A remarkable Adivasi leader of the CPI(M) and AIKS in Maharashtra, Barkya Mangat, aged 69, passed away on the evening of March 31, 2022, of a sudden heart attack. He was ailing for a few months. Mangat was a member of the Party's Maharashtra state secretariat since 2015 and was the secretary of the Party's Thane-Palghar district committee from 2014 till 2022. He was also the vice president of the AIKS Maharashtra state council.

Barkya Mangat was born on June 1, 1953 in a poor peasant Adivasi family in Talasari tehsil of Palghar district. Talasari is a stronghold of the Party ever since the days of the famous Warli Adivasi Revolt in the mid-1940s that was led by Comrades Shamrao and Godavari Parulekar.

Mangat joined the Party as a youth in the late 1970s and started working in the newly-formed DYFI in the mid 1980s. He was elected the founder district president and later state vice president of the DYFI and led militant struggles of Adivasi youth for land and employment.

In the late 1980s the Party gave a call for a land struggle in the district. Hundreds of acres of land of absentee landlords were occupied and they began to be cultivated by poor landless tribal peasants under the red flag. They braved police repression but succeeded in keeping the lands in their possession and under their cultivation. Mangat was among the hundreds of youth led by DYFI who occupied land. Later he and others also built their own houses on their land.

In the early 1990s small factories started coming to Talasari tehsil, which is on the Maharashtra-Gujarat border. While the factory owners acquired land from the tribals to set up their factories, they refused to give jobs to tribal youth. Under Mangat’s leadership militant struggles of the youth were held for jobs in the local factories. Braving police repression, they finally succeeded and thousands of tribal youth, both men and women, got jobs in the local factories. These same youth organised unions in their factories and they were affiliated to CITU. Most of the factories in Talasari tehsil today have CITU-affiliated unions.   

Mangat was for many years the state and district vice president of the AIKS and played a major role in strengthening the Kisan Sabha, through struggles for the implementation of the Forest Rights Act (FRA) and many other burning issues. He was also the president of the CITU-affiliated Lal Bavta Thane Zilla Kamgar Union, under which the unions in Talasari and Dahanu come.

Barkya Mangat served with distinction as secretary of the Party’s Talasari tehsil committee for several years. Talasari is one of the strongest tehsils of the Party even today. In 2014 he was elected secretary of the Party’s Thane-Palghar district committee. He was elected to the Party’s state committee in 2008 and to the state secretariat in 2015. He led the district Party for the last eight years with great loyalty and a high sense of responsibility. He himself stepped down as district secretary in the district conference held in early March 2022, for health reasons.

It is due to the strength of the Party and mass fronts in this area that the CPI(M) has won the state assembly election from here in 9 out of the 10 assembly elections since 1978, and has a sitting MLA from here today, Vinod Nikole. The Party has also consistently won the Talasari Tehsil Panchayat Samiti for the last 60 years since the first local body elections in 1962.   

Mangat was elected Chairperson of the Talasari Tehsil Panchayat Samiti (PS) from 1992 to 1997, and then to the Thane Zilla Parishad (ZP) continuously for 15 years. On one of these occasions in 1997, he was elected to the ZP in spite of being in jail, as a result of the conspiracy of the then BJP-SS state government. In that struggle, two young CPI(M) tribal comrades from Kawada village in Talasari tehsil were killed on Republic Day 1997 in police firing, and over 100 leading Party comrades were put behind bars for over a month. This was done just before the local body elections. The diabolical BJP game plan was to defeat the CPI(M) by launching this severe repression. But the Party fought back valiantly, won a record number of ZP and PS seats, and the BJP game plan was blown to smithereens when it lost even its security deposits.   

In Talasari and Dahanu tehsils, the Party-led Adivasi Pragati Mandal runs a senior and junior college named after the legendary Party and AIKS leader Comrade Godavari Shamrao Parulekar, as also other schools and hostels. Mangat was the Secretary of the Adivasi Pragati Mandal.

One of Mangat’s biggest contributions was the tremendous efforts that he personally took for over two years, from 2010 to 2012, to construct the Party’s large and spacious district committee office at Talasari, which is named the Comrade Godavari Shamrao Parulekar Bhawan. The foundation stone for this office was laid on October 10, 2010 by the then Tripura chief minister Manik Sarkar, and it was inaugurated on October 10, 2012 by the then Polit Bureau member and now General Secretary Sitaram Yechury. On both occasions, massive rallies of tens of thousands of people were held. October 10 has been observed for the last several decades in the district as Martyrs’ Day and as Godavari Parulekar’s death anniversary.   

On April 1, thousands of people from all tehsils of Thane-Palghar district gave their last tearful farewell to Barkya Mangat, at Talasari. Draped in a red flag, he was cremated at his village.

CPI(M) central committee member and AIKS president Dr Ashok Dhawale paid a brief tribute to the departed leader. Mangat's demise was a great loss; his simplicity, honesty, integrity, and his total loyalty and commitment to the Party, were qualities that must be emulated, he said.

Among those who attended the funeral were veteran Party leaders L B Dhangar (94), Lahanu Kom, ex-MP and ex-MLA (84), central committee members J P Gavit, ex-MLA, and AIDWA general secretary Mariam Dhawale, Party state secretary Uday Narkar, state secretariat members Kisan Gujar and S K Rege, nearly a dozen state committee members who included Vinod Nikole, MLA, and district secretary Kiran Gahala, NCP MLA Sunil Bhusara, Kashtakari Sanghatana leaders Brian Lobo and Madhu Dhodi, and several other leaders of the CPI(M).