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Comrade Ashok Maity,
the dedicated Marxist revolutionary, is no more. He breathed his last on 11th
July 2004 in Kolkata after lapsing into coma for two days. The spirited, simple
and jovial comrade Ashok da plunged into the student movement in Midnapur
district of West Bengal in the 1950s. Though sent behind bars as a firebrand
student leader several times. Ashokda, after completing M.A. in Economics from
Jadavpur University, instead of pursuing a lucrative job, turned into a
communist whole timer. When still a youth he became the Midnapur district
secretariat member of the CPI(M). He was also once P.A. to Jyoti Basu and saw in
his own eyes how the top CPI(M) leader and first United Front cabinet minister
Hare Krishna Konar and Deputy C.M. Jyoti Basu conspired to kill the peasants in
Naxalbari. He narrated to our comrades only five days before his death how Konar
and Basu tried in vain to make a forced surrender of the Naxalbari movement
leaders by appeasing the Central government. Comrade Maity later joined the
CPI(ML) and was arrested in end 1970. He was a prominent leader in the peasant
movement in Debra in Midnapur district. Soon after, in the savage killing of
numberless comrades in Midanapur Central Jail Ashokda was brutally tortured,
some of his ribs irreparably broken and one wrist twisted for life. He was first
counted among the killed. Comrade Maity was a retired professor of Economic
before his death at the Indian Statistical Institute. He was a Marxist till his
death and assured us of all help carrying on the revolutionary struggle when our
comrades met him last. He upheld the continuation of the Naxalbari struggle by
the CPI(ML)People’s War and bitterly criticized the renegades hobnobbing with
the CPI(M) in West Bengal. We pay our revolutionary homage to comrade Maity and
share the sorrows of his family members and numberless friends.
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