IT was in fact during 1946-47 that the Communists were finally able to make important inroads among the peasantry. Significantly, only three months after the Calcutta riots, the Bengal unit of the Communist-led Kisan Sabha was able to build up a powerful struggle on economic issues among the Bengali peasantry.
The Floud Commission of 1940 had promised the Bengali share croppers a two-thirds share of the harvest. This was never implemented. The Kisan Sabha now gave the call to sharecroppers to implement it themselves. The slogans were simple and direct: "tebhaga chai" (we want two-thirds share) and "nij-khamare dhan tolo" (stock the paddy on your own threshing-floor - and not, as earlier, at the jotedar's house). The movement spread rapidly at harvesting time in November 1946 to Thakurgaon, Jalpaiguri, Rangpur and Malda, as well as to pockets in Midnapur, 24-Parganas, and (predominantly Muslim) Mymensingh.
The strength of communalism had already grown to the point where old Kisan Sabha bases in (predominantly Muslim) south-east Bengal could not be revived; but Muslims participated in considerable numbers in the tebhaga bases, producing leaders such as Haji Muhammed Danesh and Naimat Ali. Some maulvis even quoted Koran to condemn jotedar oppression.
The Statesman correspondent gave an eyewitness report of the sharecroppers in the movement in its early phase:
"Dumb through past centuries, he is today transformed by the shout of a slogan. It is inspiring to see him marching across a field with his fellows, each man shouldering a lathi like a rifle, with a red flag at the end of the procession. It is sinister to hear them greet each other in the silence of the bamboo groves with clenched left fists raised to foreheads and a whispered `Inqilab Comrade'." (quoted in Sunil Sen, Agrarian Struggle in Bengal, 1946-47, excerpted in A.R. Desai, ed., Peasant Struggles in India, Delhi, 1979)
However, lathis were not enough. Starting in February 1947, the movement faced more intense repression and, when some peasant militants now began asking for arms, the Bengal C.P.I. unit could not provide them: it had perhaps not seen the possibility of a fully armed struggle developing. Meanwhile, Communist plans for a general strike in urban areas in support of the struggle on March 28 were ruled out by renewed communal riots in Calcutta on March 27.
Similarly, in the Alleppey region of the princely state of north-west Travancore, the Communists had built up a powerful base among coir factory workers, fishermen, toddy-tappers, and agricultural labourers. The Dewan of the state announced in January 1946 a plan (which he called the "American model") that would leave Travancore still under princely rule after the British left.
While the Congress leaders were willing to arrive at some compromise with the Dewan, the Communists launched an all-out campaign against it. An acute food shortage gave the movement added strength. From September 1946, the state government launched a counter-campaign of smashing the Communist-led unions, setting up police camps; arrests, and tortures in custody. In self-defense, shelter camps were set up by Communists for the persecuted workers, and a political general strike began from October 22 in the Alleppey-Shertalai area. Volunteers armed only with wooden spears managed, despite intense police firing, to attack the Punnapra police camp with some success.
The Government declared martial law from October 25; and, on October 27, the army stormed the volunteer headquarters at Vayalar. At a conservative estimate, 800 were slaughtered by the army - in a period in which Nehru was de facto Prime Minister of the Interim Government, and the Congress was pledged to dissolve the princely states into the Union!
But by far the most significant of these Communist-led movements took place in the Telangana area in Hyderabad state: the largest peasant guerrilla war in Indian history. Communists had been working in the area under the banner of the Andhra Mahasabha since 1941. The movement has, however, usually been dated from July 4, 1946, when the deshmukh of Visunur (one of Telangana's biggest and most oppressive landlords, owning 40,000 acres) had a village militant, Doddi Komarayya, killed during a protest procession. The movement was accelerated by such repression.
By December 1946 it had spread to 300 villages and a population of three lakh.
Though the initial issues differed from area to area, the basic content of the movement was an end to landlord atrocities, bonded labour, and alienation of land. The initial centres were Jangaon, Suryapet, and Huzurnagar talukas of Nalgonda, but soon Warangal and Khammam districts were involved. The peasants were organised into village "sangams", and began defending themselves against landlord attacks with lathis, slings with stones, and chilli powder. As the movement advanced, it took the form of redistribution of landlords' land.
In order to defend their new won land, peasants were prepared to constitute armed guerrilla squads from early 1947. The size of these bands ranged upto 100-120, and there were at one stage over 10,000 village volunteers and 2,000 regular squad members. The areas controlled by the peasant squads saw radical change as villages independently administered themselves, forced and bonded labour disappeared, old revenue and rent records were destroyed, loans were canceled, agricultural wages were increased, and further and further land was distributed among peasants.
For the first time, the downtrodden landless and poor peasants got a taste of democracy, their own organised strength. The condition of women improved; several aspects of caste were fought; and a great wave of people's cultural movement (progressive songs and plays in folk forms) gave voice to profound popular aspirations. All these had a lasting liberating impact on the minds of people which subsequent events could not erase.
At its height the revolt affected, at a conservative estimate, over 3,000 villages covering 16,000 square miles with a population of over three million: its repercussions spread much further. In the course of the movement, over one million acres of land as well as cattle and agricultural implements were distributed.
The Nizam and the landlords unleashed the Razakar bands on the peasants, but they were effectively routed by the guerrillas who wound up getting more arms in the bargain.
It is noteworthy that the really powerful repression came in "free India," in September 1948, when the Nehru Government initiated a "police action". This, supposedly, was to unite Hyderabad with India and to control the Razakars. Actually the action, it rapidly became evident, was designed to crush the Communists.
In the course of the repression, over 4,000 peasants - among them 300 party cadre - were killed; more than 10,000 were jailed for 3-4 years; over 50,000 were detained, intimidated and tortured; and the population of the entire region had to face raids by a 50,000 strong armed force.
The strength of the Telangana movement can be gauged by the fact that the terrific repression unleashed on the peasants by the Indian Army could not quell the revolt. From 1948 to 1951, the armed squads continued to function and receive support. If they had not been doing so, there would not have been any need for Right-wing section of the C.P.I. to continuously press for the withdrawal of the struggle. The American Ambassador Chester Bowles, hardly a communist sympathiser, wrote in his 1954 memoir Ambassador's Report:
"The lessons learned from this revolutionary upheaval are far-reaching. `Do you really know what guerrilla warfare is like?' an Indian army officer asked me. `I can understand why the French have not won in Indo-China', he said. `We could not completely win even in that one section of Hyderabad, and we were Indians, not white foreigners.'..."The Hyderabad Communists skilfully operated under Mao Tse-tung's description of guerrilla tactics: they were the fish, the villagers were the sea; when the sea is warm and friendly the fish can multiply and swim where they wish. In villages where people were given their own land for the first time the sea was ready to receive them."
There is not the space here to go into the entire debate within the C.P.I. on the Telangana armed struggle. Rather, a debate was suppressed. And it was only the advance of the struggle that brought to the fore those in the C.P.I. leadership who were keen to collaborate with the new Nehru regime, and opposed the Telangana struggle on the excuse that now freedom had been won.
CPI leaders such as Ravi Narayana Reddy, Ajoy Ghosh, S.A.Dange, S.V.Ghate, B.T.Ranadive and others began criticizing the armed struggle as soon as the Indian army entered in September 1948. One school claimed that the struggle should be altogether withdrawn, since the Indian army were liberators of the people from the Nizam (the army proceeded to liberate thousands of peasants from their land and lives). Another school said that the struggle could continue, but it was not to be a struggle against the Nehru regime. Yet another faction claimed that only a workers' insurrection could bring about the Indian revolution.
They were all united on one fundamental point: the Telangana armed struggle was to be disarmed, and soon. The Andhra Secretariat leadership, which alone defended the Telangana line, maintained that the entire debate in the party was suppressed and ranks misled. In their inner-organisational "Draft Resolution by Andhra Provincial Committee", July 9, 1948 (known commonly as the "Andhra Letter"), the Andhra leadership declared:
"India, in its real sense, is not independent and essentially remains a colony, though after August 15, with the bourgeois collaboration, it can be defined as a semi-colony.... India like China is semi-colonial and semi-feudal in character. Like that of Chinese feudal warlords, our states and feudal princes remain to be liquidated as sores on the face of the country. Like that of Chinese bourgeoisie of 1927, Indian bourgeoisie has at the present time almost started a civil war by its cruel attack on all democratic forces of the country, headed by the working class and Communist Party. The Indian bourgeoisie, afraid of the growing revolutionary forces, went under the wings of foreign imperialism to obey its dictates.... The offensive launched by Nehru Government against CPI is a part of the international offensive started by world imperialism.... To put it bluntly, this offensive is practically nothing but a crude civil war, let loose by the imperial-bourgeois-feudal combine against working class, peasants and other toiling masses.... Keeping all this in view, in areas where we are a good proportion in the masses like certain parts of Andhra, Kerala, Bengal, etc., the time has come to think in terms of guerrilla warfare (Chinese way) against military onslaughts of Nehru Government which is bent upon mercilessly liquidating us. Unless with a clear perspective we plan out methods of resistance, and if we leave it to spontaneity, the future history will charge us with the gross betrayal of the Revolution."
However, the dominant sections of the C.P.I. leadership kept up their attack on the struggle. The Congress Government was delighted at the C.P.I. leadership's open disavowal of the struggle, and was able to fully use their stand in order to suppress the struggle.
By mid 1951, after two and a half years of the Indian Army's unsuccessful attempts to extinguish the Telangana revolt, the Right-wingers had assumed full control of the Central Committee (CC) of the C.P.I.
In May 1951, the CC passed a resolution which lauded the Telangana struggle but said
"questions have been raised regarding the policies and methods to be pursued in the struggle going on for the last five years.... The CC wishes to state that it is prepared to solve the problem by negotiation and settlement, intended to preserve and protect the interests of the peasantry and the people and to restore peaceful conditions."
The CC went on to deny that the Telangana struggle was a liberation struggle:
" ... it should be clear to all that the struggle of the Telangana peasants was neither begun nor continued to overthrow the Nehru Government but to do away with feudal oppression. And everyone desiring the progress of our country would agree that to struggle to end feudal landlord oppression is right and necessary...."
Chester Bowles recorded in his memoir:
"Despite firm Indian army occupation, newly built roads which for the first time permitted rapid patrolling by armoured cars, concentration camps filled with captured communists, police outposts every few miles, and in some places very ruthless oppression, guerrilla fighting continued spasmodically until the communists themselves changed their programme of violence two years later."
Again we see how, in the history of the Indian Communists, the debate about the exact character of the Congress assumed great importance. One trend treated it as a main enemy; another (whatever its superficially anti-Congress propaganda) actually treated it as "desiring the progress of our country", and so in practice collaborated with it. The latter trend, by mid-1951, had assumed control of the C.P.I.
During the course of the Telangana struggle, the character of the Congress became crystal clear. It was a centralised repressive force more efficient than anything the Nizam could muster. "Congress Seva Dal" volunteers began the vicious attacks on Communists and their sympathisers even before the "police action" of September 1948. They even went on a rampage in the Andhra areas, which were not in Hyderabad state but in Madras province. So blatant was their repressive character that the Krishna district Congress leader (who himself got two Communists killed) issued a press statement on April 21, 1949, to dissociate himself from the rampant atrocities:
"Seva Dals (Congress volunteer squads) are being fed with money looted during the raids in villages. Drunkards, habitual convicts, have become village Congress leaders.... Loot, burning of houses, murders are being committed...."
One particular barbarity that was repeated in a large number of villages by the Congress government of Madras is described in the press statement of two Congressmen (one the President of Taluka Congress Committee, the other an APCC member):
"Police have surrounded the village (Yelamarru) on 14th morning (July 1949). Then they gathered all the villagers including a few Communists at a place. They were stripped naked, lathi-charged, paraded in the streets in nakedness, and were made to prostrate before the Gandhiji statue...". (P. Sundarayya, Telangana People's Struggle and Its Lessons, Calcutta, 1972)
The entry of Nehru's army into Hyderabad made the Congress role even clearer. Naturally, the feudal forces wanted the consolidation of Hyderabad state into the Union: the Congress was a better guarantor of landlord interests than even the feudal Nizam!
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