The socialist who mentored D Devaraj Urs, S Bangarappa, JH Patel and SM Krishna

I was 15 years old when India became independent. My first political campaign was in Shimoga district in 1952, when I was 20, for the Samyukta Socialist Party candidate Shantaveri Gopala Gowda. Our agenda was that there should be a toilet in every house. But we mostly talked to villagers about new ideas—Darwin, Marx, Mahatma Gandhi and Ambedkar. And at the end of it we asked them to vote for the Socialist Party. Before moving on, we asked them for “ondu note ondu vote” (one note, one vote), which ironically the Bharatiya Janata Party is now using as a slogan.

Gopala Gowda was very special to us. He had only passed high school and yet was so well read in Kannada literature. He was from a backward class. He was basically a cowherd who took all the cows from his village in Sagara out grazing. But because of his talent, he was able to come out of it. In 1942, he became quite radical. He just disappeared for some time. He and his friends used to collect big post boxes and bury them in the sand on the banks of the Tunga river. It was their way of protesting against the government. We would meet at the coffee house in Shimoga and they would boast of what they had done.

I was very young then but also very curious. I used to join the processions. And then my father would take me to someone’s house, where I would stay for some time. The year 1942 was spent like that. Back then, politics was not just politics—it was a way of life. And we had started talking about Gandhi and others. Gopala Gowda lived in the midst of those ideas.

He connected with Ram Manohar Lohia during a peasant agitation he organised in Sagara. Many peasants used to plough land in the area and pay rent to the landlord. Over a period of time, the landlords slowly started increasing the rent and dismissing peasants who could not pay up.

Gopala Gowda decided that there should be a peasant rebellion and the dismissed people started going back to work. Lohia came down from Delhi to support the rebellion and was arrested in Sagara. He was due to travel to the United States in a few days and it took the intervention of then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru to get him out of jail. But that is where Gowda’s bond with Lohia began.

At the end of the 1952 campaign, Gopala Gowda got elected to the assembly. Only five or six socialists were elected and they made a small opposition. Yet it looked like it was the biggest opposition ever because they would debate every issue in the assembly, and the ruling party paid a lot of attention to what they had to say. Issues like land reforms were discussed but there was no shouting at each other. There were ideological battles fought and people in the opposition—though conservative—had their own arguments. We also had a great man like Nehru to disagree with.

But this went on deteriorating because money became important in politics, toddy became important and ugly mining money started coming in.

Graft and corruption have grown so much that people in power are not shocked anymore. There is a lot of talk and speech but no action. Words have lost all their meaning. It is like an Orwellian state, and it shows what happens when language is abused—nothing can be conveyed to the common man, no truth can be told.

As told to Anuradha Nagaraj