Seth Ram Nath

Seth Ram Nath was a Punjabi Hindu Congress leader who backed the demand for a Punjabi-speaking state. The Tribune, in a feature by Varinder Singh on 29 October 2016, calls him a well-known freedom fighter and former Punjab minister, the "champion" of the Punjabi Suba movement, and says that state governments led by the Congress and by the Akali Dal did little to commemorate him. It describes him as perhaps the only Congress leader to break party lines and back the Akalis' Punjabi Suba movement in the early 1960s, and says he kept urging Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to create a linguistic Punjab state in which Sikhs would be a majority. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism calls him a Punjabi Hindu of consequence who openly espoused the cause of a Punjabi-speaking state.

Key moments

• January 1961: The Tribune says he and Sardar Harcharan Singh were the two emissaries to Sant Fateh Singh, through whom Nehru appealed to the Sant to end his fast unto death. The paper reported their part in its issues of 5, 6 and 7 January 1961.
• 7 January 1961: the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism names him in the party that flew with Master Tara Singh to Bhavnagar, where Nehru was attending the Congress session. Master Tara Singh met the Prime Minister for two hours that day but, the Encyclopaedia says, came away with nothing worth reporting to Sant Fateh Singh.
• Early 1966: the Parliamentary Committee on the Demand for Punjabi Suba heard oral evidence between January and February. The committee's list of witnesses names him as ex-Chairman of the Punjabi Regional Committee, Punjab, and names Balwant Rai Tayal as ex-Chairman of the Hindi Regional Committee.
• 6 November 1986: he died. In 1988 a sub-divisional civil hospital was named after him, which The Tribune calls the main exception to the neglect of his memory by the governments led by the Congress and the Akali Dal. His family told the paper in 2016 that no memorial had been built, and that none of them had been invited to the birth anniversary celebrations of Sant Fateh Singh at Badiala.

He is remembered, where he is remembered at all, as the Hindu politician who backed the Punjabi Suba from inside the Congress. The Tribune's 2016 feature was written to say that he had been forgotten.