Chhotu Ram was born at Garhi Sampla in Rohtak district in 1881, a Hindu Jat of modest means, took a law degree, and became the most important agrarian politician in Punjab.
With Fazl-i-Husain he founded the Unionist Party in 1923 on a cross-communal agrarian basis: the landholding peasantry of all three religions against the urban moneylending and commercial classes.
As revenue minister he pushed through the Punjab Relief of Indebtedness Act, the Registration of Moneylenders Act and the Restitution of Mortgaged Lands Act, which between them cancelled or restructured a very large volume of peasant debt and returned mortgaged land.
He is called Deenbandhu in Haryana and is a major figure there. In Punjab he is barely remembered, because his constituency was the Hindu Jat peasantry of the south-east, which went to Haryana in 1966.
He died in January 1945, two years before Partition and before the Unionist coalition collapsed.
The most effective legislator for the Punjab peasantry in the colonial period is a Haryana figure now, which is a consequence of a boundary drawn twenty-one years after his death.
He was the Unionist leader from the Hindu Jat side and the co-architect, with Fazl-i-Husain and Sikandar Hyat, of the cross communal agrarian coalition that governed Punjab.
The debt legislation he drove through in the 1930s, restricting the moneylender's remedies and cancelling accumulated interest, is what he is remembered for in the villages.
He is honoured in Haryana as a peasant leader and is almost unmentioned in Punjab. The Unionist project he built died with the province and neither successor state claims it.