Friend of Burma - India’s Marxist leader dies

by Salai Pi Pi
Tuesday, 04 August 2009 15:08

Kolkata (Mizzima) – Subhas Chakraborty, a prominent leader of India’s Communist Party of India (Marxists), who had come out in strong support of the Burmese cause in the struggle against the military junta, died on Monday from cancer in West Bengal’s capital Kolkata.

Chakraborty, (67) who was also the Minister for Transport, Sport and Youth Services of West Bengal State, was admitted in a city hospital in Kolkata for lung infection.

An official of the Department of West Bengal’s Transport Ministry said the minister died on Monday morning at 11.35 a.m.

Chakraborty, during his tenure as the head of the Sports Department in 2008 April had organized Indo-Burmese friendship football matches, in a bid to highlight the Burmese struggle for democracy.

The football matches were played between India’s premier club Kingfisher’s East Bengal junior team and the football team of the New Delhi-based Burmese Independent media, Mizzima. The Burmese football team also played against Kolkata’s Jadavpur University students.

While the soccer matches were aimed to promote Indo-Burmese people to people relationship, it also highlighted the case of 34 Burmese rebels, who were arrested in 1998 from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and are now lodged in Kolkata’s Presidency jail and facing court trial.

The late minister, during the opening ceremony of the football match last year called on the Indian government to release the rebels as they were not gun runners, as accused by the prosecution, but freedom fighters fighting against rogue military rulers of Burma.

“They [the rebels] were helping RAW, [India’s external security agency]. But six of them were shot dead while coming to the Andaman Islands,” said the late minister, expressing concern that they rebels might not get fair trial and called on the Indian government to release them.

The 34 Burmese rebels, who are Arakan and Karen ethnic groups from Burma, were arrested in early 1998 in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands by Indian security forces, who accused them of gun-running.

But the rebels said, they were freedom fighters waging war against the Burmese military regime and had been betrayed by Indian intelligence, who had promised to allow them a base at one of the Islands of the Andaman and Nicobar in exchange for monitoring Chinese naval activities in the Bay of Bengal.