The Communists in Post-Colonial Bengal, 1948-52: The Untold Story of 'Second' Tebhaga

Abstract

West Bengal is a province of India where a communist party - the Communist Party of India (Marxist) - in coalition with some other leftist parties, has been continuously in power for nearly three decades now. It has been elected to and has held on to power within a democratic constitutional framework. But in the past the communists in Bengal have also used violent revolutionary methods to secure power. In the late 1960s and the early 1970s this part of the communist movement became known as the Naxalite movement and a significant literature already exists on this. But what is less known is that the events of the 1960s-70s had a historical precedent in 1948-49 in the early days of independence. It is this less known aspect of the long and chequered history of the communist movement in Bengal that this paper seeks to unravel. This story has remained untold for various reasons - the first being the problem of sources. During the period there were regular newspaper reports of unrest, but the newspapers did not either know or did not report everything that was happening, or in other words, the real extent of the communist insurgency that started in West Bengal from the middle of 1948 remained unknown to the general public. The communists themselves have not told this story until recently, because this was another failed attempt at what later came to be condemned as 'left adventurism'. The government knew through its intelligence network what was actually happening, but kept a veil of secrecy. The professional historians have not written about it because the archives were closed and there were no other sources. The recent release of the IB (Intelligence Branch) records at the West Bengal State Archives has broken that impasse, and these records can now help us reconstruct this story in some details, for the first time, albeit remain the dangers of trying to write the history of insurgency from the texts of counter-insurgency.