GAYA

Jehanabad

Under the leadership of the peasant association, peasants have captured several plots of vested land in villages like Barki Murahari, Saida, Salempur, Shahpur, Nighma and others. These plots have been used mainly for the purpose of housing. In Barki Murahari, 8 bighas of vested land were captured and some 50 to 60 erstwhile houseless ‘households’ were accommodated in huts built on this land. Now they are demanding parchas for these land plots. Here two decimals of land have been allotted to each adult in a family. Each household has been asked to plant one tree (pre­ferably mango). This hamlet, Sravannagar, has been named after a martyr comrade who was killed in a clash with landlords and their goons in Firoji village.

In Nighma village of Kurtha block, the peasant organisation is waging struggles for capturing vested land and land above ceiling. About 15 bighas of land have already been captured.

In Ghosi block, the peasant organisation launched a militant movement for capturing the land of the self-styled Mahant of Deora Math who possesses no less than 200 bighas. Here many clashes took place between peasants and the combined forces of the Mahant’s goons, Bhoomi Sena gangsters and armed policemen. The armed squad of the peasants killed a notorious landlord, Ram Sagar Singh, and some Bhoomi Sena lieutenants. The peasants even captured 175 bighas of math land. But the final battle on this question is yet to be won.

In Jehanabad area, the peasant organisation took certain successful concrete steps to combat the menace of caste-based mobilisation. In Bhawanichak village, the Bhoomi Sena had killed three poor peasants including an activist. Tension rose so high that hundreds of bighas of land (belong­ing to landlords and to middle and rich peasants of Kurmi and other castes) remained uncultivated for two full years. Earlier a people’s committee had been formed in the area. This committee held a meeting of poor, middle and rich peasants of at least 12 villages and explained to them how landlords were trying to break the peasants’ unity through leasing out or selling their land. Since the landlords were also trying to mobilise those middle peasants whose lands, too, were lying uncultivated, the meeting decided that the land of poor, middle and rich peasants would henceforth be cultivated. A separate committee was formed and certain policies were adopted. It was decided that landowning peasants would cultivate their land all by themselves, and would hand over that part of their land which they could not cultivate themselves to the committee. The committee would then lease out that land to poor and lower-middle peasants for cultivation. Accordingly, cultivation was resumed and the tension was somewhat eased. Unity in practice was thus achieved among harijan agrarian labourers/ poor peasants and Kurmi middle peasants.

Another communist revolutionary group, COC (Party Unity) also has its mass following in this subdivision. They have a mass organisation, Mazdoor Kisan Sangram Samtti, and also some armed squads. Our peasant organisation always tries to maintain warm relations with them. Joint movements are also sought to be developed. Against Dubey government’s Operation Task Force strategy to curb the peasant movement, the two peasant organisations jointly organised a huge rally and mass meeting on 4 October, 1985, in which more than 20,000 people participated.

The Arwal Massacre

Arwal, a block under the Jehanabad subdivision of Gaya, stands face to face with Sahar, the stormcentre of the Bhojpur peasant struggle in the 70s, and the borders of the two districts of Patna and Aurangabad are only a few kilometres away. The river Sone separates Arwal and Sahar, but the message did frequently cross the river from much earlier periods.

Considered as a stroghold of the CPI and the Brahmarshi Sena led by the notorious criminal-cum-MLA and Bhumihar landlord, Sardar Krishna Singh, Arwal joined the map of revolutionary struggles in the early 80s when a section of forces of the CPI came over to our Party and apart from other struggles, an armed action to snatch rifles was success­fully carried out at Badrabad police outpost. Subsequently. there arose serious complications. leading to a setback, but in recent months the mass movement in the area was again picking up. On April 15 of this year, the BPKS convened a mass meeting at Arwal as a part of its programme to observe a protest day throughout the State in memory of Comrade Brajesh (Assistant Secretary of IPF who was hacked to death by landlords in Purnea on 15. 3. 86). The police tried to disrupt the meeting under the pretext of Section 144 and serious altercations ensued. However, sensing the mood of the enemy, the organisers, determined to hold the meeting, finally decided to shift the venue. In the last three to four months, there had taken place a spate of armed actions on police camps in the districts of Bhojpur, Rohtas, Gaya and Patna resulting in the death of 7 policemen and the loss of 19 rifles, and everywhere people’s militancy was on the rise. In retaliation the enemy was planning a pogrom to be perpetrated at the first opportunity. And Arwal provided the ideal place from where the message could be sent to four districts at a time.

On 19 April, exactly a year after the Banjhi killings in which 15 adivasis, including Father Murmu, an ex-Rajya Sabha MP, were killed by the police, the massacre at Arwal took place taking a toll of over 60 lives. The entire plan was designed and executed on the pattern of the Jallianwallabagh firing of 13 April, 1919.

The mass meeting at Arwal was convened by the Mazdur Kisan Sangram Samiti (MKSS), a mass organisation owing allegiance to COC, CPI (ML) (Party Unity) and headed by Dr. Vinayan, a grass-rooter theoretician and an ex-activist of the JP movement, as part of a struggle for a plot of land. Dispute on the plot was going on for years between 9 land­less families on the one hand and the landowner, belonging to the backward caste of Rajakas (washermen), on the other. As a superintending engineer in the irrigation depart­ment in the secretariat, the landowner has good rapport with the administration and police officials and it is with their help that he has been illegally occupying the land for years. In the month of January he demolished the huts of the 9 above-mentioned families and erected a cemented wall on the plot, all with the help of the police.

Prior to the mass meeting, the masses led by the MKSS demolished the wall. The meeting began at 2.45 pm Participants, numbering well over thousand, came from Karpi, Jehanabad, Arwal (all in Gaya) and Paliganj (Patna). Nearly 40 per cent of them were women, many carrying their children, too. The police led by the Superintendent C.R. Kaswan (once again of a backward caste) opened fire on the unarmed people with the clear intent of killing as many as possible. The meeting place was surrounded from all sides and the people had no way to escape other than scaling the boundary wall. The ground became filled with dead bodies. Even those fleeing on the roads and lanes were not spared, the police chased them for a long distance and shot whoever came within the firing range. No distinction was made between men and women, between old, young and children, or between participants and passers-by. The Indian police were acting in the best traditions of the British dogs, with C R Kaswan stepping into the shoes of the notorious General Dyer. Throughout the night the police were busy removing the dead bodies and killing the injured. The government was determined to send its message and make it clear that henceforth pogroms like Arwal would be on its agenda to quell the growing militancy of the masses, and therefore, it has refused to retreat a single step even in face of nationwide protests. Krishna Singh, the leader of the Brahmarshi Sena, has openly come out in support of the massacre; the Bharat Sevak Samaj; a body of feudal land­lords, has justified the killings in its so-called citizens’ enquiry report; the DIG of the police has blatantly threatened the ‘extremists’ with more Arwals in the days to come; and Bindeshwari Dubey, the Chief Minister, has expressed satisfaction in the fact that Arwal has finally succeeded in enforcing ‘peace’ in troubletorn Bihar.

Well, the reactionaries cannot behave otherwise. Arwal has, however, triggered off a nationwide protest movement, it has widened the cracks in the administration and intensified the crisis of the ruling classes in general and the ruling party in particular. The big business press has, as usual, sensationalised the whole affair, reporting in detail the activities of the dissident Congressmen regarding Arwal, the so-called plans of Zail Singh to visit Arwal, statements of scheduled castes and tribes commissioners, and so on and so forth. Numerous protest rallies at Arwal by revolu­tionary democratic organisations, bandh in Patna and Jehanabad at their call, powerful women’s rally at Jehanabad by democratic women's organisations, and above all, the solidarity visit to Arwal by two truckloads of activists of the Bihar Colliery Kamgar Union find no place in the press.

History shows that the Jallianwallabagh Massacre had only resulted in the ouster of the British government and General Dyer; to be sure, the same fate awaits C. R. Kaswan, Bindeshwari Dubey and their masters. Far from sounding the death-knell of the peasant struggle in Bihar, Arwal has only revealed its intensity.