Anuradha and Kobad Ghandy were among the several educated youth who, in the ’70s, gave up a life of comfort to live with the poor. Only, the couple never went back to their old lives. Their names have now resurfaced after Ghandy, 63, politburo member of the banned CPI(Maoist), was arrested in Delhi last week. Charged for spreading the organisation’s influence in urban areas, he has been sent to 14 days’ judicial custody by a Delhi court.

Ghandy was born in 1947 to Nargis and Adi Ghandy, a rich Parsi couple. Adi was a top executive in a pharmaceutical company and an ice cream magnate. Ghandy had a comfortable childhood—from his Worli Sea Face bungalow to his education at Doon School, Mumbai’s St Xavier’s College and chartered accountancy in London.

It was 1970, and Ghandy was 23, already influenced by the idea of a revolution by the poor. Leaving his charted accountancy course midway, he returned to Bombay with a thirst to understand the Indian society’s idea of justice. P.A. Sebastian, Ghandy’s associate in the late 1970s, says, “London was one of the centres of the global protests against the Vietnam War. Kobad read mainstream literature and journalism and disagreed with it.”

Upon returning, Ghandy turned his discontent—fuelled by the human rights violations of the Emergency—into a cause, participated in sporadic civil liberties movements and established the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR) in 1978. Activist Asghar Ali Engineer, friend of the couple and member of CPDR, recalls the meetings outside Rajabhai Tower of the then Bombay University campus: “We discussed issues ranging from the Albanian revolution to local human rights violations. Even though Kobad was a man of few words, he had a way with them.” Ghandy wrote for economic journals and newspapers under a pseudonym, Arvind. Activist Jyoti Punwani, who then edited CPDR’s magazine Adhikar Raksha, says he wrote about the economic exploitation of the poor.

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