From Raj to Republic: Sovereignty, Violence, and Democracy in India by Sunil Purushotham

Author:Sunil Purushotham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2020-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

AN INDIAN YAN’AN

Telangana, 1946–52

Between two worlds, one dead

And the other powerless to be born.1

Andhra Saraswatha Parishath of Hyderabad (paraphrasing Matthew Arnold) describing Telangana to President Rajendra Prasad, August 30, 1951

So far as the communists are concerned, we

are more or less at war with them.2

Nehru to B. C. Roy, May 7, 1950

ON THE FOURTH OF JULY 1946, a revolution began in the village of Kadivendi. A confrontation arose between villagers and the armed men of the deshmukh. The leader of the villagers, Doddi Komariah, was shot dead on the spot. The Telangana revolution had its first martyr. Komariah’s death, the communist leader P. Sundarayya observed, “set ablaze the pent-up fury of the Telangana peasantry.”3 The revolution did indeed begin with a blaze, when Komariah’s comrades set fire to the house of the deshmukh, Rapaka Ramachandra Reddy. The four thousand people attending Komariah’s funeral proclaimed what they called the sangham, a sovereign community that restructured society by redistributing power and resources. Its members were sanghapollu, or “those who belonged to a new community of close relationship.”4 Volunteers carrying sticks embarked on jaitra yatras (victory marches) carrying the red flag from village to village, singing folk songs, and rousing the people to rebel against the landlords. Landlords, patels, and patwaris fled the villages. By September, the sangham had spread to three hundred villages in Nalgonda, Warangal, and Khammam districts. The sangham promised equality: an end to vetti (caste-based forced labor), bhagela (debt bondage), and traditional gender hierarchies. The redistribution of land under the direction of elected gram panchayats—a democratic transformation of tenants into owners—held out the promise of a complete overhaul of agrarian power relations. Debts were forgiven, wages raised, and revenue and levy payments stopped altogether. A new society was being founded: praja rajyam (people’s rule), a radical form of direct democracy that challenged the state’s monopoly on violence.

In early September 1946, the police in Nalgonda were confronted by two to three thousand people after the arrest of a sangham leader. The Nizam’s government decided to strike back, sending waves of additional police and army forces, who, meeting with “considerable opposition from the villagers,” conducted mass arrests, resorted to violence, and opened fire on several occasions, killing five and wounding ten more.5 The revenue and police minister of the Nizam’s executive council, W. V. Grigson, accused the police of employing “terrorist methods.” Grigson went to meet the prisoners, whom he found to be “nearly all decent villagers, including cultivators, agricultural laborers, depressed classes and even Roman Catholic and Baptist converts.” He noted in particular the prevalence among the prisoners of Malas and Madigas, the Dalit castes of Telangana. There was, Grigson deduced, “a lot more behind the disturbances than mere communist propaganda.”6

He was right. And what Grigson was witnessing was just the beginning. The sangham would continue the struggle for five more years, achieving many triumphs and enduring much hardship. At the height of the movement in the months prior to the September 1948 Police Action, the sangham had established praja rajyam in somewhere between two and four thousand villages across Telangana.

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