The last rebel

The suicide by Kanu Sanyal, once firebrand revolutionary and co-founder of the Naxal movement of the late 1960s along with Charu Majumdar and Jangal Santhal, passed almost unnoticed. It was a tragic end to a fabled life-as-an-armed-revolutionary. Along with the more erudite Maoist ideologue Majumdar, who was hailed by the Chinese Communists as ‘the beacon light’ of the Indian peasant movement, Sanyal led an armed rebellion that erupted in the rural backwaters of Bengal 43 years ago in Naxalbari. The ‘people’s war’ soon spread to urban centres, including Calcutta. The growth of the Maoist cult in the 60s worried not just the authorities but also the CPI and the CPI-M. But it was the Congress government of Siddhartha Shankar Ray that put down the movement, though it could not completely crush the armed struggle.

Within a few years, the Maoists reappeared, but Sanyal and Majumdar were not its leaders. Majumdar had died under mysterious circumstances in police custody after his capture in July 1972. Two years before Majumdar’s death Sanyal went into hiding as the armed insurrection began to die out in the wake of police repression. He was arrested in 1970 and jailed in Andhra Pradesh’s Visakhapatnam district. Leaderless and losing popularity, the extreme Leftwing movement was faced with extinction. After his release from jail in 1977, Sanyal led a sedentary life in a patch of land close to Naxalbari, once considered a pilgrimage for budding revolutionaries indoctrinated in the heady mix of radical thinking, armed revolution and overthrow of the state. Reports, however, indicate that he had turned a recluse as Naxalbari, once the byword for radical people’s struggle against state oppression, turned a smugglers’ haven. Sanyal’s bare abode — a thatched mud-house by the road leading to Naxalbari — and the framed photographs of Marx, Lenin, Mao and some of his comrades-in-arms is testimony to his continued attachment to his original ideology.

Today, Sanyal’s death may not be a moment of reckoning for the widening Maoist movement lately described as the worst threat to India’s internal security. The Maoist insurgency has signaled the singular failure of the Centre in general and the West Bengal government in particular to address human survival issues. The unrelenting war and its deadly reach has also ignited a sharp debate on where the Indian state has failed its people, some of whom live in the most isolated, poverty-stricken, bleakest and all but abandoned pockets of the country.