Comrade Mahendra Singh, You Will Always Live In the Struggles and Aspirations of the People of Jharkhand and India!

COMRADE MAHENDRA SINGH dedicated his book of poems, Keemat Chukati Zindagi, to “All those/ who lived/ and died/ for love and liberation”. Truly, Mahendra Singh himself, in life and death, was passionately committed to his love for struggling people, and to striving for their liberation.

In a poem called ‘Ummeeden’ (Hopes), he wrote of how “Someone says/ In this black night/ To speak of that pale elusive light/ Is futile/ Someone replies/ But it’s a harbinger of dawn.” The dastardly assassination of Comrade Mahendra Singh is no doubt an attempt to extinguish the flames of struggle of tribals and agrarian poor of Jharkhand – a veritable forest fire which the saffron government with all the might of its POTA could not snuff out. Comrade Mahendra Singh was not killed with a single cold-blooded shot. His hired assassins savaged him with bullets and knives, reflecting the hatred that their masters, the saffron fascists, feel for the unquenchable struggles in the forests and fields of Jharkhand. In brutalising and killing this people’s hero of our time, the coal mafia and its patron, the saffron government, hope to deal a blow of death and despair to these struggles. But Comrade Mahendra Singh’s own legacy of brave, creative struggles, and the CPI(ML)’s own history of battling and triumphing over brutal State terror, is a sure sign of dawn that will be hold out hope and confidence for the forces of democracy and revolution.

Comrade Mahendra Singh was born in 1954 in Khambra village, Bagodar thana of Giridih District of Jharkhand. His father Jagdish Singh and mother Pramila Devi were ordinary middle peasants from the Rajput community. The huge ancestral house made of wood and mud was the only sign that the family must once have been fairly well off. Mahendra’s older sister, widowed at a young age, was very close to Mahendra. She remained a great source of political support all her life, and most activists in Jharkhand knew her as ‘Didi’. His wife Shanti Devi is also an activist of AIPWA. His son Vinod was an AISA activist while a student of Fine Arts at Banaras Hindu University, and later joined the Kala Kammune in Banaras. He is now involved with making alternative cinema.

Like countless other children born in South Bihar (now Jharkhand), the culture and social trends of the region left an impact on his youth. He received his initial schooling in the village, but discontinued formal education very early due to his father’s religious prejudices. However, he never lost his taste for literature and had a lifelong habit of reading widely and deeply.

After his matriculation in 1972 came a phase where he left home in search of new experience. By the time he returned home, the Naxalbari movement led by the CPI(ML) had been ruthlessly crushed all over India, but it had just begun to raise its head once again in the villages of Bhojpur and Patna under the leadership of Comrade Vinod Mishra and Subrata Dutta (Jauhar). This was the period which followed the 1974 movement; Bihar’s youth, disillusioned with the Socialists’ corruption and betrayal, were in search of a new path, and the CPI(ML) struggle for revolutionary change offered an attractive alternative. This was the backdrop which drew the young Mahendra closer to the CPI(ML).

In early 1978, the CPI(ML) had begun to work towards reviving the Party in South Bihar, taking initiatives in most of the industrial centres of what is Jharkhand today. In November 1978, Mahendra Singh came in contact with the Bokaro Unit of the Party, and he soon became actively involved in organising the struggles of the rural poor and lower middle class in his own Block. Gradually, in the course of his activism, and with the help of the painstaking ideological attention paid by Comrade Vinod Mishra himself, he exchanged the deeply ingrained religious culture of his early years, for a revolutionary Marxist worldview.

The decade of the ’80s marked a period of new grassroots experiments in the history of the CPI(ML). In Bagodar, too, Comrade Mahendra Singh was the architect of a fresh social and political experiment of organising various sections of poor rural society in addition to the agrarian labourers. This effort bore results that remained stable – even today, not only agrarian labourers but also a considerable section of the rural lower middle class, especially minorities and even the poor from the Rajput community, continue to identify with the CPI(ML) movement.

Right from the beginning, Comrade Mahendra Singh was at the forefront of the new experiments of the Party. He played a leading role in the activities of the Deshbhaakt Janwadi Morcha which was a precursor of the Indian People’s Front (IPF) in 1981. When the IPF was formed in 1982, he was elected one of its National Secretaries.

Since he joined the CPI(ML) in 1978, he was arrested and jailed on trumped up charges several times. In 1985, he was arrested on false charges of murder, and condemned to life imprisonment. An unquenchable organiser, he soon turned the Giridih jail into an arena of struggle, organising fellow prisoners and launching a scathing expose of and an assault on the crimes of the Jail authorities. Eventually, this struggle drew the attention of the Supreme Court, which severely reprimanded the doings of the Jail Administration. Many of his fellow prisoners who participated in this struggle later became a source of valuable support in the movement in this region.

In 1988, the Ranchi High Court Bench dismissed the case and set him free, commenting that he was framed on false charges for his struggles against the oppression of weak people.

The decade of the ’80s also marked the beginning of the Party’s tactical decision of participation in parliamentary struggles. This was accompanied by the painstaking groundwork of building links with a range of anti-feudal, anti-imperialist forces, bringing many of these forces within the IPF fold, as well as drawing them closer to the basic structure of the Party, giving IPF a distinct political identity as a popular democratic platform. This was the work in which Comrade Mahendra Singh distinguished himself. The political profile that he earned in this phase laid the foundations for his stature in the days to come – the fact that in the new State of Jharkhand, despite being a lone MLA from the CPI(ML), he was often regarded as the undeclared leader of the entire Opposition, especially in moments of political crisis.

His resounding speeches were popular everywhere and he addressed mass meetings in innumerable places in nearly all the districts of Bihar. In 1981, he was fielded as a candidate in the Koderma Parliamentary constituency. At that time, work in this region was in its infancy; there were few contacts outside the Bagodar Block, and in the Koderma headquarters, there were few activists barring some former CPI cadres who had joined the Party barely two weeks before the elections. Despite these adverse circumstances, Mahendra Prasad Singh secured significant votes – doubtless a result of his personal popularity and tireless efforts.

In 1990, when he was elected from the Bagodar Assembly constituency, he became one of the first IPF MLAs. He was chosen as the leader of the CPI(ML) [formally IPF] legislative group in the Bihar Assembly – a role he played admirably for five years. From the very first day, this MLA from a newly emergent poor class, dazzled the Bihar Assembly with his remarkable confidence, enthusiasm and knowledge. He made a careful study of the parliamentary rule-book, using it intelligently in the interests of the Party and the people. In this, he was a model – which is why the bourgeois media in Jharkhand today is all praise for his knowledge of the parliamentary regulations.

In 1995, he once again won the Bagodar seat and in 2000, he was re-elected for a third term. In November 2002, Bihar was bifurcated to form Jharkhand. Mahendra Singh was the lone CPI(ML) MLA in the Jharkhand Assembly, and several Opposition parties including even CPI-CPI(M) had greater numbers; but his fearless role earned him the stature of the undisputed ‘real’ Opposition in the Jharkhand Assembly.

He was widely acknowledged as the bold and assertive parliamentary voice of the streets, leaving an impact on the entire politics of Jharkhand, and emerging as a shining example of how well a revolutionary MLA can use the Assembly in the interests of the proletariat and the masses, and can ruthlessly expose it too. Inside and outside the Jharkhand Assembly, his name was associated with exposes of every major scam and crime. No BJP Minister or Chief Minister could escape his sharp and pointed assaults. His well-researched and documented exposes of the bourgeois politicians – their feudal character, their land scams, their scams in the public welfare schemes – have become a model in the parliamentary history of Bihar and Jharkhand. His experiment with the parallel panchayat system in Giridih district was a unique one.

Outside the Assembly, too, he continued to challenge feudal and criminal forces. Every land struggle in Jharkhand looked upon him as its inspiration; he also played a significant role in labour struggles. At the time of his martyrdom, he was the President of the most militant coal workers’ Union in Jharkhand, the CMWU. He was also popular amongst the Steel workers in Tatanagar and especially Bokaro. He was ever active in defending the rights of Jharkhand’s dispossessed and marginalised tribals over the rich natural resources of the State. In 2000, he was jailed for several months in the course of the movement of the tribals and coal mine workers of Koel Karo against the Sterlite Mining Corporation and the Koel Karo dam.

He had emerged as a vocal representative of the nationality movement in Jharkhand, and no Jharkhandi force would term him to be an outsider. Recently, he popularly articulated the Party’s position on the domicile issue, successfully exposing and defeating the BJP’s attempt to divide Jharkhandi nationality on the basis of ‘locals’ and ‘outsiders’. He made consistent efforts to unite the state’s left-democratic forces, and played a crucial role in forming such fronts at significant junctures.

In many senses, he was the backbone of the Party in Jharkhand, and since the Banaras Party Congress in 1997, he remained a member of the Central Committee. Influenced by him, most of the left ranks from other parties in his district joined the CPI(ML). He conducted a consistent campaign against the anarchists. He played a pivotal role in the emergence of Giridih as the foremost Left stronghold in the last two and a half decades.

Whether it be the streets or the Assembly, the courts or the jails, or even the world of intellectuals, amongst whom his poetry and his writings in the Jharkhand papers had won him respect and support, the police and the saffron administration found him a serious challenge. Finding it impossible to dislodge him from the Assembly or erode his public prestige, they resorted to silence him by murder – a weapon they had increasingly begun to use against communist cadres in the State.

On January 16, a day after he had filed nominations to contest for a fourth term in the Assembly, hired assassins took his life during the election campaign. His murder has not only robbed the CPI(ML) of an incomparable leader, it has impoverished the entire democratic movement of Jharkhand. q