Untouchables’ Leader in India Dies at Age 78

Jagjivan Ram, the pudgy, gruff-talking leader of India’s 100 million untouchables and one of the last of the men who led the battle for freedom from Great Britain, died Sunday.

The United News of India reported that he was 78 and had been hospitalized at a New Delhi nursing home since May. He suffered from respiratory complications.

A friend and political ally of Mohandas K. Gandhi, Ram’s political career spanned five decades and nearly every Cabinet post in the Indian government.

Only the prime ministry eluded him.

He was jailed repeatedly during the civil disobedience movement that led to India’s 1947 independence from Britain and he was India’s first secretary of labor. He was secretary of defense from 1970 to 1974 during the India-Pakistan war that resulted in Pakistan’s defeat and the subsequent creation of Bangladesh.

Ram was from one of India’s lower castes, the son of a farmer in impoverished Bihar state. At college on a scholarship, he had to move from the students’ hostel because the staff refused to deal with him due to his caste.

During his political campaigns he often had to eat his meals at tables distant from the other candidates because of his birth.

He began his political career in 1936 organizing agricultural workers in Bihar and fought throughout his life for an end to discrimination against untouchables, the lowest caste.

India’s castes are a hereditary class structure. Though not recognized by the constitution, castes still play a social role and untouchables still suffer from discrimination.

They derive their name because they traditionally have been forced to perform such menial tasks as disposing of dead animals or cleaning up after others. Thus they were polluted by their work and were, under Hindu religious codes, “untouchable.”

Ram was a member of India’s lower house of Parliament from 1952 until his death.

He resigned in protest from the Cabinet of the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and from the governing Congress Party after her 1977 declaration of a state of emergency that suspended many democratic guarantees. He later became a leader of the party’s main dissident faction, the short-lived Janata Party headed by Morarji R. Desai.

He then formed his own group, the Congress Party (J) but was the only member of that party to win a seat in the 1984 elections that returned Gandhi’s son, Sanjay, to power.