~ Smriti Singh
Ram Manohar Lohia was a liberty warrior, a strong democrat, and a politician with integrity. Ram Manohar has always imitated the facts and done a great job in the fight for independence. In India’s politics, before and after the independence struggle, several such leaders came to change the political stance on their own, one of them being Ram Manohar Lohia. He was known for his strong liberalism and sharp socialist views, and he gained a lot of admiration from his followers as well as his critics for such good paraphernalia.
He was born in Akbarpur, Uttar Pradesh, on 23rd March 1910. His mother was a professor. When he was very young, his mother died. A nationalist of his family, he was influenced by numerous demonstrations and opposition meetings of a young age to engage in India’s independence movements. He always preferred Hindi over English. He believed English distances the educated from the uneducated.
He used to say that using Hindi will increase the sense of unity and ideas in creating a new nation. He was also an obnoxious caste interlocutor. His brother, once Mahatma Gandhi ‘s close follower took Ram Manohar with him to meet Gandhi was another turning point in his life. Ram was influenced and followed the values of Gandhi during his life by Manohar Gandhi.
In 1921 he worked for the first time with Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and continued to work with him for many years. Later, however, they were confronted on various matters and political principles. In the year 1928, when the Simon Commission formed by the British government,
he was 18 and arranged a demonstration. He fiercely opposed India ‘s participation in World War II alongside the British. He was arrested and sent to two years in prison. His deep-rooted passion for social issues was one thing that pushed him to act. He graduated from Calcutta University in 1929 and completed his doctorate. Subsequently, in 1932, he moved to Berlin University in Germany. He eventually studied German and was also rewarded for his excellent academic achievement.
Following freedom, the Socialists agreed to follow their course in 1948 in Congress, although there were separate sources of parliamentary friendship. In 1951, caste was again relevant in the political sphere when the Directive Theory of State Policy was revived to make some special protection for the schooling, economic or social development of every disadvantaged class of people and an amendment to Article 15(3) was made so that these steps could not be opposed by the State on the grounds of potential prejudice. The Indian state was now in the middle of openly tackling these issues. Nehru and his ruling Congress government in 1955 had opposed the proposals of the Kalekar Backward Caste Commission because caste is not an adequate index to assess backwardness and that caste-based quotas can reinforce these mechanisms. Lohia believed that his aversion to dealing with castes and seeing it as an economic problem for Congress is seen to emanate from his elitist leaders, who wanted to keep
their hegemony in keeping with the current structures.
Lohia had a generic caste and class comprehension. The first free India general elections were held in absolute majority by Congress. Shortly after, Nehru embarked on a vociferous centralized policy strategy, believing that the Indian society’s rapid growth would be a cure for social unrest. His style of governance showed signs of besottedness with the kind of state sponsored economic development scheme in the Soviet Union, and a strong influence of Eurocentered power centralization ideals. This was an insufficient outlook for Lohia to cope with caste and the broader social conditions in India. Lohia was therefore dismissive of both the country’s socialist and liberal approach. He had previously opposed Karl Marx ‘s linear development of history in his Economics after Marx in 1943 as being concerned solely with introducing capitalism to Europe and refusing to consider the misery and suffering of non-Europe created by the industrial revolution and capitalist practices of Western communities.
He may have been propitiated by the crisis at home and his broader socialist impulses to remove the Wheel of History from his great narrative.
He evoked that in Indian culture, the reality that caste exists and cannot revert to class equality in this chain of oscillation implies that there is a need to examine how certain aspects of political, economic and cultural force hierarchies present themselves in the continuity of the
caste through implies of linkages and relation. Therefore, he gave his theory of caste interconnectivity and gender inequality in 1953. He stated that caste-based apartheid and gender inequality exist concurrently in India, and therefore derive from the same political viewpoint. Thus, his willingness to see beyond the limited economic interests of certain caste
classes and refuse the room within the socialist agenda speaks to his political awareness.