But to close observers, it is merely a culmination of a conflict that has been cooking for a long time.
The immediate cause of the expulsion appears to be his book, Fractured Freedom: A Prison Memoir, which was published earlier this year. They stopped short of calling him a ‘renegade’, an adjective they had used for Sabyasachi Panda, the former Odisha unit secretary who had a falling out with the party leadership. Seven years later, the harshness of the language the CPI (Maoist) used in its statement, dated November 27, announcing the expulsion of the 74-year-old Ghandy, can be called unprecedented for a leader who has not surrendered before the police, such as central committee members Lanka Papi Reddy and Jingu Narasimha Reddy alias Jampanna. In August 2014, the central committee also issued a press statement, titled ‘Immediately Stop Harassment of Veteran Maoist Leader Comrade Kobad Ghandy’, which claimed that Ghandy was being tortured in jail and appealed to civil rights activists to take up the issue of his release. Instead, an undated internal circular of the party’s central committee (which this author managed to access) issued sometime in August-September 2013, had prioritised the task of getting four senior leaders out of jail: Narayan Sanyal, Purnendu Sekhar Mukherjee, Sheela Marandi and Ghandy. They neither responded with criticism nor said the points he raised were worth pondering over. Some considered it important theoretical work, a much-required self-criticism, while others thought it reflected his ideological deviations from the principles of Maoism.īut the Maoist leadership maintained silence.
Best international relations books of 2013 series#
Particularly as it all serves a story that is, in its essence, primally simple: like all of us, Ursula wishes only to live her best life, to be who she ought to be - watching her try and fail and ultimately triumph in this basic human task is the most thrilling and moving experience fiction has to offer this year.Kolkata: Kobad Ghandy’s series of articles, titled Questions of Freedom and People’s Emancipation, published during 2012-13 in Mainstream Weekly while he was still lodged in Tihar Jail, had created quite a stir among the activists, supporters and sympathisers of the banned CPI (Maoist), India’s largest armed insurgent group. By its nature, Atkinson’s basic conceit gives rise to a gorgeous braid of storytelling that reminds us how gloriously polyphonic novels can be - Life After Life rhymes and chimes and harmonizes with itself, adding layers of complexity as it goes, in a bravura performance as great as anything published so far this millennium. Among its harsh realities are life during wartime in both London (in one life) and Berlin (in another), set-pieces that can stand with anything in the literature of the Second World War.
This is one of those fantastical novels, like The Time Traveler’s Wife, that tells us more about the realities of being human than most realist novels do. Whenever Ursula dies - at birth, or from drowning at the seaside, or at the hand of an abusive husband, or by her own hand - her life restarts, by some mysterious magic, and in her new life she tries to correct the mistakes of the old one. “Dying is an art, like everything else,” Sylvia Plath wrote in “Lady Lazarus.” “I do it exceptionally well.” So does Ursula Todd, who is born in England in 1910 and dies again, and again, and again.
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