TEN

Jayaprakash Narayan

In March 1974, a student movement in Bihar, originating as a demand for educational reform, created, under the leadership of Jayaprakash Narayan, the conditions for a powerful political challenge to Mrs Gandhi. Jayaprakash, the most unusual figure in Indian politics and for twenty-four years, 1930 to 1954, the most important in the age group under Nehru, had a career more fully representative of India’s three-cornered political tradition than any other Indian. Three streams—British liberalism, Marxism and Gandhism—met in it to evolve a personal philosophy.

The challenge to Mrs Gandhi was led by a man as different in background, experience and temperament from her as can be imagined. Jayaprakash was born, the fourth of six children, on October 11, 1902, into a lower-middle-class family in Sitabdiara village on the Uttar Pradesh–Bihar border, where his father was a revenue official in Bihar’s canal department. There were few comforts at home but there was plenty to read. He saw a city for the first time when, aged twelve, wearing the villager’s dhoti, shirt and flat cap on his head, he arrived in Patna to join school. Matriculating with high marks in 1919, he got a government scholarship of Rs 15 a month to Patna College. At about this time, he was married by arrangement to fourteen-year-old Prabhavati whose father, Brij Kishore, had helped Mahatma Gandhi collect data on indigo plantation workers in Champaran and had supported his Champaran satyagraha campaign.

Jayaprakash left college two years later when Maulana Azad and Jawaharlal Nehru made a stirring appeal to students at a public meeting in Patna to work for freedom. JP (as he was popularly known) wrote later:

I … was one of the thousands of young men of those days who, like leaves in a storm, were swept away and momentarily lifted up to the skies. That brief experience of soaring up with the winds of a great idea left imprints on the inner being that time and much familiarity with the ugliness of reality have not removed.¹

His family persuaded him to take his examination, due in a month, from the Bihar Vidyapeeth, a college just established for students who had walked out of institutions aided by the British government, and later to continue his studies outside India. In 1922 he sailed for the United States with $600 which he would have to supplement with what he could earn. He told a public meeting in Patna on June 5, 1974:

I worked in mines, in factories, in slaughter houses. I worked as a shoeshine boy and even cleaned commodes [toilets] in hotels. During vacations … three or more boys lived in a single room and we cooked our own food. After graduation I got a scholarship and three months later an assistantship in my department which made it possible for me to live in some comfort.

He spent seven years in America, his studies interrupted by a long illness and a variety of jobs, and attended four universities, leaving California (Berkeley), where he could not afford the fees, for Iowa, Wisconsin and finally Ohio. Saul D. Ozer, a classmate at Wisconsin, told Nageshwar Prasad of the Institute of Gandhian Studies, Varanasi, in March 1968:

I had never met a person who was more awake and intellectually alive to the implications of whatever anybody in that class said. He was always like an architect, developing his case and argument to its logical conclusion. And as a logician he was superb… . We all felt there was greatness in Narayan.

Ozer remembers JP as tall and strikingly handsome. When they entered the library, ‘it wasn’t more than five minutes before every seat was filled with girls looking at Narayan’. His habits were monastic. He did not smoke, drink or date. He did, in his own words, try ‘to learn to dance at the Recreation Room. I didn’t have enough time, and never became any good.’ At a farewell party given by his Indian friends in New York before he left for home, they insisted that he ‘at least smoke a cigarette before leaving the shores of the United States’.

The certificates his professors at Ohio University gave him when he applied for a fellowship in New York reveal the wholeness of his impact on them, and a sustained academic brilliance that seemed as much a trait of character as a quality of mind. Ajit Bhattacharjea lists three in his biography:

Intellectually, it seems to me, Mr. Narayan ranks as high or higher than any student I have ever had. He is a careful and critical thinker, and a searcher after truth; of course he is a wide reader. He is, in every sense, a scholar in the making. (Professor L. E. Dumley, Sociology Department.)

In his class work on theoretical psychology I think he is one of the brightest students I have ever had. My impression at this time is that he has in him qualifications which under favorable conditions will lead to an outstanding position as a social theorist. (Professor Albert Weiss, Psychology Department.)

Perhaps Mr. J. P. Narayan’s most remarkable trait … is his idealism. It infuses his daily life as well as his world outlook. It has been my experience in living with him to be surprised again and again by little unexpected acts of unselfishness. (Professor Richard Steinmetz, Campus and Communications Department.)

JP’s Hindi biographer, Lakshmi Narain Lal,² lists three others:

He shows distinctly an enquiring turn of mind and a critical capacity rare even in the better class of graduate students. He is a fine-appearing man, a thorough gentleman, and in my opinion, a thorough student. I have noted that he always has an interest in the larger and deeper problems of economics, rather than in matters of technical detail… . (Professor A.B. Wolfe, Economics Department.)

His work with me is consistently A grade. He is openminded, eager to make intellectual contacts and has plenty of originality. In short, Mr. Narayan belongs to the highest class of graduate ability… . (Professor Charles A. Dice, Department of Banking and Money Market.)

Mr. J. P. Narayan is a fine candidate for a Moral Leadership fellowship. He is one of the ablest students I have ever had, both keen and deep. His whole outlook is based on a desire to know how to do something to help society… . (Professor Millar.)

JP’s American experience was both varied and profound. At Wisconsin, Polish-born American communist Abram Landy introduced him to the communist creed and classics. Convinced that Marxism was the solution for change in India, JP found its paradoxes hard to digest. Ozer called him, ‘… a strange mixture of Marxism and Gandhism… . He told me that the major thing that bothered him was the morality, character, integrity of the Communist… .’

At home he joined the Congress, not the Communist Party. The Salt March in early 1930 impressed him deeply with the discovery that, while the ideologues propounded ideology, Gandhi, with neither ideology nor manifesto, took the people with him. The Mahatma’s mission, freedom without violence, transcended political programmes, yet concerned itself minutely with the human springs of social and economic change. Stalin’s excesses disillusioned and repelled JP as they did his contemporaries, Ignacio Silone and Arthur Koestler. Yet his belief in Marxism and his admiration for many aspects of the Soviet experiment remained integral to his thinking, even after a brief abrasive collaboration between his Congress Socialist Party and the Communist Party decided him against any further link with the communists. Differences between the two became bitter in 1939, when the CPI justified the Soviet invasion of Finland. The partnership broke when the CPI joined the British government’s war effort, ignoring the nationalist mood in India and the Congress demand for an assurance of independence before it would actively support the Allies.

Prabhavati had spent the years of her husband’s absence at Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram in Wardha. JP’s Hindi biographer records:

Seven years later, when JP returned, they began to live together; but Prabha’s vow of brahmacharya and her involvement with Gandhi’s programme caused its stresses … [ JP’s] intellectual bias was Western; rationalism was an unfailing yardstick, dialectical materialism a tenet… . On the public platform, Jayaprakash would tirade against Gandhi, subjecting his arguments to a searching scrutiny. Behind him on the same platform, Prabhavati quietly spun raw cotton on a charkha… . Yet there was a strong emotional bond that held them together.

JP’s association with the Congress party began in 1930. His intellectual calibre, integrity and ardent commitment to freedom endeared him to Nehru, thirteen years his senior, while Kamala Nehru and Prabhavati were drawn to each other. When Gandhi launched civil disobedience in 1932 and the government arrested Congress leaders, JP took charge of organizational work until his own arrest in September. He had made enough impact on the party and the public by then to merit Bombay’s Free Press Journal headline:‘Congress Brain Arrested’.

His fellow prisoners in Nasik Jail were, like himself, impatient young men afire with ideas, eager to give the Congress a leftward direction and a firm economic programme. They inaugurated the Congress Socialist Party (CSP), a radical group within the Congress, in Bombay in October 1934. The CSP sought the involvement of the intelligentsia as well as the peasants and working classes. JP toured the country to promote its programmes and explain its ideas. His first tract, Why Socialism, was published and widely read in 1936, while his four imprisonments during British rule added drama to his celebrity. His second arrest, in March 1940, for making a ‘seditious’ speech at a strike meeting of steel workers at Jamshedpur, Bihar, provoked Mahatma Gandhi to comment in his paper Harijan, ‘The arrest of Shri Jayaprakash Narayan is unfortunate. He is no ordinary worker… . He has forsaken all for the sake of the deliverance of his country. His industry is tireless. His capacity for suffering is not to be excelled… .’

His nine-month sentence ended at the close of the year, but he was arrested again soon afterwards. As organizer of strikes, particularly in the steel industry, aimed at impeding Britain’s war effort, he was a special target for the police and a growing legend for the public. Detained this time in a prisoner-of-war camp near Ajmer, he and thirty fellow prisoners went on a month’s hunger strike in protest against camp conditions. A roused public opinion succeeded in getting the camp closed and its inmates transferred to jails in their own states. JP was sent to Hazaribagh Jail in Bihar. On November 9, 1942, he and five colleagues scaled the prison’s seventeen-foot wall and escaped. The Quit India agitation begun three months earlier, sparked by the arrests of Gandhi, Nehru and other leaders, had led to violent uprisings in part of the country and caused major dislocations in transport and communications. The sensational escape from Hazaribagh thrilled patriotic sentiment, as did JP’s underground activities. In hiding, he and Ram Manohar Lohia, who had escaped with him, raised a small guerrilla band near the Bihar–Nepal border, printed militant pamphlets against British rule and travelled in disguise to organize resistance all over India. With a 10,000-rupee reward for information leading to their capture, JP was arrested in September 1943 (and Lohia soon afterwards) and held until April 1946, a year longer than senior Congress leaders.

Crowds gave him a tumultuous welcome on the train journey home to Patna. In the popular imagination he was a hero, covered with a charisma and glory second only to Nehru’s, and looked upon as his successor, though now their paths diverged. The socialists formed a separate party when the Congress took power at Independence, though Mahatma Gandhi remained a link between the two. In February 1947, on the eve of separation, Lohia, CSP president, said at Kanpur, ‘The Congress is our home. Even when one leaves a home, it is not easy to deal badly with it… . It is our hope that as long as Gandhi lives, he will not allow the Congress to abandon its revolutionary goals.’

Gandhi was killed in January 1948. His agrarian emphasis and belief in decentralization and in revolution as applicable to caste, not class struggle, achievable through peaceful, not violent means, remained a rallying programme for the socialists. The dead Mahatma continued to light the way with a fundamentally Indian leftism and rationale, as against the Moscow-dominated CPI and a Nehru government that the socialists believed was overly influenced by Western economic concepts.

The Praja Socialist Party (PSP), as a merger of socialist parties was called after 1952, was invited by Nehru in 1953 to cooperate with his government. The move was dropped when JP wrote to Nehru, saying it would have no meaning if it meant strengthening his hands ‘in carrying out your present policies’. The party’s impact was weakened and scattered when Lohia broke away with his own splinter group in 1955, and later when JP withdrew to seek solutions to India’s problems outside party politics. It was yet perhaps the most idealistic development in Indian politics. Part and parcel of the national movement and the Congress inheritance, it did not fall under the Congress spell. It rejected charisma in favour of argument, criticism and thought. Contemptuous of the doctrinaire, it kept the pot of ideas boiling.

On a visit to Gandhi’s ashram at Wardha in 1952, JP found the institutions around it were ‘in far greater touch with the people and their problems than any other group in the country’. The following year he went on a three-week purification fast in his evolving search for answers, coming to the conclusion that, ‘The problem of human goodness is of supreme moment today… it has become patent to me that materialism of any sort robs man of the means to become truly human… .’³ On April 29, 1954, he announced his intention to work for Bhoodan, Vinoba Bhave’s land gift movement, a section of the Sarvodaya movement begun by Gandhi’s followers after his death. In 1957 he gave up his membership in the PSP, in order to give all his time to Sarvodaya, ‘To create and develop forms of socialist living through the voluntary endeavour of the people rather than seek to establish socialism by the use of the power of the state.’

Though ostensibly this was a withdrawal from politics, it provided a broader canvas for creating awareness in the countryside, a labour intended eventually to raise political consciousness and teach people the meaning of their democracy. His basic involvement with politics remained, and his speech to the thirteenth Sarvodaya Sammelan (a conference of the organization founded after Mahatma Gandhi’s death to carry on his ideas) in 1961 had a prophetic ring:

It means, of course, that we do not belong to any political party, that we do not and shall not take part, directly or indirectly, in any political contest for position or power. But does it also mean that we are not concerned with what is happening in the political field; with the working of our democracy and its various institutions? If democracy were to be in peril, if there was danger of political chaos, of dictatorship, shall we sit back smugly and twiddle our thumbs on the ground that we have nothing to do with politics? Perhaps it is not understood clearly that our policy not to be involved in party and power politics is meant precisely to enable us to play a more effective and constructive part in moulding the politics of the country.

A development in Madhya Pradesh strikingly illustrated his reputation as a leader whose human qualities and moral stature were held in high regard. At the request of the dacoit leader Madho Singh, he negotiated with the government for humane treatment for the dacoits in return for their voluntary surrender. On condition that they would not face the death penalty, 400 dacoits laid down their guns and ammunition in a moving ceremony before JP and his wife.

The early 1970s had seen dramatic changes in prime ministerial style and behaviour. Mrs Gandhi’s drive towards centralization, her concentration of powers in her own hands and her frequent use of the new arbitrary arrest law (MISA, June 1971) gave notice of a growing authoritarianism. In 1973 JP wrote to members of Parliament, outlining ways to protect citizens’ rights and democratic institutions. An organization, Citizens for Democracy, was set up by him for this purpose. In an open letter to youth, dated December 9, 1973, he urged a Youth for Democracy movement, ‘What form their action should take is for the youth themselves to decide. My only recommendation would be that in keeping with the spirit and substance of democracy, it must be scrupulously peaceful and nonpartisan.’

In January 1974 a student revolt against food prices in engineering college hostels in Ahmedabad and Morvi, in Gujarat, erupted into a citizens’ movement against scarcity and Congress misrule in the state. A wave of anti-government demonstrations, comparable in size to pre-Independence civil disobedience, was brought under control by the Central Reserve Police and Border Security Force rather than the state’s own police. An unknown number of demonstrators had been arrested and between 85 and 100 killed by mid-March, when Mrs Gandhi was compelled to concede the outraged demand for the state government’s resignation. The Gujarat mood stayed anti-Congress. A year and a half later an election in the state ended in the Congress party’s defeat.

The agitation in Gujarat had taken Mrs Gandhi’s government by surprise. The first sign of organized protest in Bihar found it prepared, equipped and armoured.