OBITUARY: NIHAR MUKHERJEE (1920-2010)
Gopal Kundu
Comrade Nihar Mukherjee, General Secretary, SUCI (Socialist Unity Center of India)-Communist, a great revolutionary, freedom fighter and comrade-in-arms of Comrade Shibdas Ghosh, Founder General Secretary of the Party, after prolonged illness, breathed his last on 18 February, 2010 at 11 p.m. at the Calcutta Heart Clinic & Hospital. He was suffering from, among other serious ailments, sepsis with multi-organ failure, COPD and Parkinsonism. Comrade Mukherjee was 90.
After demise of Comrade Shibdas Ghosh in 1976, Comrade Nihar Mukherjee succeeded him as the General Secretary of the Party. Since then, under his leadership, the Party conducted many important mass movements not only in the national sphere but also in the international sphere. In both First and Second Congress of the Party held in 1988 and 2009 respectively, Comrade Mukherjee was re-elected as the General Secretary.
In his very early teens, he was drawn into the vortex of the Indian freedom struggle and joined Anushilan Samity, a revolutionary organization, where he came in close contact of Comrade Shibdas Ghosh.
When within Anusilan Samity a cult of Marxism-Leninism was released by a section of freedom fighters in the late 1930s, he associated himself with that. During the ‘Quit India’ movement in 1942, he, then underground, was arrested in Calcutta and spent three long years in the British jail. While Comrade Shibdas Ghosh initiated inside the jail the process of building up SUCI as a genuine communist party by concretizing Marxism-Leninism on the soil, Comrade Mukherjee engaged himself in that arduous struggle as a revolutionary compatriot of Comrade Shibdas Ghosh. In those days of hard struggle of party building process which culminated in the foundation of SUCI in 1948, Comrade Nihar Mukherjee, as close comrade-in-arms of Comrade Shibdas Ghosh, played a very significant role.
After independence, Comrade Nihar Mukherjee, as the then West Bengal State Secretary of the Party had, under the guidance of Comrade Shibdas Ghosh, played a decisive role in developing united left democratic movements in West Bengal. In course of that, Comrade Mukherjee emerged as a front-ranking leader of united left ovement and while leading the mass struggles, was imprisoned several times during Congress rule. He was also detained in the jail for one year in 1962 under the Indian National Security Act. In his death, the country has lost a life-long revolutionary of rare mettle and a front ranking leader of left-democratic movement.
Comrade Mukherjee’s body will be kept at the party’s central office at 48, Lenin Sarani, Kolkata 700013 on Monday, 22 February, 2010 from 10 a.m. onwards. His last journey will commence on the same day at 3 p.m.
and proceed to Keoratola burning ghat.
(Office Secretary, Central Committee, SUCI [Communist])