Today is the 115th birthday of freedom fighter and veteran leader Babu Jagjivan Ram. Jagjivan Ram, often known as Babuji, was a Dalit icon who battled for the rights of the disadvantaged.
Jagjivan Ram’s political career spanned a record 50 years. During the 1971 India-Pakistan war, he served as Minister Of defence. Between 1977 and 1979, Babu Jagjivan Ram was also the Deputy Prime Minister. Jagjivan Ram was also rumoured to have a shot at becoming the first Dalit Prime Minister. However, an incident happened after which his name was dropped.
The incident was an act of political revenge, in which intimate photographs of Jagjivan Ram’s son Suresh Ram in a compromising position with a 21-year-old Delhi University student were splashed over the centre spread of a magazine. The magazine known as Surya ran a two-page spread with naked images of his 46-year-old son, Suresh Ram, and a college student called Sushma Chaudhry.
When Indira Gandhi was defeated in the 1977 Janata Party movement, Jagjivan Ram was widely regarded as the front-runner for the position of Prime Minister. Unfortunately, Jagjivan Ram had to shoulder the weight of the subsequent sex scandal involving his son, forcing him to pull back from the run.
However, the tragedy is more than just photos published in a magazine. Indira Gandhi’s daughter-in-law Maneka Gandhi was the editor of the magazine in which these images were published. It was India’s first major political sex scandal.
This scandal breaking at such a critical juncture in Jagjivan’s political career was nothing short of a conspiracy to derail his political career. Jagjivan had resigned from his 30-year stint as a Congress cabinet minister. He had left Congress and had a solid reputation as a capable administrator and seasoned politician. He then joined the Janata Dal-Secular, providing an alternative to Indira Gandhi. But this scandal resulted in the fallout of his political career.
Notably, former Lok Sabha Speaker and senior Congress leader Meira Kumar is the daughter of Babu Jagjivan Ram. She was the first female Lok Sabha speaker, serving from 2009 until 2014. She also got the candidacy of the United Progressive Alliance for the 2017 presidential election but lost to National Democratic Alliance candidate Ram Nath Kovind.
