Shimla: The State Committee of Communist Party of India-Marxist, the academic community of Himachal Pradesh University and Indian Institute of Advance Study and the general public here have deeply mourned the death of Professor Javed Alam, a former ICSSR Chairman and Head of Political Science Department of Himachal University. Professor Alam was a famous name amongst the scholars and left activists in the hill State and would be remembered as a pioneer of initiating the Marxist ideology amongst the students and the academia here. Prof. Alam died on Monday morning in Hyderabad.
Prof. Alam had taught for many years in the Political Science Department of Himachal University and was actively associated with the Indian Institute of Advance Study, Shimla and had held academic positions and fellowships at the Centre for Study of Social Sciences, Kolkata, York University UK, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi and the Indian Council of Social Science Research, New Delhi. He was always involved in the popular movements for democratic values, human rights, secularism and sustaining the pluralist traditions of the society.
He was living with his son in Hyderabad after his retirement from the Centre for European Studies from the Foreign Language University of Hyderabad.
The State Secretariat of the CPI-M here said he was instrumental in forming the party unit in the sleepy town of Shimla in early seventies. He was responsible for the ideological nourishing of the party in Himachal for about two decades and many of the State Committee members here are his former students and colleagues.
The wide range of expertise of Prof. Alam was the philosophical treatment of modernity, secularism, Marxist and Communist movement, democracy, politics and the caste system in India.
KY Singh is a political observer and a senior journalist with an interest in a diverse set of issues related to Himachal Pradesh and other mountain states. He lives in Shimla.
