Naxalbari Uprising (1967)

The Naxalbari Uprising was an armed peasant insurrection that erupted in May 1967 in the Naxalbari, Khoribari, and Phansidewa police-station areas of the Siliguri subdivision in Darjeeling district, West Bengal. Its legal and political backdrop was the persistent failure of post-independence land reform: despite the West Bengal Estates Acquisition Act, 1953 and the West Bengal Land Reforms Act, 1955, tenant cultivators (bargadars) and tribal adivasi sharecroppers remained subject to illegal evictions, usurious jotedars (landlords), and bonded labour. The revolt was ideologically organised by a faction within the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), led by Charu Mazumdar, whose 1965–67 writings, later compiled as the "Historic Eight Documents," argued that Indian conditions required an armed agrarian revolution on the Maoist model of "encircling the cities from the countryside." Mazumdar's principal organisers were Kanu Sanyal and the Santhal cultivator Jangal Santhal.

The proximate trigger came on 18 May 1967, when a peasant who had secured a court order for his land was attacked by the landlord's men. Sharecroppers, armed with bows, arrows, and spears, began forcibly occupying disputed plots, seizing stored grain, cancelling debt deeds, and re-distributing land under newly formed peasant committees. On 24 May 1967 a police party that entered Naxalbari to make arrests was confronted by villagers; a police inspector, Sonam Wangdi, was killed by an arrow. The following day, 25 May 1967, police opened fire at Prasadujote, killing eleven people, including seven women and two children. This massacre transformed a localised land agitation into a national rallying point and gave the movement its enduring name—"Naxalite"—derived from Naxalbari village itself.

The uprising's mechanics followed a deliberate Maoist sequence: formation of clandestine peasant committees, "annihilation of class enemies" (the selective killing of landlords and their agents), seizure of arms from police and rivals, and the establishment of liberated zones administered outside the state apparatus. The United Front government then in office in West Bengal—an alliance that included the CPI(M)—moved to suppress the rebellion within roughly seventy-two days, by mid-1967, exposing the rift between parliamentary communists and the insurrectionists. This split was institutionalised when the dissidents formed the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR) in November 1967, which on 22 April 1969—Lenin's birth anniversary—founded the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist), the CPI(ML), with Charu Mazumdar as general secretary and Kanu Sanyal announcing its formation.

The movement spread rapidly beyond Bengal. By 1968–70 Naxalite activity reached Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh, Mushahari in Bihar, Lakhimpur Kheri in Uttar Pradesh, and parts of Kerala, Punjab, and Tamil Nadu, while a violent urban phase gripped Calcutta in 1970–71. The Indian state responded with large police and paramilitary operations; Charu Mazumdar was arrested in Calcutta and died in police custody on 28 July 1972, an event that fractured the first wave of the movement into competing factions. Decades later the insurgency reconstituted itself when the People's War Group and the Maoist Communist Centre merged on 21 September 2004 to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist), which the Government of India banned under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 and which sustained the so-called "Red Corridor" across Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, and adjoining states.

Naxalism must be distinguished from adjacent categories of political violence in India. It is not insurgency for secession or autonomy, as in the cases of Kashmir, Khalistan, or the Northeast; the Maoists seek to overthrow the Indian state itself and replace it with a "New Democratic" revolutionary order, making it the form of Left-Wing Extremism (LWE) the Ministry of Home Affairs treats as a distinct internal-security vertical. It differs from ordinary agrarian agitation by its rejection of electoral politics and its programme of armed seizure of power. It also diverges from the parliamentary communism of the CPI(M), against which it defined itself in 1967.

The movement has generated enduring controversies. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2006 described Left-Wing Extremism as the "single biggest internal security challenge" facing India, framing the state response around the twin pillars of security operations and development through schemes such as the Aspirational Districts Programme and the Special Central Assistance for LWE-affected districts. Critics counter that militarised responses—including controversial state-backed civilian militias such as Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh, which the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional in Nandini Sundar v. State of Chhattisgarh (2011)—addressed symptoms while neglecting the unresolved land, forest-rights, and tribal-displacement grievances that the 2006 Forest Rights Act and the Fifth Schedule were meant to redress. By the 2020s, sustained operations had sharply reduced the number of LWE-affected districts.

For the working practitioner—whether a UPSC aspirant addressing GS Paper III internal security, a desk officer in the Ministry of Home Affairs, or an analyst tracking subnational conflict—Naxalbari remains the indispensable point of origin. It demonstrates how unimplemented agrarian reform can convert localised grievance into a half-century insurgency, why governance and development deficits constitute security variables, and how a single 1967 firing in a Himalayan-foothill village seeded a movement that India still maps as its longest-running internal armed conflict.