The Naxalbari Uprising: Genesis of the Naxalite Movement in India

In the spring of 1967, a cluster of villages tucked into the foothills of the Himalayas in north Bengal gave its name to one of the most enduring radical movements in modern Indian history. The Naxalbari uprising was an armed peasant revolt that lasted only a few months before the state crushed it, yet it sparked an ideological fire that still burns in parts of central India today. Understanding what happened in Naxalbari, and why, opens a window into the unfinished business of land reform, the betrayals felt by the rural poor, and the violent path that a section of the communist movement chose to walk.

The agrarian powder keg before 1967
A region primed for revolt
The spark and the spring thunder
The leaders behind the movement
The ideology that turned a revolt into a movement
International attention and the deepening rift
From uprising to organised insurgency
Fragmentation and the long insurgency
Naxalbari’s legacy today

The agrarian powder keg before 1967

To understand why Naxalbari exploded, you have to look at the land system it inherited. The colonial Permanent Settlement of 1793 had created a layered hierarchy of zamindars and intermediaries who extracted rent from those who actually worked the soil. Below them sat the jotedars, large landholders who controlled vast plots, and at the bottom were the sharecroppers, known locally as bargadars or adhiars. These cultivators bore the full cost of farming but were forced to hand over half their harvest to the landlord, leaving them perpetually indebted and dependent.

This was not a new grievance. The Naxalbari region had a long memory of agrarian struggle. The Tebhaga movement of 1946-47, organised by communist cadres of the Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha, had mobilised sharecroppers across north and northeastern Bengal under the slogan that they should keep two-thirds of the crop rather than just half. The Bargadari Act of 1950 legally recognised these rights, but it was never properly enforced. Large estates well above the land ceiling stayed in the hands of wealthy landlords, and the promised redistribution simply did not happen.

A region primed for revolt

The Darjeeling district where Naxalbari sits had its own distinctive features that made it combustible. The area combined sprawling tea plantations with a large tribal population that included Santhals, Rajbansis, Oraons and Mundas. Landless peasants here had long complained that their plots were being encroached upon by tea estates and rich cultivators. Crucially, the region’s peasant disputes were often led by indigenous local leaders rather than outside middle-class organisers, which gave the eventual uprising a grassroots intensity that earlier movements lacked.

By the 1960s, the disillusionment had a new and sharper edge. A United Front government that included the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), had come to power in West Bengal promising land reforms. When the pace of change proved frustratingly slow and the bureaucracy continued to favour the landed elite, a section of the rural poor felt betrayed by the very party that claimed to speak for them. That sense of betrayal would soon turn into open rebellion.

The spark and the spring thunder

On 3 March 1967, just a day after the United Front ministers were sworn in, around 150 peasants armed with bows and spears seized roughly 11,000 kg of paddy and began occupying land. By 18 March, organised seizures of land from jotedars were under way, and peasant committees were rapidly established across the region within a matter of months.

The first violent clash came when a sharecropper named Bigul Kisan was beaten by the agents of a local landlord. After that, peasant committees moved to seize land, foodgrains and weapons from the landed gentry, and resistance from the jotedars and their hired men collapsed. People’s courts were set up to issue verdicts, and frightened landlords fled their homes as villagers refused to cooperate with police combing operations.

The turning point came on 25 May 1967. At Bengai Jote village, police opened fire on a group of villagers demanding their right to the crops on a disputed piece of land. The firing killed nine adults and two children, predominantly women and children, in an incident that became a defining symbol of state repression. The killings outraged sympathisers across Bengal and pushed the movement well beyond its original boundaries in the north.

The leaders behind the movement

Three names are inseparable from Naxalbari. Charu Mazumdar, the ideological architect, had organised a leftist faction within the CPI(M) in northern Bengal and served as the party’s Darjeeling district secretary. Kanu Sanyal, his comrade-in-arms, was the field leader who directly commanded the peasant struggle on the ground. The third figure, Jangal Santhal, was a respected local tribal leader among the sharecroppers, peasants and tea workers of the Terai region whose electoral defeat in early 1967 sharpened the group’s conviction that change would not come through the ballot.

The ideology that turned a revolt into a movement

What separated Naxalbari from earlier peasant agitations was its ideological foundation. Charu Mazumdar argued that the conditions in India were ripe for an armed people’s struggle modelled on the Chinese Revolution of 1949. He believed that revolution had to take the path of armed struggle rather than parliamentary politics, and that the Naxalbari uprising was the beginning of a Maoist revolution in India.

His thinking was distilled into a set of writings produced between 1965 and 1967 that came to be called the Historic Eight Documents. These articles attacked what Mazumdar saw as the revisionism of established communist parties that had won power within bourgeois governments and then, in his view, betrayed the peasantry. They emphasised secret organisation, armed training and the goal of seizing state power through rural insurrection. For his followers these documents were a revolutionary handbook; for his critics they were a blueprint for tragedy.

This ideological turn took shape against the backdrop of the Sino-Soviet split, which was tearing communist organisations apart worldwide. The rift between Beijing and Moscow translated into bitter divisions within Indian communism over whether to pursue revolution or work within the democratic system. Naxalbari became the rallying cry for those who chose the former.

International attention and the deepening rift

The uprising soon attracted attention far beyond Bengal. On 28 June 1967, Radio Peking broadcast a celebratory message describing the events in Darjeeling as the front paw of a revolutionary armed struggle launched by the Indian people. A week later, the official organ of the Chinese Communist Party amplified the praise. This endorsement raised the international profile of the Naxalbari rebels but also deepened the ideological rift between the Chinese Communist Party and the CPI(M), whose leaders were now in government and faced the awkward task of suppressing a revolt carried out in the name of communism.

From uprising to organised insurgency

The Naxalbari revolt itself was suppressed within months, but the political energy it released could not be contained. In November 1967, revolutionaries formed the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries to knit together the scattered radical groups. This culminated on 22 April 1969, Lenin’s birthday, with the formation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), or CPI(ML). Kanu Sanyal formally announced the new party at a large rally in Calcutta, with Charu Mazumdar as its General Secretary.

The new party committed itself to armed struggle, and the model of Naxalbari rapidly inspired similar revolts elsewhere. The Srikakulam peasant uprising in Andhra Pradesh, which ran from 1967 to 1970, drew direct inspiration from Naxalbari, as did the Bhojpur uprising in Bihar during the 1970s, where agricultural labourers and poor peasants mobilised against largely upper-caste landlords. In cities like Calcutta, Patna and Hyderabad, university students and young intellectuals formed solidarity groups, and many abandoned their campuses to join the struggle in the countryside.

Fragmentation and the long insurgency

The state responded with overwhelming force. Charu Mazumdar was arrested and died in police custody in Calcutta in July 1972, and after his death the CPI(ML) splintered into numerous factions under intense government pressure. Yet the movement did not die. By 1980, the People’s War Group emerged in Andhra Pradesh and renewed the armed struggle. The various strands eventually consolidated when the People’s War Group merged with the Maoist Communist Centre to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in 2004, the largest and most violent Maoist formation in the country.

Naxalbari’s legacy today

More than five decades on, the insurgency that began in Naxalbari has been described as one of the gravest internal security challenges the country has faced. At its peak in the early 2000s, Naxalites were active across a vast stretch known as the Red Corridor, spanning parts of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, and reaching into more than 200 districts.

The picture has changed dramatically in recent years. Government data show a sharp decline in violence linked to Left Wing Extremism, which the Centre has sought to address through a combination of security operations and development schemes. The number of districts reporting Naxal violence fell from 126 in 2013 to a small cluster by 2025, with the movement now largely confined to pockets of central India, primarily in Chhattisgarh. Even so, the underlying grievances that Naxalbari raised, such as land rights, tribal displacement and the gap between law and its implementation, remain part of India’s political conversation.

Perhaps the most striking irony is that the same CPI(M) leaders who ordered the police into Naxalbari went on, after coming to power as the Left Front in 1977, to carry out the most significant land reforms the state had seen. Through Operation Barga, tenancy rights were finally secured for sharecroppers and land above the ceiling was redistributed. In other words, some of the very demands that the Naxalbari peasants raised through armed struggle were eventually delivered through the parliamentary route the radicals had rejected.

What do you think? Was the Naxalbari uprising a justified response to decades of broken promises on land reform, or did its embrace of armed struggle ultimately set back the cause of the rural poor it claimed to champion? And given that some of its core demands were later met through democratic means, what does that tell us about the choice between revolution and reform in a democracy?

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Table of Contents

The agrarian powder keg before 1967 🔗

A region primed for revolt 🔗

The spark and the spring thunder 🔗

The leaders behind the movement 🔗

The ideology that turned a revolt into a movement 🔗

International attention and the deepening rift 🔗

From uprising to organised insurgency 🔗

Fragmentation and the long insurgency 🔗

Naxalbari’s legacy today 🔗