Mumbai To Host Finale Of BTR Birth Centenary Celebrations

P R Krishnan

THE finale of Comrade B T Ranadive birth centenary celebrations will be held in Mumbai on December 20, 2004. The Maharashtra state council of the CITU has formed a celebration committee for this purpose and the work is going on in full swing.

It may be recalled as per the call given in the all India conference of CITU, held in Chennai in 2003, the birth centenary celebrations of Comrade B T Ranadive, the founder president of CITU, have taken place in many parts of the country and are still taking place in several other centres.

The state council meeting of the CITU was attended by CITU president M K Pandhe and CITU secretary and MP, Jibon Roy. The meeting was chaired by Prabhakar Sanzgiri, president of the state committee of CITU while state general secretary K L Bajaj presented a report about the activities in this behalf.

In the run up to the Mumbai programme, meetings and seminars have been planned and are being held in different parts of Maharashtra. Through these meetings and seminars, an intensive political campaign highlighting the life and teachings of B T Ranadive is being carried on in the state.

The Mumbai programme, to be held in Shanmukhananda Hall, will be inaugurated by CITU president Dr M K Pandhe while CITU general secretary Chittabrata Mazumdar will deliver the keynote address. Among those who will greet the participants will be CITU former president E Balanandan and CITU former general secretary Samar Mukherjee and CITU vice president R Umanath.

The BTR centenary programme in Mumbai will include a commemorative function of Jeevan Marg, the CPI(M) Maharashtra state committee weekly being brought out since the last 40 years. An attractive calendar will be brought out by the weekly on this occasion for distribution. It would contain the portraits of leading communist and progressive leaders such as Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Min, Mahatma Phule, Bhagat Singh, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, A K Gopalan, B T Ranadive and Godavari Parulekar. The Marathi edition of BTR’s book The Freedom Struggle and After brought out by the Janashakti Publications will be released on the occasion. BTR’s famous article on ‘Right to Work’, translated in Marathi, will also be re-issued on this occasion.

The celebration committee formed for the successful holding of this programme comprises of all the state committee office bearers of CITU besides the representatives from other mass organisations. Prabhakar Sanzgiri is the chairman and K L Bajaj is the convenor of this committee.

The leaders included in the committee from the other mass organisations are Dr Ashok Dhawale and Krishna Khopkar (AIKS), Kumar Shiralkar and Prakash Chaudhary (AIAWU), Mariam Dhawale and Kiran Moghe (AIDWA), Shubha Shamim (Anganwadi Mahila Karmachari Sanghatana), Sailendera Kamble and Adv Vijay Patil (DYFI), Dr Maharudra Dakke and Ajay Burande (SFI), P R Menon and S K Bose (NRMU), Dr Kishor Theckedath and Professor Tapati Mukhopadhaya (BUCTU), G M V Nayak and Anil Prabhu (BEFI), Jitendra Deshmukh and Surendra Nalawade (Medical Representatives), Nitin Jadhav (Airport Authority Employees Union), R Ramanathan (Editor, The Air Worker), Naresh Birwadkar (Forward Seamens Union), Bhooshan Patil (NSBKS), Madan Naik (Bhadekary Kriti Samiti), Professor Ram Sagar Pande (Janwadi Lekhak Sangh), Subhash Thorat and Keshav Acharya (Sanskritik Manch), Professor Ramesh Chandra Patkar (Lok Manch) and Professor Sudhir Pranajpe (Indian School of Social Sciences).