Hisar’s historic Lala was confidant of Punjab Kesari, his son Vice-President

HISAR: Lala Achint Ram was not just the first MP to have been elected from Hisar in 1952, but also had a deep bond with one of the tallest freedom fighters of India — Lala Lajpat Rai.

Ram, whose son Krishan Kant went on to become the 10th Vice-President of India, was among the first three members of Servants of the People Society, which Lala Lajpat Rai founded in 1921. While the iconic freedom fighter passed away in 1928, Ram continued to work for the not-for-profit organisation. After Partition, when the society’s office was shifted to India, it was registered at the New Delhi residence of Ram.

Like his father, Krishant Kant was also a freedom fighter. He was elected to Parliament once. Lala Ram, a Gandhian, served a second term in the Lok Sabha as the MP from the then Patiala seat, getting the people’s mandate in 1957. While the family was linked to the Congress throughout, things changed when opposed to the imposition of Emergency and was removed from the party in 1975.

Kant plunged into the fight for freedom by participating in the Quit India Movement in 1942, when he was a student in Lahore. Hisar-based DN College head of history department Mahendra Singh Rohilla said Ram had also been a member of the provisional Parliament of India from 1950 to 52. “He was also a member of the Constituent Assembly of India which drafted the Constitution from 1946 to 1950,” he said.

Ram was born in August 1898, at Kot Mohammad Khan village in Khadur Sahib. He was educated at government high schools in Amritsar and Shimla. For pursuing higher education, he went to DAV College in Lahore. He was imprisoned by the British for his participation in the freedom movement, from 1930 to 1932, in 1939, 1940, and from 1942 to 1945.

He donated his ancestral house to Kot Mohammad village’s panchayat to run a playschool and a centre for girls. Ram’s wife, Satyavati Devi, was also a freedom fighter. She was arrested on August 26, 1942, along with her three young children for participating in the Freedom Struggle. When she died on October 26, 2010, Devi was aged 105 and was India's oldest freedom fighter.

Apart from Kant, the couple had two daughters — Nirmala and Subhadra. Subhadra, at the age of 13, was the youngest freedom fighter to be jailed during independence movement. Krishan was still the Vice-President when he died on July 27, 2002.

After leaving Congress, he joined the Janata Party and was part of the Morarji Desai government. However, he was also responsible for its fall as he was among the leaders who insisted that no member of the Janata Party could be the member of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). This attack on dual membership was directed specifically at members of the Janata Party who had been members of the Jan Sangh, and continued to be members of the right-wing RSS, the Jan Sangh's ideological parent. The issue led to the fall of Morarji Desai government in 1979, and the destruction of the Janata coalition.