A man far ahead of his times

Yogendra Yadav

PEOPLE will listen to me, but after my death.’ The 50th death anniversary of Ram Manohar Lohia (October 12) may be an apt occasion to take seriously his oft-quoted remark. Indeed, Lohia was a 21st century thinker; the last great thinker in the tradition called ‘Modern Indian Political Thought’. He is, arguably, the most relevant thinker from that tradition for today’s India. 

Learning from Lohia must begin by recalling who he was, since the new generation knows little about him. Born in 1910, Lohia was a freedom fighter, socialist leader, an MP and an inspiration for uniting opposition parties against the Congress. A scholar by temperament and having a doctorate from Germany, he wrote extensively, not just on political events and ideologies, but also on history, mythology and philosophy; and inspired a range of writers and artists. In sum, he was a leader as well as a thinker, a rare combination in our politics today.

In order to learn from Lohia, we need to wipe away a lot of confusion and misunderstanding that surrounds our collective memory about him. He was systematically misunderstood by the intelligentsia of his time and thereafter. It seems Lohia has never been forgiven for the three cardinal ‘sins’ he committed — he attacked Nehru when he was demi-god; questioned upper caste dominance when no one spoke about caste; and agitated for the abolition of English language. This made him persona non grata among the opinion makers of his time, liberals as well as leftists. That is why Lohia is either forgotten or remembered for wrong reasons.

Lohia is often remembered for three things — his ‘non-Congressism’, his advocacy of OBC reservations, and, of course, Angrezi hatao. Each of these represents a serious misunderstanding of what Lohia stood for. Non-Congressism was no more than a strategy of the 1960s aimed at preventing the Congress from perpetually having an electoral edge due to a fragmented Opposition. This was not a political greed or ideology, as is often claimed by socialists like Nitish Kumar to enter into a coalition with the BJP. Lohia was, indeed, an early advocate of reservations for shudras. But for him this category included not just the OBCs, but also Dalits, adivasis and women, irrespective of their caste or community. For Lohia, reservation was not the be-all and end-all of social justice; it was for him an element in a broader struggle for caste and gender equality. Similarly, Lohia was staunchly opposed to continuation of English as the de facto official language of the country. But his opposition was to the dominance of English language in India’s public life, and not to English language or literature in general, of which he was a connoisseur. Nor was he an advocate of Hindi; he favoured the use of Indian languages to displace English as the de facto official language. 

Once we overcome these misgivings, we can begin to see Lohia for what he was — an iconoclast, a visionary, a truly post-colonial thinker and as much an authentic Indian as a genuine internationalist. Lohia showed us a third path beyond the dualisms that marked the 20th century — capitalism versus communism, nationalism versus internationalism and tradition versus modernity. Lohia insisted that non-European societies cannot, and must not, try to relive the history of Europe. He opened the path for fresh thinking about India’s present and future.

For Lohia, socialism was a doctrine distinct from capitalism and communism. He recognised that both these dominant economic systems of the 20th century shared an obsession with big industry, large-scale technology and centralisation. Such a model required colonial plunder and could not bring equality for the rest of the world. Instead, he proposed a third way, socialism, based on small-scale technology, rural industry and decentralisation. He sidestepped the debate between private and public ownership on means of production by proposing cooperative ownership of economic assets.

Lohia shows a third way in the contemporary debates on cultural identity. Instead of choosing between jingoist nationalism and uprooted cosmopolitanism, he proposed a culturally rooted internationalism. He proposed Draupadi as the icon of Indian feminism. For him, Ramayana is the epic of North-South unity and Mahabharata symbolised the unity of East and West. His dream project was Ramayana mela, where all orthodox and heterodox versions of Ramayana would be recited. He was the first to draw attention to the plight of rivers and the need to clean our sacred places. His emphasis on the use of Indian languages connected creative cultural energies with socialist politics. He was also the first to alert the country about Chinese designs and pulled up Nehru for his complacency regarding Himalayan borders.

Lohia combined this cultural rootedness with a firm commitment to a secular, modern and internationalist outlook. He was for a world parliament and a world government elected by all inhabitants of mother earth. A staunch opponent of colonialism in all its forms, Lohia extended the idea of equality to the international domain. He was perhaps the only Indian leader to join and offer arrest in support of the civil rights movement in the US. He extended his critic of racism to our ‘fair and lovely’ notions of skin colour and beauty.

Above all, Lohia inaugurated a new way of thinking about modernity, going beyond a dualism that dominated India in the 20th century. He was opposed to the imitative modernity that we often see among urban, educated, westernised Indians. He was equally opposed to tradionalists who seek to glorify every tradition and trace every modern invention back to ancient past. For Lohia, both of these were pathological responses to our predicament. He was clear that the essence of modernity lies in drawing upon one’s heritage to respond to our contemporary challenge so as to come up with radically new responses. Thus modernity could never be imitative. Nor would it turn its back to the cultural heritage of human kind. Lohia visualised a desi modernity, if you will, that could surpass the achievements of modern civilisation. In a famous lecture, Lohia exhorted university graduates to shape a modernity that Europe had never known. Incidentally, that lecture was delivered in Banaras Hindu University. 

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