Ram Dayal Munda

Ranchi, Sept. 30: Rajya Sabha member and renowned tribal ideologue Ram Dayal Munda breathed his last at Curie Abdur Razzaque Ansari Cancer Institute on Ranchi-Hazaribagh NH-33 this evening. He was 72.

Munda, on ventilation for the past four days, died around 5.30pm.

He is mourned by wife Amita, son Gunjal and hundreds of associates who worked with him closely during the Jharkhand movement.

Condolences poured in the moment news of his death spread. “He was the guiding light for the state,” said a visibly shaken chief minister Arjun Munda. Among the others who paid tributes were Governor Syed Ahmed, longtime associate and Ajsu founder Surya Singh Besra.

Munda had been diagnosed with cancer of the prostrate gland in April, and had been sent to AIIMS, New Delhi, and Mayo Clinic, Minnesota, US, for treatment.

His body will be kept at his home near Ranchi College from 8am to 11am to enable his admirers pay their last respects. Thereafter, his last rites will be performed at his ancestral village Deori, 50km from the capital.

Many will remember Munda’s last public appearance on September 8 at the Karma festival on Ranchi University campus, where he falteringly sang a Karma song. Midway, he asked long-time associate and tribal scholar B.P. Keshri to complete it as he was too weak.

Born in Deori near Tamar in 1939, Munda in 1963 went to the US to study at Chicago University, after which he became a faculty member at the department of South Asia studies at Minnesota University. He came back to Jharkhand in 1982 on the request of then Ranchi University vice chancellor Kumar Suresh Singh, who had decided to open a new postgraduate department for tribal and regional languages.

Then began a new chapter in his life, as he, along with others such as Keshri tried to inculcate political leadership among youths of the state.

Munda also inspired the formation of All Jharkhand Students’ Union (Ajsu) in the early 1980s, which played crucial role in the separate statehood movement.

Then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, after visiting Jharkhand, had asked tribal leaders to present a report on why a separate Jharkhand was necessary. With Munda as its chief architect, the dense and well-argued report paved the way for the new state.