March-April  1999

Smash Feudal Terror In Bihar

When marauding landlord armies, with connivance of the state, massacre innocent women and children, what should the people do ? When, even after 50 years, none of the land ceiling laws have been applied in Bihar, what should the people do ? When vast stretches of common land (gair mazarana), which should have been distributed to the dalits and adivasis, are still controlled by the zamindars, what should the people do ? When the poor are butchered by the landlord and government forces for demanding land which should legally be theirs, through legitimate forms of struggle, what should the people do? When all parliamentary parties, packed with criminals, openly or tacitly back the feudal marauders, what should the people do ? When, after these massacres none of these gangsters is convicted in a court of law, what should the people do ? When feudal armies, armed to the teeth, openly roam the countryside with no interference whatsoever from the police, what then should the people do ? And when senior military officers take leave from the army, to train the Ranbir Sena, can the poor ‘democratically’ seek merely to vote their tormentors out?

The answer to these questions was given by an ordinary villager, Ramwatia Devi of Shankarbigha (Frontline 26-2-99) to the Chief Minister Rabri Devi, when she visited the village. She said, "give us guns, not compensation. We do not want your money. We want to fight with those who have been killing us and moving around freely."

The answer was also given by the state secretary of the CPI (ML) [People’s War], Com. Shravana, who told journalists (Frontline 26-2-99) "We will impose capital punishment on the killers and their sympathisers in a ruthless manner." He added that the party would continue a sustained campaign against the Sena.... as part of this they had urged the agricultural labourers to widen and deepen their economic blockade against rich landlords.

Central Bihar is in the throes of a civil war, enflamed by the class struggle.These genocidal killings are the desperate, ruthless attempts of the landlord-bureaucrat classes to retain their crumbling power.

On the night of February 11, 1999, 50 gangsters of the Ranbir Sena, armed to the teeth, sneaked into the Dalit hamlet of Naraianpur village and began indiscriminate firing, killing twelve people in their sleep. These included four women, one of whom was a 12-year old girl. It was all over in 15 minutes. Like cowards they fled the area, wined and dined in the Bhumihar section of the village, and calmly returned to their homes. The police only reached the scene the next morning and made some pretense of taking action.

A fortnight earlier, on January 25th, in the same Jehanabad district, in similar style, these blood-thirsty goons killed, in cold blood, twenty-three people at Shankarbhiga village. Of these, five were women and seven were children, including a 10 month-old child. A year earlier, again in the same district, at Lakshamanpur Bathe, in a mass genocidal slaughter, 68 dalits were killed. 23 of these were women, eight of whom were pregnant; and 17 were children under the age of 15, including a 1a year-old child. And even earlier, in July ’96, two years after its formation, the Ranbir Sena killed 20 people in Bathani Tola of Bhojpur district .... again, of these 10 were women, nine were children.

And on each occasion, the story is the same — the cowards target innocent dalit women and children; the police collaborate with the killers; the government makes a pretense of action and a show of lip sympathy; and the political parties see how best to make political capital out of the event. And after each carnage, the ruling parties, of which ever colour, send a massive posse of para-military forces to the area, not to pursue the killers, but to protect them from the wrath of the masses. After each massacre, the para-military forces enter unleashing a reign of terror against the oppressed and the Maoists leading them.

As regards the latest butchery at Shankarbigha and Narainpur the story was the same. But this time the gruesome incidents have been eclipsed by the vulgar powerplay being enacted with the blood of the oppressed. Nothing could be as nauseating as to see these politicians play with the lives of the people in pursuit of power.

The roots of the problem of rural Bihar lie in the land question. Even after half-a-century of so-called ‘independence’ the bulk of the population live in abject poverty as landless and poor peasants. Bihar is, till today, the poorest state in the country with 55% of its population living below the official poverty line (compared to a national average of 36%). Even according to Home Ministry reports the state has 40 lakh landless labourers; nine lakh acres of land still remain undistributed. According to a study 61% of the lower Backward Castes and 70% of the Scheduled Castes are landless. But here, in addition to the merciless exploitation, the masses are also subjected to ruthless forms of extra-economic forms of coercion. This primarily takes on a caste character, where the landlords are basically from the upper castes, while the poor are from the lower castes. Thereby caste oppression is intertwined with economic exploitation.

Since 1947, for two decades, all the parliamentary parties backed the feudal elements, ignoring even their own (flawed) land laws, and the plight of the rural poor only worsened. It was only with Naxalbari that the rural poor of Bihar began to realise their rights and sought to assert it through organisation and struggle. The landed gentry, backed by the full force of the state, responded with fierce and brutal reprisals. Yet the movement grew, taking on the form of armed struggle, with Bhojpur district as its centre. Unable to face the organised struggle of the masses, the landlords resorted to creating a white terror by the massacre of innocents — mostly dalits.

The first such attack was launched in 1977 at Belchi followed by a continuous stream of other such massacres. Soon after the Belchi carnage, with encouragement from the state, landlords began forming their senas linked to their specific castes. Various senas of the Kurmi, Bhumihar, Rajput and Yadav landlords were formed through the 1980s. That the government was behind these senas was evident from the statement of a DIG of police who said, "there was a tendency among the police functionary to encourage the senas to organise themselves to fight the naxalites..." (Extremist and Sena activities in Bihar : Policy document submitted in 1986). But with the growing tide of the revolutionary movement which wiped out these caste-based senas, the landlords began building stronger senas, since 1990, cutting across caste lines. The Sunlight Sena, Suwarna Liberation Front, etc; finally metamorphosed into the Ranbir Sena (RS) in 1994.

The RS was built with far greater sophistication than all the earlier senas. Vast sums were poured into building the RS; sophisticated arms were acquired (some of them from Dawood’s henchman, Silu Miyan); large numbers of lumpens were recruited with well-paid salaries; systematic centres have been established and even a ‘mass’ front, called the Rashtravadi Kisan Mahasang (RKM) has been setup. The recruits were given military training by army officers who took leave for the purpose.

More importantly, the RS has been openly patronised by the BJP-Samata combine. This is evident from the fact that : at a meeting in which the Ranbir Sena was formed, a state-level BJP leader, Swaminath Tiwari, was present; in the FIR filed on the Haibaspura massacre case, two prominent BJP leaders’ names (C.P. Thakur and Jagdish Sharma) figure; the leader of the RKM, Janardan Rai, once a Congress(I) member switched to the BJP; and prominent leaders of the RS like, Bramheshwar Singh and Janardhan Sharma are with the BJP, while another, Krishna Sardar, an infamous dacoit, is now with the Samata.

What is particularly astounding, about the high profile media publicity on the dismissal of the RJD government in Bihar, is their conspicuous silence about the BJP-Samata connection with the RS. For the cold-calculated fascist designs of the Sangh Parivar the massacres served a twin purpose : first, to get a pretext to launch an offensive on the growing revolutionary movement in Bihar; second, to further their (and Samata’s) maniacal desire for power by dismissing the RJD government. That women and children are gruesomely killed to serve these ends, matters little to these vultures.

But in this conpiracy against the people the BJP is not alone. In fact, at the time of formation of the RS, landlords owing allegiance to all parties buried their differences and launched this Sena. Hatred for the oppressed was their common bond. Since, all parties have been collaborators with this feudal outfit. In spite of a series of massacres under RJD rule not one RS person has been touched. And today Laloo Prasad Yadav has the gall to state that "the poor have been massacred to behead the state government." Then, at the time of the Bathani Tola massacre, with the UF in power, the CPI Home Minister, Indrajit Gupta, after visiting Bihar offered to send para-military forces to curb "extremists". At that time, the Janata Dal central minister from Arrah, Chandra Prasad Verma, called for the lifting of the ‘ban’ on the Sena. The Congress(I), of course has an infamous record, for, it was they who presided over the massacre of naxalites in Bhojpur in the 1972-75 period. As for the Dalit parties and leaders, of the BSP/Paswan kind, with a hope to winover some of the backward caste vote base of the RJD, they have gone to the extent of supporting the very sponsors for the RS — the BJP.

In essence all these parliamentary parties, while supporting the status quo in the countryside, shift political allegiances to serve their vote-bank politics .... none really cares for the victims of the carnage. It is only the CPI (ML) [People’s War] which works and lives amongst the oppressed masses of central Bihar leading them in their struggle for land, dignity and power and which has sought to punish perpetrators of these crimes. Already, it has been reported that the CPI (ML) [People’s War] has retaliated, killing a number of RS associates, including Bageshwar Sharma, a leader of the Jehanabad district unit of the CPI.

It is tragic that the Ranbir Sena first established itself in the CPI (ML) Liberation stronghold of Bhojpur and now utilises this base to launch attacks and spread its organisation to many parts of central Bihar. Unfortunately, the Liberation party, after turning revisionist, switched its focus to vote-bank politics rather than confront the landlords and its sena. Instead of nipping it in the bud, it allowed the monster to grow. The big mass base, built on the struggles of its earlier revolutionary period, has been converted, from being a fighting forces, into a passive voting force unfit to confront the RS.

At its very inception in Belaur village, when the RS began its attacks, the Liberation party retreated, stalled its Jan Adalats (people’s courts) and helplessly looked on as 350 Dalit Musahar families were forced to leave the village. Even more pathetic was its reaction to the 1996 Bathani Tola massacre. Here, the leadership of Liberation consciously diffused the mass anger through stereotype fasts by its MP/MLAs, demonstrations at the assembly, and sterile calls for a "new initiative for peace and development", "mass resistance" etc without getting "provoked." Even the so-called "mass resistance" of a bandh was at the last moment withdrawn and transformed into a "victory march." And what was Liberations’s great victory over the RS ? Merely that a district magistrate was `transferred’ — not even suspended !!

And so, after establishing itself in Bhojpur, the RS began spreading its tentacles to Jehanabad and other neighbouring districts, entering the territory of the genuine revolutionary forces. It was then that the MCC and more particularly the erstwhile CPI (ML)(PU) [now CPI (ML) (PW)] struck blows at the RS. In early 1997 itself, the erstwhile CPI (ML) (PU) killed 3 RS hoodlums and a policeman after a ten-hour encounter. This was followed by the elimination of six RS scum in Turi and the blowing up of the house of a chief RS patron.

Today, while the parliamentary parties are busy squabbling for power at Delhi and Patna, it is the CPI (ML) [People’s War]’s call for continuing the economic blockade of the big landlords and of retaliation against the RS that is giving the oppressed masses of rural Bihar a new hope. The people will no longer take such atrocities quietly. They will retaliate. After all, was it not the firing by people from neighbouring villages that beat back the marauders at Shankarbigha. And at Narayanpur, unafraid of even the police top brass .... did not the dalits prevent even the Home secretary and DGP of police from entering their village ? The oppressed of rural Bihar are no longer willing to cringe before feudal-bureaucratic authority !!

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