When jailed Maoist ideologue Kobad Ghandy steps into a court’s premises, he greets the assembled media persons with the cry, “Long live Anuradha, long live Bhagat Singh.”

Anuradha Shanbag is the dead wife and former comrade of the 63-year-old Communist Party of India (Maoist) ideologue arrested by the Delhi police in August.

In conversations with jail officials at the Central Jail, Tihar, Ghandy has reportedly spoken about Chinese revolutionary and Communist leader Mao Tse Tung, Indian freedom fighter Bhagat Singh and the current stage of Maoism in India.

“Apart from Mao, revolutionary socialist Bhagat Singh is a huge inspiration for me and many others in the party,” Ghandy has reportedly told jail officials.

“Bhagat Singh and we stand for similar causes: complete emancipation of the Indian masses and rejection of all forms of foreign imperialist forces.”

Ghandy argued before them that unlike Singh, the then Congress movement had been ready for a “compromised Independence”.

Ghandy is also believed to have regretted the fact that ideology no longer drives his party’s cadres the way it did in the seventies when he had joined the “movement”.

Ghandy, according to jail officials, thinks of the present-day China as “a capitalist, imperialist state, not communist. It is no longer the beacon of the Naxal movement”.

“The source of China’s disputes with India is that it wants to make the latter a market of its own products and not of America,” Ghandy is believed to have told the officials.

Ghandy reportedly argued that the “Maoists had first been peaceful in organising people’s resistance in the 1960s and the 70s but the police had then began slaughtering them....”