BY JONATHAN STRAUSS
Ashok Manohar, general secretary of the Lal Nishan Party (Leninist) of Maharashtra state, India, died in Pune on July 31 after a massive heart attack. He was only 54.
Manohar started his political journey in the early 1970s as part of a left-wing political tendency known as the Magowa group. After organising landless tribal people in Dhule district, he joined the Lal Nishan Party in 1976. Through LNP-associated unions he organised and led factory, municipal and sugar mill workers in Pune and neighbouring districts. He was involved in the historic 1982 textile workers' strike in Mumbai.
In 1988, Manohar became a member of the LNP central committee. He vigorously opposed the party's tilt towards the capitalist Congress party and played a key role in the eventual formation of the LNP(L).
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Manohar took up the challenge of revitalising the Indian communist movement. As general secretary of the LNP(L), he laid great emphasis on the political consolidation of the trade union movement. At the time of his death, he was in the midst of a massive state-wide campaign demanding reopening of closed sugar mills in the state.
In the early 1990s, Manohar came into contact with the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). Close ideological and political ties developed between the revolutionary parties, sustained by mutual discussions and joint campaigns. Manohar contributed to CPI(ML)'s journal, Liberation, and to its educational endeavours. He supported the activities of the revolutionary peasant movement in Bihar and the All India Central Council of Trade Unions. Representating the Democratic Socialist Party, I met Manohar and other members of the LNP(L) at the end of May 2001 in Pune and Mumbai. Manohar's leadership of the LNP(L) was reflected in the party's creative political thinking and capacity for open discussion, its varied political activities and its strong organisational base.
Manohar was considered the first among equals. He possessed extraordinary political and personal generosity. The memory of Ashok Manohar's communist spirit will continue to inspire revolutionaries everywhere to carry forward the struggle for a better world.
From Green Left Weekly, August 27, 2003.
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