Remembering Sumit: A gentle, radical journalist, who tried to continue his father's legacy

By Rajiv Shah 

This is about Sumit Chakravartty, who passed away in Kolkata last Saturday. One of the most unassuming colleagues during my Patriot-Link days in Delhi, which lasted from 1979 to 1993, Sumit, as we would address him, was perhaps the most polite and soft-spoken among all others.

Upon his return from Moscow, where he served as Patriot-Link's foreign correspondent around the time I joined Link as a sub-editor on January 1, 1979—my first day as a journalist—Sumit took on the role of special correspondent, covering foreign affairs and the Left parties.

I remember Sumit as a deeply ideologically driven person, emotionally discussing workers' struggles on one hand and condemning "American imperialism" on the other, while unwaveringly defending the Soviet Union. So emotionally charged was he that, I recall, during a protest by Patriot-Link workers against the paper's transition to computers in the early 1980s—perhaps the first to do it in Delhi—Sumit was one of the few journalists who joined workers in shouting slogans against management. It's worth noting that a compromise was eventually reached, allowing linotype workers to be retrained for computers and move to a spacious, air-conditioned room.

After Sumit returned from Moscow, Vinod Taksal took his place, and after Vinod’s tenure ended, I was sent to Moscow. Before my departure in early 1986, Sumit (if I remember correctly, he had already left Patriot-Link to join The Daily by then) gave me valuable advice about Moscow. He invited me to his home and, as I was about to leave, handed me a sky-blue windcheater, saying it would be useful for the mild Moscow winter. "I don't have any use for it," he said, wishing me the best of luck with my new assignment.

A die-hard pro-Soviet and often quite vocal in criticizing the Left, too, Sumit knew most Communist leaders personally. Strongly critical of the BJP, his political reports were filled with emotionally charged terms like "imperialism," "fascism," "Left adventurism," and so on. However, in personal conversations, he was extremely polite and unusually eager to befriend everyone he met.

I had no interaction with him between 1986 and 1993, while I was working as a foreign correspondent in Moscow. On my return to India in April 1993, I was looking for opportunities, as Patriot-Link was financially struggling after veteran freedom fighter Aruna Asaf Ali, who controlled the papers, turned down an offer from the Ambanis to take over. As part of my search, I met Sumit.

By then, Sumit seemed to have taken over Mainstream weekly, a Left-of-center periodical that had been running for decades under the leadership of his father, Nikhil Chakravartty (1913–1998). After Nikhil's passing, the responsibility of running the weekly appeared to fall on Sumit.

In 1993, I met Sumit at the Mainstream office in Gole Market, Delhi. I asked if he could connect me with someone in Delhi’s media who could offer me a reasonable opportunity. He politely replied, "Sure! They need someone who understands foreign affairs, which you do, given your Moscow experience. I'll get back to you..."

Soon after, I met Dilip Padgaonkar, the editor-in-chief of The Times of India. Dilip had approached me in Moscow, but since I was already working full-time with Patriot-Link and the Times wanted a stringer, nothing worked out. "If not Moscow, why not Ahmedabad?" he asked me, and I agreed. I then moved to Ahmedabad, and, to my regret, I never reached out to Sumit again.

Searching for information about Sumit online was difficult. I found only two media obituaries—one by veteran journalist Anand Sahay in The Wire and another by VK Cherian in a Facebook post. Anand’s obituary offers a personal, impressionistic account of Sumit, while Cherian’s suggests that Sumit’s professional career was overshadowed by his father.

To quote Cherian, Sumit took over Mainstream after his father’s death in 1998 and transitioned it into a digital journal "as old funders, mostly his father's friends, dried up." Cherian went on to explain that under Nikhil’s leadership, Mainstream had been like the Seminar magazine of Romesh Thapar—intellectual, cerebral, and in-depth. Nikhil was a person who "used to have breakfast" with Indira Gandhi and PV Narasimha Rao when they were Prime Ministers. 

Cherian also mentioned that Nikhil had close ties with the Soviet establishment and was instrumental in sending CPI leaders on a submarine to meet Stalin in the 1950s. Sumit, too, had witnessed that secret entry as a boy. Cherian noted that while Nikhil had no shortage of funding, Sumit had the significant burden of maintaining his father’s legacy and securing funding, which is why the weekly transitioned to a digital edition.

Sumit’s mother, Renu Chakravartty (1917–1994), was also a prominent figure in the Left movement. A women’s leader and a member of Parliament from the Communist Party of India in the 1950s and 1960s, she played a crucial role in the movement.

So who will edit Mainstream now? It was a one-person army under Sumit. I don't know  about the future of a journal originally founded by Nikhil Chakravartty, a doyen of Indian journalism. I tried searching the site to find out if a detailed obituary of Sumit exists on it, but to no avail.