An appeal: Forty years ago, on the 26th of June 1975, a State of Emergency was declared in India. A regime of dark terror had descended upon the people of our land. However the twenty-something old Indian States teeth and nails were already dripping with blood for several years preceding the declared Emergency, as the State tried to mercilessly crush the revolutionary peasant and youth uprising that sparked off in the late-sixties. The entire country was like a prison for those daring to dream and act for social change, and revolutionaries had been pushed underground. On the fateful night of 4th August in the year 1971, detectives from the States Special Branch captured revolutionary poet, journalist and communist leader Saroj Dutta from his shelter in South Kolkatas Rashbehari area (Raja Basanta Roy Road) and killed the unarmed revolutionary in a cold-blooded encounter in the Kolkata Maidan in the wee hours of 5th August. The cowards in uniform mutilated Saroj Duttas corpse by beheading it to make identification difficult. The State Police, after long 44 years since the killing, maintains Saroj Dutta as a missing man in its files. In spite of contemporary newspapers reporting the secret killing and more than one commissions being set up to probe into it, Saroj Dutta remains a disappeared man. It was not a coincidence that the state of Emergency was slapped upon the people of India just a few years after Saroj Duttas killing. Such were the dark times. Such are the dark times, indeed. As darkness of fascism threatens to engulf our democracy in the present times, we remember martyr Saroj Dutta, fondly called SD by his comrades-in-arms, on his birth centenary year. SDs life was unique in a way that in reading his life one could read into it a text of his times and that of the revolutionary Naxalbari and youth uprisings that marked a watershed moment in the peoples history of India. As part of commemorating his centenary year, we have taken up the project of making a documentary on Saroj Duttas life and times. To reacquaint Saroj Dutta with the present generation of dreamers. We appeal to you to generously contribute to the documentary with money and any unknown/little-known historical information on Saroj Dutta and his times.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 17:45:05 +0000
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