Jayaprakash Narayan

 

JAYAPRAKASH NARAYAN was born on October 11, 1902 in the tiny village of Sitabdiara, in the state of Bihar in Northern India. His father was a farmer and minor provincial irrigation official.

"As a boy, like most boys of those days," NARAYAN recalls, "I was an ardent nationalist and leaned toward the revolutionary cult of which Bengal was the noble leader at that time. . . .Before my revolutionary leanings could mature, Gandhi's first non-cooperation movement swept over the land as a strangely uplifting hurricane. I, too, was one of the thousands of young men who, like leaves in the 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 ugliness or reality have not removed. It was then that freedom became one of the beacon lights of my life, and has remained so ever since."

NARAYAN was 18 when Gandhi visited his district and urged students to withdraw from local government-supported high schools. Although only a few weeks short of graduation from Patna College, the local high school, NARAYAN withdrew—over the furious objections of his parents. They then tried to get him to enroll in Benares Hindu University, but he refused because Gandhi's non-cooperation campaign called for boycott of all educational institutions aided by the British. Instead he decided to complete his studies in the United States where he heard it was possible for poor students to work their way through college. He sailed from Calcutta in August 1922 leaving his young wife Prabhabati Devi—whom he had married while still in his teens—with his parents. She later engaged in social service work and, like her husband, became deeply involved in the movement for independence.

NARAYAN remained in America for seven years. During that time he studied at four different universities and worked at whatever jobs he could get—in a vineyard, a canning plant, a foundry, a stockyard, a terracotta factory, and as salesman of a hair-straightener and complexion cream in the Negro quarter of Chicago.

"This was the first time in my life," NARAYAN later recalled, "that I had worked with my hands and earned something. It left a deep impression. . . .The equality of human beings and the dignity of labor became real things to me."

NARAYAN enrolled first at the University of California at Berkeley where he studied natural science. He later transferred to the University of Iowa, because the tuition was cheaper, and from there to the University of Wisconsin. It was at Wisconsin that he became a convert to Soviet Communism. He joined a Marxist study group where he became friends with a young instructor in the German Department, Avrom Landy. Landy gave him some of his own translations of works by Marx and arranged for him to meet several American and Mexican Communist Party officials. NARAYAN read the writings of Marx and Trotsky "voraciously," and pamphlets by the Indian Communist, M. N. Roy, "completed the conversion."

"Freedom," NARAYAN has written about this period, "still remained the unchanging goal, but the Marxian science of revolution seemed to offer a surer and quicker road to it than Gandhi's technique of civil disobedience and non-cooperation. . . .At the same time, Marxism provided another beacon light for me: equality and brotherhood. Freedom was not enough. It must mean freedom for all—even the lowliest—and this freedom must include freedom from exploitation, from hunger, from poverty."

Following a three-month illness NARAYAN returned to the University of Wisconsin and switched to the social sciences on Landy's advice. When Landy was given a lectureship at Ohio State University, NARAYAN went with him. Here he received his Bachelor of Arts Degree on August 31, 1928. He earned his Master of Arts in Economics the following year. His thesis, "Societal Variations," argued that change in human society is the result of improvements in the tools of production.

NARAYAN returned to India in October of 1929 to find that "nationalism was reaching white heat." Early the next year, following Lord Irwin's refusal to agree to unrestricted dominion status for India, Mahatma Gandhi and his followers launched a full-scale independence movement. "Naturally," says NARAYAN, "I plunged into the fray with all my heart. . . .But I did not find the Indian Communists anywhere on the battle lines. . . .Worse, I came to know that they were denouncing the national movement as bourgeois and Mahatma Gandhi as a lackey of the Indian bourgeoisie. . . .My differences with the CPI (Communist Party of India) thus marked the beginning of my ideological alienation from Soviet Russia. . . ."

Unable to reconcile his Marxism with "Soviet dictated policy," NARAYAN joined the Congress Party in January 1930. Both Gandhi and Nehru were impressed with the young man and Nehru appointed him director of the Labor Research Department of the Congress Party. Within a short time he helped organize the civil disobedience movement. In 1932 he was arrested by the British for participation in this movement and sentenced to Nasik Central Prison. There he met a group of similarly disposed young radicals. Some, like NARAYAN, were Marxists, others socialists, but they all shared a growing dissatisfaction with the "vagueness" of Congress Party policy and the lack of an adequate program for social change.

Upon their release they banded together to form the Congress Socialist Party (CSP) on May 17, 1934, as a party within the Congress Party. The goal of the CSP was to change the middle class domination of the Congress and to "link the movement for national freedom with the movement for economic and social emancipation of the masses."

Following Hitler's rise to power and the subsequent Soviet sanction of popular front coalitions throughout the world, the Communist Party of India (CPI) offered its support to the Indian National Congress as a National Front. In spite of the opposition of some of his leading colleagues, NARAYAN welcomed this new policy. "I began," he said, "to dream of the possibility of a united socialist-communist party and of the rapid strides that both the freedom movement and Indian socialism could make under such united leadership."

In January 1936, largely on NARAYAN's recommendation as General Secretary, the CSP agreed to establish a united front with the Communists. Membership in the CSP was opened to individual communists, and it was agreed they would work together in the trade union movement. By 1938 most of South India was controlled by the CPI; they dominated the powerful All-India Trade Union Conference and were moving to control the Congress Socialist Party.

"That nightmarish experience resulted in one great good," said NARAYAN. "We learned, some of us with not little regret that. . .when the Communist parties talk of united front, it is always a ruse and at best a temporary policy dictated by the exigencies of the situation. . .and that the Communists can never think of sharing power with anyone, except as a makeshift with convenient stooges."

In March 1940 the CSP leadership decided to expel all communist members. CSP units in the South moved in a block to the Communist Party, and so many others joined them that one socialist leader called the CSP "all but finished."

NARAYAN’s final break with the Indian Communists came in 1941, when, following Hitler's attack on Russia, Indian Communists dropped all talk of freedom and urged support of the Allied war effort. NARAYAN denounced them for playing the imperialist game, and, impatient with the slowness of the freedom movement, he split from the Congress Party and demanded a complete boycott of the government until the British left India.

He was arrested and sent to Hazaribagh Prison in a remote part of Bihar. On the night of November 8, 1942 he and five fellow inmates escaped, scaling a 22-foot wall with the aid of a rope made of their clothing. Eluding capture for nearly a year, he traveled about India, working with the underground freedom movement to recruit and train saboteurs.

He was captured again near Lahore in September 1943 while on his way to Kashmir to rouse the Pathan tribesmen against the British. Tales of the brutality of his confinement circulated throughout India. Finally released on April 12, 1946 he emerged as the hero of the underground freedom movement.

NARAYAN immediately accepted an appointment to the Congress Working Committee, believing that the socialists could eventually wrest control of the party. Still advocating armed struggle NARAYAN wrote that "the fire of revolution alone can burn down the edifice of imperialism together with the supporting edifices of feudalism and communism."

On August 15, 1947 when Britain gave India its freedom, formal Partition of the subcontinent became effective. Riots had erupted between Hindus and Muslims during negotiations. In the weeks following independence violence and killings engulfed all of the Punjab and many other cities and states as well. One estimate states that "as many as 100,000 men, women and children were killed in the orgy of communal anger as nearly five million refugees crossed into India from Pakistan and an almost equal number of Muslims journeyed in the opposite direction."

Gandhi had opposed Partition and left the negotiations to undertake a village-by-village walking tour in eastern Bengal in an effort to restore calm. When renewed violence broke out, he began to fast in an appeal to leaders of both sides to stop the killings. On January 30, 1948 he was assassinated in New Delhi.

The increasingly powerful conservatives in the Congress Party, in 1947, had defeated Gandhi's proposal of NARAYAN for the presidency of the party. Pointing to the need for national unity, they now outlawed political parties within Congress; this resulted in most Socialists, led by NARAYAN, leaving the Congress Party in 1948.

NARAYAN meanwhile was continuing his critical examination of Marxist theories. Looking at Soviet Russia he saw overcentralization of political and economic authority as "not only the absence of socialism, but also of its negation." He began to believe, as Gandhi, that good ends could never be achieved by bad means. Speaking to the Eighth National Congress of the Socialist Party in Madras in 1950, NARAYAN stated: "The aims of the socialist movement. . . .[are] the creation of a society of free and equal peoples. . . based on certain values of human and social life, values which should never be sacrificed in the name of theory or the Party line or expediency of any sort."

India's first national election was held in 1951. Nehru's Congress Party won a decisive victory; the Socialist Party came in third, behind the Communists. In the aftermath of this defeat, NARAYAN sought to bolster the position of the Socialist Party by merging with the Kissan Mazdoor Praja Party into the Praja (Peoples) Socialist Party (PSP). The merger gave further emphasis to NARAYAN’s shift toward Gandhism, as the Kissan Mazdoor Praja Party in the 1951 election had supported Gandhi's ideals of nonviolence, redistribution of land, and the rehabilitation of villages.

In 1953 Prime Minister Nehru invited NARAYAN and the Praja Socialists to consider merging with the Congress Party. As a basis for coalition the Socialists presented a 14-point minimum program which included nationalization of banking, insurance and mining, and a constitutional change to permit sweeping land reforms. These proposals were too drastic for the Congress Party to accept, and negotiations for a PSP-Congress Party alliance fell through. Nevertheless, NARAYAN called Nehru's offer "a statesmanlike step," and promised to continue to meet with him.

At the time of Nehru's offer, NARAYAN was already involved in the Bhoodan Movement. This voluntary land reform began in 1951 when Vinoba Bhave, on one of his frequent walking tours, was approached by a group of poor peasants who begged his help in getting land so they could raise food for their families. Turning to the crowd, Bhave asked, "Are there any among you who will give land to your brothers so that they may not die of starvation?" One landlord stepped forward and offered 100 acres.

Out of this incident, Bhave* was inspired to devote the rest of his life to soliciting voluntary donations of land to alleviate the plight of India's huge landless rural population. His goal was 50 million acres, enough to give five acres to every family. Within a few months of walking about the countryside, he had been given 20,000 acres. Bhoodan quickly caught the imagination of the country. It "lit a moral fire and loosed a fervor for non-political constructive work" that drew to it, among many others, JAYAPRAKASH NARAYAN.

Recalling this time, NARAYAN says, there were two factors in the situation which. . .forced me to give it serious thought. One was the author himself of bhoodan. . . .When a person like Vinoba had started something it could not just be brushed aside as a stunt or a futile gesture. The other was the steady growth of the movement."

Not long afterwards, NARAYAN went to see Bhave, while he was traveling about the Banda district of Uttar Pradesh, to discuss the land distribution problem. It was then he decided to join Bhave's movement. After the 1951 elections, NARAYAN made a trip to the Gaya district of Bihar as a Bhoodan worker. "My brief experience," he said, "was exhilarating beyond expectations. Within a week nearly seven thousand acres of land were obtained as a gift—most of them spontaneous and from small holders . . . ."

As the movement progressed it took new forms. In 1952, in the village of Mangroth in Uttar Pradesh, gramdan (gift of village) was announced, later came sampattidan (gift of wealth), and shramdan (gift of labor).

NARAYAN has stated that the use of the word dan was perhaps unfortunate; in modern usage it connotes charity, whereas Bhave meant it in the classical sense of "sharing together." Thus bhoodan signified distribution of the land to the landless. Gramdan was equitable sharing together of the lands of the village by the people of the village. Sampattidan demonstrated that the methodology of the new revolution was not restricted to the problem of land, but could be applied to the entire social field. Finally, as NARAYAN said, "If we have nothing to give let us give our service—shramdan—our love and goodwill—fremdan."

In bhoodan, NARAYAN saw the essence of Mahatma Gandhi's theory of trusteeship—that man is not the master of what he possesses but only a trustee of what in reality belongs to society. And a trustee should take from his trust no more than what is necessary to fulfill his needs and give all the rest back to society.

Shortly after the announcement of the Mangroth gramdan, NARAYAN made a special trip to the village to see for himself what had happened there. "What I saw," he recounted, "opened a new vista into the future. It was thrilling to visualize the great moral, economic, political and social revolution that would sweep over the country if Mangroth was repeated in every village. And I could find no reason to suppose that what had happened in Mangroth could not happen in all the villages of India. The people of Mangroth were by no means angels.

"Vinoba's movement thus supplied an answer to the question I had long been asking: could Gandhiji's philosophy offer a practical method to accomplish the social revolution? In a brilliant extension and development of Gandhiji's work, Vinoba demonstrated that there was such a method."

NARAYAN saw it as a two-pronged method. One prong, a mass campaign of what Gandhi termed "conversion" (satyagraha—the technique of non-violent protest to achieve change of heart), to persuade men to give up those ideas, ways and values of life that have been found harmful and to accept in their place certain others. The other prong "to devise a program of self-help and self-government through which men—first those living in small communities—may learn to manage their own affairs and, moved by the new ideas and values, cooperate together to create new institutions and forms of social life. . . .The revolution in ideas as represented by bhoodan, sampattidan and gramdan and the revolution in the outward organization of society represented by community ownership of land and community self-government together constitute a full revolutionary program that is different both from revolutions of violence and revolutions made by law."

On April 18, 1954 the Sixth Sarvodaya Conference began at Bodh Gaya under the leadership of Vinoba Bhave. Most of India's political notables were in attendance, including Prime Minister Nehru, President Rajendra Prasad, Vice President Radhakrishna, head of the Praja Socialist Party Acharya Kripalani and many others. On the second day of the Conference JAYAPRAKASH NARAYAN rose to announce that he was making a jeevandan—an offer of his life. He was giving up politics to devote himself to the Bhoodan Movement and the sarvodaya (service) ideal. This decision, NARAYAN emphasized, was in no sense a repudiation of his long-held ideals, but rather, "that I had realized that those ideals could be achieved and preserved better through Bhoodan or the Gandhian way."

Thus, at the age of 50 NARAYAN gave up political power and leadership 


Once in the United States, Jayaprakash Narayan studied the political science, sociology and economics at the Universities of Berkeley, Iowa, Wisconsin and Ohio State. He was really impressed by Marxism during his study at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The ideas and writings of M.N. Roy also equally impressed him. But financial problems and his mother's health caused him to give up his dreams of securing a PhD. 

It was while Narayan was returning to India that he got the chance to meet revolutionaries like Rajani Palme Dutt in London on his way back to India. As such, he joined the Indian National Congress in 1929 upon receiving an invitation from Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. In the time to come, the great Mahatma Gandhi turned out to be the mentor and guide of Jayaprakash Narayan. Narayan was jailed and tortured by the British forces several times during the war for Independence.

Jayaprakash Narayan played a crucial role in the Quit India movement and earned a lot of fame and respect for this. JP wedded freedom fighter Prabhavati Devi, who was a follower of Kasturba Gandhi. She resided at the Sabarmati Ashram while Jayaprakash Narayan was studying abroad. Though she nurtured viewpoints that contradicted JP's, yet her husband always respected her independence.

Jayaprakash Narayan met Ram Manohar Lohia, Minoo Masani, Ashok Mehta, Yusuf Desai and other national leaders when he was put behind bars in 1932 because of the civil disobedience movement. After JP came out of jail, the Congress Socialist party was set up. While Acharya Narendra Deva was elected as its President, JP was chosen its general secretary. During the Quit India Movement in 1942, JP was again at the helm of the agitation.

Post independence and death of Gandhiji, Jayaprakash Narayan, Acharya Narendra Dev and Basawon Singh directed the CSP out of Congress to create the first opposition Socialist Party. This unit later on took the title Praja Socialist Party. Basawon Singh became the first leader of the Opposition in the state and assembly of Bihar, whereas Acharya Narendra Deva became the first leader of opposition in the state and assembly of U.P.