Ranga’s politics centred on the economic independence, political agency, and dignity of those who lived by their own labour, above all, the Indian farmers.
Not all political lives fit neatly into the ideological categories of their time, and N.G. Ranga was one such political personality. He moved from Oxford socialism to Gandhian nationalism, from the Congress to the Swatantra Party, and eventually back to the Congress. At first glance, these shifts can appear to be a long political journey through competing ideologies. However, when examined more closely, there was considerable continuity in his thinking. Ranga’s politics centred on the economic independence, political agency, and dignity of those who lived by their own labour, above all, the Indian farmers.
ECONOMIST TO THE PEASANT LEADER
Ranga did not arrive at agrarian politics through emotional appeal but through a series of events. Born in 1900 at the dawn of the century in Nidubrolu, Guntur district (Andhra Pradesh), he was raised in a middle-class peasant family. His early intellectual formation was unusually broad. At AndhraChristian College in Guntur, he read the Ramayana and Mahabharata alongside Plato’s Republic, while reformist writers such as Kandukuri Veeresalingam and Tripuraneni Ramaswami exposed him to questions of social reform and inequality.
Thereafter, he went to England in 1920 and studied economics at Oxford, where he encountered Fabian and socialist thinkers and even studied Marxism. Influenced by figures including G. D. H. Cole, H. H. Brailsford, and Rajni Palme Dutt, Ranga became involved with organizations associated with anti-colonial movements and returned to India increasingly convinced that economic and political emancipation were inseparable.
Following his return, he was not simply an economist interested in theory but someone increasingly influenced by the idea that economic questions had to be connected to political emancipation. In the initial years after returning, he pursued a conventional academic career, teaching economics at Pachaiyappa’s College in Madras from 1927 and serving as economic adviser to the Madras government in 1929-30.
However, in 1930, he gave up both positions to enter politics and the freedom movement. That decision brought together the two strands that would define his career: economics and political mobilization. His interest in the peasant was consequently not limited to demanding concessions.
Ranga wanted cultivators to be organized and politically educated. He led the Ryot agitation in 1933 and helped build a peasant organization in Andhra. In 1936, the “All India Kisan Congress’ was established at Lucknow, with Swami Sahajanand Saraswati as president and Ranga as general secretary.
Similarly, his journalism added another dimension to this political work. He reported for “Bombay Chronicle” and Andhra Patrika and later started the Telugu journal “Vahini”. By then, the peasant had ceased to be simply an occupational constituency in Ranga’s politics and had become the central object of his political commitment.
He wanted the cultivator to acquire the political capacity to speak and organize for himself. The farmer was important not merely because he produced food, but also because his economic condition was itself a question of citizenship and political power.
PARTING FROM CONGRESS
Earlier in his life, Ranga had been active in the movement against zamindari in Andhra and supported agrarian reform. But he was deeply opposed to measures that he believed could weaken the cultivator’s ownership, initiative, and economic independence.
His most consequential disagreement came over cooperative and collective farming. For such reasons, Ranga had many disagreements with the Grand Old Party, but these differences became sharper after Independence. The main reason for the disagreements was not over the need for agrarian reform but on the form that reform should take. Consequently, what are the rights of cultivators, and how far should the state intervene in rural economic life?
In 1957, he organized the Krishna District Kisan Sabha against Nehru’s advocacy of cooperative farming. The Congress’s Nagpur Resolution (1959) on joint cooperative farming brought the disagreement to a head. For Ranga, a reform imposed upon cultivators could become coercive rather than emancipatory.
This was the basis of his departure from the Congress and the formation of new political organizations. After leaving the Congress in 1951, he briefly joined the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party associated with J. B. Kripalani and Tanguturi Prakasam, before forming the Krishikar Lok Party, and eventually co-founded the Swatantra Party with C. Rajagopalachari in 1959. Ranga became the founderpresident and remained at the head of the organization for a decade.
In retrospect, it would be easy to describe this as a movement from socialism to economic liberalism. But that misses what remained constant. Ranga continued to see inequality and exploitation as problems, and what changed was his assessment of the state as the means of correcting them.
He believed reform should improve the economic security and independence of cultivators without destroying their control over land and production. He argued that farmers whose land was taken away should have alternative means of livelihood and repeatedly opposed coercive approaches to collective cultivation.
His political career gave these convictions an extraordinary institutional reach. He first entered the Central Legislative Assembly in 1930 and later served in the Constituent Assembly and Provisional Parliament before being elected repeatedly to both Houses of Parliament: the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha.
His parliamentary career extended from 1930 to 1991, making him one of the longest-serving parliamentarians in the world. Interestingly, he also represented India in international forums, including the FAO, the ILO, and the Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference, bringing an Indian peasant perspective to wider debates on agriculture and labour.
BEYOND AGRICULTURE
Ranga’s political thought, though empathetic to agriculture and farmers, must not be reduced to agrarian economics. His interventions in the Constituent Assembly reveal a broader concern with what democratic citizenship should mean in a newly independent country.
Because for Ranga, formal rights were insufficient if ordinary people lacked the material conditions to exercise them. During the debate on the Objectives Resolution in January 1947, he argued that millions of Indians were too poor, uneducated, and socially disadvantaged to make effective use of civil liberties unless their living conditions were transformed.
He described the masses as the “real minorities” because their social and economic circumstances prevented them from fully enjoying rights that existed formally on paper.
Such an understanding of democracy also placed considerable faith in ordinary citizens. Ranga was also an advocate of universal adult franchise. In fact, Gandhi had specifically asked him to persuade political leaders to accept it.
In his later interventions in the Constituent Assembly, he also argued for decentralization and a stronger role for Panchayats in public life. He also defended a meaningful role for provinces and Panchayats within a constitutional order that still required an effective Union.
However, Ranga’s position was not simply one of hostility to state power. In the final constitutional debates, he accepted the need for a strong, stable, and loyal public service and recognized the importance of effective national institutions.
At the same time, he remained concerned about how constitutional powers would be exercised and about the safeguards necessary to prevent their abuse. His wider social ideal was what he described as a ‘Cooperative Commonwealth’, expressed through his idea of a Kisan-MazdoorBuddhijeevi-Kalakar Raj.
This combination explains much of the apparent movement in Ranga’s political life. He could work with Gandhi, participate in Congress socialism, oppose Nehru on economic policy, lead the Swatantra Party, and later return to the Congress without abandoning the underlying idea that had shaped his politics from the beginning: freedom had to be meaningful in the lives of ordinary people.
The peasant was his point of departure, but not the limit of his political imagination. Fundamentally, he raised a larger question: how to construct a democracy in which liberty, economic independence, and political participation strengthened rather than undermined one another.
As such, Ranga’s political life may resist easy classification, but that is perhaps also a reason it is worth revisiting. He moved across parties and ideologies, but his arguments were anchored in a fairly consistent belief in individual dignity, economic freedom, and democratic participation, which ultimately placed him, at different times, at odds with both the Left and his own political allies.
For contemporary India, Ranga does not offer a ready-made political template but a way of thinking about the relationship between liberty, reform, and state power. In an age when polarization is instant and political arguments increasingly divide into camps before they are examined on their merits, that independence of mind may be the most useful part of his legacy.
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Prof Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit is the Vice Chancellor of JNU.
