In Memory of Gautam Sen
Gautam Sen passed away early today (25 May 2021). This is a personal note. I have written one in Bangla earlier, and this is a slightly amplified version of the same. My association with Comrade Sen goes back to 1980, though in the last one decade (2011-2021) we met rather infrequently, and talked little. This was not due to estrangement, but due to different ways of organisational functioning which made us engage less with each other. Gautam Sen was a student radical at the Durgapur RE College, who went on to join the CPI(ML), and to become a very close associate of Mahadev Mukherjee at that stage. Because of the RE college connection he told me jokingly, ‘I was a year senior to Vinod [Misra] so I want an hour in private with him, to ask certain questions which I will not tell you people'. Subsequently, from the late 1970s, he would move away from a range of CPI(ML) positions—the question of ‘Authority’, new democratic revolution, and while continuing to accept the capi...