Zakir Shaikh
11 October 1969 — 7 April 2026
Ankleshwar, Gujarat
I. ON HIS PASSING
It is with profound grief that the Indian Peoples Council acknowledges the passing of Zakir Shaikh of Ankleshwar, Gujarat, on the 7th of April 2026, following a prolonged and courageous struggle with blood cancer. He was fifty-six years of age. His death is a loss to those who knew him and to this organization, which he served faithfully without ever having asked for recognition in return.
II. CITATION OF SERVICE
Zakir Shaikh came to the Indian Peoples Council not as an ideologue, but as a worker. At the city level in Ankleshwar, he gave his time, his presence, and his effort to the foundational organizational work that a nascent party depends upon most: the unglamorous, persistent, nodal work of building structure where none yet exists. He contributed to this without formal recognition, without the apparatus of membership that was not yet in place, and without complaint.
It is precisely this quality — commitment given freely, without the assurance of institutional standing — that the party now formally acknowledges and honours.
III. THE FORMAL ACT OF MEMBERSHIP
By the authority vested in the Chairman of the Indian Peoples Council, and in recognition of the service rendered and the abiding attachment demonstrated to this party and its work, Blue Card Membership of the Indian Peoples Council is hereby conferred posthumously upon Zakir Shaikh.
Zakir Shaikh is hereby recognized as a Blue Card Member of the Indian Peoples Council.
Blue Card Membership constitutes the primary level of formal membership of the Indian Peoples Council. It is extended to those who have demonstrated commitment to the party’s work and organizational presence, independent of ideological certification. It is the party’s formal recognition that a person was, in the fullest practical sense, one of its own — a party worker, attached to the organization, and belonging to it.
IV. HIS OWN WORDS
In his final days, Zakir Shaikh expressed a wish: that he be remembered as a member of this party. We honour that wish. We honour it not as a posthumous courtesy, but as a recognition that the wish itself was consistent with a life lived entirely on his own terms — a life that neither sought approval nor offered apology for who he was.
This membership is, in that sense, as much his act as it is ours.
V. A NOTE FROM THE CHAIRMAN
Zakir was not a communist in the doctrinal sense, and he would have been the first to say so plainly. He was something rarer: a man of absolute personal conviction who wore those convictions openly, without hedging, and paid the social price for it without flinching. He was excommunicated by his community for his atheism — not a quiet atheism, not a private one, but the kind declared plainly and never walked back. Not in life. Not when life was ending. He met death as he had met everything else: on his own terms, without repentance, without theatre.
The party does not require its members to be communists. It requires them to be committed. Zakir Shaikh was committed — to this work, to his own conscience, and to a way of being in the world that asked nothing of anyone’s approval.
From henceforth, any those who ask me who was and is Zakir Shaikh, I would be pleasantly obliged to inform that he was a member of this party — one of us.
_Abhishek Parmar__
Chairman
Indian Peoples Council
Ahmedabad, Gujarat | April 2026