Parliament will again have two CPI (ML-Liberation) MPs: Here they are

In 1989, when the Indian People’s Front (IPF), which later became the CPI(M-L) Liberation, put up its best electoral performance ever and won two Lok Sabha seats, Bihar’s Arrah was one of them, then won by Rameshwar Prasad.

Cut to 2024. On June 4, the Liberation’s Tarari MLA, Sudama Prasad, 63, sprang a surprise by emerging ahead of two-time BJP sitting MP and former Union home secretary R K Singh from the same Arrah seat.

Meanwhile, in Karakat, low-key Liberation leader Raja Ram Singh Kushwaha defeated yet another NDA stalwart, former Union minister Upendra Kushwaha, in a three-cornered contest, including Bhojpuri singer Pawan Singh and a Rashtriya Lok Morcha (RLM) candidate seen as a favourite.

Thus, 35 years after it had first achieved this feat, the CPI (ML-Liberation) will again have two MPs in Parliament.

Both Sudama Prasad and Raja Ram Singh rose from humble backgrounds. While Sudama Prasad started off by running a sweetmeat shop, and later became a farmer leader, Raja Ram studied engineering before he was drawn to politics.

The new Arrah MP is a resident of Pawna village of Bhojpur. While he helped his father Gangadayal Sah run the family’s small sweetmeat shop in the village, Bhojpur witnessed a clash between farmers and landlords as part of an ongoing farmers’ agitation led by the IPF. It was this that drew Prasad to the group.

In 1982, he dropped out of school after Class 10 and became a full-time worker of the IPF.

The outfit had emerged as a political wing of the CPI (ML), which in 1969 had broken off from the CPI(M) as a radical outfit, foregrounding Mao Zedong over Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin and putting it at a growing distance from the Marxists.

Soon, the Liberation came to enjoy considerable influence in