Hundreds pay their last respects to the veteran Communist leader
TRIBUTES: Leaders pay homage to the body of K.V. Surendranath at the office of the State Committee of the CPI in Thiruvananthapuram on Friday. Photo: S. Gopakumar
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Veteran Communist leader K.V. Surendranath is no more. The 81-year-old Surendranath, `Asan' to everyone who knew him, breathed his last at 4.30 a.m. on Friday.
The body was cremated at the Thycaud crematorium in the city after hundreds of persons from all walks of life paid homage to him at the home of his nephew where he spent his final days, at the C. Achutha Menon Centre that he founded almost single-handedly and at the M. N. Smarakam, the State headquarters of the Communist Party of India (CPI).
Surendranath, who had been ailing for some time, developed breathing trouble around 4 a.m. and breathed his last while being taken to a nearby private hospital. Chief Minister Oommen Chandy and Leader of the Opposition V.S. Achuthanandan were among the first to arrive at his home to pay their respects to the Communist veteran. The body was taken to the Achutha Menon Centre at 3 p. m. and later kept at the M. N. Smarakam for about an hour before being taken for cremation.
Surendranath, member of the Kerala Legislative Assembly for three consecutive terms beginning 1980, was an epitome of probity and a man with deep understanding of Indian philosophy and Marxism-Leninism besides an abiding interest in environmental issues. He entered politics while a student and had founded the Thiruvananthapuram Students Organisation (TSO). After his studies, he worked for a brief while as reporter for a newspaper of the time `Indian Thinker', but had to leave the job when it was revealed that he was a Communist sympathiser. He returned to journalism much later in life as editor of `Marxist Veekshanam', an ideological journal. `Lokathinte Mukalthattil', a travelogue written after a journey to Manasarovar, is a widely acclaimed work in its genre. Surendranath became a member of the Communist Party in 1945 and played a major role in building the party in Thiruvananthapuram district. Police repression forced him to go underground for a year during 1946-'47 and later during 1948-'52. Branded a `Chinese spy' along with hundreds of Communist leaders during the Indo-China war, he was in jail for six months during 1963. An efficient trade union leader, Surendranath was in the forefront of the efforts to organise transport workers and the moving spirit, along with T. V. Thomas, behind the 1954 transport workers' strike. He was also one of the first to organise workers of Travancore Titanium Products Limited, Travancore Rubber Works Limited and the Metropolitan Company. He was the Thiruvananthapuram district secretary of the CPI and member of the party State executive and national council. He was a bachelor.
(courtsy( the hindu)
Thursday, August 28, 2008
PV KURYAN
P.V.kurian came to the national movement when he was a student in 1938. He was later the secretary of Forward Block in Travancore. In the orties he joined the socialist movement and was one of the founder members of the congresssocialist party in travancore. In subsequest years he stood with Dr. Lohya .On Lohia's death he continued to work for the propogation of Lohiz's ideas.kurian ,a front ranking socialist thinker of kerala has many books to his credit including his magnus opus : Dr Ram Manohar Lohya The Universal Revolutionary.PV kuryan was a socialist. not a janatha socialist.Dr.Ram Manohar lohya inter preted socialism in a new way . P.V. Kurian carried forward that tradition in his frequent writings in malayalam. He wa also an activist; he was able to indoctrinate a section of the youth in his state.
followers of Indian socialism
Kishan Patnaik
Kishan Patnaik breathed his last on September 27 at Bhubaneshwar at the age of 74. His demise comes as a great loss to the democratic movement in the country. He will be remembered for his passionate commitment to value-based politics and for his relentless campaign against the retrogressive policies of economic liberalisation. He favoured a broad-based coalition of socialists, communists and other democrats against imperialist globalisation and worked hard to retrieve the socialist stream from the morass of political opportunism. His whole political life would be remembered as a message of protest against today’s political culture of corruption, criminalisation and communalisation.
Elected to the Lok Sabha from the Sambalpur constituency of Orissa in 1962, Kishan Patnaik never subordinated movemental politics to electoral calculations and remained involved in a whole range of popular movements till the last. He was among the last of the radical Gandhians of his generation who would never compromise on principles. Kishan Patnaik’s celebrated book in Hindi published on the eve of the new millennium was titled ‘Vikalpheen nahin hai duniya’ (the world is not without an alternative), which sums up his vision and strategies in sharp contrast to the TINA (There is no alternative) factor, a mantra chanted ad nauseam by the votaries of liberalisation, globalisation and privatization.
The tumultuous 1990s transformed the Indian socialist movement beyond recognition with socialists like George Fernandez joining NDA, debunking entire ideological baggage of yesteryears, the criminal-mafia appropriation of social justice under Laloo’s regime in Bihar and most recently the ‘corporate socialism’ of Mulayam Singh in U.P. Against this backdrop, the founding of Samajwadi Jan Parishad in 1994 with Kishanji as its founder President was a significant step towards an alternative brand of socialist politics.
Kishan Patnaik was not only a socialist thinker in his own right, but also probably the most creative of the Gandhians who would expand, enrich and apply the Gandhi-Lohia-J.P. thought to the newer realities of the times. Irreconcilable theoretical differences with Marxism would still not stop him from praising Fidel Castro in following words, “Marxism is an inherent energy which has always heated the hearts of the deprived communities. The heat generated in South American countries is due to Fidel Castro…. Castro is an island of uncompromising resistance among the surrendering nations…” (Samayik Varta, Dec ’03-Jan ’04). Kishan Patnaik adhered to the Gandhian critique of modern civilization and the idea of progress. Most of the developments in late capitalism seemed to him a confirmation of his beliefs.
His prolific pen would react to most of the burning issues of practical politics as well as those of theory, from farmers’ suicides to the ‘clash of civilizations’. The June 2004 editorial of ‘Samayik Varta’ (a journal founded and edited by Kishan Patnaik for nearly three decades) was quick in pointing out that the verdict 2004 was clearly against the new economic policies pursued for the last decade and a half and that the new regime had already started betraying it, a point to remember for all those who wish to carry his legacy through the present and future struggles.
As a young member of the third Lok Sabha, Kishan Patnaik was perhaps the first MP from Orissa to have raised the issue of starvation deaths in Kalahandi in Indian Parliament. The powers that be did not have the guts to admit that stark reality and efforts were made to sweep the starvation deaths under the carpet of false claims and statistical lies, much the same way as governments deal with the phenomenon of starvation deaths and farmers’ suicides today. Between 1964 and 2004, India has certainly changed a lot, but defying the gloss and grandeur of globalisation hunger continues to stalk the villages of Kalahandi and Koraput as doggedly as was seen first hand by Kishan Patnaik in his early political years. Patnaik never lost sight of this fundamental plight of rural India, and securing the right to livelihood for the people on the margin therefore always remained central to his politics and to his vision of development.
Mulk Raj Anand
Mulk Raj Anand, one of the chief architects of India’s progressive literary movement died at the age of 99 on September 28 in Pune. Dr. Anand authored such widely acclaimed English novels as Coolie (1935), Untouchable (1936), Two Leaves and a Bud (1937), and The Village (1939), thus bringing the downtrodden protagonists and their anguish against the oppressors and social evils like caste system on the forefront of the literary landscape of his times.
Born in 1905 in Peshawar (now Pakistan), Dr. Anand was educated first in Amritsar; later he moved to England where he studied at the Cambridge and London universities. With Sajjad Zahir, Dr. Anand was the co-author of the Manifesto of the Progressive Writers Association that was adopted at the historic founding conference of the PWA held in 1936 under the chairmanship of Munshi Premchand. He was a great humanist and an intellectual of high merit, with egalitarian, secular and progressive nationalist values which inform all his writings, and this makes his writings all the more relevant for our times as well.
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida, French philosopher and founder of deconstruction theory died on 8 October 2004 in Paris at the age of 74.
Born in I930 in Algeria, Derrida was the fifth generation of his family of assimilated Sephardic Jews to be raised in Algeria. In 1940, when he was ten, the Nazi collaborationists who ruled French Algeria imposed quotas on Jewish school enrolment, and Derrida, the top student at his academy, was expelled. A teacher said French culture was "not made for little Jews". He and his family were stripped of their citizenship.
After graduating in 1956, Derrida spent a year at Harvard University on a graduate scholarship, then returned to Algeria to serve in the French army as a teacher. He moved back to France in 1960 to teach philosophy and logic at the Sorbonne. By 1965, Derrida was teaching the history of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure and was associated with Tel Quel, a leftist magazine that published work by such thinkers as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. The following year saw the publication of three seminal volumes: ‘Writing and Difference’, ‘Speech and Phenomena’ and ‘Of Grammatology’.
In April 1993, he delivered a lecture entitled “Specters of Marx” at a multidisciplinary conference on “Whither Marxism?”. In this seminal address, he paid rich tribute to the Marxist inheritance: “Not without Marx, no future without Marx, without the memory and inheritance of Marx …We all live in a world, some would say a culture, that still bears, at an incalculable depth, the mark of this inheritance, wheher in a directly visible fashion or not.”
He also cautioned against the Western academic attempt to depoliticise Marx and reduce him to just a great philosopher. “People would be ready to accept the return of Marx or the return to Marx, on the condition that a silence is maintained about Marx’s injunction not just to decipher but to act and to make the deciphering [the interpretation] into a transformation that “changes the world.” … If one listens closely, one already hears whispered: “Marx, you see, was despite everything a philosopher like any other; what is more [and one can say this now that so many Marxists have fallen silent], he was a great-philosoher who deserves to figure on the list of those works we assign for study and from which he has been banned for too long. He doesn’t belong to the communists, to the Marxists, to the parties, he ought to figure within our great canon of Western political philosophy. Return to Marx, let’s finally read him as a great philosopher.”
Derrida however remained convinced of the impossibility of this fond bourgeois dream and this explains the haunting title of his lecture: Specters of Marx!
Kishan Patnaik breathed his last on September 27 at Bhubaneshwar at the age of 74. His demise comes as a great loss to the democratic movement in the country. He will be remembered for his passionate commitment to value-based politics and for his relentless campaign against the retrogressive policies of economic liberalisation. He favoured a broad-based coalition of socialists, communists and other democrats against imperialist globalisation and worked hard to retrieve the socialist stream from the morass of political opportunism. His whole political life would be remembered as a message of protest against today’s political culture of corruption, criminalisation and communalisation.
Elected to the Lok Sabha from the Sambalpur constituency of Orissa in 1962, Kishan Patnaik never subordinated movemental politics to electoral calculations and remained involved in a whole range of popular movements till the last. He was among the last of the radical Gandhians of his generation who would never compromise on principles. Kishan Patnaik’s celebrated book in Hindi published on the eve of the new millennium was titled ‘Vikalpheen nahin hai duniya’ (the world is not without an alternative), which sums up his vision and strategies in sharp contrast to the TINA (There is no alternative) factor, a mantra chanted ad nauseam by the votaries of liberalisation, globalisation and privatization.
The tumultuous 1990s transformed the Indian socialist movement beyond recognition with socialists like George Fernandez joining NDA, debunking entire ideological baggage of yesteryears, the criminal-mafia appropriation of social justice under Laloo’s regime in Bihar and most recently the ‘corporate socialism’ of Mulayam Singh in U.P. Against this backdrop, the founding of Samajwadi Jan Parishad in 1994 with Kishanji as its founder President was a significant step towards an alternative brand of socialist politics.
Kishan Patnaik was not only a socialist thinker in his own right, but also probably the most creative of the Gandhians who would expand, enrich and apply the Gandhi-Lohia-J.P. thought to the newer realities of the times. Irreconcilable theoretical differences with Marxism would still not stop him from praising Fidel Castro in following words, “Marxism is an inherent energy which has always heated the hearts of the deprived communities. The heat generated in South American countries is due to Fidel Castro…. Castro is an island of uncompromising resistance among the surrendering nations…” (Samayik Varta, Dec ’03-Jan ’04). Kishan Patnaik adhered to the Gandhian critique of modern civilization and the idea of progress. Most of the developments in late capitalism seemed to him a confirmation of his beliefs.
His prolific pen would react to most of the burning issues of practical politics as well as those of theory, from farmers’ suicides to the ‘clash of civilizations’. The June 2004 editorial of ‘Samayik Varta’ (a journal founded and edited by Kishan Patnaik for nearly three decades) was quick in pointing out that the verdict 2004 was clearly against the new economic policies pursued for the last decade and a half and that the new regime had already started betraying it, a point to remember for all those who wish to carry his legacy through the present and future struggles.
As a young member of the third Lok Sabha, Kishan Patnaik was perhaps the first MP from Orissa to have raised the issue of starvation deaths in Kalahandi in Indian Parliament. The powers that be did not have the guts to admit that stark reality and efforts were made to sweep the starvation deaths under the carpet of false claims and statistical lies, much the same way as governments deal with the phenomenon of starvation deaths and farmers’ suicides today. Between 1964 and 2004, India has certainly changed a lot, but defying the gloss and grandeur of globalisation hunger continues to stalk the villages of Kalahandi and Koraput as doggedly as was seen first hand by Kishan Patnaik in his early political years. Patnaik never lost sight of this fundamental plight of rural India, and securing the right to livelihood for the people on the margin therefore always remained central to his politics and to his vision of development.
Mulk Raj Anand
Mulk Raj Anand, one of the chief architects of India’s progressive literary movement died at the age of 99 on September 28 in Pune. Dr. Anand authored such widely acclaimed English novels as Coolie (1935), Untouchable (1936), Two Leaves and a Bud (1937), and The Village (1939), thus bringing the downtrodden protagonists and their anguish against the oppressors and social evils like caste system on the forefront of the literary landscape of his times.
Born in 1905 in Peshawar (now Pakistan), Dr. Anand was educated first in Amritsar; later he moved to England where he studied at the Cambridge and London universities. With Sajjad Zahir, Dr. Anand was the co-author of the Manifesto of the Progressive Writers Association that was adopted at the historic founding conference of the PWA held in 1936 under the chairmanship of Munshi Premchand. He was a great humanist and an intellectual of high merit, with egalitarian, secular and progressive nationalist values which inform all his writings, and this makes his writings all the more relevant for our times as well.
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida, French philosopher and founder of deconstruction theory died on 8 October 2004 in Paris at the age of 74.
Born in I930 in Algeria, Derrida was the fifth generation of his family of assimilated Sephardic Jews to be raised in Algeria. In 1940, when he was ten, the Nazi collaborationists who ruled French Algeria imposed quotas on Jewish school enrolment, and Derrida, the top student at his academy, was expelled. A teacher said French culture was "not made for little Jews". He and his family were stripped of their citizenship.
After graduating in 1956, Derrida spent a year at Harvard University on a graduate scholarship, then returned to Algeria to serve in the French army as a teacher. He moved back to France in 1960 to teach philosophy and logic at the Sorbonne. By 1965, Derrida was teaching the history of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure and was associated with Tel Quel, a leftist magazine that published work by such thinkers as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. The following year saw the publication of three seminal volumes: ‘Writing and Difference’, ‘Speech and Phenomena’ and ‘Of Grammatology’.
In April 1993, he delivered a lecture entitled “Specters of Marx” at a multidisciplinary conference on “Whither Marxism?”. In this seminal address, he paid rich tribute to the Marxist inheritance: “Not without Marx, no future without Marx, without the memory and inheritance of Marx …We all live in a world, some would say a culture, that still bears, at an incalculable depth, the mark of this inheritance, wheher in a directly visible fashion or not.”
He also cautioned against the Western academic attempt to depoliticise Marx and reduce him to just a great philosopher. “People would be ready to accept the return of Marx or the return to Marx, on the condition that a silence is maintained about Marx’s injunction not just to decipher but to act and to make the deciphering [the interpretation] into a transformation that “changes the world.” … If one listens closely, one already hears whispered: “Marx, you see, was despite everything a philosopher like any other; what is more [and one can say this now that so many Marxists have fallen silent], he was a great-philosoher who deserves to figure on the list of those works we assign for study and from which he has been banned for too long. He doesn’t belong to the communists, to the Marxists, to the parties, he ought to figure within our great canon of Western political philosophy. Return to Marx, let’s finally read him as a great philosopher.”
Derrida however remained convinced of the impossibility of this fond bourgeois dream and this explains the haunting title of his lecture: Specters of Marx!
drRamManoharLohia
Remembering Ram Manohar Lohia
The Che of Non-Violence
By NIRANJAN RAMAKRISHNAN
The June 9, 1964 issue of Student Voice (published in Atlanta, GA), the newspaper of the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee), carried the following news report:
"JACKSON, MISS. - A member of India's parliament was twice refused service at a Morrison's cafeteria here, and was escorted away by police, the second time in a patrol wagon. On both occasions May 27-28, Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia was accompanied by white persons and was dressed in native garb. Lohia was here visiting integrated Tougaloo College."
It was just like Rammanohar Lohia, who thought himself a world citizen, ready to fight injustice in Mississippi. He had participated in the Nepalese struggle against the Ranas and launched a Goan civil disobedience movement against Portuguese rule. His role in the Indian Freedom Movement was well known - 6 years in British jails, including spells of torture, in some 6 stints in prison. After independence and another dozen -- by the time of his first visit to the US in 1951 (see [1]), he had already been to jail twice in Free India. To Lohia this was normal -- he was always engaged in some cause, usually several. A strong advocate of civil disobedience and non-violence, he wrote that "A way must be found to combat injustice without weapons. That way has already been found. In the act of civil disobedience lies the irresistible impulse of man without weapons to justice and equality. Civil disobedience is armed reason".
During his 1951 trip to the US, Lohia spoke to audiences all across the south, including Montgomery (where one report says Rosa Parks was also in the audience) about Gandhi's method of non-violent non-cooperation.
A brilliant intellectual, a Ph.D. from Berlin (1932), fluent in English, German, French, Hindi and Bengali, he routinely fought battles on behalf of India's poorest, speaking out about injustice and poverty sharply and without let-up. When he arrived in Parliament in 1963, the country had had a one-party government through three general elections. Lohia shook things up. He had written a pamphlet, "25000 Rupees a Day", the amount spent on Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, an obscene sum in a country where the vast majority lived on 3 annas (less than one-quarter of a rupee) a day. Nehru demurred, saying that India's Planning Commision statistics showed that the daily average income was more like 15 annas (a little under a rupee) per day. Lohia demanded that this was an important issue, one that cried out for a special debate. The controversy, still remembered in India as the "Teen Anna Pandrah Anna (3 annas -15 annas)" controversy, saw something akin to the tense excitement of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington". Member after member gave up his time to Lohia as he built his case, demolishing the Planning Commission statistics as fanciful. Not that the Commission was attempting to mislead, but the reality was that a small number of rich people were pulling up the average to present a wholly unrealistic picture. At that time, Lohia's figure was true for over 70% of the population[3].
Unlike the Marxist theories which became fashionable in the third world in the 50's and 60's, Lohia recognized that caste, more than class, was the huge stumbling block to India's progress. Then as today, caste was politically incorrect to mention in public, but most people practiced it in all aspects of life -- birth, marriage, association and death. It was Lohia's thesis that India had suffered reverses throughout her history because people had viewed themselves as members of a caste rather than citizens of a country. Caste, as Lohia put it, was congealed class. Class was mobile caste. As such, the country was deprived of fresh ideas, because of the narrowness and stultification of thought at the top, which was comprised mainly of the upper castes, Brahmins and Baniyas, and tight compartmentalization even there, the former dominant in the intellectual arena and the latter in the business. A proponent of affirmative action, he compared it to turning the earth to foster a better crop, urging the upper castes, as he put it, "to voluntarily serve as the soil for lower castes to flourish and grow", so that the country would profit from a broader spectrum of talent and ideas.
In Lohia's words, "Caste restricts opportunity. Restricted opportunity constricts ability. Constricted ability further restricts opportunity. Where caste prevails, opportunity and ability are restricted to ever-narrowing circles of the people". [2] In his own party, the Samyukta (United) Socialist Party, Lohia promoted lower caste candidates both by giving electoral tickets and high party positions. Though he talked about caste incessantly, he was not a casteist -- his aim was to make sure people voted for the Socialist party candidate, no matter what his or her caste. His point was that in order to make the country strong, everyone needed to have a stake in it. To eliminate caste, his aphoristic prescription was, "Roti and Beti", that is, people would have to break caste barriers to eat together (Roti) and be willing to give their girls in marriage to boys from other castes (Beti).
Lohia was early to recognize that Marxism and Capitalism were similar in that both were proponents of the Big Machine. It was his belief that Big Industry was no solution for the third world (he even warned Americans, back in 1951, about their lives being taken over by big corporations). He called Marxism the "last weapon of Europe against Asia". Propounding the "Principle of Equal Irrelevance", he rejected both Marxism and Capitalism, which were often presented as the only alteratives for third world nations. Nehru too had a similar view, at least insofar as he observed to Andre Malraux that his challenge was to "build a just society by just means". Lohia had a strong preference for appropriate technology, which would reduce drudgery but not put the common man at the mercy of far away forces. As early as 1951, he foresaw a time of the 'monotonic mind', with nothing much to do because the problems of living had been all addressed by technology.
Aside from the procedural revolution of non-violent civil disobedience, bridging the rich-poor divide, the elimination of caste and the revolution against incursions of the big-machine, other revolutions in Lohia's list included tackling Man-Woman inequality, banishing inequality based on color, and that of preserving individual privacy against encroachment of the collective.
George Will once wrote that though every city in the US had some monument to Jefferson, there was no comparable memorial for Hamilton. He added, "If you want to see the Hamilton Memorial, just look around you. You live in it" [4]. We can similarly say though not attributed to him, many of Lohia's revolutions have advanced in India, some with greater degrees of success than others. In some instances the revolutions have led to perverse results which he would have found distasteful. But Lohia wasn't one to shy away from either controversy or struggle. Unlike the democrats in our current Congress who adopt the Rodney King motto of "Can't we all just get along", Lohia believed that a party grew by taking up causes. He was a strong believer in popular action. In India's parliamentary system, where elections could be called even before the term was over, he once said that "Live communities don't wait for five years (the term of the parliament)", meaning that a government which misruled should be thrown out by the people. He carried out this idea by moving the first no-confidence motion against the Nehru government, which had by then been in office for a 16 years!
Lohia is often called a maverick socialist, a cliched but nevertheless apt description. But he gave that impression not to be controversial, but because he was always evolving his thoughts, and like his mentor, Gandhi, did not hesitate to speak the truth as he saw it. He often surprised both supporters and opponents. He astounded everyone by calling for India to produce the bomb, after the Chinese aggression of 1962. He was anti-English, saying that the British ruled India with bullet and language (bandhook ki goli aur angrezi ki boli). Full of unforgettable phrases which would characterize a point of view, he captured who was a member of India's ruling class in with near-mathematical precision that I have not seen bettered in three decades -- "high-caste, wealth, and knowledge of English are the three requisites, with anyone possessing two of these belonging to the ruling class". The definition still holds.
Rammanohar Lohia was regarded by friend and foe alike as an honest, brilliant, and profound man. He inspired deep loyalty and enormous respect, and to his followers, the words "Doctor Sahib" would conjure up only one image. He lived and died in simplicity, owning nothing. His death was a huge loss to India, for she had lost her one of her finest political minds. He was only 57.
Dr. Lohia would have been 95 today.
Niranjan Ramakrishnan is a writer living on the West Coast. His articles can be found on http://www.indogram.com/gramsabha/articles. His father, K. G. Ramakrishnan was a friend and associate of Dr. Lohia. Niranjan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. He is working on a website, www.drlohia.com, devoted to the writings and ideas of Rammanohar Lohia, to be released on Lohia's Birth Centenary.
References
[1] Lohia and America Meet by Harris Wofford, Jr. (A terrific book. Wofford later served as senator from Pennsylvania.)
[2] Marx, Gandhi and Socialism by Ram Manohar Lohia
[3] Short Biography of Lohia by Khadri Shamanna
[4] Lohia himself said at Marion Junction, Alabama, during his 1951 visit that "In history, the Jeffersons have always been beaten by the Hamiltons. The time is come, on the world's stage, for Jefferson to win." (Wofford, p. 38)
Remembering Ram Manohar Lohia
The Che of Non-Violence
By NIRANJAN RAMAKRISHNAN
The June 9, 1964 issue of Student Voice (published in Atlanta, GA), the newspaper of the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee), carried the following news report:
"JACKSON, MISS. - A member of India's parliament was twice refused service at a Morrison's cafeteria here, and was escorted away by police, the second time in a patrol wagon. On both occasions May 27-28, Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia was accompanied by white persons and was dressed in native garb. Lohia was here visiting integrated Tougaloo College."
It was just like Rammanohar Lohia, who thought himself a world citizen, ready to fight injustice in Mississippi. He had participated in the Nepalese struggle against the Ranas and launched a Goan civil disobedience movement against Portuguese rule. His role in the Indian Freedom Movement was well known - 6 years in British jails, including spells of torture, in some 6 stints in prison. After independence and another dozen -- by the time of his first visit to the US in 1951 (see [1]), he had already been to jail twice in Free India. To Lohia this was normal -- he was always engaged in some cause, usually several. A strong advocate of civil disobedience and non-violence, he wrote that "A way must be found to combat injustice without weapons. That way has already been found. In the act of civil disobedience lies the irresistible impulse of man without weapons to justice and equality. Civil disobedience is armed reason".
During his 1951 trip to the US, Lohia spoke to audiences all across the south, including Montgomery (where one report says Rosa Parks was also in the audience) about Gandhi's method of non-violent non-cooperation.
A brilliant intellectual, a Ph.D. from Berlin (1932), fluent in English, German, French, Hindi and Bengali, he routinely fought battles on behalf of India's poorest, speaking out about injustice and poverty sharply and without let-up. When he arrived in Parliament in 1963, the country had had a one-party government through three general elections. Lohia shook things up. He had written a pamphlet, "25000 Rupees a Day", the amount spent on Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, an obscene sum in a country where the vast majority lived on 3 annas (less than one-quarter of a rupee) a day. Nehru demurred, saying that India's Planning Commision statistics showed that the daily average income was more like 15 annas (a little under a rupee) per day. Lohia demanded that this was an important issue, one that cried out for a special debate. The controversy, still remembered in India as the "Teen Anna Pandrah Anna (3 annas -15 annas)" controversy, saw something akin to the tense excitement of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington". Member after member gave up his time to Lohia as he built his case, demolishing the Planning Commission statistics as fanciful. Not that the Commission was attempting to mislead, but the reality was that a small number of rich people were pulling up the average to present a wholly unrealistic picture. At that time, Lohia's figure was true for over 70% of the population[3].
Unlike the Marxist theories which became fashionable in the third world in the 50's and 60's, Lohia recognized that caste, more than class, was the huge stumbling block to India's progress. Then as today, caste was politically incorrect to mention in public, but most people practiced it in all aspects of life -- birth, marriage, association and death. It was Lohia's thesis that India had suffered reverses throughout her history because people had viewed themselves as members of a caste rather than citizens of a country. Caste, as Lohia put it, was congealed class. Class was mobile caste. As such, the country was deprived of fresh ideas, because of the narrowness and stultification of thought at the top, which was comprised mainly of the upper castes, Brahmins and Baniyas, and tight compartmentalization even there, the former dominant in the intellectual arena and the latter in the business. A proponent of affirmative action, he compared it to turning the earth to foster a better crop, urging the upper castes, as he put it, "to voluntarily serve as the soil for lower castes to flourish and grow", so that the country would profit from a broader spectrum of talent and ideas.
In Lohia's words, "Caste restricts opportunity. Restricted opportunity constricts ability. Constricted ability further restricts opportunity. Where caste prevails, opportunity and ability are restricted to ever-narrowing circles of the people". [2] In his own party, the Samyukta (United) Socialist Party, Lohia promoted lower caste candidates both by giving electoral tickets and high party positions. Though he talked about caste incessantly, he was not a casteist -- his aim was to make sure people voted for the Socialist party candidate, no matter what his or her caste. His point was that in order to make the country strong, everyone needed to have a stake in it. To eliminate caste, his aphoristic prescription was, "Roti and Beti", that is, people would have to break caste barriers to eat together (Roti) and be willing to give their girls in marriage to boys from other castes (Beti).
Lohia was early to recognize that Marxism and Capitalism were similar in that both were proponents of the Big Machine. It was his belief that Big Industry was no solution for the third world (he even warned Americans, back in 1951, about their lives being taken over by big corporations). He called Marxism the "last weapon of Europe against Asia". Propounding the "Principle of Equal Irrelevance", he rejected both Marxism and Capitalism, which were often presented as the only alteratives for third world nations. Nehru too had a similar view, at least insofar as he observed to Andre Malraux that his challenge was to "build a just society by just means". Lohia had a strong preference for appropriate technology, which would reduce drudgery but not put the common man at the mercy of far away forces. As early as 1951, he foresaw a time of the 'monotonic mind', with nothing much to do because the problems of living had been all addressed by technology.
Aside from the procedural revolution of non-violent civil disobedience, bridging the rich-poor divide, the elimination of caste and the revolution against incursions of the big-machine, other revolutions in Lohia's list included tackling Man-Woman inequality, banishing inequality based on color, and that of preserving individual privacy against encroachment of the collective.
George Will once wrote that though every city in the US had some monument to Jefferson, there was no comparable memorial for Hamilton. He added, "If you want to see the Hamilton Memorial, just look around you. You live in it" [4]. We can similarly say though not attributed to him, many of Lohia's revolutions have advanced in India, some with greater degrees of success than others. In some instances the revolutions have led to perverse results which he would have found distasteful. But Lohia wasn't one to shy away from either controversy or struggle. Unlike the democrats in our current Congress who adopt the Rodney King motto of "Can't we all just get along", Lohia believed that a party grew by taking up causes. He was a strong believer in popular action. In India's parliamentary system, where elections could be called even before the term was over, he once said that "Live communities don't wait for five years (the term of the parliament)", meaning that a government which misruled should be thrown out by the people. He carried out this idea by moving the first no-confidence motion against the Nehru government, which had by then been in office for a 16 years!
Lohia is often called a maverick socialist, a cliched but nevertheless apt description. But he gave that impression not to be controversial, but because he was always evolving his thoughts, and like his mentor, Gandhi, did not hesitate to speak the truth as he saw it. He often surprised both supporters and opponents. He astounded everyone by calling for India to produce the bomb, after the Chinese aggression of 1962. He was anti-English, saying that the British ruled India with bullet and language (bandhook ki goli aur angrezi ki boli). Full of unforgettable phrases which would characterize a point of view, he captured who was a member of India's ruling class in with near-mathematical precision that I have not seen bettered in three decades -- "high-caste, wealth, and knowledge of English are the three requisites, with anyone possessing two of these belonging to the ruling class". The definition still holds.
Rammanohar Lohia was regarded by friend and foe alike as an honest, brilliant, and profound man. He inspired deep loyalty and enormous respect, and to his followers, the words "Doctor Sahib" would conjure up only one image. He lived and died in simplicity, owning nothing. His death was a huge loss to India, for she had lost her one of her finest political minds. He was only 57.
Dr. Lohia would have been 95 today.
Niranjan Ramakrishnan is a writer living on the West Coast. His articles can be found on http://www.indogram.com/gramsabha/articles. His father, K. G. Ramakrishnan was a friend and associate of Dr. Lohia. Niranjan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. He is working on a website, www.drlohia.com, devoted to the writings and ideas of Rammanohar Lohia, to be released on Lohia's Birth Centenary.
References
[1] Lohia and America Meet by Harris Wofford, Jr. (A terrific book. Wofford later served as senator from Pennsylvania.)
[2] Marx, Gandhi and Socialism by Ram Manohar Lohia
[3] Short Biography of Lohia by Khadri Shamanna
[4] Lohia himself said at Marion Junction, Alabama, during his 1951 visit that "In history, the Jeffersons have always been beaten by the Hamiltons. The time is come, on the world's stage, for Jefferson to win." (Wofford, p. 38)
The Che of Non-Violence
By NIRANJAN RAMAKRISHNAN
The June 9, 1964 issue of Student Voice (published in Atlanta, GA), the newspaper of the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee), carried the following news report:
"JACKSON, MISS. - A member of India's parliament was twice refused service at a Morrison's cafeteria here, and was escorted away by police, the second time in a patrol wagon. On both occasions May 27-28, Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia was accompanied by white persons and was dressed in native garb. Lohia was here visiting integrated Tougaloo College."
It was just like Rammanohar Lohia, who thought himself a world citizen, ready to fight injustice in Mississippi. He had participated in the Nepalese struggle against the Ranas and launched a Goan civil disobedience movement against Portuguese rule. His role in the Indian Freedom Movement was well known - 6 years in British jails, including spells of torture, in some 6 stints in prison. After independence and another dozen -- by the time of his first visit to the US in 1951 (see [1]), he had already been to jail twice in Free India. To Lohia this was normal -- he was always engaged in some cause, usually several. A strong advocate of civil disobedience and non-violence, he wrote that "A way must be found to combat injustice without weapons. That way has already been found. In the act of civil disobedience lies the irresistible impulse of man without weapons to justice and equality. Civil disobedience is armed reason".
During his 1951 trip to the US, Lohia spoke to audiences all across the south, including Montgomery (where one report says Rosa Parks was also in the audience) about Gandhi's method of non-violent non-cooperation.
A brilliant intellectual, a Ph.D. from Berlin (1932), fluent in English, German, French, Hindi and Bengali, he routinely fought battles on behalf of India's poorest, speaking out about injustice and poverty sharply and without let-up. When he arrived in Parliament in 1963, the country had had a one-party government through three general elections. Lohia shook things up. He had written a pamphlet, "25000 Rupees a Day", the amount spent on Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, an obscene sum in a country where the vast majority lived on 3 annas (less than one-quarter of a rupee) a day. Nehru demurred, saying that India's Planning Commision statistics showed that the daily average income was more like 15 annas (a little under a rupee) per day. Lohia demanded that this was an important issue, one that cried out for a special debate. The controversy, still remembered in India as the "Teen Anna Pandrah Anna (3 annas -15 annas)" controversy, saw something akin to the tense excitement of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington". Member after member gave up his time to Lohia as he built his case, demolishing the Planning Commission statistics as fanciful. Not that the Commission was attempting to mislead, but the reality was that a small number of rich people were pulling up the average to present a wholly unrealistic picture. At that time, Lohia's figure was true for over 70% of the population[3].
Unlike the Marxist theories which became fashionable in the third world in the 50's and 60's, Lohia recognized that caste, more than class, was the huge stumbling block to India's progress. Then as today, caste was politically incorrect to mention in public, but most people practiced it in all aspects of life -- birth, marriage, association and death. It was Lohia's thesis that India had suffered reverses throughout her history because people had viewed themselves as members of a caste rather than citizens of a country. Caste, as Lohia put it, was congealed class. Class was mobile caste. As such, the country was deprived of fresh ideas, because of the narrowness and stultification of thought at the top, which was comprised mainly of the upper castes, Brahmins and Baniyas, and tight compartmentalization even there, the former dominant in the intellectual arena and the latter in the business. A proponent of affirmative action, he compared it to turning the earth to foster a better crop, urging the upper castes, as he put it, "to voluntarily serve as the soil for lower castes to flourish and grow", so that the country would profit from a broader spectrum of talent and ideas.
In Lohia's words, "Caste restricts opportunity. Restricted opportunity constricts ability. Constricted ability further restricts opportunity. Where caste prevails, opportunity and ability are restricted to ever-narrowing circles of the people". [2] In his own party, the Samyukta (United) Socialist Party, Lohia promoted lower caste candidates both by giving electoral tickets and high party positions. Though he talked about caste incessantly, he was not a casteist -- his aim was to make sure people voted for the Socialist party candidate, no matter what his or her caste. His point was that in order to make the country strong, everyone needed to have a stake in it. To eliminate caste, his aphoristic prescription was, "Roti and Beti", that is, people would have to break caste barriers to eat together (Roti) and be willing to give their girls in marriage to boys from other castes (Beti).
Lohia was early to recognize that Marxism and Capitalism were similar in that both were proponents of the Big Machine. It was his belief that Big Industry was no solution for the third world (he even warned Americans, back in 1951, about their lives being taken over by big corporations). He called Marxism the "last weapon of Europe against Asia". Propounding the "Principle of Equal Irrelevance", he rejected both Marxism and Capitalism, which were often presented as the only alteratives for third world nations. Nehru too had a similar view, at least insofar as he observed to Andre Malraux that his challenge was to "build a just society by just means". Lohia had a strong preference for appropriate technology, which would reduce drudgery but not put the common man at the mercy of far away forces. As early as 1951, he foresaw a time of the 'monotonic mind', with nothing much to do because the problems of living had been all addressed by technology.
Aside from the procedural revolution of non-violent civil disobedience, bridging the rich-poor divide, the elimination of caste and the revolution against incursions of the big-machine, other revolutions in Lohia's list included tackling Man-Woman inequality, banishing inequality based on color, and that of preserving individual privacy against encroachment of the collective.
George Will once wrote that though every city in the US had some monument to Jefferson, there was no comparable memorial for Hamilton. He added, "If you want to see the Hamilton Memorial, just look around you. You live in it" [4]. We can similarly say though not attributed to him, many of Lohia's revolutions have advanced in India, some with greater degrees of success than others. In some instances the revolutions have led to perverse results which he would have found distasteful. But Lohia wasn't one to shy away from either controversy or struggle. Unlike the democrats in our current Congress who adopt the Rodney King motto of "Can't we all just get along", Lohia believed that a party grew by taking up causes. He was a strong believer in popular action. In India's parliamentary system, where elections could be called even before the term was over, he once said that "Live communities don't wait for five years (the term of the parliament)", meaning that a government which misruled should be thrown out by the people. He carried out this idea by moving the first no-confidence motion against the Nehru government, which had by then been in office for a 16 years!
Lohia is often called a maverick socialist, a cliched but nevertheless apt description. But he gave that impression not to be controversial, but because he was always evolving his thoughts, and like his mentor, Gandhi, did not hesitate to speak the truth as he saw it. He often surprised both supporters and opponents. He astounded everyone by calling for India to produce the bomb, after the Chinese aggression of 1962. He was anti-English, saying that the British ruled India with bullet and language (bandhook ki goli aur angrezi ki boli). Full of unforgettable phrases which would characterize a point of view, he captured who was a member of India's ruling class in with near-mathematical precision that I have not seen bettered in three decades -- "high-caste, wealth, and knowledge of English are the three requisites, with anyone possessing two of these belonging to the ruling class". The definition still holds.
Rammanohar Lohia was regarded by friend and foe alike as an honest, brilliant, and profound man. He inspired deep loyalty and enormous respect, and to his followers, the words "Doctor Sahib" would conjure up only one image. He lived and died in simplicity, owning nothing. His death was a huge loss to India, for she had lost her one of her finest political minds. He was only 57.
Dr. Lohia would have been 95 today.
Niranjan Ramakrishnan is a writer living on the West Coast. His articles can be found on http://www.indogram.com/gramsabha/articles. His father, K. G. Ramakrishnan was a friend and associate of Dr. Lohia. Niranjan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. He is working on a website, www.drlohia.com, devoted to the writings and ideas of Rammanohar Lohia, to be released on Lohia's Birth Centenary.
References
[1] Lohia and America Meet by Harris Wofford, Jr. (A terrific book. Wofford later served as senator from Pennsylvania.)
[2] Marx, Gandhi and Socialism by Ram Manohar Lohia
[3] Short Biography of Lohia by Khadri Shamanna
[4] Lohia himself said at Marion Junction, Alabama, during his 1951 visit that "In history, the Jeffersons have always been beaten by the Hamiltons. The time is come, on the world's stage, for Jefferson to win." (Wofford, p. 38)
Remembering Ram Manohar Lohia
The Che of Non-Violence
By NIRANJAN RAMAKRISHNAN
The June 9, 1964 issue of Student Voice (published in Atlanta, GA), the newspaper of the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee), carried the following news report:
"JACKSON, MISS. - A member of India's parliament was twice refused service at a Morrison's cafeteria here, and was escorted away by police, the second time in a patrol wagon. On both occasions May 27-28, Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia was accompanied by white persons and was dressed in native garb. Lohia was here visiting integrated Tougaloo College."
It was just like Rammanohar Lohia, who thought himself a world citizen, ready to fight injustice in Mississippi. He had participated in the Nepalese struggle against the Ranas and launched a Goan civil disobedience movement against Portuguese rule. His role in the Indian Freedom Movement was well known - 6 years in British jails, including spells of torture, in some 6 stints in prison. After independence and another dozen -- by the time of his first visit to the US in 1951 (see [1]), he had already been to jail twice in Free India. To Lohia this was normal -- he was always engaged in some cause, usually several. A strong advocate of civil disobedience and non-violence, he wrote that "A way must be found to combat injustice without weapons. That way has already been found. In the act of civil disobedience lies the irresistible impulse of man without weapons to justice and equality. Civil disobedience is armed reason".
During his 1951 trip to the US, Lohia spoke to audiences all across the south, including Montgomery (where one report says Rosa Parks was also in the audience) about Gandhi's method of non-violent non-cooperation.
A brilliant intellectual, a Ph.D. from Berlin (1932), fluent in English, German, French, Hindi and Bengali, he routinely fought battles on behalf of India's poorest, speaking out about injustice and poverty sharply and without let-up. When he arrived in Parliament in 1963, the country had had a one-party government through three general elections. Lohia shook things up. He had written a pamphlet, "25000 Rupees a Day", the amount spent on Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, an obscene sum in a country where the vast majority lived on 3 annas (less than one-quarter of a rupee) a day. Nehru demurred, saying that India's Planning Commision statistics showed that the daily average income was more like 15 annas (a little under a rupee) per day. Lohia demanded that this was an important issue, one that cried out for a special debate. The controversy, still remembered in India as the "Teen Anna Pandrah Anna (3 annas -15 annas)" controversy, saw something akin to the tense excitement of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington". Member after member gave up his time to Lohia as he built his case, demolishing the Planning Commission statistics as fanciful. Not that the Commission was attempting to mislead, but the reality was that a small number of rich people were pulling up the average to present a wholly unrealistic picture. At that time, Lohia's figure was true for over 70% of the population[3].
Unlike the Marxist theories which became fashionable in the third world in the 50's and 60's, Lohia recognized that caste, more than class, was the huge stumbling block to India's progress. Then as today, caste was politically incorrect to mention in public, but most people practiced it in all aspects of life -- birth, marriage, association and death. It was Lohia's thesis that India had suffered reverses throughout her history because people had viewed themselves as members of a caste rather than citizens of a country. Caste, as Lohia put it, was congealed class. Class was mobile caste. As such, the country was deprived of fresh ideas, because of the narrowness and stultification of thought at the top, which was comprised mainly of the upper castes, Brahmins and Baniyas, and tight compartmentalization even there, the former dominant in the intellectual arena and the latter in the business. A proponent of affirmative action, he compared it to turning the earth to foster a better crop, urging the upper castes, as he put it, "to voluntarily serve as the soil for lower castes to flourish and grow", so that the country would profit from a broader spectrum of talent and ideas.
In Lohia's words, "Caste restricts opportunity. Restricted opportunity constricts ability. Constricted ability further restricts opportunity. Where caste prevails, opportunity and ability are restricted to ever-narrowing circles of the people". [2] In his own party, the Samyukta (United) Socialist Party, Lohia promoted lower caste candidates both by giving electoral tickets and high party positions. Though he talked about caste incessantly, he was not a casteist -- his aim was to make sure people voted for the Socialist party candidate, no matter what his or her caste. His point was that in order to make the country strong, everyone needed to have a stake in it. To eliminate caste, his aphoristic prescription was, "Roti and Beti", that is, people would have to break caste barriers to eat together (Roti) and be willing to give their girls in marriage to boys from other castes (Beti).
Lohia was early to recognize that Marxism and Capitalism were similar in that both were proponents of the Big Machine. It was his belief that Big Industry was no solution for the third world (he even warned Americans, back in 1951, about their lives being taken over by big corporations). He called Marxism the "last weapon of Europe against Asia". Propounding the "Principle of Equal Irrelevance", he rejected both Marxism and Capitalism, which were often presented as the only alteratives for third world nations. Nehru too had a similar view, at least insofar as he observed to Andre Malraux that his challenge was to "build a just society by just means". Lohia had a strong preference for appropriate technology, which would reduce drudgery but not put the common man at the mercy of far away forces. As early as 1951, he foresaw a time of the 'monotonic mind', with nothing much to do because the problems of living had been all addressed by technology.
Aside from the procedural revolution of non-violent civil disobedience, bridging the rich-poor divide, the elimination of caste and the revolution against incursions of the big-machine, other revolutions in Lohia's list included tackling Man-Woman inequality, banishing inequality based on color, and that of preserving individual privacy against encroachment of the collective.
George Will once wrote that though every city in the US had some monument to Jefferson, there was no comparable memorial for Hamilton. He added, "If you want to see the Hamilton Memorial, just look around you. You live in it" [4]. We can similarly say though not attributed to him, many of Lohia's revolutions have advanced in India, some with greater degrees of success than others. In some instances the revolutions have led to perverse results which he would have found distasteful. But Lohia wasn't one to shy away from either controversy or struggle. Unlike the democrats in our current Congress who adopt the Rodney King motto of "Can't we all just get along", Lohia believed that a party grew by taking up causes. He was a strong believer in popular action. In India's parliamentary system, where elections could be called even before the term was over, he once said that "Live communities don't wait for five years (the term of the parliament)", meaning that a government which misruled should be thrown out by the people. He carried out this idea by moving the first no-confidence motion against the Nehru government, which had by then been in office for a 16 years!
Lohia is often called a maverick socialist, a cliched but nevertheless apt description. But he gave that impression not to be controversial, but because he was always evolving his thoughts, and like his mentor, Gandhi, did not hesitate to speak the truth as he saw it. He often surprised both supporters and opponents. He astounded everyone by calling for India to produce the bomb, after the Chinese aggression of 1962. He was anti-English, saying that the British ruled India with bullet and language (bandhook ki goli aur angrezi ki boli). Full of unforgettable phrases which would characterize a point of view, he captured who was a member of India's ruling class in with near-mathematical precision that I have not seen bettered in three decades -- "high-caste, wealth, and knowledge of English are the three requisites, with anyone possessing two of these belonging to the ruling class". The definition still holds.
Rammanohar Lohia was regarded by friend and foe alike as an honest, brilliant, and profound man. He inspired deep loyalty and enormous respect, and to his followers, the words "Doctor Sahib" would conjure up only one image. He lived and died in simplicity, owning nothing. His death was a huge loss to India, for she had lost her one of her finest political minds. He was only 57.
Dr. Lohia would have been 95 today.
Niranjan Ramakrishnan is a writer living on the West Coast. His articles can be found on http://www.indogram.com/gramsabha/articles. His father, K. G. Ramakrishnan was a friend and associate of Dr. Lohia. Niranjan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. He is working on a website, www.drlohia.com, devoted to the writings and ideas of Rammanohar Lohia, to be released on Lohia's Birth Centenary.
References
[1] Lohia and America Meet by Harris Wofford, Jr. (A terrific book. Wofford later served as senator from Pennsylvania.)
[2] Marx, Gandhi and Socialism by Ram Manohar Lohia
[3] Short Biography of Lohia by Khadri Shamanna
[4] Lohia himself said at Marion Junction, Alabama, during his 1951 visit that "In history, the Jeffersons have always been beaten by the Hamiltons. The time is come, on the world's stage, for Jefferson to win." (Wofford, p. 38)
the mankind
themankind is the publication started by the eminent socialist dr. Rammanoharalohya. dr Lohya introduced socialism in a new way.He was not a mere politician. But a compassinate intellect with a world mind. hIS DREAM WAS ABOUT A WORLD without wars and hatred. He introduced politics in such dimension where a world government and new civilization emerge. this blog aims at spreading the fragrance of a new world order
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