He fights CPMisation of colleges, offices

Trinamool Congress candidate Kabir Suman’s two-storied red and yellow house lies in a sleepy locality in Jadavapur, where the hammer and sickle flutters prominently, interspersed by posters of Sujan Chakrabarty, the CPI(M) candidate. But the folk singer-songwriter is a dark horse who could prove to be a tough competitor.

Kabir is well-known to Bengalis and comes from the people’s movement. Be it the Kanoria Jute Mills and Paharpur workers in the 1990s or, more recently, Singur and Nandigram, Kabir lent his voice to their cause in more ways than one.

Kabir, in a light brown kurta and loose churidar, sits cross-legged on a sky blue rug. He speaks softly. “I am not a man of politics but ‘politically involved,” he says. He was a radio journalist for 14 years in Germany and the US and was the only Asian journalist to be invited by the Nicaraguan Government of Reconstruction to write a book on the Nicaraguan revolution, in 1985.

“Did you write the book?” “No,” he laughs. “I never got a publisher.”

So, why politics? “I am fighting the CPI(M)’s tyranny,” Kabir says. “There has been a CPI(M)isation of universities, colleges and government offices. I don’t get concert calls any more because I was never with the CPI(M),” he says.

He recalls meeting Mamata Banerjee during the Nandigram-Singur movement in 2006. “Mamata aksed me to contest [polls]. She did not usurp the Left ideology but practices it — she is against land grab, SEZ, nuclear reactors...”

But hasn’t Jadavpur always been very pro-Left? “Everyone here is pro-Left, which means everyone is for the Trinamool,” says Suman.