Maoist ideologue Narayan Sanyal passes away in Kolkata | Know more about him

Maoist ideologue Narayan Sanyal breathed his last on late Monday night in Kolkata. He was battling with cancer.

Sanyal was arrested on January 3, 2006, by Raipur police over various charges including sedition. He was released in 2014 after the imprisonment of nearly a decade. He had been kept in several jails related to different cases, but later got bail in a few of them.

He was considered as a top Maoist think-tank and leader of the Communist movement in Bengal.

Sanyal had joined Communist Party of India – Marxist-Leninist (CPI-ML) in the ‘60s and left his job from a Kolkata-based bank to join the Charu Majumdar-Kanu Sanyal led movement.

After a split in CPI-ML in the ‘70s, when Bihar’s leader Satyanarain Singh turned out as rebel against the ML leadership, Sanyal was sent to Bihar to take his charge. Later, he was arrested and sent to Kolkata.

Sanyal remained in jail till Left Front took over the reign of the state and granted a general amnesty to many of the leaders associated with the ML movement in the state. After coming out from prison, Sanyal went to Bihar four-decade back and started working with CPI-ML – Party Unity (PU), which was a union of ML leaders in Bihar and Bengal.

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Sanyal put mammoth effort to strengthen the party and worked hard in the villages of Bihar at the grassroot level. He emerged with People’s War Group (PWG) to form the CPI-Maoist. He was arrested a decade back in Chhattisgarh and kept in various jails of central India.

A senior comrade and his colleague termed him ‘Stalin’, and said: “Known for his mental agility and thick moustache, we often used to refer him as ‘Stalin.”

A few comrades in Kolkata thronged to meet him after nearly half a century later, when he was released from jail two years back.