Three Waves of Indian Terrorism: A First-Hand Report on the Naxalite Movement

For the third time in recent Indian history the cult of terror has burst into politics. The first time this happened was just over 40 years ago, when some scattered but daring young men decided they could win freedom for India with gun and dagger. They were impatient with the nonviolent struggle of Mahatma Gandhi; they thought it slow, humiliating, and unlikely to succeed. And they thought that their own method of conspicuous assassination would strike such terror in the heart of British rulers that they would quit and India would win freedom. So they started picking off individual British officers with the bullet or knife.

These early Indian terrorists paid a fearful toll. For every Englishman they killed, several of their own men were shot or hung. For every conspiracy that succeeded, several were ruthlessly crushed. Ultimately, they collapsed while the nonviolent movement carried India to freedom, mobilizing the support of vast numbers of people through peaceful mass agitation. But while it lasted, this terrorist movement fired the imagination of the young. There was romance in their deeds, which was lacking in the struggle Mahatma Gandhi waged with less dramatic weapons.

The second explosion of terrorism in Indian politics came 20 years later, when the Communists chose terror as a political weapon. Only a few years earlier they had been expelled from India’s main political party, the Congress. The two had come to a clash over their interpretations of World War II. The Communists regarded it as a people’s war against fascism and supported the Allied war effort, especially after Hitler had invaded Russia. The bulk of the Congress party, though not Nehru, opposed it as a war of British imperialism. For some years thereafter, the Communists got lost in an inner debate between rival strategies for power. Toward the end of 1948, barely a year after India won independence, they rejected parliamentary politics and chose insurrection instead. Encouraged, if not even financed by Moscow, and inspired by the recent example of China, they decided to set up a “liberated area,” their very own Yenan, in Telangana. This is a barren, rocky, and poverty-ridden region, once part of the princely state of Hyderabad and now part of Andhra Pradesh, one of the larger states of southern India. The “base” was well-chosen. Whatever else grows here, resentment does, whether, as then, against the splendor of a princely court that mocked the poverty of the people, or, as now, against exploitation of the area by enterprising immigrants from the Andhra coast. Fanning the sub-nationalism of linguistic regions, which was just becoming a serious threat to India’s survival as a nation, the Communists tried to build up a zone of independence. For their methods they chose peasant rebellion and forcible seizure of land and, for their weapon, individual terror. Several heads of landlords were paraded through the streets; ...