How can you read the writings on the wall in poll-bound West Bengal without stepping out in Kolkata? You come with me, nearly 600 kilometres north to the Siliguri corridor, the narrow, 60-kilometre, or if you stretch it right back to North Dinajpur district, 90-kilometre strip joining the Bengali mainland to its Himalayan and Dooars districts to the north and the east, respectively. And more precisely, we begin with the walls of Naxalbari.
If anybody kept track of these things anymore, we would now be observing the 59th anniversary of the armed Maoist uprising that began right here, this precise week in 1967. That’s why the first writings on the wall we read are in village Bengaijote, part of the Naxalbari cluster, where the Maoist insurgency saw its first spark.
Serendipity, or reporter’s luck, I came here in that anniversary week and found two old comrades busy giving a fresh coat of paint and a vigorous ‘jhaadu-pochha’ (scrub) to the storied memorial to that lost revolution, where busts of Marx, Lenin, Engels (spelt Angles, never mind), Stalin, Mao, Charu Mazumdar and Saroj Dutta stand. I’ve deliberately excluded one for now. The first five were the grand deities the revolution prayed to. The last two were its local founder and his successor, respectively. And then the name I excluded mischievously but here we are.
Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Mao, is Marshal Lin Piao (Biao), the strongman boss of the Chinese PLA, and often seen as the second most powerful figure in the Communist Party of China. Until, one day all of a sudden (13 September, 1971), he was gone. The aircraft carrying him and his family crashed in Mongolia in what history knows as the Lin Biao incident. The official Chinese explanation was that he was fleeing after a failed coup, or the so-called ‘Project 571’.
As with much of that history of Communism, doubts and arguments persist but it’s believed he was escaping to the Soviet Union. By this time, as we well know, a Pakistani-brokered thawing had taken place between China and the US. Nevertheless, Lin was condemned as a traitor and charged with planning a coup along with Mao’s wife Jiang Qing. Both were consigned to the CPC’s hall of shame as ‘counter revolutionaries’. But, not in Naxalbari. Here, Bengaijote is probably the only spot in the world where you’ll still find Mao and Lin next to each other. And the ‘history’ doesn’t bother Punya Singh Rajbongshi, a Scheduled Caste comrade sprucing up the memorial for the anniversaries; Naxalbari uprising’s 59th and 156th of Lenin’s birth (22 April).
How can you have Lin Biao with Mao, I ask.
‘Because Lin Biao and Chairman Mao, our Chairman, were great comrades,’ Rajbongshi says.
But, didn’t Lin betray Mao who, in turn, had him killed? I persist.
‘No, that’s propaganda. It’s that Liu Shaoqi who conspired against him,’ Rajbongshi was firm. I didn’t remind him that Liu had died almost two years earlier. Why argue with the faithful.
On the memorial wall meanwhile, another old comrade, in a significantly higher ‘spiritual’ state, is sticking pre-painted wallpaper that says, translated from Bangla: “There’s no liberation through votes. Liberation is only through revolution on the path of Naxalbari.” This, days before Naxalbari witnessed 92 percent turnout. Vote is the only revolution people believe in now.
If Naxalbari is where the revolution rose, it’s also where it lies buried. In 2021, the seat went to the BJP. Its candidate Anandamay Burman won by nearly 71,000 votes, netting 58 percent of the vote. About an hour’s drive off the highway we catch him doing a door-to-door campaign in Matigara (the constituency is now called Matigara-Naxalbari). The soft-spoken schoolteacher and lifetime RSS karyakarta says the revolution brought people nothing but misery.
In this West Bengal election the Left is in a dead heat with the Congress for the wooden spoon. This, also when the latest avatar of the Naxals, in East-Central India, has been entombed. Far in the South, in Kerala, the Left fights double incumbency. And unless it pulls off an incredible surprise on 4 May, we could proclaim the conclusive marginalisation of all Left in our independent history. A united Communist Party of India (CPI) won 16 Lok Sabha seats even in the 1951 general election.
The end of armed Communism was a matter of time. The marginalisation of the mainstream Left is self-inflicted. They were taken down by just one sentiment from their peak of 53 seats in 2004: anti-Americanism. They pulled out of the UPA and tried to pull it down, even joined hands with the BJP over the nuclear deal. They’ve only rolled downhill since, the Pinarayi Vijayan exception apart.
In so many decades of disagreeing and arguing with the Left, I’ve always found them civilised, open-minded and good-humoured. But, unchanging. In 1988 I was intrigued that the communists in Beijing and Moscow were changing but not in Calcutta. That question took me to Calcutta. My abiding memory is sitting with state secretary Saroj Mukherjee under portraits of Lenin, Stalin, Marx, the usual suspects.
Deng and Gorbachev have changed their Communism. Why aren’t Indian communists reforming, I asked.
“Because my Communism,” he said, looking up at the portraits as if for inspiration, “is purer than that of Deng and Gorbachev.” You can find that article in the India Today archives.
Almost two decades later one of his successors, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, tried to change too. I had two long WalkTheTalk conversations with him and asked him, inevitably, how his invitation to private and foreign capital squared with his ideology.
“My ideology is my belief,” he said, “But, I’m not running a revolutionary government. I have to work within my Constitution.” Now, that was change but not the kind the ideological base was ready for.
The mass campaign against his planned industrial townships Singur and Nandigram was led not by his political opposition but ideological comrades far to his Left, many of them from the intellectual clique.
For them this was a betrayal. They killed his dream, burned his party and Mamata Banerjee rose to bury it. The BJP is building its new home over that grave. Even in that most unlikely event of Pinarayi Vijayan salvaging Kerala, this election cycle will mark a most dramatic demise of a formidable political force. And if you did manage to build a mausoleum or a memorial for India’s Left, the epitaph could read something like: Because I let doctrine become my dogma, and ideology my obstacle. That, too, will be a writing on the wall, even if on an imaginary one.
Postscript: Naxalbari is now mostly forgotten but Siliguri is top of the mind. The BJP has made its vulnerability a key electoral plank, linking it to “demographic change” and dovetailing neatly into its polarisation pitch.
The BJP’s point is made somewhat more understatedly by former foreign secretary and now Rajya Sabha MP Harsh Shringla. “The sensitivity of the region makes any further demographic changes a problem.” Infiltration, he says, continues because too much of the border is still not fenced in sensitive areas.
That would refer mostly to North Dinajpur where the corridor begins narrowing. West Bengal’s 2,216 km border with Bangladesh is mostly fenced but 569 km remains open. Some is riverine though 456 km can be fenced. It remains open because the state government, Shringla says, hasn’t released the land.
This vulnerability is PM Modi’s campaign pitch and senior security officials here also worry. “Bangladesh or Nepal won’t invade us. And if the Chinese come down the Himalayas they’ll be decimated,” a top commander says. But, then “we saw the farmers hold the capital under siege, even the Shaheen Bagh protests”.
Anti-CAA activist Sharjeel Imam’s speech where he called blocking Siliguri neck and cutting off Assam the “duty of us Muslims”, especially because “Siliguri mein Muslim aksariyat hai” (Siliguri has Muslim majority), has left a scar.
It still doesn’t justify his long incarceration because you can’t jail young people indefinitely for stupidity and bringing disgrace on their IIT education. But, it has fuelled the BJP’s polarisation proposition in West Bengal. This infiltration-demographic change-national security-polarisation is the dominant strain in the entire BJP campaign. Development takes the second place.
The one area where the BJP doesn’t have an answer for the TMC is leadership. While Mamata Banerjee is a Bengali titan and probably the most skilful campaigner in the country, the BJP is true to its approach of not projecting an obvious leader. It doesn’t have one either. It’s seeking a vote against Mamata, and for Modi.
Further, on the leadership issue Mamata Banerjee delivers a one-two punch to the BJP because she also has an heir apparent, nephew Abhishek Banerjee. We catch up with him at Kanthi (formerly Contai) about 150 kilometres from Kolkata, past what would’ve become the bustling Nandigram industrial zone. Now, its endless natural green is broken by islands of plastic nettings as farmers have dug up pits for aquaculture.
Abhishek has the style and panache of his aunt, makes a grand entry to a platform set some 25 metres ahead of the stage, bows to the crowd and delivers a 25-minute assault on Amit Shah, Narendra Modi, and the BJP, in that order. The slogan we hear most often is: Je lorche sobar dake, sei jitabe Bangla Ma ke (the one who fights for everyone’s call is the one who fights for mother Bengal).
The TMC has made it a fight of Bengal versus the BJP and Bangla versus Hindi.
As we turn the corner wading through the returning crowds at Kanthi two young policemen in blue uniform stand out distinctly. I lean sideways to look at their shoulders to read which police force they are from. It says ‘WINNERS’.
Now what kind of a police force is that? And if that’s a private security agency, these young women look too fit for that, also they exude far too much authority for mere security guards.
A five-minute conversation tells us the story. The BJP’s big criticism of the Mamata Banerjee government is over women’s safety. She has therefore created a specialised female cadre within her police only to look after women’s security across the state. And she has personally chosen the name for this cadre of uniformed young women: WINNERS. The writings you read don’t necessarily have to be only on the walls, you also find them on the shoulders of uniformed young women.