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Gana Forum, Secretary General Saifuddin Ahmed Manik died in a city hospital on Sunday and was buried the next day at the Mirpur Martyred Intellectuals’ Graveyard.. Manik, a freedom fighter, was honoured with a state funeral. As his body lay in state at the Central Shaheed Minar and a contingent of police presented a guard of honour on Monday morning, several hundred mourners stood in silence. That silence broke with a group singing the International through the public announcement system and many mourners, with their clenched fists raised, joined the chorus. Singing the International at the funeral of the general secretary of Dr Kamal Hossain’s Gana Forum, which espouses neo-liberalism, is incongruous. But strange things happen, both in life and death. Manik’s political life spans about five decades, four of which he passed as a communist, rising to become the president of the Communist Party of Bangladesh in 1987. The Soviet Union imploded in 1991 and the CPB, the Soviet camp follower, was pulverised by that cataclysmic development in the communist movement. Manik became a liquiditionist and joined Kamal Hossain to float the Gana Forum in 1993. Manik thus chose to embrace, so to say, an ideological death as a communist. Manik’s contribution to the left and progressive movement – as a student leader, cultural activist, sports organiser, trade unionist, freedom fighter and, above all, political activist – is so vast and varied that his later-day deviation from his original ideological moorings did not stand in the way to remember him fondly and respectfully as a leftist politician that he used to be for most of his life. This is a testimony to Manik’s legacy to the communist movement in the country as well as to the relevance of left and communist move, even in the present-day Bangladesh. Manik died as the general secretary of the Gana Forum. A banner of the party was flung at the Shaheed Minar ceremony. But the black badge the mourners wore did not mention his party identity. In the death was ignored Manik’s Gana Forum politics and hid his communist past, making his political identity opaque. Manik, a communist, died in 1993; Manik, a mortal, died in 2008
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