Siraj Sikder
Sirajul Huq Sikder, better known as Siraj Sikder, was a Bangladeshi revolutionary, engineer, and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist insurgent.
Early life
Sikder was born on 27 September 1944 in Lakarta Village, Bhedarganj Upazilla, Shariatpur District, British India. His father, Abdur Razzaq Sikder, belonged to a Bengali Muslim zamindar family in Chhaygaon. His sister Shamim Sikder was an eminent sculptor and a professor at the Dhaka University Faculty of Arts. After passing the matriculation examination from Barisal Zilla School in 1959, he was admitted into Barisal Brojomohun College in 1961 for ISc. He obtained a civil engineering degree from the East Pakistan University of Engineering and Technology in 1967.While he was a student, he became a member of the East Pakistan Student Union. In 1967, he was elected vice-president of the central committee of the Student Union, and later that year, he joined the C & B Department of the government as an engineer. Three months later he left his job to start a private company named Engineering Limited in Teknaf.
Political activity
On 8 January 1968, along with like-minded activists, Sikder formed a clandestine organization named Purba Bangla Sramik Andolon with the objective to lead a struggle against the revisionism of the existing "Communist" organizations and to form a revolutionary Communist Party. This initiative brought forward a thesis that East Bengal is a colony of Pakistan and that the principal contradiction in the society is between the bureaucratic bourgeoisie and feudalists of Pakistan on one hand and the people of East Bengal on the other hand. Only the independence struggle to form an "independent, democratic, peaceful, non-aligned, progressive" People's Republic of East Bengal, free also from the oppression of US imperialism, Soviet social-imperialism, and Indian expansionism, could lead the society forward towards socialism and communism. In late 1968, Sikder left his job to establish the Mao Tse Tung Research Center in Dhaka, but it was later closed down by the Pakistani government. Sikder became a lecturer at the Technical Teachers Training College in Dhaka.In the meantime of war, at a liberated base area named Pearabagan at Bhimruly in Jhalokati District in the southern part of the country, on 3 June 1971, Sikder founded a new party named Purba Banglar Sarbahara Party by the ideology of Marxism and Mao Tsetung Thought. At the start of the war, he went to Barisal and declared it a free living space, establishing it as his base and attempting to spread the revolution to other locations. After the independence of Bangladesh, he turned against the Sheikh Mujib government. In April 1973, he formed Purba Banglar Jatiya Mukti Front and declared war on the Bangladeshi government. Under his leadership, the Sarbahara party carried out attacks against moneylenders and landlords.