On the March

A few carried spears, others led bullocks. Nearly all were shoeless and clad only in tattered rags. Last week, in the largest land grab in India's recent history, peasants by the hundreds of thousands marched out in ten of the nation's 17 states and seized land held by rich landlords and the government. From Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in the north to Maharashtra and Gujarat on the west coast, they claim to have seized a total of 32,000 acres, at least temporarily.

The police generally dealt gently with the marchers. Despite the magnitude of the movement, only four deaths were reported. Nine thousand were arrested, and it appeared likely that the squatters would eventually be evicted.

The operation was led by a coalition of leftist parties, including the oldest of India's three Communist parties. It was condemned by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Yet she cannot ignore the fact that, of 131 million Indians who work on the land, 30 million are landless laborers, and that more than 40% of the nation's 49 million cultivated holdings are smaller than the 2.5 acres needed for viable farming. The leftist parties seek to dramatize the point that unless the government puts into practice its long-promised land reform, restless peasants will take matters into their own hands. The specter that haunts responsible Indian leaders is that next time the marchers may be led by a new and vicious political sect that has made peasant rebellion and mayhem parts of its policy.

The new sect, which is a Pekinglining splinter of India's Communist movement, is known as the Naxalites. Praised by Radio Peking as "the front paw of India's revolution," the Mao-quoting Naxalites pose a fifth-column threat in any new Sino-Indian conflict. They have already staked a violent claim to the allegiance of the docile peasants. In 1967 they masterminded a short-lived but bloody tribal revolt at the foot of the Himalayas near Nepal in the region of Naxalbari--from which the group takes its name. For six weeks bands of peasants armed with guns, spears and knives roamed the countryside, brutally killing "class enemies"--usually wealthy landlords and moneylenders.

Police suppressed the Naxalbari revolt, only to have the Naxalites start another uprising 400 miles away in the Srikakulam district of Andhra Pradesh state. There, in 15 months of guerrilla warfare, 31 "class enemies" were cruelly executed. The Naxalites hung their victims' heads from poles, and used their blood to scrawl Maoist slogans. The uprising was finally brought under control by last spring, when 2,000 police were brought in and a land-reform and development program was started. Although the Srikakulam Naxalite leadership was wiped out--with 70 cadres killed--Naxalite groups had spread by then to eleven of India's states.

Lack of Reform. About a year ago, in a tactical switch, the Naxalites went underground in the countryside. At the same time, they discovered a fertile new recruiting ground in the cities. The 50-year-old Naxalite leader, Charu Mazumdar, who conceived and planned the original 1967 uprising, exhorts students to quit school and form Red Guard units to stir up a peasant revolt. Now numbering perhaps 25,000 members, the Naxalite movement has recruited its most aggressive members from Calcutta's middle-class college students and graduates, frustrated by lack of opportunity in India's stagnant economy.

Since April, Weatherman-type gangs of young men and women have made almost daily hit-and-run attacks throughout Calcutta. They have ambushed three police vehicles, killing one policeman and injuring three. One gang stabbed a schoolteacher to death. A plainclothes cop was chased and killed by a knife-wielding mob. Nine movie houses showing an anti-Chinese film were attacked, their audiences routed. Public buses and trams were firebombed. Naxalites ransacked a printing plant handling a U.S. Government account, and sacked the local Ford Foundation office.

A special target of Naxalite violence has been the "bourgeois" universities. Deans' and professors' offices have been rifled. Libraries containing the works of Mahatma Gandhi are prime targets; the Maoist Naxalites consider Gandhi "the crystallization of revisionism."

Since the beginning of May, Naxalite violence has intensified and spread beyond Calcutta. In a series of clashes, more than a dozen policemen have been killed in West Bengal state.

The new activity came just as the Calcutta police were finally demonstrating an ability to handle the terrorists. In July, police rounded up 125 Naxalites and an arsenal of bombs. But, as one Calcutta police official admits, "police action is only one-tenth of the total effort required to curb the Naxalites." The other nine-tenths is social reform. In its 23 years of independence, the world's largest democracy has been running a dangerous race with famine, poverty and overpopulation. Unless reforms can improve life for the bulk of the Indian people, the bomb could replace Mahatma Gandhi's spinning wheel as the symbol of the Indian masses.

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