Sudama Prasad, 63, started life in a small family-run sweet shop at Pavana village in Bihar’s Bhojpur district; this month, he will enter the hallowed chambers of Parliament as the first Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) MP in 35 years.
After decades of fighting for the rights of Dalits, the landless poor and farmers in Bhojpur district, he challenged Ara’s incumbent BJP MP, former Union Minister R.K. Singh, defeating him by almost 60,000 votes. The last time a CPI-ML member won a Lok Sabha election was in 1989, when Rameshwar Prasad won the Ara seat as a candidate of the Indian People’s Front (IPF).
Mr. Sudama Prasad will be one of two CPI-ML MPs in the 18th Lok Sabha, along with Raja Ram Singh, who won the Karakat seat, defeating the NDA’s Upendra Kushwaha, and Bhojpuri actor Pawan Singh, who contested as an Independent. Together, they won two of the five seats allocated to the Left Front within Bihar’s Opposition alliance.
File Photo of Sudama Prasad while campaigning in the Lok Sabha election.
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Special Arrangement
‘Faced feudal, police atrocities’
Preparing to enter Parliament, Mr. Prasad reflected on a lifetime of struggle for social change. “In my childhood days, while sitting at our sweet shop run by my father, I faced feudal and police atrocities, which made my life restless. I was also accused in a murder case, but the Supreme Court acquitted me,” he said. Having matriculated from the Har Prasad Das Jain School, Ara in 1978, he joined the Jain College in Ara. “But in 1982, I left my studies midway and became a full-time worker of CPI-ML and started working on the cultural front. Those days, I used to take part in plays like Sarkari Saandh, Kamdhenu, Singhasan Khali Karo, and many more,“ Mr. Prasad told The Hindu.
Third among four brothers and two sisters, Mr. Prasad entered electoral politics by unsuccessfully contesting the Bihar Assembly election from the Ara seat in 1990 under the IPF banner. He also contested the 2009 Lok Sabha election from Buxar, but lost to the Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Jagdanand Singh. Mr. Prasad finally got his electoral break in 2015, when he won the Tarari Assembly seat, retaining the seat in the 2020 Assembly election as well.
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Saving public libraries
When he was chairperson of the Bihar Bihar Vidhan Sabha Library Committee in 2022, for the first time in Bihar’s legislative history, the Assembly was presented with a report on the condition of libraries in the State. He struggled to save the 130-year-old Khuda Bakhsh Library in Patna at a time when the Bihar government had decided to partly raze the historic structure. He also took the initiative to rediscover 439 public libraries which were closed in Bihar and suggested that weaker sections of society must get an opportunity to use these libraries.
Asked about being the first CPI-ML MP in 35 years, Mr. Prasad said, “It is a blessing, it is the people of Ara who ensured my victory. People of all sections voted for me. Being connected to the grassroots, I will raise issue pertaining to the people of my constituency. It is a matter of great pride that the voice of the CPI-ML will roar in the Parliament now.”
File Photo of Sudama Prasad while campaigning in the Lok Sabha election.
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
Activist politics
Mr. Prasad has been active in protests at the ground level, leading the paddy procurement movement on the roads as well as in the Assembly. He has launched several agitations in the State, including the Bhojpur Jagao-Bhojpur Bachao movement of 1989, seeking the modernisation of the Sone canals, construction of the Kadvan reservoir, construction of bridges on the Sone and Ganga rivers, and the construction of an Ara-Sasaram railway line.
He has gone to jail twice, once in 1985, and the second time in 1989, while protesting police repression at a meeting organised against the murder of Comrade Baijnath Choudhary in Ekwari. In total, he spent a year and eight months in jail.
Mr. Prasad belongs to the Halwai community and the Kanu caste, which falls under the other backward class (OBC) category. Setting a personal example in the drive for social reform through an inter-caste marriage in 1993, he tied the knot with Shobha Mandal, who hails from a Scheduled Caste. They have two sons, Abhinav and Anubhav Prasad.
He continued his fight for social justice in 1995, taking on the Ranvir Sena, an upper caste outfit allegedly responsible for several massacres of Dalits and poor people in Bhojpur.
Back in Pavana, Mr. Prasad’s brothers still run the sweet shop in their village, providing them with an income source, and maintaining the roots of the CPI-ML’s newest MP.
