Charu Majumdar and Naxalbari (contd-4)

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Charu Majumdar died in police custody in 1972. Jangal Santhal died in ignominy in 1981, an alcoholic. And now Kanu (Krishna Kumar) Sanyal has committed suicide in Hatighisha village near Siliguri. (Hatighisha was his office and Sephtulajote was his home; it is unclear where the body was found.) That's the tragic end of the original trinity of the Naxalbari movement. "Naxal movement" is actually a misnomer. Today, Naxalbari is more like a town than a village, and is no longer deprived. It has roads, schools, even a college. But at that time, in 1967, it was a village, where a tribal youth named Bimal Kisan obtained a judicial order to plough his land. However, he was attacked by the landlord and his hoodlums. So much for governance, and the rule of law, and efficient grievance redressal through democratic mechanisms, something worth remembering when we think of solutions to the present Naxal problem. From March to May 1967, tension escalated on questions of tribal access to land. But the trigger on May 25, 1967 was in a village known as Prasadujot, and not in Naxalbari. That too is a sense in which "Naxal movement" is a misnomer. A police official was killed on May 24, 1967, and on the succeeding day, police fired on unarmed poor people and killed 11, including eight women and two children.
Despite Marxist tenets about individuals being important and inexorable forces of history, odd accidents and episodes have immense consequences. The original leaders and mass mobilisers were Jangal Santhal and Kanu Sanyal. As an ideologue, Charu Majumdar came in later, a fact he himself acknowledged.
The subsequent land-to-tiller movement was led by what was then the CPM's Darjeeling committee. Would this have taken off had police firing not occurred? Jangal Santhal stood for assembly elections on a CPM ticket in February 1967 and lost. Would history have been different had he won? Marxism (of any variety) swears by ideology. But it is doubtful Charu Majumdar's ideology would have become a movement had it not been for the mass mobilisations of Jangal Santhal (among tribals) and Kanu Sanyal (among tea estate workers and sharecroppers). In 1967, Kanu Sanyal spent some time in China and is believed to have met Mao Zedong. The split with the CPM, which now believed in elections, was inevitable.