BIMAN BASU ON KANU SANYAL

KOLKATA: When the news that Kanu Sanyal (b. 1932) who had been one of the organisers of the Naxalbari movement in the mid-1960s had died after choosing to take his own life, Biman Basu reacted to the news and spoke to PD, at length.

Biman Basu recalled that Sanyal had started his life in the Communist Party from years prior to 1947 and that he maintained direct relations with the common people, especially with the kisans. In the post-1947 years and decades, Sanyal worked tirelessly for the masses.

Subsequently, in 1967, Sanyal switched to Left sectarian politics. Sanyal, said the CPI (M) Bengal state secretary, was the one of the early organisers of the Naxalbari movement and the CPI (M-L). The CPI (M) leader clarified to say that though Sanyal chose to remain with his brand of left sectarian political outlook and activities, he “was gradually undergoing a political change”.

Sanyal, said Biman Basu, started to face and judge issues based on reason, and very recently, when the ‘Maoist’ menace started to take shape in the Bengal political scene, Sanyal had remarked, echoing Mao Ze Dong that there was ‘nothing called ‘Maoism.’ Sanyal also agreed with the notion that there was a Communist Party of China and that what Mao practised was Marxism-Leninism. That was Sanyal’s firm stand to the last.

“During the last couple of years”, Biman Basu said, “We have noted that whenever slogans were raised against imperialism and communalism, he and his party, the COI (M-L) associated themselves with the Left and democratic forces.

On a number of occasions, Biman Basu recalled, how “we worked with Kanu Sanyal in the city Kolkata against imperil aim and communalism.

“We,” continued the Bengal CPI (M) secretary, “also had had a discussion with him but that session did not materialise into anything fruitful.

Biman Basu concluded to say, “Sanyal’s demise and the report of how he had ended his life life, is sad. Nevertheless, we must ponder over the austere life he led at Hatighisha in a remote part of the terai region, and the way he chose to stick to his own conviction, and this is really something from which we are to learn the correct lessons.” (B PRASANT)

Naxalite leader Kanu Sanyal commits ‘suicide’

Siliguri, March 23 (PTI): Former Naxalite leader Kanu Sanyal allegedly hung himself to death at his home near Siliguri on Tuesday. Sanyal, 78, was suffering from kidney-related ailments.

Sanyal, was found hanging in his room at his residence in Seftullajote village, 25km from here, inspector-general of police (North Bengal) K.L. Tamta said.

At the time of his death, he was general secretary of a new CPI (Marxist-Leninist) group, formed by the merger of several splinter groups of the original party.

Along with co-chairman Charu Mazumdar and Jungal Santhal, Sanyal formed the dreaded triad that gave birth to the Naxalbari movement. The movement in the later years had transformed into an even bloodier Maoist struggle but he had openly disapproved of the strategy of armed struggle after his release from jail in 1977.

The trio spearheaded the movement, which began with a peasant uprising at Naxalbari, a small village, on May 25, 1967, in north Bengal.

The then officer-in-charge of Phansidewa police station Amarendranath Pyne was killed by an arrow shot by the Naxalites, as they came to be known, thus starting a series of killings of landowners, policemen and those associated with the establishment.

Sanyal had even actively solicited help from the communist government in China to further his goals, but it could never be established whether this was moral, tactical or financial.

He was a critic of land acquisition by the Left Front government in Singur and Nandigram and criticised it calling it capitalist.