Comrade Hasmai Reang

COMRADE Hasmai Reang, member of CPI(M) Tripura state committee and central executive council member of Tripura Upajati Ganamukti Parishad (GMP) passed away on June 6 at his house at Sikaribari under Ambassa Sub-Division, Dhalai district of Tripura. He was 64 years old and had been suffering from throat cancer for the last few years. He is survived by his wife and eight sons and daughters.

The CPI(M) state secretariat and the GMP council have deeply condoled the demise of Comrade Hasmai Reang and expressed their heartfelt sympathy with his bereaved family.

A former legislator, Comrade Reang was a beloved leader of the tribal and non-tribal people of Ambassa and Kamalpur sub-divisions of Dhalai. Though simple, suave and sober, he was at the frontline of hard struggle for ethnic harmony and upliftment of the masses. Comrade Hasmai Reang came from a shifting cultivator family at Kanchanpur, North Tripura, with the family having moved to Dhalai in the fifties in search of cultivable land.

Comrade Reang had social and political leanings right from his boyhood. He joined the GMP and later on the undivided communist party. He joined the CPI(M) following the division in 1964. He was elected a CPI(M) legislator from the Kulai Assembly Constituency of Dhalai District in 1993. He played a vital role in organising the mixed population of the entire Kamalpur sub-division including the remote Gandachhara area against the oppressive forest administration under the Congress regime. He had to suffer police persecution on numerous occasions without compromising in the least on the mass movement. As a member of Tripura Legislative Assembly he was always vociferous in the House on behalf of the common people including the poor shifting cultivators.