Naxalites, narcissists and nihilism

There is no statuette
to measure the miles lovers
cover to torch a police station,
their down or breasts not fully grown
as the ideals they die for.
Hunger too dies.
-Rabindra K Swain, Taking Sides

When dreams die, dreamers who had inspired and led youngsters to the killing fields have to search for ways to cope with the debacle. Some withdraw from public life. A few sell their pasts to secure a comfortable future. Religion, academia and commerce attract the more enterprising among the former visionaries. Invariably, the leftover nihilistic adventurers continue to live within the strands of their memories, until the disgrace of defeat forces them to commit suicide. Japanese samurais, for instance, knew that there was no disgrace in the ultimate sacrifice, and hara-kiri was in fact the last escape from a life of diminished dignity and besmirched honour. Along these lines, Kanu Sanyal (1929–2010) probably thought that there was no point in continuing a life that had ceased to be relevant to the causes he had championed. On 23 March 2010, the last remaining initiator of the Naxalbari movement committed suicide by hanging himself in his native Hathighisha village, near Siliguri. Perhaps he was disillusioned that the standard-bearers of the proletarian revolution now believe in blowing up entire patrols rather than in targeting individual exploiters.

In an unconnected but related event, in mid-April 65-year-old Digendra Rajbanshi hung himself in front of the palatial headquarters of his Marxist-Leninist party in Kathmandu. During the early 1970s, inspired by the Naxalbari uprising, some enterprising Nepali youths, including Rajbanshi, had started what was known as the Jhapali Movement, named after the district in which the movement began. But over the years, he saw his dreams sacrificed on the altar of power politics. A new bunch of armed revolutionaries had claimed the legacy of the Jhapali Movement, and his former comrades had morphed into the 'class enemy' they had once wanted to behead. In the process, Rajbanshi had lost all hope, and been reduced to a skeleton of his revolutionary self.