Rabi Ray, a highly respected politician from Odisha, prominent Socialist leader and ex-Speaker of the Lok Sabha (Parliament of India), passed away yesterday. He was 91.
It was the year 1984 when I first came to know about him. That was the time when the teenager in me started taking an avid interest in politics. The Parliamentary Election that year was the first major election I was following keenly. Those days the the voting age was still 21 years in India. There was no electronic voting, though it was tried on an experimental basis in a handful of booths in Kerala.
In the run up to the Lok Sabha elections that year, Indira Gandhi was the Prime minister of India. An iconic figure in India at that time, she was akin to Narendra Modi - there was no one close to her stature at national level. All we had a bunch of faddists and obscurantist leaders in a fragmented opposition. Though she made fiasco of in Punjab leading to Operation Blue Stat, her Congress Party was expected to be re-elected, albeit in a lesser margin.
The legendary Biju Patnaik, who was the sole non Congress MP from Odisha, was expected to get re-elected hands down, unlike in 1980 when he barely scarped through. Other opposition leaders like Rabi Ray were expected to win easily, with the opposition all set to improve its tally in the state of Odisha, mostly due to the misule of Congress in the state.
But the tragic assassination of Indira Gandhi barely couple of months before the elections changed the dynamics. Those days manual counting of votes would start in the morning but continue late into night, with the one Channel Television, named Doordarshan, showing Bollywood movies interspersed with election results and trends.
The fate of opposition stalwarts of Odisha, Biju Patnaik and Rabi Ray would go sinusoidal, toing and froing between leading and training between the movies shown on TV. At one point they would be leading by 1000 votes, to trail by 1500 votes one movie later, again to lead by 1200 votes after the end of another movie. Finally Biju Patnaik managed to scrape through by a few thousand votes from his home turf of Kendrapada.
Rabi Ray lost his Jagatsinghpur constituency by 1000 odd votes to his tainted rival Laxman Mullick, who was accused of shielding the perpetrators of an heinous crime involving the rape and murder of Chhabirani, the wife of a local journalist. It was an extremely narrow margin to lose a Lok Sabha seat. The sympathy wave due to Indira Gandhi's assassination stalled what could have been a cakewalk for him.
Indira dead proved more powerful than Indira alive. The opposition was decimated in every state, exept Bengal and Andhra. BJP with only 2 members elected to Lok Sabha was mocked as a party of HUM DO, HUMARE DO (Us two, our two), alluding to the famous Family Planning campaign those days to limit couples to only couple of kids to arrest the explosive growth of population.
Rabi Ray made a spectacular comeback in 1989, winning easily in an election I remember for voting first time in my life, as the voting age was reduced to 18. His experience and stature was rewarded, as he was made the speaker of the Lok Sabha in the short lived V P Singh led government.
I lost track of him after that, but not my respect for him. He was one of the rare breeds, from the generation of genuine socialist leaders in the mould of Jayprakash Narain, arguably was last of his kind to walk on the surface of earth RIP, Mr. Rabi Ray.
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