THE Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) joins the Polit Bureau of CPI (M) and the Centre of Indian Trade Unions in this hour of grief at the loss of one of their most senior leaders, Comrade M K Pandhe. His death at 86 takes away one of the most valuable stalwarts that the Indian trade union movement has produced.
It is inspiring that Comrade Pandhe joined the Communist Party of India in 1943 at the young age of 18, in pre-independence days, and received his doctoral degree from the prestigious Gokhle Institute in Maharashtra, India. He volunteered to work on the trade union front in those difficult days of the freedom struggle against foreign rule and was elected secretary of the All India Trade Union Congress in the 1960.
We appreciate his work as one of the founding leaders of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, building it up to become one of the premier trade union organisations of Indian working class today. That is a classic success of Comrade Pandhe, in capacity of being its general secretary for 12 years since 1991, and its president there after till 2010, until his demise.
In spite of his intellectual achievements, his Ph D degree and his mastery of complicated economic questions, he had a deep understanding of trade union organisations and their struggles. His simplicity of lifestyle and easy way of communicating with the masses were the proud personal attributes that Comrade Pandhe had acquired, and set an example of the ideal communist character for other comrades.
The CPUSA's two delegates, Teresa and Rama Kant, met Comrade Pandhe for the first time at your Party Congress in March 2008, and had a chance to discuss with him his impending visit to USA, in the first week of June 2008 on invitation of the Service Employees’ International Union, one of the largest labor organisations in the United States. The visit became an important occasion for leaders of the CPUSA to receive him in our party centers in Chicago and in New York City.
He met our vice chair Scott Marshall, chair of our trade union commission, and Teresa Albano, editor of our party weekly, the People’s World, in Chicago, and held important discussions for building up mutual friendships of the trade union movements across the globe.
He was accompanied on his visit by his wife, Pramila, who also is a party and women’s leader in her capacity as a vice president of the All India Democratic Women’s Association.
The following week, he visited our New York Party center, and had discussions with comrades, including CPUSA vice chair Libero dellaPiana, and union activists Bill Davis and Gary Bono. He and his wife also met the leadership of the Transit Workers Union at their New York headquarters.
In Chicago, Comrade Pandhe and Pramila said they very much wanted to pay their respects to the Haymarket Martyrs. They received two tours led by experts from the Illinois Labor Historical Society; one to the Martyrs’ graves and the other to the Haymarket site. One tour was led by the late author Bill Adelman. Comrade Pandhe was so impressed by Adelman’s knowledge of the subject that he arranged for the translation into Hindi of his book on the history of May Day. The Illinois Labor History Society expressed great pride in the translation.
We in the Communist Party of the USA considered Comrade Pandhe to be a friend as well as a comrade. We express our sincere sympathies to his wife Pramila and their Son in Delhi, as well as to his whole family and the membership of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
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