Since 1931, March 23 is remembered all over India as the martyrdom day of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev the martyrdom that epitomized and further ignited the revolutionary anti-imperialist spirit of the Indian freedom struggle. This year, March 23 witnessed a tragic footnote when veteran communist leader Kanu Sanyal was discovered hanging dead at his residence at Hatighisa village near Naxalbari in Darjeeling district.
For people who have known Kanu Sanyal since the stormy days of the Naxalbari peasant uprising and after, it was indeed quite difficult to imagine or accept the fact that the debilitating state of his body and mind would drive him to such a tragic end. The corporate media of course did not lose a moment to pounce upon his suicide and project it as the ultimate denouement of the Naxalbari movement and the CPI(ML)! Some CPI(M) leaders have begun attributing Sanyal's enigmatic end to his frustration with the Maoist variety of militarism, conveniently ignoring the fact that if Sanyal had been critical of the Maoists, he had been no less critical of the CPI(M)'s growing degeneration as a ruling party and its corporate land-grab drive in Singur and Nandigram.
In the wake of the Naxalbari peasant uprising of May 1967, Kanu Sanyal's name had become an integral part of the revolutionary communist lore in the country. Any animated discussion on Naxalbari would throw up the three names of Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal. On May 1, 1969 it was Kanu Sanyal who made the historic announcement about the foundation of the CPI(ML) at a public rally on Kolkata's famous Shahid Minar ground.
However, Sanyal's differences with Charu Mazumdar and many other CPI(ML) leaders began to surface quite early on. After CM's martyrdom on 28 July 1974, Sanyal went on to denounce the entire legacy of Charu Mazumdar and even rejected the very relevance of the CPI(ML).
Contrary to the expectation of CPI(ML) ranks, after his release from jail in 1977, Sanyal never joined the attempt to revive the CPI(ML). Instead, he tried to launch a new organization of communist revolutionaries. Over the next three decades, he would be involved in a series of such attempts, first in the name of OCCR (Organising Committee of Communist Revolutionaries), then COI(ML) [Communist Organisation of India(Marxist-Leninist)], and finally even in the name of CPI(ML). But every time, the organization would start disintegrating before it could acquire any real momentum.
While Sanyal's attempts at building or running a communist party did not succeed, he remained an authentic representative voice of the tea garden workers and other oppressed people in his home district Darjeeling till the end of his life. With his spartan lifestyle and rural moorings, Sanyal also continued to offer an inspiring contrast to the dominant present-day political culture of power, wealth and five-star comfort.
Sanyal was not mistaken in pointing out some of the excesses of the early CPI(ML) phase. But he failed to grasp, articulate or develop the very revolutionary spirit that distinguished Naxalbari from the beaten track of peasant struggles. Charu Mazumdar saw Naxalbari as a historic event that would go way beyond the agenda of bourgeois land reforms, for him it was a definitive beginning of a protracted revolutionary war for political power. It is this revolutionary message of Naxalbari that had spread like wildfire and unleashed the revolutionary imagination and initiative of a whole generation, inspiring a countrywide contingent of revolutionary fighters and activists in an unprecedented display of courage, defiance and determination.
CM and CPI(ML) did commit many mistakes while attempting to hasten this spread, but these were an integral part of a glorious revolutionary chapter of the Indian communist movement. Sanyal's attempts at building an error-free perfect communist party, by contrast, could not create any revolutionary ripple anywhere in the country and failed to produce either a viable organization or a sustained movement. While not agreeing with much of Sanyal's post-CPI(ML) political role, revolutionary communists will however always cherish Kanu Sanyal's signal contribution to the rise and spread of the Naxalbari peasant uprising.
