Rise! Resist! Liberate!

REVOLUTIONARY DEMOCRATIC FRONT (RDF) Press Release, 18 July 2012

Red salute to Comrade Goru Madhava Rao,

the veteran mass leader of the Indian revolution!

Comrade Goru Madhava Rao, a veteran revolutionary mass leader of Andhra Pradesh, passed away today in the afternoon of 18 July 2012. He was 87 years of age. He hailed from Jinkibhadra village in Srikakulam district in Andhra Pradesh. He steeled his temper as a worker from a very young age, as his family migrated to Titagarh near Kolkata when he was in his teens. Following his father who worked in the jute and textile mills of Titagarh and Kolkata, Goru Madhava Rao started his life as a worker at a tender age. Subsequently when Naxalbari and Srikakulam movements gave a call to the workers, peasants and the youth to join the revolutionary struggle, he readily moved from the factory to the revolutionary fields of Srikakulam armed peasant struggle. In his highly active political life spanning over the last half a century, Comrade Goru Madhav Rao served the revolutionary and democratic movement in many parts of the country, sometimes openly and at times clandestinely.

Comrade Goru Madhava Rao fought along with Adibatla Kailasam, Satyam and other great leaders of the Srikakulam revolutionary armed peasant uprising that started in 1969 following the Naxalbari revolutionary armed struggle in 1967. In 1970 he was implicated in the infamous Parvathipuram Conspiracy Case and spent seven years in prison. He was released only after the withdrawal of the Emergency. While being in jail, he fought against the left-extremist and right-opportunist trends within the revolutionary movement and strived to establish the correct revolutionary path.

Comrade Goru Madhava Rao served as the Vice-president of Andhra Pradesh Raitu Coolie Sangham (Landless Peasants’ Organisation) and contributed in its transformation into a powerful revolutionary mass organisation. Goru Madhava Rao addressed a massive conference and public rally in March 1992 in Kolkata jointly organised by 55 mass organisations that came together for the first time in the history of revolutionary mass movement in the backdrop of heavy repression unleashed by the Indian state in the aftermath of Rajiv Gandhi assassination in the name of curbing terrorism. He was the founding President of All India Peoples’ Resistance Forum (AIPRF) which was formed in 1992 after the government imposed ban on several mass organisations for the first time in history in Andhra Pradesh and Bihar. He stayed in Kolkata for four months to forge unity of the revolutionary mass movement, which took shape in the form of AIPRF. He served as the All India President of AIPRF between 1992 and 1996 for four years. Under his presidentship AIPRF spread all across the country and established live contact with nationality movements of Kashmir, Naga, Manipur, Assam and other regions.

Apart from organising lakhs of people against the Dunkel Draft and WTO and against World Bank policies, AIPRF also organised an international Seminar on the Nationality Question wherein about 20 nationality movements from four continents participated. This historic seminar conducted for four days in New Delhi paved the way for people to people relation among the democratic and revolutionary movement and the nationality movements in South Asia.

In April this year at the age of 87 he inaugurated the first All India Conference of the Revolutionary Democratic Front (RDF) held in Hyderabad. In this context it is necessary to recall that RDF emerged as the amalgamation of more revolutionary mass organisations with AIPRF for the founding of which Comrade Goru Madahava Rao was instrumental. His life-long dream to establish the revolutionary mass movement at an all India level has come to reality with the successful completion of the first conference of RDF in his presence before he breathed his last.

Comrade Goru Madhava Rao was a close associate of veteran revolutionaries like Kondapalli Seetaramaiah and Prakash Master. Though he had limited formal education, he studied Marxism-Leninism-Maoism at a greater depth and spoke and addressed massive public meetings and conferences in several Indian languages including Bengali, Hindi apart from Telugu and other languages. He played a crucial role in bringing out revolutionary magazines like The Vanguard and worked as its editor for several years. He ran Diksoochi Publications and published a large amount of revolutionary literature which immensely contributed to the spread of the movement. He always lent his name for publishing revolutionary literature throughout his life even after he became unable to edit and publish on his own.

Goru Madhava Rao was an exemplary revolutionary. He served the Indian revolution for half a century. He always won the confidence of the revolutionary and democratic movements, their cadres and leaders. His love for his comrades – from the ordinary activists to the leading figures – was such that he won high respect and affection from everyone involved in the revolutionary and democratic movement. Towards the end of his life Comrade Goru Madhava Rao desired to live in Boddapadu, one of the villages from where he learnt his first revolutionary lessons from Adibatla Kailsasam, Satyam and others and finally he breathed his last in Jinkibhadra today.

Comrade Goru Madhava Rao is no longer with us. But in his martyrdom he has left behind a great communist tradition of revolutionary mass movement and activism which stands as a beacon for all revolutionary and democratic activists and organisations. RDF pays its red homage to Comrade Goru Madhava Rao.

Varavara Rao

President

09676541715

Rajkishore

General Secretary

09717583539

Contact: revolutionarydemocracy@gmail.com