CPI Maoist Politburo leader Comrade Prashanth Bose (Kishan da) departs who represented the last of the first-generation Naxalite cadres who joined the movement when it broke out in 1967 and sacrificed the very last drop of their blood for the sake of liberation of the people
Comrade Prashant Bose alias Kishan Da, a legendary communist leader, member of the CPI (Maoist) Central Committee Polit Bureau, who fought relentlessly till his last breath for the liberation of oppressed communities for decades and for the establishment of a working-class state, expired on April 3, 2026 while in jail custody in Ranchi, Jharkhand. He was under treatment at RIMS Hospital, Ranchi for respiratory problems. and perished while getting it. His death was not a natural one but a custodial murder.
Bose represented the last of the first-generation Naxalite cadres who joined the movement when it broke out in 1967 and continued to play a leading role in evolving the Naxalite movement in its new shape. He has been a member of the politburo, central committee and central military commission of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), better known as the CPI(Maoist), since its formation in 2004.
Bose, who was lodged in Seraikela Jail, complained of severe breathing difficulties early Friday morning. Around 6 a.m., he was rushed under tight security to the RIMS, where a team of doctors began treatment. However, his condition failed to improve, and he was declared dead at around 10 a.m. on Friday.
Bose was arrested in Jharkhand on the morning of Friday, November 12,2021 after eluding the police and special forces for 43 years. Bose was arrested along with his wife, Sheela Marandi, alias Shobha Di, who is the first woman to be a member of the CPI(Maoist) central committee. She has been out of jail on bail since February, 2016.They were arrested from a car along with three other youths while returning from Parasnath. They were caught before crossing the toll .
Bose was also one of the fabricated named in the Pune police’s chargesheet in the Elgar Parishad case. The police had claimed that a document they had allegedly obtained from fellow accused Rona Wilson had mentioned Bose by name in connection with a “conspiracy to kill the Prime Minister”. He is one of the five accused mentioned in the chargesheet still absconding custody, along with Maoist leaders Dipak, alias Milind Teltumbade; Prakash, alias Rituparn Goswami; comrade Deepu and comrade Manglu.
Trademark features of Comrade Kishan Da
Bose stood amongst the last leaders in the party’s hierarchy who had first-hand experience of rebuilding or resurrecting the party’s organisation from setbacks or adversity; in several crucial junctures over the past five decades.
As an intellectual he used his intelligence not for his own benefits, but establishing the new democratic revolution in this country. He forfeited a lucrative life, inhabiting the dense wilderness, living among the people suffering from extreme poverty.
Tenacity, intelligence and creativity characterised his qualities. His political journey symbolised an unwavering battle against any kind of revisionism and even when facing the darkest adversity, he resurrected the party and mass movements to remain afloat. His leadership infused discipline in the party ranks and enabled the Maoist Communist Centre to wage to sow the seeds for building red army and waging amongst the most heroic armed actions ever witnessed in history of Indian revolutionary movement. He played a pivotal role in nurturing the collective discipline and preserving the central core of the party. Kishan Da’s leadership was instrumental in intensifying not only the striking capacity of the masses but striking the balance between armed actions and mass movements, like those led by the Krantikari Kisan Commiteees. Most tenaciously he withstood the revisionist winds to hit them at their hardest point.
Comrade Prashanth Bose's writings and tactics that he wrote concerning the oppression and looting of rulers have played a pivotal part in guiding countless revolutionaries. At the age of over seventy years, even though plagued by illness between the walls of the prison, the flame of revolution in his heart has never evaporated, but flashed to the very last.
Such leaders who sacrificed the very last drop of their blood for the sake of liberation of the people and for the liberation of the country are rarely witnessed in history.
Political Life Sketch of Kishan Da.
Prashanth Bose, who was born in a middle-class family in West Bengal, was drawn to the people's movements inspired by the then-Naxalbari struggle.
Having origins from the Bijoygarh area of South Kolkata’s Jadavpur neighbourhood, Bose was based in the Saranda forest for several years. He was also known by the aliases of Nirbhay Mukherjee, Kajol and Mahesh.
Bose was first arrested in 1974 and came out of jail in 1978. He has remained out of reach of the police forces of West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar, Odisha and Chhattisgarh ever since..
Bose was a young trade union activist in Kolkata in 1967 when the first spark of the Naxalite movement – calling for an armed overthrow of the Indian state by means of a ‘protracted people’s war’ based on an agrarian revolution bloomed in Bengal and spread to other parts of the country.
Bose was working closely with expelled CPI(Marxist) leader Kanai (also spelt Kanhai) Chatterjee at the time. Chatterjee was one of the leaders of the Dakshin Desh magazine group which had also sent its representatives to the umbrella outfit, the All-India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR), which was formed in 1968 to guide the movement.
In Kolkata, under Chatterjee’s guidance, Bose was also involved in the famous trade union movement at the Usha factory in Southern Kolkata in 1967-68.
Later, in 1969, two separate organisations were born out of the AICCCR: the Charu Majumdar-led CPI(Marxist-Leninist) in April and the MCC in October. Bose was one of the founding members of the Kanai Chatterjee-Amulya Sen-led MCC.
From 1967-70, Bose was involved in developing the MCC’s organisation in the South 24-Parganas district, the Howrah-Hooghly-Midnapore belt and the Bardhaman-Birbhum area. He had narrowly escaped raids by the police and paramilitary forces several times, his former comrades in the MCC said.
In 1970, concentrating on building Bihar as a strategic zone, the MCC sent Bose to South Bihar to build the party’s organisation in the Giridih–Hazaribagh–Ranchi–Bokaro–Santhal Parganas–Dhanbad belt. He has been based in that area since then, even though he used to frequent Bengal to meet top MCC leaders like Chatterjee and Sen.
Bose was arrested in 1974. It was during his five-year stay behind bars that one of his jaws was allegedly broken in torture. His broken right jaw remained one of his most prominent physical identifiers.
After moving out of jail in 1978, he re-joined the Maoist Communist Centre and went on to become one of its most active and impactful leaders, along with Sushil Roy, especially after the death of Kanai Chatterjee in 1982. During this period, he also played a pivotal role in spreading the MCC organisation using public sentiment for the Jharkhand movement (often also called the ‘Lalkhand movement’).His leadership played major role in fortifying the Maoist Communist Centre to give amortal blow to the notorious upper caste landlord Sensa, with the Krantikari Kisna Samiti smashing their headquarters .He nurtured rebirth of the party with creation of open mass fronts amongst students, youth , women and on cultural Level like the Nari Muti Sangh and the Krantikari Budhijivi Sangh.Comrade Kishan Da’s expertise engineered the spread of the MCC network to region sof Dhanabad, Giridh, and Hazaribagh districts of Jharkhand. An important characteristic of the movement was that party committees at all levels were manly represented by son of the soil. Inspite of facing grave repression the Maoist Communist Centre extended it’s domain of struggle to other areas like Ranchi,inghbum and Garwah.
Bose took the reins to shoulder the responsibility as the general secretary of the MCC in 1996 after Sushil Roy stepped down due to his failing health. He was leading the organisation in 2002 when several batches of Maoists from Nepal were given training in guerrilla warfare by the MCC in the forests of Bihar. Bose had also played a significant role in forging alliances with the militant groups operating in India’s Northeastern states.
In late 1998 Comrade Bose or Kishen da played a pivotal role in imitating the self-criticism of the mutual intercine or fratricidal killings or clashes between the Maoist Communist Centre with the erstwhile Party Unity and Peoples War groups, which had a successful culmination in 2003-04.It was major precursor to the formation of the CPI(Maoist) .His ideological mastery, political acumen and composure came to the fore in resolving the conflict.
Representative image of CPI (Maoist) Cadres. Photo: PTI.
In 2003, the MCC merged with a small organisation, the Revolutionary Communist Party of India (Maoist) and was rechristened as the Maoist Communist Centre of India (MCCI).
Bose was still serving as the general secretary of the MCCI when the organisation merged with the CPI(ML)(PW) in 2004 to form the CPI(Maoist). 2004 September 21 marked a milestone in the history of Indian Revolution. The role played by Prashanth Bose in fusing together the separate revolutionary trends (People's War and MCC) and forming the CPI (Maoist) party was pivotal. It orchestrated a broader united event, building a strong red army, building liberation areas in different parts of the country, to eradicate imperialism and feudal forces.
Bose represented the last of the first-generation Naxalite cadres who joined the movement when it broke out in 1967 and continued to play a leading role in evolving the Naxalite movement in its new shape. He has been a member of the politburo, central committee and central military commission of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), better known as the CPI(Maoist), since its formation in 2004.
Bose also served as the secretary of the clandestine outfit’s Eastern Regional Bureau (ERB) which looked after the party’s work in Jharkhand, West Bengal, Bihar, parts of Chhattisgarh and Uttar Pradesh and the Northeastern states.
Marandi, known as the founder of the Nari Mukti Sangh, a women’s organisation purportedly linked to the CPI(Maoist), was arrested in 2006 from Odisha and released on bail in February, 2016 after being lodged in various jails in Odisha and Jharkhand. Subsequently, she once again flew under the police’s radar.
Even though the CPI (Maoist), since 2013, decided to relieve ageing leaders of their crucial responsibilities, – as a result of which the party’s general secretary Mupalla Laxmana Rao, alias Ganapathy, stepped down in 2018 – Bose had not been relieved of his charges since the party could not find a suitable replacement to lead the movement in Eastern India.
Due to his deteriorating health, Kishan Da did not act at the forefront of the party’s armed operations for many years now but played a formative role amongst the party’s top ideologues and theoreticians. Moreover, among the party’s top leadership, his experience and guidance was invaluable.
At the time of the CPI(Maoist)’s formation, there were several members in the central committee who had joined the Naxalite movement during its first wave in the late 1960s: Bose, Sushil Roy, Anukul Chandra Naskar and Purnendu Sekhar Mukherjee from the Maoist Communist Centre of India (MCC) background and Nayaran Sanyal and Amitabha Bagchi from the CPI (Marxist-Leninist) Party Unity background. All of them were originally from Kolkata but later had their bases outside West Bengal. Of them, Roy, Sanyal and Mukherjee have died; Bagchi is in jail and Naskar, in his late 70s, has become inactive after being released from jail a few years ago.
Bose ralied the party forces to infuse a Bolshevik spirit within the newly formed party.
I recollect his interview in 207 in journal ”Peoples March’ where he most boldly and articulately summed up the positive gains and victories and the drawbacks and hurdles faced. Without any pretensions he made a criticism of the infection of revisionism and individualism plaguing the ranks of the party.
In 2011-12, when the CPI(Maoist) was placed with its backs to the wall after facing a series of gruesome setbacks, including the arrest of senior leaders and seizure of arms and ammunition, the party allotted Bose with the task of spearheading g the ideological-political battle within the party to “avert deviations.” or combat revisionism.
In this context, in a secret letter addressed to the party’s leaders and members at all levels, Bose had written that the party did not rule out ‘ideological–political deviations’ or revisionist or rightist inclination engineered among a section of imprisoned leaders and cadres in the time of a setback. He had suggested that the party needed to rectify errors noting ‘deal with them patiently in a manner that is ideologically and politically convincing’.
His letter had also stressed on the need to learn from past experiences and conduct sel-criticism or rectification in turning ‘jails into political schools and centres of class struggle’ to infuse into prisoners the party’s ideology and help resurrect the movement, just as it had happened between 1969 and 1977.
He stood amongst the last leaders in the party’s hierarchy who had first-hand experience of rebuilding or resurrecting the party’s organisation from setbacks or adversity ; in several crucial junctures over the past five decades.
Legacy
In this situation, the minimum democratic right to comrade Kishan's bail application and treatment was dismissed repeatedly. On one hand the state continues to end the indigenous and Maoist leadership in the name of fascist operation Kagar by the applying of armed forces. On the other hand, prisoned comrades are being snatched and pushed to their death.
All revolutionary democrats should demand immediate release of all political prisoners. Along with they demand proper treatment of political prisoners and protection of democratic rights. Government and state must take responsibility for the death of every political prisoner including Stan Swami, Pandu Naro, GN Saibaba including Prashant Bose. Bose’s custodial death should inspire a movement for all progressive, democratic, leftist organizations and individuals to intensify the mass movement demanding release of all political prisoners and protecting democratic rights.
Though he is no longer with us physically, his soul still lives or shimmers with his legacy standing lice beacon to inspire the working class of this country. The real tribute we give to him is to make his dreams come true for a society without oppression.
Harsh Thakor is a freelance journalist Thanks information from article by Snigdendhu Bhattacharya in The Wire of 2021 and Amit Bhattacharya book ‘Storming the Gates of Heaven.’
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