– Charu Mazumdar

At midnight of 4th and 5th August the police captured Comrade Saroj Dutta and on that very night shot him dead secretly.

Chairman has said: “It is not hard for one to do a bit of good. What is hard is to do good all one’s life and never do anything bad, to act consistently in the interest of the broad masses, the young people and the revolution, and to engage in arduous struggle for decades on end. That is the hardest thing of all!” Comrade Saroj Dutta was such a comrade and his entire life was spent in working for the revolution.

There is no reactionary force which did not fear his pen which was as sharp as a razor. That is why the police force did not even dare enact the farce of a trial, they murdered him on that night itself. Like all reactionary powers of the world the lndian Government and its accomplices – aIl the reactionary and revisionist parties – want to arrest the march of revolution by resorting to mass murders on a wide scale. In the Cossipore-Baranagar area they unitedly entered into a conspiracy and murdered over a hundred youths, The police and the goondas who committed the murders were engaged for the purpose by all those rogues who, in the name of restoring “Law and Order”, were holding’ conferences with a view to preserving this man-eating system and uniting against the revolutionaries. Today when their mask is falling off their face before the people, when it is no longer difficult for the people to recognise the blood-stained hand of the murderers, they have come forward to show sympathy for the murdered revolutionary youths to hide their devilry. They executed the same conspiracy in Barasat and Uttarpara. The orgy of murder in which they indulged in the Cossipore and Baranagar area has surpassed all previous records of their demoniac acts.

In jails also they are killing revolutionary cadres by opening fire on prisoners or lathi-charging them. They are thinking that in this way they will be able to arrest the progress of revolution. In South Vietnam the Diem clique wanted to stop the onward march of revolution by carrying on killings in this manner. The result is, the strength of the National Liberation Front has increased and it has defeated the American aggressors repeatedly. In India this killing will rouse the anger and hatred of men and a new India will be built on the destruction of the murderous system – this is the law of history. The reactionaries will have to repay in blood the blood debt that each act of murder accumulates.

Comrade Saroj Dutta was a leader of the Party and he died a hero’s death befitting a leader. His revolutionary steadfastness should serve as a model for youths. Overcoming all weaknesses, the youths will have to take to the path of revolution more resolutely and avenge these killings by integrating themselves with the workers and poor and landless peasants.

-August 16, 1971

[From Liberation,
July 1971--January 1972]

Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger, Singer-songwriter inspired folk revival in the US and was blacklisted during McCarthy era for his leftwing views and lyrics

Tributes have poured in honouring American troubadour, folk music singer and activist Pete Seeger, who has died in New York aged 94. Musicians, fans, campaigners and activists paid tribute to the singer of Where Have All The Flowers Gone and Turn, Turn, Turn, honouring his dedication to fighting for environmental and anti-capitalist issues.

Seeger was a key figure in the folk protest movement through the 1950s and 60s and protested against wars from Vietnam to Iraq; even in his 90s he could be seen marching with Occupy Wall Street protesters. “Be wary of great leaders,” he said two days after a 2011 Manhattan Occupy march. “Hope that there are many, many small leaders.”

The banjo player was known as an affable protester and remained a proud socialist and left-wing campaigner throughout his life. Once a card-carrying Communist, he came under fire in the McCarthy era of the 50s. Summoned to give evidence about his political leanings and contacts to the the House of Representatives’ Un-American Activities committee in 1955, Seeger refused to testify. He denied his views made him disloyal to his country. Asked repeatedly if he had sung for Communists, he retorted: “I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent this implication that some of the places that I have sung and some of the people that I have known, and some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical, or I might be a vegetarian, make me any less of an American.”

This led, in 1957, to an indictment for contempt of Congress, a prison sentence (later overturned) and a travel ban. In America’s cold war blacklisting and red-baiting years, Seeger was unable to perform in many venues, was excluded from college campuses and kept off television for many years. All the while, though, he kept writing and singing.

Seeger was born in New York City in 1919. He came from artistic stock – his mother, Constance, was a violinist and his father, Charles, a musicologist, who worked as a consultant to the Resettlement Administration, which gave artists work during the Depression.

Seeger dropped out of Harvard and toured with Woody Guthrie in the 1940s, forming the group the Weavers in 1948.

Seeger’s evergreen songs include Where Have All The Flowers Gone, inspired by a Ukrainian poem concerning the futility of men losing their lives in war; and Turn! Turn! Turn! If I Had A Hammer was a freedom song chanted by U.S. civil rights marchers; the radical anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks has chosen it as their official song.

And though he didn’t write it, Seeger was probably the artist most responsible for popularising the protest song We Shall Overcome, anthem of the Sixties African-American civil rights movement and staple hymn of solidarity of every student or eco-warrior sit-in that has ever graced the planet.

His hit version of Little Boxes was an early satire of suburbia (the title being a reference to middle-class homes) and suburban values.

Although Seeger clearly made an exception in his anti-militarism for the fight against Hitler, he returned to his anti-war stance during the Cold War and Vietnam War, and emblazoned his banjo with the motto ‘This Machine Surrounds Hate And Forces It To Surrender’.

He became critical of the Soviet Union, and insisted he was only a communist with a small ‘c’. Over the years, he championed almost as many causes as he had songs, from aiding small farmers and Native American tribes to opposing oil fracking and the big banks.

The British singer Billy Bragg said: ‘Peter Seeger towered over the folk scene like a mighty redwood for 75 years. His songs will be sung wherever people struggle for their rights.

(Based on tributes in The Guardian and Daily Mail)

Long Live Comrade Saroj Dutta

On behalf of the entire party Liberation pays warm tribute to the martyred leader Saroj Dutta on the occasion of his birth centenary. In this issue we bring you a biographical sketch, one of his most celebrated poems and the obituary written by comrade Charu Mazumdar soon after the death of comrade SD. We plan to publish more on the departed leader in one of our forthcoming issues. – Editor

Comrade Saroj Dutta was born on 13 March 1914 in Narail in Jessore district, East Bengal. He studied at Victoria Collegiate School in Narail and then at the Scottish Church College in Calcutta. While in college he joined the communist movement and was arrested for a while. He graduated in 1936 and got his MA in 1938 from the University of Calcutta. Comrade SD Joined the Amrita Bazar Patrika in 1939. Later he became a political whole-timer, and joined Swadhinata, the organ of the Bengal State Committee of the CPI. He was also the editor of the famous literary journal Parichaye.

During his imprisonment in 1962, SD came in contact with Comrade Charu Majumdar. Both of them joined the CPI (M) after the split in 1964. When the CPI (M) leadership nakedly advocated Khrushchev’s line of class-collaboration, comrades SD, Sushital Roy Choudhuri, Asit Sen and others formed the Marxist-Leninist Institute, a study group targeted against revisionism. Following the Naxalbari upsurge, comrade SD played a leading role in the formation of the AICCR in 1968 and the CPI (M-L) in 1969. He became the editor of Deshabrati, the Bengali organ of the West Bengal State Committee of the CPI (ML). His articles in “Patrikar Duniyaye” (meaning In the World of magazines) in Deshabrati are treated as rare gems in the treasury of Leftist Journalism. He was known as the ideologue of the famous statue breaking movement that rocked the urban life of Bengal in the early seventies.

Comrade SD played an important role in inner-party debates and vigorously fought for the implementation consolidation of the revolutionary line comrade Charu Majumdar. From 1970 onwards, he became one of the most wanted persons in India. The police was always hunting for him like a hungry wolf. Finally, in the early hours of 5th August, 1971, he was secretly eliminated by the state machinery.

Anguish of a Revolutionary Poet

My poems will never narrate my story,

My lament will not echo in any a casual line,

My poetry does not trade woes of the feeble,

Nor is it lewd fetish of the impotent mind.

Isn’t a narcissist’s decree of universal love,

Or ‘timid offerings’ of the frail at power’s shrine.

Towards a people’s sky, those that pull

The fire-chariot of humankind are comrades of mine.

I can’t be traced in my poem; there my limits

Blend into infinity of the myriad -

With flood-waters from without I have unbounded

The stagnant swamp sluggished by poison-mud.

My pain will not linger like a spirit in the graveyard,

I am a reckless droplet, ocean’s fervour in my heart.

- Saroj Dutta

Translation: Kasturi

Remembering Vasudha Dhagamwar

(1940 -2014)

(Based on Aruna Burte’s piece assessing the legacy of the late Vasudha Dhagamwar, who influenced two generations of feminists and women’s movement activists).

Vasudha Dhagamwar, legal activist and academician, passed away on February 10, 2014 in Pune of multiple organ failure. She was 74.

Dr.Dhagamwar was one of the signatories, along with three other renowned law teachers, to the famous open letter written to the Supreme Court of India in the year 1979, which had questioned the acquittal of the rapists in the Mathura rape case. This open letter influenced debates and anchored all the arguments that feminists made on the issue of rape in the 1980s. It became the rallying point of a sustained campaign on the issue of gender-based violence.

Vasudha had set up Multiple Action Research Group (MARG) in 1985 to aid peoples’ rights through legal advocacy, which took up questions of displacement and eviction strongly.

Through her activist use of the law, she influenced almost two generations of feminists and activists in other fields. However, even a person of such scholarship was not able to resist the process of communalisation of perceptions, which began distinctly after the fallout of the Shah Bano case. Many in the progressive movement would subscribe to the process of demonising the Muslim community, branding it as ‘backward’, and especially asking why women in the community did not organise to reform their backward personal laws.

Vasudha accompanied the National Commission of Women fact-finding team after the 2002 post-Godhra Gujarat genocide. Regarding the fact-finding team, she wrote in The Hindu dated 22.5.2002, ‘We had also decided that the Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, was not our direct concern.’ The report failed to record or recognise the pain, anguish, loss, injustice, death, rape and more suffered by Muslims – women, girls, children and men – in Gujarat, and state complicity in it. Moreover, the NCW spoke of getting women to do some economic activity in the camps to distract their minds by way of a healing touch. Even a person with such great legal scholarship could be blinded by the majoritarian worldview!

While remembering her lifelong contribution, we also have to remind ourselves that such pitfalls do exist. Not to fall prey to a majoritarian worldview by being on constant vigil would be one way of offering our salute to Dr. Vasudha Dhagamwar and her contribution.