Harbhajan Singh Sohi

Harbhajan Singh Sohi was a leader of the Naxalite movement in Punjab. He began in Charu Mazumdar's CPI(ML) and left it in 1969 to form the Ferozepur-Bathinda Committee, which became the Punjab Communist Revolutionary Committee (PCRC), of which he was secretary (marxists.org). A Tribune obituary of another Naxalite, Megh Raj, calls him a "renowned Naxalite leader" and places him in the Bhootwara discussion group at Punjabi University in the mid-1960s.

He rejected what his admirers call the left adventurist line of annihilating class enemies, and followed the mass line of T. Nagi Reddy of Andhra Pradesh instead (Frontier).

• Early 1970s: the PCRC played a leading part in the Punjab Students Union and the Naujawan Bharat Sabha (marxists.org; Frontier).
• June 1976: the PCRC merged into the Unity Centre of Communist Revolutionaries of India (Marxist-Leninist), after Nagi Reddy's death. Sohi joined its Central Committee.
• 1979: he led the minority that rejected the "theory of three worlds" and formed a separate UCCRI(ML); the group split again in 1982 and in 1988 joined others to form the Centre of Communist Revolutionaries of India. He later led its successor, the CPRCI(ML), as secretary for 14 years (Countercurrents).
• His writings include a 1973 text on elections, a 1980 defence of Mao Tse Tung Thought and a 1990 document on Kashmir.
• Mid-June 2009: he died of a heart attack.

His place in this record is as part of the Left that opposed Khalistani politics. A tribute in Frontier says he opposed pro-Khalistani politics and Sikh religious fundamentalism, supported Kashmir's right to self-determination, and preferred an "active political campaign" to either boycotting or joining elections. The same tribute and the one in Countercurrents were written by Harsh Thakor, who is sympathetic to Sohi's current. Thakor also lists what he sees as Sohi's weaknesses: too little attention to agrarian revolution and the caste question.

He is remembered mainly inside the Indian Left, by admirers such as Thakor, as an organiser and theorist of the mass line in Punjab.