Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia dead

Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia, Socialist Leader, died at 01-05 hours this morning [October 12] in the Willingdon Nursing Home. He was 57. Dr. Lohia was operated upon for enlarged prostate gland on September 30. Dr. Lohia was in a critical condition from Tuesday [October 10]. Doctors attending on him said medicines had little effect on him. The passing of Dr. Lohia removes one of the most brilliant figures from the Indian political scene. Once a firebrand of Congress Socialists who looked upon Jawaharlal Nehru as their leader, Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia parted ways with the Congress and founded the Praja Socialist Party along with Madhu Limaye and Mr. Asoka Mehta. He had the courage of his convictions and became the bitterest opponent of Nehru. He even fought Nehru at the polls in 1962 but failed. He did not take a charitable view of those who differed from him and convinced himself that he was always in the right. He and Madhu Limaye left the P.S.P. to form the Socialist Party of which he became Chairman early in 1956. Dr. Lohia who was offered a seat in the old Central Assembly but declined it because he would not take the oath of allegiance to the British Crown, entered on his Parliamentary career rather late in life through a by-election. He led a small but vociferous Opposition Socialist group in the Third Lok Sabha. Dr. Lohia, who joined the Samyukta Socialist Party early in 1965 and was returned to the Fourth Lok Sabha in the general election last February, himself had said he was not a Hindi fanatic but only rabidly anti-English. Born in 1910, Dr. Lohia was educated at Bombay, Banaras, Calcutta and Berlin. He became a “boy” politician when he attended the Gaya Congress at the age of 14. He organised the Foreign Office of the AICC at the instance of Nehru. He had courted imprisonment in the freedom movement and also Socialist agitations against higher irrigation rates in U.P.