The Forgotten Life Sentence of Comrade Ramchandra Singh, a Prisoner of Memories. By S. Anand
Salaam, comrade. RIP
Ramchandra Singh of Bangaramau village, Unnao district, Uttar Pradesh, silently passed away at 2 am on 2 March. It was a brain haemorrhage that took him. Anonymous that he was, there was no hue and cry about his passing. No social media obituaries celebrating his life. His is not a name you will find on Google. Needless to say, there weren’t any notices of his death in the corporate-controlled media, nor was there so much as a mention of his name in the alternative media — which too comes to us via the seemingly guileless charms of protean capital that peddles the belief that social media is the last hope for democracy and dissent.
Ramchandra Singh of Bangaramau village, Unnao district, Uttar Pradesh, silently passed away at 2 am on 2 March. It was a brain haemorrhage that took him. Anonymous that he was, there was no hue and cry about his passing. No social media obituaries celebrating his life. His is not a name you will find on Google. Needless to say, there weren’t any notices of his death in the corporate-controlled media, nor was there so much as a mention of his name in the alternative media — which too comes to us via the seemingly guileless charms of protean capital that peddles the belief that social media is the last hope for democracy and dissent.
One wonders, if a
death goes unnoticed, was the life which preceded it worth the effort? Do the
anonymous travails of entire lives spent dedicated to egalitarian values amount
to anything at all? And yet, Ramchandra Singh lived a full life, a
revolutionary life no less, with complete fidelity to his ideals, struggling
and suffering without decoration. Had his autobiographical manuscript of 13
years spent in prison not come my way, I too wouldn’t have had the fortune of
knowing him, spending time with him, writing this piece about him…
Inspired by the ideals
of communism and the cry for an end to feudal oppression, Singh became a
‘party bachcha’, a party boy, when he was a 14-year-old student in
the eighth grade. This was around 1960–61. He immediately became an active
member of CPI(M) and found himself on the party’s district committee. The
Naxalbari uprising — India’s 1968 — broke loose in 1967. Singh inevitably found
himself answering Charu Mazumdar’s call in his campaign for the ‘annihilation
of class enemy’, a movement that drew inspiration from the Chinese Cultural
Revolution.
In 1970, he
participated in a 12-man attack on an oppressor landlord who terrorised
peasants under his thrall. The landlord, from village Bakhaura some 15
kilometres from Bangarmau was annihilated
to use the term
Ramchandra Singh preferred. But just as easily, most members of the squad were
nabbed and put behind bars. Ramchandra Singh was one of them: he was awarded a
life sentence. From 1970 to 1983 he spent his 13 year imprisonment across five
jails in Uttar Pradesh.
In 2012, Madhu Singh,
a professor at the English department of Lucknow University chanced upon a
prison diary, Thehre Hue Terah Saal (1970–83), at Dastavez
Prakashan, a treasure house of books old and new. The man who ran Dastavez
Prakashan, Prashant Kumar, had founded and edited a short-lived little magazine
called Samkaleen Dastavez (Contemporary Dossier) in Lucknow.
In May 1991, he had dedicated an entire issue of the magazine to this diary and
published it under the title Thehre Hue Terah Saal.
This was
Ramchandra Singh’s diary, smuggled out of prison a few loose pages at a time.
It had first seen the light of day way back in 1984 when another ‘comrade
type’, Anand Swaroop Verma, had serialised it in Rashtriya Sahara’s
Lucknow edition. Verma — who in 1977 had translated Mary
Tyler’s My Years in an Indian Prison into Hindi (Bharatiya
Jailon Mein Paanch Saal) — continues to dream of the revolution and runs a
little magazine called Samkaleen Teesri Duniya (Contemporary
Third World) from a small apartment in Noida… read more:
https://thewire.in/rights/forgotten-life-sentence-of-ramchandra-singh