September 13, 2020 4:20:26 pm
In this March 16, 2011 file photo, RJD MP Raghuvansh Prasad Singh at the House of Parliament during the current budget session in New Delhi. (Photo by PTI / Atul Yadav) (PTI13-09-2020_000023B)
Veteran Socialist leader, former Union Minister and former RJD MP Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, who passed away on sunday, played many roles in his long political career. He was one of the highest socialist leaders of the generation after Karpoori Thakur. As minister of rural development between 2004 and 2009, Singh was one of the key people behind the success of UPA’s flagship government scheme, MNREGS.
At a time when most regional parties have a monolithic structure and their leaders are not questioned, Raghuvansh Prasad Singh was an outlier. He never hesitated to question even supreme party Lalu Prasad Yadav. To his followers and most of the media, he was a “personable Brahmababa”.
The 74-year-old leader inspired immense respect that cut across party lines. And this was exemplified in the tribute that Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid him. The prime minister said that the disappearance of Raghuvansh Prasad Singh “has left a vacuum in Bihar’s political sphere as well as in the country.”
Read | Raghuvansh writes to Nitish Kumar, JD (U) warms up with a veteran socialist
Lalu Prasad, Singh’s longtime associate and head of RJD, whom he parted ways with a few days ago, wrote from prison how he would miss his old friend.
The former Vaishali MP, who represented the constituency a record five times, had recovered from the Covid infection. He had to be admitted to AIIMS in Delhi after developing complications.
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Annoyed with the operation of the party that he had formed with Lalu Prasad, he faced an ideological dilemma. Like a true socialist, he sent two handwritten letters, one to Lalu Prasad and one to Bihar CM Nitish Kumar. He also wrote a separate two-page note on the loss of degradation of socialist ideals with direct and indirect reference to the RJD. The staunch socialist lamented how the images of Mahatma Gandhi, BR Ambedkar, Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia, Jayaprakash Narayan and Karpoori Thakur were replaced by five people from one family (a reference to Lalu).
Singh had his personal reasons for being upset with his match: He had longed to be sent to Rajya Sabha after back-to-back polling losses to Lok Sabha. Perhaps, he had also aspired to land a major role in the party, and was also resisting the entry of his archrival and former MP Rama Kishore Singh (who had beaten him in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls as the LJP candidate) into the party. . match.
its one line resignation letter to Lalu Prasad he summed up his pain, anguish and frustration. Singh had written about how he had been behind Lalu Prasad for 32 years since Karpoori Thakur’s death. “But not anymore” was all he wrote as the last message to his old friend.
Read | Bihar 2020 Election: Two Months After Resigned From RJD Post, Raghuvansh Likely To Stick After ‘Lalu Message’
His death cannot be seen in the social or electoral prism. He was much more than a high caste Rajput leader. He was like a loyal sentry to the devastating fortress of the RJD. At a time when most of Karpoori Thakur’s prodigies in the Lalu camp had either left the party or felt suffocated with the next generation of Lalu taking over, Raghuvansh had been fighting for the respect of the party elders. He was his own man, a sharp critic.
Bihar CM Nitish Kumar silently admired Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, but was never able to get him to pass JD (U). Singh had been an outspoken political rival of Kumar.
Whether because of the extension of rural roads or the generation of employment under the MNREGS, Raghuvansh Prasad Singh was seen as one of the best performing ministers in Manmohan Singh’s cabinet at UPA-I.
Singh, who learned his political lessons from the likes of Jayaprakash Narayan and Karpoori Thakur, was a rare breed of socialists. He hardly learned ways to commit to his ideals. It was the voice of sanity amid the din of degraded politics. His death is not just a loss for RJD and Bihar, it is the passing of the last of the true socialists in Indian politics.
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