Patriots > Freedom Struggle under Mahatma Gandhi > Lohia Rammanohar (Dr.)
Lohia Rammanohar (Dr.) (1910-1967)
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.
Author : B . P. Mazumdar