Once the cradle of Naxal movement, now no red flags or Left candidates
There are hardly any red flags left at Hathighisa village in Naxalbari except at the house of the late Naxal leader Kanu Sanyal which remains locked. As the Darjeeling seat, under which lies Hathigisha that had stood witness to the Naxal movement, goes to polls on April 26, neither the Communist Party of India (MarxistLeninist) Liberation or the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has fielded any candidate from here. The only leftleaning party that has named a candidate from the seat is Socialist Unity Centre of India (Communist).
Abhijit Mazumdar, a leader of CPI(ML) Liberation and son of the late Communist leader Charu Majumdar, said the party is fielding only one candidate from West Bengal for the Lok Sabha polls from the Bardhaman Purba Lok Sabha seat.
“I had contested the Lok Sabha elections from Darjeeling in 2009 and in the last elections our party supported the CPI(M) candidate,” Mr. Majumdar said. Under the LeftCongress electoral understanding, the CPI(M) has left the Darjeeling seat to the Congress, which has fielded Delhibased academic Munish Tamang from the seat.
Next to Sanyal’s house lives Shanti Munda, alias Shanti Sarkar, the last of the surviving leaders who had participated in the movement in the late 1960s. Ms. Munda, 82, recalls that when Sanyal was alive people would flock to Hathigisha village. She said the BJP’s promise of making Hathigisha a model village has fallen flat.
“In 2014 Ahluwalia (BJP MP from Darjeeling S.S. Ahluwalia) told me that Kanu Sanyal wanted to bring revolution through guns and I will change the village through papers and legal documents. Nothing has changed in the past ten years,” Ms. Munda said.
Recalling the Naxalite movement, Ms. Munda said that she was young and had to flee and hide in the adjoining riverbed with a 15dayold baby.
Reflecting on the politics of violence unleashed by the Naxalbari uprising, Ms. Munda said she did not believe in “khatamer rajniti (politics of killing)”. “How many will you kill,” she asked.
“I used to have differences with Kanu babu on that. He had also admitted that politics of killing was not the right course,” said Ms. Munda, who receives an old age pension from the State government.
Not far from Hatighisa is Bengai Jote village where the Naxal movement became a revolution. Next to Bengai Jote primary school stands the memorial in red with names of 11 persons including, two children, killed in police firing on May 25, 1967. The busts of nine leaders including those of the leaders of Naxalbari movement Majumdar, Saroj Dutta and Mahadeb Mukherjee share space with communist icons Mao Zedong, Lenin and Karl Marx.