India: On the March

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Lack of Reform. About a year ago, in a tactical switch, the Naxalites went underground in the countryside. At the same time, they discovered a fertile new recruiting ground in the cities. The 50-year-old Naxalite leader, Charu Mazumdar, who conceived and planned the original 1967 uprising, exhorts students to quit school and form Red Guard units to stir up a peasant revolt. Now numbering perhaps 25,000 members, the Naxalite movement has recruited its most aggressive members from Calcutta's middle-class college students and graduates, frustrated by lack of opportunity in India's stagnant economy.

Since April, Weatherman-type gangs of young men and women have made almost daily hit-and-run attacks throughout Calcutta. They have ambushed three police vehicles, killing one policeman and injuring three. One gang stabbed a schoolteacher to death. A plainclothes cop was chased and killed by a knife-wielding mob. Nine movie houses showing an anti-Chinese film were attacked, their audiences routed. Public buses and trams were firebombed. Naxalites ransacked a printing plant handling a U.S. Government account, and sacked the local Ford Foundation office.

A special target of Naxalite violence has been the "bourgeois" universities. Deans' and professors' offices have been rifled. Libraries containing the works of Mahatma Gandhi are prime targets; the Maoist Naxalites consider Gandhi "the crystallization of revisionism."

Since the beginning of May, Naxalite violence has intensified and spread beyond Calcutta. In a series of clashes, more than a dozen policemen have been killed in West Bengal state.

The new activity came just as the Calcutta police were finally demonstrating an ability to handle the terrorists. In July, police rounded up 125 Naxalites and an arsenal of bombs. But, as one Calcutta police official admits, "police action is only one-tenth of the total effort required to curb the Naxalites." The other nine-tenths is social reform. In its 23 years of independence, the world's largest democracy has been running a dangerous race with famine, poverty and overpopulation. Unless reforms can improve life for the bulk of the Indian people, the bomb could replace Mahatma Gandhi's spinning wheel as the symbol of the Indian masses.