Articles by Sumanta Banerjee

A sense of public anger in West Bengal over Singur and Nandigram has not added up yet to a statewide agitation against the Left Front. The electorate is wise enough to recognise that there is no viable alternative as yet. But if the CPI(M) continues to be obdurate, public outrage may take desperate forms. Reactionary forces like the Trinamool and BJP are waiting in the wings - the first such ominous signs were evident in Singur and Nandigram.

Singur is a test of sorts: For the Left Front government that is very ardently pursuing industrialisation as the only pathway to progress and also for its opponents, who are speaking up for the unregistered sharecroppers and landless labourers, who stand to gain little from the project. The wide nature of opposition also offers an opportunity to diverse groups to explore an alternative path to development.

Terrorism rears its head whenever a society suffering from great inner political confusion and social disintegration reaches a cul-de-sac, where certain aggrieved sections of the people find that the democratic business of political change becomes an impossibility, and when the socialist and secular forces break faith with these disgruntled and desperate masses by failing to provide an alternative leadership. Tragically, governments have in turn put in place a state of permanent emergency through a slew of draconian laws, and created a monolithic monster that controls every activity of individuals - from street demonstrations to air travel.

The route of the Naxalite movement that was mapped in 1967 at the time of the Naxalbari uprising and adopted by the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) in 1970, that of organising peasant guerrilla movements as a means of capturing power, has been reiterated in the programme adopted by its successor, the CPI (Maoist) in 2004. But there is a need to combine guerrilla warfare with the building up of united fronts with other democratic forces in the political arena and civil society in order to supplement the protracted armed struggle.

The popular jubilation at the first round of victory in April in Nepal is tempered with a realistic scepticism about the next moves to be made by the seven-party coalition as well as the king. Nevertheless, Nepal is on the threshold of a new dawn and the Maoists there may yet show the way for armed revolutionaries elsewhere.