He paid price for dumping mandolin, picking gun

Others speak of this son of an Army Major as a rebel, revolutionary, editor, writer, scholar, historian, musician. And perhaps the only extremist whose scholarly work is read in a university in the same state which shot him dead yesterday.

But then, many agree, Saket Rajan hardly fits your stereotype of a Naxalite.

‘‘I can’t imagine a gun in his hands, not the Saket I knew,’’ says Dr Lingaraj Gandhi, Professor of English at Mysore University. ‘‘I want to remember him playing his mandolin, intensely as he used

Saket and Gandhi studied together and grew into inseparable friends. Gandhi became a professor at Mysore University while Saket took the Naxalite trail. His parents had expected him to become an engineer.

But that was his first rebellion. He dropped out of his B.Tech course and chose to study literature instead. He then studied Communications at IIMC, New Delhi.

‘‘He had many parts. An intensely private man, a serious thinker, a college Romeo, a great player of the mandolin, a yoga exponent. And a complete rebel who was also very soft-spoken and sensitive,’’ recalls Gandhi, who shared a room with Saket for four years, and later jointly authored a book with him on tribals.

Saket read voraciously, and widely. Gandhi recalls the terrible impact that Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of The Earth had on Saket. ‘‘I was confused, but he was beginning to make up his mind.’’

In Delhi, Saket networked with the extreme-Left intellectual circuit. Then there was no looking back.

‘‘He became an executive member of our All India Revolutionary Students Union (AIRSU) in 1985, and editor of its national journal,’’ recalls Vara Vara Rao, poet and official spokesman of the CPI (Maoists). By then, Saket was writing for several newspapers and had authored a two-volume research effort on Karnataka’s history. ‘‘Parts of this work are now being taught at Mangalore University,’’ Prof Gandhi disclosed.

Assisting Saket at AIRSU was Rajeswari, a young journalism graduate. They lived together for 11 years, moving from one Naxalite hideout to another. Then four years ago Rajeswari, who was editing Vanita Vimukti, the women’s journal of the Naxalite movement, was shot dead by police.

Saket’s Army Major-father used to plead with Gandhi to ask his son to return to the fold. It never happened and the father died, leaving Saket’s mother to stay alone in an ancestral mansion in Mysore.

When he was killed, his mother stayed away. She had not set eyes on him in 15 years and could not bare to see him with bullet holes.

Buried beneath the announcement of the encounter was a small detail that few knew. Rao says that in all these years, Saket had not taken part in any ‘action’—a killing or attack in Naxalite parlance. He had lived with armed men in the jungles and hideouts. But Saket worked with his pen, not a gun, though he died from it.