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Apr 11, 2026
YagnaSri

West Bengal Chronicles: The Decade of Blood — Political Violence Before 1977 Part 1

West Bengal's descent into political violence before the Left Front's ascension in 1977 constitutes one of the most harrowing chapters in post-independence Indian political history. During the Second World War, the areas that now constitute West Bengal experienced a horrific famine engineered by the British. Millions died. That was followed by the terrible communal violence by Jinnah and his followers during the last years of colonial rule and the partition and forced mass migration of Hindus. The Nehruvian economic policies did not help the state to recover economically. Many towering Bengali leaders, like Subhash Chandra Bose and Syama Prasad Mukherji, the greatest of the national leaders of that time from Bengal, were suddenly unreachable and out of action. So, there was also a serious vacuum of political leadership in the state. In this background, the state was in a state of serious unrest. What then began as socio-economic unrest rooted in these partition-era dislocations, food shortages and ideological ferment rapidly metastasised into a decade-long cycle of insurgency, state repression, and institutional decay. Understanding this period is essential to understanding every political formation that followed, for the tools, tactics, and traumas of the 1967–1977 decade left indelible marks on the state's body politic. I. Background: The Structural Conditions for Violence The 1965 India-Pakistan war had disrupted trade and economic normalcy. The state faced a severe food crisis. Moreover, perhaps most consequentially, a massive tide of East Pakistani Hindu refugees — the majority from lower-caste, economically marginalised communities — had placed extraordinary pressure on the state's already-strained infrastructure. The Congress government in Calcutta, weakened by years of misgovernance and factional strife, was ill-equipped to address these challenges. This structural exhaustion of the Congress created the opening for what would follow. In the 1967 assembly elections, the Congress was swept out of power for the first time since independence. In its place came the United Front — a fragile, ideologically heterogeneous coalition of Left parties — with Ajoy Mukherjee as Chief Minister and Jyoti Basu as Deputy Chief Minister. Very few people in India even know that the Left came to power not in 1977 but in 1967 itself as part of the political alliance. The social temperature was already dangerously high in 1967. The coalition government, riven by internal conflict, could not provide stability. What it accidentally provided instead was a kind of ideological permission for violence to enter the political arena. II. The Naxalbari Spark and the Birth of Armed Politics (1967) In May 1967, a seemingly local land dispute in Naxalbari, in the Darjeeling foothills, ignited a movement that would redefine radical politics across India. Led by Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal, peasant activists took the land redistribution into their own hands — literally seizing it, expelling landlords, and establishing what they called "liberated zones." The Naxalbari uprising was explicitly Maoist in inspiration, drawing on the rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution's "People's War" against feudal and capitalist class enemies. The CPI(M), nominally in government in a coalition, was caught in an impossible position. The Naxalites were, at one level, its ideological cousins. However, the armed uprising embarrassed the party internationally and threatened to expose it as unable to govern. Jyoti Basu, as Home Minister in the United Front, took a hard line against the uprising. This would become the first of many moments in which the Left's declared solidarity with the peasantry dissolved when it collided with the imperatives of power. The CPI(ML) — the Naxalite breakaway — was formally constituted in 1969. Its programme of "annihilation of class enemies" moved violence from the countryside to the city, from land seizures to targeted assassinations. Police officers, government officials, and members of rival political parties were systematically hunted. University campuses were paralysed. Statues of national figures — including Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore — were decapitated in acts of symbolic repudiation of the post-independence order. III. The Sainbari Massacre: The Face of Partisan Barbarism (1970) Among the many atrocities of this period, the Sainbari massacre of March 17 1970, stands as a defining symbol of the dehumanising depths to which political violence in Bengal had sunk. The Sain family of Bardhaman — Pranab Sain, Malay Sain, and their private tutor Jitendranath Rai — were Congress supporters in a locality where the CPI(M) was aggressively expanding its grip. Their refusal to abandon their political allegiance made them targets. On the morning of March 17, the day after the Second United Front government collapsed, a CPI(M) mob led by a local activist named Khokon Sen descended on the Sain household. What followed was an act of savagery without parallel in the annals of Bengal's political violence. Pranab and Malay were dragged from their home, beaten, and had their throats cut in full view of their family. Their elder brother Nabakumar's eyes were gouged out. In the most grotesque act of the incident, the mob forced the brothers' mother, Mriganayani Devi Sain, to consume rice mixed with the blood of her slain sons. She never recovered her mental faculties. Nabakumar himself was beheaded a year later. The state government constituted the Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry under retired Justice Tarapada Mukherjee on April 28 1970. The Commission submitted its report on July 27 1970, finding that the local police and administration had been "unable to control the crowds and the situation"—a finding widely criticised as a gross understatement of administrative culpability. The Commission noted a "keen political rivalry" between the Sain brothers and the CPI(M) but, curiously, found no prior conspiracy. This conclusion contradicted its own recorded evidence. The names of those accused in the First Information Report (FIR) included CPI(M) leader Benoy Konar, who went on to become a member of the party's central committee, and Khokon Sen, who reinvented himself as Nirupam Sen and served as Industries Minister in the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government, winning three MLA elections from Bardhaman South. None was ever convicted. The Sain family waited for justice for decades. When the TMC government set up the Arunava Basu Commission in 2011 to reopen the case, the CPI(M) called it a political vendetta. The acquittal of all 83 accused in 1978 by a court in the immediate post-Left-Front period effectively closed the legal chapter, though not the moral one. Indira Gandhi herself visited the Sain household in the heart of Bardhaman to console the bereaved family, an indication of the national shock the incident caused. However, the Sainbari murders remain almost absent from standard historical accounts and educational curricula — a lacuna that is itself a form of violence against history and against the dead. IV. The Siddhartha Shankar Ray Era: State Repression and the 1972 Elections (1972–1977) Following the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War and a brief period of President's Rule, the Congress returned to power in West Bengal in 1972 under Siddhartha Shankar Ray (SSR). This period represents a different — but equally destructive — modality of political violence: the institutionalisation of counter-insurgency terror as an instrument of governance. The 1972 assembly elections were widely denounced as among the most rigged in the state's history. Allegations of systematic booth capturing, voter intimidation, and the terrorisation of opposition candidates abounded. The CPI(M) boycotted the legislature for five years, calling the Congress's victory a "semi-fascist takeover." Whether or not the term was accurate, the elections permanently poisoned the well of democratic legitimacy in West Bengal — establishing the precedent that the party in power could manufacture elections. We must acknowledge the present levels of rigging, intimidation, and manipulation, all started not by CPM but by Congress. CPM perfected that diabolical art after that, and now TMC has taken it over. The SSR government launched a ferocious crackdown on the Naxalite movement. Thousands of young men were arrested without trial under draconian legislation, including the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) and the West Bengal (Prevention of Violent Activities) Act, 1970. Extra-judicial killings — "encounters" — became routine. The bodies of young men were found heaped in locations that became infamous: Barasat, Cossipore. The human rights toll of this period was immense, though it has never been systematically documented. Siddhartha Shankar Ray's role extended beyond Bengal. He was a key architect of the National Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in June 1975, personally advising her on its necessity and implementation. During the Emergency, political activity was entirely suppressed, civil liberties were suspended, and thousands of opposition leaders — including those of the CPI(M) and the nascent Janata formation — were imprisoned. The Emergency years in Bengal overlapped with and amplified the culture of administrative contempt for civil and political rights that SSR had normalised. By 1977, the cumulative exhaustion of a decade of violence — Naxalite terror, state repression, rigged elections, Emergency-era abuses — had created a public desperate for change. The Left Front's landslide victory was not merely an electoral outcome. It was a civilisational exhaustion, a collective cry for normalcy. What the public received, however, was a different — and in some ways more sophisticated — form of the same pathology. The tragic consequences of the emergence of the CPM rule started a tragedy that continues to this day more in Part 2.

Apr 10, 2026
Siddhartha Dave

Trump’s ‘Madman Theory’ in West Asia: Brinkmanship, Coercion, Limits of Strategic Unpredictability

The ongoing Iran-Israel-US conflict has revived one of the most controversial ideas in diplomatic history: the “madman theory” — the strategic use of calculated unpredictability to pressure adversaries into concessions. First associated with Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War, the doctrine is now being widely invoked by analysts to explain the conduct of Donald Trump in the present West Asian crisis. As The Guardian recently observed, Trump’s alternating posture of fury and conciliation bears unmistakable resemblance to Nixon’s attempt to convince adversaries that he was capable of going to any length to secure an outcome. The current crisis began in late February, when joint U.S.-Israeli military strikes on Iran triggered a severe regional escalation. Tehran responded through missile strikes, proxy mobilisation, and, most consequentially, by tightening control over the Strait of Hormuz — the world’s most vital energy chokepoint. Roughly one-fifth of global oil and LNG trade moves through this narrow corridor. Reuters reports that the resulting disruption has become the worst supply shock in the history of the modern oil market, with hundreds of tankers stranded and maritime traffic dropping to well below 10 per cent of normal volumes. It is in this context that Trump’s conduct has drawn scrutiny. Throughout the crisis, he has issued a series of maximalist threats — warning Iran of devastating strikes on infrastructure, power plants, and military assets — while simultaneously floating ceasefire offers, negotiation windows, and claims of diplomatic breakthroughs. This oscillation between coercion and conciliation has led many observers to argue that Trump is using strategic ambiguity not as a sign of chaos, but as a deliberate bargaining tool. The logic behind such an approach is simple: if an adversary believes a leader may act irrationally or disproportionately, it may choose compromise over confrontation. Reuters, in its analysis of the crisis, notes that the essence of the madman theory lies in weaponising uncertainty to compress an adversary’s decision-making and create pressure for de-escalation. In tactical terms, the strategy may have yielded short-term results. A two-week ceasefire was announced this week, reportedly linked to a phased reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and renewed talks between Washington and Tehran. The White House has presented the truce as proof that Trump’s hardline rhetoric forced Iran to the table. U.S. officials have argued that sustained pressure and deadlines helped create diplomatic urgency. Yet the reality on the ground suggests that the ceasefire is more of a pause than peace. Despite the truce, shipping through Hormuz remains near a standstill. Reuters reported on April 9 that Iran is allowing no more than 15 vessels a day through the strait — a fraction of normal traffic — while continuing to insist that ships remain under its territorial control. Major shipping firms such as Maersk and Mitsui O.S.K. have refused to resume normal operations, citing the absence of “full maritime certainty.” Insurance costs remain elevated, and energy markets remain nervous. The Washington Post has also highlighted the contradictions surrounding the ceasefire. Washington insists the truce includes guarantees on shipping access and de-escalation, while Tehran maintains that it has not surrendered any sovereign rights, particularly over uranium enrichment and maritime security. Iranian officials have accused Washington of misrepresenting the deal, while Trump’s own public statements have sometimes appeared at odds with U.S. negotiators’ positions. This confusion underscores the central limitation of madman diplomacy in the contemporary era: unpredictability may create leverage, but it can also erode credibility. During the Cold War, Nixon’s strategy operated in a relatively structured bipolar system. There were clear channels of communication, known red lines, and a narrower set of actors. Even then, the results were mixed. While Nixon’s posture may have pressured adversaries, it did not decisively alter the strategic end-state in Vietnam. In the present West Asian theatre, the challenges are far greater. Today’s conflict environment is crowded with multiple state and non-state actors, fragile alliances, globalised supply chains, instantaneous information flows, and high domestic political scrutiny. In such a setting, strategic ambiguity can easily morph into dangerous ambiguity. A threat intended as bargaining pressure can be misread as an intent to escalate. A temporary pause can be mistaken for settlement. A rhetorical flourish can unsettle allies as much as adversaries. For Iran, Trump’s rhetoric has likely reinforced long-standing suspicions that Washington cannot be trusted as a stable negotiating partner. Hardliners in Tehran may well see this crisis as proof that only resistance preserves strategic space. For U.S. allies in the Gulf, the war has exposed the risks of overdependence on an American security umbrella increasingly shaped by personality-driven decision-making. For Israel, the conflict has once again demonstrated that military superiority can create operational advantage, but not necessarily political resolution. For Gulf states and Asian economies dependent on Hormuz, the lesson is starker: regional instability in West Asia is now inseparable from global economic vulnerability. The broader foreign policy lesson from this crisis is that coercive diplomacy can force pauses, but it rarely delivers a durable peace unless backed by institutional follow-through. Ceasefires secured under duress can buy time, but they cannot substitute for structured agreements on nuclear safeguards, maritime rules, regional proxy conflicts, and mutual verification. Trump’s use of the madman theory may have created a tactical off-ramp in the immediate crisis. But diplomacy rooted in fear is inherently unstable. It depends on sustaining uncertainty without crossing into catastrophe — a balance that is difficult to maintain, and even harder to institutionalise. In West Asia, where history is layered with mistrust, humiliation, and unfinished wars, theatrics may command headlines. But only consistent statecraft can secure peace. The real test of Trump’s strategy is not whether it produced a temporary ceasefire. It is whether brinkmanship can be converted into a credible political settlement. As of now, the answer remains deeply uncertain. This article was first published in Organiser

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