 Rammanohar,
son of Hiralal Lohia, a Vaishya businessman, was
born at Akbarpur (in the District of Fyzabad,
U. P.), near Ayodhya, on 23 March 1910. Their
original home was at Mirzapur (U. P.), where his
great-grandfather, Lala Mansukhram, had a flourishing
business in cloth and iron. Having lost his mother
Chandri or Chanda, of a Jhunjhunwala family of
Chanpatia in North Bihar, at the age of two years
and a half, Rammanohar was brought up by his grandmother
and aunt.
His earliest education was at the Tandon Pathshala
and Visheshwar Nath High School, at or very close
to Akbarpur, and then at the Marwari School in
Bombay, where his father had started a fresh business.
He passed the Matriculation examination from the
Bombay University in the first division in 1925,
I. A. from the Benares Hindu University in 1927.
While at College he attended the session of the
Indian National Congress at Gauhati in 1926. After
graduation, he secured some grants from a few
Trusts for higher studies abroad. He first went
to London and then to Germany. He obtained the
Ph. D. degree at the Berlin University in 1932
for a thesis on ‘Salt and Civil Disobedience’.
Home and environment determined his interest in
politics. His father, who had not married again
after the death of Rammanohar’s mother, actively
participated in the activities of the Congress.
He took his only son Rammanohar, a boy of eight,
to the Ahmedabad session of the Congress in 1918.
As a school student, he participated in demonstrations
on Tilak’s death.
Coming back to India in 1933, Lohia sought employment.
Failing to get a teaching job at the Benares Hindu
University, he reluctantly became the Private
Secretary to Rameshwardas Birla for a few months.
The final choice of politics as a career was made
when the Congress Socialist Party was formed in
1934. Lohia was elected a member of the Executive
Committee and also the first editor of the new
weekly, the Congress Socialist. With his election
as Secretary of the Foreign Department of the
Indian National Congress at the Lucknow session,
he changed his headquarters from Calcutta to Allahabad,
and began to take more interest in international
affairs.
But in 1938 he had to leave that office in accordance
with a Congress resolution. In that year he had
been elected a member of the Socialist faction
of the Congress at Lahore. The possibility of
World War II led him to suggest to the Congress
in 1939 and again on the premises of the A.I.C.C.
at Allahabad on 7 June 1940. During these years
he did not approve of either the Gandhi-Viceroy
Statement of 9 September 1939 nor of the attitude
of Subhas Chandra Bose to the War.
National and international events in 1941-42 brought
Lohia closer to the other sections of the Congress.
Welcoming the Quit India resolution on 8 August
1942, he went underground, conducted broadcasts
of the secret Congress Radio at Bombay and Calcutta
in 1942 and along with J. P. Narayan, worked for
the ‘Azad Dasta’ in Nepal for some time.
He eluded the grasp of the police since 9 August
1942 but was finally arrested on 20 May 1944.
Inhuman torture was inflicted on him at the Lahore
jail.
Released from prison on 11 April 1946, he was
offered Secretaryship of the Congress. But he
declined, as the Congress Party refused to comply
with the proposal that neither the Congress should
become the Prime Minister nor any member of the
Working Committee of the Party, a Union or State
Minister. He and other Socialists finally left
the Congress in 1948, as a strong section of the
right-wing leaders and the A. I. C. C. resolved
that the Socialists were “exploiting”
the Congress, as an organised group within the
Party.
The Socialists after having merged with the Krishak
Mazdoor Praja Party formed the Praja Socialist
Party in 1952. But neither the compromise with
J. P. Narayan and Asoka Mehta at the Betul Convention
in 1953 nor his election as General Secretary
at Allahabad (1953) could keep Lohia within the
He resigned the Secretaryship as a protest against
the refusal of |
Pattom Thanu Pillai,
Chief Minister of Travancore-Cochin, to quit on
the issue of police firing on language agitators
in 1954.
The P.S.P. warned Lohia for dictating to Pillai
and shortly thereafter suspended him for his approval
of the criticism of the party leaders by Madhu
Limaye at a Press Conference on 26 March 1955.
Soon he inaugurated the formation of the Socialist
Party at Hyderabad and became its first Chairman
and editor of the Mankind in 1956.
On 7 June 1964 this Party merged with the Praja
Socialist Party and came to be known as the Samyukta
Socialist Party. But the merger did not result
in the formulation of a common programme in 1965
or later because of the insistence by the followers
of Lohia on Hindi as the national language, rights
of the untouchable and no compromise with the
Congress and Communists.
Lohia died on 12 October 1967 at the Willingdon
Nursing Home, New Delhi, following an operation
on prostate gland on 30 September 1967.
As a member of the Lok Sabha since 1963 from the
Farrukhabad Constituency (U. P.), Lohia was a
stormy petrel in the House. He was also a prolific
writer. Among his publications may be mentioned:
‘Mystery of Sir Stafford Cripps’ (Bombay,
1942), ‘Aspects of Socialist Policy’,
(Bombay, 1952), ‘Wheel of History’ (Hyderabad,
1955, 1963), ‘Will Power and other Writings’
(Hyderabad, 1956), ‘Guilty men of India’s
Partition’ (Allahabad, 1960), ‘Marx,
Gandhi and Socialism’ (Hyderabad, 1962),
‘India, China and Northern Frontiers’
(Hyderabad, 1963), ‘The Caste System’
(Hyderabad, 1964), ‘Fragments of World Mind’
(Allahabad) and ‘Language’ (Hyderabad,
1966).
He travelled abroad in many countries. In 1951
he attended the first International Conference
of Socialists at Frankfurt (Germany). He also
organised, though he did not attend, the first
Asian Socialists Conference at Rangoon in 1953.
He also initiated freedom movements in Goa and
Nepal in 1946.
Short like his mother, bespectacled, simple in
dress, drinking tea and smoking, rising late,
bachelor Rammanohar worked hard. A critic of Hinduism,
post-1947 Congress and Communist Parties, he proposed
equi-distance from the Congress, the Communist
and the communalist parties at the Betul Convention
(1953). He pointed out numerous lapses in Marxian
thought.
In his concept of New Socialism, particularly
in the Indian context, he referred to permanent
civil disobedience, oscillation between caste
and class, synthesis of centralisation and decentralisation
in politico-economic matters and a functional
federalism wherein the units are the villages,
the districts, the provinces and the central government.
He strongly opposed partition of India in 1947.
After independence he fought for civil liberty
and criticized the foreign policy of the Government
of India. He campaigned against the Chinese occupation
of Indian territory and India Government’s
advocacy for the admission of China in the U.N.O.
in 1962.
He argued in favour of the nationalization of
foreign assets, introduction of machines in small
economic units, 60% of vacancies in Government
service to be filled by backward classes, remission
of land-tax on holdings below 6 ½ acres,
preventing concentration of capital and reducing
inequality of income. He also pleaded for the
introduction of Hindi as the medium of instruction,
more effective birth-control measures, abolition
of the dowry system, and introduction of inter-religious
and inter-caste marriages.
“He was limited in appeal because of his
personal defects. He was a critic who liked to
tear his opponent to pieces with biting words
and supporting statistics. Within the Party itself
his point of view had to be accpeted or he would
not cooperate” (Phulgenda Sinha : Praja Socialist
Party of India). In spite of these limitations,
Lohia’s memory would be cherished for his
learning, provocative ideas, fluency in French,
German, Bengali, Urdu and other Indian languages,
imprisonment for more than nineteen times, intense
patriotism and broad outlook. |