Analyse the ideological and strategical features of Naxalbari movement. (2002, 1999)
The peasant uprising in the Naxalbari area of Siliguri subdivision, Darjeeling district, West Bengal, of 1967, which became a national event with the police firing of 25 May that year, was the first Indian peasant movement to define itself as the opening of a revolution rather than the redress of a grievance. Analysing it means separating what it believed from what it did, because the gap between the two explains its collapse.
The structural setting
Tenants (adhiars or bargadars) held land from jotedars on insecure, unrecorded sharecropping terms, with Santhal and Rajbanshi cultivators at the bottom. The United Front government that took office in February 1967, with communists in it, raised expectations of land redistribution that its own ministries could not satisfy — a textbook case of relative deprivation in Ted Gurr’s sense.
Ideological features
- Maoism applied to India. Charu Majumdar’s Historic Eight Documents (1965–67) held India to be semi-feudal and semi-colonial; the principal contradiction lay between the peasantry and feudal landlordism backed by imperialism.
- Agrarian revolution as the axis — land seizure was not a welfare demand but the base of a protracted people’s war moving from countryside to city.
- Rejection of the parliamentary path and of the revisionism it attributed to the CPI and the CPI(M); state power, not bargaining, was the object.
- Class-enemy analysis: the jotedar was defined as an enemy to be eliminated, not a party to be negotiated with. Beijing’s People’s Daily hailed it as “Spring Thunder over India” (July 1967) — validation that became a nationalist liability.
Strategical features
- Annihilation of class enemies (khatam) — the deliberate replacement of mass agitation by selective killing, held to generate revolutionary consciousness through action.
- Small secret guerrilla squads in place of open peasant fronts; seizure of land records, crops and firearms; refusal of legal and electoral avenues.
- Liberated base areas on the Yenan model, extended to Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh and Bihar, and from 1970 to Calcutta’s students.
- Organisation: the AICCCR of 1968 became the CPI (Marxist–Leninist) in April 1969 — a party built for insurrection, without trade-union or kisan-sabha anchorage.
Analysis: why the two diverged
Partha Nath Mukherji’s field study is decisive — the peasant’s revolt was against the excesses of the agrarian system, not against the system itself; participants wanted secure tenancy and a fair share, while the leadership wanted state power. D. N. Dhanagare, A. R. Desai and Kathleen Gough show Indian peasant militancy to be real but issue-bound, refuting Barrington Moore Jr.’s thesis of a docile peasantry. The annihilation line severed the movement from its mass base, invited overwhelming coercion, and ended in Majumdar’s death in custody in 1972 amid endless splits.
Conclusion
Naxalbari was transformative in ideology and quasi-movemental in practice — its strategy destroyed the mobilisation its ideology required. Its afterlife, through the CPI (Maoist) formed in 2004, mapped onto tribal dispossession rather than tenancy; the Ministry of Home Affairs reported in 2026 that no district remains classified as left-wing extremism affected, with 234 violent incidents recorded in 2025. The unresolved question Naxalbari raised — why constitutional land reform failed the sharecropper — outlived the movement that asked it.