Kanu Sanyal: The faded comrade

      Each ideology finally ends up with the same evils which it sought to remove. I am sad to repeat the similar sentence in less than a month. The news of suicide by Kanu Sanyal comes to me as a shock. He, along with Charu Majumdar, was the founder of Naxalite movement in late sixties. I’ve passed through Naxal Bari many times, which is a village in Siliguri district of north Bengal, not far from Indo-Nepal border. The village can be proud and ashamed of being an epithet of Maoist menace in India.

      Some times back I read an interview of Kanu Sanyal in which I felt that he was not happy with the way Naxalite movement has changed. Though, since beginning, he had differences with Charu Majumdar on ‘the deviation from the ideology of Marx, Lenin and Mao’. But root cause of the problem was the way the movement was started. It’s a well established fact that ‘Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ Those ‘Weaks’ after attaing power from ‘Powerfuls’ start doing same oppression which they were opposing. This is the inherent fault with an armed revolution, at least in Indian settings. Indeed the root cause of the Naxlite terrorism (let’s stop saying it a movement now) is poverty & corruption. In a country where surplus grain was rotting in the granaries and people in hunger were dieing of eating poisonous kernels in Orissa, not strange they can be easily gathered to take arms. Alas! Government is more interested to suppress Naxlites than to improve the socio-economic condition of the tribal and poor. But Naxal movement has lost its path and this might have forced Kanu Sanyal, a man of strong will power, to commit suicide.

      Organizing and spearheading a popular movement is a very sensitive job. It’s still easier to instigate an uprising but giving it correct direction is far difficult. I believe that a prevailing system should never be challenged till you don’t have a well researched better system to replace it. Leaders like Kanu Sanyal, while starting a movement, forget to understand this fact. They import and implement the ideology of Marx, Lenin and Mao but ignore the Indian social conditions.