• Capt. Praveen Davar

Babu Jagjivan Ram, whose 113th birth anniversary falls on April 5, was the Deputy Prime Minister from 1977 to 79 and the country’s longest serving union minister for three decades. Though Defence was the most high-profile portfolio he held twice, there were many other important ministries he headed with distinction in the cabinets of Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Morarji Desai. The great Dalit icon was also the Congress President when the party split in 1969, and continued to remain in the Indira Gandhi cabinet despite holding the top Congress post for nearly three years.

Though Jagjivan Ram was a prominent freedom fighter and became a member of the Legislative Council, at a young age of 29, followed soon by getting elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1937, he shot into national prominence when on September 2, 1946 he became member of the Interim Government headed by Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru. This was a singular honour, considering the fact, that he was part of a Cabinet of only 14 ministers that included stalwarts like Rajendra Prasad, Rajaji and Sardar Patel. Jagjivan Ram was made the Labour Minister, a portfolio that he continued to hold in the first cabinet of independent India with Jawaharlal Nehru as the Prime Minister and Sardar Patel as the Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister. It was in this cabinet that Dr. BR Ambedkar was also included as the country’s first Law Minister. In the order of precedence, Jagjivan Ram was ranked number 7 ahead of names like Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, Raj Kumari Amrit Kaur, BR Ambedkar and Shyama Prasad Mukherji. This is not surprising as Jagjivan Ram became senior by virtue of being in the Interim Government 11 months earlier while the others were inducted for the first time.

It is common knowledge that Dr. Ambedkar was inducted in the first cabinet of independent India at the instance of Mahatma Gandhi who convinced Prime Minister Nehru to include him along with other non- Congressmen like SP Mukherjee from Hindu Mahasabha and Baldev Singh; who was already the Defence Minister in the interim ministry. According to IndraniJagjivan Ram, who has written a memoir of her husband’s life, it was Jagjivan Ram who spoke to Gandhiji about Ambedkar. She writes in Milestones, a Penguin publication: “He requested Gandhiji to recommend Ambedkar’s name to Jawaharlal Nehru for inclusion in the first cabinet.” This was despite the fact Jagjivan Ram and Ambedkar had developed serious differences after the Gandhi- Ambedkar Poona Pact of 1932. A number of Dalit (then popularly called Harijans) organizations had turned against Dr. Ambedkar after he signed the Poona Pact. Dr. Ambedkar gave a call to Harijans for religious conversion to escape the atrocities of upper castes. In Pune, the President of Hindu Mahasabha, Pt. Madan Mohan Malaviya, who was earlier Congress President, supported Jagjivan Ram who had been campaigning for entry of Harijans in temples, and appealed to them not to leave the Hindu fold. Soon after Jagjivan Ram and Ambedkar met at Mumbai (then Bombay) where the former tried to prevail upon the latter not to influence the Harijans towards religious conversion. The meeting was not successful. Dr. Ambedkar himself converted to Buddhism with lakhs of his followers two decades later, a few months before he passed away. But Jagjivan Ram remained, till the last, opposed to religious conversions. He wanted to fight the ‘sins’ of Hindu society from within, by remaining in the Hindu fold. This was a visionary and extremely courageous decision taken in national interest after deep thought and motivated by his deep faith in Gandhi- Nehru ideology. Who was right? Baba Sahib Ambedkar or BabuJagjivan Ram? We are too near the events to pass a judgment for there is no better judge than posterity.

Dr. Zakir Hussain, the third President of India, died suddenly in harness on May 3, 1969. In a closely contested election between the official Congress candidate Neelam Sanjiva Reddy and the then Vice President VV Giri, supported by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and majority of Congress leaders, the latter won by a narrow margin. The support of Jagjivan Ram for VV Giri was crucial for his large following amongst SC and ST in the electoral college of MPs and MLAs. However, forgotten is the fact that it was not Giri but Jagjivan Ram who was the first choice of PM Indira Gandhi. His candidature was not accepted by a majority vote of the Congress Parliamentary Board which voted for Sanjiva Reddy by a narrow margin. Jagjivan Ram’s election as the country’s President in 1969 would have been a befitting tribute to Mahatma Gandhi during the centenary celebrations of his birth anniversary. However, in the Congress split that followed soon after, he was elected as the President of the Congress (R), the faction owing allegiance to Indira Gandhi, which ultimately was recognized as the official Congress.

Barring the period of Lal Bahadur Shastri as Prime Minister from June 1964 to January 1966, Jagjivan Ram remained a Union Minister from September 1946 to July 1977, making him the longest serving Minister of India for almost 30 years. Besides two terms each in the Ministries of Defence, Labour, Transport and Food, he was Minister for Railways, Communications, Agriculture and Irrigation. He succeeded C. Subramanian as the Food and Agriculture Minister during the heralding of Green Revolution in the late sixties. Earlier, as a long serving Labour Minister in the Nehru cabinet, he ushered many far-reaching labour reforms like Minimum Wages Act, Employees Provident Fund Act, Employees Insurance Act and many more pro-labour measures. Similarly, as Railways and Transport Minister, he expanded the infrastructure and network of railways as never before. ‘Babuji’ excelled in every portfolio he held. His performance as Defence Minister during the Bangladesh Liberation War, 1971, was so superb that when the Janata Party government headed by Morarji Desai was formed in 1977, he was brought back as the Defence Minister while becoming, alongwithCharan Singh, the country’s second Deputy Prime Minister after Sardar Patel.

If BabuJagjivan Ram narrowly missed being the President of India in 1969, a decade later the office of Prime Minister eluded him when Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, the President of India, in July 1979, rejected the demand of Chandrasekhar, Janata party president, to invite Jagjivan Ram, the leader of the Janata party, to form the government, after the fall of Morarji Desai and Charan Singh governments. He may have missed the top posts, but BabuJagjivan Ram stands tall as one of the ‘tallest’ political leaders of independent India. A Gandhian to the core he believed that the only way forward is to carry on with the legacy of the father of our nation: “The last and most powerful blow to the old system was given by Mahatma Gandhi...The work begun by him has to be carried on. It has to be realised that the real end of man’s journey is freedom. Anything which restrains or injures human dignity restrains freedom.”

The writer is a columnist and political analyst