SEPTEMBER 25, 2021 marked the birth centenary day of Comrade Prabhakar Sanzgiri. He was born on September 25, 1921 and passed away on March 9, 2009. In him, the Left movement, the CPI(M) and the CITU in Maharashtra lost one of their extraordinary leaders. He joined the Communist Party in 1941 at the age of 20. Sanzgiri devoted 68 of his 87 years to the Communist movement with exemplary devotion.

For most of this period, he was one of the front rank leaders of the Party and CITU. A former Maharashtra state secretary of the CPI(M) and former member of its Central Committee, former state president and state general secretary of the CITU and its former all India vice president, former editor of the state Party weekly Jeewanmarg, an MLA and later MLC of the Party, and a creative Marxist intellectual – he fulfilled all these responsibilities for a prolonged period. His faith in Marxism-Leninism remained unshaken till the end.

VALUABLE IDEOLOGICAL
CONTRIBUTION
Sanzgiri was a creative Marxist thinker. Four of his path breaking books – Anuchya Antarangat (Inside the Atom), Manavachi Kahani (The Story of Man), Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar – A Marxist Appraisal and Charvak te Marx (From Charvak to Marx) not only made a great impression in Maharashtra, but most of them were also translated in many Indian languages and they reached large parts of the country. In each of these books, he creatively analysed the subject under discussion from a Marxist standpoint. Through these books, not only did he ideologically nurture contemporary Left activists, but he also left a treasure trove for coming generations.

For two decades, from 1989 to 2009, he was the editor of Jeewanmarg. His editorials and his column called Prasangic Paramarsh (review of current events) became very popular. His  writings were extremely simple, precise and caustic. This period of two decades saw major changes and challenges in the world, in our country and in the state.

The early nineties saw the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. This was undoubtedly the biggest setback to socialism. Bourgeois ideologues immediately launched a shrill campaign against socialism. Sanzgiri wrote several penetrating articles and editorials in Jeewanmarg strongly defending the validity of Marxism.

During that same period, two major changes took place in our country. On the one hand, the Congress government in 1991 inaugurated the neoliberal policies of imperialist globalisation. On the other hand, communal forces like the RSS, VHP and BJP increased their influence by their Ayodhya Ram Mandir campaign and by demolishing the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 and inciting communal infernos across the land. Sanzgiri, in Jeewanmarg and through various pamphlets, launched a broadside attack on these twin challenges and called upon the Party and the Left to strengthen their resistance to both.

The caste system in India was another special subject of Sanzgiri’s study. He had read widely and thought deeply about it. By carrying forward the works of Comrades B T Ranadive and                  E M S Namboodiripad on caste, Sanzgiri, with his own seminal contribution, helped to change the attitude of the Party in Maharashtra on caste and social issues. Sanzgiri had also made a study of the nationalities question in India. He used to stress that the Party and the Left must make a Marxist evaluation of the great progressive figures in Maharashtra – Chhatrapati Shivaji, Mahatma Jotirao Phule, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar and others – and must strive to carry forward their rich legacy.

LEADER OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY
But Sanzgiri was never merely a Marxist theoretician. He had completely absorbed Lenin’s dictum that Marxism is a guide to action. And that is why he began his political life in the early 1940s as an AISF activist who faced the brutal lathi charges of British sergeants in the freedom struggle. He was a brilliant student, but soon after completing his MSc, he chose to become a full time worker of the Communist Party, under the influence of Marxism. After that there was no looking back.

Sanzgiri thereafter remained in the forefront of numerous struggles and campaigns like the Mumbai textile workers, the Samyukta Maharashtra movement (during which he was the secretary of the Mumbai committee of the undivided CPI), the Goa liberation struggle, the bitter inner-Party struggle against revisionism, his incarceration in jail from 1962-66 along with many other leading communists in Maharashtra and all over the country, the resistance to the Shiv Sena, the establishment of the CITU among the working class of Bhandup, the intense struggles of the CEAT workers, agitations of peasants and agricultural workers in Beed and Pune districts, the battle against the Emergency, the struggle for the renaming of the Marathwada University after Dr Ambedkar, work in the state assembly and the legislative council, struggles on questions of drought and land, the agitations by slum-dwellers and the formation of the Bhadekaru Kriti Samiti, the formation of the Janashakti Co-op Credit Society, campaigns against globalisation and communalism, the successful joint struggle for ousting Enron, and the constant efforts to forge Left and secular unity.

Comrade S Y Kolhatkar was the first state secretary of the CPI(M) in Maharashtra from 1964 to 1983. He was succeeded by Comrade Ahilya Rangnekar from 1983 to 1986. She was perhaps the only woman state secretary of the Party in the country so far. She stepped down for health reasons. After Sanzgiri’s election as state secretary in 1986, one of his important initiatives was the state organisational plenum of the Party at Nashik in January 1991, which mainly uncovered the historical reasons for the stagnation of the Party in Maharashtra and suggested remedies. Sanzgiri remained state secretary of the Party till 2005, when he retired for reasons of age and health.

As a teacher of the Party, Sanzgiri was instrumental in building Party activists throughout Maharashtra. The numerous study classes on Marxism and other subjects that he took, especially for young student-youth activists of the Party over the years, helped to build a new generation of Communist cadre in Maharashtra.

LEADER OF THE WORKING CLASS
As the leader of the CITU, Sanzgiri took great pains for decades to build up the Bhandup CITU centre (Mumbai Shramik Sangh) and guided the trade union movement in Maharashtra. Sanzgiri’s distinctiveness was that he was also well versed with the problems of the peasantry and the agricultural workers. In 1992, he drafted an excellent resolution on “Tasks on the Kisan Front” and placed it for discussion before the Party state committee. Along with Central Committee resolutions on this question, this resolution also helped to give direction to the peasant and agricultural workers movement in Maharashtra.

His commitment to worker-peasant unity was reflected in the initiatives he took in several struggles of the rural poor. But it was also evident from one other decision that he took many years ago. To provide wages to full time workers on the agrarian front in Maharashtra, he started the practice of the CITU Bhandup centre giving a big sum to the Party state committee every year. This practice still continues today. He paid special attention to his beloved Bhandup centre in Mumbai, where he built up a capable leadership team of Party and CITU comrades.

Sanzgiri’s simple living, fighting nature, immense study, capacity for hard work and his concern for cadres were all qualities worthy of emulation. In the last four or five years of his life, although he had serious health problems, he never once complained about them to anyone. In all his life and work, his wife and comrade, Suman Sanzgiri, stood by him like a rock and so did the members of his family.

In the last one decade and more, we have lost almost all senior Party leaders in Maharashtra. A generation that went through the furnace of the freedom struggle, that faced the repression of the Congress regime, that went through the intense inner-Party struggle, and that had boundless faith in Marxism-Leninism and the Communist Party, has now departed from the scene. This greatly increases the responsibility on all of us of the next generations.

On the occasion of his birth centenary, all of us pay respectful homage and give our red salute to the memory of Comrade Prabhakar Sanzgiri!