It is difficult to believe that the friendly man waving at us from the second-floor balcony of his house in Calcutta’s well-to-do Salt Lake City neighbourhood was once upon a time on the West Bengal Police’s “most wanted” list. Arrested in 1971, when he was underground as a central committee member of the CPI-ML and secretary of its ‘Bengal-Bihar-Orissa Border Committee’, and slapped with several non-bailable charges, including Section 302 IPC for murder, he spent eight years in a north Bengal prison, including four in solitary confinement—“with my hands and legs shackled to a ball-and-chain device,” he recalls.
How did he keep his sanity? “Why would I lose it?” he retorts, giving a hint of the proverbial Naxalite nerves of steel.
Naxalbari: A Long And Bloody Battle 
Lone Female In The Hilly Terrain 
