Comrade Azad.
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COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA (MAOIST), CENTRAL COMMITTEE
North Regional Bureau Press statement, 3rd July, 2010
It is not an encounter at all!! It is a cold blooded murder by AP Police!!
Red Salutes to Martyrs com. Azad (Cherukuri Rajkumar) and com. Hem Pandey (Jitender)!!
Let us avenge the killings of the beloved comrades by the khaki clad fascist gangs of AP government!!
Azad was arrested at Nagpur on June 1st along with com. Hem Pandey
On June 1st, the notorious Andhra Pradesh Special Branch Police for its abductions and cold blooded murders, have arrested com. Azad, Polite Bureau member and Spokesperson of CPI (Maoist), and com. Hem Pandey, a zonal committee level comrade in Nagpur city around 11′o clock when they went to meet a comrade who was supposed to receive them from Dandakarnaya zone. Com. Azad reached Nagpur around 10 am on the fateful day along with com. Hem Pandey, after travelling from long distance. With specific information, the lawless goons of AP SIB abducted them, perhaps flown them in a helicopter, to Adilabad jungles near Maharashtra border and killed them point block and in cold blood.
We pay our red homage to our beloved comrades and vow to take vengeance of these killers.
The Life of Comrade Azad
Comrade Azad is one of the senior most party leaders of CPI (Maoist). He was born in Krishna district of AP, in a well to do family. He did his school education in Sainik School, at Korukonda of the present Vizianagaram District. Com. Surapuneni Janardhan, a legendary comrade of the student movement brought com. Raj Kumar into RSU in 1974.
He moved length and breadth of India, to organize the Seminar on Nationality question held in Madras (now Chennai) in 1981. He was shifted to Karnataka in 1982 and com. Azad was one of the founder members of the Karnataka Party and worked as the secretary of the Karnataka State Committee. He was taken into CC, after the Central Plenum in 1990.
He was the elected member of CC in the All India conference in 1995 and since then he served in CC and PB. He continued in those posts after the formation of CPI Maoist too in 2004. He has been the spokes person of the CC since then.
Known for his simple life and hard work; voracious reading and brilliant analyses of situations, crystal clear articulation and sharp logic, and fine organizational skills, he contributed widely to the revolutionary movement in many spheres.
He wrote profusely to the People’s March, Peoples war (theoretical organ of the CPI (Maoist), and to the Maoist Information Bulletin. He wrote a fine critique of the intellectuals of AP, who got disillusioned and lost faith in revolutionary movement after the 1990 events of collapse of soviet imperialism and its satellite regimes.
In his death, the Indian revolutionary movement lost an exemplary comrade and a shining star, who served the movement more than three and half decades.
Just before his last journey, he received questions for interview from a well known magazine. He replied that he was in the journey and would send the answers as early as possible.
It is not Sukhdev, but com. Hem Pandey of Uttarakhand who was killed by APSIB
Com. Hem Pandey, 30, hailed from a nearby village of Pithoragarh town of Uttarakhand State. He did his MA history in Nainital University and got himself registered in PhD. While he was in college, he was active member of AISA, and slowly realizing he pseudo revolutionary character of AISA politics, he moved to the radical groups, later in 2001 he joined the then CPI (ML) (PW). He organized peasantry in the mountainous villages in Almora district, taking up umpteen numbers of issues of peasantry, including the problems arose out of Binsar Sanctuary.
Soft-spoken, bespectacled, lean and energetic Com. Hem won the love of people of that region. He was moved into more important works in 2005. He had done his new assignments with patience and endurance. His appetite for learning new things, reading more and more, and zeal for penning his ideas are things for the emulation for all the revolutionaries. He has written various articles to newsmagazines under various pen names. We request the civil rights organisations to demand the A P police to send the body of com. Hem Pandey to his bereaved mother who is in Haldwani, Uttarakhand state, who is his sole surviving parent.
APSIB- the Indian avatar of Mossad
The Andhra Pradesh Special Intelligence Bureau, which has been partially trained partially by the Mossad, has acquired the notoriety of its master trainer-Mossad, in India. It has been moving across the state borders, and conducting abductions and cold blooded murders with impunity. This is all happening with clear blessings of Manmohan- Sonia and Chidambaram. This fascist gang has established its tentacles all over India, resorting the killings of revolutionaries, scoffing at the recent AP high court judgement that all encounters are to be first booked as murders under IPC 302, Ultimaely these killers will be taken to task by the revolutionary masses.
Will Chidambaram expect CPI (Maoist) to sit for talks with his blood on his hands of com. Azad and com. Hem Pandey?
CPI (Maoist) never contested or raised any hue and cry in the case of real encounters. The AP Police is resorting to globbeian lies, not believed even by gullible. CPI (Maoist) stood for truth and accountability to the people, and always stated facts. There is no such programme of Azad going to Sarkepally forest of Adilabad. Azad was going to discuss with our comrades, inter alia, the concrete proposals of well meaning people like Swamy Agnivesh about particular dates for the mutual cease fire. He was a carrying the confidential letter of Swamy Agnivesh written to Azad dated- 26th June 2010. Will Chidambaram expect CPI (Maoist) to sit for talks with his blood on his hands of com. Azad and com. Hem Pandey? He calls repeatedly to us to abjure violence? Killing the unarmed comrades by AP Police with your blessings – is it not like devils chanting scriptures?
Lies by AP Police
When there is no movement and organization in Adilabad, what is the necessity of Azad going to Azad? That the police found AK47 is again white lie. He alighted from a train around 10 am along with com. Hem Pandey in Nagpur Station, and was caught by the APSIB unarmed. Is the government following its own constitution of article 21? Is the government following kernel of the Geneva Convention that “defenceless persons” should not be harmed? Is it not utter hypocrisy and hoax that on one hand the government is placing the prevention of torture bill and the police every minute resorting to the torture of the detained? It is a concocted story of encounter repeated ad nauseum, by the AP Police, churned out to the media umpteen times. The right life, guaranteed under the constitution is mocked and the right to be produced within 24 hours of the arrest is metamorphasized into killing within 24hours of arrest, so that there is no scope for any redressal by their near and dear.
We appeal to the civil rights organizations, democrats, patriots to raise to raise to the occasion thoroughly investigate this fake encounter as an example of extra judicial killing that are happening in scores in this country and bring out the truth before the people.
Ajay,
Spokes Person,
CPI (Maoist)
Killing Azad: Silencing the Voice of Revolution
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/venugopal290710p.html
by N Venugopal
To suppress the most articulate voice of the Indian revolutionary movement, the state indulged in the brutal assassination of Cherukuri Rajkumar, popularly known as Azad, spokesperson of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), along with freelance journalist Hemchandra Pandey, on July 2. Azad was supposed to meet a courier at Sitabardi in Nagpur, Maharashtra at 11 am on July 1, to go to the Dandakaranya forest from there. The bodies of Azad and Pandey were displayed on a hillock in the forest between the Jogapur and Sarkepalli villages in the Adilabad district of Andhra Pradesh, about 250 kms from Nagpur.
Around 9 in the morning on July 2, the television channels in Andhra Pradesh started flashing that there was an "encounter" in which two Maoists were killed. Within the next few hours it was speculated that the deceased were Cherukuri Rajkumar alias Azad and Pulluri Prasada Rao alias Chandranna, secretary of the North Telangana Special Zonal Committee. By afternoon Gudsa Usendi, spokesperson of the Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee, came on air and told the channels that the second person might be Sahadev, an adivasi courier sent to fetch Azad. Then, Usendi came on air again and told that Sahadev returned safely after not finding Azad at the rendezvous. Meanwhile, friends of Hemchandra Pandey recognized the picture of his dead body that appeared in the New Delhi edition of the Telugu daily Eenadu, and Pandey's wife Babita announced that at a press conference in Delhi. For the first few days, Pandey was passed off as a Maoist; once he was identified, police started denying that he was a journalist.
The official version of the incident goes like this: On the night of July 1, police got information that there was some movement of Maoists in the Maharashtra-Andhra Pradesh border forests and a combing party consisting of police from both the states went in search of them. Around 10:30 the police party identified the Maoists and asked them to surrender, but the intransigent Maoists, numbering around 20, started firing at them. In order to defend themselves the police returned fire and the exchange of fire continued till 2:30 in the morning. The police party could not search the area due to pitch darkness and came back next morning to find two unidentified dead bodies, along with an AK-47, a 9 mm pistol, two kit bags, and revolutionary literature.
However, newspaper readers in Andhra Pradesh are sceptical: they have been reading the same story over and over again for the last forty years with changes in proper names alone. That nobody believed the official story was a commentary on the credibility of state machinery.
There are a number of reasons even the most credulous didn't buy the official story this time round: Azad was known for his vigilance, so much so that the police did not even have his recent photograph and had to make do with a 30-year-old picture of him. Given his importance as a politburo and central committee member, Azad would have been well guarded if he had been in forests. He would have been alone and unarmed only if he had been in an urban area. Newspersons who visited the site where the dead bodies were shown said that it was difficult terrain, so it would have been impossible for police to come out unscathed if there had been a real exchange of fire. Moreover, there were no telltale signs of an exchange of fire at the site except two bullets; the nearby villagers did not hear any sounds of gunfire, despite the police claim that the exchange lasted for four hours.
The ruling class' wrath against Azad was such that even his dead body was not allowed to be accorded due honour. Azad's mother, an ailing 75-year-old Cherukuri Karuna, pleaded with the High Court to direct the government to first bring the body from the remote Jogapur forest to Hyderabad. She told the court that her age and health would not permit her to go all the way to the Adilabad district. The court denied her request and only directed the police to postpone the post-mortem till the mother could see the dead body of her son, as if that were a sign of great benevolence. At the ill-equipped hospital in Mancherial, where hundreds of people gathered to pay their last respects to Azad, heavy police force was deployed and people were dispersed with a lathi charge. The police allowed only his mother and brothers inside the hospital.
Cherukuri Rajkumar was born to a middle-class family in the Krishna district of the state of Andhra Pradesh in May 1954. His father, an ex-serviceman, moved to Hyderabad to run a small restaurant to raise a family of four sons and a daughter, Rajkumar being the second son. Rajkumar received his primary education in Hyderabad and secondary education in Korukonda in the Vizianagaram district. He graduated with a degree in chemical engineering from the Regional Engineering College (REC), Warangal and did post-graduate work in marine engineering at Andhra University, Visakhapatnam. He was a brilliant student throughout. His mother remembers: "He suffered from an eyesight problem when he was in class X and had to begin using contact lenses. Initially he could not adjust to the lenses and arranged a friend to read out the lessons to him. By just listening, he secured distinction in seven subjects that year." Even after he became an activist, his teachers and friends say, he remained a meritorious student, a prize winner in elocution and essay-writing contests.
The Srikakulam struggle broke out when Rajkumar was in high school; several of his family members were influenced by the struggle. His maternal grandfather's family had settled in the Adilabad district and some of them were part of peasant struggles there, led by Kondapalli Seetaramaiah, one of the founders of the Naxalite movement in Andhra Pradesh. Rajkumar used to spend his summer vacations in that area and was influenced by its revolutionary environment.
By the time he entered the REC in 1972, the college had become a hotbed of a revolutionary student movement, inspired by peasant movements in the Warangal district, and being a very sensitive and sharp person, he became a part of the student fervour. He was two years junior to Surapaneni Janardhan, a very effective radical student leader. Not only Janardhan but also the peasant and working-class movements in and around Warangal in the pre-Emergency days made a lasting impression on Rajkumar. REC students were in the forefront in forming the Andhra Pradesh Radical Students Union (RSU) in October 1974, and Rajkumar was part of that group. The RSU held its first conference in February 1975 in Hyderabad. Within three months, it came under severe repression, with the imposition of the Emergency. Several radical students went underground to avoid arrest as well as to organise peasants. Rajkumar, too, was arrested under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act though he was let off after a couple of months. Janardhan, along with three other student activists, were killed in a fake encounter in July 1975 in the Giraipalli forest in the Medak district.
The Giraipalli killing, along with several other killings, created furore in the post-Emergency period. Janardhan, like Rajan, another REC student from Calicut, became a symbol of the democratic rights movement then. Jayaprakash Narayan set up a people's fact-finding committee under the leadership of V M Tarkunde to enquire into the fake encounters in Andhra Pradesh. It was Rajkumar who helped the Tarkunde Committee gather the necessary information and protect the witnesses in the Giraipalli forest and surrounding villages. The Tarkunde Committee's report led to the constitution of the Justice V Bhargava Commission, which held its enquiry during 1977-78. It was again Rajkumar who helped the defence team led by K G Kannabiran in arguing the case before the commission. Kannabiran fondly remembered the efficient assistance rendered by Rajkumar in those days in his autobiography 24 Gantalu, published in 2009.
The Radical Students Union was revived after the Emergency and held its second conference in Warangal in February 1978. Rajkumar, by that time doing his M Tech in Visakhapatnam, became its state president. It was at this conference where the RSU gave students its famous call to "Go to Villages." The village campaigns brought about a sea change in the outlook of participating students as well as spread the revolutionary message at the grassroots. The campaign became a prelude to the Karimnagar-Adilabad peasant struggles and the RSU in turn gained strength from it. The "Go to Villages" campaigns directly led to the formation of the Radical Youth League in May 1978 and Raithucooli Sangham in 1980. During those historic years, Rajkumar was the president of the RSU. He was re-elected twice, at the third conference in Anantapur in February 1979 and the fourth conference in Guntur in February 1981. However, by the time of the Guntur conference, he was being hunted by police and could not even attend the public proceedings.
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.
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