9th December 2022
Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) saw many dreams but had his share of nightmare visitations too. His dreams were going rather well in the early years of his political life but at the end the nightmares came crashing through.
JP’s best, perhaps also his happiest, days were when he was Jawaharlal Nehru’s close companion and trusted ally in the 1930 and early 1940s. He was a dependable enfant terrible, and a great backup source for the restless socialist wing in the pre-Independence Congress party. Nehru and he had similar dreams, but JP’s failing in those days, and later too, was that he believed in them in his waking hours as well. Time and again, there were rude knocks on the door, but JP did not heed them.
While his first disagreements with the Congress began with Sardar Patel, Rajagopalachari, and Rajendra Prasad in pre-independence times, Nehru disappointed him as well in Independent India. Reluctantly, but firmly, he often criticised Nehru for not being vigilant enough on human rights and for letting authorities physically attack working class strikes. Congress’s record after 1948 did little to cheer JP and he even complained how in Uttar Pradesh the party was turning ‘fascist’ as it was unmindful of workers’ rights to protest and strike.
The Partition years were difficult for JP to accept, but he did not fault Nehru for that. What he could not ignore was when radical measures, as he saw them, were cast aside by Congress under Nehru, for the sake of political expediency. Though this left him bitter, he still nursed an emotional and ideological affinity with Nehru. If one were to go by the letters they wrote to each other, this feeling was profoundly mutual. Their disagreements never became acrimonious and his daughter inherited this goodwill till she blew it with the Emergency.
For a full-bodied awareness of all this, and much more, we are lucky to have a sensitive, detailed, and critically appreciative biography of Jayaprakash Narayan by Bimal Prasad and Sujata Prasad. This father-daughter effort is, of course, a tribute to JP, but this volume is also a daughter’s tribute to her late father, Professor Bimal Prasad, and what a fine tribute it is to both.
It was JP’s ideological restlessness that led him to continuously scan the political horizon for a safe and friendly harbour to dock. The two ports he instantly, and instinctively, stayed away from were the ones that were outright communal or bourgeois right wing and, of the two, his distaste for the former was greater. He opposed all forms of communalism and like Nehru, he saw majority communalism as a greater threat. That one begets the other was not entirely lost on him. This is why he openly condemned the Muslim League too for fostering exclusiveness and non-involvement with the upsurges that were enveloping British ruled India.
Later when the Ranchi riots broke out in 1967, JP was livid with rage at the way massacres were carried out. Unsparing in his criticism he angrily remarked, ‘There must be something terribly wrong with our upbringing, with the religious beliefs that have been inculcated in us, the education that is being imparted, the group attitudes that are being developed by assiduous propaganda to make it possible for human beings to change suddenly into bloodthirsty monsters.’
The authors of this volume adroitly highlight JP’s rare gift to see subtleties of shade where others saw just black and white. It is this that set him apart from most intellectuals around him and also made him a perennial political misfit. For example, his criticism of the two nation theory took a turn quite unlike the usual argument that spoke of goodwill and historical conviviality. Instead, JP raised a theoretical issue when he questioned the convergence between nation and state in the minds of many commentators.
Accordingly, JP drew attention to the fact that Britain was one state but had several nations like the Scots, Irish and Welsh in it just as French, German and Swiss coexist in Switzerland. Why then, JP asked, can’t Hindu and Muslim nations live amicably in a single nation state? The idea of ‘two nations’ was not debunked, as is often the case. The complication JP’s problematic raised was: ‘Why should this multiplicity (or diversity) matter when it comes to making a unified nation-state?’ Yes, there may be more than one nation in India’s nation-state, so what? Once this issue was placed upfront, the tenor of the debate underwent a drastic change.
It was this ability to view several established opposites as subtleties that probably explains why JP found it difficult to drop ideological anchor and settle down. His student years in America opened his mind to high political theory which he read as avidly as he did Steinbeck and P.G. Wodehouse. He came back to India a socialist but soon disassociated himself from Soviet style communism. JP astutely recognized that the idea of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was a bogus one and that this doctrine was never there in any of Marx’s works. JP could have well added that in the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx had clearly said that communists should never form a party; a warning that Leninist Marxists simply ignored.
Later, when he was drawn to Mahatma Gandhi, non-violence for him was not an inviolable dogma. At one point he even felt that should there ever be a Gandhian state, the ‘Stalins of Gandhism’ would make a mess of it just as Lenin’s successors had mangled the Soviet Union. Again, by viewing social facts as a subtle engagement of passions JP could justify why a bayonet wielding soldier deserved humane treatment in a prisoner of war camp.
The Gandhian streak in JP lingered for long inspite of his equivocations on non-violence. What appealed to him most was the sense of self sacrifice for the larger good which he felt was so quintessentially what the Mahatma preached. To that end JP organized a voluntary band of young activists who would combine philanthropy with social uplift to energize redistribution of wealth but without cataclysmic outcomes. It was never violence versus non-violence, or socialism versus capitalism, in their pure and absolute terms that attracted JP. For him it was important to work along the cracks and interstices of these ideological blocks and thus render them meaningful to everyday people.
This is why when Naxalism was growing in India in the 1960s, JP found himself reluctantly supportive of their spirit of rebellion as there was so much injustice in the countryside. However, he was critical of the CPI when it asked its followers to come to a protest meeting for land redistribution armed with sticks and spears as he felt this was an unwarranted justification of violence. His involvement with the Bhoodan Movement clearly indicated where he stood on violence versus non-violence, but that did not blind him to the injustices that the poor routinely faced.
This probably explains why JP stayed for as long as he did in the Congress though he had leading figures in it level serious charges against him. At one point in 1932, JP was even called the ‘Congress brain’. JP’s political involvement became even more tricky as his advocacy of partyless politics was expressed time and again while he himself was an integral part of a party. Later in the closing decades of the 1950s, JP passionately embraced Gandhian values and even advocated village republics and self-sufficient agro-industrial communities. Sadly, these high sounding views stayed as vague and impractical as they were when originally formulated by Gandhiji in Hind Swaraj.
There was then space for Marx and for Gandhi, just as there was space for the idealist in Nehru but also for the feisty Ram Manohar Lohia. The Congress Socialist Party had a diverse membership base. At one extreme there was Swami Sampurnanand, who was inspired by Vedantic ideals, and then there was Minoo Masani, an avowed Fabian. JP had no hesitation in straddling both these dimensions, as long as there was unanimity on the ideals of socialism.
It was not just Soviet style communism that JP found abhorrent, but he also disagreed with the easy equation of calling acts such as that of bank nationalization socialist. More importantly, for JP socialism could claim a legitimate place only after it had first ushered in democracy. His insistence on this principle comprehensively separated him from the communists of his time. People may accuse JP of being untidy in many of his political positions, but not on this one.
Though JP did fall out in the post-Independence years with Nehru and Lohia, for different reasons, of course, he never deprived them of his affection. He left the Congress fold to establish the Praja Socialist Party (PSP) in 1952 to underline the importance of achieving socialism without violence and Bolshevik conspiracies. Later, when he found the socialists were getting no traction, particularly with reference to labour and land struggles, he quit the PSP. He now readied himself to dive into Gandhian politics and this is what led him to Vinoba Bhave and the Gramdan-Bhoodan movement.
Predictably, he soon found fault with this approach too as it was far too subservient to goodwill and less inclined to apply pressure. In his heart, he had not forsaken the Congress altogether either. Initially, JP was on Indira Gandhi’s side and even congratulated her when she became the prime minister. He was all praise for her in the way she handled the Bangladesh crisis. In his letters to her, he addressed her as ‘Indu’. Soon, however, ‘Indu’ became ‘Indira’ and then ‘prime minister’ in step with his mounting criticisms against Indira Gandhi’s policies. His disenchantment with her began with bank nationalization and then climaxed sensationally with the Emergency of 1975. When JP was incarcerated post-Emergency in 1976, he wrote that the treatment meted out to him then was much worse than the way the British treated him in Lahore Fort jail
JP’s dream years were in the 1930s and early 1940s when he was seen as Jawaharlal Nehru’s chosen one and likely successor. His escape from Hazaribagh Jail in 1942 was a sensation and it made him an immensely romantic figure. Gradually, his differences with Nehru resulted in JP drifting towards a more socialist position, hence his PSP affiliation. That was not the end of it, there were other disappointments on the way. After his born again Gandhian attachment to Bhoodan movement waned, he was tempted to abandon politics altogether.
The decade of the seventies was when JP scripted both his dramatic rise and fall. In 1974, he found himself as the leading mascot of the Bihar agitation to dissolve the Assembly. He rather cherished this position for he felt that he could finally realize his dream of ‘total revolution’. But he was really deluding himself. It did not take long for this vision to become a dreadful disappointment as it broke into several pieces along predetermined party lines. Even Morarji Desai, as prime minister, ticked off JP when the latter queried about inner party decision making. It was JP, after all, who had given credibility to and buoyed the Janata Party and now he was being rudely sidelined. The dream of ‘total revolution’ soon dissolved and became his nightmare.
This biography of Jayaprakash Narayan by late Professor Bimal Prasad and his daughter, Sujata Prasad, is a labour of love to the dreamer who had to meet a tragic end for he dreamt too hard. Though the story this biography relates is sympathetic to JP, it is far from being hagiographic. The many errors of judgement that JP made, his naivete with regard to the Bhoodan movement, and indeed his unrealistic expectations of the Janata Party are presented unadorned. It is also a touching and painstaking effort by a daughter to bring her father’s efforts to fruition. Professor Bimal Prasad had envisioned the book, had done the ground work for it but, sadly, did not live long enough to finish the project. It is to Sujata Prasad’s credit that she brought to a fine conclusion what her father had started. With this book, JP lives again!