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Red Salute to Comrade Arijit Mitra

After nearly three weeks of ceaseless battle between life and death, Comrade Arijit Mitra finally breathed his last on 5 January 2003. He had undergone a cardiac surgery on the 17th of December. His end came just a week before he would have turned 53.

“The pull of life is irresistible and immortal” (From the last notes of Comrade Arijit Mitra written just before being taken to the operation theatre on December 17, 2002). "How unique and strange is this life! It has its own intense and irresistible pull, its own immortal attraction. Though life and death constitute two opposing sides of the same process, the flag of life always flutters high atop the mountain of death. "I deeply feel that my Party is bound by an intensely sensitive and human bond between the entire organisation and every individual member. Whatever happens to me, my Party must lead the united march of the Left in the great war against communal fascism and imperialism. "Right now, death is not what occupies my mind. I am driven by an intense thirst for life. Humanity shall have the last word. The final victory shall be of the humankind. This world must become a more beautiful, sacred and prosperous place."

The news of his most premature death came as a bolt from the blue for the progressive intelligentsia of West Bengal. A pall of gloom descended on the entire Party in West Bengal. Just the previous night the Party State Committee had concluded its first meeting after the Seventh Congress amidst news of improvement in Comrade Mitra’s conditions. In tune with the wishes of Comrade Mitra, his eyes were donated to the eye bank and his body was handed over to the Kolkata Medical College.

On January 7 his body was first taken to Herambachandra College in South Kolkata where he was the Head of the Bengali Department. Hundreds of students and teachers bade their beloved teacher and dear colleague a tearful farewell. From the college, the body was brought to the Party State Office where hundreds of Party activists and comrades and friends representing various Left parties, cultural organisations, trade unions, little magazines paid their last respects to the departed leader. Singing the tune of the Internationale, a procession then escorted his body to the Medical College. Apart from all members of the Party State Committee, several members of the Party Central Committee including Comrades Dipankar Bhattacharya, Swadesh Bhattacharya, Raja Ram, DP Bakshi, Kartick Pal, Arindam Sen and Partha Ghosh attended this unique funeral.

On 16 January a condolence meeting was held at Yuva Kendra. It was attended by leaders of almost all Left parties in West Bengal. Writers Mahashweta Devi and Ashok Mitra, poet Amitabha Dasgupta, playwright Amal Roy, singers Pratul Mukhopadhyay, Ajit Pandey, Bipul Chakraborty and Bratati Mazumder, professors Jyoti Prakash Chattopadhyay and Tarun Sanyal, columnist Azizul Haque and several other progressive writers, singers and cultural and academic personalities were also present in this meeting. The meeting called for fulfilling his dream of forging a broad-based unity of Left, democratic and patriotic forces to resist the growing imperialist-fascist offensive.

For the last twenty-five years, Comrade Arijit Mitra had worked tirelessly for rebuilding the Party and spreading the message of the revolutionary Left and democratic movement to every nook and corner of West Bengal. He was among those students of the prestigious Presidency College of Kolkata who had taken their first steps in revolutionary politics in the wake of the great peasant rebellion of Naxalbari. He also served a jail sentence during the repressive semi-fascist regime of Sidharth Shankar Ray. After the lifting of the Emergency in 1977, Comrade Arijit plunged headlong into the campaign for release of political prisoners.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s when the Party began to stress mass political agitations, Comrade Arijit emerged as one of the most creative and passionate pioneers of this new practice in West Bengal. As one of the General Secretaries of the Indian People’s Front, he was instrumental in carrying the Party’s message among broader Left and democratic circles. During the best part of the 1990s and till the end of his life, he was secretary of the Paschim Banga Gana Sanskriti Parishad and editor of the cultural magazine Nabanno. He was also a long-standing member of the editorial board of the Party’s State organ Deshabrati and was re-elected a member of the Party’s State Committee at the Krishnanagar Conference (November 2001).

He had a very charming personality, firm in his internal conviction and yet very gentle and modest in his external articulation. An outstanding orator and a prolific writer, he left a lasting impression on all his comrades and friends, those who knew him for a long time or who had only limited acquaintance with him. A collection of his selected writings in Bangla has been planned to be released in the forthcoming Kolkata Book Fair.

Let us learn from Arijitda

-- Dipankar Bhattacharya

I have grown up in the Party listening to Arijitda’s speeches. It is hard to accept the fact that never again shall we hear that great inspiring voice.

In his last note, Arijitda has placed a demand on his beloved Party. ‘Regardless of whatever happens to me’, he has scribbled in his last note, ‘the Party must lead the great battle against communal fascism and imperialism and for Left unity.’ These are his last words, his last wish. The Party must and will surely do all it can to fulfil this last wish of this tireless campaigner for progressive culture and people’s democracy.

Arijitda was a great ambassador for the Party in the progressive political and cultural circles of West Bengal, Kolkata in particular. It is a cruel irony of history that after the initial setback of the 1970s, while the CPI(ML) could register a strong presence in the Hindi belt which has long been considered an inhospitable terrain for the communist movement, in West Bengal, the land of Naxalbari and the birth of CPI(ML), the Party has not yet been able to regain its lost strength and appeal. In Kolkata and urban Bengal, there is no dearth of goodwill for the heroic sacrifice made by the CPI(ML) in its early days, but politically the Party is still understood in terms of some of the extreme forms of struggle adopted in the 1970s and excesses committed in that period.

Freeing the Party’s real identity from the prison of misunderstanding and distorted propaganda and developing a new idiom and language to take the Party’s message to the people in the changed situation of Left-ruled West Bengal is a major challenge. Arijitda had grasped this challenge quite early on and he devoted his entire post-77 political life to meeting this challenge. He had deep roots in the soil of Bengal, in the progressive culture of Bengal and especially in the rich heritage of Rabindranath. Communists and especially Naxalites are often accused of dismissing Rabindranath as a ‘bourgeois poet’, but whoever has listened to Arijitda’s speeches and followed his writing will remember him as one who always went back to Rabindranath to arouse the people to fight for freedom, democracy and human glory and awaken them from the slumber induced by the consumerist offensive of globalisation.

Deepening his understanding of the people of Bengal and their culture was a passion for Arijitda. His love for the Bengali language and literature was a key element of his personality. But he was not a regional chauvinist masquerading as a communist. He responded equally passionately and actively to events outside of Bengal as events inside the state. He was equally vocal against the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984 and last year’s Gujarat genocide, against the massacres in Bihar and against the killing of agricultural labourers in Left Front-ruled West Bengal. He held the Left Front government’s refusal to punish the perpetrators of the white terror of the 1970s as one of the biggest expressions of the betrayal and bankruptcy of the CPI(M) rule in West Bengal. He was moved equally by the plight of the flood victims in West Bengal, the super-cyclone victims of Orissa and the earthquake victims of Gujarat. If he took to the streets in protest against the US war on Iraq and Afghanistan, we know he was also no less critical of the erstwhile Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan and the coercive suppression of the dissenting voice in Beijing’s Tienanmen Square. In West Bengal, he will be remembered as a tireless campaigner for Left unity, but as has been rightly pointed out editorially in the pro-Left Bengali daily Aajkaal, Left unity for him was not something born out of compromise and silence, his vision of Left unity presumed consistent struggle and an ever-awakened democratic conscience.

Arijitda had a truly modern mind. For him revolution did not just mean seizure of state power, for him democratic revolution meant above all the forging of a modern democratic consciousness. And this passion for modernity and progress permeated his view of life in its entirety. He resented everything rotten and reactionary, whether feudal-patriarchal-Brahminical or decadent-imperialist, from the core of his heart. The secret of Arijitda’s friendly ties with the entire range of progressive and democratic forces lay in this broad canvas and consistency of his modern mind. The sharp edge and depth of his consciousness was effectively matched by the intensity of his feelings and the vastness of his mental horizon. True, his charming and graceful personality – always active and energetic and yet modest, soft-spoken and informed by an innate sense of humour and courtesy – had its own attraction. But we must not forget the source of power that lit and propelled this personality: his modern democratic mind that roamed freely within its expansive Marxist moorings.

And we can never forget the example of a revolutionary intellectual and cultural activist that Arijitda has set for us. In this respect he was an ideal inheritor of the vibrant revolutionary legacy of Sukanta Bhattacharya and Saroj Datta. He understood that if there can be no culture without creativity, there can also be no creativity without conscious and constant practice. And the most important field of practice for a revolutionary intellectual and cultural activist is the people and the society, not just the aspect of the situation and society that immediately surrounds him but the basic classes toiling away at a little distance with their smiles and tears, defeats and victories, and above all, with their never-say-die yearning for freedom and progress. He hated traits like aloofness, alienation and arrogance that are often treated as hallmarks of an intellectual. He was also no taker of the fashionable notion that intellectuals can only play their role away from organisations, as an institution-in-themselves or rather institution-for-themselves, that intellectuals must abhor all kinds of discipline and live as embodiments of anarchy. He was out and out an organisation man, a committed partisan who always voluntarily accepted the democratic discipline of a communist party.

The last few years had seen Arijitda at the peak of his creativity and activism. The heightened offensive of imperialism and communal fascism had begun to bring out the most passionate and committed communist in Arijitda. His best was perhaps yet to come, but few people can produce such a rich legacy of active and creative anti-fascist anti-imperialist resistance within such a short span of time. We can only remember and respect him by enriching his legacy and intensifying the resistance.

Remembering Arijit Mitra

(Comrade Arijit Mitra’s premature demise has jolted the entire progressive intelligentsia in Bengal. Below we reproduce a few condolence messages and tributes.)

A Friend Who Was My Pride

"Long ago, veteran leader and historian of the peasant movement, Comrade Abdullah Rasul had once recited to us one of Tulsidas’ great poems which says: when you were born, you cried and cried, your face held up to the sun and the sky, and the whole world greeted you with smiles. Do something in your lifetime so that, when you leave, the world bids you farewell in tears. Arijit mirrored this great mission in his life.

Today we are in tears. Tears where pride blends with pain. Communists are the greatest humanists – Arijit was a live illustration of this truth. Displaying deep faith in Marxism as well as the democratic consciousness and humanist values of Tagore and other international luminaries, Arijit was driven by the dream and determination of wiping out the tears of the toiling masses. His was an indispensable presence in the domain of united cultural movement. Working with him, I often felt that the points of agreement by far outweigh our points of difference. It is difficult indeed to find such a friend.

Arijit left us precisely when we needed him most. This is something I find hard to accept."

- Indranath Bandyopadhaya,

Secretary, Association of Democratic Writers and Artists, West Bengal

Your Battlefield Is Where You Stand

"I heard the news of Arijit passing away when I was in Delhi. It was simply unbelievable. The cruel truth sank in only when I was back in Kolkata.

After their release in 1977, many Naxalites used to frequent my place at Ballygunge Station Road. It all was so live and natural, my mind still harks back to those days. I can still see Arijit climbing up the spiralling stairs, carefully hiding himself in a light shawl. From then onwards, we met so many times. He had a pair of bright and memorable eyes and a strong personality …

To remember Arijit is to remember IPF. … In today’s hour of crisis, my mind only looks for Arijits! … It is only such people with shared courage of conviction who can carry forward the mission of liberation in the realm of thought and ideology and also direct the mind’s eye towards the ground. I for one will continue to believe that thinking along correct ideological lines is not enough; it is necessary to carry on practical work as well.

And this task has to be taken up by those who are still young. The vacuum created by the departure of one Arijit must be filled up by many others. People like Arijit can only be remembered through constant work.

My battlefield is where I stand. All of us must grasp this firmly. And all of us must get active. That’s all."

- Mahashweta Devi

The Attraction Called Arijit

"Why did Arijit use to attract me so much? Why does he continue to attract me even after his death?

Many years ago I came to know him as a colleague in the college and university teachers’ movement. As a modest, soft-spoken, sincere, honest and friendly person who was firm in his own belief. He had a large heart. Feet firmly planted on the soil of his conviction, he used to stretch out his hands to call others, in a voice that was soft and low but irresistible.

Beyond the domain of the teachers’ movement, he used to pull me into the realm of social and cultural action, and even onto the road of political agitation. How many processions and meetings must I have attended at his call! There was no way I could not have attended them. Always and everywhere he used to rally us and then relegate himself to the background. At the end of every meeting I used to realise that he was the real leader, a different kind of leader.

Why did I always respond to Arijit’s call? The answer does not lie merely in the realm of logic and reasoning, sense and ideas. Beyond all that there used to be Arijit, the Arijit who used to dream and use his dream to touch and kindle the dreams of others. So powerful was this dream that moments before he fell silent for ever, he could pen these unforgettable words, “yet the flag of life always flies high above the land of death.”

Now I have no difficulty in understanding why Arijit used to attract me so much. Why he continues to attract me, even after his death."

- Prof. Jyotiprakash Chattopadhyay

A Person Worthy of Remembrance

He was only 53. He has been sincerely active in politics for years, yet he was never spotted by the limelight of publicity. He was an accomplished professor of Bengali language and literature. A bright Leftwing intellectual. A leading organiser of the M-L movement, but he had a much wider circle. He had close contact with organisers of other Left parties and also with partyless individuals among the Left. From anti-war marches and anti-communal protests to the movement for healthy and progressive culture, he straddled a vast territory. And he used to be not alone, but with everybody else. Everybody used to respond unhesitatingly to the calls of this thoroughly non-sectarian person. Last Sunday, January 5, this tireless fighter for meaningful Left unity went away prematurely.

There is yet another unforgettable aspect to his character. On the one hand he was modest, soft-spoken, and popular to one and all. On the other hand he was firm in his principle, strict in discipline, and radiant in his own internal glow. An advocate of left unity, who never had to compromise for the sake of unity. Many used to know and admire him. Many others did not know him. He was not one who would force his way to the front to get known to others. Those who used to know him and had heard about him, are shell-shocked. He will live for ever in those countless shocked hearts. Let those who did not use to know him and had not heard about him, now get to know him and learn about him. The responsibility of letting others know about him lies with those who used to know him. A memorable man. A memorable name. Arijit Mitra.

- Editorial,

Aajkaal (a leading Bengali daily), Kolkata, 8 January 2003

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