While the eyes of the world were on the Indian invasion and "liberation" of East Bengal, the Government of India made an onslaught against left wing forces in its own country. During the week November 21 to 28 (when the invasion in fact began) half of India's paramilitary Central Reserve Police arrived in West Bengal. About 10,000 leftists were reported arrested. Under the Prevention of Violent Activities Act introduced some months ago, political detainees may be held without trial for up to a year. Many arrested earlier have in fact already been held more than a year because of the huge numbers awaiting trial. The Act is due to expire early in 1972 but news that preparations are underway to remove political prisoners to special centres is ominous.2 At Alipore jail on November 26th a massacre took place, the precise extent and circumstances of which are unclear and may remain so. Police and government have admitted six persons killed and 237 wounded, but according to some reports up to 50 were murdered outright, while many of the injured hovered between life and death. 3 The authorities claimed an attempted jailbreak; brickbats and tiles thrown by prisoners; hapless warders reacting in self defence. This is hard to credit: armed police were on guard outside the jail, making escape unIkely; no damage to gates or walls was reported; all of the victims were beaten to death with clubs.
Alipore was the sixth major jail massacre during the past twelve months, and the wth in terms of isolated or inadequately reported jail killings. Jail murders have been an increasingly common response to the attacks of the "Naxalites" or Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), the Maoist party formed in April 1969 and officially recognized by China. Since early 1970 party policy has concentrated on "annihilating" individual landlords, businessmen, money. lenders, police, and political enemies, in the countryside of Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Bihar, West Bengal, and increasingly in Calcutta City. Undoubtedly, arrested CPI-ML cadre have rebelled and have attempted jail breaks several times: they glory in it and some of the jail battles have resulted from these efforts. On April 22nd, 1971, the Party's second anniversary, and on May 2nd, for example, Naxalite prisoners in Dum Dum jail rebelled and hoisted the red flag on the prison tower.4 On May 14th, 50 prisoners managed to escape. Inside the jail a battle ensued between 150 Naxalite teen-agers and armed sentries and jail warders. Thirty-two prisoners were reported killed with clubs, and the rest severely wounded. Many of the dead were beaten to a pulp, their bodies unrecognizable by the relatives who came later to identify them.5 More commonly, jail-breaks have apparently been staged. Prisoners are told they are freed on bail, are escorted to the gates, then shot "while escaping". As far as can be judged this is what happened at Midnapore jail on December 15th, 1970, where nine peasant Communists were murdered, and at Berhampur in January 1971, where seven undertrial prisoners were killed. Similar incidents have been reported from Howrah, Birbhum, Cooch Behar, Siliguri, Kurseong, and three times from Allipore.
The CPI-ML has been the chief victim of these massacres. But the parliamentary Communist Party of India (Marxist), highly organized in Kerala and West Bengal, has also suffered increasing assaults. The Party claimed 30 members shot in jails in the eight 48 young men killed at Bart, Beliaghat, Salt Lake and Diamond Harbour while supposedly "resisting arrest" 6 Jail killings have, moreover, spread from West Bengal to the neighbouring state of Bihar. OnJuly7th prisoners in Patna jail noted after one of them died under suspicious circumstances. In the riot, ten prisoners including five Naxalites escaped; two were killed and 42 wounded. In Hazaribag jail on July 25th there was no evidence of riot or escape attempt, yet somehow 17 prisoners were killed and 27 injured by bullets.7 A I*gular feature of these killings is that fascist gangs of specially selected warders and imComrades and friends abroad, In the light of what has happened in the South Asian region during the past twelve months, we wish to make some statements and ask some questions.
First, it should be made absolutely clear that the revolutionaries of this subcontinent regard it as one country and are resolved to erase, through struggle, the "international boundaries' drawn up by Messrs. Patel, Nehru, Jinnah and Stafford Cripps.
Second, what took place in East Bengal in the first quarter of 1971 was nothing but the bloody and genocidal suppression of a people's mass and democratic movement by a gang of fascist, obscurantist and utterly foul madmen-and every adjective is carefully chosen. Third, a certain Foreign Office abroad, the only one from which we expected a principled stand, chose to represent black as white, chose to hide from its people the true nature of its fascist friends, chose to depict a people's desperate struggle against bloody ogres as an 'anti-China war plot', chose to use the terms rebel and secessionist as abuse(!) and chose not to interfere in the "internal affairs' of inhuman murderers-after having interfered in the "internal affairs' of Ceylon and Sudan-on behalf of the inhuman murderers, of course.
Fourth, the clever reactionaries in India (who never turned a hair while brutally suppressing the revolutionary movement in West Bengal, Andhra and Punjab, and the national struggles of the Naga, Mizo, and Kashmir peoples) and their Soviet well wishers, cashed in on a oncein-a-lifetime opportunity and immeasurably strengthened their position in the sub-continent-partly, if not wholly due to the marvellous non-interference by the leaders of world revolution and the activities of their good friends, the Maoist mullahs of Islamabad. The inner crisis of the revolutionary movement in South Asia is the subject matter for a different discussion. But what did the revolutionary leadership of our party (now split in the tradition, no doubt, of 'one divides prisoned criminals carry out the executions, often after sadistic torture. They are paid in perquisites from the prison food stores. 8* To dwell on jail killings would, however, mislead, for individual and mass murders of alleged Naxalite supporters have gone on for months outside the jails as well. In addition to silent killings in the night, whole groups were killed publicly last summer at Beliaghat, Noapara and Howrah. In Howrah 12 Naxalites were murdered and their houses and shops destroyed, after which the civilian mob which did the killings dutifully turned in its arms at the local police station. The worst pore-Baranagar area on August 12-13. A worker of the ruling Congress Party was killed by an unknown murderer. An armed mob of 1,000 then rampaged over two square miles, dragging youth from their homes and burning the shops of those suspected of hiding extremists. Some bodies were thrown in the Ganges; others removed in push carts. The police did nothing for 17 hours, during which more than 150 teen-age boys were butchered and their names recorded on a list nailed up on an improvised scaffolding on the Kutighat Road. Very few of the boys were Naxalite activists; most were friends or neighbours or people who had spoken to known Letter From Members of the CPI(ML)
into two') do with regard to the Indo-Pak crisis? Since their proclaimed first principle is "loyalty to the CPC [Communist Party of China]'-not loyalty to the masses or to Marxism-Leninism, but to the CPC-they naturally proceeded with the holy task of rationalising the opportunism and chauvinism of the Chinese Foreign Office. A quantitative (or is it qualitative) development of Mao Tsetung Thought was made by a certain leader who proclaimed that Yahya Khan was a 'national bourgeois' (sic!!).
We have been betrayed, comrades and friends, and we know that this is strong language. The 'proletarian headquarters" has indulged in nothing but out and out opportunism and big power chauvinism and we, who were ardent "Maoists until recently, say this with the deepest sorrow and dismay. We ask the Maoist missionaries-do you expect us now to quote the Red Book at common people murdered by Chinese bullets? Do you expect us to preach armed struggle to people whose just armed struggle was faced with Chinese tanks? We shall not give up revolution gentlemen, as you have, but we have learned a very bitter and yet very basic lesson-the loyalty of a revolutionary party is to the people, to Marxism, and certainly not to this or that party. And we shall not accept the selling out of proletarian internationalism to the Yahyas, Nimeirys, Nixons and Bandaranaikes of the world. From Stalin onwards, the Soviet leaders have sacrificed world revolution at the altar of their chauvinist foreign policy. We cannot allow this to happen all over again. Perhaps Allah will tell us why our great helmsman steered our ship onto the rocks and then abandoned us. But, as someone said once, great men need no reasons, they leave them to the creative hands of their apologists. "Sham is sham, and the mask must be stripped off -it is a damning irony that we have now to strip the mask off the Chinese leadership. SOME INDIAN COMRADES OF CPI (ML) (Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)] activists once or twice.?
As long as the murdered were announced as "Naxalites" the public did nothing, Many peanle , thought the CPI-ML had invited fascist attacks by its own terrorism. The parliamentary CPIM has itself been accused not only of not defending the CPI-ML but even of betraying its cadre to the police, and there have been internecine murders between the two parties. Now, however, the chauvinist hysteria of the war has provided the government with an ideal opportunity to "get" the well organized parliamentary CPI-M as well. As the liberal Economic and Political Weekly records: 40111the Left is proceeding apace in West Bengal... Massive attacks on CPI-M bases jointly by armed police and armed Congress bands, point-blank shootings of boys and girls, inhuman atrocities on detained men and women, and cases of people burnt alive" are the order of the day in Free India. 10 But so far, the liberals have said little. A sad contrast with 1938, when the ailing Bengali poet Tagore, aged 90, led a mass rally on the Calcutta common to protest the British shooting of two detainees in the Hijli detention camp. Today the heirs of Gandhi indiscriminately recruit hoodlums and murderers into the ruling Congress Party, no doubt to get rid of their opponents in good time before the West Bengal elections, scheduled for February. Even the pro-Moscow Communist Party of India was constrained to issue a lengthy protest-while jointly organizing a huge celebration in Calcutta with the Congress Party to greet the "Liberation" of Bangla Desh.
On the day after the Pakistani forces surrendered, Indira Gandhi said of the governments of India and Pakistan, in a plea for negotiations: "There are more things in common between us than those which divide us."I1 There are: both are butchers, of Communists, youth, anyone who obstructs the preservation of their obsolescent social systems. And the "socialist world"? Most heart-rending! In April the government of China gives $100 million interest-free loan to Yahya Khan's dictatorship at the height of its massacre of East Bengali intellectuals, revolutionaries, workers and peasants. 12 In December, the Soviet Union arms the Indian government and covers for it in the Security Council while India commits foreign aggression and nips off East Bengal for the Awami League: no doubt partly to defeat a leftward shift in the revolution that was underway there; partly to cover up its own slaughters in Eastern India; perhaps also to stake a claim to the Indian Ocean on behalf of a Soviet bid to encircle China. The victims are the revolutionaries and the common people of India and Pakistan, The CPI-M surely knows this. Its slogan, "Yahya Khan-Indira Gandhi Ek Hai" (Yahya Khan and Indira Gandhi are the same) echoes Mrs. Gandhi herself. The party leadership's response to the onslaught was to form a united front with the Revolutionary Socialist Party and the Forward Block for the municipal elections in Burdwan, West Bengal. Soon, however, it will have to fight back or go under.
Devi Arad FOOTNOTES Fred Bridgland reporting from Calcutta The Vancouver Sun, Vancouver, B.C. Canada November 27, 1971. "Genocide in Jails", Frontier, Calcutta, December 4, 1971, p. 2.
Le Monde,November 30, 1971, and Frontier, December 4, 1971. "Revolutionary Armed Struggle Rises to a Higher Stage in West Bengal", Liberation, (Journal of the CPI-ML), April-June 1971, Vol.4, No.4, reprinted in Chingari, Vol.4, No. 3, July-October 1971, p.58, r.u.Box 3z, staton r, toronto, Canada. Frontier, "What Goes on in Jails", July 17, 1971, p.9. "CPM on Jail Killings", Frontier, June 5, 1971, p.16. "The Hunting Hounds", Frontier, August 28 1971, p.6.
Frontier, July 17, p.9; November 20, 1971, p.15. 'Shades of Indonesia", Frontier, August 21, 1971,p. 1; "Cossipore-Baranagore", September 18, 1971, p.10. 10. "West Bengal: Liquidation of the Left", Economic and Political Weekly, Bombay, December 4, 1971, p.2425. 11. The Province, Vancouver, B.C., December 18, 1971, p.2. 12. The Financial Times, London, May 14 and June 17, 1971.
The French version of this article was published in