People's Democracy

An Exceptional Revolutionary

Comrade Anil Biswas seen addressing a massive rally at Brigade Parade grounds, Kolkata

B Prasant

STATE secretary of the Bengal unit of the CPI(M), and a Polit Bureau member of the Party, Comrade Anil Biswas (62) passed away at 5:25 in the afternoon of March 26, 2006.

Admitted to a south Kolkata medical institution during the evening of March 18 with a massive cerebral haemorrhage, Anil Biswas was immediately operated upon to remove the blood clot from his brain.  He was then put on a life-support system on which he remained, except for a brief period, until his demise.

Comrade Anil Biswas belonged to the generation of communists who came forward to raise high the Red Flag at a time of turbulence and crisis, during the 1960s.  In the front line of the Left students’ movement from 1962, Anil Biswas joined the CPI(M) in 1965, became a whole-timer four years later, and started to work as a journalist of the daily Ganashakti, the organ of the Bengal state committee of the CPI(M).

Born on March 1, 1944 at the Danyermath village at Karimpur in Nadia in a family of middle peasants, of Asutosh and Prafullakumari, Anil Biswas came in touch with the Left students’ movement while a student at the Karimpur Jagannath High School. The political contact with the Communist Party occured when he volunteered to work for the relief and assistance of cholera victims at Ranaghat.  His introduction to the Communist Party in the early 1960s when he was a graduate student in the Krishnagar Government College, reading honours in political science, was through Bengal Provincial Students’ Federation (BPSF) leadership, especially the late Comrade Dinesh Majumdar. Anil Biswas ran for the BPSF in the election to the students’ union of the Krishnagar College and had three successive victories.

The arrest of a large number of well-known communist leaders during the Sino-Indian border imbroglio deeply affected the young Comrade Anil and he soon enough joined the Communist Party while a student at the Calcutta University, reading his MA in political science.  The year was 1965.

A resident at Kolkata’s S C Mullick Square students’ hostel, an active centre of communist initiatives, Anil Biswas took a very active part in the students’ politics of the day and he was elected to the central executive council of the students’ union of the Calcutta University.

During the Sino-Indian border war Anil Biswas was sent to jail for 11 months. He took his first two papers of his MA examination while in prison and could complete the examination after serving his sentence.

On coming out of jail, Comrade Anil Biswas started to live in the Party Commune in the company of such communist leaders as Ganesh Ghosh and Samar Mukherjee.  He acted as a courier for Party documents and letters.

By this time – this was the late 1960s – Anil Biswas had started to write for the Chhatra-shakti periodical, and his forte was the political essay, something that he developed further in the subsequent years and decades.  When the organ of the BPSF, Chhatra Sangram was published, he was the natural choice as its founder-editor.

It was around this publication that the important and vital struggle started to grow over the issue of first right deviation, and then left adventurism in the student movement.  In these turbulent times, Comrade Anil Biswas functioned as the vice-president of the BPSF and in this capacity delved deep into the task of building up the organisational set up.

A Left student activist with a penchant for long hours of study, that he carried on during his subsequent years with the CPI(M), Anil Biswas taught briefly at the St Barnabas School at Kidderpore in Kolkata.  He started to live in small, congested flats, first at Deb lane, then at Ananda Palit Road, and later at Entally.

Joining the Party as a wholetimer in 1969, Comrade Anil Biswas started as a communist journalist under the leadership and guidance of the late Comrade Saroj Mukherjee. He assisted Comrade Muzaffar Ahmad in writing up Party documents.  Comrade Anil Biswas was deeply involved with Party tasks of the state centre when Comrade Promode Dasgupta was the secretary of the Bengal unit of the CPI(M).

As the news editor of Ganashakti in 1972, Anil Biswas would address Party classes and Party general body meetings.  He was put in charge of the Tathya Barta publication of the Party that was published during the Emergency years.  In 1976, he married Gita Biswas.

With Comrade Saroj Mukherjee becoming the secretary of the Bengal unit of the CPI(M) in 1982, and later also the Bengal Left Front chairman, Anil Biswas rose to take greater responsibilities of Ganashakti, becoming its editor in 1983. Comrade Saroj Mukherjee became the chief editor. He remained editor until 1998.

A member of the state committee of the CPI(M) in 1978, Comrade Anil Biswas became a member of the state secretariat in 1982.  A central committee member of the CPI(M) from 1985, he became the secretary of the Bengal unit of the CPI(M) when the late Comrade Sailen Dasgupta stepped aside on grounds of ill health. 

Comrade Anil Biswas became a member of the Polit Bureau of the CPI(M) in the same year.  He also started to edit the theoretical organ of the Bengal unit of the CPI(M), Marxbadi Path.  He led the Society for the Democratisation of Education, and was a member of the senate of the Calcutta University for three successive terms.

One of his many achievements was the role he played in the publication of the complete history of the Communist Party as per the resolution of the 17th Party congress.  He was a member of the History Commission of the CPI(M).  He also undertook a drive to bring together and publish communist documents. 

He wrote more than 20 books on different aspects of politics, political philosophy, and ideology.  As a leader of the CPI(M), he visited such countries as the former Soviet Union, China, Democratic Korea, Cyprus, Bangladesh, Japan, Great Britain, and the United States.

A man of weak constitution from his childhood days, Anil Biswas could put in an enormous amount of work every day.  Everybody who would work with him could not but notice his sharp intelligence, his grasp of the basics, his organisational skill, his soft and gentle behaviour, and his sparkling witticisms.

A communist who remained ever engaged in the political-ideological struggle to strengthen the Party and to ward off deviations of the right as well as the left, Comrade Anil Biswas was steadfast in the application of the tenets of Marxism-Leninism in the reality of the situation.  He would never under any circumstances compromise in the realm of politics and ideology. 

Ideological struggle indeed found the highest priority in his thoughts and actions.  He was deeply involved in the rectification campaign of the CPI(M).  A firm internationalist, Comrade Anil Biswas was known for his great ability to dissect, analyse, and weigh national and regional political developments.  He was an inveterate opponent of imperialism.

Comrade Anil Biswas has written, literally hundreds of long and valuable essays on matters political, ideological, and organisational, in the publications of the Party and of the mass organisations.  A master of the simple language and of the correct turn of the phrase, in Bengali and English, Comrade Anil Biswas’s writings were popular amongst the reading public as such.  His polemical work exposing the ‘Maoists’ shall continue to have lasting political-ideological value.  Comrade Anil Biswas who was keen to publish as reprints classics of Marxism-Leninism was in charge of the National Book Agency for a very long time.

The anti-Left politics in Bengal took a turn for the worst by the time Comrade Anil Biswas became the secretary.  He led from the front the battle against the Congress, the Trinamul Congress, and the BJP.  The successive elections, the 2001 Assembly polls, the 2003 Panchayat polls, the 2004 Lok Sabha polls, and the 2005 municipality polls saw the CPI(M) and the Left Front win great accolades in terms of electoral successes. 

Although falling ill occasionally from 2004, Comrade Anil Biswas slackened not one bit his pace or volume of work.  He would speak at several Party meetings every day and across the state, explaining before the Party workers, the principal political content of the assembly elections.  He brooked little about his health condition and worked relentlessly. A firm believer in the principle of collective leadership, Comrade Anil Biswas spoke about and deeply believed in the tenet that a Communist leaves behind his ideology only.