Baba Bujha Singh

Baba Bujha Singh was a veteran of the Ghadar movement who turned communist and, in his last years, became the best known elder of the Punjab Naxalite movement. The Tribune says he came from Chak Maidas village near Banga, and was 82 when he died. Tarsem Singh's Panjab University thesis and Jaspal Singh give his age as 80.

Jaspal Singh writes that in his twenties he went to Shanghai and then to Argentina, where he became a Ghadar Party leader, and that he later led a group of Ghadarites to Moscow to study and edited the Ghadar paper Kirti. The Tribune adds that he later joined the Congress in the mid-1930s and was active in the communist movement. The thesis calls him one of the red communists who were extremely active in Punjab.

Key moments

• After the 1967 Naxalbari uprising he returned to activism, urged dissidents in the CPI(M) to break with their leadership, and taught Marxist philosophy to young people (The Tribune). On 15 March 1968, at a meeting in Punjab, he proposed that the Punjab Students Union be dissolved so that its leaders could join the armed struggle (the thesis). The student leaders were unwilling at first and later joined the movement underground.
• 27 July 1970: unarmed, he was cycling to a village near Phillaur to teach a class when police picked him up near Nagar village. According to the writer Ajmer Sidhu, quoted by The Tribune, he was taken to Banga police station, tortured and killed, and his body was left on a canal bridge near Nai Majra village in Nawanshahr district.
• 28 July 1970: Jalandhar police announced that they had thwarted a plot to assassinate top political leaders. The story fell apart because the man killed the previous night was too old to fit it. Jaspal Singh writes that thousands surrounded the police station and forced the handover of his body, and that he was cremated in his village.
• The matter was raised in the Vidhan Sabha by the Communist leaders Satpal Dang and Dalip Singh Tapiala (The Tribune).
• October 1977: the Tarkunde Committee, set up to investigate Naxalite deaths declared to be encounters, examined eight cases, including his. It reported that each victim had been killed in a fake encounter, and that at least two had been tortured to death because their bodies carried no bullet wounds (the thesis). Jaspal Singh writes that no one has been punished.

What he is remembered for: he became the emblem of the Punjab Naxalite decade. The thesis lists him among the 83 Naxalites it counts as killed by the police in Punjab, and says the state government put him in the first category of top Naxalite leaders. Ajmer Sidhu wrote a book on his life, Bujha Singh: An Untold Story, and The Tribune marked the 50th anniversary of his death in 2020.