How will you be able to read the writings written on the walls in Bengal without traveling to Kolkata and beyond? So come, travel with me 600 km to the north to the narrow 60 km corridor of Siliguri or to the 90 km wide strip connecting the Himalayan districts of the north and east with mainland Bengal. Let us start with the walls of Naxalbari itself. If anyone had paid attention to these things, we would have been celebrating the 59th anniversary of the armed movement of 1967 today. That’s why we started from Benghaziot. This village is a part of Naxalbari, where the first spark of rebellion broke out. Here I found two comrades sweeping and painting the monuments of that forgotten revolution. Statues of Marx, Lenin, Engels, Stalin, Mao, Charu Majumdar and Saroj Dutta are installed on this memorial. The first five leaders were such great personalities, whose names are taken in the prayers of this revolution. The other two were his successors and local founders of the revolution. But standing shoulder to shoulder with Mao was Marshal Lin Piao (Biao), the most powerful boss of China’s People’s Liberation Army, and often described as the second most powerful leader of the Chinese Communist Party. But suddenly one day, on 13 September 1971, he passes away. The plane in which he and his family were traveling meets with an accident in Mongolia. Regarding this accident, the Chinese government clarified that they were migrating after the failure of the alleged ‘Project 571’ of the coup. It is believed that they were fleeing to the Soviet Union. Lin was declared a traitor and accused of planning a coup in collaboration with Mao’s wife Jiang Qing. Both of them were declared ‘counter-revolutionaries’ by the Communist Party of China. But Benghazi is the only place in the world where you can see Mao and Lin next to each other. Punya Singh Rajbongsi, a Dalit comrade who was cleaning Lenin’s memorial to commemorate the 59th anniversary of the Naxal movement and his birth anniversary (April 22), had no problem with this. I ask him: How can you put Mao and Lin Biao together? They say: Because he was a great comrade. I say: But, didn’t Lin betray Mao, and didn’t Mao get him murdered? Rajbongsi said emphatically: No, that’s all propaganda. The conspiracy against him was hatched by Liu Shaoqi. I didn’t remind him that Liu had passed away two years earlier. Why cross-examine the devotees? Meanwhile, other elderly comrades were pasting printed wallpaper on the memorial wall with the Bengali text: “Liberation will not be achieved by vote. Liberation will be achieved only by revolution.” A few days later, 92 percent voting was recorded in Naxalbari. Today people have started believing in revolution only through votes. If the revolution was born in Naxalbari, it was also buried there. In 2021, this assembly seat was won by BJP candidate Anandmoy Barman by about 71,000 votes i.e. 58 percent votes. We saw him campaigning door-to-door in Matigara (the constituency is now called Matigara-Naxalbari). Anandamoy Burman, a soft-spoken teacher and RSS activist, says that the movement gave nothing to the people except poverty. In this election of West Bengal, there is a competition going on between the leftist parties and the Congress as to who gets a bigger share in the spoils. This is the situation when the new incarnation of Naxalites has been buried in the grave in East-Central India. Farther south, the Left parties in Kerala are facing a twin anti-government uprising. If they do not perform a miracle on May 4, we can declare that the Left has now been decisively marginalised. The end of armed communism was only a matter of time. But if the mainstream left has also been marginalized, then it itself is responsible for this. When it reached its peak in 2004 with 53 Lok Sabha seats, it was driven by the rise of just one sentiment: anti-America. He had separated from the UPA government, and also tried to topple that government by joining hands with the BJP on the issue of the nuclear treaty with America. After this they all started on the path of decline. Despite decades of disagreement and debate with the Left, I have always found him to be civilized, open-minded, and funny. But they never changed. In 1988, I was surprised to see that communists were changing in Beijing and Moscow, but not in Kolkata. This curiosity took me to Kolkata. I had asked CPI(M) state secretary Saroj Mukherjee: Deng and Gorbachev changed their communism. Why are India’s communists not reforming? He said: Because my communism is purer than the communism of Deng and Gorbachev. About twenty years later, one of his successors, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, tried to change this. I asked him how the way he is inviting private and foreign capital matches his ideology. He had said: My faith is my ideology. But I am not running a revolutionary government. I have to work as per my constitution. The mass movement against the industrial cities he had planned to establish in Singur and Nandigram was not launched by his political opponents but by his own extreme leftist comrades. He broke Bhattacharya’s dreams, destroyed his party and Mamata Banerjee stood up to bury him. BJP has started building its new palace on that grave. Congress and Left Front are fighting for the remaining votes. Left parties and Congress are competing for a share in the West Bengal elections. While Maoism has been buried in the grave in East-Central India, comrades in Kerala are struggling with dual anti-government sentiments. Leftist ideology is now marginalized. (These are the author’s own views)
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Shekhar Gupta’s Column: Where are the Left in the West Bengal elections?
