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SPECIAL REPORT

Comrade Ram Naresh Ram Will Always Remain Alive in Ours Hearts

CPI(ML)’s senior-most leader and architect of the people’s revolutionary struggles led by the CPI(ML) in Bhojpur, Comrade Ram Naresh Ram (Parasji) passed away on 26 October 2010 at the age of 86. He was one of the founders of the revolutionary CPI(ML) current in the communist movement in Bihar. With his demise, a glorious chapter in the history of post-independence revolutionary struggles comes to an end. Comrade Ram Naresh Ram was born in 1924, in Ekwari village in the Sahar block of Shahabad district (now called Bhojpur). As an 18-year-old he participated in the Quit India movement of 1942 and thus began his political career with the freedom struggle. Some years later he entered the communist movement and joined the peasant movement. The voice of the peasant insurgency of Telengana touched him and in 1948, he participated in a campaign to collect funds in support of that movement. In 1951 he became a member of the Communist Party of India and in 1952-54, he was one of the leaders of the CPI-led peasants’ struggle against hike in the canal irrigation rate by the Bihar Government.
At the time of the division of the Communist Party he joined the CPI(M) and in 1965 he contested for the post of mukhiya of Ekwari panchayat. This step was an open challenge to the feudal forces because till then, the feudal forces of Ekwari village had been electing their own candidates unopposed and on this pretext, they tried to stop Comrade Ram Naresh Ram from contesting elections. But he defied every scheme of the feudal forces and, on the strength of the unity of the poor and oppressed of Ekwari under the communist banner he gave a crushing defeat to the feudal candidate and opened a new chapter in the assertion of the oppressed. He was hailed as Ekwari’s ‘mukhiyaji’ ever since.
In 1967, he was the CPI(M) candidate in the Bihar Assembly elections. This election became a direct contention with the feudal forces and during the elections, Comrade Ram Naresh Ram’s comrade and fellow-fighter ‘Master’ Jagdish was captured and beaten nearly to death and Comrade Ram Naresh Ram was locked in a room to prevent him being able to come to Comrade Jagdish’s rescue. This incident gave birth to the resolve in Comrade Ram Naresh Ram’s mind to wage armed struggle against feudal forces.
Soon after, the ‘spring thunder’ of Naxalbari could be heard in Bhojpur and Comrade Ram Naresh could see in it the future trajectory of anti-feudal struggles. He internalized Comrade Charu Mazumdar’s idea that people’s democratic revolution is the only way ahead, and peasant revolution is its essence. In the phase following Naxalbari, those comrades of Bhojpur who were disillusioned with the CPI(M) went straight to Kolkata to seek out and make contact with the CPI(ML). In 1970, Comrade Ram Naresh along with other comrades of Bhojpur joined the CPI(ML) and as an underground leader, he took responsibility for the peasant struggles led by the party. With this starts the glorious saga of the revolutionary struggles of the Bhojpur plains.
In underground life, Comrade Ram Naresh Ram was known as ‘Parasji.’ He had become a popular mass leader whose relations with the masses were as deep as that of fish with water. This was why, even while he was underground, he was successful in ensuring the participation of the masses in CPI(ML)’s revolutionary struggles, and in the decade of the 1970s, the armed struggle of Bhojpur’s peasants always had a mass character and the emphasis in these struggles remained on opening the doors for people’s initiatives and on mass actions. In 1974, after the reorganization of the party, it was Bhojpur’s experience that showed the party the way for the rectification campaign and even in underground circumstances it was in Bhojpur under Comrade Ram Naresh Ram’s supervision that the party’s special All India Conference was successfully held.
In the CPI(ML)’s Third Congress (1982) Comrade Ram Naresh Ram was elected a member of the party’s Central Committee, since when he remained a member of the Central Committee all his life. After the Congress he took up the post of the party’s Bihar State Secretary and in the 1980s he led the fresh upsurge of the peasant struggle in Bihar. Later he was given responsibility of Secretary of the special regional committee which functioned under direct leadership of the Central Committee. In 1990 Comrade Ram Naresh Ram took on the responsibility of the party’s open front and in the same year, addressed the massive ‘Dam Bandho Kam Do’ Rally organized by the Indian People’s Front (IPF) at Delhi as CPI(ML)’s representative. After this, he was elected National Vice President of the IPF and attended the CPI’s Vijaywada Congress as the fraternal representative of the CPI(ML)-IPF. Comrade Ram Naresh Ram was a Polit Bureau member of the party between 1989-1992 and 1995-2007.
In 1995 when CPI(ML) decided to participate in elections for the first time in the Party’s own name, Comrade Ram Naresh Ram led the election campaign, and filed nominations in the name of Parasnath in the Sahar Assembly constituency. This caused great consternation in the ruling class camp. The Government and administration put up many hurdles to his candidature and indulged in widespread slander. In the face of all this, he won the seat by a wide margin. Thus, after a relentless struggle of 28 years, he entered the Bihar Assembly and took up the post of the party’s legislative group – a responsibility he retained till the end.
Comrade Ram Naresh Ram’s victory caused deep demoralization among the feudal and communal forces. The Ranveer Sena (a private feudal militia) was born out of this demoralization and reaction, and then began the phase of barbaric massacres in dozens of poor hamlets like Bathani Tola, Bathe, Nagri, Shankarbigha, Narayanpur, Miyanpur, etc. In these massacres, the Ranveer Sena took the lives of hundreds of dalits and poor people, including a large number of unborn babies, children, women and old people. Under the perceptive political guidance of Comrade Ram Naresh Ram and the leadership of the CPI(ML), the poor people of Bhojpur and Bihar defeated this feudal ploy. Today the Ranveer Sena along with all other private armies no longer exist in Bihar.
His role as an MLA representative of the revolutionary opposition was unparalleled, and a model for all communist legislators. As an MLA, he always led the people’s struggles of his constituency from the front and always posed a challenge to the Government and administration. In particular, he waged powerful struggles inside and outside the Assembly on the question of political patronage to the Ranveer Sena and imposition of draconian laws (especially TADA) on the struggling poor. On the other hand, he himself gave direct leadership to the process of establishing people’s supervision and regulation over the development undertaken by government machinery and in reining in the corruption by government officials and contractors. As a result he became such a popular MLA from his constituency that all his opponents considered him invincible.
Comrade Ram Naresh Ram always remained a major challenge for the ruling class. Be it the Congress Government, the ‘social justice’ government of Laloo-Rabri or the Nitish Government with its rhetoric of ‘good governance-development’, all felt threatened by him. Not only during the Emergency but during Laloo’s rule (1995 and 1997), Rbari Devi’s rule (2000) and during Nitish Kumar’s rule (currently), fresh false cases were concocted and filed against him and there were plots to arrest him. In one such false case, a warrant for his arrest was issued which was never scrapped even till the day of his death, in spite of the fact that the entire Opposition united inside the Bihar Assembly to protest the police’s attempt, through this warrant, to brand him an ‘extremist,’ and even the Bihar CM was forced to issue a statement on this question.
From the first war of independence of 1857 through the 1942 Quit India struggle, and beyond, Comrade Ram Naresh Ram was a torch-bearer of the revolutionary anti-imperialist anti-feudal legacy of the entire freedom struggle. It was this legacy that he carried forward by leading the revolutionary communist movement. In his constituency he had a memorial to 1942 martyrs constructed at Lasarhi – something which no previous MLA of this constituency had undertaken in 50 years of India’s independence. Every year a ‘Shaheed Mela’ would be organized at this memorial and this year too Comrade Ram Naresh Ram actively participated in this event.
During the freedom struggle Swami Sahajanand Saraswati had played a vanguard role in lighting the spark of anti-feudal and anti-colonial struggles among India’s peasants; in the period of India’s ‘second Independence struggle,’ Comrade Ram Naresh Ram under the leadership of the Communist Party played the same role – lighting the revolutionary spark of political assertion in the most oppressed sections of society from the initial phase till the revolutionary anti-feudal struggles of the Bihar plains. As a result of these struggles, the dalit-backward rural poor of independent India achieved their basic democratic right – the right to vote – for the first time and not only sent their representatives to the Parliament and Assembly but also changed the balance of forces in local self-governance bodies. Comrade Ram Naresh raised the issue of land reform in Bihar with such commitment that he can be called the Swami Sahajanand of independent India. At the founding Conference of the All India Agricultural Labourers’ Association (AIALA) at Ara in 2003, he was elected the National President of the organization and till the end, he remained the Honorary President of AIALA.
In spite of the travails of old age and serious illnesses, Comrade Ram Naresh Ram remained active till his last days and participated actively in mass programmes. He not only addressed the Jan-Adhikar (People’s Rights) Rally this very year in Patna, he was even present at the mass meeting for the nomination of party candidates in Ara a few days before his demise. Expressing outrage at the arrest of Comrade Rameshwar Prasad during nominations, he asked the assembled people to ensure the victory of Comrade Rameshwar as a fitting rebuff to this unjust and biased move of the administration.
Comrade Ram Naresh Ram’s wife passed away last year. He is survived by two daughters. Comrade Ram Naresh Ram’s personality was steel tempered in the fire of revolutionary struggles. He was a peerless leader from among the dalit-oppressed people, speaking their own language. On the one hand he was known for his simplicity, his friendly and simple nature and his humility and on the other for his firm principles and his dauntless commitment. He was a unique icon of struggle and simplicity. He grasped a range of immensely varied responsibilities given to him by party and successfully undertook them with great commitment. His entire struggling life will be a lighthouse of inspiration not only for the present but for the coming generations.
Comrade Ram Naresh Ram is no longer physically present among us. As long as oppression, exploitation and inequality remain in society, until struggles for land reforms and social transformation achieve their goal, Comrade Ram Naresh Ram will continue to guide our way like a flaming torch in fields of struggle of Bihar and India’s democratic revolution. Only by marching in the light of that flaming torch to realize his dreams can we pay true homage to Comrade Ram Naresh Ram.

Red Salute to Comrade Ram Naresh Ram!

Central Committee,
CPI(ML) Liberation

Reflections on a Revolutionary Life

Pranay Krishna

We aimed to reach Ara from Allahabad at 5 am, so as to have a final glimpse of Parasji, but thanks to the railways, we reached at 10 am. By then, thousands of comrades had already started out from Ara to Ekwari on motorcycles and four-wheelers, to accompany Comrade Ramnaresh Ram on his last journey. We could join this journey after about 15 kms. Every kilometre or so, crowds of people would stop the procession, voices raised with grief-filled yet resonant slogans. They would satisfy themselves with a sight of his still body that they had never seen thus motionless. Large numbers of people with red flags on their cycles and motorcycles would offer flowers and then join the procession. People – children, old people, women - would run up to the cortege where he was lying in repose, anxious not to miss a last glimpse of him. Some would run as far as they could alongside the vehicle. One was reminded of similar scenes at Comrade VM’s last journey from Banaras to Ara. In the same way, from Bhabhua till Ekwari, the cortege would stop every few kilometres, and people would run alongside it for as long as they could, raising slogans with tearful voices. Between Ara and Ekwari, people had begun mass meeting in anticipation of the funeral cortege. All along the route, the paddy crop irrigated with the blood and sweat of agricultural labourers, waved gently in the soft breeze, as though waving their hands to bid farewell to this immortal son of the soil. In this moment of final farewell, the paddy crops are accompanied by the red vaijayanti flowers at some places and limitless white lotus (kamalini) flowers floating on ponds with round green leaves, postponing their smiles till the night.
Parasji began his political life in the struggle against the white oppressors, and the rest of his life, till the end, was devoted to tireless struggle against the brown oppressors. It’s as though he enjoyed such a long life just so that the entire heritage of our revolutionary current, its fierce courage and boundless patience, the deep sorrow of setbacks and the ceaseless striving for ever-renewed strength, the beauty of resistance and the music of awakening could reflect themselves in the life of a single person. No doubt, he achieved this long life for the people, not as a gift, rather by meeting death in the eye and wrestling with it.
From the national revolt of 1857 to the legacy of Naxalbari, the most direct witness to the continuous flow of people’s consciousness is Shahabad’s soil, and its representative chapter is the life-spirit of Ram Naresh Ram. We who are intellectuals and cultural activists, in spite of being surrounded by the most modern methods of communication, could not record, in Parasji’s lifetime, this saga of unfinished revolution in his own words. However even now one of our most important tasks is to seek out the stories embedded in the memories and collective wisdom of the revolutionary people and struggling comrades, stored in each and every home in Sahar and Sandesh, its fields and barns, its ponds, its crossroads, and get the message of Parasji’s life and struggle down on paper, so that revolutionary ranks and people at large can benefit from it.
Parasji’s life symbolises both the scope and depth of the revolutionary struggle. Scope does not mean only contemporary geographical spread, it also means the historic time-period across which a legacy lasts. Those who understand ‘scope’ only in the first sense of the word would like us to forget our history, our identity. They see depth as cut off from scope, and therefore their vision is partial and lop-sided, they merely count leaves, and fail to see the depth of the roots and the thickness of the trunk from which the leaves too take their life-essence... Parasji’s life is a tremendous message against forgetting and betraying our history and identity.
In the history of the country’s communist movement, Bhojpur is also a model of how the end of caste oppression too is possible only by class struggle. Till the path of India’s new democratic revolution with agrarian revolution as its axis is not followed, till land relations are not radically transformed, till then the struggle to eradicate untouchability and terrible caste and gender inequality and annihilate the caste system cannot even begin. The people of Bhojpur, led by Comrade Ramnaresh Ram and his comrades, embraced this path four decades back. The liberation of the so-called ‘low’ castes from feudal, caste oppression cannot come about by a small handful of newly-rich and powerful representatives becoming a part of the power structure of the landlord-capitalist state. The revolutionaries led by Comrade Ramnaresh Ram proved time and again that the struggle for land, wages and social dignity are one consolidated struggle, not separate ones. Comrade Ramnaresh Ram’s political life is also a model for how the struggle to build a revolutionary opposition, even inside parliamentary and legal arenas, can have happen only on the basis of people’s movements and class struggle, not isolated from it; that revolutionary opposition is not merely a thing of the parliamentary arena.
In the last pledge-taking meeting on the banks of the Sone river, when Comrade Dipankar Bhattacharya said from the dais that “We could not give this kind of farewell to the leaders we lost in the decade of the 1970s,” tears sprang in spite of themselves to the eyes of many among the thousands of people gathered there. Gradually, even the sun was taking its leave from the sky, the feet of thousands of toiling feet were leaving their prints on the sands of the Sone, innumerable towels, absorbing the tears and sweat of yesterday, today, and tomorrow could be seen unfurled on shoulders, innumerable red flags, their heads raised in pride on sticks and poles, were declaring their resolve to tackle the challenges to come. Countless women, defying tradition (that forbids women from attending cremations), had come out on the sands. After all, this was the moment to bid farewell to none other than their leader, the leader of Indian revolution, Comrade Ramnaresh Ram.

An Extraordinary Ordinary Man

(This article based on an interview was written after a conversation with Comrade Ramnaresh Ram in Delhi on the eve of the “Daam Bandho-Kaam Do” rally organized by IPF on October 8 1990. It appeared in the 23 September-6 October 1990 issue of Samkaleen Janmat. This is possibly only occasion on which he spoke in any detail to any magazine about his life and struggles. Excerpts from that piece are reproduced here. - Ed.)
Meeting this living legend, one would not think that he has crossed the age of 66. What is striking is his simplicity and endearingly resolute personality. Listening to comrade Ram Naresh Ram is an experience in itself which gives us an insight into history and makes us understand why, in spite of attacks by the ruling classes and frenzied talk of its demise, Naxalbari has not died and why it will remain alive.
Asked how he feels when he looks back on his life, Comrade Ram Naresh smiles. At first he is not willing to walk down memory lane with us, especially so where personal memories are concerned, preferring instead that we remain with the present political challenges and his vision for the future. Still, when he was finally persuaded to talk about past days, it was as if a whole new window to history opened up.
The first spark of Naxalbari in Bihar actually fell in Musahari but it was soon extinguished. This spark was once again ignited in Ekwaari village and took the form of a raging fire in the Bhojpur revolution which could never again be extinguished. When this spark fell in Ekwaari, the three who came forward to pick it up and carry the torch are well known in the Bhojpur revolution as the trio of ‘Mahto, Paswan and Yadav’ – Master Jagdish Prasad, Ramnaresh Ram, and Rameshwar Ahir (Sadhuji). With them were Comrade Ramayan Ram and Comrade Baijnath Choudhury who were part time workers in name only; they used to work as much as, and in some aspects more than, full time workers. They were all from Ekwaari. When Comrade Ram Naresh turns his eyes to the past, they light up with the memories of these names.
He tells us that he was born in Ekwaari in 1924 in a poor landless family; they lived on the landlord’s land. The family bonded labour for the landlord. “My great grandfather did ‘banihari’ (worked as an attached labourer) with this same landlord. Although my family had no thought of my schooling, I got an education up to middle school. A boy from the neighbourhood motivated me to go to the school with him. When I went there, I saw that many boys shouting out their lessons aloud. I felt that this was another world; if I also studied I too would shout out loud like this and start reading books. The class teacher asked me my name and whether I wanted to study and I said, “Yes!” That very day I was admitted to the children’s class although I had not taken the admission fee with me. In those days the admission fee for the children’s class was two annas. Back in my home, they were searching for me, worried at my unexplained absence. The school was a mile away from home. When I returned at 5 in the evening, I was about to be thrashed! But when I explained that I had gone to school and enrolled and had to pay a fee of two annas, my father was very happy. He was poor but very courageous in social matters. It was he who first inspired me to take part in politics. Due to poverty I was often absent from school but as this did not affect examinations, the teachers were affectionate to me and did not bother too much about attendance. Poverty, the absence of schooling after middle school in the village and my getting involved in the 1942 movement were the reasons I did not study further after middle school.”
“I was influenced by the voice of peasants’ rebellion in Telengana, its suppression and the news of the hanging of comrades Balu and Balan and others. At that time the Communist Party newspaper “Naya Savera” was calling for collection of funds to fight the false charges slapped on the comrades. I also got involved in fund collection and joined the Communist movement in 1948, although the man instrumental in making me join this movement was a racketeer himself. I think his name was Sinhasan. We soon got to know of his dishonesty. Whatever funds we had collected, he spent the money to buy utensils for his home instead of sending it to the Party. As soon as we came to know this, he was thrown out of the Party cell. We started searching anew for people who were Communists. Not long after, Satya Narayan Singh, who was underground at that time, arrived in our midst, stayed for a week, organized us and conducted an education programme. Then the Communist Party was formed in our area and I got membership in 1951. Then the Party was working in the open. At that time my political understanding was very little but debates over socialist revolution and people’s democratic revolution were coming to the fore and caught my attention too. Earlier the work of the Communist Party was mainly urban based, especially in the industrial cities. But later, especially in Bihar, work in rural areas started to be emphasised.
“There was an on-going debate over the party line in the Communist Party which was aggravated by the India-China war. The Party was divided into three groups. All these events were creating turmoil in my heart. The policy of the CPI of “bearding the lion in its own den”, that is, of fighting the system through parliamentarim, was opposed as being parliamentary cretinism, prey to blind nationalism, and embracing the policy of peaceful transition, i.e straying away from the path of armed struggle. The party broke and the CPI (M) was formed.
“In the beginning the CPIM seemed to take up the line of the people’s democratic revolution by talking of armed struggle, of opposing parliamentarism and following internationalism. However, in reality they started treading the same path as the CPI. On the pretext that circumstances are not yet ripe for revolution, hey began hobnobbing with a section of the ruling classes, and are still doing so today. But in those days, in spite of seeing the shortcomings of the CPIM, I was with them as they appeared more progressive than the CPI.

Anyway, we were busy in the task of organizing and preparing the peasants for militant struggles. Our village Ekwari has a large population – the second most-populated in Bhojpur district. It has a considerable bhumihar population and was known as a bhumihar village. But taken together, the total population of backward, dalit, religious minorities etc, is three times that of the bhumihars. Although from an economic point of view there is no big zamindar, these so-called zamindars enjoyed great power because of their caste and they perpetrated very cruel oppression in social matters. In 1965 I was elected the Mukhiya of the Ekwari Gram Sabha. Even after I won, some people held a caste meeting to plot against my life. However, seeing people’s mobilization here, they did not dare to do so. Then came the Assembly election of 1967. I stood again as the candidate of the CPIM. Comrade Jagdish Master was our election agent in this election. The lathi wielding young men of the zamindars had already conspired to attack and capture the booths and had created havoc. Master sahib and I reached the place, challenged some false voters and had them arrested. At this, they locked me up in a house and started beating up Master Jagdish. Some people came to his aid but they were also beaten unconscious. They left Master Jagdish for dead. One of the workers took Comrade Jagdish home. Even in this injured condition, Master sahib resolved to avenge the attack and demolish feudal ‘pride.’ Meanwhile Comrade Rameshwar (Sadhuji) came back from jail influenced by the politics of the CPIM and joined hands with us to begin his journey in the Communist movement.
In the meanwhile the spark of Naxalbari rebellion reached the soil of Bihar but in spite of being influenced by that line, I remained away from the organization of the CPI(ML) till 1970 and remained with the CPIM. The reason for this was that the Bihar leadership of the CPI(ML) was in the hands of Satyanarayan Singh, of whose activities I was well aware and unhappy with. These were the reasons why Comrade Jagdish and Sadhuji joined the organization but left it again. Then began the search for proper leadership, which we eventually found. By that time S N Singh had also shown his true colours. The spark of Naxalbari had spread to become a forest fire throughout the country. This was as a result of comrade Charu Majumdar’s eight documents which called for struggle against the CPIM’s neo-revisionist line of spontaneity, which, in the name of revolutionary circumstances not being ripe, was making the CPIM degenerate into a tail of the ruling classes.
In the beginning we propagated party politics among youth and students. Many students and young people left home and dedicated themselves to organizing the poor landless farmers. Seeing this, priority was given to political intervention and the region was partitioned. Before this re-organization the peasants’ movement had emerged in Musahari in Bihar, but now it suffered a setback. The main speciality of Bhojpur was that firstly it was the centre of militant peasants’ movement and secondly the leadership here was in the hands of local youth and older experienced people who were full of the spirit of sacrifice and were totally selfless. There was such an unbreakable unity among the activists of Bhojpur that the machinations of S N Singh, who was himself from Bhojpur, could not succeed. After the martyrdom of Charu Majumdar in July 1972 and before the re-constitution of the Central Committee in 1974 a situation of great political upheaval, factionalism and unrest prevailed. At this time Comrade Jauhar raised the banner against the wrong line of the Sharma-Mahadev faction. Highlighting the programmes of the first congress and the revolutionary line of Comrade Charu Majumdar, the Central Committee was constituted has remained stable till today.
In the era after the martyrdom of Charu Majumdar Master Sahib (Jagdish Master) was elected member of the Bihar State Committee. However, he was martyred befor he could attend even a single meeting of the State. He had written in his diary and used to say, ‘One cannot predict when a leader of a revolutionary party will become martyred, so every comrade must be mentally prepared to shoulder the responsibilities of any area at any time.’ Such was the wisdom of the comrades thanks to which a stable party organization was built in Bhojpur. That is why, during the timeof Mahadev and Satyanarayan the party broke up in all other places, but the party organization in Bhojpur remained unbreakable. This kind of unbreakable unity based on politics came to be a heritage of our party. From the third Congress to the recent (in 1990-Ed.) party conference in which the decision was taken to make the party chiefly overground, many such big changes took place but the party did not break.