Calcutta, Sept. 9: The communist cubs are sticking to their dictum of “catch them young” but a few others have acknowledged that school students should not be dragged out of classrooms and herded to rallies.

“In the history of student movements, no student has taken permission from their parents to attend rallies and meetings. This is absurd,” Kaustuv Chatterjee, the state president of CPM student wing SFI, said this evening.

Chatterjee did not mention that children of many communist leaders have studied or are studying in “bourgeois” schools where bunking class to attend rallies can trigger consequences that parents would not call “absurd”.

“If there are issues related to students, who is going to raise them? We have our school units and the agenda is explained to the students. We don’t force students to attend,” Chatterjee said.

If force is not being used, the children of Bengal must be among the most enlightened in the world. Consider some of the issues that have drawn children to the CPM’s rallies: American imperialism and the bombing of Hiroshima. Never mind some of them headed to the US or worked for clients there when they grew up.

Communist regimes could rarely resist the temptation to indoctrinate children. If Russia had the Komsomol and the Little Octobrists, China came up with the Young Pioneers.

In India, as early as in 1943, the undivided Communist Party set up the Kishore Bahini (the poet Sukanta Bhattacharya, an uncle of former chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, was involved with the organisation then).

The Bahini was primarily meant to court children from Left-leaning families and under-privileged sections.

After the party split, Kishore Bahini went through a lull before it was revived with a launch at Salt Lake stadium in 1985 with then chief minister Jyoti Basu in attendance. The mover and shaker of the newly revived organisation was the late CPM leader Subhas Chakraborty.

CPM leaders pointed out that in 1966 when Sheikh Nurul Islam, idolised by the party, fell to police bullets during a protest in Basirhat, he was a school student. It was in this spirit, they added, that the Kishore Bahini was revived. The Bahini now has 1,576 units in the state with around 1 lakh members.

But Pijush Dhar, the Mukhya Sangathak of Kishore Bahini, said there was nothing political and “we teach children the cultural values of our country”.

A jarring note came from the Left camp. “Bringing children to rallies is something wrong. All political organisations must put a stop to such practices,” said Samar Chakraborty, the general secretary of the CPM-backed All Bengal Primary Teachers’ Association.

The organisation will hold a convention on September 18 where it will call upon all parties to keep students away from political meetings.

Trinamul Chhatra Parishad state president Shankudeb Panda said his party leadership had not given permission to run any school unit.