Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia Had A Passionate Interest In Human Freedom, Justice And Dignity

Vice President Delivers First Ram Manohar Lohia Lecture

Gwalior (PIB-GR-TYP-BIN): Vice President Mr. Hamid Ansari said that late Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia had a passionate interest in all matters relating to human freedom, justice and dignity. Delivering the first Ram Manohar Lohia memorial national lecture in Gwalior on September 23, he said Dr. Lohia differed with the Congress leadership on a whole range of issues. These included the acceptance of the decision on Partition in 1947 and he wrote a detailed monograph entitled The Guilty Men of India’s Partition. Mr. Ansari said Dr. Lohia had pronounced views on the caste system and the damage it has done to Indian psyche. At the same time, he was realistic about ways of modulating it.

The Vice President said despite the adulation of earlier years, Lohia’s criticism of Nehru and his policies after early 1940s was trenchant. His articulation of the principles of the Congress Socialist Party transmuted itself in the fifties into the Praja Socialist Party which, as he put it, “is as distant from the Congress party as it is from the communist and the communalist parties.” He had a nuanced view of the parliamentary form of government and advocated alongside the option of direct mass action. He told his party colleagues in 1955 that instead of an insurrectionary path they ought to choose a balanced mix of constitutional action and civil resistance where necessary.

Mr. Ansari said Rammanohar Lohia’s political legacy and the impulses generated by it are very much in evidence today and has been so far over two decades. “In the world of politics,” as one of his ardent scholar-activist followers has put it, “Lohia is remembered today as the originator of OBC reservations; the champion of backward castes in the politics of north India; the father of non-Congressism; the uncompromising critic of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty; and the man responsible for the politics of anti-English.”

(Source: PIB/GR/TYP/BIN/USPA/WN/IAIJ)