It Is About Time Konkan’s Anti-emergency, Pro-Goa Liberation Hero Was Honoured
· Free Press Journal
Sawantwadi Road railway station will bear the name of one of the greatest sons of Konkan, Prof. Madhu Dandavate. A physicist by education and a physics lecturer, a socialist by commitment, a freedom fighter by training, an anti-Emergency and pro-Goa liberation hero, and India’s railway minister and finance minister with admirable track records, and among the few people’s politicians that India has had, Prof. Dandavate represented Rajapur, near Sawantwadi, in the Lok Sabha for five consecutive terms from 1971 to 1991. He passed away in November 2005 at the age of 81, having retreated from public life a few years earlier but keenly following India’s trajectory as a nation. The Maharashtra cabinet has done itself proud by approving the proposal to rename the Sawantwadi Road railway station as ‘Lokmanya Madhu Dandavate Railway Terminus’. It must not only speed up the process of making the formal recommendation to the union government—the ministry of home affairs and the ministry of railways—but also put its might behind the task.
To be sure, Prof Dandavate would have baulked at the proposal and discarded it in the dustbin of his modest one-bedroom flat in Dadar as an unnecessary exercise in vanity. He was that kind of politician—self-effacing and in service of a larger public cause. Though the practice of naming places after deceased politicians can be debated, so long as it is followed, this would be a fitting tribute. Prof. Dandavate, as the railway minister in Prime Minister Morarji Desai’s cabinet, immediately after the Emergency, rolled out decisions that continue to have a far-reaching impact on how millions of Indians travel on the world’s largest passenger rail network under a single management.
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Prof. Dandavate abolished the third class in long-distance trains, upgraded the bare wooden benches and berths in the second class to foam-padded ones, initiated computerisation of ticket reservation, and presided over the making of the Konkan Railway that brought rail linkage to languid towns and isolated villages along India’s Western Coast. If E. Sreedharan could become its architect, it was because Prof. Dandavate initiated and supported the project right from 1978 to 79. When he upgraded the second class with two inches of foam to make rail travel comfortable for the country’s poor, Prof. Dandavate had famously argued, “What I want to do is not degrade the first class but elevate the second class.” That impetus of politics as a method to uplift the poor informed his long political career in the Praja Socialist Party. In Mumbai and Delhi, Prof. Dandavate, along with his equally formidable and committed politician wife Pramila—they wrote letters to one another when jailed in separate prisons during the Emergency—represented the best that political service can be. It would be Sawantwadi’s honour to carry Prof. Dandavate’s name on its railway station.