All Red in the Rear View Mirror

Former Naxalite Ashim Chatterjee looks back at the rebellion that made him.

- Dola Mitra

IT is difficult to believe that the friendly man waving at us from the second-floor balcony of his house in Calcutta’s well-to-do Salt Lake City neighbourhood was once upon a time on the West Bengal Police’s “most wanted” list. Arrested in 1971, when he was underground as a central committee member of the CPI-ML and secretary of its ‘Bengal-Bihar-Orissa Border Committee’, and slapped with several non-bailable charges, including Section 302 IPC for murder, he spent eight years in a north Bengal prison, including four in solitary confinement—“with my hands and legs shackled to a ball-and-chain device,” he recalls.

How did he keep his sanity? “Why would I lose it?” he ret­ orts, giving a hint of the proverbial Naxalite nerves of steel.

Ashim Chatterjee was a student of economics at Presidency College, Calcutta, in 1967 when peasants and tea­garden workers in and around Naxalbari, a village in north Bengal, organised sit­ins in the fields owned by landlords (‘jotedar’ in Bengali), infuriating the then state government, which sent in the police to evict and arrest them. On May 24, a police inspector was killed with an arrow; when the police returned the next day and fired at a crowd of villagers. Among those killed were eight women. There was outrage across the state and even outside, leading to what came to be known as the Naxalite movement. Ashim immediately plunged into it.