India: On the March

A few carried spears, others led bullocks. Nearly all were shoeless and clad only in tattered rags. Last week, in the largest land grab in India's recent history, peasants by the hundreds of thousands marched out in ten of the nation's 17 states and seized land held by rich landlords and the government. From Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in the north to Maharashtra and Gujarat on the west coast, they claim to have seized a total of 32,000 acres, at least temporarily.

The police generally dealt gently with the marchers. Despite the magnitude of the movement, only four deaths were reported. Nine thousand were arrested, and it appeared likely that the squatters would eventually be evicted.

The operation was led by a coalition of leftist parties, including the oldest of India's three Communist parties. It was condemned by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Yet she cannot ignore the fact that, of 131 million Indians who work on the land, 30 million are landless laborers, and that more than 40% of the nation's 49 million cultivated holdings are smaller than the 2.5 acres needed for viable farming. The leftist parties seek to dramatize the point that unless the government puts into practice its long-promised land reform, restless peasants will take matters into their own hands. The specter that haunts responsible Indian leaders is that next time the marchers may be led by a new and vicious political sect that has made peasant rebellion and mayhem parts of its policy.

The new sect, which is a Pekinglining splinter of India's Communist movement, is known as the Naxalites. Praised by Radio Peking as "the front paw of India's revolution," the Mao-quoting 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 of India's states.