While president of the RSU, Rajkumar led a number of struggles in Visakhapatnam in particular and throughout the state in general. The struggle against the private local transport system in Visakhapatnam, under his leadership, resulted in the nationalisation of city buses. He was a powerful public speaker and addressed hundreds of meetings of students and others. All these activities made him a dangerous person in the eyes of the state. During the second half of 1980, Rajkumar chose to become a whole timer and began his underground life. There was no looking back.
In August 1981, the RSU organised an all-India seminar in Madras on the nationality question in India. Rajkumar wrote an introductory pamphlet as well as a paper to be presented at the seminar on behalf of the AP RSU. This seminar connected various student organisations of different nationality struggles as well as radical democratic movements. As a follow-up to the seminar, the Revolutionary Students’ Organisations Co-ordination Committee (RSOCC) was formed, and after four years of deliberations, the All India Revolutionary Students’ Federation (AIRSF) held its first conference in Hyderabad in 1985. Rajkumar was one of the main leaders who coordinated all these efforts.
For the next 25 years, Rajkumar worked in different areas from Karnataka, Tamilnadu, Kerala, Maharashtra, Gujarat, to Dandakaranya, giving theoretical, political, and organisational inputs to struggles. He guided party units and committees in all these states as well as the Southwestern Regional Bureau. He is known to have acquired fluency in at least six languages during this time.
Rajkumar was part of a collective decision-making body of the party, but his personal vision, expertise in several fields, and sharp insight into different developing themes clearly made their own distinctive contributions to the movement. He was a voracious reader and prolific writer. Given the nature of his clandestine activity he wrote under different pseudonyms, and often credited his writings to collective, but one could easily identify his style in numerous writings in Voice of the Vanguard, People’s March, People’s Truth, Maoist Information Bulletin, etc. His hand could be identified in various documents of the party also.
It is reported that Rajkumar began thinking of international activity about 15 years ago, demonstrating that he looked much further ahead. There is an unconfirmed report that he participated in an international conclave of Maoist parties held in Brazil a few years ago. It is also reported that he was instrumental in setting up the Co-ordination Committee of Maoist Parties in South Asia (CCOMPOSA) and addressed its meetings several times.
A couple of instances of his theoretical, political, and organisational guidance and coordination are worth mentioning:
When K Balagopal raised some fundamental questions on the relevance of Marxism as an instrument of social transformation, even as an efficient tool of analysis, in 1993, a number of revolutionary sympathisers felt disillusioned and a theoretical rebuttal was expected from the party. It was Rajkumar who wrote one critical essay in 1995 and another in 2001 answering all the philosophical questions of Balagopal. Despite his criticism on the questions of perspective, Rajkumar still paid rich tributes to Balagopal after the latter’s demise. His condolence statement stands as a model — respecting the significance of Balagopal’s contributions to people’s movements even while mentioning post-modernist tendencies in him.
Consistently exploring the importance of the nationality question in India, Rajkumar was instrumental in holding an international seminar on the question, under the auspices of the All India People’s Resistance Forum (AIPRF) in February 1996. With the participation of scholars like William Hinton, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Luis Jalandoni, Raymond Lotta, Jalil Andrabi, and Manoranjan Mohanty, this seminar heard more than 30 papers on various nationality movements in India and across the globe. The seminar led to the formation of the Committee for Co-ordination of Nationalities and Democratic Movements (CCNDM), an important milestone in the expansion of the revolutionary people’s movement in the country.
In 2002, the government of Andhra Pradesh accepted the proposal of some well-meaning intellectuals and the Committee of Concerned Citizens (CCC) to hold talks with the then CPI (ML) Peoples War to bring about peace. It was Rajkumar who guided the efforts of peace negotiations on the part of the revolutionary party, and he wrote a number of statements and gave interviews to newspapers clarifying the party’s position. The talks could not go ahead at that time, except a preliminary round between the emissaries proposed by the party and the government representatives.
Rajkumar was also part of the collective that guided Mumbai Resistance 2004, an event organised parallel to the World Social Forum, which attracted quite a few revolutionary organisations from various countries towards the people’s movements in India under the leadership of the CPI (ML) Peoples War.
Again in 2004, in Andhra Pradesh the Congress party made an election promise to hold talks with the revolutionary parties and came to power. This time around the talks moved a little forward till the first round of negotiations between the representatives of the CPI (Maoist) and the CPI (ML) Janasakthi on one hand and the representatives of the government on the other. Beginning in May 2004, when the Congress acquired power, till January 2005, when the party withdrew from the process after gross violations of the ceasefire agreement and a spate of encounters on the part of the government, it was again Rajkumar who guided and prepared a lot of statements and documents for the talks. Thus, the party was so well prepared for the talks that it had the agenda ready and background papers prepared on the three issues that were discussed, and it circulated a number of documents and met with different sections of people to share the party’s point of view, whereas the government, with its mammoth machinery and all resources at its disposal, could not bring itself to producing a single sheet of information throughout, the government representative not doing any homework.
Beginning in 2007, when the Prime Minister described the Maoist movement as the biggest internal threat, Rajkumar consistently exposed the real intentions of the mining mafia behind the onslaught, including Operation Green Hunt. Through writings and interviews in several media, he elaborated the party’s positions on various issues including the peace process. Indeed, a number of statements given by him — an 18-page interview along with an audio sent to the press in October 2009, his 12,262-word interview given to the Hindu in April 2010, and his letter of May 31, 2010 in response to Home Minister P Chidambaram’s letter of May 10 to Swami Agnivesh — are crystal-clear expositions of what the CPI (Maoist) is thinking and doing right now.
Azad’s killing is an integral part of the Operation Green Hunt: by killing him the government wanted to kill the voice of resistance. The Operation Green Hunt is a mission of the Indian ruling classes to surrender rich resources of the Indian people to MNCs and their Indian junior partners. The ruling classes eliminated Azad since his was a powerful expression of those obstructing the outright plunder of the people’s natural resources.
N Venugopal is Editor of Veekshanam, a Telugu monthly journal of political economy and society. See, also, Tusha Mittal, “The Third Letter: The Maoist and the Undelivered Missive: Azad’s Death Is No Man’s Peace” (Tehelka Magazine, 7.28, 17 July 2010). Posted by (Bulatlat.com)
