Charu Majumdar

Charu Majumdar was a communist organiser from north Bengal and the main ideologue of the Naxalbari uprising of 1967. The Week reports that he was born in 1918 into a landowning family and began as an activist of the Communist Party of India, working during the 1943 Bengal famine and the 1946 Tebhaga movement.

Between January 1965 and April 1967 he wrote eight articles, later published as the Historic Eight Documents. According to Tarsem Singh's 2020 Panjab University thesis, they argued that the Indian revolution had to be an armed one on the Chinese model, Mao's people's war. In 1967 he urged peasants to seize land by force, the CPI(M) expelled him, and the Naxalbari uprising broke out the same year (The Week).

Key moments

• 22 April 1969: the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries founds the CPI(ML), with Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal as its leaders. He went underground that year.
• Mid-1969: the CPI(ML) begins targeted killings of so-called class enemies, the policy Majumdar had formulated (the thesis).
• 16 July 1972: he is arrested at a hideout in Entally, Calcutta, and held in the Lal Bazaar lock-up.
• 28 July 1972: his family is told that he has died, twelve days after his arrest. His daughter believes he was denied life-saving medication. The thesis lists his death among those of prisoners tortured to death in custody.

The line of annihilation. Majumdar is blamed for a theory calling for the killing of "class enemies". His son Abhijit told The Week that this is why people remember his father, and that "class enemies" meant those who harmed the poor, so his father could not have ordered the killing of teachers or policemen. A former police chief told the magazine that Majumdar denied proposing it. In Punjab, the thesis says, the targets were landlords first, then moneylenders, police informers and policemen.

In Punjab. Tarsem Singh writes that the radical section of the CPI(M) in Punjab organised under Majumdar's ideology. The Punjab Naxalites began in April 1968, when their first wall posters went up, and the first land seizure was at Samaon in Bathinda district on 30 November 1968. Harbhajan Singh Sohi's group broke away in 1969, calling the annihilation line left adventurism. The thesis lists 83 Naxalites killed by the police in Punjab, among them Baba Bujha Singh.

What he is remembered for: supporters remember the founder of the CPI(ML) who died in custody. Critics remember the annihilation line. The Panjab University thesis calls his tactical line a distortion of Marxist, Leninist and Maoist principle that damaged the image of the peasant upsurge, but says that is no reason to condemn the whole movement.