As 2025 draws to a close, India’s socialist fraternity has been left poorer. In the last three months alone, five towering socialists — figures who embodied and defined the movement’s ethos — have passed on. None of them was a politician in the conventional sense. None of them chased public office. Their lives were dedicated to work that most do not even think of as ‘politics’.

But if a leader is someone who shows society a direction, and if politics is truly the art of turning the good into the real, then each of them deserves to be remembered as a statesman in the richest sense of the word. They did not belong to any party that today calls itself socialist but they came from the same nursery.

On 2 October, after entering his hundredth year, Dr G.G. Parikh passed away in Mumbai. In November came the news from Muzaffarpur that Satchidanand Sinha had died at the age of 97, followed just days later by the passing of Prof. Satish Jain in Agra. And most recently, we have news from Maharashtra of the passing of Pannalal Surana and Baba Adhav, both of whom had also crossed 90.

Every one of them was heir to the Narendra Dev–Jayaprakash–Lohia tradition. They were moulded by socialist politics, and till the end of their lives, their faith in building an egalitarian society remained unshaken.

Yet none of them chose the path of power politics. Despite being senior and respected members of socialist........

© National Herald