COMMENTARY

Lohias Contribution to
Socialist Politics in India
Keshav Rao Jadhav

Rammanohar Lohia gifted muscle

and blood to a socialist movement
that was smarting at the defeat
in the 1952 general elections. His
emergence as a man of the masses
gave a certain agenda to Indian
politics. In his last days, Lohia
said that tomorrows leaders will
not be national leaders but those
of localities and villages.

efore Rammanohar Lohias emergence in Indian politics the socialist movement suffered from an
overdose of Marxist rhetoric as also an element of abstract formulations. But politics is not only a construction of ideological formulations, it has to deal with social
problems as also day to day situations.
Lohia provided flesh and blood to
largely abstract formulations of the
socialist movement.
Lohia believed that the caste system was
responsible for most of the ills of Indian
society. He formulated the thesis that
castes arise when the struggle between
classes becomes intense and compromise
impossible. However, in other societies,
except the indigenous empires in central
and south America and in Japanese
society, caste comes and goes; there is
constant movement between caste and
class. Since conflict and its just resolution
takes society forward, any attempt to put
a lid on conflict creates stagnation. A
suffocating atmosphere is thus created,
doing immense harm to society, destroying its creative impulses.
The persistence of the Indian caste
system with its inbuilt inequalities and cruelties has dehumanised both the oppressor
and oppressed castes. The system has been
fashioned in such a manner that if people
belonging to a depressed caste feel constantly humiliated they have the satisfaction that they are superior to at least one
other caste. In the final analysis this has
proved to be suicidal for India and its people. From Buddha to Lohia there has been
an unbroken chain of resistance to the caste
system. But their visions and methods were
different. So also were the directions of
their attacks.

Role of Caste
Keshav Rao Jadhav, based in Hyderabad,
has been active for decades in the socialist
movement and also in the field of civil liberties.

Caste prevents the emergence of a cohesive, integrated and united society. It, in
fact, breaks up society and creates hundreds
of sub-societies, all inward-looking and

Economic & Political Weekly EPW october 2, 2010 vol xlv no 40

complete in themselves. These caste-based

sub-societies then break up further into
more societies and sub-castes. However,
these societies are not autonomous. They
are dependent on each other. An elaborate
system of rituals has been created to
link these caste-based societies to each
other, giving a sense of satisfaction to
every group.
Religion, economy, culture and social
structures are brought together and woven
into a single strand to provide satisfaction
and reward but also maintain hierarchy.
Whether or not this came about as a result
of unfinished struggles and compromises
we do not know. Hindus very rarely wrote
their history. If they had regarded history
as a description of a peoples attempt to
fashion a civilisation they would have
perhaps attempted to write history. After
all the philosophy of yugas describes the
ascent and descent of civilisations. But
neither Indians nor any other people
regarded history as a history of people.
And repeated defeats interspersed by a
few victories of Indian arms resulted in
inward-looking societies unable to explore
the reasons of their subjugation.
The Indian division of society into castes
based on the concept of the superiority of
mental work and inferiority of manual
labour is both unnatural and based on a
wrong assumption. There cannot be anything like pure mental and pure manual
work. In all things the mental body has a
role to play; in all things the manual mind
has an important role. That a country
which first propounded the essential unity
of mind and matter should create such an
artificial division of labour is astounding.
Or was it a deliberate and motivated violation of its own understanding of existence? Another aspect of caste may be
noted. Though the gender problem is
universal it acquires casteist overtones
in India. Depressed caste women suffer
from double oppression that of caste and
gender-based injustice. The notion of
pollution is rigidly applied to man-woman
relationship.
Almost all the attacks on the Indian caste
system have failed to destroy it because
they were made from one particular direction. Buddhism, Jainism, Veerashaivism,
Chakradhars and Narayan Gurus from
religious and philosophical directions,

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COMMENTARY

Guru Nanaks, Kabirs and Naickers from

a rational point of view, Mahatma Phules
from a historical angle, and Mahatma
Gandhis and B R Ambedkars from a
social and religious angle. Lohia realised
that the caste in India is too firmly entrenched to be annihilated by an assault
from any one direction. He believed that
the destruction of caste is possible only
through a multi-pronged attack philosophical, religious, historical, political,
economic, educational, gender and social.
Most of his own followers have ditched
the agenda for short-term gains.

Language
Lohia also regarded the language policies
of Indian rulers from the ancient to modern
times as a weapon to reinforce caste. Sanskrit in ancient times, Farsi in the medieval
period and now English were and are
being used to subjugate the non-upper
castes and poorer sections of upper castes.
English is being used not to provide
knowledge but to prevent the spread of
knowledge among the poor. How can one
language become a source of all knowledge? Such a perverse use of language
creates elitism in society producing a class
of people who want to look different from
the common people, speak and work in a
different language, even eat a different
type of food and now use even a different
type of water! The language problem in
fact is a part of the caste problem.
That Hindu-Muslim tensions were aggravated and used by the British to create
Pakistan moved Lohia to sit down to pen
his only systematic attempt at writing.
(All his other books were his public meeting speeches and a few lectures at seminars and small gatherings recorded by
followers and admirers.) Lohia believed
that Pakistan, created by the British to
increase tensions between Hindus and
Muslims could not resolve the HinduMuslim problem. He held that a wrong
reading of the medieval happenings by
both the communities was responsible for
the tensions. Not only Buddhist and Hindu
kingdoms, but also Muslim kingdoms turning native were defeated and destroyed
by foreign Muslim armies, e g: Turks conquering the Buddhist, Hindu and Afghan
(Muslim) kingdoms of Afghanistan. Later the
Moghals led by Babar defeated the Afghans

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at the first battle of Panipat as also Maharana Sanga of Rajaputana. Shershah Surs
relentless war on the Moghals, resulted
in the defeat of Humayun and after
Shershahs death the destruction of the
Indian Pathan kingdom by Moghals at the
second battle of Panipath. Similarly, there
was Aurangazebs war on the Shia kingdoms
of the Deccan as also his 28-year-war on
the Maratha kingdom which resulted in
his defeat and death in Maharashtra followed by the dissolution of the Moghal
empire. So where is Hindu-Muslim conflict? He said that the defeat of most Indian (Hindu and Muslim) armies at the
hands of foreigners was the result of lethargy, caste, disunity and treachery.

Prices
Price rise for the poor means starvation
and even death. Yet neither the ruling nor
the opposition parties seemed to bother.
Lohia made this the main issue of politics
in India. He demanded that there should
be parity between the prices of agricultural products and industrial goods.

Police Firing
In no other country are police firings so
regular and casual as in India. First, people
are provoked to agitate even for the right
to exist. Petitions are thrown into the
waste paper-basket, peaceful demonstrators are lathi-charged and tear-gassed and
when they become angry and start throwing stones at the police they are fired
upon. The aim of firing should be to disperse mobs, not to kill unarmed people.
About 30,000 people had been killed in
police firings in the first 20 years after independence. Lohia made it the main issue
of Indian politics. Public meetings were
organised and tracts were published by
the Socialist Party to educate the government and the people. Every year hundreds
die in police firings at all sorts of places
religious gatherings, protest demonstrations outside Parliament and assemblies,
people demanding better wages, food and
water; farmers demanding protection for
their lands and wanting to know why
prices crash when their produce reaches the
market; students protesting an increase
in fees, etc. Yet, no fair enquiry is ever
held and the guilty punished. For Lohia it
was the colonial mentality of the ruling

classes, especially the Nehru family, that

was responsible for such a horrifying
state of affairs.
Addressing farmers at Rewa, Lohia
propounded the thesis of the Four Pillar
State equal powers including financial
ones to the village panchayat, district
parishad, the state assembly and Parliament.
Decentralisation of power was necessary
for creating responsive governance.

Industrialisation
Condemning attempts to industrialise India
in the western manner, he propounded
the theory of the small-unit machine. It is
foolish to try to industrialise India or
another Asian, African or Latin American
country in the manner of the west. The
capital outlay on tools of the western type
was simply not available. Only if half of
the population is wiped out will such a
project be possible, even then with a large
dose of western money.
So Lohia propounded the thesis of fashioning the small unit, power-run machine.
It was not an utopian idea. The attempt to
recreate the western-type industrial system (where there is plenty of capital, itself
a result of 300 years of colonial rule as
also total destruction of native American,
Australian and New Zealand economies
and populations) can only be imagined.
But there was no stopping the African,
Asian and Latin American politicians, totally westernised and incapable of thinking
independently of western mode of thought
and action. Even Gandhis warnings could
not stop them from taking up such a suicidal project. So how could Lohia succeed?
Thus Lohia became an untouchable in
Indian public life, hated by the political
establishment, reviled by the media and
laughed at by other opposition parties.
It was the defeat at Chinese hands that
reminded politicians and intellectuals
that Lohia had predicted such a disaster
long back.
Entering Parliament at the age of 52, he
was instrumental in moving the first noconfidence motion against the government led by Nehru. A veritable storm
broke out in India after Lohias speech
in Parliament.
Lohia died at the age of 57 in suspicious
circumstances in a government hospital
that he had gone to for a minor surgery,

october 2, 2010 vol xlv no 40 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

COMMENTARY

rejecting the idea of going to an expensive

private hospital, where the rich and powerful go. The corrupt, insensitive and unimaginative system created by the Congress
had its revenge.
Thus we see that Lohia gifted muscle
and blood to an anaemic socialist movement smarting at the defeat in the elections of 1952, but unable to comprehend
its meaning. The poor and oppressed of
India wanted a leadership concerned
with their everyday problems and not

obsessed with abstract formulations.

Lohias emergence in Indian politics, as a
man of the masses gave a certain agenda
to Indian politics. Similarly, the socialist
movement was deeply affected and for
the first time in the history of modern
India, the poorest of the poor joined the
Socialist Party and fought for their rights.
Today socialists have no sense of purpose
and direction.
Fights for regional autonomy and
against internal colonialism, for cultural

The Democratisation
of Censorship: Books and the
Indian Public
Mini Chandran

The alarming trend in India

today is censorship by the mob,
or in other words, the true
democratisation of censorship,
where it has ceased to be a
punitive measure wielded by the
government. The trajectory of
literary censorship from the days
of the British Raj to the present
shows that even as the courts
have increasingly stood for free
expression, the mob demands
the suppression of material
antithetical to its views. The
public outcry over James Laines
book on Shivaji is a case in point.

Mini Chandran (minic@iitk.ac.in) is at the

department of humanities and social sciences,
the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

ensorship in India is part of the

embittered legacy that the British
bequeathed when they left a fragmented subcontinent in 1947. Faced as it
was with the hydra-headed nature of
problems peculiar to India, the incoming
native government retained most of these
bureaucratic and legal systems, along
with the laws dealing with free expression. If it was the government that was
alert on these matters in the initial days,
the task of monitoring art and literature
now seems to be a public responsibility.
The Indian public is today the judiciary
and the executive, demanding suppression
of objectionable materials, and occasionally even capable of preventing books from
reaching the reading public. In this essay, I
attempt to trace the trajectory of literary
censorship in India from 1947 to the
present day, and try to understand this new
trend of public censorship.
The British Raj in India in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries was characte
rised by indecision regarding matters of
free expression. As Gerald Barrier
(1976:11) notes:
the bureaucracy had not resolved the inherent ideological tension between theoretical adherence to democratic ideas and
ultimate recourse to repression as a means
of political survival.

Economic & Political Weekly EPW october 2, 2010 vol xlv no 40

identity, the rise of adivasis against the

attempts to grab their lands, the right of
locals to their lands, water and jobs, food
security, womens struggles for equality
and anti-corruption movements will be on
the agenda of Indian politics for quite
sometime to come.
Lohia had said in his last days that
tomorrows leaders will not be national
leaders, but leaders of localities and
villages. His prophecy seems to be
coming true.

This is brought out starkly in the official

communication between Lord Morley,
secretary of state for India at the India
Office in London and Lord Minto who was
the viceroy in India. The liberal in Morley
was opposed to imposing restrictions on
freedom of expression in India, while Lord
Minto understood the realpolitik that demanded strict action against errant journalists and writers. In a letter dated
19 May 1908, an exasperated Minto wrote
to Morley (quoted by Barrier 1976: 21):1
The modern House of Commons is absolutely incapable of understanding Indian
humanity and the influence of many creeds
and traditions, and is to my mind perhaps
the greatest danger to the continuance of
our rule in this country.

Needless to say, subsequent acts of violence by Indians even in London, for instance, the assassination of Sir William
Hutt Curzon Wyllie by Madan Lal Dhingra
in 1909 convinced Morley of the necessity
of stringent action, including tight controls over the press in India. This resulted
in stricter application of the various laws
on printed matter from 1910 up to the year
of Indias independence in 1947.

Inheritance of Ambivalence
The Democratic Republic of India inherited this ambivalence in approach towards
free expression. Its native rulers also
seemed to testify to the truth of Lord
Mintos statement that this was a difficult
country to govern. Laws framed by the
coloniser were used by the newly liberated colony to gag the press and literature.
Major laws used to curb literature, like
the Customs Act, the Post Office Act, the
Official Secrets Act, the Press Registration
Act of 1867, and Sections 124, 153 and 252

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