Pash
Avtar Singh Sandhu, the revolutionary poet of the Naxalite years, killed at 37.
Avtar Singh Sandhu, who wrote as Pash, was born at Talwandi Salem near Jalandhar into a farming family. He was drawn to the Naxalite movement as a teenager and was jailed at nineteen on a false murder charge; his first collection, Loh Katha, 'Iron Tale', came out while he was in prison and made him famous.
His poems are short, hard and furious. They speak in the voice of the peasant and the labourer against the police, the landlord and the comfortable middle class, and against the deadening of hope. His most famous poem says that the most dangerous thing is not the police beating or the betrayal of friends but the death of our dreams. It is taught, quoted and painted on walls across India.
In the 1980s he wrote against the violence of both the state and the militants and was on hit lists from more than one side. He was shot dead by militants in his village on 23 March 1988, the anniversary of Bhagat Singh's execution. He was thirty-seven.
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