Word: naxalbari
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Land reform is another vexing problem. To prevent further bloody peasant revolts such as those that occurred in the Naxalbari region in 1967, the government must find a way to cut through the legal red tape that has effectively hamstrung land reform. The zamindars, a breed of feudal aristocrats and absentee landlords whose estates often consisted of as many as 50 or more entire villages, have got around the law in West Bengal by parceling out property to relatives, who often number in the hundreds. Though land reform is a state problem, Indira is expected to draft model legislation...
...acres per person on rural land holdings, but many feudal aristocrats had got around the measure by parceling out land to armies of relatives. After court attempts to untangle the land-reform problem failed. Charu Mazumdar, a member of the Marxist group, instigated a peasant revolt in the Naxalbari region of West Bengal. The leaders of Mazumdar's own party, fearful that the peasant revolt would spread, sent in armed police to put down the uprising. At least eleven women and children were killed. "After that," as a Naxalite spokesman said, "nobody could stop the movement...
...Delhi since its Communist-led government resigned last March. Throughout West Bengal, and especially in its capital city, Calcutta, Naxalite terrorism is on the rise (TIME, Aug. 24), and so is the resultant police repression. The Naxalite movement, so named because it originated four years ago in the remote Naxalbari region near the Himalayas, has spread to several parts of India but is now concentrated among the embittered students and unemployed college degree holders of Calcutta...
...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...