Kobad Ghandy (born 1951) is an Indian communist activist. He became involved in revolutionary politics whilst a student in England in the 1970s, and worked as an organizer for the civil rights movement in India. He was a founding member of the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights. He was arrested on the accusation of being a politburo member of the underground Communist Party of India (Maoist) in 2009. He was acquitted and released after almost a decade in jail in 2019. [1][2]
Kobad Ghandy was born to Nergis and Adi. Adi was a senior finance executive in Glaxo. He hails from a wealthy Parsi family in Mumbai.[3] Ghandy attended The Doon School and later St. Xavier's College, Mumbai.[4] He went to Cambridge University, England[5] to pursue a course in chartered accountancy but got initiated in radical politics, was deeply influenced by the revolutionary ideology and returned to India with his course unfinished.[6]
Upon his return to India, he became active in revolutionary politics in Maharashtra.[7] He was the founding member of Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights.[8] He spent the late 1970s and early 1980s in Nagpur, working as a CPDR organizer.[9]
Ghandy was elevated to the Politburo of the CPI(Maoist) at the 2007 Unity Congress.[7] He was placed in charge of the CPI(M) Central Committee sub-committee on mass organisations and was responsible for the production of English-language party materials.[7] He was expelled from the party in December 2021 for his anti-party statement in his book Fractured Freedom: A Prison Memoir, over charges of straying from the party line of dialectical materialism, embracing spiritualism and bourgeois idealism.[11][12]
He was arrested in South Delhi[13] on the 17 September 2009 while undergoing treatment for cancer.[14][7] His arrest was made public on September 21, 2009.[7] Per a statement by CPI(Maoist) the arrest had occurred after Ghandy had been betrayed by a party courier.[7] Ghandy had made a visit to the guerrilla zone prior to his arrest.[7] He was released from prison on bail in 2019, after serving a majority of his jail term in Vishakapatnam Central Jail. [15]
Kobad Ghandy married Anuradha Shanbag in 1977[6][16][17] She was also a Central Committee member of CPI(Maoist).[6] She died of cerebral malaria in April 2008[6] in the jungles of Dandakaranya in Central India.
