Charu Majumdar acolyte, ‘Maoist’ Sohal passes away in Patiala
For the past around 60 years, the state had been desperately looking for Jagjit Singh Sohal. But that name existed just in intelligence dossiers. The man that the police had been searching for had shed that name long ago and had been working for people’s movements under various names. The most popular among them was “Sharma Ji”.
Naxalite leader Jagjit Singh Sohal, who succeeded Charu Majumdar, founder of the Naxalite movement, in early 1970s, is no more. After playing hide and seek with the police for almost six decades, he passed away on Sunday. He was 96 and was cremated in Patiala.
Sohal, who hailed from Shampur village in Sangrur district, was a contemporary of Jagir Singh Joga, Satpal Dang and Harkishan Singh Surjit. He was part of the Communist Party of India when it was headquartered in Lahore.
Following its split in 1964, he chose to be part of the CPM. Three years later, he joined the Naxalites and became a member of its central committee led by Charu Majumdar. After Majumdar’s death, he became general secretary of the central organising committee of the CPI (Marxist–Leninist) in 1974. Since then, he had been leading an underground life and his file thickened when the faction led by him first merged with the People’s War Group and later became the CPI (Maoist).
Leader of the Krantikari Kisan Union Gurmeet Singh Dittupur, who worked with Sohal since 1967, said, “In his death, we lost the last link between communist movement of undivided Punjab and the present one.”
“It is a moment of pride for all of us that we are today bidding adieu to a person who left a treasure of struggles and memories for us, which will definitely show the path to the coming generations,” said democratic rights activist Buta Singh Mehmoodpur.
“Sharma Ji was in high spirits till his last breath. He lived for the oppressed and had no regrets,” said his wife Vimal, who while doing PhD at Panjab University, Chandigarh, in the late Sixties, also went underground with him. Sohal was immortalised in a Punjabi biographical novel “Panna Ekk Itihaas Da” by Baru Satwarg.
