Revolt of the forgotten Communist

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It's not surprising that a renewed Naxalite movement in India started as the country was marching on the highway of globalisation. In Bengal though, it was coupled with the potent mixture of a 33-year-long Communist rule, which reaped the benefits of one-time land reform programme in repeated elections, but failed to cling on to its pro-poor image.

But for a CPI-M led Left Front government, that continued their rule just three years back with a thumping election victory, things started going wrong with Singur and Nandigram. In Singur, the government gave agricultural land to TATA for making the Nano at a throwaway price; in Nandigram, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya's police force killed innocent villagers, protesting land acquisition, in broad daylight, ripping apart the pro-poor Communist image. It was a question of land after all.

That's how it had started back in the late 60s. The movement, which began as a violent peasant resistance to landlords at Naxalbari village in May 1967 on the basis of the land-to-the-tiller slogan, had acquired a larger appeal in about two months on account of the open support it evinced from sections of the State units of the CPI(M) in West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir. They defined the objective of the new movement as 'seizure of power through an agrarian revolution'. The strategy was the elimination of the feudal order in the Indian countryside to free the poor from the clutches of the oppressive landlords and replace the old order with an alternative one that would implement land reforms.

Today, the CPI-M has started faltering in their stronghold - rural Bengal. Their pro-poor image and political line has taken a serious beating, not only for trying to take away land from poor farmers, but also for creating a social system in the villages of Bengal which is dictated and ruled in a feudal manner by CPI-M's leadership at the district and the panchayat level.

The Maoists of today, many of them disenchanted CPI-M workers, have filled in the vacuum created by the Left. A vacuum which has seen poor villagers die, mostly from starvation, even as the local CPI-M leader was busy building his stand-out mansion from funds meant for development. It's a vicious cycle.

It's also has a logical dénouement. Which Mamata Banerjee seems to have latched on to. For her and the Maoists, the enemy is the same. At least for the time being. While Mamata is busy filling the political vacuum, the Maoists are getting ingrained in the social strata of the landless, classless villagers, most of whom would be happy if they got to eat properly, daily.

It's not just a train the Maoists have hijacked or a police officer they have kidnapped - they have run away with the CPI-M's pro-poor image - the very basis of their political identity and existence. That's why the CPI-M is at a loss and no singular strategy is in place to tackle the Maoists.