by Richie Lasrado

(This was written by Richie Lasrado, our Resident Editor, while he was the Associate Editor of 'Mangalore Today' English monthly and published in its July-August 1999 issue. - Editor-in-chief, Daijiworld.com)

May 14, 1999 brought a pall of gloom all over the city and around. For, the day saw the passing away of a great Mangalorean, who had made a name on several counts - including being a civil administrator, a parliamentarian and more than all as an upright human soul.

And he was none other than Joseph Mathias Lobo Prabhu, of Indian Civil Service (Retired) and a former member of Lok Sabha.

Born on February 24, 1906 in an elite family - of Sylvester and Annie Lobo - from Bolar, Mangalore, JM lost his father when he was hardly a month-old infant. His mother's courage and capability in bringing him up perhaps moulded his character. He had his early education  at St Aloysius, the institution which stands on the land that had been generously donated by his family earlier.

At school, he was an incorrigible prankster. But he was a topper in class. Yet, for the only reason of his pranks, he was dismissed from the school. Taking it up as a personal challenge, he joined the Government College - the current-day University College near Nehru Maidan - but later managed to come back to his original alma mater.

He was an all-rounder, a topper in the class and a good sportsman, said his classmate and benchmate, Fr Leo Cutinha. The classroom capers apart, Lobo Prabhu had certainly realized that he was cut out for something substantial in life. He borrowed Rs 18,000 - quite a fortune by today's monetary standards - from an uncle of his to pursue further studies in England.

"Enrolling himself at the London School of Economics, he had the privilege of being a student of Harold Laski and Lionel Robbins," recalled his wife Louella, years later. "He lived a frugal life and spent most of his time in the Brisith Museum and the library."

JM was compulsively brilliant. He passed the Indian Civil Service in 1926 prior to his graduation, a feat a very few may have achieved. His training in ICS was partly in Oxford, but mostly in India. His first assignment was at Moradabad - in the present-day Uttar Pradesh - as an assistant magistrate.

In the very second year of his service, he was promoted as joint magistrate and collector of Moradabad. His efficient control of locusts which were harming the crops, maintenance of communal harmony in Amroha, the mass-disposal of thousands of decomposed corpses on the banks of the Yamuna during the post-Partition violence, the Chauri Chaura incident, when he braved some marauding crowds, even risking his life and several other deft administrative steps of his will remain as bright spots of a brilliant ICS career.

Later serving in the Madras Presidency - later to become Tamil Nadu with additions and deletions of some territories -  in the 1950s, he was largely responsible for the setting up of the Neyveli Lignite plant. Earlier, his British seniors had found him dynamic but difficult. "On the whole, I got on better with them than with their successors, the Indian ministers," he used to reminisce later on.

Unwilling to brook any nonsense, he would always call a spade a spade. While serving under the erstwhile chief minister of Madras, Bhaktavatsalam, he had a serious difference of opinion with him. On one occasion, the intrepid ICS man gave the wily politician a piece of his mind, saying: "I can resign from the ICS and become a politician. But you can never in this world become another ICS officer." These words must have kept reverberating in the chief minister's ears for many years.

The inevitable had to happen sooner or later. Finding it uncomfortable to pull along with the new masters of the post-Independence era, ultimately he resigned from the ICS in 1957.

He saw a glimmer of hope for the nation in the ideology of the newly-founded Swatantra Party, led by the former governor-general of India, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, better known as Rajaji. The party advocated free-market economy. It is a historical irony that the same Swatantra Party policies, dubbed those days as pro-Maharajahs and pro-West by the ruling Congress party, were pursued since the early 1990s, following the Manmohanomics-based Liberalization.

Lobo Prabhu contested the Lok Sabha election from Mangalore on a Swatantra ticket in 1962 but lost. But he took to a novel method to interact with the people to facilitate his next election campaign. He floated a Kannada weekly, Gaon Sevak, alongside his highly-popular English weekly, Insight. The people found in him a selfless champion as he contested the parliamentary seat from Udupi in 1967 and won.

This writer still remembers, as a young student, having heard Lobo Prabhu's election speeches, and had them indelibly etched in memory.  The two thrusts of his forceful campaign were: One, his detractors called him a rich man and questioned how a rich man can espouse the cause of the common man. His answer: If a poor man was to be elected, he would spend his whole tenure only amassing wealth for himself, which was not needed in his case. Two, he always said he wanted to win not by a large majority but only by margin of a single vote - so that every person who voted for him would be proud that it was because of his/her vote that Lobo Prabhu had won.

These two highlights of his campaign - called the unique selling points, or the USPs in advertising and marketing parlance - must have worked wonders for him and he won not by a single vote but by a handsome margin.

In his last attempt to get into the parliament, Lobo Prabhu faced a shock defeat. Since then he lived in his stately mansion Chateau de Lou, located  on the equally imposing Light House Hill with his family.