On 28th July, 1972 Charu Majumdar was tortured to death in police custody in Kolkata. It ranks among the worst abuse of human rights of a political prisoner or leader in India or the world. Today history is repeating itself with custodial deaths routinely recurring in prisons or police custody. We take this opportunity to remind our readers of comrade CM’s life and contributions.
Charu Majumdar, more popularly known as CM, was born in 1918 into a zamindari family in Siliguri. Influenced by petty-bourgeois national revolutionaries during his school years, he joined the All Bengal Students Association, an affiliate of the Anushilan group. His father, a lawyer, was an active participant in the Congress freedom movement, and his mother was notably progressive for her time. Majumdar left college in 1937-38 to become a Congress worker, organizing bidi workers and others. After a few years, he left the Congress and joined the undivided Communist Party of India (CPI), focusing on the peasant front. He worked primarily among the Jalpaiguri peasantry, gaining popularity as a leader. in North Bengal. This movement deeply influenced his belief in the potential of an armed peasantry to drive revolutionary change. Later, he also worked amongst the tea garden workers in the Darjeeling district. After the CPI was banned again in 1948, he spent the next three years in jail. In January 1954, he married Lila Sengupta, a CPI member from Jalpaiguri. They moved to Siliguri, which became the hub of his activities.
There, his family faced severe financial constraints, having lost their ancestral property. As the peasant movement waned, he focused on organizing tea garden workers, rickshaw pullers, and others. His ideological rift with the CPI widened after the Palghat Congress in 1956. Severe financial constraints added to his depressing conditions. However, the Great Debate, in the international communist movement lifted his spirits. During the Indo-China war, he was imprisoned again. Although he joined the CPI (M) after the split, he found the leadership evasive on crucial ideological issues. In 1964-65, while recovering from illness, he devoted himself tostudying and writing about communism and Mao Tse-tung thought. It was during this period that he developed the ideas articulated in his writings and speeches of 1965-67, known as the ‘Historic Eight Documents’. These documents laid the political and ideological groundwork for the Naxalbari movement.
Comrade CM ignited the spark of Naxalbari and planted the seeds of the revolutionary Indian Communist movement demarcating from revisionism by formulating the path of New Democratic Revolution in Indian context. Agrarian revolution was to be the axis of Indian revolution based on teachings of Comrade Mao Tse-Tung derived from the Chinese Revolution. He prepared the base for re-building a pan-India Revolutionary Party which came in the form of CPI (ML) by delivering a striking blow to revisionism and parliamentary dogmatism. He made an immense contribution in pulling out the Indian communist movement from the marsh of right opportunism and restored its revolutionary essence.
Comrade CM imbued the dream of a liberated India in thousands of students and youth, and infused the spirit to rebel against feudal autocracy, imperialist subjugation and authoritarian social order. In his call thousands of students and youth rebelled against the semi-colonial and casteist education system and integrated with the peasantry in the ongoing agrarian revolution. In his call and leadership, workers, peasants, student-youth, artists, and petty-bourgeois masses plunged into the flame to Naxalbari. The spark initiated by CPI (ML) in the leadership of comrade CM spread across Srikakulam, Birbhum, Debra-Gopiballavpur, Mushahari, Lakhimpur-Kheri, Bhojpur, parts of Punjab, Kerala and took a shape of a nationwide upsurge. This gave rise to the stream of left movement representing the interest of workers, peasants, dalits and other downtrodden, often branded by the ruling class as Naxals, whose spectre still haunts the Indian state.
