ਹਰਕਿਸ਼ਨ ਸਿੰਘ ਸੁਰਜੀਤਹਰਕਿਸ਼ਨ ਸਿੰਘ ਸੁਰਜੀਤ

Harkishan Singh Surjeet (23 March 1916 to 1 August 2008) was a communist leader from Bundala village in Jalandhar district, Punjab, who rose from the freedom movement and the Punjab farmers' movement to serve as general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) from 1992 to 2005.

Early life in Bundala, Jalandhar

Surjeet was born on 23 March 1916 in Bundala, a village in the Phillaur area of Jalandhar district, in a Sikh Jat farming family whose family name was Bassi. Bundala, in the Doaba region between the Beas and the Sutlej, later became known in Punjab's political memory for the number of communist workers it produced, and Surjeet was its best known son. He studied at the village school in his early years before politics took over his life while he was still a schoolboy.

The event that shaped him was the execution of Bhagat Singh in March 1931. Surjeet, then in his early teens, became a follower of Bhagat Singh and in 1930 joined the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, the youth organisation Bhagat Singh had founded. From that point his life followed a single track: first the movement against British rule, then the organisation of Punjab's farmers and agricultural labourers, and finally national politics in Delhi.

A teenager in the freedom movement

In March 1932, at the age of 16, Surjeet hoisted the Indian tricolour at the district court in Hoshiarpur. He was arrested and sent to a reformatory school for young offenders. After his release he came into contact with the early communist organisers in Punjab. The CPI(M)'s own profile dates his joining the Communist Party to 1934, and in 1935 he also became a member of the Congress Socialist Party; some summaries give 1936 for his joining the Communist Party of India, and the difference is noted here rather than hidden.

The party's profile records a hard early life of prison and hiding: in total he spent ten years in jail, eight of them before independence, and eight years underground. Externed from Punjab in 1938, he went to Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh and started a monthly paper, Chingari, and he also published Dukhi Duniya in the pre-war years. Arrested in 1940 after going underground at the start of the Second World War, he was held for three months in solitary confinement in Lahore Fort and then in the Deoli detention camp until 1944. During the violence of Partition in 1947 he worked for harmony between communities in Punjab, and by then he was secretary of the Communist Party in Punjab.

Building the farmers' movement in Punjab

Surjeet's lasting base in Punjab was the kisan movement, the organised movement of farmers. He was a co-founder of the Kisan Sabha in Punjab and was elected secretary of the Punjab State Kisan Sabha in 1938. His work among farmers later carried him to the top of the All India Kisan Sabha, where he served for long periods as general secretary and then as president, and he also worked with the Agricultural Workers Union.

In 1959 he led the Punjab farmers' campaign against the betterment levy, a charge the state government had placed on land in the Bhakra canal area, and the campaign became one of the best known peasant struggles of the decade in Punjab. Just after independence he had again been forced underground for about four years, when communist leaders were detained under preventive detention laws, so his rise in open politics came only in the 1950s.

From the CPI split to the CPI(M) Polit Bureau

In January 1954 Surjeet was elected to the Central Committee and the Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India at its third congress. He was elected to the Punjab Legislative Assembly in 1954 and served until 1959. When the Communist Party of India split in 1964, Surjeet sided with the new Communist Party of India (Marxist), and he was one of the nine members of its first Polit Bureau. He was elected to the Punjab Assembly again in 1967, serving until 1972, and he sat in the Rajya Sabha from 10 April 1978 to 9 April 1984.

For three decades he also headed the CPI(M)'s international department, building links with communist and other parties abroad. At home, his books set out his positions and his party's history: Land Reforms in India, Happenings in Punjab and Outline History of the Communist Party, alongside many pamphlets on current questions. Through the difficult years of violence in Punjab in the 1980s and early 1990s, he argued for the unity of India and for politics kept separate from religion, a position his party records with pride and which cost many Punjab communists their lives in those years.

How did a Punjab farmers' leader become a central figure in national coalition politics?

He became a central figure because, as CPI(M) general secretary from 1992, he was willing to build broad political arrangements with parties very different from his own in order to keep governments in place. His party records key roles for him in the political formations of 1989, 1996 and 2004. In 1996 to 1998 the United Front governed India with outside support that he helped to assemble, and after the 2004 election the Left parties supported the United Progressive Alliance government from outside, an arrangement Prime Minister Manmohan Singh later described by calling Surjeet one of the architects of the UPA.

That coalition role rested on long personal familiarity. By the 1990s Surjeet had known most of India's senior politicians for decades, across party lines, and leaders sought his advice even when they disagreed with his party. Obituaries in 2008 returned to the same picture: a leader in a white turban and simple clothes, living plainly, whose influence came less from office, which he never held in the Union government, than from negotiation, patience and memory.

General secretary, final years and legacy

Surjeet was elected general secretary of the CPI(M) in 1992, succeeding E. M. S. Namboodiripad, and he held the post until 2005, retiring at the age of 89 and handing over to Prakash Karat. He remained a member of the Polit Bureau until April 2008, when, with his health failing, he was not included in the new Polit Bureau at the party's nineteenth congress and was instead made a special invitee to the Central Committee, the first time since 1964 that he was outside that body.

He died on 1 August 2008, aged 92, at the Metro Hospital in Noida, where he had been admitted on 25 July; some reports of the day described the place of death simply as New Delhi. He was cremated in Delhi on 3 August 2008 with state honours. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in his condolence message, called him a great political leader and a man committed to the welfare of the poorest, and said he had valued his friendship and guidance.

Surjeet's legacy has two parts. In Punjab, he is remembered as the best known product of Bundala and of the kisan movement, a leader who began as a teenage follower of Bhagat Singh and spent eight years in British jails before independence. In national politics, he is remembered as the CPI(M)'s general secretary through the coalition era of the 1990s and 2000s, when a party that never joined the Union government still shaped who governed India. Few Indian politicians of his generation worked at both levels, the village meeting and the Delhi negotiation, for as long as he did.