Tuesday, 3 June 2025

THE PHASE OF POLITICAL ASSASSINATION IN BIHAR: REMEMBERING K.B. SAHAY ON HIS 52ND DEATH ANNIVERSARY (03/06/2025)

 





On May 23, 2024, Himanta Biswa Sarma challenged Rahul Gandhi to address several unsolved historical incidents involving senior Congress leaders. (News Courtesy India Today, NE)

Sarma's list included the unnatural deaths of two prominent political leaders of Bihar. They included the fatal accident of K.B. Sahay and the mysterious bomb blast which claimed the life of L.N. Mishra.

K. B. Sahay's Fatal Accident: The Chief Minister, Sarma, raised concerns about the unexplained car accident that claimed the life of Bihar’s former Chief Minister K. B. Sahay, known for abolishing the Zamindari System, after falling out with Indira Gandhi. "Why wasn’t his death investigated?" Sarma probed.

Lalit Narayan Mishra's Death: Sarma questioned the mysterious bomb blast that killed former Union Railway Minister Lalit Narayan Mishra, who had differences with then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. "Who was behind the blast?" he asked.

On June 2, 2025, ‘The Indian Express’ published an article, ‘Why L.N. Mishra’s killing is being discussed 50 years later?

The unnatural and untimely demise of K.B. Sahay on June 3, 1974 and of L.N. Mishra just six months later on January 5, 1975, began a dark chapter of political assassination of political rivals. Both K.B. Sahay and L.N. Mishra were unparalleled in their political stature. The third leader who survived the brutality was Loknayak Jai Prakash Narayan, who launched the ‘Sampurna Kranti’ to dislodge Mrs Indira Gandhi. However, we are all aware of Jai Prakash Narayan’s sufferings in jail during the emergency, which took a heavy toll on his health.

WHY K. B. SAHAY’S CASE IS A COLD-BLOODED MURDER AND NOT A FREAK CAR ACCIDENT

The brutality with which K.B. was eliminated opened the shady chapter of violence in politics in post-independence India. The car accident was a Machiavellian ploy to eliminate K.B. Sahay, which was carried out with criminal precision to make it appear an accident.

On that fateful day, K.B. Sahay left Patna for his native Hazaribagh at 5.00 a.m., which was quite usual for him. He was seated in the front seat of the ambassador car (BRM-101) along with his grandson, while his wife and daughter-in-law, with three children, were seated in the rear seat. As soon as their car reached the highway, a truck followed the car. This truck kept speeding, overtaking, and abruptly stopping on the pretext of disturbances on the road ahead. But the car driver successfully manoeuvred these disruptions and safely reached Jhumri-Telaiya, even crossing the Rajauli valley in the Koderma Reserve Forest without any harm. K.B. Sahay halted at Jhumri-Telaiya at his son’s place for an hour. The said truck stopped over at the petrol pump just a short distance away, as people who had seen that particular truck confirmed later. From here K.B. Sahay proceeded to Hazaribagh.

As K.B. Sahay left Jhumri-Telaiya, the cat-and-mouse chase between the truck and the car began once again. The family was just 5 kilometres away from Hazaribagh when the truck struck the car at a place near Sindur village on a sloppy stretch of the highway. The driver of the truck screeched the vehicle to a sudden halt, expecting the car to ram head-on into it from behind on the slope. But the driver was fairly experienced, and he managed to stop the car swiftly enough, just short of ramming into the truck. However, the worst happened thereafter. The truck went into reverse and steered to the left to ram the car forcefully on its left side, i.e. the side of the front seat where K. B. Sahay was seated. The act proves beyond doubt that it wasn’t an accident but a cold-blooded attempt at assassinating K.B. Sahay. K.B. Sahay was quite agile even at this advanced age, and just as the truck was about to hit the car, he swiftly lifted his grandson to push him behind, saving his life just in time. But the hit proved fatal for this veteran of many a struggle. Face smeared with blood, K.B. Sahay was gasping for breath when he and his family members were picked up by a private car and admitted to the Hazaribagh hospital. Doctors tried their best to save him by giving mouth-to-mouth respiration, but they failed to bring him back to life. (K.B. Sahay dies in car mishap near Hazaribagh, ‘The Searchlight’, June 4, 1974, (Courtesy- Sachchidanand Sinha Library, Patna-1)

The manner the hit-and-run incident was made to appear like an accident left no scope for doubt that K.B. Sahay was eliminated by his political rivals. Another Gandhian was silenced for taking up the cause of the poor and the downtrodden. Thus, unfortunately, the decision ‘to be’ to live a meaningful political life was made null by unknown forces that must not have wanted his resurgence, which led to his life’s end in a ‘hit-and-run’ case. The story of the life of K. B. Sahay lives on through the words of his numerous speeches, his revolutionary political initiatives and the mark of stamp he left in the administration of Bihar.

 

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