India after Naxalbari. Bernard D'Mello
Emergency—when the Opposition was jailed, the press gagged, the constitution emasculated, and elections suspended—is widely regarded as an exception in India’s otherwise excellent “democratic record.” Liberals apart, even influential left historians, Professor Bipan Chandra, for example, bought this story. What was essentially a class project—the Gandhi-Nehru-supported-by-the-big-bourgeoisie-led national movement (Chandra characterizes it as a “bourgeois democratic movement”)—was depicted as the national project, never mind the democratic and anti-colonial proclivities of the many autonomous peasant uprisings before and after 1885 that were also part of the independence struggle. To this left historian, the “bourgeois democratic movement,” led by Gandhi and his protégé Nehru and supported by the Indian bourgeoisie, was all that mattered, for the capitalist class, he claims, was independent, anti-imperialist, very modern and liberal, and it was these characteristics that, over time, shaped the political culture and economy of independent India.8 Indeed, for the period after the transfer of power, even when it had become evident that the socioeconomic and state structures of the past had remained largely intact, Professors Bipan Chandra, and his former students turned colleagues, Mridula Mukherjee and Aditya Mukherjee, remained captivated by what they identified as the progressive sections of the bourgeoisie, and with Nehru and the Nehruvian model of development. Their largely uncritical glorification, bordering on hero worship, of Nehru makes it difficult for the discerning reader to distinguish them from conventional Congress nationalist historians.9
Clearly a section of left intellectuals was deceived by the then establishment’s marketing (dressing up) of what was in fact a class project as the national project. The world looks very different when one examines it from below. “1968” India was packed with contradictions that came into the open in the political struggles of the underdogs to resolve them and in the severe repression of those campaigns by the Indian state.
I came of political age at this time, and so I don’t think I can be dispassionate in my analyses of them. But I will try to throw some light on the main social issues of the time, making no pretense to comprehensiveness. Essentially, there are two distinct parts to what I am about to deal with, one, the various fountainheads of resistance and struggle, and two, the sources of the repression. The two cannot but be viewed in interaction with each other, for both are embedded in the history I am setting out. The distinction might however prove fruitful to grasp right at the start. I will try to explain important developments, and figure out the social forces of the past from which they emerged. I believe that if one looks reality in the face, the chances of adequately explaining it are better. For instance, that the principal architect of the Emergency, Mrs. Gandhi, could come back to power, in 1980, in a matter of three years, indeed, legitimately via a massive popular mandate, when in 1977 her opponents triumphantly rode into office on the back of public indignation against her Emergency, says something important about the shallow democratic consciousness of the Indian establishment and ruling classes.
THE CHARACTER OF THE ESTABLISHMENT
The declaration of the state of Emergency in June 1975 brought, as one commentator put it,
19 months of terror during which there were wholesale arrests without any redress; all conceivable opponents of the regime were jailed; prison conditions became more savage still; many more ‘ordinary’ prisoners were chained, assaulted, maimed; some vanished, and not even their corpses were found.10 ‘Black laws’ were passed; men of all ages, young and old, in towns and villages were forcibly sterilized; without warning, strong-arm squads marched into urban bustees, demolished homes, shops and workshops, pushed the people into trucks and deported them to distant barren sites. At the same time, strikes and meetings were banned; … wages were effectively cut and bonuses withdrawn.… And none of this was allowed to be reported; press censorship and a strict monopoly of official news manufacture were imposed.11
And, as another narrator, with an emphasis on the economy put it,
rapid industrial growth, increasing exports and foreign investment, and benefits for urban bourgeois classes and rural agricultural entrepreneurs, with the costs being paid by a repressed industrial laboring class, an urban lumpenproletariat and the lower echelons of the peasantry and landless agricultural workers in the countryside, all kept firmly in tow through an increasingly powerful police establishment …, with the whole process enveloped in continual gasconades of leftist rhetoric from a rightist central government.12
It must be stressed that all these happenings were in keeping with the class character of a regime that permitted capital untrammeled power over labor. At the time, J. R. D. Tata, board chairman of one of India’s top large business houses, told a U.S. journalist that “things had gone too far. You can’t imagine what we’ve been through here—strikes, boycotts, demonstrations. Why, there were days I couldn’t walk out of my office into the street. The parliamentary system is not suited to our needs.”13
The substance of the state repression was, however, in place even before the declaration of the Emergency; the latter only greatly enhanced the degree of it. Consider the ordeal of Primila Lewis, a ’68er, who along with her British husband, then the head of the Indian branch of Oxford University Press, had rented a farmhouse in the Mehrauli tehsil (an administrative subdivision of the district) just south of New Delhi in 1971, much before the Emergency began. There, she was to find, much to her dismay, that her neighbors, pillars of the establishment, high-level diplomats, senior bureaucrats and military officers, top industrialists and politicians, including Prime Minister Indira Gandhi herself, were provided land and other facilities for their “model farms” dirt cheap by the Delhi Development Authority. They were, in effect, absentee landlords who practiced a modern-day version of slavery in the treatment of their farm-workers. All the labor laws on the statute, including the Minimum Wages Act, were being violated with impunity. Impelled by a sense of natural justice, and with courage, Primila helped organize the Mehrauli Agricultural Workers’ Union.14
A mere suggestion that the “modern” gentry implement the provisions of labor law on their farms was enough of a provocation, for none of these modern-day slave owners seemed to have an iota of democratic consciousness. Did the wretched low-caste, migrant farm-workers, driven by poverty from their villages in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, have any rights at all? The union, the “modern” gentry decided, had to be stamped out, not a difficult task, given the fact that the government, through the police, the bureaucracy and the judiciary as its handmaidens, had no commitment to implement the law that it had itself enacted. As for Primila, having unequivocally declared that she was on the side of the farm-workers, she was to be treated just like the laborers she had helped organize, with an added dose of personal vendetta for disowning her own class, for becoming, what the establishment deemed, a “Naxalite.”
Strictly speaking, a Naxalite is one who has been part of an organized armed struggle not merely to overthrow the established government and regime but also to upturn the existing class-caste structure, to bring about a “New Democratic” revolution. But, in the prevailing context of rebellion, even a left-winger who was part of a collective endeavor that challenged the prevailing political authority with a view to overthrowing the existing government, or indeed, even one who took on the existing political authority without any intention of replacing it, was also deemed a “Naxalite,” if s/he proved sufficiently sincere, courageous, and uncompromising. Like Primila, and mattering little whether they were deemed Naxalites or not, there were thousands of such ’68ers in the India of those times.
HUG THE TREES, SAVE THE VALLEY
The ’68ers include even those “crusading Gandhians” and “ecological Marxists” whom the ecologist Madhav Gadgil and the social historian Ramachandra Guha associate with “that most celebrated of ‘forest conflicts,’ indeed, ‘ecological conflicts,’ the Chipko (Hug the Trees) movement that began in April 1973.”15 Guha’s The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, first published in 1989, views the Chipko Movement in a broader historical perspective, locating its historical roots in the forest policy of the colonial period, designed to meet the demand for teak wood for shipbuilding and railway tracks. This policy led to deep, widespread resentment