NEW DELHI: A month ago, Pandit Ramkishan sat on a dharna in Rajasthan, demanding better quality water for his home district, Bharatpur. One of India’s oldest former MPs (he was in Parliament in 1977), he told TOI on Friday, a day before he turned 100, that he will always remain a socialist. “That’s what I learnt from Ram Manohar Lohia.”Sitting in his Bharatpur home, the veteran, “Lohia’s oldest disciple” as he likes to call himself, speaks with the authority of one who has not just witnessed history, but shaped it. Until a recent fall briefly hospitalised him, he was holding three meetings a week.What keeps him going is unfinished work.“The day I stop thinking about a better India, that’s the day I will stop living. I am alive now and my voice will be heard,” he insists. “The values we fought for — equality, integrity, dialogue — are under strain. We need to speak up.” Aptly named, his autobiography, out last year, said just that — Main Zinda Hoon.
First half of life defined by ideology, second has seen its erosion: PanditjiBut why continue agitations that are physically taxing, sitting under the sun, sometimes without food and water, with a failing knee and the weight of a century behind him? “It comes naturally to me,” Pandit Ramkishan says simply.A participant in the Quit India movement of 1942, “and shaped by Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan”, Panditji, as people call him fondly, was jailed during the Emergency, from which, he says, he came out wiser.Not born into politics, he was a farmer’s son for whom Independence meant “freedom from fear, from ‘lagaan’ and scarcity, and freedom from a system that kept the common man on edge”.He recalls looking for Mahatma Gandhi in his youth. As a student in Bharatpur, he one day travelled to Delhi with a few coins collected among friends, hoping to hear Gandhi speak. Panditji was not impressed. “We had gone looking for revolutionary ideas.”Today, he believes, the idea of freedom itself is unsettled. If the first half of his life was defined by ideology, the second, he says, has seen its erosion. Politics, he argues, has shifted from conviction to convenience.Panditji left the Congress when the socialist bloc split — and never returned. He remembers repeated attempts to bring him over, including offers to head the state of Rajasthan. He refused. “It was difficult — but necessary…opportunity or pressure should never override principle.”So, what are the modern issues he grapples with these days? “Quite a few,” he says. “From problems concerning farmers and Dalits to climate change, unemployment and artificial intelligence.” What unsettles him, though, is “what politics now has lost”. He tells a story. “I was contesting against Union minister Babu Raj Bahadur, who once stopped mid-journey to help me during my campaign when my vehicle broke down. We were fighting elections, but there was no enmity.”Today, he says, the opponent is treated as an enemy, not as part of governance. “Criticism is meant to strengthen democracy — not invite hostility.”Is he hopeful?Panditji pauses. There is pessimism when he speaks of communal polarisation and political opportunism. But also a refusal to give up. “The solution will not come from political parties. It’s the common people who have to understand what affects the country’s progress, and in turn, their own,” he said.
