Veteran Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) leader Srilata Swaminathan, who was also president of the All India Progressive Women’s Association (AIPWA), died after a brief illness in Udaipur on Sunday. She was 74. Her body was cremated at Ashok Nagar crematorium in Udaipur on Monday.
Ms. Swaminathan had suffered a stroke on January 28 night and was rushed to a hospital where she was admitted in the intensive care unit. She breathed her last following a cardiac arrest.
Born in Chennai on April 29, 1944, Ms. Swaminathan shifted her base from Delhi to southern Rajasthan in 1978 to work among tribals, women, small peasants, workers, rural bonded labourers and trade unions in the mining sector and other industries in the region.
Firebrand leader
Ms. Swaminathan was considered a firebrand leader of the masses, who worked to strengthen the revolutionary Left movement and spread and defend progressive ideas and values against the deeply entrenched feudal forces in Rajasthan.
She was elected president of the AIPWA in the mid-1990s and was chosen as a member of CPI(ML) Central Committee in 1997. She continued to discharge her responsibilities till she had to be relieved on health grounds at the Ranchi Congress in April 2013. She also held the post of vice-president of the All India Central Council of Trade Unions.
Ms. Swaminathan’s grandmother, Ammu Swaminathan, was a member of the Constituent Assembly and was elected a Member of Parliament five times from Chennai. Capt. Lakshmi Sehgal of the INA, who had contested the presidential election against A.P.J. Abdul Kalam as a joint Opposition candidate, was her aunt.
CPI(ML) general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya has described Ms. Swaminathan’s death as a great loss to the Left democratic movement of which she was a strong pillar. Mr. Bhattacharya who arrived in Udaipur on Sunday morning to meet her, got the news of her demise.
The People’s Union for Civil Liberties’ Rajasthan unit has condoled Ms. Swaminathan’s death and paid homage to her.
