In the November 16, 1966 edition of The New York Times, J Anthony Lukas began an article titled ‘The Week of the Cow: Many in India Think Cabinet Shifts After Riot May Hurt Prime Minister’ with: “The proverbial bull in the china shop has had nothing on the Indian cow this last week. Usually lethargic and amiable, the cow has somehow managed to upset much of India’s political crockery in its current rampage.” The article, unacceptable as its imagery would be today, had nothing to do with bovine umbrage, though. It was about the food riots in eastern and central India that had, since the beginning of that year, shaken Indira Gandhi’s government to its withers.

In mid-May 1966, Mrs Gandhi acknowledged “that 4,66,00,000 people were affected by famine conditions in 117 districts spread over Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Rajasthan”. Conspicuous by its absence was any mention of West Bengal, where rioting had been at its severest; that was largely because Mrs Gandhi continued to insist, as she had done in March that year to a maddened parliament, that the riots in the state were due to “deliberate plans for violence” by the nation’s Leftist political parties.

But the centre’s dissembling didn’t quite work. Suspecting the birth of a populist, ideologically Left but parliamentary groundswell, correspondents came pouring in from American newspapers as little-known as The Gadsden Times, Alabama; the Spokane Daily Chronicle; the Tri-City Herald; and the Lewiston Evening Journal, Lewiston-Auburn, Maine. Unlike many Indian dailies and periodicals, the American media were under no commitment to be supportive of Indira Gandhi. The Spokane Daily Chronicle commented that when home minister G L Nanda and food minister Chidam-Baram (sic) Subramaniam went to Calcutta in March 1966, the two repeated Mrs Gandhi’s assertion that “West Bengal’s wave of violence is a premeditated assault on the New Delhi government’s authority”. In the Lewiston Evening Journal, Joe McGowan Jr was more alarmist: “If the race is lost, all of India will face a serious threat, experts here agree. Repercussions could be felt throughout Asia.”

The operative pejorative at the centre was “Leftist”. West Bengal chief minister P C Sen said that it was not “as sometimes assumed, merely a demonstration against food and kerosene shortages in the state”. In the first week of March 1966, Indian army units hurriedly entrained for Calcutta, with orders to shoot into mobs – some estimated at upwards of 10,000 – that attacked railway stations, trains, police stations and the odd foolhardy vehicle. This was the first time that the Indian army had been used to quell non-insurgent, civilian violence (which stands out in stark contrast to the UPA government’s ‘ethical’ refusal to bring the armed forces to bear against its pet beef, the Maoists).

By the end of that year, violence in the state – left, in a stunning paradox of political exigency, both unaddressed and over-manhandled – was ideologically legitimated. Radio Peking played its opportunistic mischief by hailing student agitators at Calcutta University as “path-blazers” in India’s “cultural revolution”. But it would take another year for Naxalbari, in Darjeeling district, which had also been hit hard by the food shortages that had spared the Terai zamindars, to explode and burn itself like a painful afterimage in the minds of every government at the centre and the state.

In mid-1966, West Bengal was surrounded by a forest fire of violence – radical, populist but not Left – which fed the fire in its starving belly. In Assam, the army thumped after lightfooted Mizos who would eventually coalesce into an en masse demand for statehood. The Mizos ripped up roads and felled trees across them, a simple foiling of an army’s implacability that became the default method of protest by West Bengal’s dispossessed. In East Pakistan, rioters began their long fight for statal autonomy, leading Pakistani president Ayub Khan to order the media to blame food shortages alone for the ruction.

Surrounded by such examples of the possible, and pumped with a living history of anticolonial impulses, Calcutta went officially Red in 1967, flooded with doctrinaire students, the thoroughfares of Gariahat, Ballygunge and College Street stacked with pamphlets, booklets and books by Mao Tse Tung, Marx, Lenin, Liu Shao Chi and the odd anarchist Bakunin and Proudhon. Within a year, leading colleges like Presidency were facing a steady depletion of brainiacs, who went underground and took to arms as readily as they had taken to scholarship.

Amidst this political volatility, in November 1967, the central government offhandedly dismissed the West Bengal United Front government. The Congress-led minority government soon collapsed and president’s rule was imposed. The crisis in the Communist Party of India (Marxist) ignited as district-level leaders Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal impetuously posited the birth of an “Indian revolution”. Prafulla Debbarman, who was part of the original “band of dreamers”, says that that declaration was typical of the “jumping of the gun syndrome that cost early Naxalism its genuineness and its life”.

Then the Communist Party of China validated Naxalbari, outraging the CPI (M), which, as majority partner in the West Bengal government, had been bearing down on Naxalites. With CPI (M)-CPC relations terminated, revolutionary hardliners – but no big guns among them – peeled off to form the All-India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR), which formally separated from the CPI (M) at the Burdwan plenum in April 1968. It was a decisive rift in the established Left throughout the country.

Exactly a year later, on Lenin’s birthday on April 22, the AICCCR gave itself a more user-friendly name, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), but that did nothing to mellow its character. Nobody braced themselves for a politicocidal feud that would slaughter thousands and, four decades later, be decisive in unseating the uninterrupted, oligarchic, three-decade-old Left Front government in West Bengal.

Nobody – not the central or state governments or the extreme Left or the various political parties or the police and the paramilitary or academia or civil society or human rights groups – has kept a body count of violence over the decades in West Bengal, but unofficial, conservative estimates talk of upwards of 10,000. The CPI (M) has its own varying counts depending on who’s listening and reads from a script about the violence of the “Maoist-Trinamool combine”; the Trinamool Congress (TC), many of whose “martyrs” were either in the process of quitting the CPI (M) – in which case they make the CPI (M) list as well – or once were CPI (M) lumpens who bumped off TC members and Maoists, has its own iffy death stats that often includes members of the Maoist-backed People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities (PCPA), which was born after the police overkill following an assassination attempt on chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee at the ironically named Lalgarh in 2008; the Maoists kill pretty much at will – their victims include a raft of unverifiable “informers”, CPI (M) members, some Trinamool members and many tribals, killed for reasons ranging from defying orders to skip town before the security forces show up, intra- and inter-tribal rivalries, crossfire, and refusing to host or pay for the upkeep of militiamen.

The epicentre of the violence has for decades been Midnapore, where 365 people were killed last year, and which has a century-old reputation for revolutionary impulses and centrality in the Khilafat movement. But the current surge of the three-way political attrition among the CPI (M), the Trinamool Congress and the Maoists has its roots in the by-now almost-mythic carnage in Nandigram in March 2007, in which 4,000 armed police killed 14 people while trying to stamp out protests against the state government’s intent to appropriate 40 sq km of arable land for a special economic zone chemical hub to be developed by the Indonesia-based Salim Group. The fact that the group is also the world’s largest instant noodle-maker lent the intentions of the state government a slightly unreal aura.

But reality struck home when the people of Nandigram declared the area, in the language of the extreme Left, a “liberated zone”, digging up roads and hacking up communication cables. It became clear in hindsight that at least some of the police overkill was aimed at breaking up the three-month-old Bhumi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee (BUPC), a merger of three anti-CPI (M), anti-SEZ organisations, one each from the Socialist Unity Centre of India and the Congress; the Trinamool Congress; and the Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Hind and the Provisional Central Committee, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). In the months to come, some of these organisations would be sidelined, and the Trinamool and the PCC, CPI (M-L) would end up sharing a platform. Despite Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee’s assertions to the contrary, there is both video and audio evidence that the Trinamool made it possible for the Maoists – perhaps due to its inexperience in dealing with a group that had kept its wits through years of an underground existence – to see daylight again.

What led the villagers of Nandigram to mass behind the BUPC? And how did the ripples spread unstoppably outward till it brought the Trinamool into the reckoning and the Maoists into a place of angry recidivism? In November 2007, after the Calcutta High Court excoriated the police action as “wholly unconstitutional”, chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee told the party mouthpiece People’s Democracy that the chemical hub had been shifted to a relatively uncontroversial sandhead on the Ganges called Nayachar. Nayachar is expected to attract an investment of Rs 440 billion. Since it is the same project, only in another place, it is roughly the same amount that Nandigram would have received – and that would have changed the impecunious economics of East Midnapore forever.

The answer, says economist Debabrata Sikdar, lies in a populist Left act that has come back to bite the West Bengal government in its fundament: Operation Barga, launched in 1978 (a year after the Left Front came to power and began its uninterrupted 32-year rule) and concluded by the mid-1980s. It was India’s most celebrated land reforms movement, putting the names of bargadars (sharecroppers) on record, protecting them legally against eviction by landlords and entitling them to a share of the produce. With the centre looking on warily – but more or less helplessly, since the operation was in line with Article 34 of the constitution’s Directive Principles of State Policy – Operation Barga made no bones that its basis was collective action. Large fiefs were occupied and divided into complex jigsaw puzzles of small, non-quadrilateral parcels of land that would, two decades later, prove to be hell to put together seamlessly and hand over to the corporates, without hundreds of neighbours agreeing to sell at the same time. Although the bargadars were never legally the landowners of their cabbage patches, the passage of the years gave them that right. The problem was that the protracted process of settlement was abandoned in favour of overnight occupation by the peasantry.

By then, a righteous “culture of entitlement” had found an honoured place in the hearts of Bengal’s middle and lower-middle class. If sharecroppers could be given such massive handouts – precious land – why couldn’t workers? And teachers (whose tenures today are indestructible and salaries among the highest in the country)? Anyone, in fact, with a union behind them? The culture of vehicular and market paralysis – the dreaded bandh – an import from the countryside, came into Calcutta, from where it spread to mofussil towns. When bandhs didn’t work, the methodology of a thwarted “culture of entitlement” came down to general arson and promiscuous violence, the spectre of which the state continues to live under in these times of the Trinamool Congress’ pre-eminence. The actors, after all, are the same they ever were, their worldview unchanged: they have merely shifted allegiance from the CPI (M) to the Trinamool. One party’s lumpen will become another party’s lumpen, not its ideologue.

Not that Operation Barga was entirely successful: first, it was blamed for distributing and consolidation poverty in patches of land too small for adequate farming returns; second, it created tensions when sharecroppers tried to buy out each other to expand their holdings; third, by the end of Operation Barga, only a third of sharecroppers in the state had been registered.

But some land is better than no land, and its defence necessitated as much by emotion as by the economics of compensation. So when the time came for the state machinery to acquire for the chief minister’s joint venture and private projects meant ostensibly for ‘the public good’, such as in Nandigram and Singur (2008), the bargadars fought back. The state government, in its frenzy of corporate enticement, fought back, too. The Trinamool saw the advantages of intervening in this see-saw, even as it caught the ready fancy of the Maoists.

The Maoists went into the tribal-dominated, developmentally feeble zones of West Midnapore, Bankura and Purulia (which comprise a sort of tribal condominium called Jangalmahal), much of which had been bypassed by Operation Barga. The tribals aren’t peasants by any but the most generous definition: equipped with bows and arrows, machetes and spears, they are mostly forest-produce dependent. Mostly, not all: Rajat Kanti Das wrote in Social Transformation and Political Orientation: The Case of Midnapore Tribals (2003), “Affiliations to political parties are to an extent responsible for differentiating tribals into tradition-bound and emergent role performers.

Before the Trinamool made its play by trouncing the CPI (M) in the rural elections in May 2008, the Left Front-affiliated tribal hotheads, “emergent role performers” who were a minority part of the vast, combustible network of the CPI (M) lumpen, had it better than those making a traditional, precarious living. After 2008, the actions of the “tradition-bound” and the “emergent role performers” were interchanged. Suddenly, the hotheads – many of them 15-16 years old and paid Rs 2,500 a month; 500 were trained in the first half of 2010, according to West Midnapore  superintendent of police Manoj Verma – are the Maoist rank-and-file. Kept untutored about extreme Left doctrine, they have the hair-trigger rage of the newly empowered dispossessed, which results in reckless incidents like the derailment of the Gyaneshwari Express in West Midnapore on May 28, 2010, which killed at least 141 passengers and blackballed Maoists across the state till they executed some of the tribals involved

Basudev Gangopadhyay, who worked with the Uttar Bango Tapsili Jati O Adibasi Sangathan (Northern Bengal Backward Caste and Adivasi Organisation, UTJAS), a political movement among tribals in northern West Bengal that couldn’t recover from CPI (M) violence in Alipurduar in 1987, says, “This is far beyond what we accomplished – if accomplished is the right word. But we never sought to change the tribals to fit an ideology.”

But a common thread unites West Bengal’s tribals with the Maoists – a pan-regional presence. Many Maoists – including their elusive leader, Kishanji alias Koteswar Rao – are not indigenous to West Bengal. Among the tribals, the need for a socialistic order that supersedes their traditional egalitarianism plays second fiddle to their desire for a borderless communitarianism, which is reflected in the popularity of the Jharkhand Movement – especially the 49-tribal party Jharkand Coordination Committee, which is pushing for a state incorporating the tribal-dominant areas in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and West Bengal. While there have been frequent clashes between the CPI (M) and the Jharkhand Party, the Maoists routinely kill activists of the Jharkand Party (Naren), which is one of four Jharkhand groups affiliated with the Bharatiya Janata Party. In effect, if you are a tribal in Bengal, you’re dead if you’re red, and you’re dead if you’re not. Invaluably for the Maoists, the tribals know the lie of the land they do not sharecrop or own; they can live off, and in, the forests; those that they leave behind in the villages – their fathers, mothers, non-combatant sisters and younger brothers, their extended, close-knit families – make up the bulk of the primitively kitted army that the Maoists throw in so-called “swarming attacks” at the security forces and at the CPI (M) lumpen, who comprise what Mamata Banerjee calls, to Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s helpless chagrin, the “harmad bahini”.

Being referred to by union home minister P Chidambaram as the “harmad bahini” must hurt the CPI (M): the term’s etymology is too contemptuously colonial. It is a Bengali corruption of the English word ‘armada’. Seventeenth century Portuguese pirates, who razed Bengal’s coastal villages for loot and slaves for the European market, were called ‘Harmad’. So, calling the CPI (M)’s armed ‘activists’ the harmad bahini (armada militia) is like slapping the party’s much-vaunted “collective action” in the face. Against his better judgement, one presumes, the chief minister recently pleaded with Chidambaram to prevent Mamata Banerjee from using the term.

But there is ample evidence that the harmad exists. On October 18, 2010, for instance, about 12,000 CPI (M) cadres marched 12 km from Dharampur and Goaltore to Lalgarh and ‘reclaimed’ the region. On September 1, 2010, based on information supplied by the Trinamool, Chidambaram curtly said that he knew of the existence of armed CPI (M) camps in the state. On December 21, 2010, he virtually told Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee to ensure that the harmad bahini was “immediately disarmed and demobilised”.

But that isn’t likely to happen, even though a report by the Central Reserve Police Force on January 29, 2011 cleared the CPI (M) camps in Lalgarh and its adjoining districts of the charge of stocking armaments. “A list was given to us by the (Calcutta high) court mentioning the location of armed camps in the three districts (Midnapore, Bankura and Purulia) and we distributed the list to the field officers so that they can conduct raids in their areas,” said inspector-general (CRPF) T B Rao. “There has not been any positive result.”

But there is a disconnect here. A source said that last month the CPI (M) had decided to beef up 12 camps in Lalgarh and its vicinity. Debabrata Sanyal, a party cadre, said that since March 2010, the CPI (M) had set up 87 camps in West Midnapore, Bankura and Purulia, with 45 in West Midnapore alone. In open defiance of the Maoists, a large camp has been set up at Bamal village, less than five km from Lalgarh, from where the security forces evicted the red underground in mid-2010 but wait nervously for their return. Most of these camps house armed cadres, although firearms are quickly stowed away whenever ‘civil society’ teams – read human rights groups, formal and informal – and central scrutineers arrive. “This is why the CRPF missed our stash,” he says. “If,” his colleague, a first-generation migrant from Uttar Pradesh, adds pointedly, “they missed it at all.”

In the run-up to the elections, the Trinamool’s attrition force hasn’t time enough to organise itself to the max with arms, ammo, a supply chain and fortifications. The harmad bahini might just up its ante to counter an expected increase in Maoist violence. A few alleged Maoists have been cornered in Trinamool-run camps for party refugees from areas ‘reclaimed’ by the CPI (M) cadres, which the CPI (M) is brandishing as proof that the Trinamool and the Maoists are sharing logistics. Most of the Maoists that the security forces have captured in West Bengal since the beginning of the five-state anti-Maoist Operation Green Hunt in November 2009 have been scrawny, clueless-looking tribal youth. One, arrested late last year, was brought to Kolkata and medically diagnosed as mentally challenged; he had been found hiding behind a tree during a firefight. A few arrestees have been middle-level functionaries, with enough terrain familiarity to send the CPI (Maoist) into a paroxysm of activist replacement.

But some functionaries can’t be replaced, and might even have to be feared as the elections draw close. A year ago, 15 years into their campaign, the Maoists lost Marshall alias Gurucharan Kisku of Purulia to a change of worldview. Marshall, one of the architects of the Jangalmahal insurgency, was a zonal leader with a price on his head. Today, he calls Kishanji a “non-tribal leader” and “outsider”, and has vowed to float a new outfit – he says he has signed up 150 armed men already – to fight for “the tribal cause”. “Maoists are also powermongers, just like any other political party,” he says. Observers expect some internal bloodshed in the Maoist ranks as apostates like Marshall gather a slew of tribals behind them to counter those who are, like Sasadhar Mahato or Bikash alias Mansaram Hembram, “merely executing the policy decided by non-tribal leaders like Kishanji, Deepak and others”. Marshall is not a CPI (M) quisling: he remains in hiding, wanted for ambushing a police party in Bandwan in Purulia in 2003 and killing the officer commanding and five constables.

According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal database, 425 persons died in Maoist-related political violence in West Bengal in 2010 – 318 civilians, including 116 CPI (M) members, 36 security forces personnel and 61 Maoists – as against 158 in 2009, 24 in 2008 and six in 2005. (These figures do not take into account non-Maoist-related violence, for instance, between the CPI (M), the Trinamool, the Congress and the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha, all of which taken together can, according to a rough count from daily news reports, add up to about 250 more in 2010.) Civilian fatalities in West Bengal recorded a 145 per cent increase over the elevated base level of 134 for 2009.

This year is set to break this record, not just because of the usual pre-election cadre hijinks. First, the CPI (M) strengthened its reputation for letting its cadres get out of hand by beginning the year with a shootout, in Netai in West Midnapore on January 7, which killed nine civilians in a crowd that had gone to CPI (M) leader Rathin Dandapat’s house to speak to him about forced domestic work in the CPI (M) camp and forced conscription. That’s nine down already, not counting tit-for-tat killings between the Trinamool and the CPI (M), and Maoist-related attrition.

Second, Sudip Chongdar alias Kanchan and other CPI (Maoist) State Committee members arrested on December 4, 2010 revealed during deep interrogation that Kolkata was at the centre of a Maoist plan to build an urban backup force. Documents in their possession showed that there were more than 200 primary CPI (Maoist) members and hundreds of sympathisers in the city.

In one of his rare interviews, the Maoist supremo Kishanji appeared to second Kanchan. “We will have an armed movement going in Calcutta by 2011,” he told the BBC in 2009. The state government seems to have woken up to the threat just now: on February 7, Sitaram Yechury asked the Election Commission to seal West Bengal’s borders ostensibly in order to prevent pre-election Maoist infiltration from Jharkhand, Orissa and Bihar.

But Kolkata is far from the borders, and it is in the crosshairs of the Maoists.