In the seventies when Sidharatha Roy ruled the state, and before him the CPM, they had drenched their hands with the blood of thousands of revolutionaries. The Congress and the so-called communists had wanted to extinguish the flames of revolution that had started from Naxalbari. Despite the criminal behaviour of their state towards the revolutionaries the flames of revolution could not be smothered from the land where it had started and inspired thousands and thousands around the whole length and breadth of India. Though the revolutionary movement faced big setbacks in the state of West Bengal it continued to burn and illuminate other parts of India. Of late the revolutionary movement has again been spreading to the parched tracts of West Bengal and made the pseudo communists shudder at the prospect of a real red political alternative to the system they are defending. The heinous murder of comrade Ashim Das points to the increasing uneasiness of the revisionists over the emerging revolutionary alternative among the people, and hence the need to revert to open fascist terror, now in the form of encounter killings.

Ashim Das was a popular mass leader before he went underground. Right from his student days in the eighties he was involved in the student’s movement. Then he joined the CPM and worked for it. But he soon realized that this party had nothing to do with revolution and was a big fraud for the working class and its movement. So he decided to leave it and joined a social organisation going by the name of Panihati Nagrik Committee which took up the issues that served the interests of the people and took up struggles for their rights. In the course of working for the people he came in contact with the revolutionaries and joined their ranks. He became a member of the PW and soon became a State Committee member of the party. It was all due to his conviction to work for the emancipation of the people that he traversed a long path that ultimately brought him in contact with the revolutionaries.

The anger of the people against the police and the CPM government grew stronger and stronger and in the end they were forced to hand over his body for the last rites. Two days after the Bandh they discovered that his body was lying in the said hospital. A large number of people belonging to the youth, student and various mass organisations and general masses of the area got control of the remains of the comrade and took it to the cremation grounds in a swelling huge procession. He was cremated with full revolutionary honours and respect.

The killing of comrade Ashim lays bare the undemocratic, fascist and anti-people face of the CPM government once again, which has let loose its police forces against those forces which are trying to build the revolutionary movement in the form of people’s war in West Bengal and throughout the country. It exposes the CPM’s reactionary face that is in the service of the Indian ruling classes and their imperialist masters. The killing of revolutionaries in cold blood is, in part, an imperialist agenda which is already being carried out heinously in Andhra Pradesh by World Bank funded Chandrababu Naidu’s govt. and in other parts of the country where people’s guerrilla war is raging. But this guerrilla war is bound to spread to new areas in spite of these dastardly killings as the life of the people is becoming more and more wretched and unbearable. The rulers sitting on the Delhi throne and their provincial chieftains are only being isolated further and further from the people. The CPM is no exception. It is acting as an advanced detachment of the Indian ruling classes in the garb of the red flag which is being further drenched in the blood of the people. Ashim has been killed by his ex-‘comrades’ who are happily imple-menting imperialist and World Bank policies in the State of West Bengal. We salute comrade Ashim Das!