ABSTRACT
As the Naxalite decade overwhelmed West Bengal, what was happening in the neighbouring state, Bihar? Bihar, in the eighties, mirrored the Naxalite decade of Bengal with equal vigour or perhaps with more intensity and on a greater scale. The violence of class war was witness in the last years of the sixties and the first half of the seventies to a rare chiaroscuro of militant movement and popular movement – one mixed with the other. This chapter thus returns to the theme – raised in the introduction – of the simultaneity and succession of popular movement and insurgent class war. In no other state in India was there as telling an instance of this simultaneity as in Bihar at that time. To understand this apparently inscrutable aspect of radical politics of the people, we have to go back though extremely briefly to the background in
which the popular outburst occurred in Bihar in the early seventies. It will help us understand our paradoxical past this book chronicles.
