A Report from Com. Himadri Sen’s Memorial Meeting
By Debabrata Chakrabarty. This
article was written on the occasion of the meeting held in memory of
Comrade Himadri Sen, West Bengal State Secretary, CPI (Maoist). The
meeting was held at the Bharat Sabha Hall, Kolkata, on August 29 2016.
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What is their lot in life? Harassed by
the police, watched by spies, under constant financial strain, facing
total government apathy, anxiety, and helplessness. Scouring through
every report of every police encounter, dreading the worst. And even
when the names are those of others, getting little consolation – after
all, those names, relief notwithstanding, are also loved by the ties of
political ideology – an ideology of utter selflessness and sacrifice in
the quest for radically changing society.
Comrade Himadri Sen (Somen)’s wife
Shikha spoke with strength during the recent meeting commemorating his
life, at the Bharat Sabha Hall in Kolkata. Suppressing tears, she spoke
of the revolutionary spirit that lay at the core of this life-long
communist. She spoke of his struggle for others, of the immense respect
that even his political opponents held for him, of the quiet way that
this man, who spoke only sparsely, loved her, of the letters he wrote
from jail, of the relentless fight in the courts, dragged from jail to
jail, and the cancer that tore into him finally.
Dressed in a worn saree, she spoke about
him with pride. Bharat Sabha Hall, filled to the edges, listened with
rapt attention as she described the unconditional love that Comrade
Somen and his family had for the toiling masses. In the audience were
workers of the civil rights movements, farmers who had come from as far
as Murshidabad and 24 Parganas to pay their respect to Comrade Somen,
and youth from various students movements. They listened, coming to know
Comrade Somen – their beloved Bachchu-da – through the eyes of Shikha.
On the dias were several senior political figures – Gour Chakraborty,
the one-time spokesperson of the CPI (Maoist), who had just been
released after seven years behind bars; Narayan Sanyal, the octogenarian
Politburo member of the CPI (Maoist) (on the charge of meeting whom, we
might recall, Dr. Binayak Sen had been imprisoned for over two years),
Santosh Rana, and others.
Somen is unknown to most in our society.
He was not a celebrity, a famous intellectual, a much-listened-to
pundit, or a man who, having been applauded by the fashionable media,
was now engaged in producing reams of rubbish. There were no interviews
of him in circulation, and he had not settled into the defeated middle
class life, ensconced in government housing, that is the fate of some
radicals. An ordinary man who had led an extraordinary life – standing
beside the toiling masses, from Nandigram to Lalgarh, from one
underground shelter to another, until the State one day threw him in
jail – a life of uncompromising struggle – that is what the audience
heard from Shikha.
Perhaps one day someone will write a
history of this extraordinary man; perhaps a future generation will come
to know about him. But today, at Comrade Himadri Sen’s Memorial
meeting, we understood why the wife of a revolutionary holds her head
high, and why, in the face of such repression, she lives with such
dignity.
Many of us have not seen Comrade Himadri
Sen, but today we saw Shikha, the revolutionary’s wife. May Shikha live
as an eternal flame.
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