THERE are certain other sections of people who complain, ‘It’s true that the rural poor, particularly the harijans, are extremely oppressed and exploited. Landlordism must be abolished, land must go to the tillers, and labourers must get fair wages. And for all these, they must struggle. But here they are going too far, they are committing excesses.’ Liberals sermonise the peasants: ‘Struggle, but with a decency, according to the rules of the game.’ And the name of this game is ‘politics without arms, politics without any­thing like the illegal and the underground, or, politics without any revolutionary party’.

Peasants in general and peasant struggles in particular never fit in the framework of decency as perceived by these liberals. Decency in rural areas is another name for the diabolical discipline imposed by the most indecent, most uncivilised sections of our society : the landlords. This, so-called decency is based on the acceptance of certain norms and taboos and privileges. Hence the first act of each and every peasant movement worth the name has always been to break these chains of decency. And the peasants in the struggling areas of Bihar are precisely doing that.

This does not imply that the peasants of Bihar are led by the dictum of ‘an eye for an eye’. Brutal oppression by the landlords, coupled with rigid caste polarisations, does sometimes provoke them into indulging in indiscrimi­nate retaliation; but they readily understand that such an attitude will only harm their struggle. From the very experiences of life, peasants know who is bad and who is not, who can be reformed and who cannot, who should be punished heavily and who deserves somewhat softer treatment. And their own experiences apart, there is the network of the Party activists who rigorously explain to them the positions of various classes in the countryside and the necessity of forging a broad-based people’s front so as to isolate the chief enemy who acts as the pillar of this oppressive system. It is this combination of Marxist-Leninist politics with the peasants’ very own experiences of life that is working wonders in the age-old caste-ridden rural society of ‘backward’ Bihar, and by now, the tendency of blind retaliation on the part of the oppressed peasantry has been more or less transformed into organised mass resistance.

Just as the peasants have realised, in the course of their struggle, that blind retaliation will not take them anywhere, so have they learnt that without a Marxist-Leninist Party and without arms they cannot overpower their enemy. Any one who wants to analyse the ongoing peasant struggle in a narrow framework devoid of these two inalienable components, viz., the Party and the arms, is bound to fail miserably in his endeavour. All reformists and liberals try to separate the peasants from their Party and arms, but while they persist in their efforts, peasants stubbornly cling to their precious realisation regarding the indsipensability of these two weapons, a realisation that has taken them long years of experience and a lot of blood.

The path of so-called extremism is prompted by this reality and illumined by these lessons of history, and the peasants of Bihar have declared in no uncertain terms their determination to stick to this path, come what may.