His father did not amass wealth or build bungalows, but had a rock-solid reputation as Dhanbad’s first MP. It is this wealth that Shankar Bose, now 88, and son of noted freedom fighter, trade union leader and politician Prabhat Chandra Bose is most proud of, as India gears up for Lok Sabha elections next month.
A Gandhian schoolteacher who joined the freedom movement and was involved in labour rights at the coal hub, the late Bose — popular as PC Bose — had been elected on a Congress ticket from Dhanbad in India’s first general elections in 1951-52, and re-elected in 1957. He died in 1959 as a serving MP.
Shankar, who lives in a single-storey nondescript house at Amla Para in Jharia with aged siblings Tushar Kanti and Ira, said his father’s words to his mother Mrinalini after becoming an MP still rang in his ears.
“My father said, ‘now that I am a people’s representative, the responsibility of bringing up the children is yours, I have to devote my time to people’,” the son quoted.
“It is because of men like P.C. Bose that coal workers or miners in the regulated sector get around Rs 50,000 a month today,” said the 88-year-old who remembers his boyhood home crowded with coal labourers coming to talk to his father and his mother serving them tea. “Labourers, politicians, senior bureaucrats and policemen got the same respect and hospitality.”
“We were two brothers (Shankar, Tushar Kanti) and three sisters (Gita, Mira and Ira) but my father hardly had time for his five children. He was busy with work from the crack of dawn. But we remember our dinners together and his conversations,” he recalled.
As a young man, P.C. Bose shot into the limelight at the first conference of All India Trade Union Congress in Mumbai in 1920. “Such was impact of my father’s speech in Mumbai that top leaders of AITUC decided to hold a conference in Jharia in 1922 and again in 1928, when Jawaharlal Nehru was its president.”
“My father attended the International Labour Conference in Geneva in 1924 as an AITUC representative. In the 1930s and 40s, satyagraha and Quit India had gripped the nation. Gandhiji chose my father to motivate people in Dhanbad for satyagraha. My father was jailed for three years from 1942.”
Such were P.C. Bose’s principles that he had stopped a young Shankar from joining British mining firm Bird & Co. as it would have sent a wrong message to labourers. “I’d been offered the post of general manager in the British firm. My father said, ‘you can’t be a part of the management when your father is working for workers’,” the seven-decade-old memory bringing a smile to his face.
Shankar, who was also arrested for three months during the Quit India Movement, went on to practise law and become a trade union leader. His only son, Anshuman, is a software engineer in Ghaziabad. In the autumn of his life, Shankar said, “I’m glad I am the son of a man for whom politics was about serving the people.”
Will he vote this time? “Yes, yes,” his eyes lit up.