THE INDIAN SCENE SIGNS OF A NEW MILITANCY AMONG THE NATION’S POOR

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32274, 17 April 1970, Page 12

THE INDIAN SCENE SIGNS OF A NEW MILITANCY AMONG THE NATION’S POOR

(By

GEOFFREY MOORHOUSE.

reporting from Barasat, Bengal, to the “Guardian”, itanchester)

(Reprinted by arrangement)

For the closest parallel to the events of the last few days here you have to look to Russia and to China. I suppose it must have been a bit like this when the Narodniks were planning revolution before Lenin came on the scene, or in the backblocks of Kweiyang before Chiang Kai-shek was sent packing into Formosa. I imagine we have just seen a small important step towards the rising of the Indian peasants.

From all over the subcontinent 1500 delegates have been in session in this village, a couple of hours out of Calcutta, which already has a reputation for rebellion. It was here, a hundred years ago, that the Indian serfs began to turn on the infamous indigo planters; and round here they seem to know Warren Hastings as “the notorious British despot.”

Well, times have changed somewhat. Barasat has been aflutter with red flags carrying a white sickle device. Young men in red berets, bearing bamboo staves, have been marshalling the crowds in the conference compound. Young ladies have been dispensing tea and chappatis to hungry comrades. Exhibitions have been mounted and all of them have been calculated to excite and inspire what they call “the toiling peasantry.” Small boys with long canes bave been leading posses of illiterate old men along rows of pictures showing the rise of Lenin, the fall of British imperialism, the continuing struggle of the heroic North Vietnamese. A Peasant Nation This has not been a unique demonstration of Indian communism. Less than 36 hours before some idiot tried to assassinate him, India’s most turbulent politician, Jyoti Basu, was addressing maybe 100,000 Marxists on the Maidan in Calcutta. He was surrounded by his own Red Guards toughs, supple, and enormously well-disciplined young men. They sang the Internationale through loudspeakers when that demonstration was over and hundreds of torches were lit, and it must all have seemed a promise of something much better for the future in the sweatshops of Howrah and the. Chitpore Road. in spite of industrial growth since independence this is still a peasant nation, with 37 out of every 50 people illiterate, faced periodically with all the horrors of agrarian poverty; no-one round here can forget that in 1943, in Bengal alone. 12 million people died of famine. From time to time good and gentle men have tried to remedy the social ills and evils that flourish on this baked land and they have utterly failed. No Indian peasant can point to any significant advance he and his family have made because of Ghandi. And Vrnobe Bhave’s bhoodah (land-giving) movement has scarcely left a mark; he still wanders across India and manages occasionally to persuade a landlord to donate some fields to his fiefs; and more often than not these are retrieved the moment the old man has passed on.

Something More Rugged

But now something more rugged has started to happen, particularly in West Bengal. Last month the state’s United Front Government which was dominated by Communists—collapsed in a mess of spite, bickering and downright thuggery. Yet in 13 hectic months it had achieved two considerable things. One was a substantial increase in a lot of urban wage rates. The other was a redistribution of land in the country districts. This was not a gentle process. It meant, very often, that the peasants took acres by force from the jotedars, the small and devious landlords who had over the years accumulated far more property than they were strictly and legally entitled to.

The Central Government in Delhi, for good political reasons of its own, had never dared to enforce the law properly before. The U.F. Government in West Bengal merely allowed the peasantry to take the law into their own hands. People have been killed in this process, others

mutilated, a lot more have been badly knocked about an'd frightened out of their wits. But 300,000 acres, as a result, have changed hands since the start of 1969. To some extent it has all been part of a mighty unpleasant political game. But if you stand where Sibsankar Jha stands, it will look like the first glimmering of ultimate salvation. He has been in Barasat as party delegate from his area of Bibar with his Communist badge dangling lopsided from the breast of his dhoti He is 46 years old and he has seven children. He inherited five acres from his father, most of it rice paddy, but for the last three years the rice crops have failed in Bihar and so he has been growing sugar cane and corn.

Rapacious Moneylending

This has meant that the family income has dropped from 3500 rupees to 2000 rupees—which is rather more than £2OO a year. On this the family manage to eat rice once a day, as a luxury Otherwise they exist on corn and on pulses, which is a dangerous diet; if taken regularly over five or six years pulses can cause paralysis and beriberi. The family enjoy milk every other year, after their buffalo has calved.

They keep going because they are able to raise loans, but this is quite the most terrible thing in their lives. The state bank lends money to a credit society at 6 per cent, which lends it to a moneylender at 10 per cent. He passes it on to Sibsankar Jha at 25 per cent

interest Indian economists will tell you that no alternative to this rapacious system has yet been devised. And under it Sibsankar Jha’s eldest son—a B.A. of Bihar University —is unemployed and learning how to type to give him what might possibly be a saleable skill. Under it,, the next two boys are about to leave school with no prospect of work either. Under it, Sibsankar Jha confesses that he is himself living on hopes.

At Barasat he and his 1500 comrades have been trying to ’ formulate some of these i hopes. They have a colossal 1 weight of tradition against i them—the feudal exploits-1 tion, the criminal lack of birth control, the inertia of i central government Much I worse, they and their kind I are divided in half-a-dozen 1 different ways at once. Every i speech at Barasat has been < made in English (the language of notorious despots i and merchant-pirates, according to the local rule book) ! before translation, because; the South Indian delegates, would have walked out if! someone had tried to pass the message first in Hindu.

And they are only acting under the cloak of the Communist Party of India, which bows to Moscow. Mr Basu's followers are orientated somewhat farther East. There are several other professions of communism in the land and at the moment they are (sometimes literally) at daggers drawn with each other. But the Naxalites, who are the furthest Left of all and who would follow Chairman Mao down to the last devastating letter, have a new strategy which suggests an all-Indian pattern for the future. From now on, they say, they are briefly abandoning the class struggle in the cities; they are going to encircle the towns and after that everyone can watch out. Everyone in West Bengal, in fact, will be watching out in November, when the new harvest begins and when the jotedars and their mobs see peasants cropping 300,000 acres without the protection of a U.F. government. What happens then could be a preliminary to something larger and nastier than India has known for some years. It could be a foretaste of the time, which must come, when the peasants can forget their divisions and act together. I When I think of Sibsankar , Jha paying his moneylender 25 per cent, I do not think I , should wish to get in their way if and when they do.