12th March 2022
Dissenter extraordinaire, JP (Jayaprakash Narayan), was a movement by himself. In hindsight, he was the most controversial politician independent India has ever produced. The storms he threw up, especially in the turbulent 1970s, reached every nook and cranny of the country and shook the nation’s conscience and imagination. Quite interestingly, all the smoke and fire his life had triggered were for causes that would redefine the idea of India.
That takes us to the most important question: Who is this man? After JP’s death in 1979, several scholars and historians have attempted to answer the question and have not been able to offer a comprehensive answer for the mere fact that JP’s multifaceted life defied existing paradigms of how a political human should be.