End of an era in Bengal’s Naxalite politics

Veteran Naxalite leader Azizul Haque passes away at 83

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Azizul Haque — firebrand poet, political thinker and one of the last towering leaders of India’s Naxalite uprising — died here Monday, marking the end of a turbulent, blood-soaked chapter in Bengal’s radical Left history that once shook the nation in the 1960s and “70s.

He was 83. Haque, who was born in Howrah in 1942, belonged to the generation of Naxal leaders who believed that ‘bonduker nol-i, khomotar utsa’ (Political power flows out of the barrel of the gun), a doctrine popularised by their ideological mentor, Charu Mazumdar, who made the Mao Zedong’s slogan popular in India in the Sixties and Seventies.

A poet, political thinker and once the head of the CPI(ML)’s second central committee, Haque had long been battling illness and was admitted to ICU after a fall at home that left him with a fractured hand.