Mao gave us cigars, didn’t want to be our idol, says Khokan Majumdar
Debjyoti Chakraborty, Hindustan Times July 06, 2013
Even at 83, his eyes — dimmed, no doubt, with age — haven’t totally lost the glimmer of intelligence.
From behind thick glasses, they constantly shift to different parts of the wooden shanty with a tin roof that he calls his “room”, which actually is an office of the CPI (ML)-Janashakti at Khemchi in Naxalbari, about 570 km north of Kolkata.
The only noticeable thing in the room is a life-size photograph of Charu Majumdar — the unquestioned leader of the Naxalbari movement during his lifetime — with one of his quotes about eliminating class enemies on a huge festoon.
Dodgy as he had to fend for himself all his life as one of the acolytes of Charu babu — often on the run under different names and faces — Khokan Majumdar, born as Abdul Hamid, hasn’t forgotten the tricks of subterfuge.
When asked to answer a question that he finds uncomfortable for his party or himself, Majumdar just shifts his gaze or says, “I no longer remember the details after a cerebral stroke I had six years ago.”
The ravage of the attack is evident. His speech slurs. His right hand and leg are not as strong as they used to be — his left limbs are still active, though. But he goes for a walk every morning around 4.30 all alone.
“You should always have somebody with you.” He smiles, and again shifts his gaze to the small ceiling fan fighting a losing battle in a hellishly hot late June morning.
Clad in a lungi and a shirt — he has two sets of each and a pair of vintage trousers and a shirt for the occasions when he has to appear in public —Majumdar believes he is still in politics and proudly introduces himself as a politburo member of the CPI (ML)-Janashakti, an almost marginalised faction of Naxals.
But he refuses to accept that the party he helped set up in 1969 has become almost a relic of the past after several rounds of bitter and vicious faction fights.
Majumdar, these days, sounds critical of the Naxalbari movement that began on May 25, 1967 and permanently changed the face of Left politics in India.
“It was a mistake to get detached from the rural people and focus more on urban guerrilla tactics.” Instead, he enjoys narrating his trip to China in September, 1967 and his meetings with Mao Zedong.
Asked about his journey to China with four of his associates — Mujibar Rahman, Deepak Biswas, Khudan Mallik and Kanu Sanyal — his eyes twinkled. “We decided to meet the chairman and seek his opinion on our movement. Charu babu was keen on Mao’s opinion.”
“How did you reach China?”
“First, we crossed the Pakistan border and asked for their help. But the wounds of the 1965 war were still fresh. They told us that they didn’t want to open another front with India so soon and pushed us back. Actually, they were suspicious of our politics. Then we went to Nepal and from there we entered China through Tibet, mostly on foot.”
Majumdar said the Chinese were initially suspicious of them and placed them under strict vigilance. But once convinced that they were really representatives of the Naxalbari movement — which Beijing radio had called the Spring Thunder — they took them in as state guests.
“How was your first meeting with Mao?”
“One day, we were taken to a pavilion-like structure in a park. We could see top party and military leaders seated around a long table. But we could not find Mao among them. Then, one of our hosts took us to a man pacing in the garden and smoking furiously. The man smiled and shook hands with us. We were overwhelmed.”
Majumdar said Mao and the entire Chinese establishment were keen on political developments in India.
“We stayed there for three months and received training in political ideology and guerrilla warfare.” But it didn’t have a happy ending.
“Mao was quite upset with the slogan, “Chiner chairman amader chairman (China’s chairman is our chairman). He said it’s wrong and politically immature. We had no explanation to offer.”
Majumdar said since his party — especially Charu babu, who thought that the Naxalbari movement was ideologically close to the Chinese experience — Mao’s opinion was important.
And when they came back and reported Mao’s opinion to Charu Majumdar, he went into depression.
So, Majumdar gave him a cigar from Mao. “Mao gave each of us a cigar. But I saved it as a memento. I gave it to Charu babu to cheer him up.”
“Who interpreted for you? Mao spoke only Chinese and you spoke no English.”
“I don’t remember all those details. It’s about 50 years ago. And remember, I had a stroke six years ago.”
Learning politics began early for Majumdar. A marginal farmer’s son, he left home at 12 to run away from the life of a bidi labourer.
The story that followed was of a helpless boy, doing odd jobs. He began active politics as a trade union activist after joining a tea garden near Naxalbari. And then he met Charu Majumdar, already a hero among the peasants.
“I met Charu babu in 1953. We fought on the very first day when Charu babu denounced the Indian communist party’s focus on building mass organisations. He thought the Chinese could make their revolution a success only because they avoided that route. I didn’t agree with him. And that tension was always there.”
On the day of the Naxalbari uprising, Majumdar led a small band of tribal farmers and faced the police. He doesn’t recall who drew the first blood, but distinctly remembers that a police officer rushed towards him and collapsed just in front of him.
“When I carefully laid him on the ground, I noticed three arrows buried deep on his back.”
That was the beginning he thinks to be proud of. But the strategy adopted later on was of unnecessary bloodshed.
Asked whether the Naxals actually believed that they were following the Chinese model, he said, “Our understanding at that time was insufficient. But our enthusiasm and commitment cannot be questioned.”
What went wrong, Majumdar said after almost half a century, was the lack of contact with the people. “Charu babu was in a hurry to go to war with the establishment. So, our people didn’t have anything to fall back on once things became too hot to handle. We were scattered, lost and immersed in endless factionalism.”
The eyes were no longer shifting. They were watching every bit of reaction that his words produced. But the moment passed before the next question was formed.
Majumdar said although it was too late for his party to think about Mao’s opinion, there were small victories and a strong legacy. Maoists are still important in Indian politics.
“But are they in touch with you and your party?”
“They used to come to us for discussions. We were a brother party. But then they stopped visiting us. They’re making the same mistake maybe — going to war with the establishment without preparing the ground.”
“But they are better organised and more resourceful.”
Majumdar looked away. He doesn’t want to discuss the Maoists. His only comment in this context: “We can’t even repeat history. We tend to forget everything.”
A visit to Naxalbari confirms Majumdar’s claim. Almost 50 years after a peasants’ revolt turned into the most important armed struggle in independent India, hardly anything has changed in Naxalbari, barring some random signs of development.
After almost four-and-a-half hours of intense discussions and reliving his days as a man of action, Majumdar suddenly thought of playing host and offered tea, but retreated hastily after being snapped at by a female voice that came from somewhere behind his shanty.
So, he took me to a roadside tea stall that he frequents — he walked with a strange gait, dragging his weak right leg behind his left one and swaying his right hand to maintain balance. The stall also serves rice and fish curry to the daily labourers, mostly from the Rajbongshi tribe, and, of course, doesn’t have a name.
The stall owner, more out of love for Majumdar than awe, asked him whether he had eaten anything that day because tea in an empty stomach is poison. “Please have something with tea.” The reply was indifferent: “I don’t remember. Maybe I had some puffed rice in the morning. I don’t feel like eating now.”
Asked sternly to have something with tea, he agreed reluctantly. We ordered a pack of biscuits. He munched two — eyes closed — dipping them in tea and wrapping the rest carefully.
My last impression of Khokan Majumdar alias Abdul Hamid, one of the leaders of the bloodiest movement in India’s history: a slightly built old man walking back slowly — his right arm swaying comically —to his “room” and to another evening of loneliness and a life-size photograph of his leader.
The Modi factor and the fake outrage over Ishrat Jahan
by R Jagannathan Jul 5, 2013
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has done much to convince us that the Ishrat Jahan killing was a “fake” encounter. However, its charge-sheet in the case, and all the related developments, suggest that the agency’s autonomy is largely fake; that the UPA’s belated attempt to give the CBI a veneer of “autonomy” is intended to correct this impression and hence surely fake; and also that the “liberal” outrage over the encounter itself is fake.
All of this has happened not because of our “collective conscience” but because of a congruence of vested interests that feel threatened by the rise of one outsider to Delhi –Narendra Modi. If the man hadn’t existed, none of this would have happened. Fake encounters would have gone on as usual; the CBI would have been content to remain a “caged parrot”; the UPA would not even have dreamt of giving the CBI autonomy; the courts would probably not have taken note of the parrot’s true status; and “liberals” would not have appeared on TV expressing fake outrage over the encounter.
The truth is Modi makes us all insecure and uncomfortable. Not because of who he is, but because of who we are.
Over the last 11 years, the full resources of the state, the media, the courts and every possible investigative agency in the land have been put to work to get one man nailed. Has this ever happened in any case in independent India? Nah!
This is how the schema has worked. If lower courts can’t implicate or nail Modi, try the higher courts; if the higher courts can’t go too far, get another investigation started; if that doesn’t work, move the courts again to appoint a SIT; if the SIT’s report is not enough, try an amicus curiae; if that doesn’t work, try another SIT in another case; if that doesn’t work, try the CBI. And so it goes on and on.
The goal is simple: keep trying till you get the verdict you want. Make everyone feel guilty that our job as liberals is not done till one man goes to jail. Nailing Modi is the cure for a system we don’t want to change.
One should ask: is the cause of justice served by spending crores and crores and hundreds of manhours of legal time trying to get one man? Or are the courts supposed to try and deliver justice for everybody? How come the courts happily spend a month or more on vacation if they were so concerned about the cause of justice?
Clearly, there is something about Modi – or rather, our response to him – that makes everyone act out of character.
Take the Congress party.
A party that till December was unwilling to govern, suddenly wakes up and starts doing things, both on the economic and political fronts.
Even more, it is willing to do enormous damage to the country to achieve its goal of keeping Modi out of power at the centre. It is willing to risk setting one intelligence agency against another and compromise national security; it is willing to send people to the gallows just to show one man up (Ajmal Kasab before the Gujarat elections, and Afzal Guru after it); it is even willing to sacrifice Manmohan Singh’s reputation to achieve the party’s larger goals (sacrifice Pawan Bansal and Ashwani Kumar, both reportedly close to Manmohan Singh). Sacrificing Bansal and Kumar was necessary to invest the CBI with some credibility and go after Modi.
In the fight against Modi, the Congress will sacrifice all its party pawns, includingManmohan Singh, if it comes to that.
One man “riding a horse” cannot solve the problems of the country, said Rahul Gandhi. But does he even believe his own statement? His party seems to think sending one man to jail will save the nation from all the evil it is surrounded by.
This is the background against which one must see the government’s moves to give the CBI autonomy.
It is a fake autonomy for three reasons.
One, merely having the opposition leader and the Chief Justice in a panel to choose the CBI chief is hardly going to make the CBI independent. The choice will be made from a short-list overseen by the government. Once chosen, the CBI will need to depend on the government for day-to-day support and staffing. The only way to guarantee autonomy is to make the CBI accountable to a multi-party parliamentary oversight committee and not the government. This is not happening.
Two, even the cosmetic nature of the government’s autonomy proposal for the CBI stems not from Congress conviction, but from fear of the courts. By announcing the proposal and submitting it in court, the Congress is trying to prevent any court directive on how this autonomy is to be achieved. It is meant to pre-empt true autonomy. Three, the autonomy proposal is intended to protect the Congress and give it some say in the appointment of the next chief in case it loses the next election. The current chief, appointed by the party, will anyway be chief till well after the next election. So there is no worry about the “caged parrot” till after 2014. But there is a lot of scope to tinker with the autonomy proposal in case the UPA returns to power next year.
Now, to the Ishrat Jahan case.
The CBI may have established the fakeness of the encounter in the public eye – though one can’t be sure of that, given its track record in obtaining convictions in so many cases –but the very fact that it has been pussy-footing around the involvement of the Intelligence Bureau (IB’s) role in the encounter is telling. It is to hide the fact that the encounter didn’t happen at the Gujarat police’s instance.
A Times of India story today says the CBI’s charge-sheet itself suggests that IB official Rajinder Kumar is the key mastermind behind the encounter, but it does not name him. Instead, it opts to make a laundry list of the Gujarat officials who did the actual dirty work. The pawns have been sacrificed to save the Queen.
This could be for two reasons. One is practical. They may go after Kumar after he retires on 31 July, and hence avoid an inter-agency squabble over arresting a serving official.
The other is clearly political. It does not serve the Congress’ purpose to have the whole case get over early. By delaying and dragging the whole process of filing the full charge-sheet it can keep Modi and the BJP permanently on tenterhooks, even while herding the Muslim vote towards itself.
Delays enable inspired leaks about “white beard” and “black beard” – presumably veiled references to Modi and Amit Shah, his close aide. The charge-sheet has nothing to speak about the colour of anybody’s beards.
The last, and saddest part, in this whole business is our fake outrage over all this. The media and the public have been taught to pretend outrage in anything involving Modi – not anyone else.
Communal riots anywhere else do not outrage us – not in Assam or UP. Encounters in Kashmir, the north-east, Punjab, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh and all the states affect by the Maoist insurgency do not outrage us beyond a day or two.
But for 11 years, we have been “outraged” by anything involving Modi. From 2002 to his various statements (“the 50-crore girlfriend”) to his growth model to the alleged fake encounters in his state.
Even in the Ishrat case we are missing one thing: nobody has bothered to tell us what benefit Modi might have seen in the elimination of the girl or the other three who were killed in that fake encounter, assuming he was even told about it.
It is most likely that the Gujarat police did what every other police force was doing everywhere else in the country – eliminate those against whom they can’t see a decent chance of securing a conviction legally – and this is why the IB was complicit in the encounter.
The truly guilty parties are those we can’t see.
One, the politicians who do not want police reforms and CBI autonomy because it does not suit them.
Two, the judicial system that delays justice for its own reasons. This is why the police kill people in encounters instead of trying hard to find the evidence to convict them.
Three, civil society, which just wants to get on with life, and let someone else solve the problems of terrorism, corruption, or every other evil confronted by society.
Modi comes into the picture not because of what he’s done, but because it is easy to pin all our guilt on one man and forget all about it. We need to change the system, but we prefer to think of Modi as the problem, not the system, since its easier. We want silver bullets.
It suits everyone to hang him without a conviction. It’s not about “innocent” Ishrat Jahan and her premature demise.
