Anuradha Ghandy lecture

Despite threats from a right-wing organization to disrupt the talk, the ninth Anuradha Ghandy (pictured) Memorial Lecture was conducted smoothly, with about 100 attendees at the Mumbai Marathi Patrakar Sangh, on October 13, 2017. The Lecture is conducted every year in honor of Ghandy, wife of jailed Maoist leader Kobad Ghandy. Anuradha passed away in 2008 of cerebral malaria while working with tribal women in Jharkhand.

Speakers at the lecture were revolutionary poet and writer Vara Vara Rao from Andhra Pradesh and veteran left-wing leader Tilak Dasgupta from West Bengal. Dasgupta described the Naxal movement, which completed 50 years this year, as "one that is about the revolutionary seizure of power by the people.”
On October 10, members of a group called Legal Rights Observatory wrote to the Bombay police commissioner urging that the scheduled Lecture to be held by a "notorious anti-Indian terror group” be cancelled, according to news reports. The Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Committee faced threats from the right-wing in 2012 too when author and activist Arundhati Roy was to speak at St Xavier’s College. The police had warned the organizers that the Shiv Sena may disrupt the event. "But we carried on with the lecture anyway,” Gurbir Singh, a member of the Committee was reported as saying, on the news website scroll.in on October 18.