Obit: Balram Jakhar, a leader who always looked out for farmers

Dr Balram Jakhar Ji was one of the most towering personalities to sit on the Lok Sabha Speaker’s Chair. An avid reader of admirable intellect, equally at home in a library or on a sports field with his towering 6 feet 5 inches’ frame. He will be missed. He will be missed by his family and farmers alike. He was born on the August 23, 1923, in village Panjkosi near Abohar in Punjab, which is close to the border with Pakistan. He studied in Sangaria in Rajasthan and later in Lahore in present day Pakistan. He was an avid reader of books, loved poetry and could recite innumerable Sanskrit shlokas and Urdu poetry. His first language remained Urdu and he could also read and write in Sanskrit, English & Hindi. He was a horticulturist - first person to farm grapes in this part of the country and played an instrumental role in positioning the Abohar region as the prime area for Kinnow farming.

He was actively farming till the age of 50 and it was around this time that he entered politics and was elected to the Punjab Assembly. After completing two terms in the Assembly and being elevated to the position of the Leader of the Opposition in 1977, he contested the Parliamentary elections in 1980 for the first time and did so successfully. As a first time Parliamentarian, he was elected unopposed to the position of the Speaker of the Lok Sabha. In 1985, he was once again elected as the Speaker of the Lok Sabha and when he relinquished the office of the Speaker at the end of the life of the Eighth Lok Sabha in December 1989, Dr Jakhar earned the distinction of being the only Speaker in independent India to have presided over two successive Lok Sabhas for their full terms, only about a month short of a full decade (22 January 1980 to 18 December 1989.) His house was always open to everyone, all the time. 

His tenure as the Speaker of the Lok Sabha was a remarkable tenure and he came into his own in this position and settled the question of many a rule. His tenure as the Speaker also saw the evolution of several procedural innovations and initiatives in the Lok Sabha. There was a comprehensive review of the Rules of Procedure and Conduct of business in Lok Sabha in 1989 for the first time since 1952, under his initiative, and several changes were formalised and incorporated into the Rules. He demonstrated one of the most courageous and outstanding interpretations by a Speaker in his historic ruling regarding the role and limits of the judiciary wherein he held the view that every part of the government should work within the limits and jurisdiction defined by the Constitution of India and that these limits ought not be flouted and the autonomy, rights and special powers of the other parts of the government ought to be respected.

Dr Balram Jakhar Ji taking charge as the Union Minister of Agriculture, during the 1991-1996 period, was a momentous occasion and one of the rare instances where a farmer held this important portfolio, a progressive farmer who could relate to both the evolution of farming in independent India and to the farmers who remained relatively untouched by the progress in this field. Therefore, his primary concern was the protection of the interests of the Indian farmers who constituted nearly 80 percent of the population. With hindsight, it would be pertinent to take note of the fact that his constituency was actually the farming community and that he did not succumb to the easy path of caste-based or geography-based support but steadily followed the issue-based approach to polity. When one looks at the role he played in protecting the interest of the farmers during a period when ‘liberalisation’ was the mantra and ‘subsidy’ was a profanity, one understands the amount of national and international pressures he would have had to withstand in his quest.

In his passing, India has lost one of its finest ‘kisan neta’ and the polity is much poorer by it. More so, it is the Indian National Congress which would be impacted the worst as since his retirement from active politics, the party has struggled to find farmer leaders with actual connect to the farming community as one of their own. This was the strength of the party and it now finds itself in a vacuum amongst this community with the only saving grace being that this space does not find any takers amongst any other political party as well. 
 

The writer is the Treasurer of the BCCI. @anirudhchaudhry