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Diary of a
Revolutionary
WSN Bureau
 Ethnic nations
must consider the diaries of revolutionaries as a great asset for
these are the documents that shall preserve histiory, facts and used
to nail lies. Kerala’s Naxalbari, the autobiography of Ajitha
Narayanan, the only woman member of the Pulpally attack of 1968 -
the Kerala edition of Bengal’s ‘Spring Thunder’, is a welcome
edition to this niche of literature. Beautifully translated by Sanju
Ramachandran, it is the story of a revolutionary. And a revolution.
Revolutions are
never the work of one person and Ajitha is meticulous with her
day-to-day notations of the progress of the movement as nurtured in
the Wyanad: “We met some local tribals on our way. We exhorted them
to join us and told them that we had destroyed the MSP (police) camp
and that our next aim was to attack the houses of landlords. Their
faces lit up... a new way of liberation was open before them.” And,
subsequent failure: “Our numbers had come down.
Some comrades
who had hidden themselves on their way to the MSP camp had not
joined us at all.” The memoir is good rescue work of the many stages
of revolt - the excitement, resolve, doubts, betrayals and the guilt
- and of faceless volunteers who led, joined and bled for the cause:
the freeing of the peasants and the indigenous people crushed by the
local landlords and the police, the other oppressive arm of the
State. The book, however, suffers from an uncritical look at the
role of violence in ultra- Left politics. An increasing reliance on
it is perhaps why the movement is in retreat in Bihar and,
conversely, on the rise in Orissa and Chhattisgarh. A revolution
even when it is waged for the benefit of the people, cannot take off
without popular support. Politics should command the gun and not the
other way around.
Where do we
place the Pulpally- Thalassery revolt? And why should we take
notice? First, it underlines where the State has erred: by taking a
policy decision against violence without understanding its source.
 The
Pulpally-Thalassery revolt is also important from another angle - it
was one of the early indications of the distance that is bound to
grow between the Party and the People when a communist movement
becomes parliamentary and part of the State machinery. State power,
even when the state is ruled by Marxists, is not socialism. As
Ajitha quoting Lenin says: “The real essence of bourgeois
parliamentarism is to decide once in every five years who among the
ruling classes would repress and crush the people through
parliament.” The lesson to be drawn here is that struggle and
failure may be the price of socialist movements but there is always
scope from within the movement to reclaim the revolution.
Gorilla, written
by a former LTTE child soldier, Shobasakthi on the Tamil Eelam
movement when it first came to town, is the fascinating account of a
different revolution. Set in the Kunjan Fields in north ern Sri
Lanka, it tells the story of the movement’s degeneration through the
part abusive and part exploitative relationship of a fatherand- son
story. Gorilla’s son, Rocky Raj, joins the movement and then his
troubles begin.
In the
beginning, Rocky like the other Tiger cubs go around dispensing
their rough justice. Disillusionment creeps in when in the manner of
all cadre-based movements, radicalism is imposed from above, without
dialogue and engagement. There’s a telling incident in the book when
Rocky discovers a booklet of a rival organisation also fighting for
Tamil eelam. It is titled, ‘The Lesson Learnt from Bengal.’
“Some of the
points raised made perfect sense… he decided if he got a chance to
change his name, he would call himself Mujibur.” And then consider a
senior cadre’s response: “If they eat snakes in Vietnam, we cannot
eat them too… for the first time in history, we have a great leader,
versed in the arts and sciences of war to lead us into battle.” With
that, the argument ended. The novel winds up in
Paris
with what seems to be a mindless assassination. The foreword says it
best: “Here too the killers didn’t come in with guns blazing…” The
killer and the victim were part of the same community.
It could be
said, both from Kunjan Fields, were friends. But the violence that a
gentle Lokka laments and ironically perpetrates when pushed to it is
the violence that the Eelam culture has made its pact with. The end
of adventurism is foretold. There will be blood.
7
May,
2008
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