Shankar Guha Niyogi

The anti-mechanisation campaign in Dalli-Rajhar The anti-mechanisation movement in the iron mines was one of the distinctive campaigns for which Dalli-Rajhara became known as the nerve centre of the workers’ struggle. I was there during the intense last phase of this movement. At the time these events occurred, Chhattisgarh was a part of the state of Madhya Pradesh. It was[Read More...]

Six prosperous doctors of different generations in my family inspired me to be a doctor. After I entered Medical College, the Medical College Democratic Students’ Association taught me to dream anew of being a very different kind of doctor…a doctor like Dr. Norman Bethune, like Dr. Dwarkanath Kotnis. But where would I go? There was no anti-Franco resistance in Spain[Read More...]

This article was published in a book Social Movements in Contemporary India edited by SK Chaube in 1996 Many small Nadis join to make the Mahanadi. This statement of Shankar Guha Niyogi, the architect and the ideologue of the Chhattisgarh movement under the red –green banner of Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha (CMM), explains the motif of its slogan, ‘A New Chhattisgarh for a[Read More...]

Shankar Guha Niyogi was a leader with immense integrity and political purpose-fulness in life. And I am aware that I am not the right person to write about him. But since certain memories haunt me, I feel it may be good to relieve myself by writing about him. The time was 1979-80. My mind was filled with Marxian politics and[Read More...]