From Namita Bora, IFWJ Secretary
Bhubaneswar: Former vice-president of the Indian Federation of Working Journalists (IFWJ) and Utkal Journalist Union president Basant Das died at his Bhubaneswar residence morning. He fell to Covid-19. He was 81. His wife was by his side.
A senior journalist leader Basant Babu, as he was popularly known, served as vice-president when K. Vikram Rao took over as the President of the union. He had organized an IFWJ national council session at Cuttack’s Barabati Stadium in 1985. The Congress chief minister, late Sri Janaki Ballabh Patnaik, had inaugurated the conference. A founder-president of the IFWJ unit in Orissa, Patnaik, in his inaugural address, referred to his long association with the IFWJ. He introduced himself as an editor who learnt work from IFWJ founder vice-president and freedom-fighter, late. K. Rama Rao, editor of Nehru’s National Herald in Lucknow in 1938.
Basant Das was in the 35-member IFWJ delegation, which visited 13 countries, including Moscow, Berlin, London, Paris, Generva among others. The IFWJ delegation was invited by the DPR Korea journalist union to Pyongyong in 1985. It was led by IFWJ president K. Vikram Rao. Among its other members were Rajiv Shukla, Congress minister in the Manmohan Singh cabinet and chairman of the I.P.L. cricket, Sunita Aron, now editor of the Hindustan Times in Lucknow and Prakash Dibey, group editor of the Bhaskar in Nagpur.
Basant was the Orissa bureau chief of Kolkata’s Amrita Bazara Patrika and Jugantar group. He succeeded late veteran Gopal Mishra, UJA president, who was elected IFWJ vice-president at the Ayodhya plenary session in 1984. IFWJ deeply mourns his death.
