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| DR RAM MANOHAR LOHIA (23 MARCH 1910-12 OCTOBER 1967) |
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| KRISHNA BALLABH SAHAY 31 DECEMBER 1898-3 JUNE 1974) |
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| RAM MANOHAR LOHIA AND JAI PRAKASH NARAYAN- THE TWO PILLARS OF SOCIALIST MOVEMENT IN INDEPENDENT INDIA |
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| EXCERPTS OF NEWSPAPER MAY 1964 |
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| BOOK AUTHORED BY RAM MANOHAR LOHIA. IT REVEALS THE ROLE OF VARIOUS THE COMMUNAL ORGANISATIONS OF THE PERIOD AND QUESTIONS THEIR NATIONALISM DURING WORLD WAR II |
Dr Ram
Manohar Lohia is considered the most powerful Socialist leader who left his
mark by heralding an era of non-Congress Government in the Hindi heartland
after the third general elections. In his quest for installing a non-Congress
government, Dr Lohia followed the adage that ‘everything was fair in love and
war’- unseating Congress was never less than a war for this Socialist veteran.
Dr Ram Manohar Lohia was born on
23rd March 1910 in Akbarpur, Uttar Pradesh. In
1934, along with Jai Prakash Narayan and Acharya Narendra Dev,
he founded the Congress Socialist Party. The party’s members addressed
each other "Comrade" a word that came to be used extensively by the
Communists. Till the attainment of independence in 1947, the Congress Socialist
Party remained an integral part of the Congress, in the same way as the
Congress Swaraj Party was carved out as a separate wing of the Congress during
the Home-Rule Movement in the Twenties. After independence, the Party
chalked out its separate identity in the name of the Socialist Party of India
and the leaders of this wing began the ‘long march’ to upstage the Congress.
The Socialist Party of India was not quite successful in its initial attempts
at electoral politics. However, Ram Manohar Lohia did not lose his
heart and carried on with his efforts to provide an alternative to Congress. He
looked beyond the Socialist fold to invite parties and leaders of different
ideologies and developed an alliance to upstage the Congress. This brought him
face to face with Krishna Ballabh Sahay just before the third general elections
in 1967.
In 1965, Bihar was reeling under
severe drought due to a lack of monsoon. The Chief Minister of the state,
Krishna Ballabh Sahay, was taking all measures to deal with this natural
calamity. Certain policies of the central government such as restrictions
on inter-state and inter-regional transportation of food-grains, imposition of a
levy on paddy, and ceilings on central assistance of foodgrain to States, were
also instrumental in escalating the crisis and creating a state of unrest in
the province.
The State Government nevertheless was proactive
to ensure the availability of foodgrains to its citizens. The measures included
the collection of foodgrains directly from influential farmers’ i.e. erstwhile zamindars
and their distribution to the people. The state administration also took stern action
against hoarders of foodgrains. However, to make matters worse for the
Government, the non-gazetted employees went on strike demanding a pay hike. In
such a situation, the Socialists were eager to exploit the political climate of
unrest emerging due to natural calamity and they started instigating the
non-gazetted employees. In 1965, Dr Ram Manohar Lohia was in Patna in this
connection. Krishna Ballabh Babu was not ignorant of the political
character of the Socialists. On December 9, 1964, during a debate in the
State Assembly, he quoted a verse from Tulsidas ‘Ramcharitmanas’ to
highlight the opportunistic attitude of the Socialists-‘Keshav kahi na
jaaye ka kahiye, rachna tohi vichitra ati samujhi samujhi man rahiye’
(It is difficult to comprehend the peculiarity of the creator’s creation)
The day Dr Ram Manohar Lohia landed in
Patna; he was placed under house arrest by then-District Magistrate J. N. Sahu
who provoked the provisions of the Defence of India Act 1962 and passed an
order to this effect. He was later deported to the Hazaribagh Central
Jail. Though Dr Lohia managed to get bail from a five-member bench of the
Supreme Court, (Hon'ble A. K. Sarkar, M. Hidayatullah, R.S. Bachhawat, J.R.
Mudholkar, and Raghubar Dayal), he learnt the harder way that in Bihar he was
face to face with the ‘louh-purush’ (Iron man) of Bihar who brooked
no nuisance.
Dr Ram Manohar Lohia realized the
toughness of his mission as he was face to face with a leader who was known for
his steely determination. The ‘Iron Man of Bihar’ so to say, K. B. Sahay forced
Dr Lohia to do a rethink his strategy. Dr Lohia, therefore, embarked on the
support of all opposition parties in the name of ‘Non-Congressism’ to remove
the Congress Government in the Hindi heartland. Compromising on his Socialistic
ethos and values, Dr Lohia invited the Communist Party, Marxist Communist
Party, and other parties like Praja Socialist Party, Republican Party, Jan
Kranti Dal, Swatantra Party, and Jharkhand Party into a grand
alliance against the Congress. This was against Socialist thinking and policy
because these parties had differing ideologies and principles and in some
respects, these were opposite to each other. Ignoring this shortcoming, Dr
Ram Manohar Lohia appealed to all these parties to come together to defeat the
Congress and Krishna Ballabh Sahay- ‘those who do not positively join the
coalition when the offer is made, might be described narrow-minded and
sectarian lot’. After the elections, even the Bharatiya Jansangh threw its
weight behind Dr Lohia with an announcement by Atal Bihari Vajpayee that ‘keeping
out of coalition Government would amount to applying brakes to ‘democratic
revolution brewing out in the country’. (‘The Indian Nation, April 24,
1967)
The rag-tag coalition of parties
professing differing ideologies succeeded in ultimately denting the invincible
image of the Congress. Though after the 1967 general elections, the Congress Party
led by Krishna Ballabh Sahay still emerged as the single largest party, despite
its internal bickering, it fell short of an absolute majority. Congress Party romped
home with 128 seats followed by Dr Ram Manohar Lohia's Samyukta Samajwadi Party
of which bagged 68 seats. This was followed by the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (26), the
Communist Party (28), the Praja Socialist Party (18), Mahamaya Prasad
Sinha led Jan Kranti Dal (13) and Swatantra Party (3). The number of
independents who got elected was 33.
Thus political parties belonging to
different hues and cry- from the far Left to the extreme Right and from
Socialist to revolutionist all got together into an unholy alliance merely to
grab power in the name of ‘non-Congressism’. The political ideology of all
these political parties lay in tatters as they dumped it conveniently to
capture the seat of power for the first time after independence. It was this
politics bereft of any principle that K. B. Sahay was determined to expose when
he took up the challenge to bring down the Government of the rag-tag coalition
within a year.
Krishna Ballabh Sahay’e efforts were
made easier by the warring factions of the coalition government which dithered
away under its contradictions. The political ambition of Bindeshwari Prasad
Mandal, who had left the Congress in 1964-65, disgruntled at not being made a
minister, was well known to K. B. Sahay. He was now a senior leader of the
Samyukta Socialist Party and the face of the Party in Bihar. While compromising
on socialist principles to remove the Congress, Dr Lohia had never visualized
that it would open a floodgate of unholy compromises. Dr Lohia desired to give
representation to women, Harijans or Adivasis from his party in the Mahamaya
Prasad Sinha's cabinet. But that did not happen and Bindeshwari Prasad Mandal
succeeded in capturing a Cabinet berth by directly bargaining with Mahamaya
Babu. This was a rude setback on Dr Lohia who could do nothing but tolerate
this indiscipline within the rank and file of his party. Next, Dr Lohia had also
made it his party policy to not allow any Member of the Parliament to accept a
ministerial berth in the State Government. The decision to make Bindeshwari
Prasad Mandal a minister in his cabinet on the Samyukta Socialist Party quota
flew in the face of Dr Lohia as B. P. Mandal, a leader from Saharsa, was a
Member of the Parliament from the Yadava dominated Madhepura constituency when
he became a minister in the Mahamaya Prasad Sinha’s ministry. This was contrary
to the policy laid down by the party patriarch. It annoyed Dr Lohia to such an extent
that he put the matter bluntly and publicly that Mandal’s action ‘amounted
to using the party machinery to climb the ladder of power’. But Bindeshwari
Prasad Mandal paid no attention to such outbursts. Bindeshwari Prasad Mandal had
effectively relegated his leader Dr Ram Manohar Lohia to the sidelines and made
him irrelevant in the scheme of Bihar politics.
K. B. Sahay was waiting for this
moment to expose the hollowness of the ‘Non-Congressism' professed by Dr
Ram Manohar Lohia. K. B. Sahay turned the table on Dr Ram Manohar Lohia
and paid him back in the same coin by countering the unprincipled politics that
Dr Lohia ushered in the name of ‘Socialism’, by engineering a revolt in his
party. If Dr Ram Manohar Lohia believed that everything was fair in the name of
‘Non-Congressism’, K. B. Sahay exposed the futility of the experiment called
‘Socialism’.
Bindeshwari Prasad Mandal, who
was a minister without being a member of either house, was about to
complete his six-month term on September 4, 1967. Dr Lohia did not want
him to continue in the Bihar cabinet under any circumstance. Hence Dr
Lohia did not allow any MLA to resign to facilitate the continuance of B.P.
Mandal as minister by contesting and winning the resultant by-election. Defying
his ‘political guru’ a furious Dr Bindeshwari Prasad Mandal walked out of the Samyukta
Socialist Party along with 25 of his supporters MLAs and formed his party on 2nd
September 1967 which was named ' Shoshit Dal' (Party of the
Depressed). Members of this Party called themselves exploited because all
of them were persecuted by the state government for storing grain illegally. Most
of the party members were well to do zamindars and did not fit in anyway
in the definition of depressed class. With the help of Krishna Ballabh Sahay,
the Shoshit Dal got the support of the Congress and thus in less than a
year i.e. ten months
and twenty days to be precise, the Mahamaya Prasad Sinha government was voted out of the
majority on the 25th January 1968. Bindeshwari Prasad Mandal
was still not a member of either House. The Governor conveyed his reluctance to
administer the oath of office to a person who was not a Member of either House.
This led to an impasse.
Krishna Ballabh Babu removed this
bottleneck through a stop-gap arrangement under which the Shoshit Dal ministry
took the oath of office on 28th January 1968 under the leadership of Satish Prasad
Singh. On the same day, Krishna Ballabh Babu asked his close confidante Parmanand
Babu to resign his seat in Bihar Legislative Council. On 29 January 1968, Chief
Minister Satish Prasad Singh recommended the name of Bindeshwari Prasad Mandal to
this vacant seat. On January 30, the assent of the Governor was
received. On 1 February, Satish Prasad Singh resigned from the post of
Chief Minister and on the same day, Bindeshwari Prasad Mandal took oath as
Chief Minister. Thus the curtains were drawn on the Socialist experiment
of Dr Ram Manohar Lohia, though he did not live to see the culmination of the
downfall of his party as he passed away on 12 October 1967 in Delhi at a
relatively young age of 57.
Dr Ram Manohar Lohia and his Samyukta
Socialist Party could not gain back the prestige that it lost by deviating from
it’s principles during the 1967 elections for the sake of grabbing power.
Socialism as a political concept suffered a tremendous setback and with it, Dr
Lohia lost the high moral ground that he enjoyed as the ‘beacon’ of the socialist
experiment in India. On one occasion Dr Ram Manohar Lohia had proclaimed confidently
and proudly that 'I do not have anything to my credit except that the
ordinary and poor people of India think that I am their man'. But by
putting his seal on the politics of opportunism, Dr Ram Manohar Lohia lost his
credibility which he was unable to acquire back during his lifetime.
(Excerpts: ( i ) Proceedings
of the Bihar Legislative Assembly, (ii) Coalition Politics in
India: Paul R. Brass (American Political Science Review ), (iii) Multi-Party
Coalition Government in India - The Phase of Non-Congress (iv) The Indian
Nation 24 April 1967, (v) The Politics of Defecation - Subhash C.
Kashyap (vi) The Bihar Experience: Indradeep Sinha, (vii) National
Archives, New Delhi
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