A rebel remembered

The leader of the Naxalbari movement Charu Mazumdar was killed in police lock up after his arrest from a Calcutta house on July 16, 1972, says his son Abhijit Mazumdar. In a recently published book, Maoism in India and Nepal by journalist Ranjit Bhushan, Abhijit, a CPI (ML) activist in West Bengal, opens his heart out about an affair that took place more than four decades ago and recalls the legacy of a moment that his father founded. Excerpts from the book:

The important aspect was that he was never taken to court, and there was no trial because the state was afraid of taking him to an open trial. So in the name of interrogation, they put him up in the Lal Bazar lock-up for 12 days.

And was killed on 28 July, 1972. And I remember that the previous day, ie, 27, the police administration allowed us — myself, mother and two sisters — into the Lal Bazar lock-up and we could see our father. What we could see were a couple of things: one, he said that dreaded police officers like Debi Roy and Vibhuti Chakrabarty, the notorious ones who killed a large number of Naxalite activists during that time, come every afternoon and interrogated him for very long periods. Charu Mazumdar was also a cardiac patient, and he always needed medicines to subside his cardiac pains. What the police did was to withdraw all sorts of medications. We never saw an oxygen cylinder, which was needed for a patient who was ill. In an indirect manner, by withdrawing his medication and by putting him through hours of interrogation, his health was made to deteriorate, which ultimately led to his death. He was not tortured physically, but what they did culminated in his death.

Later when my mother demanded that the body be handed over to her to be taken to Siliguri for cremation, they refused. They were scared. So the body was taken to a cremation ground in Calcutta. The entire ground was surrounded by the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and other forces. They got us to confirm that the body was indeed of Charu Mazumdar. There was great furore over the matter.

It is true that the state terror that accompanied Charu Mazumdar’s arrest was not resisted by comrades all around. The one major cause of that was that his shelter was exposed and betrayed by some of his party comrades. So it was a betrayal from within the party. Otherwise it was not possible to get him arrested…A section of the middle class went against the revolutionary movement as it was turned off with the annihilation theory as well as breaking of idols of great personalities from the nineteenth century. Rather the middle class base of the party became vulnerable. It was very difficult for Charu Mazumdar to find shelter.

Yes we have been demanding an inquiry into the mass massacres that took place in the 1970s, including the killings of Comrades Charu Mazumdar, Saroj Dutta and others of the Naxalbari movement. When we took out a rally from Naxalbari to Calcutta in 1998, we perceived that it was not going to be an easy job. In our analysis of the bourgeoisie state, like its ideological state apparatus, and also when we look at the judiciary and the Parliament, everything is ranged against the Naxalites. It becomes easy to see why – because in 2006, (the then) Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, from his speech at the Red Fort (on Independence Day), identified Naxalism to be the greatest threat within the country. When the spectre of the 1960s and 1970s is sought to be created today, how can we expect help from this state apparatus?

When we demanded from Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee (former West Bengal Chief Minister and CPM leader) that he must come out with the documents of the 1970s, which must be lying with the state archives in Calcutta, he denied it outright. He said that no documents are available because most of them were destroyed by the previous Congress government. That is a blatant lie. I say so because we have some common friends working for the state government, even in the state archives. They confided in us that certain police documents are still there.

Charu Mazumdar’s legacy is the legacy of the revolutionary movement in India. For me, I borrowed it from my family traditions. But until this emotion is not translated into political activity, it does not have any meaning. It gets lost.  So that is the legacy I have to live up to. I hero worship my father, and I am emotionally attached to my father. But that in itself is not enough to lead me to my essential goals…I believe that Charu Mazumdar played his historical role. He was not very different from, let’s say Bhagat Singh. There is an entire legacy of Bhagat Singh. Similarly, the Naxalbari tradition sees its origins in Charu Mazumdar. It could have been someone else. But the time has now come to stop thinking only in emotional terms. Remembering Charu helps us to look at the past and to bring up a new future. The essential ingredients of the Naxalbari movement are what make it popular amongst the toiling masses. Seventy percent of the party cadres come from different parts of the country.

Yes he (Charu) wrote extensively as a political activist and political leader. Since my boyhood years, we used to read him. And there was a family ritual of reading his documents and other writings within the family, particularly on 28 July, the day of martyrdom, every year. We used to borrow phrases from my father’s writings, commemorate and read him. That are two things that impressed me the most. One is the exposure of social democracy in its Indian form 1965 onwards and also the historical content of the entire ideological movement, for instance questioning the nineteenth century history of Bengal. The second was the nature of comment on the state — on the bourgeoisie to brand them as compradors. These were the hallmarks of Charu Mazumdar’s major formulations. It is very important. It influenced not only me but has been subsequently influencing hundreds and thousands of people of India.