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print versionLife and times of Kanu Sanyal: Rebel with a cause
March 23, 2010
Kanu Sanyal, one of the founders of the Naxal movement in India, committed suicide at his residence at Seftullajote village in north Bengal on Tuesday.
Rediff.com takes a look at the life and time of the veteran leader, who changed the course of Communist politics in India.
Who was Kanu Sanyal?
Kanu Sanyal was one of the founder members of the Naxal movement. Sanyal, along with fellow Communist revolutionary Charu Majumdar, started the Naxalbari movement in West Bengal on May 25, 1967. Though the movement was brutally crushed by the police within a few months, Naxalism as an ideology managed to survive and has evolved into the Maoist insurgency, considered to be the biggest threat to internal security in India today.
Sanyal was born in 1932 at Kurseong in Darjeeling. While working as a revenue clerk at the Siliguri court, Sanyal was arrested for waving a black flag at then West Bengal chief minister Bidhan Chandra Roy, to protest the Centre’s ban on the Communist Party of India.
He was lodged at the Jalpaiguri jail, where he met then CPI district secretariat member and future comrade-in-arms Charu Majumdar. Influenced heavily by Majumdar’s ideology, Sanyal joined the CPI after his release, and later sided with the CPI-M after the party split over the Indo-China war.
Sanyal soon became known for his firebrand politics, and in 1967, he famously led the armed peasant’s movement in Naxalbari village in north Bengal. The movement marked the beginning of armed Communist struggle against the government, which later spread to other states and assumed virulent proportions in Andhra Pradesh and Orissa.
What happened at Naxalbari?
In May 1967, an armed peasant uprising against the oppression of landlords broke out in Naxalbari village in Darjeeling district.
Led actively by Sanyal and Majumdar, the movement was envisaged as an ’agrarian revolution to eliminate the feudal order’. Both Sanyal and Majumdar defended the use of arms and violence to fight back against the landlords. However, the state police, led by then chief minister Siddharth Shankar Roy, brutally suppressed the movement within a few months.
But the discontent and anger of the marginalised and the underprivileged sections of society continued to simmer in Bengal, which witnessed an intense surge in Naxal violence in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
What was Sanyal’s next step towards a Communist revolution?
Sanyal and Majumdar founded the Communist Party of India-Marxist-Leninist in 1969. The duo aimed for an ’Indian revolution’ via a sustained arms struggle, to establish ’liberated zones’ across the country that would eventually be merged into a single vast unit completely under Naxal control.
Sanyal publicly sought help from China to further the arms struggle, and reportedly even visited Beijing, via Kathmandu, Nepal, in September 1967. However, it is not clear whether China offered any moral, financial or logistical support to the Naxal movement raging in Bengal.
What were the activities of the CPI-ML?
The CPI-ML believed in capturing power by violent means and carried out political assassinations by targeting the ’enemies of the proletariat’. They also conducted raids on banks and armouries to build up their resources.
Was Sanyal arrested for the group’s activities?
Sanyal, who had gone underground, was arrested in August 1970. He was convicted in the Parvatipuram case (an organised uprising against landlords in Andhra Prdesh and Orissa), often dubbed as the biggest conspiracy case in history, and imprisoned for seven years at a jail in Visakhapatnam.
In July 1972, Majumdar was arrested from his hide-out, and he died in police custody at a Kolkata jail a fortnight later.
By 1977, West Bengal had heralded in a Communist government and then chief minister Jyoti Basu personally intervened to ensure Sanyal’s release.
Was Sanyal involved in politics even after his release?
Though Sanyal had renounced armed struggle, he formed the Organising Committee of Communist Revolutionaries after his release. He later merged the OCCR with the Communist Organisation of India-Marxist-Leninist.
Sanyal later became the general secretary of the revamped CPI-ML, which was formed when several like-minded groups coalesced to form a Left-wing organisation.
On January 18, 2006, Sanyal was arrested with fellow agitators for disrupting a Delhi-bound Rajdhani Express train at the New Jalpaiguri Railway Station in Siliguri, while protesting against closures of tea gardens in the region.
Sanyal was a vocal critic of the land acquisition methods adopted by the state government in Singur and Nandigram. He slammed the CPI-M-led government, calling it capitalist, and hailed the popular uprisings in the two regions. Sanyal believed that led by selfless and strong leadership, the protests in Nandigram had the potential to surpass even the Naxalbari movement.
What were Sanyal’s views about the Maoist insurgency?
Ironically, Sanyal often spoke out against the Maoist movement, even though he is considered to be one of its founding fathers. He was disillusioned by the relentless violence perpetrated by the Maoists, and the indiscriminate victimisation of poor farmers and tribals.
Readily admitting the mistakes made by his CPI-ML in its hey days, Sanyal often declared that acts of terror could not bring change; they only hurt popular movements and alienated the masses.
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Naxalism founder Sanyal kills self
Debasis Sarkar, ET Bureau Mar 24, 2010, 05.48am IST
HATIGHISHA(NAXALBARI): Kanu Sanyal has died. The legendary Naxalite leader committed suicide at his party office in Hatighisha near Naxalbari on Tuesday afternoon. Pushing 80, severely paralytic and nearly blind after a cerebral stroke last year, Sanyal was the last of the three legendary founder movers of the peasants’ revolution of north Bengal in the late 60s, that became infamously known throughout India as the Naxalbari movement. It was without doubt the most traumatic and turbulent period of West Bengal’s history post-Independence, which saw amidst the ensuing blood-bath, the beginning of capital outflow from the state.
Charu Majumdar and Jangal Santhal, the other two pioneering stalwarts of the movement had died long back. Sanyal lived, but lived in acute depression. Just two days ago, in an informal talk with ET, Sanyal had expressed his anguish: "Just carrying on with a body is not a life, and there is no life if I cannot be of any use to my party." His impaired vision, paralytic body was a torment that constantly wracked him. "He was very depressed due to his inability in taking part in party programmes," said Dipu Haldar, Darjeeling district committee member of CPI (ML) and close acquaintance of Sanyal.
With Charu Majumdar and Jangal Santhal, Sanyal had initiated the Naxalbari movement that later ran amok. Discords galore surfaced and while Sanyal, in his later years, disapproved of Majumdar’s strategy of armed struggle, there are some even now in CPI(ML) who never thought Sanyal was in the same class as Majumdar was in being a "true communist". But for that matter, Sanyal wasn’t ever too great a votary of excessive bloodshed and he always thought the present Maoist movement was utter rubbish.
Born in Kurseong in 1931, Sanyal joined the Communist Part of India (CPI) in 1950 and became a whole-timer. He worked mainly among the tea workers in Matigara and Naxalbari. He went to China in 1967 for three months to meet Mao Zedong. This inspired him to announce the formation of the original CPI(ML) in 1969 at a public meeting in Kolkata that coincided with Lenin’s birthday.
He spent many years between 1970 and 1977 behind bars. After his release in 1977, he started living permanently at Hatighisa and formed Organising Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (OCCR). In 1985, he became the leader of Communist Organisation of India (Marxist-Leninist), a conglomeration of six Marxist Leninist factions. He formed the New CPI(ML) in 2003 and was general secretary of the organisation.
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Frontline Magazine, April. 10-23, 2010
OBITUARY
End of a revolution
SUHRID SANKAR CHATTOPADHYAY
Kanu Sanyal, a founder of naxalism, was a revolutionary who devoted his life for the cause of the peasant masses of West Bengal.
TAMAL ROY/AP
Kanu Sanyal in an agricultural field at Hatighisa village near Naxalbari on September 13, 2005.
Kanu Sanyal, the man who created the term naxalism and gave this extremist form of communism a permanent place in Indian history, took his own life on March 23 by hanging himself at his residence in Hatighisa village near Naxalbari – from where his peasant revolution originated. If Charu Majumdar is considered the ideologue of the naxal movement, Kanu Sanyal was its organiser and iron fist.
He was a revolutionary to the core and had unimpeachable integrity. He spent all his life among the peasants for whose cause he had taken up arms, and considered their sorrows and problems as his own. Such was his legend that even those who differed radically with his politics did not hesitate to express their sorrow over his death.
Biman Bose, Polit Bureau member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), said: “His simple, unostentatious lifestyle can be a role model for everyone.†His colleague Sitaram Yechury said: “Kanu Sanyal’s death is very unfortunate. Of late, particularly after Nandigram and Lalgarh, he has been saying that the line adopted by Maoists does not conform to the revolutionary understanding that the naxalite movement had at the time when it started.†Yechury also pointed out that Sanyal had been supporting all major agitations and programmes organised by the CPI(M)-led Left Front in Bengal against imperialism and other issues.
There are some doubts about the year of Kanu Sanyal’s birth; according to some, it was 1928, while most others believe it was 1932. Sanyal was born in the Kurseong subdivision of Darjeeling district in North Bengal. He was the second-youngest of the seven children of Annada Govinda Sanyal, a clerk in the local court. After completing his matriculation from the Kurseong ME School (later renamed the Pushparani Roy Memorial High School), he enrolled in the Jalpaiguri College in the science stream, which he did not complete. Subsequently, he took up a job as a clerk in the Kalimpong court; he was later transferred to the Siliguri court.
In 1949, Sanyal was briefly jailed for waving a black flag at Bidhan Chandra Roy, the Congress Chief Minister of West Bengal, as a mark of protest against the banning of the Communist Party of India (CPI) in 1948. It was while in prison that he got acquainted with Charu Majumdar, who was a member of the CPI district secretariat. In 1952, Sanyal became a whole-timer of the CPI, and when the party split in 1964, he, along with Charu Majumdar, sided with the breakaway faction, the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
Soon after the CPI(M)’s formation, a section of leaders wanted the party to add armed revolution to its agenda following the example of China. The party leadership did not entirely dismiss the possibility of an armed uprising, and so there remained within it a space for the more radical members. Prominent among them were Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal.
In 1965, Charu Majumdar came out with his famous ‘Eight Documents’, which essentially exhorted the party to fight against revisionism within itself, follow the example of Mao Zedong’s China and take up armed struggle against the state, and underlined that action, rather than politics, was the need of the day. The two factions of the party continued to co-exist, albeit a little uneasily, under the same banner for a while. Their differences became irreconcilable when the first CPI(M)-led United Front government was formed in 1967.
At that time, Kanu Sanyal, a member of the CPI(M)’s Darjeeling district committee, was the most important grass-roots organiser of tea estate workers and peasants. According to him, the situation then was ripe for an uprising, thanks to the tireless work of the party workers in the region. Meanwhile, some of the more militant cadre in the party had, on Charu Majumdar’s directive, already started seizing arms and acquiring land forcibly on behalf of the peasants from the big landholders.
Naxalbari uprising
The spark that led to the Naxalbari uprising came towards the fag end of April 1967. Bhigul Kissan, a landless farmer who worked on the land of Iswar Tirkey, a powerful landlord, was ousted from his land. He then appealed to the Krishak Sabha, whose most prominent leader was Kanu Sanyal, to intervene on his behalf. The peasants laid siege to Iswar Tirkey’s land, and Tirkey, who was a member of the Bangla Congress, a major constituent of the ruling coalition, used his political influence to ensure the police take action against the agitating peasants.
What followed was a series of police raids that culminated in the police-peasant standoff at Boromaniram Jot in Naxalbari on May 24, in which Sonam Wangdo, a police officer, was killed by the peasants’ arrows. The next day, the police opened fire at a Krishak Sabha meeting in Prasad Jot in Naxalbari, and 11 people were killed, including seven women and two infants.
The peasant uprising, with Sanyal at the helm, then spread like wildfire in the region. On June 27, 1967, the Naxalbari Krishak Sangram Sahayak Committee was set up. Giving a huge fillip to the movement was an editorial on July 5 in People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, which read: “A peal of spring thunder has crashed over the land of India. Revolutionary peasants in the Darjeeling area have risen in rebellion. Under the leadership of a revolutionary group of the Indian Communist Party, a red area of rural revolutionary armed struggle has been established in India. This is a development of tremendous significance for the Indian people’s revolutionary struggle.â€
Despite the heavy police clampdown, the movement had already captured international attention and was already being seen as a source of inspiration for peasant struggles in other parts of the country. In November that year, the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (CPI-M) was formed; the CPI(M) was later dropped after the group broke away from the party.
In the monsoon of 1968, Kanu Sanyal led a team of five revolutionaries to a trip to China where they received a warm welcome. It is believed that in their two-and-a-half month stay in China they even took military training.
Formation of CPI(M-L)
At an extended meeting held from April 19 to 22 in 1969, the AICCR decided to form a new party called the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). Charu Majumdar hailed the event as the beginning of a “war of annihilation†.
On May 1, Kanu Sanyal announced the establishment of the new party at a gathering on the Sahid Minar grounds in Kolkata. In March the following year, the CPI(M-L) State committee was established, and in May, the first party congress took place in which Charu Majumdar’s line of khatam – annihilation of class enemies – was endorsed unanimously. Meanwhile, police crackdown on the party became more severe and ideological differences began to crop up within the top leadership. Kanu Sanyal, however, remained firmly behind Charu Majumdar’s policies.
China’s rejection
Following the congress of the CPI(M-L) in May, one of its leaders Souren Bose had gone to China with the party documents. This time, however, the Communist Party of China was strongly critical of the CPI(M-L)’s activities, and rejected the latter’s claim that “China’s Chairman is our Chairman†.
“They said this had nothing to do with Mao, and the line that we had chosen was one of the main reasons for our debacle,†an old naxalite leader told Frontline. None of the facts relating to this episode has ever been published, and its veracity is not absolute either; but according to the general prison lore of the period between 1971 and 1972, Souren Bose, upon his return to India, discussed China’s criticism with Charu Majumdar, and hoped the latter would present the facts before the party. Although some of the leaders may have been privy to this information, by and large most members of the party were not aware of it.
Sanyal did not know of it either as he was in prison. Souren Bose discussed the issue with him after Charu Majumdar’s death, when they were imprisoned together in the Srikakulam conspiracy case in Andhra Pradesh. “Many of Charu Majumdar’s followers will, however, deny that this ever took place. They will argue that if it did indeed take place, then why did Charu Majumdar not talk about it,†the old naxal leader said.
Shift in ideology
In Charu Majumdar’s view, the naxalbari movement and the Terai upheaval were a part of the process of overthrowing the prevalent social order and seizing state power. In other words, Charu Majumdar reasoned, the movement was not an anti-feudal struggle for land but an armed struggle against the state itself.
Kanu Sanyal fully endorsed this view in his “Terai Report (1968)†, and on no occasion did he publicly disagree with Majumdar over this issue. He did, however, come out with a paper in 1973 from prison called “More about Naxalbari†, in which his reservations against many of Majumdar’s views came to light.
In it, Sanyal argued that the naxalbari movement was an agrarian uprising that would finally culminate in an armed movement. He even suggested that Majumdar’s interpretation that the movement was one against the state was wrong and that it was one of the reasons for the debacle that the party was facing then. It was not that Kanu Sanyal was against the idea of armed struggle against the state; he just did not consider the naxalbari movement to be that.
Sanyal also rejected Charu Majumdar’s advocacy of individual assassination, which, according to Ashim Chatterjee, former CPI(M-L) Central Committee member and top naxal leader of the 1970s, was “anarchism of the Bakuninist kind†. (Mikhail Bakunin was a Russian revolutionary and theorist of collectivist anarchism.)
Sanyal was also very critical of the activities of present-day Maoists, and denounced on more than one occasion their “wanton killing of innocent villagers†. Although he supported the Gorkhaland movement, he did not accept the Gorkha Janamukti Morcha’s demand to include the Terai and parts of the Doars in the state it sought to create.
After jail
In 1977, after the Left Front assumed power in West Bengal, Chief Minister Jyoti Basu took the initiative to have Sanyal, who was serving a sentence for his involvement in the Srikakulam case, released from prison. Even when he was in prison, Sanyal was getting increasingly critical of the CPI(M-L) and its activities; and after his release, he openly denounced his party, even questioning the need for its existence in the first place. This further isolated him from his own movement and from the political milieu with which he could not relate to.
“We may have been against certain policies of the party but when Kanu-da rejected the reason for the formation of the party and its glorious history, we just could not accept that,†Amar Bhattacharjee, writer and former naxal leader of the 1970s and 1980s, told Frontline.
Kanu Sanyal tied up with Ashim Chatterjee and Asit Sinha to form the Organisation of Communist Committee of Revolutionaries. Later in 1984, he formed the Organisation Committee of India (Marxist-Leninist). Then, finally in the early 1990s, he set up another organisation – called the CPI(M-L) ironically; a name he had rejected a decade earlier – but subsequently moved away from it in around 2000. After that, he was not known to be in any organisation but continued to work at the grass-roots level mainly with the tea workers.
Personal life
His was a unique life of Spartan simplicity. He lived among the simple peasants of Naxalbari. He resided in a mud hut in Hatighisa village, which did not even have a toilet, and he used to go to a nearby river to bathe. “There have been times when his house was brought down by herds of elephants roaming the area, but then he would build it up again,†an old friend of Kanu Sanyal’s told Frontline.
Dr Dipanjan Rai Chaudhuri, a senior naxal leader of the 1970s, remembers seeing Sanyal in a public transport bus in Kolkata in the mid-1980s. “It was a very crowded bus, with hardly any space to stand. I recognised him immediately and offered him my seat. But he politely declined and continued to stand,†he said.
Right until the end of his life, Kanu Sanyal remained a rebel and a fighter. In 2006, while travelling in the unreserved compartment of a Kolkata-bound train, dacoits boarded the compartment and robbed passengers of their belongings. While everybody else gave in without a fight, the septuagenarian revolutionary put up a resistance and received stab injuries. Age and illness could not rob him of his spirit
In some ways, his career seemed to be one of failure – a revolutionary who lost faith in the process of the revolution that he himself had engineered, an activist who could not find a permanent platform to operate from, and finally a man committing suicide, which even those who were most closely associated with him could not explain.
But, as Dipanjan Rai Chaudhuri said, his life was not a failure in the wider perspective of history. He said: “If you ask me if Kanu Sanyal’s and our movements, naxalbari and the Terai uprising, were all in vain, I would say no for two reasons. First, take the case of the big landlords in West Bengal: they did not fight the onslaught of the CPI(M) and the reason for that is the naxals. It was better for the landlords to accept the terms of the CPI(M) than face us. Our movement played a huge role in ridding this State of landlordism.
“Our second contribution is we proved that the idea of an armed agrarian revolution as the way of liberation of the people is not just an idea from a foreign land, but a practicable one that was applicable in this State itself. Naxalbari proved precisely that.â€
