‘It was a grisly sight. The zeal and fervour with which the karsevaks were taking part in the demolition job sent a chill down our spines. Those who had no tools to use were scratching away like madmen with their fingernails on the domes. A few young men tied a noose around the domes and were trying to pull them down.’
When the CPI(M)-led Left Front was swept to power in 1977, Suman was twenty years old. His upbringing in an educated middle-class family, his brief brush with politics during his student days at the Presidency College and his friendship with people, many of whom would later play important roles in politics, enabled Suman to critically watch the world around him change irrevocably. By the time the Left Front firmly dug its political heels in Bengal through its second thumping victory in the 1983 Assembly polls, Suman had taken his first step into journalism.
As a journalist, Suman’s USP has always been his insistence to be at the spot where news breaks, notwithstanding his official position.
He was among the first handful of journalists to be in Kabul, just before the fall of the Soviet-propped regime, he was the first Indian journalist to arrive in Moscow (that too without a valid passport!) as the Soviet regime withered away, he was in Islamabad to cover the Rajiv Gandhi–Benazir Bhutto agreement, he was in the United States covering P.V. Narasimha Rao’s historic visit to that country, which finally set the seal marking the beginning of India’s economic reforms, he covered the demolition of the Babri mosque, he has covered every major Lok Sabha and Bidhan Sabha polls since 1983, across India. Suman had and still has close personal relations some of the leading figures of Indian politics, including, Pranab Mukherjee (who was his father’s student), Jyoti Basu, Priyaranjan Dasmunsi, Mamata Banerjee and Anil Biswas, the architect of the CPI(M)’s stranglehold over Bengal.
In his story are personal insights into all these events and personalities.