Rameshwar Prasad (Hindi: रामेश्वर प्रसाद) is an Indian politician, belonging to the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation. He is a Central Committee member of CPI(ML)Liberation and the president of All India Agricultural Labourers Association (AIALA).[1]
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Rameshwar Prasad hails from a Nonia (Dalit) family and is the son of a brick-kiln worker.[2] Prasad dropped out of school in 1979, to become a full-time activist of the party.[3] He was elected to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian national parliament, in 1989 as the Indian People's Front candidate from the Arrah constituency.[3] Prasad obtained 178,211 votes.[4] He became the first Naxalite Member of Parliament from Bihar.[2] His election slogan was har mazdur ko roziroti, har dalit ko man; har kisan ko khet-pani, har yuvak ko kam ('Daily bread for every worker, dignity for every Dalit, water and land for every farmer, employment for every youth').[2]
Prasad lost his parliamentary seat in the 1991 Lok Sabha election, again standing as an Indian People's Front candidate. His vote had dropped to 117,262 (17.17%, finishing in third place).[5]
He won the Sandesh seat with 36,760 votes (34.23%), as a CPI(ML)Liberation candidate, in the 1995 Bihar legislative assembly election.[6][7] Prasad lost the seat the 2000 election, finishing third with 28,776 votes (25.21%).[8]
Prasad came third in the Arrah seat in the 1996 Lok Sabha election, with 146,398 votes (22.97%).[9] He contested the Arrah Lok Sabha seat again in the 1999 election, again finishing third with 141,939 votes (20.82%).[10]
He again won the seat in the February 2005 legislative assembly election, with 33,834 votes (32.73%).[6][11] However, he lost the seat in the October 2005 election, finishing in third position with 26,323 votes.[12]
In 2006, CPI(ML)Liberation nominated Prasad to contest a by-poll for the Nalanda Lok Sabha seat.[13] Prasad obtained 17,515 votes (5.62%)[14]
Rameshwar Prasad was the CPI(ML)Liberation candidate in Sandesh in the 2010 assembly election. But on October 19, 2010, he was arrested by police as he was filing his nomination papers. The case upon which the arrest is based dates back to 2000, when a violent confrontation had occurred at Arrah Collectorate in connection with a protest against a police killing of a CPI(ML)Liberation activist. Four CPI(ML)Liberation activists were killed. According to the CPI(ML)Liberation they had been killed in police firing, but that the local police had lodged criminal cases against the CPI(ML)Liberation leaders (including Prasad) as a retaliatory measure.[15] His party strongly condemned the arrest of Prasad, labeling it 'illegal'.[16]
Prasad finished in fourth place in the election, with 15,095 votes.[17]