ABSTRACT
If Congress was torn by its own internal debates in the early days of freedom, around the same time another serious political alternative was being offered by the communists, but their story has not been told by historians as yet. West Bengal in the late 1960s and the early 1970s witnessed a violent communist insurgency, which became known as the Naxalite movement, and a significant literature now exists on this.1 However, what is less known is that the events of the 1960s and the 1970s had a historical precedent in 1948-49 in the early days of independence. But except for some brief references, this story has remained by and large untold. Of the two recent general histories on post-colonial India, Bipan Chandra and others think that the communists decided to opt for this adventure because of intense factionalism within the party and their inability to understand ‘What is the political situation in India?’2 Ramachandra Guha, on the other hand, thinks that, emboldened by the success in Hyderabad, the leaders of the Communist Party of India (CPI) mistook the ‘scattered disillusionment with the Congress’ as revolutionary potential and thought that Telengana ‘would be the beginning of Red India’.3 These observations reflect the earlier interpretation of T.J. Nossiter, who argued that this decision to opt for revolutionary insurgency was partly because things were moving too fast after independence for the CPI leaders to formulate a coherent policy, particularly in the absence of any clear guidance from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). And it was also partly because a section of the communist leadership ‘truly believed that a revolutionary situation existed in Bengal, if not the country as a whole.’ So they did not want to let the opportunity slip out of their hands.4
