Untouchable with a Touch

IAGJIVAN RAM has a lumpy, 5-ft. 5-in. frame, thick features and ears that fairly bristle with hair. He is an Untouchable, with roots in the lowly chamar (leatherworkers) caste. Yet, as Congress Party president, Minister for Food and Agriculture, and Indira Gandhi's chief ally, Ram at 61 is one of India's most powerful politicians. He is also one of the very few harijans ever to rise above the ceilings dictated by the caste system.

Ram had several advantages. His father, though an outcaste farmer, owned a spread of 40 or 50 acres in a relatively tolerant area of Bihar state. Not until he went to Banaras Hindu University in 1926 did Ram really learn the anguish of Untouchability. When word of his outcaste status got around, his landlord threatened to lock him out. As Ram recalls it today: "I told him that if he broke my lock, I would break his head."

With a degree in science, Ram joined Gandhi's anti-British Congress movement, and wound up in jail as an agitator in the early 1940s. At independence in 1947, Ram was Congress' Minister of Labor--the first of a series of Cabinet positions he has held, with one 28-month hiatus, ever since. -

Though he now spends more in a week on his State Express cigarettes than he did for a month's room and board at college, Ram is a plain-living man. A teetotaler, he counts as his greatest private pleasures a game of bridge and a few hours tending his carnations and roses.

He is regarded as India's ablest working Cabinet man. As Communications Minister in the 1950s, for example, he planned the airline reorganization that nationalized Air-India, the country's international carrier. Even more important than his ministerial work is his role, conferred by Gandhi 23 years ago, as the Congress Party's harijan leader. It provides him with a powerful fulcrum. When Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri died in 1966, Ram swung his bloc of more than 50 harijan parliamentary votes behind Indira Gandhi, assuring her election as Prime Minister over a conservative Syndicate faction rival. The Syndicate's bosses have never forgiven him. Recently, they tried to break him with charges of tax fraud. As it turned out, Ram had neglected to pay $2,718 in taxes on the earnings from a small investment that had accrued unnoticed over a ten-year period. Indira publicly forgave him for his "forgetfulness," then maneuvered to have him named president of her own faction of the Congress Party. During the crisis, Ram said nothing. "Even if you have the greatest adversity," he says with the special wisdom conferred by his harijan background, "bemoaning it will not help." -

Currently, Ram's highest priority is a program to settle harijans on their own land. "Land is not only a means of livelihood," he says, "it also gives its owner status and prestige." Ram acknowledges that attitudes toward Untouchability are changing, albeit slowly. "Forty years ago a caste friend would have preferred to go to jail rather than dine with me," he says. But where the Untouchable was the object of hatred before, he adds, "now the attitude is one of indifference." As a harijan, Ram may never have a real chance to become India's Prime Minister; his age may also be a handicap. Nevertheless, whenever Indira decides to step down, Jagjivan Ram may well find himself in the role of kingmaker.

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