25 June 1972 — when the first declaration of APDR was adopted and its first committee was constituted is taken as its foundation day. No political party can claim credit for founding the APDR and till now it has been able to maintain organisational independence from all parties and groups. Yet, it has been portrayed as a front organisation of the Naxalites or Maoists by successive governments. That is because it has been most vocal in defence of the democratic rights of the communist revolutionaries who are the most persecuted of all opposition groups under any regime.

On the eve of APDR’s 28^th conference scheduled to be held on 23-24 October, at Sheoraphuli, in Hooghly district of West Bengal, Groundxero, will publish edited excerpts, chronicling the 50 years epic journey of APDR from Nilanjan Dutta’s forthcoming book, Civil Liberties Movement in India. Nilanjan Dutta, member of APDR, is a human right activist and an independent journalist.

The excerpts will be published in parts. Part 1 comprises brief life-sketches of a few of the people who came together to form APDR in 1972. It reveals the diversity of the founders’ social, professional and political backgrounds. And at the same time also point to the thread that joined APDR as a civil liberties organisation with its predecessors.

The Pioneers

Amid the suffocating atmosphere in West Bengal prevailing in the wake of the state terror unleashed to crush the Naxalite movement, some people had become desperate to find a way to breathe. Among them, those who had seen the colonial days and had fought for freedom, felt that “the orgy of slaughter and brutal repression that have been sweeping for last two years all over India was unknown even in the days of British Raj”. [1]

One such person was Sushil Bandyopadhyay [1902-1976], who had spent 30 years of his life as political prisoner and internee before Independence and again went to jail in 1968. He was an old man by that time, fondly called ‘Dadu’ (Grandpa) in his south-west Calcutta neighbourhood of Behala. Legend has it that seeing the police drag away two boys barely out of their teens, he blocked their way spreading out his arms like the wings of a mother bird eager to protect her young and rescued them from possible slaughter. Despite keeping out of limelight, he still commanded great respect from many people of position who had been his followers during the freedom struggle.

Another person like him was Promode Sengupta [1907-1974], an associate of Subhas Chandra Bose and a former minister in the Azad Hind Government. He had also played an active role in the Civil Liberties Committee (CLC) formed before Independence, first as its joint-secretary and later as secretary. He was also working with the ‘Marxist group’ within the Forward Bloc after coming back to India after the war. Intelligence reports, however, said that he was actually a communist mole in the Forward Bloc and it was the CPI which told him to join the CLC. This well-known freedom fighter was arrested in “free” India under the Preventive Detention Act in 1950. [2]

When the 1967 uprising took place, both Bandyopadhyay and Sengupta became actively involved in the Naxalbari O Krishak Sangram Sahayak Committee (Naxalbari and Peasant Struggle Solidarity Committee). Sengupta also joined the All-India Coordinaion Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR), though he later fell out with Charu Mazumder and other leaders.

Dr Amiya Kumar Bose [1900-1975] was a leading cardiologist of Calcutta. He was never a member of the communist party, but was close to many communist leaders and intellectuals. He was actively associated with a number of Left-inspired social and professional organisations including the Students’ Health Home, Peoples’ Relief Committee and Indian Medical Association. The road where he used to live is now named after him.

Kapil Bhattacharya [1904-1989] was a civil engineer who did some innovative experiments with concrete, lived in France for a while and wrote in both French and Bengali progressive literary magazines. After coming back to India, his interest was turned towards the character of rivers. He became a pioneering critic of big dam projects at a time when these were regarded as the “temples of modern India”. For this blasphemous view, the corporate Press branded him as a traitor to the nation.

Kalyani Bhattacharjee [1907-1983] was an organiser of the student movement and militant women’s movement and a participant in the revolutionary movement in colonial Bengal. She spent many years in prison and under internment. Her younger sister and a member of her organisation Chhatri Sangha, Bina Das, had fired at Bengal Governor Stanley Jackson at the Calcutta University convocation hall in 1932. After her marriage, Kalyani went to live with her husband in Bombay and got involved in the civil liberties movement there in the 1940s. She was also imprisoned there for her participation in the Quit India Movement. Back in Bengal after her release, she devoted herself to the work of famine relief. She contested the first general election as a candidate of the Praja Socialist Party (PSP) and lost as her party had no funds for campaigning which her rival Congress candidate had aplenty. That was her first and the last involvement in electoral politics.

Activist-lawyer Abdul Latif had been an assistant secretary of the CLC in 1946-47. He went over to Pakistan during Partition, did the Communist Party’s underground work there and was jailed in 1949. He came back to India after being released in 1953 became a trade unionist. He dropped his party membership in 1966. APDR’s first joint assistant secretary Sanjay Mitra has said in his reminiscence on the early days of the organisation that it was Latif who had suggested the name ‘Association for Protection of Democratic Rights’. Latif though has said in his own memoir that the name was given by a fellow lawyer called Ajit Dutta, who was “very enthusiastic about forming a civil liberties body”. Dutta had asked Latif to write a draft declaration for the organisation. He wrote it and discussed it with some others lawyers before the first preparatory meeting for the organisation. At the meeting, Sanjay Mitra said it lacked spirit. Then, Mitra was asked to prepare another draft. Dutta and some others found Mitra’s draft too political and they backed out, but Latif stayed on for some more time. [3]

Sanjay Mitra and some of his comrades belonged to a political organisation called the National Liberation and Democratic Front (NLDF). This group consisted of mostly young activists, who were tempered by the revolutionary fire of Naxalbari and joined the AICCCR, but kept out of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) or CPI(ML) as they could not agree to its political formulations and formation process. Strongly influenced by Sushil Bandyopadhyay, they had taken it as a political task to form a civil liberties organisation.

These are brief life-sketches [4] of only a few of the people who, amid the “orgy of slaughter and brutal repression”, came together to form APDR. These reveal the diversity of their social, professional and political backgrounds. And these also point to the thread that joined the APDR as a civil liberties organisation with its predecessors.

No political party can claim credit for founding the APDR and till now it has been able to maintain organisational independence from all parties and groups. Yet, it has been portrayed as a front organisation of the Naxalites or Maoists by successive governments. That is because it has been most vocal in defence of the democratic rights of the communist revolutionaries who are the most persecuted of all opposition groups under any regime. In fact, the revolutionary outfits have always been ill at ease with those who fight for “bourgeois” democratic rights. However, in the beginning, several medium and small Left parties apart from the NLDF, such as the RSP, Forward Bloc, Socialist Unity Centre (SUC) and Workers’ Party took it as a serious task to constitute a civil liberties organisation at that juncture. So, several of their members joined or actively supported it. Individually, even one or two Congress and CPI leaders had been involved. On the other hand, Saumyendranath Tagore, who was very active in the civil liberties movement in the 1930s, dropped out at its planning stage. At a meeting in his house, he could not agree with the demand of unconditional release of all political prisoners. Those who had murder charges must face trial, he said. Promode Sengupta contested him saying one could not expect a fair trial in the prevailing situation. And besides, they did not commit any murder for their own interest. Whatever they had done was for a political cause and so, they should be given the status of political prisoners and released unconditionally. After that, a meeting was held at the house of Calcutta Municipal Corporation councillor Baren Daw of RSP, where the organisation took shape. Kapil Bhattacharya readily agreed to be the president and also to let the living room of his house to be used as its office. [5]

The first committee of the APDR included the following office-bearers:

Kapil Bhattacharya (president)

Kalyani Bhattacharjee (working president)

Sushil Bandyopadhyay (vice-president)

M.A. Latif (vice-president)

Barendra Krishna Daw (vice-president)

Saroj Chakraborty (vice-president)

Dr Amiya Bose (vice-president)

Promode Sengupta (general secretary)

Dilipkanti Chaudhury (joint assistant secretary)

Sanjay Mitra (joint assistant secretary)

Amal Bose (treasurer)

There were 30 other founder members. They were:

1. Kshirod Dutta, freedom fighter
2. Asit Ganguly, advocate
3. Dulal Bose, journalist
4. Satyananda Bhattacharya, journalist, trade unionist and ex-councillor, Calcutta Corporation
5. Kanai Paul, ex-MLA
6. Suhasini Devi, freedom fighter
7. Guruprasanna Ghatak, advocate
8. Utpal Dutt, dramatist
9. Nalini Sur, advocate
10. Subhas Chandra Ganguly
11. Sudhir Mazumdar, advocate
12. Mrityunjay Dasgupta
13. Sova Sen, actor
14. Mrinal Sen, film director
15. Santosh K. Roy
16. Pinaki Chatterjee, sea-explorer
17. Adhir K. Mukhopadhyay
18. Tilottama Bhattacharya, journalist
19. Indrajit Gupta, CPI MP
20. Dr Bijoy Kumar Bose
21. Dr Dhirendra Nath Ganguly
22. Dr Bimal Bhattacharyya
23. Dr Angshuman Ganguly
24. Bina Dhar
25. Debashis Ganguly
26. Rashbehari Ghosh
27. Manoj Kumar Sadhu
28. Biswanath Prasad Adhikari
29. Binayak Dutta Roy
30. Sudhi Pradhan

Some of the above were quite famous people in their respective fields, while some others were young activists at that time. We must mention the names of a few more persons who were not even in the committee, but were there from the very beginning and contributed a lot to the organisation. One of them was Santi Sarkar. She was a member of the Workers’ Party of India and took an active part in the formation of the organisation. It was she who had brought in Kalyani Bhattacharjee who became the first working president of APDR and also convinced her own party about the need for supporting the civil liberties movement, according to old-timers of the Workers’ Party of India like Sukhendu Bhattacharya. Bharati Chatterjee came from the student movement and brought some of her comrades into the process of formation of APDR. Those who had worked with her said that she performed the role of its office secretary in the initial days, meticulously sorting and filing every report and every newspaper clipping, going through every letter that reached the office and replied to it. Her work prepared the ground for APDR’s encyclopaedic publication, Bharatiya Ganatantrer (?) Swarup, which exposed before the world the state terror that was prevailing in the country. We will come to that part later. Biren Banerjee used to run a printing press in central Calcutta where many of the APDR publications, including Bharatiya Ganatantrer (?) Swarup, were printed. He was an associate of Sushil Bandyopadhyay in the freedom struggle and was sentenced to death by the British, which was commuted to life imprisonment. Later, he joined the CPI and was elected as an MLA from Howrah in the 1950s. He and his nephew Radharaman Banerjee had to suffer severe police torture and huge financial losses because of doing the APDR’s printing jobs.

First Declaration

The date of the meeting — 25 June 1972 — where the first declaration of APDR was adopted and its first committee was constituted is taken as its foundation day. The declaration was issued at a Press conference on 9 September the same year. The beginning of the declaration is notable:

DEMOCRATIC and human rights are the indispensable preconditions for the development of individual and society. Over centuries, people of all lands have been in the ceaseless struggle for attaining these fundamental rights and getting them well-entrenched and expanded in their social organisations.

In India, too, tradition of movement for achieving these human rights forms a glorious chapter of our history. In days of the British whenever the alien rulers struck at the national and democratic movement, robbed us of the fundamental human rights and resorted to repression and detention without trial, the people from all walks of life came forward to protest against those.

It was in this way that the people of India have been fighting without respite over a long period for a number of basic human rights, which ultimately won constitutional recognition. These are freedoms of association, freedom to call mass meeting, freedom of religion and political belief and right to have a secure life, etc. The solemn promise that these rights will remain unchanged and be protected by the prevalent laws of the Indian Union have also been enshrined in the constitution.

Three aspects merit attention in this preamble. First, the activists in this phase had begun to speak in the language of universal human rights, while putting emphasis on the protection of ‘democratic rights’. Second, even as they set it in a global context — where “people of all lands have been in the ceaseless struggle” — they were well aware of the legacy of the movement in India and called it a “glorious chapter of our history”. And third, they based their claims on the “solemn promise” of the Constitution of the country to preserve the hard-earned fundamental rights.

Thus, with their feet firmly on the ground and vision clear and far-reaching, they set out to challenge the “reckless abuse of power in the name of maintaining law and order”. They indicted the state’s tyrannical activities on three counts: that these “stand against humanity, are illegal and undemocratic”. Here we can see that universal, legal as well as democratic principles are invoked together to prepare a strong moral ground for the movement. Towards the end of the declaration, there is an appeal to all sections of our people including workers, peasants, intellectuals and students — whatever differences of opinion and party affiliation we have, let us agree to a united effort to end this reign of terror and repression and also to end mutual in-fighting amongst us.

The framing of the appeal shows that the founders of APDR wanted to achieve a social as well as political unity within the rights movement. The last part is very specific to the contemporary context — hostilities not only between the radical and parliamentary Left but also amongst the various groups and streams of the radical Left had reached fratricidal proportions which needed to be put a brake to. However, this infighting never stopped totally, although the degree of violence has varied.

In the first declaration, the APDR made two appeals: first, it urged the people to set up its branches in their own localities and second, it requested the “relatives and friends of political detainees, victims of slaughter arid repression due to political reason” to contact its office at Kapil Bhattacharya’s residence, 18(N) Madan Baral Lane, Calcutta 12.

The first appeal got good response from the beginning; like the Civil Rights Committee of 1918, its branches came up one after another, beginning with Berhampore (Murshidabad district), Midnapore (Midnapore district) and Shantipur (Nadia district). It was these branches that became its source of sustenance and eventually helped APDR become the oldest and widest functioning civil liberties organisation in India. Though news of the formation and activities of this organisation was hardly covered by the big Press at that time, people came to know about it through small but popular periodicals such as Frontier. Having read a report in this news magazine, well-known former Congress politicians turned civil liberties and social activists from Orissa, Nabakrushna Choudhuri and his wife Malati Choudhuri, wrote to Kapil Bhattacharya expressing interest in forming a similar organisation in their state. Nabakrushna Choudhuri was the first chief minister of Orissa. People also got in touch from Bihar, Delhi and abroad.

Historic Rally

In response to the second appeal, letters poured in at the APDR office and relatives and friends of political prisoners and victims of torture began to contact. And it was from the vicinity of this house that a historic procession of the “mothers, sisters, wives and other relatives of political prisoners” rolled out on the main street on 12 February 1973 with heavily armed police forces forming a moving cordon on all sides. Calcutta had not seen anything like that for a long time, as all voices of protest had been suppressed brutally. Most of the marchers, mostly women, too, had never taken part in a rally before. Rather than raising slogans, they were just yelling at the police personnel around them, taking them as the immediate representatives of state power. On their part, it was a spontaneous outburst of pent-up anger; for the numerous onlookers, it was a spectacle of protest. Tilottama Bhattacharya has reminisced, “We had a tough time marching with those delirious women. But I would say our procession was successful, because the common people had shed their tears that day.” [6] A five-member women’s delegation met the chief minister Siddhartha Shankar Ray in his office and handed over a memorandum, although he sounded quite dismissive in talking with them. After this rally, the APDR began to attract wider attention from the public, the media as well as the state. Like the ‘2 Palm Place’ address of the Civil Liberties Committee, ‘18 Madan Baral Lane’ now came under strict surveillance. In fact, because of police harassment, the office of the APDR had to be shifted several times before the Emergency — from Kapil Bhattacharya’s house to Sanjay Mitra’s house at 20 Kalidas Singha Lane to Dr Amiya Bose’s house at 99/5/1 Ballygunge Place to Forward Bloc leader Bhakti Bhushan Mandal’s house at Park Street Extension.

It was impossible for the state intelligence to understand the civil libertarian motivations of those who were trying to defend even those communist revolutionaries with whom they had wide political differences. So, they reported that here, people like Kapil Bhattacharya and Promode Sengupta were trying to bring the scattered rebel groups on a common platform. They further apprehended that using his old Indian National Army (INA) contacts, Promode Sengupta was preparing the grounds for a revolutionary movement over the whole of South and South-East Asia. He had to pay the price of his civil liberties activities till the end of his life. In February 1973, at the age of 66, he applied for a fresh passport intending to visit his ailing mother-in-law in Germany. The Government of India sought the opinion of the government of West Bengal. On 3 September 1973, the intelligence branch reported, “He is associated with the Ganatantrik Adikar Raksha Committee [a distortion of ‘Ganatantrik Adhikar Raksha Samiti’, the Bengali name of APDR] formed by the CPI to support Naxalite prisoners.” It was not safe to issue a passport to such a person. After being refused, he applied again — and was refused again because of the secret reports. The chain of secret notes went on up to as late as 1975 — until an officer discovered that the person concerned was no longer alive. The file was closed with the last note saying that Promode Sengupta had died on 18 November 1974. [7] Sanjay Mitra became general secretary after his death.

Several other organisations such as the Legal Aid Committee, Prisoners’ Release Council and even the CPI(M)-influenced Democratic Lawyers’ Association worked closely with APDR, although there existed serious debates regarding forms of movement, reliance on legal proceedings and defending those held on charges of violence and murder. Committees also grew up with the objective to act on specific cases, like the Committee against the Parvatipuram Conspiracy Case and the Committee against the Fifth Tribunal Case. Both APDR and Legal Aid Committee — which had several common members — became popular and got warm response to their appeal for funds to meet the court expenses and for sending clothes and other necessities to the prisoners. In one instance, four political prisoners detained in an Orissa jail themselves collected Rs 100 and sent it to the Legal Aid Committee. [8]

Solidarity with Political Prisoners

Political prisoners at Alipore Central Jail, Presidency Jail and Midnapore Central Jail undertook a hunger-strike on 26 February 1974 demanding recognition of their political prisoner status and facilities according to the Jail Code. Before that, they had sent a copy of their charter of demands to APDR, which made it public at a Press conference on 23 February. As the demands were not met, the political prisoners again went on fast from 17 May, which continued up to 14 June. This time, they had added some demands concerning other long-term convicts and low-paid jail guards too. Prisoners in other jails also joined the movement. The news of their agitation was spread by the APDR far and wide. Solidarity messages were wired from Canada, USA and West Germany. A statement signed by well-known academics and journal editors from North America and Europe said:

We, the undersigned, are deeply anguished to know that many of the political suspects detained in Indian jails are on indefinite fast since May 17, 1974 to press their demand that they be recognized as political prisoners. We also deeply deplore that tens of thousands of political suspects have been kept rotting in Indian jails for several years without even proper trials and subjected to the most inhuman conditions as well as to physical torture. Most of these detainees are young people who are merely suspected of being Naxalites. We are aware that the Defence of India Rule, Preventive Detention Act, Maintenance of Internal Security Act, and a continual series of trumped up charges are among the means used to keep these people in custody in spite of the Indian legal framework. We are horrified that in a democracy such flagrant violation of people’s fundamental rights could go on. We urge the Government of India to stop it. More specifically we urge the Government of India to recognize these detainees as political prisoners and to bring them to fair and speedy trials. We also ask our fellow academics and intellectuals in India to do their utmost for the same ends.

Among the signatories were Kathleen G. Aberle, Chin Banerjee, Gerald Berreman, Marlene Dixon, Richard Flacks, Robert Heifetz, H. Hickerson, John Horton, Mark Juergensmeir, Peter Limqueco, N. Lincoln, Harry Magdoff, David Matza, B. Muratorio, R. Muratorio, Gail Omvedt, Franz Schurmann, Charles Schwartz, Herman Schwendenger, Hari P. Sharma, Paul Sweezy and J. Whitworth.

From 29 May, women including relatives and friends of the prisoners began a relay hunger-strike at Esplanade in the heart of Calcutta city at the initiative of the APDR and Legal Aid Committee. A convention was held at Calcutta on 30 May and noted intellectuals like Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Soumitra Chattopadhyay issued a statement supporting the demands. People flocked around the women’s fast venue in increasing numbers and all Opposition parties sent their representatives to address them. Under public pressure, the state jail minister Gyan Singh Sohan Pal went to a jail, met the prisoners and accepted one or two minor demands. The hunger-strike continued both in and outside the prisons and solidarity meetings and marches were held all over the state every day. Representatives from the APDR, Legal Aid Committee and Forward Bloc visited the jails to check the condition of the fasting prisoners. The delegates, Sanjay Mitra, advocate Arun Prakash Chatterjee and Bhakti Bhushan Mandal found that despite losing weight and suffering from ill-health, their spirit was unbroken. Some inmates of the Dum Dum jail had been hurt when the authorities tried to force-feed them.

Eight Left parties including the CPI(M) issued a joint pledge on 13 June to build up a bigger agitation in support of the prisoners’ charter and appealed to them to withdraw their fast. The next morning, the jail minister again appealed to the prisoners to lift their fast, but they refused. In the afternoon, a delegation of the Left parties led by Bhakti Bhushan Mandal went to meet them and this time they relented. The APDR issued a statement saying, “We pay our respect to the political prisoners at the end of their protracted glorious hunger-strike. We hope those who have given them some assurances would remain faithful to the pledges…. We will continue this movement unitedly.” As a result of the hunger-strike and solidarity actions, the prisoners were able to secure certain rights, such as regular visits by their relatives and access to non-proscribed newspapers and periodicals. Clothes were to be supplied by the authorities to under-trial prisoners whose relatives were not in a position to do so. [9]

Meanwhile, on 3 May, about 250 women workers of nine parliamentary Left Parties who staged a civil disobedience agitation protesting rising prices were detained in Presidency Jail for 24 hours. Within this short time, they found out despite the best of efforts by the authorities to prevent them that there were seven young Naxalite women prisoners cast away in a separate enclosure beside the ‘lunatic cells’. Every month, they were taken to the Calcutta Police headquarters at Lalbazar and tortured severely in the name of interrogation. Shukla Daw, wife of APDR vice-president Baren Daw, was one of the detained women who met them. Hearing the harrowing stories from her, the APDR got a statement prepared by her and three of her comrades Gita Sengupta, Bani Majumder and Nupur De and released it to the Press immediately. It created a furore all over the country. The jail minister met the women prisoners. Though they refused to speak to him, he said in public that the allegations were false. Then CPI MP and APDR member Indrajit Gupta visited them and brought out the truth. After this, the torture stopped.

Solidarity to the democratic rights movement in West Bengal was also extended by international organisations such as the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, USA, Indian Workingmen’s Association, UK, Indian People’s Association in North America (IPANA) and Amnesty International (AI). An AI representative first visited the state in early 1973. After making a thorough investigation into the situation here and in the country in general, the organisation sent three memoranda to the state and central governments, dated 15 March 1973, 19 October 1973 and 1 February 1974. During the prison hunger-strike, the AI prepared a Short Report on Detention Conditions in West Bengal Jails, which it sent along with some recommendations to the Prime Minister of India and the Chief Minister of West Bengal on 14 June 1974. An updated version of the report was published in September the same year. [10] The APDR maintained live contacts with the AI.

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