Batle for Redland

THE BATTLE FOR RED LAND
The late 60s.... Karl Marx was fashionable...his writings began inspiring left radical struggles across the West… civil rights and anti-war movements in America; students' agitations in Western Europe; Che Guevara's struggle and death in the jungles of Bolivia…everyone spoke of revolutionary humanism…in such heady times...erupted the Naxalite movement in West Bengal…rebellion was in the air…the best and brightest, mostly students,   joined the Naxalites, alongside the poorest of the poor. Landlords were chased out of North Bengal villages, bombs exploded in Kolkata cinema houses...the city of joy would perpetually protest...only to be suppressed with brute force….

1967… Naxalbari in Darjeeling district was up-in arms...Seduced and inspired by the siren song of Mao Zedong, majumdar along with Kanu Sanyal led a militant peasant uprising….They broke away from the ranks of Communist Party of India-Marxists (CPI-M)...and faced the might of the ruling United Front government led by CPI(M). ..

25th may, 1967 police shot dead 11 people at this spot...8 were women and 2 children. It was then the Communist Party of India-MarxistsLeninists (CPI-ML) was born….with the goal to overthrow the feudal landed class

In tea country of Darjeeling and Dooars, Charu Majumdar’s son Abhijit is still fighting for his father’s ideology and party...he believes that the present-day feudal lords are the owners of tea gardens… these landless tea-tribe labourers the protagonists of his struggle

1977…the naxalites had been crushed by the Congress government led by Siddharta Shankar Ray…The CPI-M led Left Front swept into power on the promise of land reforms..they launched Operation Barga, which proposed a more equitable distribution of land among the landless bengali farmers…the project was half-hearted, but it won them loyalty from the farmers…rural bengal became their votebank...The Communists have been in power ever since..but operation Barga failed to do...