At the dawn of the 20th century, two epochal events shaped the way any conscientious Indian thought. The first was the return of Mahatma Gandhi from South Africa in January, 1915 and the second marked the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in March, 1917. These events presented for the first time the classical binary of political choices before every thinking Indian: Gandhism and Marxism. In their aftermath an entire generation of people either turned into dyed-in-the-wool supporters of Gandhi and his creed of truth and non-violence, or became besotted with the romantic radicalism of Marx and Lenin. Still there were some who oscillated between both Gandhi and Marx and no one epitomised these intellectual shifts more vividly than Jayaprakash Narayan.
Jayaprakash Narayan, popularly known by his initials, JP, was the poster boy of democratic and radical dissent. In the early 1940s he along with his diehard socialist comrades disrupted British war efforts by organising labour strikes in the various industrial centres of colonial India. When arrested in Jamshedpur on 7 March 1940 while instigating Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO) workers to strike, he pleaded guilty to the charges of conduct prejudicial to the defence of British India. ‘I plead guilty of the charges’, said JP. ‘As far as the charge of endangering the defence of British India, I think the irony of it cannot be lost upon us. A slave has no obligation to defend his slavery. His only obligation is to destroy the bondage’. Such daring radicalism was only expected from someone who went to America in the 1920s, hopped from the universities of Berkeley to Wisconsin and Ohio, went through the entire writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Plekhanov available in English, listened to the politically charged songs of Woody Guthrie, and actively participated in protests and public meetings.
JP had turned into a militant socialist by the time he returned back to India in November 1929. What is more interesting is that before embarking on the American journey he was so much inspired by Gandhi’s Swadeshi movement that he had given up foreign cloth and footwear and started wearing coarse khadi kurtas and handmade shoes. The man who was gripped by what Marx and Engles wrote in The Communist Manifesto was once a regular reader of Bhagwat Gita and had embraced its core message of selfless action. On returning home JP would still touch the Mahatma’s feet, yet he would dismissively refer to him as ‘the old man’. He deemed Gandhism a ‘dangerous doctrine’, a compound of ‘timid economic analysis, good intentions and ineffective moralising’ that was deceiving the masses and ‘encouraging the upper class to continue their domination’.
With his firebrand ideas JP unsuccessfully tried to radicalise the Congress and develop it into an anti-imperialist organisation. When these efforts were thwarted by the Congress right wingers headed by Sardar Patel with generous backing from the Mahatma himself, the Congress Socialist Party was launched in 1934 with JP as its general secretary. The inner conflict and contradictions of the CSP left JP distraught and disillusioned. He swerved and gravitated towards Gandhi yet again. This time it was ‘a nonviolent ideological detour prompted by the conviction that orthodox Marxism needed Gandhian antibodies to remain immune to violent assaults on democratic norms’.
In 1952 JP formally renounced power politics to become a whole time follower of Vinoba Bhave, the most prominent living Gandhian. Dismayed by the banality of conventional politics, he found his ground zero in the Gandhian Bhoodan-Gramdan movement and that remained his muse for two decades. The fiery former socialist now preached peace and reconciliation, using Gandhi’s methods to bring together ‘the landed and the landless, the dacoits and the police, the Naga and the Indian state’.
Then in the early 1970s, at a time when PM Indira Gandhi dealt sternly with political dissent and widespread unrest was brewing among the youth, JP left Sarvodaya as dramatically as he had joined it. ‘’The erstwhile hero of the ‘Quit India’ movement’’, writes Ramchandra Guha, ‘’had become the visible public face of the ‘Quit Indira’ movement”. Spearheading the students agitation in Gujarat and Bihar, the language now used by JP was confrontational and the social change he strived for was no more incremental. He now spoke of Sampoorna Kranti (Total Revolution), a term that resonated with the Permanent Revolution of Leon Trotsky. The atmosphere in 1973-75 was naively of a simmering revolution. With failing health, JP journeyed across the country and addressed a slew of public meetings for months on. At these meetings the delirious public often chanted Ramdhari Singh Dinakar’s powerful words: ‘Singhasan khali Kari ki janta aati hai’. The government was alarmed and searched for drastic measures to control the unrest. In a pre-dawn swoop on June 26, 1975, after emergency had been imposed on the preceding midnight, JP and a number of opposition leaders were arrested. What happened thereafter is too sordid and banal yet their vivid recapitulation in the book would give goosebumps to many gentle readers.
Indeed, JP’s dream of revolution collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions but an entire generation was caught in a swirl of admiration. The book ends with this befitting pre-obituary, as it were, written by the India Today collective of Dilip Bobb, Arun Louis, Sunil Sethi, Prabhu Chawla and Farzand Ahmad, a few weeks after JP was bizarrely declared dead and a few months before he eventually passed away.“Even in his illness, Jayaprakash remains the country’s foremost dissenter, critic, visionary and fighter lost causes which never lose their value. He has always been one ’ism’ out of step, one generation too early or too late”.
This excellently written biography of JP’s incredible life was originally conceived by Late Bimal Prasad, affectionately called Bimla Babu by the legions of his contemporaries and students, who was the head of the South Asian division of the School of International Studies in JNU and later India’s long time Ambassador to Nepal during the early 1990s. A close associate of JP, Bimla Babu edited the ten volumes of JP’s Selected Works. As his daughter and co-author Sujata Prasad puts it, “My father was at death’s door when he started the project. Our home was an incubator of JP memories, inconsequential and profound, feeding my inchoate hunger for details. After my father’s death, it was left to me to glue the broken fragments of his narrative”. And she has been squarely accomplished her goal. The book beautifully portrays the life and times of Jayaprakash Narayan making it an essential read for anyone interested in the history and politics of modern India. Bimla Babu had intended to keep JP’s hidden love life and other personal nuggets under wraps and outside the narrative but his daughter has allowed them to creep in. This has made the book a riveting tale of an icon whom Gopalkrishna Gandhi calls ‘the greatest keeper, after Gandhi, of India’s political conscience’.
The writer is an IAS Officer and currently posted as Director of Dr Ram Dayal Munda Tribal Welfare Research Institute, Ranchi.