Chinese diplomats, a Bengali play and the Naxalbari mystery: New book revisits questions over Beijing's role

New Delhi: Hours before the Naxalbari uprising erupted in north Bengal, two Chinese diplomats were in then Calcutta, in the audience of a politically-charged Bengali play on May 23, 1967.

The play, titled "Ajai Vietnam", was written and directed by popular actor Utpal Dutt who was on the cusp of joining the Maoist movement and would soon be jailed. The Chinese officials attended the play as "special invitees".

The play attacked the conduct of American forces in Vietnam and, according to the then external affairs minister M C Chagla's parliamentary account, contained "derogatory and objectionable remarks" against the then prime minister Indira Gandhi and the Indian government.


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The presence of Chinese diplomats at the performance, therefore, acquired significance far beyond an evening at the theatre, particularly because it came just as a peasant uprising was taking shape in Naxalbari.

A new book tracing Bastar's turbulent past now revisits that episode and the larger question of China's role in the emergence of India's Naxalite movement.

"Rebel Bastar: History, Maoism and the Search for Answers in India's Heartland" by senior journalist Shantanu Nandan Sharma looks beyond the Maoist insurgency to examine Bastar's longer history of tribal resistance, administrative failure and resource exploitation.

Sharma argues Maoism in Bastar was "not an aberration but the latest chapter in a centuries-old story of resistance against state power". The book was published by Hachette India in July.

One chapter turns back to Naxalbari in 1967, examining the lingering questions over how far China was involved in India's first major Naxalite uprising, and what Indian officials themselves suspected at the time.

In Parliament, opposition members sought to know whether Chinese Embassy officials had travelled to Calcutta (now Kolkata) shortly before the Naxalbari violence and whether their presence had any connection with the uprising.

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The government was also pressed over the contrasting restrictions placed on Indian and Chinese diplomats. While Indian envoys in China were confined to the city limits of Beijing, opposition leaders questioned why Chinese diplomats were allowed to travel freely across India.

Chagla's answer was carefully worded. The government, he said, had made further inquiries and found that the Chinese officials had gone to Calcutta but not to Naxalbari.

Asked what they had done in Calcutta, he pointed to their attendance at "Ajai Vietnam".

When pressed on whether their presence had any connection with the unrest, Chagla said they "might have given aid and comfort from Calcutta", but had certainly not gone to Naxalbari.

The parliamentary record does not establish that the diplomats directed or organised the uprising. But it does show that the Indian government was concerned about Chinese diplomatic activity.

The suspicion surrounding Beijing's role acquired a much more explicit ideological dimension on July 5 that year, when China's People's Daily published a provocative editorial, hailing the Naxalbari uprising and prescribing Mao's revolutionary path for India.

The editorial urged Indian revolutionaries to rely on the peasantry, establish rural base areas, wage protracted armed struggle and use the countryside to encircle and finally capture the cities - the strategy that had underpinned Mao's revolution in China.

The official narrative placed China's direct involvement after the uprising, pointing to a Radio Peking broadcast about a month later. But the presence of Chinese diplomats in Calcutta only days before the violence complicated the picture, leaving open the question of what exactly the diplomats were doing there.

Sharma's account goes further into the paper trail. Drawing on Ministry of External Affairs files, government records and parliamentary material, he describes how officials in New Delhi wrestled with how to indict China for encouraging Naxalite activity without escalating tensions with Beijing.

One draft prepared for a Lok Sabha reply was unusually blunt, according to the book. It accused Chinese information, press and propaganda agencies, including the Chinese Embassy in Nepal, of openly encouraging the "unpatriotic and treasonable activities" of Indians involved in and around Naxalbari.

But the sentence did not find mention in the final written reply delivered by Indira Gandhi, who was also holding the external affairs portfolio at the time, having succeeded Chagla in September 1967.

Another passage in the draft sharply criticised Chinese diplomatic conduct and referred to the Chinese mission in Nepal as having "openly and repeatedly violated every rule of diplomatic behaviour". That passage too was removed.

The alterations, Sharma suggests, offer a glimpse into the dilemma confronting Indian officials. They were concerned about Chinese interference but were also wary of escalating tensions with Beijing, especially after the border war in 1962.

The book also points to the 1968 Pulpally-Tellicherry episode in Kerala, where confiscated documents indicated correspondence between the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi and local cadres over the publication of Maoist literature in Malayalam.

There was another strand to the story: Nepal.

Sharma writes that the Chinese Embassy in Kathmandu played a key role in stirring up disruption and facilitated the transit of Kanu Sanyal and other Naxalites to Beijing in September 1967.

The material assembled by Sharma paints a more complicated picture, with the uprising soon attracting explicit ideological endorsement from China alongside evidence cited in the book of Chinese diplomatic involvement in the activities of Naxalites.

That question has acquired a fresh relevance this year. In March, the government declared the Maoist insurgency effectively defeated, meeting its long-standing deadline to end Left-wing extremism. He later made a formal celebratory visit to Bastar on May 18, reiterating the government's declaration.

It is against that backdrop that "Rebel Bastar" looks back rather than simply celebrating an endpoint. Its central question is why a foreign ideology found a haven in Bastar for more than four decades, and what the region's history before Maoism tells us about that long insurgency.

The book has plenty of other such detours into Bastar's past, including the extraordinary life and death of its last Maharaja, Pravir Chandra Bhanjdeo - a story involving tribal rebellion, a Rolls-Royce, missing passports, London and an anxious Indian diplomatic mission.

When Sharma visited the Bastar palace, a black-and-white photograph of the erstwhile royal family's Rolls-Royce Phantom caught his eye.

The car led him to the far more intriguing figure: Bhanjdeo, the boy ruler who went on to become, in Sharma's account, a temperamental teenager, a failed military man, a tantric, a messiah for Adivasis, a casual politician and, ultimately, a rebel seeking to reclaim Bastar's pre-merger status.

While staying temporarily in Waltair (Visakhapatnam), Bhanjdeo was issued a passport by the Madras authorities in November 1948 for travel to the UK. Intelligence reports suggested that the young maharaja was planning to travel to Britain "in search of a foreign bride". Then he turned "non-traceable".

A month later, Bhanjdeo resurfaced in Waltair, ready to surrender the passport. The Madras authorities impounded it.

About a year and a half later, the mystery returned. This time, officials suspected that the maharaja had actually fled India using a fake passport and reached England.

The then high commissioner Krishna Menon recommended informing Scotland Yard, while hoping the British police would help locate Bhanjdeo without pursuing the matter further. But the assumption behind the diplomatic exercise proved wrong.

The maharaja whom Indian officials in London feared had slipped into Britain was, in fact, still in India.

Madhya Pradesh Police's Special Branch was trying to trace him. After Bengal intelligence failed to make headway, an inspector was sent to Calcutta. Bhanjdeo had arrived in the city in the first week of April 1950 and then moved to Darjeeling before returning to Calcutta again in May.

On May 19, Bhanjdeo bought a revolver, a pistol and cartridges and obtained a permit to visit Kashmir, which was mandatory at the time.

Once he was spotted in the Kashmir Valley, the Ministry of States sent an urgent telegram to London clarifying the mistake -- Bhanjdeo was very much within India. The message expressed regret for the inconvenience caused and said the government had acted on information supplied by the chief minister.