Ram Vilas Paswan

Ram Vilas Paswan (born July 5, 1946, near Khagaria, India—died October 8, 2020, Delhi, India) was an Indian politician and government official who was a long-serving national parliamentarian and was the founder and longtime leader of the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP), a regional political party in Bihar state, eastern India.

Paswan was born in a village near Khagaria in what is now eastern Bihar to a Dalit (formerly untouchable; now officially a Scheduled Caste) family. He completed a master’s and a law degree, passed the Bihar civil service examination, and was selected to be a deputy superintendent of police. Instead of accepting that job, however, he decided to pursue a career in politics, joining the Samyukta Socialist Party (SSP). Since then Paswan promoted himself as a leader of Bihar’s Dalits and other low-caste Hindus as well as of the state’s Muslim community.

Paswan first ran successfully for public office in 1969, when he was elected to a seat in the Bihar state legislative assembly. In 1970 he was made the joint secretary of the SSP’s Bihar branch. Four years later he became the general secretary of the Bihar branch of the new Lok Dal (People’s Party) after it had been formed through the merger of the SSP and other parties to present a more-effective opposition to the long-dominant Indian National Congress (Congress Party).

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Paswan’s career was interrupted in 1975, when he was one of the political opponents of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who were arrested and imprisoned as part of Gandhi’s imposition of emergency rule in the country. He was released in 1977, and that year he ran for and was elected to the first of what would be eight terms representing a Bihar constituency in the Lok Sabha (lower chamber of the Indian parliament). During a more than 30-year stretch, he lost only two Lok Sabha elections: in 1984 and 2009. Following his 2009 defeat, he won a seat in the Rajya Sabha (upper chamber of the Indian parliament), again representing a Bihar constituency.

Meanwhile, his career in party politics advanced as well. In 1985 he was named the general secretary of the national Lok Dal organization before shifting his affiliation to the Janata (People’s) Party (JP), where in 1987 he became the general secretary. A year later, when the JP was one of the constituent components that formed the Janata Dal (JD), he was chosen to be the general secretary of the new party. By 2000, however, the JD had split into two factions over the issue of joining the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition, and that year Paswan and several other JD members formed the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP). He became and remained the president of the party.

Paswan served as a cabinet minister in several national governments. His first appointment was as the minister of labour and welfare (1989–90) in the short-lived National Front (NF) coalition government led by Prime Minister V.P. Singh, a principal founder of the JD. He also was in two more successive NF governments in 1996–98 as the minister of railways. The LJP initially supported the BJP’s NDA government, and Paswan served as minister of communications (1999–2001) and of coal and mines (2001–02) before pulling the LJP out of the coalition. In 2004, after having spent nearly all of his career as an opponent of the Congress Party, Paswan joined the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and was appointed the minister of two portfolios—chemicals and fertilizers and then steel—serving until his electoral defeat in 2009.

The loss in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, following the preelection decision of the LJP and Congress Party to sever their ties, led Paswan to rethink his political strategy. For several years he worked to develop a closer relationship with Congress through support for the legislations initiated by that party. In 2012 Paswan extended his backing for the government’s controversial bill that would relax restrictions on direct foreign investment in large retail enterprises such as department stores. He also stepped up his efforts to reforge the LJP-Congress alliance in anticipation of the 2014 national and state elections.

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Shortly before the April–May Lok Sabha polling, however, he reestablished the LJP’s ties with the BJP. That strategy paid off, as the LJP won six parliamentary seats in Bihar. Paswan was one of the successful candidates; he regained his old constituency and garnered his ninth term in that chamber. He was then invited to join the cabinet of Narendra Modi, who had been named prime minister and had formed a government after the BJP won a landslide victory in the election. Paswan was given the portfolios for consumer affairs and public distribution.