At a time when an overwhelming 87% of country’s MPs are crorepatis, three-time Jharkhand MP A.K. Roy of the Marxist Coordination Committee (MCC) had no bank account, did not have more than two sets of trousers and shirts and lived in a desolate party office without electricity. Mr. Roy, thrice MLA of the Bihar Assembly, and three-time MP from Dhanbad, passed away on Sunday. He was 84.
Arun Kumar [A.K.] Roy was born in erstwhile East Bengal (now Bangladesh) in 1935 to a middle income family and got his engineering degree from Calcutta University. He then went to Germany for higher studies.
On his return, Roy started working as an engineer in the coal belt of east India but soon became a full time labour activist after witnessing the plight of the coal workers and emerged as a leader of the coal workers.
He joined the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) and contested from Sindri, then in Bihar as a CPI (M) candidate in 1966. He was elected to the Bihar Assembly twice after 1966, but as a candidate of Janwadi Kissan Sangram Samiti, an outfit he founded. Later he got involved with Jayprakash Narayan’s anti-Congress agitation.
Between 1977 and 1989, Roy was elected to the Lok Sabha thrice from Dhanbad — twice as an Independent (1977, 1980) and in 1989 as a candidate for the MCC, again a party that he founded.
Dhanbad lies at the heart of east India’s coal belt and politics is the controlled by the powerful coal mafias in the Bengal-Jharkhand border.
“Despite being an MP, Roy- da (elder brother) had no personal enmity with anyone. But owing to his deep personal bonding with the coal workers, he bagged the seat thrice,” said Sushanta Mukherjee, Central Committee member of MCC.
The allowance that Roy received as an MP was distributed among party’s full time members and the coal workers. In fact when he started receiving pension after his tenure in Parliament, he donated it to the President’s fund.
“He argued that a politician does not have an age of retirement and thus he would not take pension. He lived in the party office without electricity. His argument was that he should not use electricity until workers get electricity in their villages,” said Mr Mukherjee.
Roy continued to travel in general class compartments in trains and never used any government facility, he said
With Shibu Soren, Roy formed the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) in the 1970s. Around the time in adjacent Chattisgarh — then part of Madhya Pradesh — another trade unionist, Shankar Guha Niyogi was developing his organisation, the Chattisgarh Mukti Morcha. Both organisations managed to look at workers’ problems holistically instead of confining those within the precincts of wage movements, unlike many other Marxist parties. But as JMM emerged as a powerful player about to capture power, Roy and Soren fell out.
He continued to remain a people’s leader and was active till few months back.
