Prafulla Chandra Sen (10 April 1897 – 25 September 1990) was an Indian politician and freedom fighter. He was the Chief Minister of West Bengal from 1962 to 1967.
Background
Prafulla Chandra Sen was born in the village Senhati in the Khulna District of Bengal on 10 April 1897 in a Baidya family. Most of his childhood was spent in Bihar, Eastern India. He started his education in Bihar and passed the entrance exam to attend the R. Mitra Institute in Deoghar. He then went on to receive a Bachelor of Science degree from Scottish Church College in Calcutta. After graduating, he joined an accounting firm and aspired to move to England in order to become an articled clerk. His ambitions changed upon hearing Mahatma Gandhi's speech at the Calcutta session of the Congress Party in 1920.
Influenced by Gandhi's speech, Sen abandoned his plans of studying abroad and rallied to Gandhi's call for a mass non-cooperation movement against the British. In 1923, Sen shifted to the area of Arambagh in the Hooghly district, which became his laboratory for Gandhian experiments on Swadeshi and Satyagraha.
Political career
During the Raj
Sen plunged headlong into the freedom struggle. He was one of the staunchest supporters of the Indian National Congress Party and led the freedom struggle against the British. He was a die-hard nationalist and was committed to Gandhi's philosophy of grass-roots democracy and a self-reliant rural economy. Gandhi's influence on Sen was so pervasive that, in the 1920s, he shifted his area of social and political activity to Arambagh, an under-developed and malaria-infested area of West Bengal and worked ceaselessly for its betterment. For his efforts, Sen earned the sobriquet Gandhi of Arambagh. He was thought to have been encouraged by the then president of the union and the noted academic (headmaster of Arambagh High School) Nagendranath Chatterjee, whom he defeated in a poll, but they never lost mutual admiration. It is reported that Sen offered a pranam to Chatterjee every time they met, long after he became a national figure.
Sen threw himself into the freedom struggle and spent over 10 years in various jails between 1930 and 1942 for anti-British activities. During that time period, the Congress Party office at Serampore was his home and he earned virtually nothing, simply possessing one home-spun dhoti (sarong) and kurta. In the partial exercise of democracy permitted by the British in the 1940s, Sen was elected to the Bengal Assembly from Arambagh in 1944 and was deputy leader of the Opposition.
After Independence
In 1948, he was inducted by then Chief Minister Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy into the West Bengal Cabinet as Minister of Agriculture. This was a portfolio he held until 1967. He also functioned as Roy's Deputy Minister and was acknowledged as his political heir.
After Roy's death in 1962, Sen became West Bengal's third Chief Minister. Three years later, his regime faced a drastic food shortage in the state following a countrywide drought. At a Food Ministers' conference in Delhi, Sen advocated introducing the politically unsound measure of food rationing in urban areas. Within months, he had introduced food-grain rationing in the state, a system which has continued with minor modifications to this date.
To build food stocks, he imposed a heavy levy on rice mills. In the process, he alienated the business community. Shortages of essentials led to anti-Congress Party strikes. This was followed by violence and police excesses which further isolated Sen's government. In 1967, the Congress lost the West Bengal election to the Marxists with Sen losing his Arambagh seat in the West Bengal Legislative Assembly as well.
After this setback, Sen, although re-elected to the West Bengal Assembly, never recovered high political office. In the 1980s he fruitlessly espoused the cause of partyless democracy and, although he had left the Congress (I), having little sympathy for its leaders, came around to publicly supporting the party at public forums.