The Naxalite movement in Punjab

Who: Young communists who broke from the CPI(M) after the Naxalbari uprising of May 1967, among them Harbhajan Singh Sohi, Hakim Singh Samaon and Daya Singh; students of the Punjab Students Union under Darshan Bagi; the veteran Ghadarite Baba Bujha Singh; and the Punjab Police and state government.

What: In October 1967 the CPI(M) expelled Sohi, Samaon and others for taking the Naxalbari line. On February 7, 1968, at Bhagatwana village, they formed the Punjab Coordination Committee of Revolutionaries. On the night of April 12, 1968, 9,000 posters went up across Punjab saying the path of liberation was not elections, and people read them on the morning of Vaisakhi. Students joined in numbers. After police shot dead Jagtar Singh, a student at Sudhar College, during a college strike on December 12, 1968, the Punjab Students Union's leaders went underground, and 19 of the movement's 83 dead came from the union.

Peasants seized land at Samaon village, in what is now Mansa district, on November 30, 1968. On April 30, 1969 guerrillas wounded two policemen at Chamkaur Sahib police station, and attacks on landlords and police informers followed. The state created special police cells and recruited more police, and several arrested peasants were tortured. On the night of July 27, 1970 Baba Bujha Singh, aged 82, was killed in what police called an encounter near Phillaur. The writer Ajmer Sidhu says he was picked up unarmed and tortured to death at Banga police station, and a commission headed by Justice V. M. Tarkunde later called the encounter fake. The groups split over armed struggle against mass organisation, and after the Emergency of 1975 the movement faded, losing its effect by about 1977. Counts of the dead differ: 83 in a Panjab University thesis, nearly 100 in a journalist's account.

Where: Villages and colleges across Punjab, including Bathinda, Ferozepur, Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Sangrur and Ropar.

Why it mattered: The thesis calls it Punjab's first armed movement after Partition, driven by class where the Sikh movement of the 1980s was driven by identity. Journalist Gurpreet Singh writes that it drew its strongest support from Dalits and marginal farmers, most of them Sikh. It also produced a Punjabi literature of resistance, with poets such as Pash writing in its underground magazines.