
minister from West Midnapore, or Mamata Banerjee who have both been
known to play footsy with them. I mean Dalit and adivasi villagers who
regard them as saviours. While nothing is heard of the Rs 400-crore
development package announced last year for the area, Maoist cadres
have reportedly dug wells, built roads and dams and set up health
centres in remote places.
Ideological rebels
Class manifests itself somewhat differently in Bihar. Going to Arrah
district once because of reports of Naxalite activity, I found only
illiterate landless Dalit peasants whose crime was to ask for the
minimum legal wage. Their employers at once summoned the police and
denounced them as ideological rebels. Moustachioed village elders
stalked me as I talked to the Dalits, and ordered me to write they
should be allowed firearms without licenses. Physically, these
worthies looked like the village daroga.
A veteran former Communist, Jolly Mohan Kaul, writes that people
looked up to Jyoti Basu because he was an England-returned barrister.
The CPI co-opted many such men into its central committee without
making them go through the ranks as local recruits had to. But these
gallants or comrades like Prakash and Brinda Karat or Sitaram Yechury
hardly qualify as "indigent wage-earners", "labouring classes" or the
"lowest class of community" whom Marx held to be the only "really
revolutionary class". Dalits and adivasis do, explaining their
misguided support for the Bon Party.
The so-called "red corridor" is not a manifestation of the proletarian
revolution. It speaks of adivasi and Dalit resentment of society's
traditional upper caste leaders, and of Maoist exploitation of this
festering grievance.
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