Kolkata: Veteran Naxalite leader Azizul Haque, also a writer, columnist, and a prominent Leftist thinker, died at a private hospital in Kolkata on Monday afternoon. He was 85. Haque, who was jailed for 18 years during the Seventies and Eighties, was suffering from multiple age-related ailments, including an infection in his blood, and was on ventilation.Haque was born in 1942 in a zamindar family in Uluberia. He came in contact with communist leader Biswanath Mukhopdhyay as a student and became a member of the undivided Communist Party at 17. In 1959, he joined the food movement and was injured during an agitation, Haque was a prominent CPI-ML leader at the height of the Naxalite movement. He was jailed on multiple charges and spent nearly two decades behind bars. After his release in 1977, he rejoined the movement and had formed a ‘revolutionary govt’ in some districts of south Bengal and Bihar. He was jailed again in 1982, and was released in 1989 after it was revealed that he was allegedly tortured in jail, leading to crippling injuries.Haque was a student of Calcutta University. Though he stayed away from active politics subsequently, he continued to write on politics. He founded the ‘Bhasha Shahid Smarak Commitee’ that campaigned for Bengali language and the rights of people. His book ‘Karagare 18 Bachhar’ narrates his horrific experiences in jail, being physically abused, and watching his party colleagues being brutally tortured or dying in custody. His book and his subsequent campaign for the release of political prisoners was an important phase of Bengal politics in the Eighties.Despite being frail and fighting multiple ailments, Haque remained uncompromising in his stance against capitalism and held on to his radical Leftist belief. During the Singur agitation, Haque sided with the CPM govt and said he agreed with then CM Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s opinion that a farmer’s son need not be a farmer. If farmers stuck to agriculture, they will lose out in the long run, he wrote in a vernacular daily. CM Mamata Banerjee expressed her condolences on X. “I express my condolences at the demise of veteran leader Azizul Haque. He was a fighting leader who never bowed to anyone in his long political career. I convey my empathy to his family and associates,” she wrote.
