Babu Jagjivan Ram spent his life working to restore the dignity of the marginalised who were forced to occupy the fringes of society, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said here today.
Delivering the sixth Babu Jagjivan Ram Memorial Lecture, she said the late leader saw that India, like other societies, has institutionalised habits, customs and traditions which ended up confining some people to the fringes of society.
"The marginalised and the excluded were denied their voice," she said.
"Marginalisation and exclusion disproportionately affected only a segment of society. It meant that (your) destiny had nothing to do with who you were or what you have done... It was predetermined by who your parents were," she said.
"Babu Jagjivan Ram sought to change that," the President, also a Nobel Peace Prize winner, said in her speech on 'Social Inclusion Dimension of a Transformation Agenda'.
Addressing an audience comprising mainly school and college students, Sirleaf cited the teachings of another civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr, who had famously said that people should be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.
Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar, the daughter of Jagjivan Ram, said the late leader had spearheaded the mission for the upliftment of the weak and marginalised while simultaneously mobilising them against British rule.
"Apart from Mahatma Gandhi, he was the only leader at the national level to fight on two fronts - against colonial rule and against the caste system.
"The path he chose was fraught with danger, least of which were his years in British jail and the threat to his life from casteist forces," she said.
Recognising his innate strength, Gandhiji had described him as "burnished gold emerging out of fire", the Speaker added.
Social Justice Minister Kumari Selja, her deputy Manikrao Hodlya, Sudhir Bhargava, IAS, and VN Dalmia, Executive Vice President of the Babu Jagjivan Ram National Foundation, too, attended the function.
