our home of revolution
Naxalbari has been revered as the birthplace of an influential armed rebellion in the political history of post-independence India. On May 25, 1967, the small town and Aramdeh block of Siliguri subdivision of Darjeeling district of West Bengal witnessed a peasant revolt, which triggered a nationwide political revolt against the systemic injustices that flourished within our democracy. When I visited it, in the tea-growing Terai region at the base of the Himalayas, amid the high-voltage Bengal assembly elections, I saw a distinct Naxalbari. The once red bastion of ultra-left Indian communists, with all its concomitant romanticism, was in my thoughts as I cut down the cobbled lanes of National Highway 327 to lush tea gardens. The slogan ‘Tomar Bari, Amar Bari, Naxalbari, Naxalbari’ (Your home, my home is Naxalbari) of my growing up years in Left-ruled Bengal reverberated in my mind. I was in shock. It took me less than 20 minutes to reach the center of this last revolution from the Bagdogra airport in Siliguri. The road leading to Naxalbari from the highway has created many surprising situations. Posters, banners, flags and cut-outs of the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) and BJP were strewn all over. I didn’t see a single communist flag. There was an obvious reason. The ultra-leftist CPI (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation-Jungle Santhal, led by Dipankar Bhattacharya, is the most prominent of the 20-odd division groups of the original Communist Party of India (ML), founded by Naxalite masterminds such as Charu Mazumdar and Kanu Sanyal. – Withdrew from the electoral fray to strengthen the ruling TMC against its “class enemy”, the BJP.
a sad milestone
To reach the place where the famous clash between police and villagers took place on that fateful day in 1967, one needs to take a one-lane road running parallel to the railway tracks across the Mechi river towards the Nepal border check post of Kakarbhitta. . There is a small piece of land next to the Bengizot Primary School, where a memorial to the martyrs was built by the CPI (ML) many years ago. There were seven busts of Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Lin Biao, Charu Mazumdar, Saroj Dutta and Mahadev Mukherjee, while a small plaque next to them bore the names of the 11 people killed that day – Dhaneshwari Devi, Seemeswari Malik, Nayaneshwari Malik , Surubala Burman, Sonamati Singh, Phoolmati Devi, Shamsari Saibani, Gaudrau Saibani, Kharsingh Malik and two unidentified dead children. I was surprised to see that there was no idol of the local tribal leader Jungle Santhal. The statue of Kanu Sanyal, another stalwart of the movement, was also missing.
last remnants
A five-kilometer drive to the Sabadella hamlet on the Serpentine Tar Road outside the town of Naxalbari brought me to one of the most remarkable relics associated with Sanyal. His dilapidated hut was the only place other than the Martyrs’ Memorial where I could see the Red Flag with its iconic sickle and hammer. The once flamboyant Naxalite leader had ended his life by committing suicide. Ironically, Sanyal’s radical revolutionary ideology also died slowly in his lifelong laboratory of Leninist socialism and Maoist militant communism. The recent defeat of the Leftists and political humiliation by his party CPI(ML) has proved to be the last nail in the coffin of Naxalbari’s epoch-making communist past. Crossing that space I could see how the socio-political space, once occupied by the ultra-leftists, has been mostly occupied by the BJP. This summer’s assembly election results were a clear manifestation of this.
a wuthering low
Darjeeling district, along with a significant part of northern Bengal, bore some of Mamata’s ‘khela hobe’ (game on) war slogan. The victory of Anandamoy Burman of BJP from Matigara-Naxalbari assembly seat by a huge margin of over 70,000 votes and a massive 58.1 per cent votes saw a paradigm shift in the political history of Naxalbari. Believe it or not, the Communists had a hand in that victory too. The Darjeeling-headquartered Communist Party of Revolutionary Marxists (CPRM), founded by former CPI(M) MPs Tamang Dawa Lama and RB Rai, forged an unprecedented left-right alliance with the BJP. Even with their short and imperceptible existence, the Pahari Party helped Burman in the siege battle, in which the lone Left party, the SUCI(C), got less than 1,000 votes from NOTA. The highlighting fact was the completion of a 180 degree turn at Naxalbari.
Suvam Pal is an international media professional, writer and documentary filmmaker
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