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JP Narayan a political morality re-examined David Selbourne

To cite this article: David Selbourne (1981) JP Narayan a political morality re-examined, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 13:1, 38-49, DOI: 10.1080/14672715.1981.10409918

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 JP Narayan

A Political Morality Re-Examined

by David Selbourne

In the wake of JP’s death and the flurry of ill-informed judgments which followed it, his critics pronounced his life and thought to have been vacillating and indecisive; 1 at worst, a confused individualist and even a crypto-“fascist,” at best a well-intentioned but impractical idealist. In my own book, An Eye to India, I described his politics as “naive and impassioned, popular and populist” and the Bihar movement, which he led in

1974-1975, as a “mass-movement which must be called eva- nescent, and whose evanescence was to be proved subsequently by its rapid evaporation. ”2 Of his concept of “Total Revolu- tion,” I wrote that it was “neither total nor a revolution.”3

But reconsideration of his life and work has changed my view. The trajectory of JP’s thought, from his “American” Marxism of the 1920s, to the founding of the Congress Socialist Party in 1934, to his espousal of Sarvodaya* and the Bhoodan movement,* to the politics of the “Total Revolution,” and finally to the protest against Emergency rule which led to the founding and debacle of the Janata Party, was not as erratic as his critics make it out to be. Indeed, the closer and more patient

the examination the more consistent itappears; and it certainly does not represent a “zig-zag course of celebration,’”* as one of the post-mortems of JP put it.

To begin with, it is a politics of protest, against the British Raj, capitalist exploitation, political tyranny, Indian establish- ment privilege and corruption, against violence, Congress mis- government, and arbitrary and authoritarian Emergency rule. And behind the protests stood certain determinate and coherent political notions which I will discuss later.

Of course, it was characteristic of such a politics of protest that he often overstated his own case, while understating or mistaking that of his opponents. Thus, when he asked in 1949, “Does Socialism merely mean solving the problems of bread and butter? Has it only an economic content?” and answered “I refuse to accept this view, ”s he was conveniently ignoring the fact that many socialists refuse to accept this view also. The premise on which the rhetorical questions were based was a false one. But behind the false premise, the rhetorical question and the categorical answer, there lurks–as usual with JP’s discourses–a crucial issue, which holds the long evolution of his thought together: namely, how to achieve political equality, moral progress and economic emancipation together, without sacrificing any one of them to another. JP’s belief in the attain- ability of such an elusive goal may have been utopian, but his commitment to it was a consistent and unshaken feature of his political theory and practice.

Of course, it was the same man who attacked Gandhi as a ‘bourgeois leader’ and upbraided him for his politics of ‘class collaboration’ in 1935, and who was urging India twenty years later to turn back to Gandhi for its true social and moral princi- ples. But the supposed ‘vacillation’ was more apparent than real, since between the first and second positions stood the great watershed of JP’s own carefully rationalized disillusion with the example of the Soviet Union. Indeed, JP’s 1956 correspondence with Ajoy Ghosh of the Communist Party of India (CPI), on the issues of power and freedom, democracy and socialism, state and citizen, places him squarely and precisely in the center of the first Cold War’s ideological turmoil, as it impinged on India. The positions he took up express a familiar recoil from a coer-

cive and bureaucratic system of power which, in the name of freedom and equality, is held to crush the former in order to achieve the latter.

This dilemma is as old as the Himalayas, or almost; and though the Cold War promoted and cynically profited from this debate, and from the genuine–as well as faked–moral an- guish to which it gave rise, it was nevertheless a real issue. Moreover, there is no philosopher, and certainly no longer any socialist, who can afford to conceal from her or himself the fact that, however the terms ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ may be de- fined or blatantly misused, the issue will not be resolved by dogmatic pronouncements, whether from right or left.

For the questions of who shall hold power, and how that power will be held, whether in a “democratic” or a”socialist” or a “democratic socialist” state, rightly take precedence over most other political questions. More particularly, the issue of whether the “dictatorship of the proletariat” or, say, the “na- tionalization of the means of production, distribution and ex- change,” leadstogreaterpoliticalequalityandeconomicdemo- cracy, or to new forms of exploitation of working people, is a question not merely to engage the minds of senile “petit- bourgeois” libertarians, but those of every socialist and com- munist who is still capable of thinking.

One early consequence of the way JP faced up to this kind of moral problem was his public self-questioning of 1948,

* Sarvodaya: “communalwarfare.”

** Bhoodan movement:The “LandGift” movementwhichsoughtto encour-

agethe voluntarysurrenderoflandbylando~vnersforredistributiontothepoor. 38

 which in outline indicated the direction of what was to be a fixed preoccupation: “Is everything due to economic inequalities? Is capitalism the only evil? Can we entirely depend upon class struggle?”6 The negative answer which JP gave to all three questions was later to become increasingly common ground among progressive thinkers the world over, and rightly so.

Socialism, as JP put it then, will “never be full and com- plete without democracy.”7 And JP’s great strength over his adversaries on right and left was that this position was sustained by an intellectually coherent conception of what he meant by “democracy” wighin the terms of his political theory, unlike the cynical anti-socialist who so often hides behind false moraliz- ings about the sanctity of”individual freedom,” while meaning nothing more by it than the right to benefit from the sufferings and deprivations of others, in a political and economic system which defends this right by force and intimidation.

The fact that he had started this “long process of question- ing” as a result of the Russian purges, as he put it in 1957, and that he ironically described himself four years earlier as a former “worshipper at the shrine of the goddess dialectical material- ism”8 is thus less important for its Cold War terminology than for its substance and its implications.* But there were other related issues too, which JP raised in this period, above all, questions of the relationship between economic and political democracy, and between centralized and decentralized power. And however much a critic may object to the political vocabu- lary of JP’s debate with himself, his moral concem with “demo- cracy” distinguishes him qualitatively from those Indian poli- ticians of the ruling class who claim a monopoly of democratic and socialist virtue for themselves; while they, at the same time, defend the status quo with the Central Reserve Police and powers of preventive detention. Furthermore, whether one likes his conclusions or not, JP had the moral and intellectual cour- age, which many socialists entirely lack, to question openly the foundations of his own belief.

“Here and Now”

In 1958, JP held the view that “Bhoodan is a great mass movement of conversion… It attacks and corrects here and now the system of exploitation and inequality. It teaches men to share what they have, with their fellow men.”9 He was wrong; it did no such thing. But once more, behind these utopian accents are deeper truths. There are also the persisting echoes of a socialist commitment which I do not believe he ever set aside. **

* I hold this view despite JP’s frequent equation of Marxism with Communism, and Communism with totalitarianism, equations which were and are merely Cold War commonplaces; while to confuse “materialism” as a philosophical world-view with “materialism” as a form of consumerism, in the way that JP began to do, was simply crass.

** His was a commitment which India’s Congress leaders from Jawaharlal Nehru to Indira Gandhi, to say nothing of Sanjay Gandhi, could never have emulated in theory or in practice, even if they had wished to. Instead, they merely borrowed for cosmetic reasons parts of his political program, from the Fourteen Points in 1953–which included the abolition of the privy purses and bank nationalization–to the Gujarat and Bihar slogans of 1974-75, some of which reappeared in the Twenty Points of the Emergency’s false prospectus.

Moreover, in the urgency of this search for “mass conver- sion” only a very shallow, or deeply prejudiced, political ana- lyst would find merely the symptoms of a demagogic populism, even if such elements are clearly present. Much more important is the strong sense of an overriding political and moral impera- tive built upon the ruins of his regrets, which once more he grossly overstated: “the communists have not even tried to live up to the ideal of brotherhood in their own societies.”1~ In addition, such language contains a characteristic demand which is at the opposite pole to the brutal impatience of Emergency rule: that solutions be found to the real problems of real human beings, here and now, and not in the Indian hereafter.

I believe, too, that it was precisely the consistent and principled subordination of self to this moral imperative im- posed on him by the bitter condition of the Indian people, which brought him into conflict with the other Sarvodaya leaders, in particular Vinoba Bhave–the true exponent of political ambi- guity and moral vacillation–during the dispute about the meth- ods and direction of the Bihar movement. Thus because JP was, and remained, a socialist in his convictions he struggled all his life (before, during and after his specific commitment to Sarvo- daya) not just to express and embody, guru-like, an abstractly moral aspiration, but to intervene practically in the political process.

It is for this reason that I think Minoo Masani was wrong, and superficial, to argue that JP “rejected Marxism because it did not answer the question: “Why should man be good, or why should anyone be good?” and that “from then on there was no looking back.” 11Instead, in this long intellectual and political journey, JP bore all his ideas forward–Marxist, socialist, Gandhian–into his courageous challenge, in 1974, to the full panoply of corrupt class and state power under the rule of Congress. And it was exactly because he struggled to wed sometimes irreconcilable notions together, in an organic and responsive philosophy with which to guide direct political action, that he was bound to collide with a succession of com- placent dogmatists incapable of doing other than maintain en- trenched positions much narrower than his own.12 To say,

1. E.g.C.N. Chitta Ranjan, ~4ainstream, New Delhi, 20.10.79, p. 7. 2. DavidSelbourne,AnEyetoIndia,Harmondsworth,1977,pp.24-25. 3. David Selbourne, “State and Ideology in India”; Monthly Review,

New York, December 1979, p. 31; reprinted Mainstream, 15.3.80, p. 17.

4. C.N. Chitta Ranjan, op. cir., p. 7.

5. AttheSeventhConferenceoftheSocialistPartyin1949,quotedinV.

Nargolkar, JP’s Crusadefor Revolution, New Delhi, 1975, p. 45. 6. Ibid., p. 41.

7. Ibid., p. 42: cf. “… Just as we had to taste the ashes of indepen- dence, sofuturegenerationsmayhavetotastetheashesofsocialism…” J. P. Narayan, ibid., p. 62.

8. J. P. Narayan, Freedom First, Sept. 1952, qu. Minoo Masani, En- counter, December 1975, p. 17.

9. Qu. Nargolkar, op. cit., p. 59 (my emphasis).

10. J. P. Narayan, Three Basic Problems of Free India, London, 1964, p.

37 (my emphasis).

11. Minoo Masani, op. cit., p. 17.

12. C. N. Chitta Ranjan, op. cit., p. 7. This is just as true of the self-

righteous defenders of inactivity in the Sarvodaya movement, as it ksof those who pretend, for polemical purposes, that the Bhoodan campaign was “launched actually to help the rural vested interests fight back and paralyze the massive agrarian unrest that had begun to be evident in many parts of the country.”

39

 therefore, that JP was “an individualist groping for his political m~tier” 13now seems to me to do him a substantial injustice, to undervalue JP’s personal commitment to the moral and political imperative of which I have spoken. Moreover, it was not so much JP who failed–despite his strong sense of failure–as some of the movements and causes he espoused; which is quite a different matter.

“People’s Partyless Democracy”

I said earlier that JP had a fully worked-out and intellectu- ally coherent conception of what “democracy” meant to him. But it cannot, in my view, be understood without the awareness that it embodied the two cardinal aspects of his thought which I so far covered: his recoil from “statism,” grounded in his reading of the Soviet experience, and his drive to find an immediately effective political means for a real transformation of the people’s conditions.

His democratic theory, whose scope far exceeds the range of its critics, is logically a theory of decentralized power. Given his legitimate disgust with the political corruption and misgov- ernment which has characterized independent India’s rule by Congress, it is equally logically a theory of “partyless” ad- ministration. For him, “party” was synonymous on the one hand with bureaucratic elitism in the Soviet Union and, on the other, with corrupt place-seeking in India; and these two re- sponses converge in his notions of what “democracy” ought to be. The first of these responses was expressed by JP, with the full banality of Cold War rhetoric, in 1952, when he asserted that” in the kingdom of dialectical materialism, fear makes men conform, and the Party takes the place of God.” 14Moreover, his political career–despite the fact that in 1934 he was a moving force in the foundation of the Congress Socialist Party,

and in the creation of Janata in 1977–was throughout marked by a suspicion of party. Thus, I think that his refusal in 1974 to set up a new political party which might embody the mass forces being unleashed by the Bihar movement was fully in accord with his deeper political convictions.

Certainly, as far as the Indian experience is concerned, JP’s unease with party is comprehensible. If by “party” is meant the organized and principled expression of ideologically coherent socio-political interests and policies, it is arguable that post-independence ruling-class India has never had a party at all, only agglomerations.

Yet in JP’s conception of a “partyless democracy,” “partylessness” is not really the principal feature. Like Rous- seau, JP counterposed “formal representative democracy” with what he sometimes called “people’s democracy,” a term char- acteristically borrowed from a communist provenance, but dis- tinct from communist usage. It denoted his sense that the former type of democracy, in its exclusion (except at times of election) of true participation by the people and of accountability to them of their “representatives,” is largely an illusion. He plainly believed that “govemment by consent.., is not an adequate enough concept.” Instead, as he put it in 1961 in his little book Swaraj for the People, he had in mind “government by par- ticipation”–“govemment brought as near the people as possible.”~5

It was this latter idea which, as we shall see later, made him dangerous to entrenched power and vested interest. The people, he argued, had been “left out of the democratic way of life.” They had “no stake” in a t’epresentative democracy “even

though they had the vote”; and “though Swarajcame, it had not come to them,” but only “the very thin layer of the educated middle class.” “It is not the abstract virtues of democracy that so excite us,” JP continued, but “the concrete fruits of democ- racy in terms of the people’s welfare.’16

Thus, again like Rousseau, JP in his democratic model seeks to discover and embody the popular will, logically by- passing the politics of state, party and faction, in search of the

elusive principle of “true” or “real” democracy: the philos- opher’s stone, Lok Shakti, which democratic thinkers have sought since the word was invented. It is thus entirely consistent that JP should have been attracted to the notion of gram sabka, in which the “collective will” of village India could be aroused, village by village, as the sage of Geneva had dreamed was possible two hundred years before him. The “entire adult mem- bership of the community” would gather in a “collectivebody” and would constitute, or reconstitute, the “groundfloor of the noble edifice of democracy.” 17

Moreover, JP was to carry forward such dangerous notions into the heart of the Bihar movement nearly fifteen years later. As he poured scorn in 1974 on the abuse of democratic institu- tions in India, he once more made the classical democratic de- mands, impossible to meet without a prior revolution: for the pre-selection of candidates not by parties but by people’s com- mittees, for the accountability of the elected to the electors, and for the right of the latter to recall the former. Furthermore, undercutting the forms and norms of bourgeois liberal democ- racy, he struggled in Rousseauist terms towards a “new conven- tion,” and the embodiment of the idea of the “General Will” in the proposition that “all elections should be determined as far as possible by consensus.” is Here he comes as close as he ever did to the Social Contract, in an Indian translation.

“Is IndiaDemocratic?”

And yet consistent as they are, there is a contradiction in JP’s views on democracy in India, which comes near to wreck- ing the whole structure of his thought. It is a contradiction which reflects his own ambivalence on the subject; an ambivalence which is not present–in this form, at any rate–in the thought of Rousseau himself. Is India a democratic country, or is it not? And if it is, but imperfectly so, is it necessary to replace or merely to amend the particular forms which its “democracy” tokes? And if it is necessary merely to amend what is essentially democratic, what need then of a “total revolution”?

There is no satisfactory answer to these questions in JP’s thought. Thus he says that “Indian democracy rests on a very narrow base”;19 that he wants “the reform and reconstruction” of Indian political institutions to make them “more demo- cratic”20; that India needs “a more stable, popular and satisfy-

13. Ibid.

14. J. P. Narayanin FreedomFirst. Sept. 1952,qu. MinooMasani, Encounter.Dec. 1974,p. 17.

15. J. P. Narayan,SwarajforthePeople.Varanasi,1961,p. 3. 16. Ibid.,pp. 1-3.

17. Ibid.,p. 11.

18. Qu. Nargolkar,op. cit., p. 182.

19. J. P. Narayan.SwarajforthePeople,p. 2(myemphasis). 20. Ibid.,Introduction[p. 1](myemphasis).

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 ing form of democracy”;~ and he is opposed in 1974, as we have seen, to “the abuse of democratic power and democratic institutions.” In each case the argument rests on the premise that, however flawed, there is democracy in India; it is merely not democratic enough.

On this premise, at least, the term “total revolution” is an extravagant one, and the need for such a “total revolution” is not made out. It seems, prima facie, that we have a politics which will preserve, not inaugurate, Indian democracy, while extending its range by the introduction of certain safeguards for the people. Put in its most extreme and contradictory para- phrase, the “total revolution” would have to be brought about without drastic structural change to India’s essentially demo- cratic system.

Now if JP’s thought and action was in fact reducible to this vacuous proposition–and he is sometimes guilty of the reduc- tion himself–then there would be little more to be said about it. Indeed there are other powerful deterrents to going further, as, for example, in this bland and utopian assertion that “true democracy demands that existing division, inequalities and conflicts in society are not accentuated by its processes, but smoothed out and ultimately eliminated by the promotion of community spirit and common endeavour towards the common good.” 22And yet, a glib rejection of JP’s democratic theory on the grounds that it is untenable unless there has been a prior revolution is also impossible. It is checked not merely by the historical record of JP’s leadership of the massive popular challenge to India’s power structure in the mid-1970s, but also by a deeper understanding of his explosive conception of “peo- ple’s power.”

In practice JP provided the impulse for the biggest chal- lenge, after Telengana,* to Congress hegemony and misrule in the history of independent India. It even came close to giving JP a role in the turmoil of 1975 which thephilosophes of the French Revolution, Rousseau included, would have recognized and saluted.

“Building DemocracyFromBelow”

Indeed since Jayaprakash Narayan remained a revolution- ary activist to the end of his days, he was well aware of the correctness of citing the example of the French Revolution in weighing India’s future prospects. In Three Basic Problems of Free India, for instance, which was published ten years and more after his supposed break with a revolutionary political perspective, he wrote approvingly of the fact that the French Revolution “demonstrated that the people could assert their sovereignty, overthrow the powers of kings and establish their o w n . ” 23 L i k e w i s e , a n d a n i l l u s t r a t i o n o f t h e l i f e l o n g c o n t i n u i t y of his thought, he asserted that “the Indian freedom movement was a people’s movement par excellence. It was not rajniti

[politics of the state], but lokniti [politics of the people].” 24

* Telengana refers to the site of a peasant rebellion in Andra Pradesh from 1946-1950, eventually crushed by the Army.

21. Ibid.,p.22(myemphasis).

22. Ibid., p. 32.

23. J. P. Narayan, Three Basic Problems of Free India, p. 8. 24. J. P. Narayan, qu. Nargolkar, op. cit., p. 63.

JP in 1952 (photographer unknown)

His language, in fact, is one of constant reiteration of the theme of “the people,” too often abstractly perceived as undif- ferentiated by class or caste, but nevertheless more than a populist slogan. Indeed his particular insistence upon “people’s power” as a sine qua nonfor any morally validpolitical system, whatever such a system be called, is one of the essential features of his thought. At different times in a long life, consistently punctuating his political discourse, come references to “peo- ple’s struggle,” “people’s self government,” “the people’s will,” “people’s awakening,” “people’s upsurge,” “a real people’s democracy,” “people’s administration” (Janata Sarkar) and, of course, a “people’s party”: hopefully–his hopes were belied–a party of and for the people which would transcend person and faction, and escape the boundaries of

41 traditional political practice.

 This continuous emphasis indicates an organic element in his political thinking which, on the one hand, goes beyond a shallow populism, and on the other cannot be reduced to metro- politan conceptions of “devolution” of political authority, even though he sometimes used the word himself. 25Furthermore the issue is not merely “the people.” It is the question of power which engaged him: the abuse and manipulation of power by those unworthy to hold it–as in the notorious case of Sanjay Gandhi–and its restoration to the sovereign people, whose present lot is “to be moved about as pawns by political parties and ambitious politicians.” 26

Thus, in pursuit of what he called “the taming and control- ling of power.., concentrated in a caucus of leaders,”27 as it now is and always has been concentrated in free India, he wanted not merely to devolve such power, but to “build democ- racy from below,” 28a somewhat different and more subversive political ambition, which momentarily gave a fierce impulse to the Bihar movement. In the “inorganic system of democracy based on individual voters,” however–which he contrasted with an “organic and participatory” democracy–there was “hardly any force that tends to pull power down towards the people.” 29Instead he argued, as cogently as any utopian philos- opher ever has, not just for a stereotyped model of political and economic decentralization with an accompanying apparatus of local self-government, but for a decisive restriction of power at the Center. The Center must have “only as much of it as is required to discharge its central functions”; “all the rest” must be exercised at lower, sub-central, levels. And however sim- plistic his pyramidal structure may appear, with his recommen- dation that “as you proceed from the bottom levels of govern- ment to the top, each higher level should have less and less functions and powers, ”3~ such a program seems to threaten the very dissolution of state power.

His argument was also that a “strong centre” irresistibly becomes more and more totalitarian, as it has tended to do in India since Independence, while also being thefons et origo of corruption and subversion of the rights of the individual. More- over, it was on the basis of this political understanding, however limited and schematic it may have appeared to its critics, that JP mounted his huge challenge to political authority through the Bihar movement. “What can people do,” he asked in May 1974, “when constitutional methods and established demo- cratic institutions fail to respond to their will, or to solve their burning problems?… Therefore, it is a healthy and welcome symptom of our democracy that the people, the real masters, should rise and take recourse to unconstitutional but powerful means to assert themselves, and bend the powers that be to their will… Thereisnogreaterpower,” headded, “thanthepower of the people. It is our duty to arouse that dormant power. Our hope lies in it.” 31

* Krishnamurti: mystic (b. 1897) who believed himself to be a new Messiah. Aurobindo started a school of Hinduism based on the teachings of the Yoga.

25. E.g.inSwarajforthePeople,p.5.

26. Ibid., p. 8.

27. J. P. Narayan, Three Basic Problems of Free India, p. 24.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., p. 5.

31. J. P. Narayan, qu. Mainstream, 13.10.79.

32. David Selbourne, “State and Ideology in India,” Monthly Review,

These are not the accents of “a petit-bourgeois liberal,” or a “fascist” or a man given over to “zig-zag cerebration.” However complex and ambivalent, this is the voice of a social- ist, a democrat and even a revolutionary (if not a “total revo- lutionary”) who had evidently forgotten neither his Gandhian nor his Marxist antecedents.

Legality and Morality

I notice that some Indian commentators on JP’s thought have accused him of articulating his ideas in a “sophisticated” or “Westernized” idiom, though the fact that the two terms should be regarded as synonyms has its own disturbing reso- nance. I think the judgment of him which is implied by these adjectives to be shallow and wrong, if put in such a one- dimensional perspective. Indeed much of JP’s theory and prac- tice is not decipherable, except at a superficial level, unless placed in relation to a quite specifically Indian moral, philo- sophical and historical context and outlook. Though I have pointed out elsewhere that “the moralities of a Tolstoy or Kropotkin clearly reveal that the leading features of the Gan- dhian ethic have been by no means confined to India, ”32 there were frequent occasions when what JP did and said stood outside any recognizable boundaries of the “Westernized idiom.” It is therefore necessary for Indians and non-Indians alike not to be misled into a narrow Eurocentric categorization of his ideas, merely because their vocabulary and their accent often resemble the familiar terms of “Western” discourse.

To begin with, the troth of the matter here as elsewhere is that JP’s political and moral philosophy is many-levelled. At one level, his conception of “rights” and “freedoms” does not differ from the “classical” (imperial British) “authorities” whose sacred texts have always included the Magna Carta, Dicey and the largely-mystical British Constitution. Thus, if JP had been alive today, he would justly have been as gratified by the 1980 Indian Supreme Court decision protecting the funda- mental rights of the Indian citizen from usurpation by a par- liamentary dictatorship, as any Indian constitutionalist in the days of the Raj. One could even go further and say that the particular form of the “democratic spirit” which he embodied lives on in this court judgment.

But at another level, JP’s idea of rights and freedoms owes nothing to the formal provisions of inherited law and constitu- tion. Emancipation, for such thinkers as he, is necessarily invested with a moral dimension which transcends the defini- tions contained in legal prescription and legal sanction, and becomes, as he put it in From Socialism to Sarvodaya, a “pas- sion for life.” It takes on, in some of his writings and speeches, an aura which is deeply moral in the best sense. At times, of course, it brings his political philosophy up to (but never, I think, beyond) that threshold of mystification which Krishna- murti and Aurobindo* crossed, and where the secularist rightly fears to tread. Indeed, it is a measure of both the subtlety and balance of his thought that he does not very often overstate– despite the temptations in India–the more elusive virtues of a “spiritual” freedom, which in extremis passes all rational understanding.

Instead, a modest and temperate notion of “self- realization” takes its place in his thought, alongside “ortho- dox” conceptions of the practical Rights of Man, in a way which owes nothing to “bourgeois individualism” and every- thing to a sense of human dignity which is indivisible and

Dec. 1979, p. 35.

42

 universal. 33 “Materialists” can no longer afford to insist upon dogmatic scruples which object to such terms on the grounds that they are “idealist,” even if, in fact, they are. Rather, I think that we are bound now to agree that “no matter what kind of social organization we build up,” as JP put it, “that organiza- tion should make it possible for the individual to pursue this spiritual search for self-realization.”34There is nothing inher- ent in this proposition, or even in the similar assertion that “man must go beyond the material to find the incentives to good- ness,”3swhichcouldorshouldbeheldtothreatenthewelfare of the people. Indeed, JP and thinkers like him would claim the opposite, and they must be left to think it, since they are more right than wrong.

Furthermore, the fact that in 1952 he was very much more wrong than right in asserting that “the task of social reconstruc- tion cannot succeed under the inspiration of a materialist philos- ophy, ”36 should not be allowed to discredit judgment of the tendency of his thought. It is similarly irrelevant that, like Mahatma Gandhi before him, he often appears to adopt the western Orientalist’s ideological vision of India, transmitted to India in the nineteenth century and solemnly digested as a governing truth by many Indians themselves. It proclaims the uniquely “spiritual” essence of Indian life; but the real and fictitious “spirituality” of India–when “Hinduism” is in practice the most this-worldly of all the great religions–was never more praised by the British than when they were most assiduously looting the material wealth of the Indian people. Though a rationalist, JP showed himself both unable and un- willing to move away for long from this structure of perception, and self-perception. Hence, “the most characteristic and most important value that Indian society has developed,” he wrote, “is the value of spirituality.”37 But it is not, and never has been; instead, it is the immense moral and physical fortitude of its toiling millions in withstanding, with dignity, the assault on their well-being which is remorselessly meted out to them by India’s economic system. It is this “value’ which a moralist, a democrat, a humanist must salute. Far from it being “the value of spirituality” which “has to be placed in the position of control,” as he put it,3s he himself knew, especially in 1974 and

1975, that there were other and more pressing tasks on India’s political agenda.

And yet at a deeper level still, there is consistency, political logic and persuasiveness in his position. The demand for a “spiritual” life is not a program for inertia and injustice but a means, once more, of protest. It is statism, corruption, privilege and exploitation which, in his philosophical scheme of things, stand to lose most from the active recovery of certain values. And, however utopian such a perspective seems to be, the politics–very profoundly Indian–of mass moral protest lies dangerously close below this apparently bland surface.

The Bihar Movement

JP, as I see it more clearly now than 1 did before,39 provoked Mrs. Gandhi to revenge and reprisal in June 1975, not because his leadership of the Gujarat and Bihar movements threatened India with “right-reaction”–and even less with “fascism”–but becausefromMarch 1974hefoundhimselfat the head of an unarmed popular moral force which had begun to call armed established power, particularly the corrupt power of Congress, into question.

Though the language of the Bihar movement might have

43

been more Messianic than Marxist, and the hopes utopian not scientific, the power unleashed was real, and the threat of militant direct action against institutions and structures of au- thority potent. “Our immediate task,” JP said on October 14, 1974, “is to demontrate the people’s will and the people’s power.” There were millions ranged behind him, and as the mass protests against scarcity of food and rising prices, the black market and the rigging of ballots, corruption and un- employment, mounted to a deafening crescendo, power visibly trembled,fingering itslathi(bludgeon).

These were the fleeting moments of the moral rearmament (in both its good and bad senses) of a people’s India; “I have come out openly,” JP declared to crowds of hundreds of thou- sands, “to wage a fight against corruption.” A non-violent “moral regeneration” of the whole social order seemed, for a while, to beckon beyond the horizon. At long last, this gigantic dharna (civil disobedience), firmly wedded to Indian tradition, seemed to promise the vindication of a politics of means and ends which refused to go beyond satyagraha (non-violent resis- tance) in order to overturn the social structure.

JP’s constituency was a wide one, crossing all class and caste boundaries, and though self-serving critics have subse- quently tried to square its composition with their own categories of analysis, the Bihar movement was too extensive and too varied to fit them. As armed and unarmed force clashed in the streets of Patna, the blood of the poor and downtrodden began to flow, as it always has in India. Driven to fury by the scale of the challenge, and the growing paralysis of administration, corrupt power denounced its opponents for corruption, while the unfit official custodians of Indian “democracy” such as Abdul Ghafoor, the Chief Minister of Bihar, condemned JP as “a lawless rebel out to destroy India’s democratic institutions.”4~

In more respects than one, this was a prelude to the Emer- gency, which the Bihar movement was instrumental–with other factors–in provoking. And as the situation in the country became “explosive,” in JP’s words, the prison-house door began to open wider. “Friends,” JP had said on June 5, 1974, “this is a revolution, a total revolution,” Sampurna Kranti. Bt/t it was a revolt, not a revolution. We will return to it in a moment.

JP’s Moral Realpolitik

It is necessary now to ask and answer, in more detail, this question: What was the moral basis of JP’s leadership of the Bihar movement? To begin with, it is very quickly possible to find something more than innocent credulity in his moral posi- tions. At the same time as it was honest, his morality had always been based on very practical calculation. Thus, as early as the Sixth Conference of the Socialist Party in 1948, he had argued

33. E.g. see Three Basic Problems of Free India, pp. 19-25;From Socialism to Sarvodaya, passim.

34. Ibid.,p.22.

35. J. P. Narayan,qu. Masani,op. cit., p. 19.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.,p.24.

39. E.g.seeAnEyetolndia,pp.24-30,pp.333-34. 40. TheStatesman.3.11.74.

  that “there are people in our society who accept moral values. We must have a correct psychological approach towards these people, as they are not influenced by our phraseology of class struggle.” This is, in a sense, a moral realpolitik. But it is also the language of a man aware of the profound ideological barriers which exist in India (and not only in India) to the easy mobiliza- tion of the people around causes and slogans which correspond neither to their perception of their own condition nor to the means to overcome them. 4t

While JP’s theme was the removal of all those obstacles

which “prevent man becoming truly human”–a this-worldly

aim, if ever there was one–it was neither vacuous nor naive. I

do not want to say that his moral campaigns were merely

instrumental, but they were plainly guided by a greater sense of

realism than some of his critics would allow. In addition, the

structure of his moral argument does not stand in a complete

socio-economic vacuum. Instead, for him, moral turpitude and

“indiscipline”–a dangerous word in Indian politics–lead

directly to economic ruin and political chaos. Moreover, JP’s

residual materialism, however much he might have denied it,

prevents him from then falling into the extremer follies of an

abstract theory of “human nature,” as most other idealist think-

ers quickly do. He is, in any case, far too intelligenta rationalist

to allow himself the ignorant luxury of attributingpoverty to the

innate qualities of the poor, and wealth to the virtues of the rich. Indeed, he castigated those who used the term “backward” of the “rural masses” (another unpleasant term which, ideolog- ically, dissolves individuals into the anonymity of a political slogan). “They are no more backward morally,” he wrote, “or deficient mentally than the urban elite.”42

Nevertheless, there is also in his thought a crippling moral platitude. It may disarm the wicked and the ruthless on paper, but in practice, as Mrs. Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi showed, it provides a feeble defense against those who are hell-bent on maintaining power. The “fair and pure” means which JP recommended to his followers, as did Christ, Tolstoy and Gandhi before him, have unfortunately been able to withstand the onslaught of the real world only on fairy-tales and moral fables.

It is simply not true that the “stronger sections” in a social order structured by privilege and exploitation can be “per-

41. Cf.:”It iscertainlydifficulttolinkinapurposefulwaytheMoralMan and the CommonMan,” C. N. ChittaRanjan, op. cit., p. 8. Thisseemsto meto reveal a disablinglack of understandingof the so-called”CommonMan’s” aspirations,inwhatwasintendedasanobituaryjudgmentofJP’s life-work.

JPaddressingapublicmeetinginDelhi, 1952

44

42. Swarajfor the People, p. 61.

 suadedtosharevoluntarilyapartoftheirwealth.., withtheir less fortunate neighbours.”43 It is simply not possible that the “leaders of the political parties” in India could “place them- selves under a self-denying ordinance and refrain from setting uppartycandidatesinelections.”44Anditiswishfulthinkingto expect the crooks who dominate much of India’s political sys- tem to devote themselves to “the politics of service, not the politics of power.”4s

Yet much of JP’s own life, in particular the climax of it, dislodges the mocking critic from his pedestal. “Violence,” he once said, is “undemocratic,” and in the sense in which he meant it, it is, particularly in a country like India where an overwhelming capacity and readiness to use violence against the most defenseless is one of the main features of the political and social system. When he wrote in his Prison Diary, on August 23, 1975, that “those wanting a change must also change themselves before launching any kind of action,” only the most benighted determinist, stuck with his dogmas, could dissent from it.

But his truest vindication, together with the greatest chal- lenge he could issue to established authority, came in his appeal to the police to disobey the orders of their superiors, if their consciences told them they were improper. That a single indi- vidual could, like Joshua at Jericho, appear to an embattled ruling class to be threatening the very stability of the state by moral force alone, was the greatest tribute they could pay him.

Utilitarianism

All political philosophies, however high-flown, contain a utilitarian element; indeed the more high-flown, often the more covertly utilitarian. I have already indicated that JP’s thought, like Gandhi’s, is a good deal less unworldly and closer to the terrain of real practice than its idealist vocabulary might some- times indicate. Moreover, no one whose head is in the clouds can take command of a popular revolt, as both Gandhi and JP did, unless his feet are also planted firmly in the ground of real struggle, against a real adversary.

JP’s intermittent utilitarianism should, however, strike a chill warning-note in those whose enthusiasm for his crusading political morality blinds them to his statements of an ulterior purpose which has precious little to do with Marx, Owen or Rousseau. Behind the moral categories and the nobilities of non-violence, it is possible to hear from time to time not so much the call to battle of a tribune of the people, as the paternal- ist voice of a progressive utilitarian anxious–like John Stuart Mill and Mahatma Gandhi were–to advance both the well- being and the “responsible” behavior of the lower orders.

43. Ibid., p. 14.

44. Ibid., p. 9.

45. J. P. Narayan, qu. Nargolkar, op. cit., p. 196.

46. SwarajforthePeople,p.8.

47. Ibid., p. 9.

48. Ibid., p. 17.

49. See “On the Probable Futurity of the Labouring Classes” in J. S.

Mill, PrinciplesofPoliticalEconomy,London, 1848.

50. SwarajforthePeople,pp. 17-18.

51. Cf.JP’sviewsoneducation,ibid.,p.22.

52. J. P. Narayan, letter of resignation from Praja Socialist Party, Dec.

21, 1957, qu. Nargolkar, op. cit., p. 61 (my emphasis). 53. SwarajforthePeople,p. 18.

54. Ibid.,p.9.

Perhaps the most revealing indication of this occurs in Swarajfor the People, where it is often much less the unleashing of the immense power of the downtrodden of India which is at issue, then the” strengthening” of their” consciousness”46and “responsibility”47–a hybrid combination of the strategic thinking of Marx and Mill, dominated by the latter. There is also no doubt at all that Mill would have assented to JP’s assertion that “good government can never be a substitute for self- government,”as but for Mill “self-government” was an anti- dote to revolution, not a synonym for it. Indeed Mill’s politics, however radical-seeming, in fact constituted a modest program for power-sharing with an internally colonized proletariat, rather than for its political emancipation through the growing scope of its self-organization.

Moreover, precisely as Mill had himself argued in his Principles of Political Economy, 49 so JP argued more than one hundred years later: that “the remedy for backwardness [a term he elsewhere rejected] is not to deny the people their sovereign righ/s, but to enlighten, educate and train them with as much expedition as possible. ”5~ Indeed Mill feared the dangers to established order in mid-Victorian England if the unruly ad-

vance of “the masses” failedtobe constructivelychannelledby means of practical reforms, social progress and enlishtened education. 51 The end in view for the subordinate classes was nothing less than informed and orderly political conduct, under the democratizing patronage of their benevolent elders and betters.

Some of the features of this utilitarian strategy can be found scattered across the pages of JP’s writings–nowhere closely or systematically reasoned, and by no means predominant, but nevertheless appearing and reappearing as one of the themes of his thought. Thus, like Jeremy Bentham, JP was capable of thinking in terms not merely of”fashioning alternative forms of collective behaviour,” but also of “alternative forms of social control, ”52 a perspective which, on the face of it, belies his commitment to the truly democratic possibilities of “people’s power.”

But there is one crucial distinction to be made between a manipulative utilitarianism, which perceives the “lower clas- ses” to be in need of gratification and pacification, and JP’s demand that greater “responsibility” be given to the Indian people. JP believed that the price of”refusal to hand over power and opportunity to the people for self-government” was not the overthrow of the ruling class, as Mill plainly feared, but “the complete corrosion of democracy in this country, and some kind of dictatorship.”53 jp is counterposing “democracy” and “dic- tatorship,” and arguing in a way that Bentham and Mill never argued that “the withholding of responsibility.., would lead naturally.., to an attitude of irresponsibility in the people,” who would, he said, “ever be on the lookout for heroes and miracle-makers to solve their problems. It is out of such a psychological situation that dictators are born.”54

The Cart Before the Horse

Utilitarianism, the inevitable concomitant of all political thought and all political practice–even the most moral of moral philosophers is not exempted from its persuasions–is the cru- cial element in JP’s perspective. It can hardly be said to discredit him, since it is as much part of a necessary realpolitik in a country fronting the socio-economic problems which India faces, as it is a characteristic symptom of the philosophy of a leader,ratherthanthephilosophy,oftheled.

45

 The really serious difficulties and tensions within JP’s political thought are to be found elsewhere. I have already argued that, despite certain contradictions, he had a consistent and coherent theory of democracy, which was both potentially progressive and deeply threatening to established power. The same cannot be said, however, of the politico-economic theory which is interwoven with it. Though the subject is too big to raise more than briefly here, since it contains a major and persisting theme of contemporary Indian politics, one thing at least is certain: that JP’s dalliance with the Spencean and Gan- dhian dream of an arcadian village economy, frozen in time, and his belief that “a new socio-economic technology”55could be found for India, were founded upon hallucination.

Of course, JP himselfknew that “mere harping on khadi* and village industries will not take us far,”56 a statement which in itself reveals his capacity for boldness in face of the Gandhian tradition. It is also the case that he knew that the Bhoodan movement had failed. Indeed, this knowledge provided a pow- erful impulse for his search for an alternative path, and brought him ultimately to the leadershipof the Bihar revolt. The volun- tary vesting of all village lands in the gram sabha (village assembly), so that each person in the community might become an equal shareholder in the landed wealth of the village, had foundered–and always will founder until the land is expropri- ated-upon the incorrigible realities of the rural power struc- ture. JP, whatever he might hope or say, knew this as well as any.

Nevertheless, great and damaging havoc was wrought to the viability of his socio-economic ideas by the variety of incoherent influences which played upon them. It is in JP’s Prison Diary entry for September 9, 1975, for instance, that the baleful impact on his thinking of eclectic and mutually irrecon- cilable positions is perhaps most apparent. By then, his “new socio-economic technology” had degenerated into a random- seeming espousal of the removal of “unnecessary restraints” on the private sector, the “social ownership”–not workers’ ownership–of “large establishments,” the encouragement of the self-employed producer, and community ownership organ- ized around the gram sabha. But there is no social order under the sun in which such diverse economic structures could co- exist. Certainly “the Yugoslav pattern minus dictatorship,” which he described (from detention) as “quite an agreeable feature,” bears no resemblance to it.

Yet there was nothing much wrong, prima facie and in theory, with JP’s earlier advocacy of economic decentraliza- tion, the development of labor-intensive technologies in in- dustry and agriculture, and the full utilization of local resources to meet local needs, such as occurs in his November 1974 program. The trouble is not simply that India’s industrial and socio-economic development has proceeded too far for such a reversal of time and “progress,” but that the necessary condi- tion for the implementation of such policies in India is itself a preceding revolutionary transformation of the structures of land tenure, ownership and vested interest. It is to put the rural cart before the horse. And since a bitter inter-class and inter- caste civil war over rights to land in India has been fought unremittingly since Independence–and never more bitterly than in the present period–such notions, pure and seductive on paper, cannot stand in practice, merely because they are com- manded to do so by the morally well-intentioned.

This is not to say that a pleasing symmetry of ideas is absent from his thought at this point. JP himself sought to draw

theirstrandstogetherbyarguingthat”adecentralizedeconomy would be more democratic.”s7 It could also, by the same token, be a good deal less democratic. Indeed, deeper levels of rural oppression and exploitation immediately suggest themselves in the arguments which JP himself advances in favor of such “decentralization”; among them, that “the element of volun- tary labour would be greater,” and that “other social costs would be much lower.’ ,58In fact, it is precisely for such reasons as these that a “decentralized” rural economy is so attractive to the more far-seeing defenders of the industrial capitalist system in urban India.

Beyond these criticisms, of course, lies another much more sweeping diagnosis–which I do not share–of the nature of this and all such utopian “ruralism” in Indian thought. Palme Dutt put it at its fiercest when he described “Gandhi and his spinningwheel” as”the trueprototypeofabourgeoisiebornold without ever having known youth,” and as “the consistent expression of one aspect of capitalism in decay. ”s9 Further- more for Dutt, writing in the early 1930s, “a descent towards a lower technical and economic level,” together with “the urge to break Ul5large-scale organization and to revert to more localized and more primitive self-sufficienteconomic units,” was a char- acteristic of fascism’s “tendency to petrifaction.”6o

Though this proposition deserves to be taken seriously even if it is untrue, JP was neither the “passive reactionary” of Dutt’s description of Gandhi, nor the crypto-fascist agent of the CIA whom Mrs. Gandhi’s Emergency needed as a political scapegoat. Nevertheless, the allegations that JP’s political theoryandpracticeinfactrepresentedaradicalismnotoftheleft but of the right must now be examined in closer detail.

“Fascism”

The argument that JP was becoming an active agent for a fascist takeover in India,” as Rajni Patel put it on July 13, 1975, after JP had been arrested, was a commonplace in Indian politi- cal debate from late 1974 onwards. Moreover, pointing to the unemployed students, the “lumpen elements” and especially the marginalized lower-middle class among his constituents (while ignoring the hundreds of thousands of poor peasants and workers who supported the revolt in Bihar) it was, and is, possible to argue that Marx’s brutal description of “the inde- terminatefragmentedmass.., therefuseofallclasses” inthe Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon 61 fitted many of the supporters of the Bihar movement. And much of JP’s thought indicates an organicist view of the social order, at first sight not far removed from the corporatist ideal. Concepts of “national consciousness” and of “national integration,” coupled with an urge to dissolve structural social differences and divisive class conflicts into a mass movement, seem to point in all-too- familiar directions.

I IIII |

* Khadi:homespuncloth,symbolizinganartisanorruraleconomy.

55. Ibid.,p. 21. 56. lbid.,p. 19. 57. Ibid.,p. 22. 58. Ibid.

59. PalmeDutt,FascismandSocialRevolution,Chicago(reprint),1974, p. 69.

60. Ibid.,p. 247.

61. KarlMarx,”EighteenthBrumaireofLouisNapoleon”inSurveys from Exile, (Fernbach,D., editor),London,I973,p. 197.

46

  It is also feasible to go back to JP’s foundation of the Congress Socialist Party in 1934 and there find, in what has been called “the urge for socialism and the restlessness of militant nationalism that soon made the Congress Socialist Party a force to reckon with,”62 the roots of a nearly universal

“national socialism” which accompanied the international eco- nomic crisis. Threading together these and other similarly slen- der political clues, it might then be possible to reveal the JP of the Bihar movement as the crypto-fascist of Emergency propaganda.

Similarly, if fascism is essentially a theory-less politics of “action,” such as Sanjay Gandhi epitomized, then judicious selection from JP’s speeches will produce many examples of the urgency of his political protests and demands which can readily be fitted into such a schema. Communists, it might be argued, wait for the maturation of class forces and the class struggle, liberal democrats permit the long and slow unfolding of elec- toral procedures to deliver their objective verdicts, but the politician suffering from “fascistic tendencies” cannot wait. Instead he proclaims from the roof-tops, as JP did with increas- ing frequency from 1973 to 1975, that “the Time for Action is Here and Now,” and mobilizes his inchoate mass forces for a pre-emptive coup d’~tat, in order to outwit the democratic process.

Furthermore, if you look, you can find that JP–not unlike Sanjay Gandhi, a much more fitting claimant to the post- humous title of “fascist”–frequently called upon “Youth” and “Yuva Shakti,” Youth Power, to be “prepared for the sacrifices necessary for playing its historic role of spearheading the revolution.”63 Just as Mrs. Gandhi’s Twenty Point program incorporated some of the leading demands made by the Bihar m o v e m e n t , 64 s o s o m e o f t h e ” y o u t h ” c o n s t i t u e n c y w o n o v e r t o JP’s banner was later to be found among the strongly “lumpen” elements in the Youth Congress. In fact, it is arguable that the Congress Party boosted its youth movement from 1975 onwards precisely in order to harness for the Congress the energies which JP had successfully unleashed against it.

Therefore, there undoubtedly is evidence, if one wishes to assemble it selectively, for the proposition that JP’s leadership of the Bihar movement merely represented a rival populism, with similarly “fascistic” characteristics, to that of the dynastic rump of the Congress Party in the Emergency and post-Janata periods. 65 And if one adds to this analysis the fact that the Jana Sangh (Hindu National Party) was always prominent in JP’s movement (and hence, thereafter, in the Janata Party), the term “reactionary,” or “right-reactionary” can be made to seem a just and sufficient epithet to attach to Jayaprakash Narayan. At any rate, there can be no dispute at all with the judgment that at least some of those who “flocked to this banner . . . were believers neither in Gandhism, nor in socialism, nor in revolu- tion, total or partial.”66

The simple trouble with all the foregoing arguments, which I have paraphrased, is that persuasive though they are because they contain an element of truth amid falsehood, they do not contain sufficient truth to stand up to closer examination. The constant leitmotiv of JP’s declared positions and actions, as I have already indicated, was the defense of “democracy” as he understood it, an understanding notably distinct from the views, expressed at the time of the Bihar movement, of Atal Behari Vajpayee that parliamentary democracy was “unseemly,” and “no longereffective.’,67Ofcourse,Mrs.Gandhi,too,claimed during the Emergency to be acting in defense of democracy.

JP in 1972 (photographer unknown)

But JP, unlike Mrs. Gandhi, believed that he was defending Indian democracy against the risk of dictatorship; and not any kind of dictatorship, but against the specific possibility of a fascist dictatorship in India.

Yet it has to be conceded that the truth in this matter of the “reactionary” nature of JP’s politics remains a complex one. And if it is certainly untrue that the notion of “partyless” democracy was “anti-democratic,” and itself would lead to dictatorship in India, 68 it is equally true that JP’s leadership of the Bihar movement was based on too many unquestioned assumptions about the moral superiority of his personal princi- ples. JP’s crusade against corruption, his re-emphasis of certain traditional Indian values, his desire to see develop an indigenous idea of democracy, and his advocacy of simplified socio- economic structures are all anticipations of some of the themes of revolt and revival–not all of them progressive–which have convulsed other countries in the region since the later 1970s.

62. “Analyst,” Mainstream, 13.10.79,p. 3.

63. J. P. Narayan,June 23, 1974,qu. Nargolkar,op. cit., p. 116.

64. Suchasthedemandsforlandreform,andforattackstobemadeon

“smuggling,” blackmarketeering,andhoarding.

65. E.g.inAnEyetoIndia.p.90.

66. C. N. ChittaRanjan,op. cit., pp. 8-9.

67. AtalBehariVajpayee,qu. Nargolkar,op. cit., p. 175. 68. Ibid.,p. 130.

47

 There is one further level of understanding which cannot be excluded from the discussion: namely, that JP was at heart a permanent “outsider” in relation to the small political estab- lishment which had ruled, and has continued to rule, India since Independence. In consequence his politics, from his earliest career until its conclusion, was likewise a continuous reaction to Congress hegemony and the deepening misgovernment of India, which was to continue unchecked throughout the Janata period. We do not, therefore, have far to look for an explanation of a rhetorical style which, as S. K. Ghose has put it, was often “agitational and apocalyptic.’69 The apocalyptic tone of his discourse cannot, of itself, establish a commonality of intention with the obscurantists who joined him. It is also defamatory to suggest that he had anything of substance in common with those who, having imprisoned him, went on to demolish, in the name of democracy, much of the apparatus of the rule of law, the prerogatives of Parliament and the rights of the individual.

Instead, JP’s deepest belief—despite his forays into utili- tarianism-seems always to have been that “the only remedy” for India was “for the people to take their fate into their own hands, and shape it according to their will. ”7~ It represented a profoundly democratic commitment. Moreover, from at least as early as 1961, and perhaps earlier, he had warned with repeti- tious consistency, and in increasingly Cassandra-like terms, that for the “fate of the country” to be “in the hands of a few great leaders” was “a very unstable state of affairs” and “likely to lead to national paralysis.”71 “The democratic proc-

ess” wasbeing”strangulated,”72and”thewholeedificeof democracy” was liable to “topple at the adventurer’s touch.” 73 “Unless steps were taken to preserve democracy, sporadic violence followed by dictatorship” would be “inevitable”;TM and “a ‘strong’ centre would gradually move away from democracy, and become more and more totalitarian.” “It is not without reason,” he added, “that those in India who advocate a unitary form of government have marked fascistic tenden- cies.-75 Such views were not those of someone who was him- self an”active agent for a fascist takeover in India.”

Apogee and Imprisonment

As early as May 22, 1974, at Vellore, JP–subsequently to be accused on the left of “not being an organizer,” and of not being “an integral part of the nationwide upsurge of the masses”76–had declared that “the future of Bihar, nay that of India, lies in the consolidation of the organized power of the masses.”77

As the Bihar movement rose through late 1974 and early 1975 to its massive climax, these and other arguments about JP’s politics and purpose were briefly lost in the roars of an aroused people. The mass strike of October 3, 1974, the huge march on Patna on November 4, the plans to set up a parallel “people’s government” (or system of dual power) in Bihar for “the reconstruction of society on the basis of equality and the elimination of poverty, oppression and exploitation,” the de- veloping signs of the movement’s spread to other states of India, and the threat to gherao(picket/surround) the Delhi parliament early in March 1975 seemed for a moment to be bringing the

Bihar movement to the gates of national power.

“I want you to see it,” JP had told a vast crowd at

Kurukshetra on November 27, 1974, “that the rrgime at the centre headed by Shrimati Indira Gandhi i s . . . dislodged. She has assumed the role of a solitary leader like a dictator, and has ignored the people.” In conclave at Narora during the same

month, the Congress leaders had begun to plan a political counterattack which would ultimatelytake thousands, including JP, to jail and attempt to overthrow the Constitution. An extra- parliamentary mass movement for the redress of popular griev- ances, cutting across party boundaries, caste loyalties and class organizations, had brought a man allegedly without ambition, and “unable to forge the instruments of change,” face to face with the whole apparatus of corrupt Congress power.

And what was subsequently alleged on the left to have been no more than “an outburst of anger at inequity and injustice”7s was met by a huge show of armed force in Patna and assailed on all sides as India moved towards precisely the form of dictatorial rule which JP had feared and provoked into being. Thus H. N. Bahuguna, one of the foremost and least scrupulous of JP’s assailants, denounced him in Lucknow on March 10, 1975 (in a rhetoric close to that of Mrs. Gandhi herself) for “shattering the

people’s confidence in their fight against poverty.., at a time when India is facing external dangers,” for “demoralizing the people.’ ,79

Worse, and “unnerved by the spontaneity and massiveness of the popular demonstration,” as Nargolkar has correctly put it,s~ as well as by the moral challenge of non-violence to a Congress rrgime brutalized by unchallenged years of power, Mrs. Gandhi lashed JP for “fomenting anarchy, violence and terror.” Transferring to him responsibility for the murder of L. N. Mishra,* she accused him of “undermining the roots of democracy while simultaneously masquerading as its saviour.”stTheclimaxofthisconfrontationwastobeacrush- ing one for Jayaprakash Narayan, but in these moments of its apogee,Gandhi’spoliticalandmoralsuccessorwasthefocusof widespread hopes in India and beyond.

But JP was playing with fire. His movement was not only “threatening to engulf the whole country,” as he himself de- scribed it, but calling Congress’ bluff over its claims to be a party committed to socialism, democracy and the people’s wel- fare. In his advocacy of basic electoral reforms, in his struggle against corrupt forms of patronage, ballot-rigging and the use of black money in elections, he was also threatening to strike directly at the very roots of Congress authority in the country. “Nepotism, fraud and lying,” and “the manipulation of the masses” were JP’s targetss2 No wonder that the “entire demo-

* L. N. Mishra: Minister for Transport in Mrs. Gandhi’s cabinet and a leading fundraiser or her party, he was murdered in a bomb-attack on 2 January 1975. It was alleged that he had been silenced in order to prevent disclosures of corrup- tion. The Government refused to hold a parliamentary inquiry into the circum- stances of his death, or to publish the findings of the Central Bureau of Investigation.

69. Mainstream, 20.10.79, p. 11.

70. Swarajfor the People, p. 32.

71. Ibid., p. 32.

72. J. P. Namyan, Dec. 9, 1973.

73. Swarajfor the People, p. 2.

74. J. P. Narayan at Begusarai, July 1974, qu. Nargolkar, op. cit., p. 129. 75. Swarajfor the People, p. 5.

76. C. N. Chitta Ranjan, op. cit., 20.10.79, p. 7.

77. J. P. Narayan, Vellore, May 22, 1974.

78. E.g. “Analyst,” Mainstream, 13.10.79, p. 4.

79. H. N. Bahuguna, Bombay, March 9, 1975, qu. Times of India,

10.3.75.

80. Nargolkar, op. cit., pp. 138-39.

81. Indira Gandhi, qu. Axun Shourie, Mainstream, 20.10.79, p. 13. 82. J. P. Namyan, Everyman’s, 28.7.73

48

  cratic system”–that is, rule by the Nehru family and its im- mediate entourage–should have been said to be “hanging in the’balance”a3 as Mrs. Gandhi’s enemies, JP chief among them, were rounded up and placed in detention.

JP as Avatar*

India is always in search of political as well as spiritual

avatars to follow. If not Mahatma Gandhi, then Jawaharlal

Nehru; if not Nehru, then Indira Gandhi; if not Indira Gandhi,

then Jayaprakash Narayan; most recently (and most absurdly),

Sanjay Gandhi. And after Sanjay Gandhi, who? The guru-

figure and the chamcha (follower, retainer, hireling) define one

crucial aspect both of political structure and political behavior in

India.

But it was a deep irony, in JP’s case, that he should have

been chosen by naillions to be such an avatar for them, when he himself genuinely wished the Indian people to be politically mature enough not to need it. Indeed, his hope for a “renewal of democracy” was linked very closely to his hope for such a “maturation” which would make “the people…. worthy” of asserting their power over the polity. In fact he mistook the reasons for this supposed “immaturity,” seeing it as a symp- tom, once again, of an “inorganic” system of democracy. Moreover, he made the same mistake in his diagnosis of the reasons for the concentration of power in the hands of a caucus. Both are the products of feudalized social and economic rela- tions, with which his version of “democracy” cannot in any case coexist. It is a matter of historical record, and of political logic,thatboththesephenomena–thepoliticalcredulityofthe electorate and the concentration of caucus power–were to manifest themselves even more disastrously for India after his death and the collapse of the Janata Party.

An even greater irony, also with its own logic, was that independent India’s first experiment with dictatorship, whose rise he had always feared if his pleas went unheeded and “democracy”failed,shouldhaveclaimedhimin1975asoneof its first victims. And it was equally logical that he and others should then have been tarred with the brush of “extra- constitutionality” and “right reaction,” accused by Mrs. Gandhi of receiving funds from the CIA and capitalist interests and of being a fascist.

But beyond irony, and beneath contempt, were the tributes paid to JP’s corpse on its cremation-ground. To Mrs. Gandhi, “all his activities were imbued with patriotic fervour” and “his life,” which she had helped to end, was “a source of in- spiration. ”a4 To H. N. Bahuguna, “the light which time and again showed the path to the nation is out”; his death, he added, was “too deep for tears.”a5 And so on.

It was to the accompaniment of such funeral eulogies that “the individualist without an eye for details ”at and the man who had “not made an original contribution to political thought” (his own judgementaT) joined the pantheon of the other lost hopes of India. He left behind him an unabated and unresolved dispute about the characterization of his politics and morality, as well as what was well described as “the noise of hypocritical homage. ,,as Facile interpretations of his life-work d e n o t e d i t a s t h e ” p o l i t i c s o f p o p u l i s t i l l u s i o n , ” 89 t h e p r o d u c t o f ” a vague concern for humanity at large, ”9~ as a deceptive and unoriginal remaking of “classical anarchism,”91 as “a career bereft of consummation,”92 and so forth.

The truth, as I have tried to show, is different and a good

49

deal more complex. But what is entirely clear, as far as the realpolitik of the left is concerned, is that JP’s utopian struggle for a “partyless democracy,” had it gained further ground, would have begun seriously to undercut and disrupt the Indian socialist, communist and trade union movements. Progressive forces, already insufficiently strong and disablingly divided, could not have afforded the attempt to build permanent and alternative mass organizations. Moreover, JP notwithstanding, the necessity for a’party-led, not partyless, democracy, from Delhi to the panchayat level, has never been clearer.

Nevertheless, JP’s legacy to India is a profound one. In order to get to the’ heart of it at a time of deepening political regression, we can afford to brush aside his view that “the class conflict approach at the village level is likely to help least those very sections of the community that stand most in need of it.’ ,93 The inter-class and inter-caste struggle over land-rights in India is not a matter of recommendation or disapproval–both of them equally utopian–but of the ineradicably opposed inter- ests of the landed and landless.

Instead, as India (especially from 1975 onwards) has step- by-step moved further and faster than ever away from the decentralization of power, and away from the struggle against corruption which JP sought to wage for the “people’s welfare,” it is salutary to be reminded of perhaps the finest of all JP’s moral-political declarations: that “if there is corruption, man- ipulation of the masses, naked struggle for personal power and personal gain, there can be no socialism, no welfarism, no democracy, no justice and no freedom.’94 And we might add, no communism either. Moreover, such an assertion, not easily arrivedatbyanyotherpolitical-ideologicalroutethantheonehe travelled, serves as a fitting memorial to Jayaprakash Narayan’s lifeandthought,andanequallyfittingrebuketohiscritics. ‘~”

* Avatar: Incarnation of a deity.

83. K. D. Malaviya at Narora, Nov. 1974.

84. IndiraGandhi,qu.Hindu(InternationalEdition),2.2.80. 85. Qu. Arun Shourie, op. cit., p. 13.

86. “Analyst,” ibid., p. 3.

87. Swarajfor the People, intro. [p. 2].

88. C. N. Chitta Ranjan, op. cit., p. 7.

89. David Selbourne, Monthly Review, Dec. 1979, p. 31.

90. M. Masani, op. cit., p. 17.

91. Ibid.

92. “Analyst,” op. cit., p. 5.

93. Swarajfor the People, p. 14.

94. J. P. Narayan, qu. Nargolkar, p. 187.