Azizul Haque, a prominent leftist intellectual, writer and one of the early leaders of the Naxalite movement in India, died on Monday at a private hospital in Salt Lake after a prolonged illness.
He was 85.
Haque, best known for his prison memoir Karagare Atharo Bochhor (Eighteen years in prison), had been battling age-related complications for months. His condition worsened after a fall at home resulted in a fractured hand. Doctors said subsequent infections, organ dysfunction and progressive frailty led to his death at 2.28 p.m. despite efforts to revive him.
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee expressed deep condolences over his passing. “Azizul Haque was a relentless, courageous political figure who never bowed his head,” she said in a post on social media platform X. “His life was a testament to protest through ideology, imprisonment, and writing. With his departure, a significant political voice has fallen silent.”
A key figure in the radical Naxalbari uprising of the late 1960s, Haque rose to prominence after the death of CPI (ML) founder Charu Majumdar in 1972, when he took over as the chief of the party’s second central committee. He spent nearly two decades in jail, facing multiple arrests under successive governments. His memoir, penned behind bars, documented the harsh realities of political imprisonment in India. It recounted early-morning beatings, rotten food, psychological torture and alleged killings of fellow inmates. The manuscript, nearly seized by prison authorities, was rescued and eventually published thanks to the intervention of a journalist and a reporter from the Bengali daily. In 1986, reports of custodial torture on Haque stirred public and political outcry. Senior CPI(M) ministers and Congress leader Subrata Mukherjee reportedly visited him in jail, supporting his release on parole due to his deteriorating health.
Although Haque withdrew from active politics in his later years, he remained a vocal social commentator. He founded the Bhasha Shahid Smarak Samiti (Language Martyrs Memorial Committee) and regularly contributed to Bengali dailies. Azizul Haque is remembered as a fierce advocate of revolutionary politics whose personal history mirrored the tumult of an era marked by ideological strife and state suppression.